The Silver Lining of the British Disorder

Aug 22, 2024 by

By Sumantra Maitra, American Conservative.

Ash Sarkar, a “libertarian-communist” British pundit who is the self-declared spokesperson of the British version of “dirtbag left” posted a few videos on X about why she thinks British society is having a rupture, as evident from the recent riots, crackdowns, and counter-mobilizations after the stabbing of three small girls at a Taylor Swift–themed dance class by a second-generation Rwandan migrant. The crux of the argument is thus: Modern Britain is a deracinated 51st state of American consumerism; that has destroyed local culture and, yes, even Englishness and English identity. She longs for a more European communitarian approach wherein—and I am slightly paraphrasing here—people come to their local village pubs and churches, dance around like Merry and Pippin, and watch “football.”

One might be forgiven for catching a glimpse of a longing for a feudal hyper-localist communitarian past, prior to the industrial revolution and the age of global empires. Incidentally, she also claims to be English, and not British. This “proud English, but hate the British past” is not a new sentiment. Christopher Hitchens said the same thing once: in his own words, a sentiment that can be stretched back to a certain strain of radical Englishness, the same sentiment that influenced the Glorious Revolution, the republicanism of Thomas Paine, and the abolitionists in both England and New England. It is also a strange irony that both Hitchens and Sarkar’s theses hinge on the idea of “geographical nationalism”—that is, the identity of a specific in-group of people, sharing the same culture and history, paying the same social burdens such as taxations for similar service under equal law, within a geographically defined space of a nation-state, an idea taken to near perfection in the country called the United States of America. Hitchens had been quite clear about that. America to him was the epitome of a classical English republic under English common law. Sarkar, on the other hand—not such a huge fan of America.

But in an interesting way, Sarkar is right about the loss of shared history and sacrifice as the chief reason there are so many fissures in the British isles. If she thought a little deeper, perhaps she would have finally reached the logical end point of what might be too shocking for her to contemplate: that for, its problems, the British Empire was the truly unifying multiethnic progressive force that her people, including her great-great-aunt, worked day and night to destroy in favor of monoethnic small states. As a result, one of the identities that she and many others are struggling to define now is Englishness, which, absent a civic progressive multiethnic imperial core, is bypassing the forces of geography and returning to forces of ethnic homogeneity.

 

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