Seen from certain angles, Dover Castle looks like the most formidable fortress in the world.  Far below, the English Channel is a vision in ozone and aquamarine—the deeps dotted with shipping, the Pas-de-Calais shimmering with memories, the chalky cliffs ant-tunneled with ancient emplacements, a pristine Cross of St. George snapping in the breeze from the topmost walls.  Kings, queens, field marshals, and prime ministers have stood here and stared out, wondering what the east wind would bring, and whether England could withstand it.  The Kent motto, Invicta, exhales defiance, and the county’s white horse emblem (although Jutish in origin) somehow seems to paw specifically Anglo-Saxon air, evoking the atavistic horse carvings of the South Country, the fierce steeds of a free people.  This ensemble of national tropes is made complete when Spitfires fly past in a Rolls Royce roar, commemorating the halcyon months when they upheld an empire on their wings.

But all this is an illusion.  Look inland, and far higher than the castle you see the real power in the land—tall media masts glinting in the sun, hazy with energy, transmitting neuroses instead of pride, and weakness when once they might have sent strength.  Look down, and there is the town of Dover, bombed by the Luftwaffe, shelled by long-range German artillery, and scurvily rebuilt, where ferries disgorge endless imports, and asylum-seekers lounge in car-exhausted streets.  And even staring seaward at what looks like an immemorial scene, you know that below that moat of Shakespearean dreams extends a marvel of underground engineering, at the French end of which are shanty-towns swollen with the surpluses of less happy lands, all desperate to break into the erstwhile demi paradise, no longer sealed against infection or the hand of war.  Dover Castle was never conquered, but it was circumvented, made irrelevant through the inattention of Wellington’s and Churchill’s puny successors.  The form remains, but it is as falsely fortifying as the misnamed Royal Naval flagship H.M.S. Bulwark, currently dutifully picking up migrants in the Mediterranean, many of whom will filter through to the United Kingdom—possibly including the likes of Rafikhe Tayari, an accomplice of the Sousse beaches murderer Sifeddine Rezgui, reportedly awaiting transit from Libya.

England is full of unease, strikingly expressed in an IPSOS/MORI poll of over 1,000 adults released on August 21, which for the first time showed that immigration has overtaken the National Health Service and the economy as the principal public concern, even among Labour voters.  And so it should be, because what is being allowed to happen threatens to alter irreversibly the national character, within just a few decades.  The country that for so long defied absorption through feats of arms is being eaten away from inside and underneath, existentially attacked through massive immigration blended with political pusillanimity and sociocultural sickness.

As recently as 1991, the “White British” percentage of the population was 93 percent—although this included other white groups.  (“White Irish” and “Any Other White” are now categorized separately.)  But the slightly selective immigration policies of Thatcher and Major were bonfired by New Labour, which may have seen their landslide as a mandate for the most fundamental sort of social change—to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity,” as ex-Labour advisor Andrew Neather would recall in 2009.  During the Blair and Brown years, 2.5 million new people came here to live, deportations of illegals were virtually halted, exit checks were abolished, asylum-seekers arrived in record numbers, and free rein was given to every kind of p.c. extravagance.

By 2011, the White British component had shrunk to 80.5 percent (whites as a whole make up 86 percent)—an eight-percent decrease in a generation, with all trends pointing to continued shrinkage until a tipping point circa 2050, after which the once unassailable majority will have become a minority.  This is happening in a country that has never been “a nation of immigrants,” or at least not since 1066.  Many modern Britons are descendants of Iron Age Britons, and even now Dark Ages divisions are detectable in DNA differences—as along the Cornwall/Devon border, or in the tiny ex-kingdom of Elmet.

It would be wearisome to enumerate all the ways in which demographic dumping has altered British life.  The record is a sorry one—restrictions on freedom of speech and association, social distrust, covered-up sexual abuse of white girls by Asian gangs, the presence of such barbarisms as muti, “honor killing,” slavery and female genital mutilation, electoral fraud and intimidation, race riots, and homegrown Islamism promulgated by welfare-receiving preachers—not to mention everyday pressures on welfare, jobs, healthcare, housing, schools, and transport.

For decades, politicians of all parties virtually ignored these phenomena, with occasional Conservative mavericks swiftly sidelined by party managers.  So did most of the media, partly because the powerful National Union of Journalists forbids its members from producing “material likely to lead to hatred or discrimination on the grounds of a person’s age, gender, race, colour, creed, legal status, disability, marital status or sexual orientation.”

Even now, when the media cover the subject frequently, the narrative is often limited to economic impacts and effects on infrastructure.  There is still a penumbra of shame discouraging deeper discussions, with even the archconservative Daily Mail feeling the need to balance salutary critiques with heart-tugging stories about little Ahmed or Aleesha, “who only want a better life.”  Big Business in combination with Big Emotion is easing away the old country, one tariff or taboo at a time.

On several occasions during the Coalition years, senior Tories pledged to cut annual net immigration to under 100,000.  Inevitably, this did not happen.  The Conservatives were of course in hock to the Liberal Democrats, whose views on immigration are even more childish than Labour’s.  But many suspect that Mr. Cameron’s heart is not in the fight.  Even if it is, it is difficult to see how he can make meaningful progress while the United Kingdom belongs to the European Union—which mandates free movement of citizens—and is a sincere signatory to European and U.N. human-rights and nondiscrimination legislation and treaties.  The only party with a coherent restrictionist platform at the last election was UKIP, but despite polling strongly, they had only one MP elected—and he the most immigration-friendly of all their candidates.  The latest available figures show that, from March 2014 to March 2015, Britain saw a record net migration of 330,000 people.  To add to this, in September the government caved in on Syrian refugees and gave permission for 20,000 to be “welcomed” (to use the Home Secretary’s word) over the next five years—and these will come not from among those Syrians already in Europe, but from camps in countries adjoining Syria.  Will this government try?  Even if they do, with so slender a parliamentary majority they are always prone to be outvoted by the massed forces of p.c.

The Conservatives have a tendency to reduce all arguments to the level of economics.  They, too, often talk about immigration as if it were a question of calculus—so much outlay in welfare versus so much potential consumption or tax revenues.  Cultural, communitarian, or emotional considerations are virtually ignored.  Many Conservatives seem to assume that national identity is almost infinitely expandable, as long as applicants are capable of economic activity and are committed to “British values.”  These latter are sketchily defined—but even when Conservatives enumerate them they generally include double-edged notions like nondiscrimination, equality, and diversity.

A partial exception is made for Muslims, who are increasingly seen as qualitatively different from all other groups.  The government is to set out a counterextremism strategy in the autumn which—apart from the usual recommendations, like closing down certain websites—will apparently include ideological combat to tackle the myths that fuel Islamism.  Speaking in Birmingham in July, for the first time David Cameron admitted there is a link between Islamism and Islam, on the ingenious grounds that “to deny it has anything to do with Islam means you disempower the critical reforming voices.”

Ideas once chortled at as the fruit of the “looney left” have become endemic to the bourgeois mainstream, and the puritanical tension is constantly ratcheted up, with voluble people vying to outdo one another in degrees of sociopolitical commitment.  Political correctness itself has become politically incorrect, with even faultlessly liberal public figures falling under dark suspicions of closet chauvinism.  The target du jour is eminent theatrical director Sir Trevor Nunn, who in August came under fire for not casting any nonwhite actors in his four-hour Shakespearean production The War of the Roses.  His defense of “historical verisimilitude” was derided by the perpetually outraged, who scour past, present, and future seeking things to be offended by.  The movement toward “colorblind casting” in theatrical productions is strongly pushed from the ultraleft, because it reinforces the cultic dogma that Britain has always been multiracial, or even—as the think tank British Future expresses it—a “mongrel nation.”  It never seems to occur to such theorists that a nation which does not see itself as being somehow special will probably never achieve anything special.  Whatever its other merits, hybrid vigor rarely gives rise to high culture.

Guilt-sodden gestures are part of the emotional landscape, as in all formerly Protestant countries.  Examples can be harvested from almost any newspaper or site, on almost any day.  For example, in August, in an orgy of post-Presbyterian angst and saccharinity, the Scottish National Party’s social-justice secretary wrote a open letter deploring Westminster’s policies on asylum.  The letter averred that if only the SNP was given jurisdiction over immigration they would lavish money on the poor wee refugee bairns and generally be much more sensitive than the auld Sassenach oppressors.  They do not seem to have considered what effect a sudden descent of Afghan, Syrian, or Ivorian New Scots might have on the sparsely populated old country with its already endangered traditional culture.

The ranks of auld oppressors would probably include the West Midlands Police, who admitted recently that in 2010 they had suppressed a report into Asian sexual grooming of young white girls for fear that it would affect the outcome of the general election.  An even more oppressive authority figure, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, said recently, in a less than full-blooded defense of his force and civil society,

If other people think we are institutionally racist, then we are . . . in some sense there is a truth there for some people . . . I think in some ways society is institutionally racist.  We see lack of representation in many fields, of which the police are one.

He went on to suggest that older white officers might be retired early in order to increase diversity.

Policemen do not make history, only administer it.  Something much more significant than the self-flagellations of browbeaten functionaries happened in June when, after a 15-minute discussion and what one exultant monomaniac called “an uncomfortable silence,” the Oxford Union unanimously passed a resolution that it was institutionally racist.  Similarly significant spinelessness may be found at Goldsmiths College in London—ominously, a locus for teacher training—whose diversity officer was permitted to stay in post despite organizing a meeting from which whites were formally excluded, referring to a fellow student as “white trash,” and supposedly even tweeting #killallwhitemen.  She could not be a racist, she smirked, because she was an ethnic minority woman—and white students apparently found this a satisfactory defense (except for 165 still in possession of spines, who had called for her to be ousted).

Another day, another coast, the same problems seen from a different angle.  I am in Liverpool’s World Museum, in front of a large glass case, looking at a vital display—West African animist deities, zoomorphic face masks, spears, shields, royal thrones, and a large carving of a white man on a bicycle.  The white man is a caricature of an imperial-era district commissioner—of the kind once sent out straight from England’s minor public schools to administer vast swathes of tropical territory and multifarious tribes with little more than a pith helmet and a fly-whisk (albeit backed up with the threat of Martini-Henry-toting redcoats).  He looks harried, and one imagines he would have been perspiring as he bicycled feverishly between clammy outposts to bring the natives news of the English God, Westminster-style democracy, and the products of Birmingham.  In the next case are Hausa relics, in the one after that Igbo, and so on around the former empire in Africa—after which attention turns to the Americas, Oceania, and Asia.  All these relics, museumgoers are informed piously (and perhaps patronizingly), are essential symbols of group identity, badges of belonging, central to ideas of self-knowledge and self-worth.

These piquant exhibits are in notable contrast to the exhibits in the nearby Museum of Liverpool, which are practical to prosaicness—trains, docks, 1930’s advertisements, pictures of the Beatles.  In the Museum of Liverpool, one does not hear about group identity, or badges of belonging, or tribal loyalty—except when it comes to the experiences of black or Asian Liverpudlians.  The emphases are all on commerce and consumption.  The nearest allusion made to white Liverpudlians’ communal identity is to deplore the allegedly ongoing racism encountered by black and Asian arrivals—and of course the slavery of earlier centuries, on which the once great port’s prosperity was partly founded.  (There is a museum devoted to this in Liverpool, but I had enjoyed enough guilt for one day.)

De-emphasis of ethnicity may be an inevitable corollary of a country’s development.  As a country becomes more comfortable, it starts to forget once useful instincts, and old realities.  We start to feel that reason can deal with every problem.  These tendencies may be especially powerful in England, whose people are often undemonstrative and individualistic.  But just as Islamism cannot be decoupled from Islam, race can probably never be removed from nationhood.  The truth is that for most people in the world, ideas of nationhood are bound up with physical self-image, a kind of photo library of tutelary figures from national history.

In England, as in all other European countries, that self-image is of a white person.  Last year, the novelist Martin Amis was excoriated for pointing out the connections between identity and appearance:

a Pakistani in Preston who says “I’m an Englishman” . . . would raise eyebrows, for the reason that there’s meant to be another layer of being English.  There are other qualifications, other than being a citizen of the country, and it has to do with white skin and the habits of what is regarded to be civilised society, and recognisable, bourgeois society.

Could, say, a Samoan or an Inuit ever really be viewed as unequivocally English?  Conversely, could a white person ever be considered Nigerian, or Chinese?  And why would he even want to?  Such thinking obviously leaves nonwhites in Europe in a parlous position—in but never fully of a country, however well disposed toward it, however hard they try to conform to its norms.  One of the reasons we hear so much about Britishness is that Britishness is seen as a safe, colorblind kind of identity—whereas Englishness is seen as dangerously visceral, an irrational, atavistic something that is carried in the blood rather than conveyed on a page.

One is naturally reluctant to marginalize further ethnic-minority citizens who are already alienated, yet difficult things must be said, and soon, if a final fizzling-out of an ancient identity is to be averted.  At the very least, white Britons—so long present, builders of such castles—surely have as many moral rights as the Hausa or Igbo.

 

[Image Credit: By Ad Meskens (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]