When Robert Jenrick defected from the Tories to Reform this January, he upset his former shadow cabinet colleagues by declaring that Britain was broken, and that they were in denial. Feisty as ever, Kemi Badenoch countered that Britain was ‘a great country with deep reserves of strength, talent and resilience’ and just needed a dose of de-regulation and tax-cutting to unleash its potential. But the claim that Britain is broken, echoed by Suella Braverman on her defection a few days later, hints at a deeper cultural and social malaise that strikes a chord with millions. As Nigel Farage argued in a speech in Blackpool in June 2024, ‘Britain is broken … nothing actually works anymore … We are in decline culturally, we’ve begun to forget who we are, what our history is and what we stand for.’
What Farage is referring to, necessarily in coded language, is the loss of our national culture: that shared sense of values, decencies, memories and loyalties rooted in a common experience of home; and its replacement by a society of fractured communities and ethnically segregated neighbourhoods – an ‘island of strangers’, as Keir Starmer inadvertently termed it last year. Farage is speaking to Chesterton’s ‘secret people’, the ‘silent people of England’, and they instinctively recognise this.
How should conservatives respond to this social and cultural disintegration? Michael Gove’s Spectator (editorial, 24 January), a standard-bearer of liberal-conservatism, will have surprised many by coming out in favour of ‘national conservatism’, which they term ‘the most coherent right-wing agenda for government since the late 1970s’. Its politics of ‘national preference’ and ‘national self-assertion’ would, they argue, provide the frame for a possible collaboration between Reform and the Tories.
But the term national can only have substance and significance if it refers to a nation, just as democracy requires there to exist a demos or people, whose will might be exercised. And the ‘multi-faith’ society that the Spectator lauds in the same editorial – a fashionable euphemism for diversity and multiculture wrought by mass immigration – is by definition a society lacking a unified national spirit, a shared culture, or any sense of constituting a people.
These are dangerous terms: nation, national spirit, national culture, people, indigenous people and (heaven forbid!) race – a word that not so long ago served as a proxy for nation or people, as in Churchill’s The Island Race (1964), an illustrated abridgement of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. They signify heresies that even Reform steers clear of, for in a society where progressive liberal orthodoxy dominates, they conjure up the spectre of the extreme right, ‘ethno-nationalism’, and the racial theories of the Nazis.
It ought to be obvious that culture is not transmitted in the genes, and therefore that there is no racial requirement for belonging to a nation or people. Yet there cannot be a shared history or culture without there having been a settled population within which that culture could develop over generations, and into which newcomers could assimilate – which implies in turn a large measure of shared ancestry. That is why distinct peoples, like the Japanese and English, are associated with distinct cultures.
The liberal left accuses conservatives of ‘fighting the culture wars’, the implication being that anyone who questions the coming of the new multicultural utopia, the adolescent fantasy of a borderless global commune, is a racist, nationalist and xenophobe. But the construction of this utopia necessitates the destruction and erasure of the pre-existing national culture, just as so much rubble must be cleared from a building site. Which is why the English have in recent years been rebranded ‘a nation of immigrants’ with no distinct culture or identity of their own (only ethnic minorities, including the Scots, Welsh and Irish, have the right to ethnic and cultural identities), Britain a ‘community of communities’ in place of a nation, and the term ‘British values’ concocted to signify an all-inclusive civic identity.
Of all the attempts to eradicate our national culture, none is more brazen than the recent proposals drawn up by Defra to introduce diversity into the countryside on the grounds that ethnic minorities see it as ‘a white space’ associated with ‘white culture’. Any suggestion that our cities are increasingly black or brown spaces in which the ethnic majority feels excluded would provoke outrage – such is the nature of ‘asymmetric’ multiculturalism. The idea that the communities of rural England might constitute a legitimate culture, a historic community rooted in territory – something blindingly obvious to any visitor from overseas – is not entertained for a moment. And is it far-fetched to suppose that the imposition of unwanted and disproportionate housing developments on our towns and villages has the ulterior motive of repopulating and diversifying them? It will not be long before the face of rural England is changed out of all recognition.
The need for conservatives to make a stand becomes more urgent by the day. But they stand no hope of defending our ancestral national culture unless they engage in a wholesale assault on the ideologies of multiculturalism and diversity. And this cannot be done without challenging the prescribed Newspeak, which brands perfectly good English words – like indigenous, ancestral, homeland, people, race, nation, host (nation), national (culture) and colonise – as inflammatory or racist, unless they are deployed by ethnic minorities. Social and cultural conservatives, both of the left and the right, must recognise and name what is at stake. It is not Britishness or legalistic ‘British values’, which anyone can sign up to. It is England, the English people, and English culture and civilization. It is the deliberate and systematic eradication of a people, its culture, and its historic inheritance.
