History shows that a tribe which embarks on an imperial project must make a Faustian bargain. In the pursuit of power over other tribes, the core tribe must accept that empire-building transforms the core language, norms, and institutions peculiar to their tribe into a multinational enterprise whose destiny they will be increasingly powerless to alter. Over time, the centre of the empire drifts from the core tribe as they are gradually weakened by their blood becoming exhausted in maintaining the empire and the necessary introduction of outsider individuals and tribes into cultural and economic production, and political decision-making of the empire. In the end, it will consume them as the subjugated integrate and meld with their subjugator. The Visigoths replaced the Romans, the Turks the Hellenised Anatolians, and the Mongols the Han Chinese — first gradually, then all at once.
The core tribe is not unaware of what is happening to them. They become increasingly anxious about the loss of control over their own language, norms, and institutions as outsiders increasingly adopt and synthesise them. Nativist ideas spread, laws are legislated to gate-keep positions and institutions, and the core tribe creates an imaginary past to unite it in the present. However, the process of empire-building is unstoppable, and the allure of short-term power over other tribes over the long-term existence of the core tribe is too great.
Between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the 20th century Great Wars, Britain embarked on the greatest imperial enterprise in the history of man. The British ignited the Industrial Revolution, conquered a quarter of the world’s landmass and nearly the entirety of its seas, and built globe-spanning institutions that today remain the basic template for finance, diplomacy, and knowledge production. A small, rain-drenched island at the edge of the northern hemisphere has impacted humanity like no other. Yet history has a habit of coming full circle. What the British built over centuries collapsed in mere decades in the Great Wars.
For the British elite, their imperial prestige was not so easily discarded. The blood of their people was now exhausted after two centuries of industrial production and war-making, and having lost their global empire, the elite decided that if they could not maintain their empire abroad, they would bring it home. The Faustian bargain once made cannot be undone.
In the post-war era, the idea of a homogeneous nation has become a faux pas harkening to Europe’s embrace of fascism. Instead, the new world demanded the mixing of races to create a truly global civilisation. The elite now more than ever see themselves as a people apart from those that occupy their territorial hinterlands; the new British elite see themselves as globe-trotters bound to a network of Alpha Cities and feel more at home in London, New York, and Singapore than Birmingham, Manchester, and York.
Successive governments have increased the pace of immigration to the extent that England’s biggest cities are now only plurality white British, whose lower and middle classes have been driven out of much of Britain’s inner cities, clinging uncertainly to the suburbs.
Fears of population replacement occurred as early as the 1960s, when Enoch Powell gave his now infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in the city of Birmingham in 1968. Half a century later, the Severn does not froth with the blood of ethnic feuding, but the demographic replacement of this city and many other cities across England has occurred as he predicted.
I recently returned to the area of my childhood where my family used to live and where I went to school for most of my primary education. Nearly two decades ago, this area was mostly lower-middle class white British population. We were one of the few non-white families there, no more than a single-digit minority. Most things have not changed here. The staid suburban atmosphere creates a quaint but uncanny feeling. Having lived abroad for several years, the pace of change there means that I cannot guarantee that the same apartment blocks and stores will be there in a year or twos’ time. Here, however, the high street is largely unchanged save for a few of the larger businesses that collapsed and never returned after the Great Financial Crisis. My school still stands and the trees seem unaged. There is no sense of progress or collapse. Life is mere inheritance of the status quo.
One thing, however, has changed. In the few decades since, the demographic makeup of this area and other suburbs of Britain’s greater cities has been transformed. ‘Halal’-branded supermarkets featuring an array of imported products from South Asia, Saffron-flag’d Gurdwaras, and the people themselves now primarily of Subcontinental heritage have turned the lower-middle class white British into a cultural and numerical minority. It feels like the social script was edited so that the ordinary course of life continues as it always has, yet the faces are different, and the minutiae of social interactions are uncertain and diverse, creating a more fractious society at the lowest levels.
White flight occurred almost immediately after the initial waves of migration to Britain in the post-war period, massively accelerating in the Blair area and reaching an exponential level under fourteen years of Tory government. The first stage of flight was from the inner cities, where primarily Subcontinental migrants first arrived and now form absolute majorities. The second stage of flight occurred over the past few decades. Inner cities are no longer able to host more people, and the initial Subcontinental migrant population is now too large and are in turn being replaced with East & North African, Middle Eastern, and Khorasanian migrants, and so the Subcontinental population have experienced a sort of ‘brown flight’ into the suburbs to seek living space and escape the increasing dysfunction of inner city life. The white British population in turn are moving further out, driven by demographic collapse and fears about becoming minorities in their own neighbourhoods.
Inner city areas tend to be ‘no-go’ zones not because of any fear of threats or unsafety but because they have become culturally unfamiliar to the majority of Britons. Even where you have two venues on the same street and their patrons self-segregate based on race and religion into either venue. Often, to enter the wrong-coded establishment is a faux pas. This is not true in the more cosmopolitan areas of the country such as in London where ‘race relations’ seems to be more harmoniously ordered such that mixing is common, but is absolutely true in England’s lesser cities. Self-segregation is the norm, not the exception.
Recent statistics on migration show that massive demographic and cultural change is baked into the country’s future, and a whole host of political questions follow what has ostensibly been treated as mere procedure. Whether migration continues at its present pace or is reduced is no longer a material question. The question is how an increasingly heterogeneous society will reshape higher institutions to reflect this reality.
There is an imagination that the demographic structure of this country can be completely altered without any upstream effects on the institutions that make up not just this country and its identity, but also the very foundation of power on which the elites rest. They are unschooled in the necessary techniques of governance employed with authoritarian vigour by successful states in the non-west such as Dubai and Singapore. These states benefit from millennia of experience in governing heterogenous societies, and what is deemed an authoritarian impulse on their part is a necessary part of the process of governing over heterogenous societies. Where democratic parliaments exist, they are usually for show and the real decisions occur behind the scenes in a delicate balance of power among the different communities that inhabit the country. These societies require significant tools of repression to ensure the management of ‘community relations’.
It is likely that these institutions will, almost by accident yet entirely driven by the incentive of necessity, adopt authoritarian modes of governance. Parliament will no longer be a place for the discussion of legislation for individual interest. Instead, members of parliament will be elected as stalking horses for diverse communities to play out their feuds against each other. Institutions will be infiltrated by people who capture those institutions, and turn them into extractive cash cows for their personal relations and tribes. Increasingly, affairs of state will be occupied with matters of social harmony. People will not resort to the procedures of liberal democracy to settle differences but instead do things their own way: settle grievances via the fist and the feud. The government and police forces will not understand what his happening, and blame will be put on asinine issues like structural racism or the lack of ‘youth programmes’. The government will try to maintain law and order in such a low trust society through the use of technology, surveillance and heavy repression on speech to ensure ‘social harmony’ among the tribes. The cold politics of liberal procedural democracy will melt before the hot politics of ethnic and religious tribalism.
The British were first to industrialise, then to imperialise, and finally to wage great wars in which the blood of their people would be spent utterly. A people who build empires eventually become consumed by their empires. The English language, English institutions, and English laws have become the global lingua franca. The British themselves seem resigned to pass into the pages of history as a particular people. Their elites have given up on the idea of a British nation in an British homeland because it is no longer tenable to believe so. A small but growing reactionary movement in Britain believes that it can resurrect the past, that it is a matter of policy by government, that a quaint vision of Britain endures. History suggests otherwise. The most previous iteration of what constitutes Britishness or the British people must necessarily pass. Nations must adapt or die, and often the least adaptable elements of a nation must pass so that the most adaptable parts of that nation may evolve. This is the post-imperial bargain made by the most powerful in Britain, to abandon the least adaptable among them so that they themselves can continue to survive in the new world. The 21st century is proving to be a great filter within nations, with the ‘winning’ becoming a globe-trotting elite, and the losing majority doomed to waste and decay until they pass from memory.
This is a requiem for the genteel norms and order of British society, no longer high trust and low governance but low trust and high governance. Many norms and institutions developed over the centuries and taken as a given are being lost. Like all previous empire-building tribes, the British are now consummating the bargain their ancestors made on the path to empire.
Of course, the future of Britain cannot be imagined without a hard-nosed appraisal of contemporary conditions, and a recognition that the most important question before this country, and ourselves, is the Muslim Question. Constituting the majority of migrants and, in the eyes of the reactionary groups, the antagonists of Albion’s closing chapter as a homogeneous society, how British Muslims see ourselves integrating into the social, cultural, and political structure of this country, and what influence they themselves wish to exert on these structures, may come to define Britain’s fate in the 21st century. What Abdul Hakim Murad eloquently termed as tanfirism and lahabism that characterises insular Muslim opinion and reactionary non-Muslim opinion, respectively, has created a discourse dominated by antagonism and fear. Yet he himself is an exemplar of one alternative future state for this country, a narrow Golden Path to a future without civil strife and political repression, and perhaps a source of renewal for a spent people. More to come on that.