The Anglosphere Embraces Tyranny: The Reason Americans Fear for Britain
The old England which cherished liberty is dying, and a more sinister society is emerging in its place. In that, it joins Australia, New Zealand and Canada. It's a grim warning for the United States.
by Roger Kimball
December 13, 2024
As an American Anglophile, I find it difficult not to look upon the news emanating from Great Britain and despair. “Terminally ill pensioners could end their lives earlier to spare loved ones six figure tax bills, experts have warned,” says the Telegraph. A Christian preacher in West London has just had his conviction upheld for standing in silent protest too close to an abortion clinic while holding a placard displaying a Bible verse.
The old England, which cherished liberty, is dying and a more sinister society is emerging in its place. Prime Minister Keir Starmer just gave an extraordinary speech in which he admitted that Britain’s open immigration policies were an “open borders experiment.” He blamed the Tories, even though the floodgates were opened under Tony Blair.
Preserving the emotion of virtue is paramount to Labour, which is why Britain under Starmer, while signaling that he understands the concerns over immigration, has upped the ante on wokeness and censorship.
Following the summer’s violent riots after the Southport attack, a House of Commons Committee on Science and Technology announced that it wanted to call Elon Musk, who owns X (formerly Twitter) to give evidence on “social media, misinformation and harmful algorithms.” Musk responded that the committee members “will be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens.” Good for him.
Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions, noted that police officers would be “scouring social media” to identify and arrest people who had the temerity to write things the Crown Prosecution Service deemed “insulting or abusive which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred.” Several people, including a fifty-five-year-old woman, have been arrested for reposting words that fell afoul of Britain’s new censors. A woman in Newcastle, meanwhile, was arrested for standing quietly on the street while holding a sign that read “Fight The Government Not Each Other.”
How about the people distributing notices in Jewish neighborhoods with the legend, written in Hebrew, “Every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be Slaughtered”? The police are apparently too busy with other threats to pay much attention. Sir Mark Rowley, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Force, threatened to extradite foreign citizens who violated Britain’s speech codes. “Whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” he said. Good luck with that, Mark.
It looks as if you might have to be awfully careful about what you say or write in Britain. The latest wheeze is the possibility of instituting blasphemy laws. Speaking in the House of Commons recently, Labour member of parliament Tahir Ali asked: “Will the prime minister commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions?” Starmer did not indicate that he opposed it.
Earlier this year, vice-president-elect J.D. Vance speculated that “the first truly Islamist country” to get a nuclear weapon might not be Iran or Pakistan but Britain under the Labour leadership of Keir Starmer. James Murray, the Treasury minister, responded that “in Britain, we’re very proud of our diversity.” Noted. How about the substance of your history and your civilization? Are you proud of that, too?
Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves, Starmer’s chancellor of the exchequer, has issued a draconian budget that calls for confiscatory taxes on farms and farmers. In response, 20,000 farmers marched on Downing Street with celebrities such as Jeremy Clarkson joining the protest. Others helped circulate a petition calling for a new general election. As of this writing, more than 2.9 million people have signed it.
What if you are old, sick or just plain inconvenient? Starmer’s government has a plan for you, too. It’s called euthanasia, sometimes known as mercy killing, but what unsophisticated rubes like me would call state-sanctioned murder. Lawmakers in the House of Commons voted by 330 to 275 to support the assisted dying bill. The idea was outlined by Evelyn Waugh in his brief novel Love Among the Ruins. “In the New Britain which we are Building,” one of Waugh’s characters says, “there are no criminals. There are only victims of inadequate social services.”
Waugh’s protagonist is Miles Plastic, a sort of porter at one of the scores of euthanasia centers dotting the country. Although not part of the original 1948 health service, Waugh explains, such facilities had by degrees become “key” departments, “designed to attract votes from the aged and mortally sick. Under the Bevan-Eden Coalition the Service came into general use and won instant popularity. The Union of Teachers was pressing for its application to difficult children.”
Of course, Waugh was a satirist. Children would never be eligible for this “service.” But how about the Canadian judge that this year cleared the way for a twenty-seven-year-old woman to end her life with the help of her doctors? Perhaps this was the sort of thing that Nigel Farage had in mind when he wrote that “I voted against the assisted dying bill, not out of a lack of compassion but because I fear that the law will widen in scope. If that happens, the right to die may become the obligation to die.” Welfare and palliative care are so expensive. A pill or injection, though, is quick, painless — and cheap.
It is that sort of thought that prompted one wise academic to observe, “Assisted suicide bills are always sold to the public as increasing autonomy and preserving dignity when we all know they do the opposite: they prey on the weakest and most vulnerable among us, precisely by denying their inviolable dignity and seeing them as better off dead.”
How long will the prime minister last? His approval rating has collapsed from plus eleven immediately following his election this summer to minus thirty at the end of November. It is said that Donald Trump and his team are paying close attention to what has unfolded in Britain since Starmer took office. They regard it as an object lesson in what not to do. So far, Team Trump’s main response has been to object to Starmer’s plan to hand over the Chagos Islands, part of the British Indian Ocean Territory, to Mauritius. The strategically important airbase on the atoll of Diego Garcia is leased to the United States and Trump wants to keep it. As of this writing, there is unhappy hand-wringing from the prime minister’s office. Some say Starmer has his eyes on pleasing China, which would certainly like more access to the Indian ocean. But the possibility of a “humiliating” reversal on the deal under pressure from the US flutters through the press.
The adults in Whitehall might want to look to Trump’s team for hints about how to turn their country around. There are at least three issues that need to be addressed.
One is migration. Millions upon millions have entered Britain over the past two decades. They must be assimilated or expelled. We won’t be able to spare Tom Homan, Trump’s newly appointed border czar, for a while, but Britain needs to cultivate a home-grown alternative.
The second issue is government spending. Trump has pointed the way out of that fiscal death spiral by instituting a Department of Government Efficiency and putting Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge. “Unlike government commissions or advisory committees,” they wrote, “we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.” Britain must do the same. It must also reject the smothering interference of the hypertrophied regulatory state. “Entrepreneurship” and “innovation” must be the new watchwords, not “diversity” and “climate change.”
The third issue is free speech. Britain, the land of Milton’s Areopagitica and Mill’s On Liberty, has come close to embracing Orwell’s 1984 as a how-to manual instead of as a stark warning about encroaching tyranny. Political liberty depends upon liberty of thought and speech. This is something else for which Elon Musk has argued. Britain must reject the rancid pities of wokeness and multiculturalism or it will be consumed by that narcissistic ideology of intolerance.
Following Trump’s lead on immigration, the economy, and free speech will be a tall order. Taller still will be replicating the cultural confidence Americans feel about their country. “MAGA” is no longer a negative epithet, it is the name of our desire. This newfound cultural confidence is poised to be America’s biggest export.
Britain is teetering on a precipice. Keir Starmer or his replacement needs to reclaim the animating current of genuine liberalism from the from the diseased clutches of socialist accommodation. The example that Donald Trump is setting in America, not least his robust policies on illegal immigration, can help. Lord d’Abernon once observed that “an Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.”
That time is now.
— This essay was originally published at The Spectator.
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