“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction”
– Ronald Reagan
When I grew up, Great Britain was exotic. There were the red telephone booths, Buckingham Palace, black cabs, and, of course, the Bobbies (police) and the Beefeaters. England was the land of Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, and Henry IV. For me, Britain was history incarnate.
Obviously, part of that comes from the fact that, as Americans, we share a great deal of history with the British. Not only did we split from Britain in 1776, but our history continued to stay close until modern times…from the US joining Britain in the fight to end slavery to fighting two world wars together to the British Invasion in the 1960s that brought us the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks.
Modern England largely dates back to 1066, when William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel and put the finishing touches on a unification that had been evolving since the Romans abandoned the island in 410 AD. (For clarity, as the terms are often used interchangeably, the United Kingdom (UK) is a sovereign nation comprising England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. “Great Britain” is the largest island in the British Isles, containing England, Scotland, and Wales, but not Northern Ireland.)
The 1,000-year span since has seen Britain, like the rest of the world, evolve—always, however haltingly, in the direction of freedom. This journey began with the Magna Carta, agreed to by King John in 1215. A watershed event in Western culture, it limited the King’s powers and declared he was subject to the law, guaranteed church rights, access to an impartial system of justice, and limited taxes.
Although the Magna Carta would have a rough beginning, it was an enormous step in the drive towards liberty. The document would set the stage for Parliament to evolve from councils that advised the King into a representative body that began taking a more active and powerful role in governing.
It was just the first in a line of steps that would make Britain the freest nation on the planet for centuries. The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 would guarantee the right to trial and demand the state show cause for holding someone. A decade later, the English Bill of Rights would set out Parliamentary rights, the right to petition the king, and the freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Over subsequent centuries, the British commitment to freedom would expand, eventually including all her citizens, not just the barons who first held King John’s feet to the fire.
Over that march to freedom, England would produce an extraordinary array of freedom advocates, some of whom inspired our Founding Fathers. Men such as John Locke, Edmund Burke and, later, William Wilberforce, the man who led the fight against the slave trade.
It is this incessant march towards freedom that has always given England an aura of consequence that few other nations share. And that’s what makes today’s Britain so sad.
The genesis of today’s dystopia began almost three decades ago when immigration took off in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The number of non-EU immigrants averaged over 200,000 per year for a decade and then skyrocketed after 2020. A nation of 55 million in 2000 is today over 65 million, with almost all of that growth coming from immigration, a majority from non-EU nations, particularly from the Middle East and Africa, countries that don’t share British culture or, importantly, religion. (It’s also likely that many of the ostensibly EU immigrants originated in non-EU countries.)
As a consequence, London, home to 20% of England’s population, has gone from approximately 80% native white British in 1991 to approximately 36% in 2021. The native population has surely shrunk more since then.
The result of this transformation of Britain from a largely British nation to something else has been monstrous. Possibly the single most despicable example is the 20-plus-year Rotherham child rape scandal that saw hundreds of Pakistani Muslims rape over a thousand British girls right under the noses of police who did nothing for fear of being called racists. As if that wasn’t bad enough, those who dared report on the various trials—see, e.g., here and here—found themselves jailed for doing so.
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