“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction”—Ronald Reagan

When I grew up, Great Britain was exotic. There were the red telephone booths, Buckingham Palace, black cabs, and, of course, the Bobbies (police) and the Beefeaters. England was the land of Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, and Henry IV. For me, Britain was history incarnate.

Obviously, part of that comes from the fact that, as Americans, we share a great deal of history with the British. Not only did we split from Britain in 1776, but our history continued to stay close until modern times…from the US joining Britain in the fight to end slavery to fighting two world wars together to the British Invasion in the 1960s that brought us the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks.

Image by Vince Coyner

Modern England largely dates back to 1066, when William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel and put the finishing touches on a unification that had been evolving since the Romans abandoned the island in 410 AD. (For clarity, as the terms are often used interchangeably, the United Kingdom (UK) is a sovereign nation comprising England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. “Great Britain” is the largest island in the British Isles, containing England, Scotland, and Wales, but not Northern Ireland.)

The 1,000-year span since has seen Britain, like the rest of the world, evolve—always, however haltingly, in the direction of freedom. This journey began with the Magna Carta, agreed to by King John in 1215. A watershed event in Western culture, it limited the King’s powers and declared he was subject to the law, guaranteed church rights, access to an impartial system of justice, and limited taxes.

Although the Magna Carta would have a rough beginning, it was an enormous step in the drive towards liberty. The document would set the stage for Parliament to evolve from councils that advised the King into a representative body that began taking a more active and powerful role in governing.

It was just the first in a line of steps that would make Britain the freest nation on the planet for centuries. The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 would guarantee the right to trial and demand the state show cause for holding someone. A decade later, the English Bill of Rights would set out Parliamentary rights, the right to petition the king, and the freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Over subsequent centuries, the British commitment to freedom would expand, eventually including all her citizens, not just the barons who first held King John’s feet to the fire.

Over that march to freedom, England would produce an extraordinary array of freedom advocates, some of whom inspired our Founding Fathers. Men such as John Locke, Edmund Burke and, later, William Wilberforce, the man who led the fight against the slave trade.

It is this incessant march towards freedom that has always given England an aura of consequence that few other nations share. And that’s what makes today’s Britain so sad.

The genesis of today’s dystopia began almost three decades ago when immigration took off in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The number of non-EU immigrants averaged over 200,000 per year for a decade and then skyrocketed after 2020. A nation of 55 million in 2000 is today over 65 million, with almost all of that growth coming from immigration, a majority from non-EU nations, particularly from the Middle East and Africa, countries that don’t share British culture or, importantly, religion. (It’s also likely that many of the ostensibly EU immigrants originated in non-EU countries.)

As a consequence, London, home to 20% of England’s population, has gone from approximately 80% native white British in 1991 to approximately 36% in 2021. The native population has surely shrunk more since then.

The result of this transformation of Britain from a largely British nation to something else has been monstrous. Possibly the single most despicable example is the 20-plus-year Rotherham child rape scandal that saw hundreds of Pakistani Muslims rape over a thousand British girls right under the noses of police who did nothing for fear of being called racists. As if that wasn’t bad enough, those who dared report on the various trials—see, e.g., here and here—found themselves jailed for doing so.

At the same time, London has become a killing ground for knife attacks, the overwhelming number being committed by minorities. Indeed, the country has become beset with machete attacks, a crime that was historically unheard of in Britain but which is common in the third world.

In July, the 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants knifed ten little girls, killing three of them. With the government withholding information on the killer, online posts asserted he was an immigrant. Tensions rose, and, across the UK, Brits protested the unfettered invasion of immigrants, the violence being perpetrated by immigrants and Muslims, and the system’s seeming duplicitous, two-tiered approach to justice when it came to immigrants and Muslims vs. white Brits, all of whom the government and the state-run media invariably characterize as “far right.”

These protests drew the new Labour government’s ire, and it launched a wave of arrests and a propaganda campaign against the “far right” anti-immigration “racists.” People were sentenced to prison for chanting “who the f*** is Allah” (although they were neither violent nor making threats), shouting “You’re not English anymore” at the police, or selling stickers that say “It’s OK to be white.”

Seeking to curtail what it claims is misinformation and incitement, the government warned the British citizenry, “You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial / religious hatred.” They also warned potential anti-immigration protesters, “We’re watching you.”

So basically, the government decides what’s false, threatening, or hate speech, and if you post anything about it online, you could end up in jail. And if threatening Brits’ freedom of speech wasn’t enough, the government threatened online platforms (and Musk) if they allowed prohibited speech.

Nor did the government stop there. It promised to extradite citizens of other countries if they engage in such prohibited online speech, even if not in Britain at the time. And because there’s not enough room in British jails to hold all of these anti-immigration “racists,” the government plans to release 5,000 criminals from jail to make room for those guilty of “wrongthink.”

While the Tories are responsible for the unfettered immigration over the last one-and-a-half decades, July’s election, which put Labour in power, represented a leap in transforming Britain into a tyranny. A free Britain, which took over 1,000 years to evolve, essentially became a Stalinist police state in less than two months.

While Britain is not the United States, our shared history, language, and similar cultural and political trajectory over the last 20 years suggests that what is happening there could easily happen here. Contrast the kid glove treatment given the 2020 BLM / Antifa rioters with the draconian treatment J6ers received, recall Democrats’ ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board, and look at what’s been done to Donald Trump and you see the writing on the wall as we head down that dark authoritarian path.

Like Turkey and Venezuela before it, Britain demonstrates that a single election can make the difference between freedom and tyranny. As we approach November 5th, we just might want to take note…

Follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA