Tracing the footsteps of the conservative Anglophile man of letters Nirad C. Chaudhuri, my English life as a doctoral researcher started in 2015 with disillusionment. It’s hard to convey the stark absurdity that hits you in your face the moment you start comparing your romanticized ideas about the motherland of modern parliamentary democracy to the reality. The nation that once lorded over three-fourths of the globe, whose contributions to my place of birth include the rule of common law, a defined territory, science, railways, and the English language, has become a nation of around 5 million knife crimes a year and an 8 percent annual rise in the murder rate.
Brexit, arguably the first conservative-nationalist rebellion in the Western world, was a welcome development. A cottage industry of polemicists and public intellectuals have since sought to explain it through the predictable lens of racism, sexism, far-right politics, alienation of the white working class, and xenophobia. Nothing could be further from the truth. Brexit was inevitable. And to trace its roots, a clearer picture of Britain needs to be drawn for those living on the other side of the moat.
When I first arrived in Britain, I assumed its Tory government would consist of conservatives similar to those in the United States, a country with which I was intrinsically familiar due to my work. I didn’t realize that I’d face a bleak post-religious society, quite similar to other parts of Western Europe. Just 2 percent of young adults say they are interested in the Church of England, in spite of all the efforts of Anglicanism to wed itself to LGBT rights, female vicars, and liberalism. Britain is currently led by a nominally conservative government, manned by squabbling politicians and frontbenchers who are closet Whigs pretending to be Tories. The prime minister proudly proclaims herself a feminist and is currently interested in consolidating laws that would make divorce easier. Formerly majestic churches and cathedrals, which once loomed hauntingly over imperial cities, now have their glass panels guarded by iron mesh so that drunken hooligans don’t throw stones for fun on a weekend, night-out destruction binge. Homelessness is rife, with drunk, able-bodied, military-age men sitting on the roadsides, right next to those disused churches and their dilapidated charity schemes, a sickening rot at the heart of the once glorious Anglican superpower. Broken families, rape gangs, drugged teenagers, and rabid youths exist next to sophisticates in their finance offices and clubs — a seething underbelly of Morlocks next to a class of pretentious, naive, and sexually promiscuous Eloi, the ravages of a social and sexual revolution in a great power formerly known as Great Britain.
British police are cutting down on investigating serious crimes like burglary, robbery, stabbing, and acid attacks, due to apparent funding cuts. They have instead prioritized spending millions on investigating online abuse on Facebook and Twitter, with officers comically prancing around in nail polish to promote “anti-slavery” awareness. The justice system emphasizes Euro-liberal, rights-based rehabilitation instead of more traditional punishment and deterrence. A 12-year-old girl was accused of racial discrimination against her abusers in an Islamic grooming gang. Academics are being hounded off university campuses by transgender activists.
It is taboo to raise the question of what devastation post-’60s society has wrought, but its devastation is everywhere. Thousands of teenage girls have been groomed and sexually abused because the authorities are rendered immobile by fears of racial insensitivity, betrayed not just by their working-class parents but also by the broken community they live in, the Church, and the state. Entire neighborhoods are wracked by pathologies. Terror attacks, knife crimes, and acid attacks are not features of any healthy society. Unchecked liberty without any authority and sense of personal responsibility reign supreme.
Healthy civic nationalism is looked down upon. Humans, by nature tribalistic, seek a cause greater than their meaningless individual selves. Today, overt civic patriotism is considered bigotry by Britain’s bipartisan cosmopolitan elite, even under Tory stewardship. But the vacuum is usually filled. Without the unifying factor of loyalty to the ground beneath one’s feet, the country remains divided as people happily choose their transnational ideological flags to fly, whether the red flag of Trotskyist internationalism, the black flag of the Islamic State, or the liberal internationalism of the star-studded, blue EU standard. Everything but the flags of their forefathers.
The less said about the British armed forces, the better. The once proud Royal Navy is operationally at its weakest since the 16th century.
Meanwhile, her majesty’s honorable opposition is led by a Trotskyist who clings to clapped-out command economic ideas, who wants to destroy the country’s nuclear deterrence, despises the United States, attends rallies with notable anti-Semites, and once portrayed Hugo Chavez as a beacon of humanity. National institutions such as the media and academia are completely hijacked by Gramscian radicals. For example, I was unable to find a single historical show in the U.K. that focuses on the military leaders of the country’s history; nothing on Nelson, Havelock, Pellew, or Napier. Instead, all the shows are obsessed with revisionist falsehood and human drama, a heavy dose of historical revisionism bordering on propaganda. The universities long gave up on classical education based on enlightenment values, reasoning, and logic, and instead have Marxist-feminist student clubs and gender studies professors who act as Soviet commissars instigating students against their academic enemies.
The social contract of the United Kingdom is broken. This is a country where average Britons are divided and the elites are either too opportunistic about their own careers to notice or actively disdainful of the land’s historic legacy. Middle-class Britons no longer feel proud of their country, their history, and their legacy. Working-class Britons are called tribalistic bigots and racists when they do.
As the Brexit campaign started, I remember talking to people about the referendum: Polish taxi drivers, British-Indian and -Chinese shopkeepers, north England grocers. The predictions that “remain” would win didn’t make sense. The momentum toward “leave” was too evident, and yet unspoken and often ignored in media and policy circles. The majority of “commoners” were clearly left out and even vilified as xenophobic by the daily propaganda on behalf of the EU’s Byzantine behemoth.
“Remainers” on both left and right failed to muster much in the way of arguments. Social democrats long ago stopped questioning the authoritarian blitzkrieg of good intentions. Euro-conservatives were too baffled by the onslaught of globalization to foresee the inevitable backlash that was lurking on the far horizon. The British media and political class, from its cosmopolitan bubble, completely failed to foresee this simple urge to be free of EU imperium.
Disillusioned Europeans have cast about from far left to far right in search of an alternative to the narrow EU-approved spectrum of liberal conservatives and social democrats, but the solution they seek may not be ideological at all. Civic nationalism and autarky are an instinctive and understandable reaction. The civic-nationalist forces that opposed the Soviet tyranny are the same ones now opposing another union determined to remove all borders and flatten all diversity, this time from Brussels instead of Moscow.
The Brexit “leave” campaign’s message resonated with the people of the U.K. and with euroskeptics across the broader EU and was, by and large, delivered calmly and on point. The fundamental debate was over the contradiction of the EU as an idea and the survivability of European democracy and values in a pervasive bureaucracy that is slowly gobbling up the Shires. The only way forward was to “take back control.”
It connected with the working class and with older generations, regardless of skin color or ethnicity. It included British-born Indians and Poles, British-resident Chinese and Slovaks. Brexit was not about prudence, not about common sense, not between social classes or economic points of view, but about a more instinctive, clannish survival against perceived elite-driven social restructuring. It was as British as Nelson ordering the starboard battery of HMS Victory to face the combined might of the Franco-Spanish fleet.
The British elite, other than a handful few, never wanted to leave the European Union. Popular revolutions historically don’t work well in Britain. Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal is essentially the deal that her predecessor David Cameron wanted to negotiate with the EU before the referendum — be a part of the customs union but with added control on migration — before German Chancellor Angela Merkel shut him down. That is how this farce is ending up, just in a more humiliating way. This is, after all, Britain’s Versailles moment. The relative power of the EU is seven times the U.K.’s. The only way for Britain to win a favorable deal was to play the ultimate card it had in hand: security. British troops patrol Eastern Europe, and British deterrence of Russia is a must for a continent focused on migration and LGBT rights. But that card was not even on the table, much less displayed.
As EU turns into a hyperliberal empire, the failed Brexit revolution is unlikely to be an isolated event. At the time of writing, seven European countries have toppled their establishment governments and nine more have lurched rightward. That will only increase. The British elite now face a choice. The social democrats and neoliberals are on the retreat across most of Europe, but the conservative movement is also divided.
The European Union, on the other hand, has to grapple with a fundamental question, which sooner or later every political union has to face: how to crush dissent within. The differing social forces within Europe are going to tear it apart unless the EU takes on an imperial character, crushing conservative rebellion and forcing elite-driven social engineering and liberal change. There can only be two logical endgames from there, either a liberal European empire, which then creates a security dilemma and antagonizes other land and maritime powers such as the United States and Russia, or an end to the EU project, torn apart by a conservative rebellion led by Eastern Europe. To channel popular rage, conservatives need to take up a leadership position in the fight for Option B. Conservatives, in Europe and especially in Britain, therefore need to focus on two simple positions: a strong state providing security and law and order to taxpayers and a strong defense of the realm from external changes and social engineering. Otherwise, as genuine mainstream conservatives impersonate their liberal antagonists, they will cede ground to Marxists and fascists.
Sumantra Maitra is a writer and a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. researching great power politics, grand strategy, and foreign policy realism. He can be reached on Twitter: @MrMaitra.
