British Virtues and British Decline

How the first makes us uniquely vulnerable to the second.

I started to think today about whether Britain can actually survive its current government. Assuming that the Keir Starmer government both lasts a full term and manages to enact the things it wants to enact can Britain survive it?

In one sense, and especially to those happily ignorant souls who exclusively follow mainstream media, this will seem like a hyperbolic as well as a rhetorical question. The irony here is that those whose hearts might be stirred by an anthem such as “There’ll always be an England” are the most likely to be pessimistic about the chances of national survival and the prospects for the future, whereas those who would sneer at the ‘jingoist nationalism’ of such cultural self-expressions would at the same time tell us that everything is going swimmingly.

Which calls to mind the elegantly grim little poem Not Waving but Drowning written by Stevie Smith in 1957. It is rather as if Britain is the swimmer in the poem. Is he waving, or is he drowning? Perhaps those who want him to drown are the most inclined to say “whatever are you worrying about? You’re on the beach. It’s a nice sunny day. Feel the warmth on your skin. Wave back….and don’t notice those dinghies full of those angry and savage looking young men unloading on the beach either….”.

As in poetry, so in life…I was much further out than you thought. Britain’s decline is much further advanced than most of us are prepared to acknowledge. Even now, when our government is an obviously Marxist one composed of people who thoroughly detest us and rather enjoy seeing us suffer, there is still an air of normality lent to the increasingly rapid and deliberate murder of the nation. If the number of people who are at one with the project of destruction and welcome it is still quite small, confined primarily to the most educated and the most ignorant (the two now being synonyms thanks to the nature of modern education as leftist indoctrination), the more concerning and larger figure belongs to those who know the nature of the people in charge but still pretend to themselves that the damage they can do is limited.

It is the malign who destroy our world, but it is the apathy, complacency and insistence that things will work out alright in the end of a much larger number of people that allows them to do it.

One of the tragic ironies of our present situation is that it is the qualities of the British at their best, their traditional virtues of not making a fuss, of being patient, orderly, law-abiding, suspicious of wild talk and revolutionary fervor, are ones which make them more vulnerable than any other population in the world to the kind of disguised but constant evil that is the Globalist project of national destruction.

I think of those images of milkmen picking their way through the rubble of London during the Blitz. There are times when carrying on as if everything is normal is a supreme testament to the quality and courage of a place and a people….and yet there are also times when this same capacity is a terrible flaw. Imagine doing the milk round when the people who have bombed your homes are your own leaders, for instance, which is the closest we can get to what carrying on without a grumble under Globalist rule looks like.

The British were the people on Earth most inclined to laugh dismissively at terrible danger, to pick themselves up swiftly after terrible tragedy, and to close their ears when people started ranting about the crimes of the government. Of all European nations, Britain was the place where obvious and declared Marxism found the hardest, toughest soil for its seeds of resentment and malice.

There was never a strong, powerful British Communist Party, as there was in France and Germany. Leftist radicals were kept to the fringe. Even today, when leftist radicalism is obvious about what it is, it gets rejected by the majority of British people. It always has to pretend to be moderate, as it did under Tony Blair and as it did under Keir Starmer who rather laughably was cast as the respectable ‘moderate’ among those who had stood by Jeremy Corbyn’s side.

Our best national qualities have also been the routes by which we were destroyed. The postwar British were actually less instinctively racist and more generously accommodating towards others than any of their European fellows, which allowed not just deliberate ethnic replacement and demographic change to begin, but to allow it to continue and expand for 80 years continuously while the majority of people considered it first rudely impolite then extremist and racist to oppose it.

Or take the history of Britain regarding revolution and uprising compared to our Continental neighbors. The British political settlement was far less prone to fanaticism and fury than that of neighboring nations. In Britain, politics evolves, in Europe, it revolts. Our most absolutist monarchs were in the post-feudal world less absolute than the Continental average. Look at our terrible monarchic despots outside the bloody context of the early medieval period and you see that the two most associated with devastating uprisings against them-George III in losing the American colonies and earlier than that Charles I in provoking the English Civil War-were possibly the mildest despots in history.

Crippling mental illness linked to a specific condition meant that the ‘tyrant’ George was often not in the least bit responsible for the actions of his government and when in possession of his wits was a mild, civilized, rather kindly type likely astonished that anyone could get so worked up about a few minor tax increases (considerably less onerous than modern taxation, by the way). Charles I meanwhile had that fatal monarchical combination of stubbornness and vacillation but was hardly any kind of monster-he governed without Parliament due to Parliament’s annoying habit of constantly berating and humiliating him but never lined them all up for execution.

If you had to pick a tyrant to live under, your smartest move was to pick a British one. Generally, they were pussy cats (just as the British Empire was generally benign too). A proper understanding is only obtained if you contrast British examples with foreign ones. William the Conqueror might just about compare for brutality and cruelty (if not being an equal in raving madness-William was a very pragmatic psychopath) with an Ivan the Terrible, but not many British monarchs do.

In other words both our rulers and our populations tended to refuse the leap when it came to jumping the gap between the firm and the fanatical. For all the modern conditioned hatred of us (in our own people as well as in former foreign foes) the British had fewer revolutions and fewer civil wars and fewer atrocities in their history for a reason. That reason was a national political preference for mediated compromise and a sustained belief in individual liberty and an innate suspicion of fanaticism (strongest in England, as we should probably admit that some of this doesn’t apply for example to the most fanatical Scottish Calvinists).

This may seem a long way from the initial point, but it really isn’t. The malign thrive on the exploitation of your virtues. Moderation and preference for settlement is a virtue that granted the mainland British Isles (excepting Ireland as a unique case) an unusual degree of political stability, one of the factors in Britain’s rise globally. When the Cromwellian dispensation proved more fanatical than kingship, we immediately restored the Monarchy. When Monarchs attempted to return to a version of autocracy, they were deposed, but oh so quietly-the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a bloodless one, for example. There was no British direct equivalent of the Thirty Years War that devastated Germany in the days of competing German principalities and the Holy Roman Empire. And this is but one of many examples where British politics evolved as a series of compromises where European politics much more commonly descended into bloody conflict.

There was no French style revolutionary Terror in Britain. There was no version of the earlier French Wars of Religion either. Even into the more modern era we see Italy and Germany only being unified by violence and the Kaiser having much more direct authority over government than Queen Victoria or any British monarch had. We see peaceful transitions in Britain, and multiple and repeated revolutions in her European neighbors. We see autocratic Bonapartism spread by a military genius, and Britain’s military genius being applied to the defensive support of conquered nations. We see Fascism, Communism, Nazism all being enacted in European nations in the early and mid 20th century, and never capturing or even coming close to capturing Britain from within because the British people simply do not like tyranny in any form.

For one and a half thousand years we have but a handful of examples of really sustained internal conflict and fewer than that of atrocity on the mainland of Britain. The average European nation has more of both in the last 150 years. England as a political entity has existed for centuries or even a millennia longer than other major European nations. Its had less autocracy and less foreign rule. The Wars of the Roses and the English Civil War are the great self-inflicted scars between the Norman invasion and the present day, and they are very much exceptions. It didn’t suffer a single successful foreign invasion in 1,000 years. Its armies tramped across the globe, but the conflict was never at home. Within still living memory the whole of the rest of Western Europe knew what it was like to live under foreign conquest by Nazis and the whole of Eastern Europe knew what it was like to live under internal or foreign conquest by Communists. Mainland England has not had a fully foreign army on its land burning its houses really since the Norman Conquest (examples such as an invited French Dauphin who soon went home and Henry Tudor’s forces just before the Battle of Bosworth don’t really count as entirely foreign).

When the largest revolt in European history ever seen occurred, the 1848 uprisings, they swept over 50 countries. The ‘summer of the barricades’ ended the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe in France and created the French Second Republic, swiftly replaced in turn by Louis-Napoleon’s Second French Empire. It swept Denmark (ending absolutist monarchy there), the Italian states, the German states, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Romania, Belgium, on and on. Where was unaffected? Britain, save for an uprising in Ireland. Why was mainland Britain unaffected? Because many of the things being protested against had already been removed in Britain. Britain had more moderate dissent because it already had more moderate rule.

We understand this characteristic preference for moderation and suspicion of fanaticism and tyranny if we know for example that Puritans going to the New World did not leave Britain because of religious intolerance of them-they left because the British had made a political and religious settlement that wasn’t as fanatical as the Puritans wanted it to be. In other words, the Elizabethan religious settlement was too moderate for Puritans to accept. Save for the Puritan influence on the Cromwell Regency, Puritans were not directing policy. It’s not that they were driven out because Britain was so intolerant. It’s because they left in disgust that Britain was not enacting a ‘pure’ vision controlled by them.

All of this really does tie into apparently much more trivial social expectations and habits. Public disorder, rioting, even strikes, have historically been rarer in the UK than abroad, save for a few very specific periods of dissent. It’s almost laughable at times how moderate and civilized and easy to contain British political dissent is. The Peasant’s Revolt was halted by the King of the day trotting out to say hello and speak nicely to the leaders of the revolt. It sheepishly disbanded itself, like a bunch of naughty schoolchildren after a reprimand. The Chartists didn’t build guillotines and parade the heads of nobles on pikes-they presented a series of signed petitions.

Even today, protesting French farmers set fire to things or use industrial muck spreaders to coat government buildings. British ones do a three hour slow drive through Westminster then go home. The British fuel protests of the early Blair government in the year 2000 saw a very rare modern example of smart targeted protest by British dissidents-they targeted fuel depots and supplies and virtually brought the country to a halt. Typically, though, moderation won at the expense of long term results. The protest leaders halted the action in return for just a temporary cut in fuel duty, allowing the Blair government (which would have fallen had the protest continued) to survive.

British protest is rare, overwhelmingly moderate, and especially if enacted by patriots or ordinary people (rather than hardcore leftist or environmentalist groups) easily dealt with. A million people marched for the Countryside Alliance during the Blair government’s attacks on country communities and traditions. Then they went home with nothing changed. A million people marched against the Iraq War under the same government. Again-they went home with nothing changed.

British decency, moderation, lawfulness all gave us greater stability and saved us, internally, from falling for Fascism, Nazism and Communism. But these qualities are the very worst to possess when facing Globalists. Because Globalists disguise incredibly extremist intentions and actions in a cloak of moderation and reasonableness themselves. Globalists unite highly destructive, extremely radical policy choices which pose existential risks to national survival as being more moderate, more sensible, and less extreme than opposition to them is. They use media and propaganda to normalize extreme positions and very damaging and destructive policies while simultaneously casting traditional, populist and beneficial policies and parties as radical and dangerous.

Can Britain survive this current Labour government? The truth is that its not a hypothetical question, or a rhetorical device, or an example of hyperbole at all. It’s the most urgent and real question faced by the people of Britain at this moment. We cannot act as if these are normal times and the threat we face is confined to some slight degree of economic mismanagement that results in a few years of hardship. We cannot be as moderate and accepting as we have always been.

Because we aren’t ruled by people who will themselves stay within sensible limits. We aren’t ruled by people who just want to govern reasonably well for the benefit of the nation.

We are governed now by people who do genuinely and sincerely hate us. Or are genuinely and sincerely brainwashed into absurd and extreme policy choices (like Net Zero) that will impoverish and ruin us. There are multiple ways in which this government is the most dangerous that has ever ruled us. They have the desire to totally and radically transform everything and to punish, destroy and control every group that stands in the way. They have already targeted farmers, pensioners, and the white working class. The treatment of the Southport protesters is a carbon copy of the Biden administration treatment of the J6 protesters. As with J6, it was largely an engineered false flag operation. As with J6, the aim was to provide an excuse to clamp down hard, sweeping up dissidents, passing draconian sentences, and normalizing imprisonment for thought crimes, for any form of dissent, and for speech including social media posts. The point was to chill debate and enforce consensus through legislative and judicial terror.

The tax on farmers promises the destruction of Britain’s food security, our countryside, and our rural communities. It is literally stealing from British farmers to force them to sell, Marxist land appropriation followed by a transfer of that land to multinational corporations or State control. That stolen land will then be used for other Globalist projects like the insane building proposals to provide housing for the imported millions of foreigners and the use of the land by BlackRock affiliates for Net Zero wind farms and solar farms (both of which are near useless anywhere, but particularly so in the UK given our weather).

The government intends to extend the tax on farmers to everyone by removing the inheritance tax allowance altogether (its currently around £350,000 before you can be taxed on an estate inheritance, the proposal is to reduce that to zero meaning that if you inherit ANYTHING the government will take a big chunk).

In the first few months we have seen a level of contempt for the people and a level of destructive policy from this government that even the Blair government could not equal. The Net Zero policies alone will be more damaging than the madness and wealth transfer that occurred in the Johnson and Sunak governments. The Globalist policy of destroying Britain and smashing us down to Third World nation status has never been quite this obvious or advanced quite so ruthlessly and shamelessly, even during the long periods of fakeservative betrayal.

The project is our destruction, and we don’t have a lot of built in resources and breathing space left before the struggle gets mortal. Managed decline governments have been betraying and destroying Britain for a century, but this could indeed be the last betrayal of all. There will still be a place called Britain at the end of it….but will it be in any way British? Will it be anything other than an unsalvageable shithole, a Once Was Britain? I think we will have lost so much that made us worthwhile that it won’t be Britain in anything except name.

Traditional British moderation is unlikely to provide an answer to that question, or a means of preventing my conclusion from being right either.

We aren’t going to muddle through this one, and it won’t turn out alright in the end even if we do nothing to resist it. It will just be the end.