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February 25, 2024

When the Empire Strikes Back, you get Britain’s degradation in 2024

By Andrea Widburg

One doesn’t have to support colonialism to acknowledge that its colonies allowed Great Britain to ship the idea of liberty around the world. Beginning with the Glorious Revolution in 1689 and continuing through the Enlightenment and the Victorians’ muscular (but not murderous) Christianity, Britain believed in its values. Therefore, it accepted the (racist) “white man’s burden” to bring those values to the world. It established an admittedly imperfect Empire, the furthest reaches of which are now striking back. The latest evidence is Hamas’s rising power over the British parliament.

Colonialism was mankind’s norm until the 20th century. Whenever nations, or any group of people, could expand through conquest, they did. Conquest disabled potential adversaries and provided essential resources, especially manpower. In a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist era, after all, the two major energy sources were domesticated animals and slaves.

Great Britain was all-in on this approach to the world, joining other nations in doing everything that the left now attacks as crimes unique to “white supremacy” (e.g., slavery, unequal rights for individuals, militarism, etc.) But what Britain also delivered were the notions of individual liberty and individual worth, ideas that led to the end of slavery and child labor, the elevation of women to equal legal status with men, and the cultural values of due process of law and equal rights for all under the law.

Image created by Andrea Widburg using the Hamas flag and a photo by Terry Ott. CC BY 2.0.

Humans being stubborn creatures, these ideas took a while to spread from theory to practice, but they did. Moreover, when they took off, they proved to be of enormous benefit, not just to Great Britain herself but to her former colonies. Niall Ferguson, in Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, uses mountains of data to make a case that we all can see without data: In almost every region of the world, former British colonies did better than neighbors that had other European colonizers.

Nevertheless, barring the Anglo-sphere—that is, those nations that the British actually conquered and settled, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia—most of the former colonies kept their own cultures and values. Nowhere was this truer than in Muslim regions. Indeed, in oil-rich Muslim regions, by the 20th century, the tables turned when it became apparent that the British desperately needed that oil. As the world shook off colonialism, Britain now made obeisance to those who controlled that black gold.

Something else happened after WWII and the end of Britain's colonial authority: While Britain once exported her native-born population to the four corners of the globe, now her former colonies, along with surrounding countries in the same regions (i.e., the entire Middle East and Africa) exported their native-born populations to Britain. In keeping with Labour policy, Tony Blair accelerated that trend in the 1990s, and every government since then, whether Tory or Labour, has done the same.

Almost 8% of Britain’s population comes from non-EU nations, while only 3.6% comes from EU nations (and it’s possible that many of those originated in non-EU nations). That’s an enormous cultural shift. Between (a) importing people who come from nations with values often antithetical to Britain’s and (b) the children and grandchildren of those immigrants being educated in leftist British schools that also have values antithetical to traditional British values, the nation that shipped liberty to the world no longer exists.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the rise of Islamism in Britain. Like the rest of medieval Christendom, England was antisemitic (look at the York massacre in 1190 or the Jews’ eventual expulsion in 1290), but, by the Victorian era, it had settled into dislike, not a genocidal frenzy. That began to change in the 1990s (see Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within by Melanie Phillips), and the genocidal frenzy is beginning to peak.

We’ve already seen tens of thousands of Muslims taking over the streets to pray or protest against Israel, as well as British communities that are entirely Muslim. If you don’t believe me, enjoy this alleged debunking of British concerns about rising Islam. It repeatedly agrees that many perceptions about Islam’s growth within English culture are true or close to true but still manages to argue with conclusions drawn from them. For example, the welfare part of the “debunking” skips over the part that British law gives welfare to plural wives.

This is all a necessary prelude to what happened last week in and around Parliament as it debated trying to force a ceasefire on Israel now that Israel is prevailing against Hamas. Outside, there was a mob openly threatening the parliamentarian’s safety. Inside, the MPs openly expressed their fear of the pro-Hamas mob:

As Konstantin Kisin explains, this fear was so overwhelming that Parliament changed its rules to hide from the mob:

Two AI pictures sum up exactly what happened:

Meanwhile, in other parts of Britain, Scotland’s Muslim, Israel-hating first minister is vacationing in Qatar, home to Hamas’s leadership.

Contrary to the famous WWII song, there won’t always be an England—and its end is coming fast. (Ironically, the ad tied to that linked video, at least on my computer, begs for aid money to Gaza.)

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