'Is There No England Now?'

f news reports are accurate, by the time you read this, Keir Starmer may no longer be the prime minister of the United Kingdom. Depending on the source, he has either decided to resign or is seriously considering it. In any case, the events in Britain over the last few weeks—the murder, enabled by the police, of Henry Nowak by the Sikh Vickrum Digwa; the attempted beheading of a man in Belfast by a Muslim immigrant; the release of a report on the systematic and protracted rape of young women and girls by Muslim “grooming gangs”; the subsequent (and understandable) renewal of unrest over largely unchecked immigration; and the government’s increased efforts to limit and control speech—have likely doomed Starmer and the Labour Party, making it impossible for them to maintain or regain the trust of the people.

None of this should really surprise anyone. In a narrow context, Starmer has been on this course for some time, likely since the very start of his premiership. He was never especially well-liked and always seemed to be the wrong man for the moment. In a broader context, Starmer’s agenda, which pits the ruling class against the rest of the country, has agitated the rest of the country for years. The catch, of course, is that “Starmer’s agenda” isn’t really his at all. It’s the agenda of the ruling class more generally. Again, in a narrow context, immigration, plus speech suppression, plus net-zero green madness, has been the agenda of both British major political parties for the entirety of the 21st century. In a broader context, the often unintentional but always unremitting annihilation of the uniquely British identity has been the agenda of the British ruling class since the end of World War II.

Forty-two years ago, the British rock band the Kinks released their 21st studio album, titled Word of Mouth. It was a mostly unremarkable record—with one exception, the Dave Davies composition “Living on a Thin Line,” which has become a cult classic over the decades (thanks, in part, to its use in an episode of The Sopranos). The song is moving, if somewhat depressing, while Davies’s lyrics are pointed, profound, and, it would appear, rather timeless:

All the stories have been told
Of kings and days of old,
But there’s no England now.
All the wars that were won and lost
Somehow don’t seem to matter very much anymore.
All the lies we were told,
All the lies of the people running round,
Their castles have burned.
Now I see change,
But inside we’re the same as we ever were.