It’s Time To Start Naming The Problem

The rapid growth of Islam in the United Kingdom has—largely on account of its rapidity—caught many in the country by surprise. London, Birmingham, Leicester … city after city has been transformed. The native, culturally British people of these isles have increasingly fled to rural parts as urban areas have ceased to resemble what they previously were. Concurrently, such cities and large towns have become places of extreme unsafety, especially for women. 

Now, in those rural refuges—often areas contending with considerable poverty and marginalisation—the government has set up ‘migrant hotels’ where significant populations of migrants, legal or otherwise, are sheltered at the astounding expense of the already struggling taxpayer. The government has thus brought to native Brits the very challenges they fled when they left the towns and cities. 

It should come as no surprise that protests are growing in Norfolk, Essex, and elsewhere, with nativist protesters objecting to what they deem the destruction of their home. The British police departments are responding as you would expect a police force in the grips of ideological fervour to react. The Essex police department, for example, taxied Antifa over to the recent protest in Epping. The police in the UK risk becoming a force with little to do with the basic obligations of traditional British policing: to uphold the law fairly and firmly, bring to justice those who break the law, and keep the King’s peace, helping and reassuring the community they police. Instead, there is widespread concern that the police are now more or less ideological paramilitary enforcers, more interested in thought-crime expressed on social media than real crime—like the rape and torture of children by Muslim gangs across the land.

Understandably, then, among those concerned by the observable devastation of Britain, various suggestions are being proposed among the so-called Right (especially as manifest online) regarding how to mitigate the challenges the country faces, and even how to reverse damage done. Such suggestions are deeply ‘illiberal.’ I use that term technically: the recommendations—frequently encountered in online comments boxes and on social media—are not easily accommodated by a liberal worldview—that is, of self-realising individuals enjoying equality under a common rule of law.

Recurring suggestions which I at least have encountered are: the banning of halal, of consanguinity, of face coverings, alongside deporting illegal immigrants and financially rewarding the remigration of legal immigrants. The banning of halal could, it is suggested, be advanced for animal welfare reasons, as it’s a form of livestock slaughter that’s far from the most humane available, given modern abattoir technologies. The banning of consanguineous marriages (like those between first cousins or between uncles and nieces) could be outlawed on grounds of mitigating congenital diseases, which many maintain isn’t only common sensical, but the offspring of such unions arguably entail an unnecessary burden on taxpayers in a country with a nationalised health service. The banning of face coverings could be advanced on the grounds that showing one’s face is normative in our culture and the option to cover one’s face greatly increases crime and unsafety in our society. And financially rewarding remigration of legal immigrants is a way of inviting people to leave without coercion. As should be obvious, all these suggestions have the perceived advantage of countering Islamification without ever stating that that’s their purpose.

In that sense, though, it could be said that these suggestions in fact concede something to the liberal paradigm. They are posed because, by not privileging or degrading one group or set of groups over others, they do not directly undermine the notion of a settlement of self-realising individuals enjoying equality under a shared rule of law. But surely if it’s really post-liberalism that the New Right wants, that would entail at least naming the challenges it wants to address, irrespective of the pressure from liberals not to do so. Indeed, it surely even means favouring certain communities over other communities—like, for example, prioritising native, settled peoples and their culture over newly arrived peoples and their cultures. 

A friend of mine recently returned from the West Country of England. He told me what a wonderful break he’d had over there. I asked him what he enjoyed so much about being there. I then watched him squirm for the next five minutes as he desperately tried to find a way of saying that, unlike most of elsewhere in England, the West Country still felt like England. He used words like “nostalgic” and “old-fashioned” and “well-mannered” and “gentle”; he reflected on the fact that people seemed largely to live there “as we did in the past,” and that people still seemed to “know each other” and have “a sense of community.” In a post-liberal settlement, presumably he would have felt free to say, “Oh it was great; it’s a part of England that hasn’t been wrecked and has actually kept its culture.”

Many now insist it’s time to move into such a post-liberal paradigm, but that’s to fail to see that we’re already there. After all, the UK’s current political and social order is clearly post-liberal. The notion that we do not live under a regime in this country—but merely within a structure of free and equal individuals under a shared rules-based order—has been fully repudiated by the case of Lucy Connolly, by the police aid offered to balaclavered Antifa to disrupt nativist protests, by the decades-long institutional protection of Muslim rape-and-torture gangs throughout the land, and so on. It’s quite obvious that the UK’s inhabitants live under a post-liberal regime. 

The rules-based order, if it ever really existed, has been largely replaced with ideological policing and ideological court sentencing. Britain is not so much a web of self-realising individuals, but a chaotic matrix of opposing groups, some of which are institutionally privileged above others. Presumably, in a post-liberal order that was honest about being such, on the basis of ideational commitments, certain groups would still be privileged above others. The privileged groups, though, would—it is increasingly hoped—be those with an attachment to the national territory, the native people and their history and culture, rather than newly arrived peoples with no such attachments.

As stated, we seem to have already moved into a post-liberal order. Politics that’s about favouring certain groups over others is post-liberal. Hence, it’s unrealistic to suppose that censorship can continue to be imposed on the grounds of holding up a liberal order that’s already disappeared. And until a good reason for that sort of censorship arises, those who wish to should feel free to name the challenges they feel need addressing. 

It is clear that the challenges Brits increasingly do want to address are those that orbit the country’s Muslim presence. Perhaps they should not be made to feel unreasonable in desiring to do so. Between the 7th and 12th centuries, Muslims conquered two-thirds of the Christian world by the sword; for hundreds of years, they enslaved the southern English with frequent coastal raids; they seized the entire Spanish peninsula for centuries; they sought to annihilate Europe at Tours, at Lepanto, at Vienna, and at so many other decisive battles; and to this day, Christian and other religious minorities face constant persecution and often outright genocide at Muslim hands, in Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria, and so many other places. Perhaps, in the light of such facts, we can just name the problem: Brits, and I’m sure many other European peoples, arguably have very sound reasons for expressing anxiety about the rise of Islam in their midst.

Interestingly, the UK government is apparently aware that the myth of ongoing liberalism is being exposed, and it seems implicitly to acknowledge that we do not live equally under a rules-based order anymore. The government is hoping to enshrine its curious patronage of the Islamic ascendency in the law of the land. Thus, Labour has proposed an official definition of ‘Islamophobia.’ You will not name the challenge you face, the government is saying to the people it’s elected to serve, for we will make doing so illegal. 

The country is traumatised from learning that Muslim rape-and-torture gangs have—under indirect police protection and collusion—destroyed the lives of vulnerable native girls for many decades. The full extent of the horror remains unknown. The government is in turn seeking to curtail even the possibility of discussing these atrocities, or which cultural and religious assumptions might justify them in the minds of the perpetrators. Basically, this is the government’s last desperate attempt to prevent people from naming the challenges they face.

So, hopefully at least we can all agree that the UK is now firmly in a post-liberal order. We have ideological group politics, with some groups being favoured above others. And perhaps that’s as it should be. Post-liberals on the Right, then, probably ought not to argue for an end to liberalism. That liberalism has ended is apparently the one certainty we have. Rather, they should argue for a move from the current regime into a new one: a regime that privileges the United Kingdom over its perceived antagonists within and without. Such a regime change will require people to start naming the challenges they want to address.