The Silver Lining of the British Disorder

Ash Sarkar, a “libertarian-communist” British pundit who is the self-declared spokesperson of the British version of “dirtbag left” posted a few videos on X about why she thinks British society is having a rupture, as evident from the recent riots, crackdowns, and counter-mobilizations after the stabbing of three small girls at a Taylor Swift–themed dance class by a second-generation Rwandan migrant. The crux of the argument is thus: Modern Britain is a deracinated 51st state of American consumerism; that has destroyed local culture and, yes, even Englishness and English identity. She longs for a more European communitarian approach wherein—and I am slightly paraphrasing here—people come to their local village pubs and churches, dance around like Merry and Pippin, and watch “football.” 

One might be forgiven for catching a glimpse of a longing for a feudal hyper-localist communitarian past, prior to the industrial revolution and the age of global empires. Incidentally, she also claims to be English, and not British. This “proud English, but hate the British past” is not a new sentiment. Christopher Hitchens said the same thing once: in his own words, a sentiment that can be stretched back to a certain strain of radical Englishness, the same sentiment that influenced the Glorious Revolution, the republicanism of Thomas Paine, and the abolitionists in both England and New England. It is also a strange irony that both Hitchens and Sarkar’s theses hinge on the idea of “geographical nationalism”—that is, the identity of a specific in-group of people, sharing the same culture and history, paying the same social burdens such as taxations for similar service under equal law, within a geographically defined space of a nation-state, an idea taken to near perfection in the country called the United States of America. Hitchens had been quite clear about that. America to him was the epitome of a classical English republic under English common law. Sarkar, on the other hand—not such a huge fan of America.

But in an interesting way, Sarkar is right about the loss of shared history and sacrifice as the chief reason there are so many fissures in the British isles. If she thought a little deeper, perhaps she would have finally reached the logical end point of what might be too shocking for her to contemplate: that for, its problems, the British Empire was the truly unifying multiethnic progressive force that her people, including her great-great-aunt, worked day and night to destroy in favor of monoethnic small states. As a result, one of the identities that she and many others are struggling to define now is Englishness, which, absent a civic progressive multiethnic imperial core, is bypassing the forces of geography and returning to forces of ethnic homogeneity.

What bonded the British Isles under the Union Jack was, of course, the empire; the children of the empire such as Sarkar herself constitute the current entity. As is the norm, lacking that glue, monoethnic instincts go in all unforeseen directions. America is a unique example and experiment, in some ways very similar to the late British or Habsburg Empires. England and the European states, however, aren’t America. 

In fact, the troubles of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are not new, and not, contrary to what people are mostly talking about, solely about migration. Yes, there is a significant Muslim minority that has not been assimilated and never will be, and sooner rather than later there will be retaliatory violence against them, if not from white native Brits, then from other minorities that are traditionally opposed to radical Islamists. 

But the tragedy of Britain is not just that. It is that the UK and Britain as we know it isn’t an entity that exists anymore, the previous one has, for all practical purposes ceased to exist, and the new ones have not been born from the struggle that is requisite for state building and state consolidation. That struggle is only starting now.

Great Britain never went through a steady state formation as the other modern states have. The short lived republic of England was a puritanical and martial entity, something the Irish often forget when they taunt Britain for still having a monarchy. The puritanical forces in turn were then packed off to America. A strain of New England progressive politics is nothing but a bastardized form of that Cromwellian self-loathing and joyless puritanism. 

But despite everything, America continued the English customs, and traditions, a mix of Bilbo Baggins and Sir Lawrence Oates; a melting pot, where generation after generation came to be a part of something greater than themselves. America still dreams big, and despite the differences, barring, once again, say a small portion of Islamists in Minnesota or Michigan, a significant chunk of migrants, even illegal ones, are coming to America to do something good with their lives. America, as much a credal empire as any, instills that particular form of loyalty. 

No such thing res in the UK. The current crop of illegals don’t share any heritage from the former empire, and don’t care much about current, almost undefined British sensibilities. Lacking a heartfelt affinity for their new home or the vision of a shared future, they can be metaphorically compared to locusts. 

Britain, and England are, of course, different, but this wasn’t always the case. The current British state is a result of the First World War, as AJP Taylor so memorably explained. English nationalism is easier to define territorially and culturally, but harder to define ethnically unless one brings out the calipers and 23andMe, especially in a country where Bukayo Saka and Marcus Rashford play for the England team that reached the Euro cup finals cheered by millions. One cannot simply exclude them and commit the same historical mistake of subjecthood without citizenship and affinity that doomed the British empire. 

But, even then, most British migrants of an early era who are second-generation citizens also grew up learning to hate the entity which perhaps more than any other would have considered them all equal, all cives Britannici. The Conservatives post-Thatcher dare not defend their patrimony and are more focused on economic gains above all; consider the Osbornian push to return the Elgin marbles. The liberals and the left both hate the unique traditions of their country and history more than anything, and worship the unaccountable European superstate as a model of governance. 

Pages after pages have been written about the root causes of why the British state collapsed. The reason is simple. A British state that cannot define what it stands for was always bound to fail to survive in the long run. The Conservatives are powerless to go against the state, the enormously powerful and shadowy left-wing civil service, the higher-education cartel, and ideological human-rights NGOcracy, because they are loath to use state power for fear of being called fascists. The left has no such problem; they have informational hegemony in both higher-education and mass media. 

It is also the nuance that differentiates the right’s tacit support for mass-migration and the left’s overt push for it. The right, which has always been for selective meritocratic migration, has simply stopped caring about both merit and the rump British state that survived the empire. The British left, however, wants to use mass migration for two reasons: to dissolve the reing bonds between the four countries that formed the union and to curtail the power of English nationalism, which, especially post-Brexit, is the reing greatest threat to their ultimate vision of being a constituent part of the an ever-growing and egalitarian union under the European superstate. Every facet, from the two-tier policing to the new blasphemy and speech laws, can be explained if seen from that lens. 

I don’t know what the future is, but it looks bleak in some ways. The two schools of thought in English postliberal circles can be summarized thus. The first accepts the fact that the future of Britain is to be a part of the EU, and hopes the EU changes someway, shifting to the right. This is a fantasy; borderless empires are almost always a progressive force, just that the definition of progress might differ in different ages. The second proposes a little England, cutting out the rest of the world. This is also a fantasy, for obvious reasons.

What the right can hope and work towards is this: a long-term project that enhances English territorial and civic nationalism, colorblind while cognizant of the current population division, extremely meritocratic, and, to some extent, culturally and socially hierarchical. This can then be used to shape the rest of the Union, and renew geopolitical ties with the rest of the core Anglosphere. But that would be a long term project, measured in decades. 

In the meantime however, there is one silver lining. The real lesson from the riots and disorder is that the 200-year aberration of liberal democracy is now over. The left in Europe is completely postliberal and imperial, more so than any element of the right, and it is opposed to any nation-state in any form; the current struggle is which form of postliberalism we’ll find ourselves under. The form of liberal democracy we knew in the British Isles from the industrial revolution to the Internet needed specific socio-economic conditions that do not exist anymore. And with the two-tiered state, postliberal Britain is starting to look increasingly similar to pre-liberal Britain: new blasphemy rules, hyper-localist and quasi-feudal loyalties, private security against highwaymen, a colonial form of policing, and a minimalist tenance of order. 

The accelerationist case for disorder is therefore this: It will bring about newer social contracts, a new state formation, and security architecture. When the state refuses to do the duties that were designed for the modern state lasting the last 200 years, then it inevitably will lead to the people refusing to pay taxes—which will inevitably lead to further receding state power, private security, and feudalism in all but name. And after all the pain of a new state formation might come a newer social order.