The Chinese certainly know how to turn the screw. The People’s Liberation Army guard of honour in Peking, welcoming the British prime minister last week, were clearly chosen to tower over poor Keir Starmer’s portly figure. Media photographs might even have been intended to stir the few lingering folk memories within the British subconscious imagination: They’re changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace. Christopher Robin went down with Alice. The Chinese unquestionably remember something rather more consequential: The Opium Wars of the 1840s, and the British destruction of the stupendous Summer Palace, which makes the current one in London seem like a Nissen hut.
Despicable though Starmer is – and he really, really is – there was something deeply pitiful about his trip to China, as he pocketed a few concessions from the Chinese – lowered duties on Scotch and a handful of British parliamentarians unbanned. In exchange, the Chinese can keep their huge ambassadorial spy-hub athwart the communications grid connecting to the London Stock Exchange. Quite: The 60 guilder purchase of Manhattan by the Dutch from the hapless Lenape Indians comes eerily to mind. How the mighty have fallen.
Starmer is merely the latest in a truly terrible series of British prime minister starting with the worst of them, Tony Blair, the progenitor of a serial decay that might well result in the end of the United Kingdom. Though the British people do not fully deserve this fate, they cannot absolve themselves of the electoral responsibility for the abject condition of their country.
The first requirement for the death of any society is for social amnesia to become more powerful than cohesive public memory. In essence, this is what has happened to Britain, not coincidentally with the arrival to national positions of authority of the Boomer Generation, born 1946-56. Perhaps the most vapid and entitled cohort in world history, virtually every state where they have come to power has been destabilised and demoralised by their feverish attempts to reform and improve existing society. Their names sound like a civilisation’s death-knell: Blair, Brown, Bush, Clinton, Hollande, Johnson, Merkel, Merz, Obama, Sarkozy, et alia. Yes indeed, a dizzying antiphon of doom, but pride of place must go to Britain, and the dismal heir of almost thirty diseased years of misgovernance is Keir Starmer.
His distant predecessor Blair came to power in 1998, arriving with a psychopathic detachment from consequence. Almost overnight he did a capitulative-deal with the IRA that ended their insane 25-year-long campaign, which in time saw their boastfully unrepentant Sinn Fein wing become the largest political party in Ireland. Blair then sent the British Army into two wars that were not remotely in the British national interest, taking young soldiers into terrible fights with irregular forces. Roundly defeated in both countries, the army withdrew, only for British governments’ legal advisers to create post-facto rules that retrospectively outlawed the activities that had been forced on the army. Suitably prompted by a handful of greedy and corrupt British lawyers, Iraqis then began to sue the British Army. Who became the Iraqi litigants’ pro bono adviser? Keir Starmer, no less, not for money but for human rights reasons.
Since Blair’s motorway pile-up of a premiership, Britain has endured a series of increasingly incompetent prime ministers, as if all had been recruited from 1960s Italian coalition governments. Head and shoulders above them all was Boris Johnson – however, not for his prime ministerial talents but for a capacity to lie, bamboozle, fudge and fornicate that makes Silvio Berlusconi seem like a cross between Mother Teresa and Erasmus.
Simultaneously, Britain’s post-Thatcher economy stepped into a lift-shaft at the penultimate floor while the lift was jammed-shut at the penthouse. In the mid-1960s, Britain was the largest exporter of commercial vehicles and sports cars in the world. By 2000, Britain had essentially stopped making both. Perhaps Britain’s most brilliant company, Rolls Royce aero-engines, is looking for future-expansion, not around its home base of Derby, but in Germany and the US. The greatest under-achievers academically in Britain are now poor white males. Admittedly, English soccer clubs are still prospering – but only because almost all their players – and not just the best ones – are foreign.
As if to compensate for its many failings, Britain has been inhaling vast numbers of immigrants from around the world, largely from the vast pools of the poor and uneducated whose arrival has driven down the incomes of Britain’s increasingly immiserated under-classes. However, unlike the earlier Jews and Huguenots, who had arrived in far smaller numbers and who enormously enriched British life, many (though not all) of these newcomers possess a rare ability to game the British welfare state. They were assisted in their ambitions by the arrival to administrative power of the 1960-70s college graduates, most of them mentally awash with the toxins of Francophone “intellectuals” such as Marcuse, Derrida and Althusser.
Naturally, these boomers studiously ignored the American folk-wisdom, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it by fixing almost everything. Blair redesigned the legal system so that it works like a wind-powered diesel engine, ie, barely at all. Education ministers reshaped the school curriculum to make it pupil – rather than syllabus -oriented, prompting a collapse in educational standards. Meanwhile their fellow-travellers in the arts shifted the culture in politics, theatre and television, so that within a generation, “anti-racism” replaced Christianity as the official religion of Britain’s institutions. Almost overnight, British history, television and theatre were rewritten to make both multiracial, and sex is invariably portrayed as consisting of fully-clothed women sitting astride naked men. Meanwhile immigrants groups were inoculated against any need to assimilate or comply with British laws. Thus these incomers soon realised that they were immune to the quaint native ordinances that – quite absurdly – outlawed rape or sex with children, and – would you believe it? – yes, even forbade the harmless practice of drugging kiddies to make them more compliant.
By the start of this glorious century, the mass grooming and rape of white working-class girls by gangs of Pakistani men had become endemic across Britain, and everyone in authority and the media agreed that to take any action to protect their victims would be “racist”. Outcome: some 100,000 or more white English girls – thousands of them under-age – were raped. Chief Crown Prosecutor for much of this time was a “human rights lawyer” named Keir Starmer.
Meanwhile, along with their allies in the USA, British academics rewrote the history of slavery, making it entirely the work of white men. That all enslaved Africans were captured and sold by fellow Africans was deleted from the history books. So too was the dreary, lethal, disease-ridden but heroic work of the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy that ended the transatlantic slave trade. The last African country to abolish slavery was Ethiopia, but only after it was liberated by the British in 1941. Of course, no British child learns that, merely that wherever there is oppression, it is the work of white men.
Britain is now collapsing culturally and politically under the weight of mass-immigration, native incompetence and elite-driven national self-hatred. Like half a dozen other British cities, London is now ethnically foreign, a process that has been intensified by the presence there of some 600,000 illegal immigrants. However, these are hardly responsible for the collapse of house-building: In 2025, perhaps empowered by its superlative Muslim Mayor, Sadiq Khan, work began on just 5,547 new houses in London, where 88,000 are needed annually. Give or take, a comparable picture applies across Britain, as dystopia remorselessly extends its co-sovereignty over the rest of the kingdom.
Nonetheless, this is not a final declaration that Britain is doomed, merely an observation about its direction, with nobody in or near power apparently able to read the compass-bearings or grab the tiller to steer away from the deadly Charybdis ahead. All well and good, and a prognosis that would doubtless be agreed by much of Europe; but within that same area, in what way is Britain unique?
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Europe forgets real genocide and cuts loose from all historical knowledge