Streams of Tears, Rivers of Blood
Streams of Tears, Rivers of Blood
The Death of Queen Elizabeth II brings to a close an England that truly could have rejected global liberalism. All the English have left to do now is to witness the end of England.
For as much as the American tradition concerns Republicanism and the rejection of monarchy, the average American has been inundated with news over the death of Queen Elizabeth. A stalwart figure of her age, to be sure, but as some have noted, she was less so a figure of an age as much as she was the figurehead of a transitioning, sinking, ship called Britain.
By the time of her ascension as the monarch to all British subjects, India had already been lost, and during her reign, the decolonization of Africa would lead to leaders such as Robert Mugabe and Idi Amin taking the reigns of former British territories. Perhaps not all of the colonies found themselves with such horrible fates, but as Tucker Carlson remarked in his segment following her death:
It’s gone now, barely even remembered. Elizabeth the Second was the last link to a truly Great Britain. […] What did come after the British Empire? […] It’s not an improvement. The entire continent of Africa has a new master: The Chinese Government. China is the latest colonial power to dominate Africa. Its subjects will be pining for the British soon, assuming they are not already.
Alas, Queen Elizabeth came from a time where it was possible to consider such possibilities or indeed even put one’s own nation above all else. For as much as Elizabeth may have had controversy (perhaps not herself, but certainly in the family), there were few who could doubt her love for God and Country. Her recent Prime Ministers, however, do not embody this love of God and Country. For the most part, they reject such values.
When David Cameron came to speak at Texas A&M University a little over a month after the beginning of the Donbas War (a term I much prefer to the unhelpful term “Russo-Ukrainian War,”) he bragged loudly about leading a coalition of countries opposed to settlement in the aftermath of the Crimea Crisis of 2014. He acknowledged the grave cost that would likely come to Europe in the stead of pursuing the conflict on Ukraine’s behalf but insisted that such action was the correct course of action.
He of course, then, can take plenty of blame for the crisis in its first place. Cameron can take responsibility for the failure of Minsk I (as he stood limply off-continent) during his stead as PM, as well as his successors’ disgusting prostration at the feet of Volodymyr Zelenskyy (alongside his SBU, authoritarian tactics, and repression of the Russian populations in Eastern Ukraine that sparked this crisis), endless taps of funding, the intentional scuttling of peace talks in April, and the (second) most recent PM’s willingness to openly commit to nuclear war.
All of this is to say that the UK’s problems are not new, at least in a somewhat long term. None of this is intended to place the blame for all of Britain’s woes at Cameron’s feet, however. He was simply the herald for the true collapse of Britain’s place in the world as all of its problems began to reach a boiling point. The behavior is enabled from top to bottom in Britain’s politics — especially among the Tories — and has been for some time.
The current Regime in Washington does nothing but support this behavior in the UK. The situation from 1776 has practically reversed itself: culturally and politically, most of the Anglophone West is now a colony of the United States. It should surprise nobody, then, that our closest ally in Europe now faces problems that echo our own, with spiking energy prices, illegal immigration, a culture war of censorship (encouraged and allowed under governments of the “conservative” party, hilariously enough), and rampant inflation. All the while, the movements and institutions that should be standing in face of this “progress” limply allow themselves to be washed away with the current.
England, in becoming colonized by the United States, became colonized by its infinite acceptance of foreign migration. As had been prophesized by Enoch Powell over 50 years ago, England would descend into racial and ethnic conflict, enabled by endless migration. Racial riots have become increasingly common in the United Kingdom, and the new Hindu-Muslim clashes in Leicester on the eve of the Queen’s funeral embodied the impending doom the UK is likely to face. These riots are not new, and as much as the categorization/logging of such riots on places such as Wikipedia is intentionally obfuscated, race riots and racial segregation (though Labour’s policies increase its inevitability) in England is becoming more common.
Perhaps a serious change could have been realized by a new Conservative leader, but alas, the members of the Tory party chose the then-“Minister for Women and Equalities,” who was once a self-professed Republican and Soc-Dem in her college years.
England, then, finds itself without much defense of its values at all. Some writers, among them some of my inspirations, claim that Charles III will be a stalwart defender of British values and the faith. Perhaps he will truly embody a “post-liberal” mindset. To those, I ask: Even if he does, what is left of Britain and its faith? What is left of the forces of culture and conservatism in the United Kingdom?
Among the institutions that should be advocating the defense of Britain’s culture should be the Conservative Party. But what is left of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom? As Peter Hitchens elaborated in the Roger Scruton Memorial Lectures of 2022;
But this assault on free speech and thought, and this total abandonment of due process, of the presumption of innocence and the whole idea of justice, seems to me to be the end, and not the beginning, of a long process in which adversarial debate has been strangled, and it has been strangled largely because a useless political party, believing in nothing but office and money, thought it beneath it to fight. To fight for what? To fight for the Christian religion, to fight for the freedoms won over centuries of struggle, preserved by repeated battle on land and sea in the air. To fight for patriotism, for the honest love of every field and hedgerow, landscape, language, architecture, law and justice, lifelong marriage, private life, for our unique language, for Shakespeare, the Bible, and the prayerbook. For Dickens, and Wordsworth, for the great cathedrals and parish churches which express, without words, the truth about us. For the fact, for that we are, unique and should remain so. For the ashes of fathers, and the temples of our gods. It was all in our hearts, once, and it is still in mine, but what do they offer us? Box homes, and tower blocks, and hedge funds, freeports, and tax cuts, exciting trade deals with the far east, and the tangy flavor of chlorine-washed chicken. […] It’s got no bite in it! No sense of the great truth, expressed by Edmund Burke, that he who truly fears God, fears nothing, nobody else.
The Tories, in another way of saying, have not conserved much of Britain at all. Indeed, the most recent census figures in the United Kingdom show that 1 in 6 residents of England and Wales were born abroad — a 33% increase in that figure in 10 years. The current Sunak government shows no sign of stopping, despite the Conservatives promising to do so in every manifesto released in the past 12 years.
Enoch Powell, for his time, was considered a madman for such predictions. In his now infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, Powell made predictions about the United Kingdom’s immigration policy that seemed uncouth, outrageous and unbecoming of a man in politics. By all means, read the speech in its entirety, but ask yourself if his predictions were incorrect:
In 15 or 20 years [speech was given 1968], on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's Office. There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population. […]
Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. […] As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."
Powell’s prediction were eventually vindicated in more ways than one; from the numbers, scale, and effects, to the dependency and social strain they would put upon the entirety of Britain.
Britain’s politics no longer resemble rationality. They are, instead, a death spiral: vultures circle overhead to pick at the corpse of a nation and empire that assembled the Anglosphere, dominated the 18th and 19th centuries, and indeed assembled many of the freedoms and structures that America inherited at its founding.
After the tears for the Queen have dried, Britain is left only with a façade of a civilization. While conservatives in the United States fight the idea that America is simply an “idea” and a “place to do business,” it seems Britain is now closer to Airstrip One than being the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.