10/24/2022
The Conservative (“Tory”) Party has been in power in the United Kingdom for 12 years, with a long line of forgettable Prime Ministers surfing over restive voters who demanded Brexit, reduced immigration, and more national sovereignty [How long have the Conservatives been in power and who were the Prime Ministers, by Caroline Westbrook, Metro, October 20, 2022]. But in what can only be considered pure spite on the part of the British Ruling Class, the UK will now be governed by a caricature of Politically Correct “Conservatism” — an Indian hedge fund manager, Rishi Sunak, who used to work at Goldman Sachs and is worth more than King Charles III [Rishi Sunak, the new UK prime minister, is yet another Goldman Sachs alumnus, Business Insider, October 24, 2022]. Almost as if on purpose, the Conservative Party has broken apart its winning coalition to pursue policies that favor no one except Sunak’s former colleagues. Gleeful Labour supporters and Celtic separatists are poised to inherit frustrated working-class voters and the existence of the Union itself is in jeopardy. Underpinning all of this: the baffling, enraging, and totally self-defeating Tory policy of increasing immigration in direct defiance of what voters want.
Let’s recall that the major reason the United Kingdom has an immigration problem now is that Labour deliberately opened the gates to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity,” to use Labour apparatchik Andrew Neather’s phrase. That’s about as close to a smoking gun in the “Great Replacement” debate as can exist: the Labour Party wanted to replace the British electorate. It did this as a conscious choice. It was treason.
What’s remarkable is that the Tories now want to rub their own voters’ noses in the filth, with outgoing PM Liz Truss running against immigration during the leadership race and then promptly calling for more immigration afterward.
Prime Minister Sunak was softer than Truss during the leadership race and has a record of immigration enthusiasm [Chancellor Sunak Expected To Increase Immigration Routes To UK In Budget, by Jack Montgomery, Breitbart, March 2, 2021]. His supposedly “pragmatic” approach to immigration suggests that we can discard any rhetoric about border control and look for more immigration for supposedly economic reasons, i.e., more cheap labor [What Rishi Sunak could do about the cost of living, the NHS, immigration, energy, and Brexit, by Fionnula Hainey, Manchester Evening News, October 24, 2022].
It would also be in keeping with recent Conservative policy. Despite party members repeatedly identifying immigration as a key concern, and Brexit being carried to unexpected victory as a kind of proxy for the immigration issue, the Tories have deliberately and consciously increased non-European immigration into the United Kingdom.
Thus, at the end of the second Elizabethan Age, we have the poetic irony of a Third Worlder from the former Raj taking the helm of what can only be called an Occupation Government, in which the rights of free speech, self-defense, and freedom of association simply do not exist [Once Great Britain Under Occupation, by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, December 1, 2017].
Some Indians, quite rightly, see this as a kind of conquest of their former overlord. As the popular newspaper Dainik Jagran put it (via Google Translate), “Rishi Sunak will become the Prime Minister of Britain, the command of the country that ruled India for years is now in the hands of an Indian, October 24, 2022].
Nationalist Indians are gloating over Rishi Sunak becoming UK’s PM, whose wife didn’t even pay taxes in UK. The same nationalists were calling for a kind of civil war against Sonia Gandhi becoming India’s PM though her husband had sacrificed his life for India.
— Ashok (@ashoswai) October 24, 2022
1608: East India Company arrives in India at a port near Surat
…414 years later…on Diwali day.
2022: Rishi Sunak becomes PM of UK.
Time changes everything. Happy Diwali all!
— Chetan Bhagat (@chetan_bhagat) October 24, 2022
Still, focusing on Sunak’s identity as an Indian might be the wrong way to look at it. It’s not that he’s some Indian revanchist; he’s more of a citizen of nowhere. There are many whites just like him.
In truth, Sunak’s racial heritage is less salient to most Britons than another fact about him — how rich he is. He owns a mansion in West London; a house in Santa Monica, California; and a Georgian-era home in Yorkshire with an ornamental lake and a swimming pool …
Sunak’s wife, the fashion designer Akshata Murthy, is even richer. She is the heir to an Indian telecommunications fortune, and the revelation in April that she was a “non-dom” — a foreign national who paid a £30,000 flat fee in lieu of millions of pounds in income tax on earnings outside Britain — nearly sank her husband’s political career. (To add to the Rishi Register of Cringe, the legitimate media attention on his wife led Sunak to declare that he sympathized with Will Smith’s defense of Jada Pinkett Smith. “At least I didn’t get up and slap anybody, which is good,” he added.) The same month, it emerged that Sunak had held a green card until October 2021, allowing him permanent residency in the United States. Questions about how committed he was to living the rest of his life in Britain have bubbled through back channels and social media.
[Rishi Sunak, Scion of Britain’s New Ruling Class, by Helen Lewis, Atlantic, October 24, 2022. Links in original]
It’s not (just) that Sunak is Indian or that the Tories have open contempt for their voters, it’s that England itself seems to have utterly lost its identity, with British identity consisting of no more than a passport [Sangita Myska dismantles caller’s claim that Rishi Sunak ‘isn’t even British,’ by Adam Solomons, LBC, October 22, 2022]. Having lost their faith and their Empire and having opened their doors to the Third World, British identity has become a costume. England itself is just a neutral battleground between brawling mobs of non-Europeans [Why are mobs fighting on the streets in Leicester, UK, Indian Express, September 21, 2022].
Americans may sneer at the English who have lost their country and say they are simply behind the times when we should be pursuing globalism and free trade.
But note that, in a supposedly democratic country, the English have in fact made bold electoral choices against their Establishment. They gave the Tories a potentially stable coalition as a National Conservative party. The Conservatives, led by Boris Johnson, broke Labour’s “Red Wall” by focusing on patriotism, immigration restriction (and its economic benefits), and appealing to Labour’s traditional working-class voters. In 2019, this led to a crushing victory for the Tories (see Conservative Victory In UK Shows Path Forward For Trump’s GOP, If They Have The Wit To See It ) and the possibility of a generational realignment.
Yet, amazingly, the Tories have undone their victory. Matthew Goodwin, one of the best scholars of National Populism, reports that the Conservatives have failed to win over the new voters they attracted in 2019 with their pro-worker, patriotic message.
Compare the US & UK. US Republicans still in tune with the realignment. In 2024 polls, uni grads favour Biden by 20 pts while (much larger number of) working-class voters back Trump by 16 pts. But in UK Labour now has 20+ pt lead among workers. Tories totally blown realignment.
— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) October 23, 2022
It’s so extraordinary and so self-evidently destructive that it challenges one of the very premises of democracy. Apparently, Conservative leaders value mass immigration and globalism more than even keeping power. Voting is pointless because your chosen representatives won’t just ignore you but will do the exact opposite of what you requested.
This is not overstatement; if King Charles III unironically exercised direct power and ruled instead of reigned, it would be more representative than what exists now. His subjects would at least know where sovereignty lies and who should be held accountable in case of failure.
The Tory trick of mobilizing a bunch of “diverse” Members of Parliament — themselves a product of the party managers’ imposition of Politically Correct minorities on the local nomination process (cf. Herschel Walker, Tim Scott) — to force through an agenda that their voters don’t want will lead the party to disaster, perhaps dissolution. Labour now holds the greatest lead in 25 years [Rishi Sunak faces biggest Labour poll lead in 25 years, by Ian Jones, PA Media, October 24, 2022]. The Scottish National Party has said it may treat the next General Election as a de facto independence referendum [SNP could treat general election as independence vote, says Ian Blackford, by Mark McLaughlin, The Times, October 22, 2022]. The phony nationalists of the SNP just want to be part of the European Union megastate, but they could conceivably win a second referendum, not least because the Tories squandered their coalition after Brexit [UK Top Court to Hear Scottish Independence Vote Bid, Reuters, October 7, 2022].
The United Kingdom faces economic ruin, not least because of surging energy prices and a spiraling budget crisis because of the country’s peculiar determination to fight a proxy war with Russia in lockstep with the U.S. [UK will match record Ukraine support in 2023, Prime Minister’s Office, September 20, 2022]. Because the UK’s leaders apparently want to pretend they are playing “The Great Game” with the Tsar, they are losing the British Isles themselves.
You can’t reason with people who won’t even support their own political survival. There are many reasons why they are so determined to destroy the United Kingdom. It could be bribery, racial resentment, or just sheer stupidity or short-sightedness. It doesn’t matter. What’s needed is a new patriotic force that can deliver on the promises of Brexit, offer relief to British workers, and maintain the unity of the United Kingdom.
Perhaps only Nigel Farage can lead such a movement, given that the Tories seem determined to go down with the ship [‘Nothing is going to change!,’ Farage explains why Sunak will be ‘disaster’ for Tories, by Tom Watling, Daily Express, October 24, 2022].
Absent that, I question (as a supporter of Scottish independence) whether King Charles III will even have a United Kingdom to preside over when his coronation takes place in May 2023. The British people are stateless and unpresented. The fecklessness and cowardice of the Tories over the past decade have rendered the great victories and sacrifices of their forebears in all the centuries past completely pointless. Alfred the Great, Marlborough, Nelson, or Wellington might as well not have existed given that the island will be handed over to the Third World anyway. Outright Viking conquest would have been less destructive.
Will there “Always Be An England?,” as iconic British songstress Vera Lynn sang during World War II?
No. There’s not one now. There’s only the hope of Restoration, and that won’t come from the Conservative Party. They’d rather lose than stand for their people.
Whatever explains this British failure also explains the spiritual rot that exists within the rulers of the U.S. and the entire Western world — a class that seems not just indifferent to their subjects, but actively hateful.
James Kirkpatrick [Tweet him @VDAREJamesK] is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc. His latest book is Conservatism Inc.: The Battle for the American Right. Read VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow’s Preface here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.