or engineers, doctors, scientists or theologians. When your go to response to everything is legislation or taxation you impede your ability to understand the world. I've been joking for years that all the British government need to do to get net zero up to work is to repeal the second law of thermodynamics - sadly I don't think anyone in government would get the joke.
It is not coincidental that a Labour party that 'rode the tiger' of the Pakistani clan system for votes and now witnesses those voters fragment to Islamist campaigners were also instrumental in demonstrating a distinct lack of interest and resolve in addressing the systematic rape and torture of young white girls by those very same pakistani muslims.
I was there in West Yorkshire in the 1980s and saw it happening, without realising its extent or reach. Everyone noted the studied indifference of the local Labour politicians, the Labour city councils and West Yorkshire Police.
These people should be prosecuted, but I have more chance of winning the Euromillions than a single prosecution.
Now Labour politicians squirm on the sharpened blade of an inquiry and think up ever more fantastical reasons not to hold one.
And I quote "In 1981 Armed revolutionary committees loyal to Khomeini (which came to be known as the Pasdaran) arrested many thousands of youth and activists from both nationalist and leftist groups, many of whom were later tried by Lajevardi, known as the Hanging Judge, and executed."
This is not ancient history Kier Starmer was at university when this happened.
Revolutions turning on their supporters is not new. The French and Russian Revolutions are full of examples. Lots of people supported the 1979 Revolution: Michel Foucault for one, and me (I'm a few months older than the PM) for another. In my case on the grounds that being ruled by your own is better than being ruled by somebody else. (I voted for Brexit, so I may not have changed all that much.)
To be charitable, I suppose you're saying that communists and nationalist in Iran were more like "fellow travellers" than Robespierre or the committed Party members Stalin had shot—and should have known better. But I think things turning out the way they did is less an Islamic problem than the way revolutions tend to go.
Have to say that Wikipedia entry is not that encyclopaedia's strongest work: 'These arrests ended the alliance between the Tudeh Party and the ruling clergy of Iran and it collapsed, even as the Soviets worked with the Iranians to build up their nuclear capabilities.[citation needed] Even with this agreement, the Iranian government saw the Soviets as "atheistic devils" and the Soviets did not like the government because it had suppressed the Tudeh.[citation needed]'
This "They take no interest in other cultures or the prejudices common within; they view all religions as Anglican in nature,"
Is one of the most common errors ever - thinking that everyone else thinks like you. Although it is surprising how someone can become PM and still believe that.
I’m neither a British citizen nor a conservative Muslim, but I think I know much about these two worlds, and I’d say that the time is ripe for a deep, objective, and pragmatic rethinking of the state of the UK! Before it’s too late!
By “too late”; I do not allude to an apocalyptic scenario such as an impending civil war, but to Ibn Khaldun’s analysis of the clash of social values that belong to different groups, which might lead to the fragmentation of the collective psyche in ways that can be thoroughly unpleasant (unironically, Ibn Khaldun wrote about the sexual abuse of young boys in his time as evidence of the inevitable conflict between urban communities and untamed nomadic groups).
This fragmentation might lead in turn to an open struggle between those groups where Qahr (which can be roughly translated in this context as symbolic violence) can be used to diminish and delegitimise the other group’s sense of self! Which might accelerate a shift in political fortunes and an actual transfer of power from one group to another!
There will not be a civil war as there is no real geographic dimension but there will be increasing Islamic insurgency (aka terrorism) to further their political goals and separate political demos.
During the 2010s I worked next to a Muslim, and after a skirmish near Israel (long before October 7th) I heard him say something like "they took Israel from us like we took Bradford from the British". So they do still think in terms of physical territory. That is one of their weaknesses IMO.
What I mean is that there will be no UK-wide civil war, as that always has a geographic dimension e.g. civil war over say Welsh independence.
I agree there is a physical dimension e.g. Bradford and that will play out over increasing separatism over the coming years with a weak UK state pandering to the demands
Perhaps the conclusion here is ironic, but if Islamist voters are moving away from Labour it is unlikely they will return. There are now enough Islamist in many seats for an explicitly Muslim party to be viable, so why would they switch back? Labour may of course continue to court them due to a sincerely-held belief about multiculturalism, but the cynics in the party – among them perhaps Morgan McSweeney – will see that there's no future in chasing clans when the clans have their own parties.
could be, but I think they will try. I'm doing a follow-up post on the new Islamopobia proposals, which I think are aimed at this, and which obviously bring risks to freedom of religion, and freedom from religion.
One future possibility is Labour ending up with 320 seats and an Independent Alliance with 10 - what happens then?
If Labour gives them the anti-"Islamophobia" law before the next GE won't it have to promise something even worse for the rest of us to get them to vote Labour in that GE?
UK is walking the same walk as the rest of Europe: in 5-10 years we’ll have a LABCONS party/coalition, a Reform party, and several crazie(-er)s to each side. Unless DomCum comes up with his TSP, that is. God help us.
This is also what happened in Scotland where Labour poured their scorn on the hated Tories and were then outflanked on the left by the SNP. Like most of us here I feel pretty unhappy with this new problem, as it wouldn't have happened if the parties we voted into power had done what their manifestos said on immigration. Blair and co were cynical, but Boris's wave is simply unforgivable.
Two good points, except in Scotland, they always disliked Thatcherism/Blairism but stuck with Labour until 2010, largely I think because Gordon Brown was of course Scottish. Ed Milliband the London lawyer with two kitchens cost Labour their Scottish fiefdom. And Alex Salmond was an effective political leader.
"Ethno-narcissism, and its less pathological variant, ethnic pride, is the norm almost everywhere in the world. Europeans are very unusual in consciously rejecting it and viewing it as a sin, a product – more than anything – from the shock of 1914-45, which effectively vaccinated them against this human emotion. "
To use a recent Curtis Yarvin quote:
"At the dawn of the industrial war which destroyed Europe, most Europeans actually still believed in Mars. Every country had its chanting crowds ready to go to battle. We understood the immense value of traditional warfare in building culture and society. And then—the best aristocrats of the continent found themselves physically destroyed by industrial death machines. An artillery shell can’t even tell the difference between Achilles and Thersites."
War is dysgenic - it kills off the heroes first and most.
Thersites, no.
He runs a media operation appealing for recruits.
There are still idiots pretending that battles like The Somme and Passchendaele didn't wreck Britain, although many of the Western Front heroes hadn't yet fathered children (or only one).
The heroism of WW2 was the West's last gasp; and won by the West's pulverising superiority in science, technology and industrial production far more than by courage. And with the Soviet Union and China doing the heavy lifting.
After 1945, with Hitler dead, impoverishment of the gene pool has made its presence felt throughout the West. And a weary, kneejerk cynicism (the inevitable consequence of governments and establishments herding young men into the 1914-18 slaughterhouse) has become universal.
The infamous Neather quote is one I’ve longed brooded on, I think it was the unspoken but psychologically intended purpose of the New Labour period of migration to essential make Labour the permanent party of government. In the process of doing so, it essentially destroyed the grassroots purpose of the Labour itself, moving away from its working class base to being much more a coalition of rival interest groups (much like the Democratic Party). I remember thinking how in the 2010s Labour just couldn’t win back its northern heartlands thanks to this migration and how it was effectively out of government for a long time to come. What I could never foresee is how Boris ruthlessly betrayed his Brexit base by having an even more extravagant and irresponsible migration policy thanks Blair’s. It was without question the most cynical political betrayal that I have ever since in British politics and it’s impacted is going to be far greater than Brexit ever will be. The Tories willing chose political suicide and keeping SW1 happy rather than biting the bullet and changing immigration policy. I would laugh if it wasnt for the despair I feel for the future
Thanks Joseph. I was an early bregetter, but my feeling was that, in or out, the consequences of EU membership are going to be minuscule compared to the immigration policy being pursued by countries across western Europe. I found it utterly strange to see people emotionally torn about this assault on their sense of identity while either oblivious or complicit in a far bigger - and irreversible - change.
It is always interesting to see the right wing approach to a national problem. Islam is coming up to its millennium and a half, roughly where Western Europe was in 1519 when the great divide happened. Before then the Catholic Church could arrest anyone it considered heretical and torture them before finally burning them in public. We spent 200 years fighting each other. In one incident involving the Spanish Army besieging a city, the officers asked how they would distinguish Catholic from Protestant. The commander replied, “kill them all, God will know his own”. Islam may have to go through this period as it is inevitable that many of the restrictions imposed by the Quran may not be acceptable to generations born in the West. This is certainly true of Jewish people born in the West. I was a Catholic myself at one time when its leaders thought the increasing birth rate of Catholics would enable them to dominate English society. What a surprise when the next generation of Catholics failed to go to Mass and restricted their families to two children.
And the last time that sectarian politics was an issue in England was Liverpool where the Irish Party had an MP until 1929. The English have a tendency to forget history but the sectarianism that blighted Northern Ireland was very much an issue in parts of England, let alone Scotland, before the First World War.
Curiously, although I cannot find the map now, support for Farage in his UKIP days in the Lancashire area mapped on to Irish Catholic settlement a century or so before. The historically Irish parts were still much less attracted - don't know if that is still true.
The issue of power in Northern Ireland was always going to cause trouble. There is a historian who explained the problem in terms of the Scottish Clans who were transplanted to NI by James 1. The Scots always allowed the majority Clan to impose its will on the minority, and accept that the majority party/Clan may in time become the minority. In NI there was no chance that the Catholics, who were the majority before most of them were forced out (to Hell or Connacht, as Cromwell said.) The resolution of the NI issue in 1998 was the acceptance by the Unionists that the Catholic majority should be allowed a share of power.
Remember that it has taken the West over 500 years to get to this state. It is possible that Islam may avoid what you call apostasy but most Christians and Jews take a more nuanced view of the existence of God. We are getting better off every generation and more peaceful so the possibility that we will sink into some form of non-existence is highly unlikely.
The West is perfectly capable of defending itself, especially against most of its known enemies. China will never go to war against the West as they have over 2000 years of civilisation behind them to demonstrate that it is easier to deal with your friends rather than your enemies. Russia has 140 million population and the GDP of Australia with 35 million people.
"Among the descendants of recent newcomers, there are many integrated, liberal secularised urbanites, but they are too small in number to be significant in a democracy"
This passage is intriguing. 'Integrated' here is assumed, unquestioningly, to mean 'liberal and secular'. Does a latent Whiggery emerge from beneath the trappings of Toryism which the editorial of this publication sometimes seems to wear? Or is it merely ventriloquising for Progressivism?
Many people who consider themselves conservative in this Kingdom are really, at heart, displaced Liberals. Their creed is the MIllsian principle that the law has no business interfering with private acts that harm nobody else and that the law should not enforce moral norms.
Many muslims, and all conservatives, on the other hand, hold Baron Devlin's view that "society means a community of ideas; without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics no society can exist". The soteriological and legalistic differences between Muslims and Christians are paper thin compared with the gulf that separates both from Godless Materialists.
The Hart-Devlin debate is the true dividing line. Do you believe that the state has a right to legislate on the basis of universal, religiously based, moral laws, or do you believe individual liberty and private conscience should have the greater influence?
"The Labour Party has come to rely on the votes of sectional groups who have no real interest in liberal or progressive politics, merely using them as useful allies against a Right which is less welcoming but psychologically closer"
This second passage, I die pronouncing it, is the riddle of British politics into the next generation.
The new 'Eastern Question'. Whoever can forge the Blue-Green synthesis of the future, unite the ordered, hierarchical, conservative, disposition of the British Islamic constituency with the place-specific patriotism of the British Conservatism would have the world before them.
I admit openly to being a child of liberalism, even if I'm not a Whig (too pessimistic). Julian the Apostate wished to return Rome to the old gods but in his worldview and ideas he had become Christianised. The same is true of most modern conservatives.
from an integration point of view, the children of immigrants joining the Church of England and becoming ardent fans of the Book of Common Prayer would probably be optimal, but becoming deracinated secular urbanites comes close!
"...beoming deracinated secular urbanites comes close!"
I'm not so sure.
I believe that your spirited paraphrase of Christopher Caldwell, on an earlier posting, really pinned the issue to the wall. I immediately felt its truth and wrote it down at the time.
"What secular Europeans call “Islam” is a set of values that Dante and Erasmus would recognise as theirs; the collection of three-year-old rights they call “core European principles” is a set of values that would leave Dante and Erasmus bewildered.’ Schools across the land – including my children’s – came to define ‘British values’ as ‘tolerance’ and opposition to homophobia and transphobia, something which would have left even a generation earlier completely mystified."
There is a challenging Protean truth in there that we must all wrestle with in this generation.
The disquieting 'Foreignness' of the Islamic ethos in this country, it strikes me, is foreign chiefly in the sense that L.P. Hartley understood it - in that "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,".
You are leaping from Dante (died 1321) to the ghastly vapourings of today's liberals, as if nothing at all happened in- between.
In reality, Islam is a theology, a religious faith, wholly inimical to Christianity and the core Christian values of mercy and forgiveness. That both faiths agree on much lesser values like diligence and sobriety, is irrelevant.
And if Islam is so compatible with Christianity - why does Dante place Islam's founder in an especially dreadful predicament in the "Inferno" ? And why did people die to defend Christendom from Islam, if Islam is simply the near-Eastern form of traditional Toryism ?
I do not say Islam is 'so compatible', I merely say that it is more compatible, and I offer only a personal view, gleaned from life in the Modern Babel that is South London.
I entirely agree with you that the much of the ethic of Islam, particularly its attitude to religious violence, is utterly opposd to the message of Christ.
Personally I am privately persuaded that Islam is an early Christian Heresy. Indeed, the worlds most succesful Christian Heresy.
That said, when I speak with my Muslim neighbours about the human condition, and our understanding of an ordered universe and our duties and obligations to God and neighbour we are talking about the same thing.
When I speak with Godless Materialists - self-wrought, unaccountable and and uncreated - we are not.
Re: What secular Europeans call “Islam” is a set of values that Dante and Erasmus would recognise as theirs
Not really. There were significant ideological and cultural differences at the time of the Crusades. The split between state and church (even when they were entwined and all up in each other's business) had no parallel in Islam. And European women's status and their occasional involvement in public affairs was also distinct.
I suppose the point Prof. Caldwell was making is that the Islamic worldview, its anthropology and its ethics as well as its theology, would have been recognisable to Dante and Erasmus rather than to argue the finer points of jurisprudence or what we call 'gender relations'.
An ordered, hierarchical universe, bounded by a Divine Creation and an eventual Millenium, Birth, Death and Judgement, all undergirt by a special and providential role for mankind under an immanent natural law, written on the heart of all living men.
That is what is truly anathema marantha to Western Progressivism.
Dante had Mo in Hell though. (Inferno, Canto 28.) He may have seen that there were similarities between Islam and Christianity, but that was taken as evidence for the falsity of Islam. Mohammed is the Eighth Circle of Hell, the one "for those who have committed fraud; specifically, he is placed in the ninth bolgia (ditch) among the sowers of discord and schism." (Wikipedia)
Good grief there's a lot of tripe on the internets about this—"academic" papers that show their bias by referring to "the Prophet Mohammed" and Dante and trying to suggest DA nicked the idea and the form of "The Divine Comedy" from Islamic writers. (He did, in the same way that Michelangelo pilfered the design of the Sistine Chapel ceiling from Islamic painters…)
Speaking personally, as a practising Catholic, Islam's denial of Jesus's divinity (and of His crucifixion and resurrection) horrifies me infinitely more than the vapidity of JS Mill or Richard Dawkins.
Mohammed is a far more serious opponent - esp now that Western secularism is dying; inevitably, since it is only the result of Western power and affluence, now in their death throes.
Muslims detest non-Muslim things, conservatism included. The idea that they will make an alliance with kaffirs is absurd.
And what price a dismal conservatism / Conservatism (which are both in many ways a mockery of Christ, hence the Revolutions of 1517, 1688, 1789 and 1917) in our apocalyptic and Apocalyptic era ?
You are of course correct in much of what you say in principle. But then being a man-made chimera of different earthly instincts, dressed in the borowed garb of Divine Revelation, Mohammedanism is an unstable and fissile compact. it is, essentially, a spitirual closed loop. Self destructive and self-consuming
So I have no fear of Islam, or of Mohammeds legacy.
But in the sublunary world of political economy, if one needs must make oneself a friend of the Mammon of Unrighteousness, if we are commanded "as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men" and if we find ourselves having to look for friends on the PTA as our childrens schools drift into nihilism and anomic libertinism - we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves on the same side of the room as our Muslim neighbours - rather than our Godless fellow countrymen.
Too many economists and lawyers in public life, not enough historians.
or engineers, doctors, scientists or theologians. When your go to response to everything is legislation or taxation you impede your ability to understand the world. I've been joking for years that all the British government need to do to get net zero up to work is to repeal the second law of thermodynamics - sadly I don't think anyone in government would get the joke.
It is not coincidental that a Labour party that 'rode the tiger' of the Pakistani clan system for votes and now witnesses those voters fragment to Islamist campaigners were also instrumental in demonstrating a distinct lack of interest and resolve in addressing the systematic rape and torture of young white girls by those very same pakistani muslims.
I was there in West Yorkshire in the 1980s and saw it happening, without realising its extent or reach. Everyone noted the studied indifference of the local Labour politicians, the Labour city councils and West Yorkshire Police.
These people should be prosecuted, but I have more chance of winning the Euromillions than a single prosecution.
Now Labour politicians squirm on the sharpened blade of an inquiry and think up ever more fantastical reasons not to hold one.
This is astonishingly good BTW
Thank you
Some members of the Iranian communist party supported the 1979 revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudeh_Party_of_Iran
And I quote "In 1981 Armed revolutionary committees loyal to Khomeini (which came to be known as the Pasdaran) arrested many thousands of youth and activists from both nationalist and leftist groups, many of whom were later tried by Lajevardi, known as the Hanging Judge, and executed."
This is not ancient history Kier Starmer was at university when this happened.
Revolutions turning on their supporters is not new. The French and Russian Revolutions are full of examples. Lots of people supported the 1979 Revolution: Michel Foucault for one, and me (I'm a few months older than the PM) for another. In my case on the grounds that being ruled by your own is better than being ruled by somebody else. (I voted for Brexit, so I may not have changed all that much.)
To be charitable, I suppose you're saying that communists and nationalist in Iran were more like "fellow travellers" than Robespierre or the committed Party members Stalin had shot—and should have known better. But I think things turning out the way they did is less an Islamic problem than the way revolutions tend to go.
Have to say that Wikipedia entry is not that encyclopaedia's strongest work: 'These arrests ended the alliance between the Tudeh Party and the ruling clergy of Iran and it collapsed, even as the Soviets worked with the Iranians to build up their nuclear capabilities.[citation needed] Even with this agreement, the Iranian government saw the Soviets as "atheistic devils" and the Soviets did not like the government because it had suppressed the Tudeh.[citation needed]'
This "They take no interest in other cultures or the prejudices common within; they view all religions as Anglican in nature,"
Is one of the most common errors ever - thinking that everyone else thinks like you. Although it is surprising how someone can become PM and still believe that.
I’m neither a British citizen nor a conservative Muslim, but I think I know much about these two worlds, and I’d say that the time is ripe for a deep, objective, and pragmatic rethinking of the state of the UK! Before it’s too late!
By “too late”; I do not allude to an apocalyptic scenario such as an impending civil war, but to Ibn Khaldun’s analysis of the clash of social values that belong to different groups, which might lead to the fragmentation of the collective psyche in ways that can be thoroughly unpleasant (unironically, Ibn Khaldun wrote about the sexual abuse of young boys in his time as evidence of the inevitable conflict between urban communities and untamed nomadic groups).
This fragmentation might lead in turn to an open struggle between those groups where Qahr (which can be roughly translated in this context as symbolic violence) can be used to diminish and delegitimise the other group’s sense of self! Which might accelerate a shift in political fortunes and an actual transfer of power from one group to another!
There will not be a civil war as there is no real geographic dimension but there will be increasing Islamic insurgency (aka terrorism) to further their political goals and separate political demos.
During the 2010s I worked next to a Muslim, and after a skirmish near Israel (long before October 7th) I heard him say something like "they took Israel from us like we took Bradford from the British". So they do still think in terms of physical territory. That is one of their weaknesses IMO.
What I mean is that there will be no UK-wide civil war, as that always has a geographic dimension e.g. civil war over say Welsh independence.
I agree there is a physical dimension e.g. Bradford and that will play out over increasing separatism over the coming years with a weak UK state pandering to the demands
What in the name of sanity have we done?
Perhaps the conclusion here is ironic, but if Islamist voters are moving away from Labour it is unlikely they will return. There are now enough Islamist in many seats for an explicitly Muslim party to be viable, so why would they switch back? Labour may of course continue to court them due to a sincerely-held belief about multiculturalism, but the cynics in the party – among them perhaps Morgan McSweeney – will see that there's no future in chasing clans when the clans have their own parties.
could be, but I think they will try. I'm doing a follow-up post on the new Islamopobia proposals, which I think are aimed at this, and which obviously bring risks to freedom of religion, and freedom from religion.
One future possibility is Labour ending up with 320 seats and an Independent Alliance with 10 - what happens then?
If Labour gives them the anti-"Islamophobia" law before the next GE won't it have to promise something even worse for the rest of us to get them to vote Labour in that GE?
UK is walking the same walk as the rest of Europe: in 5-10 years we’ll have a LABCONS party/coalition, a Reform party, and several crazie(-er)s to each side. Unless DomCum comes up with his TSP, that is. God help us.
It appears the dam has broken on two party politics. But what that means in practice is tricky to predict.
This is also what happened in Scotland where Labour poured their scorn on the hated Tories and were then outflanked on the left by the SNP. Like most of us here I feel pretty unhappy with this new problem, as it wouldn't have happened if the parties we voted into power had done what their manifestos said on immigration. Blair and co were cynical, but Boris's wave is simply unforgivable.
Two good points, except in Scotland, they always disliked Thatcherism/Blairism but stuck with Labour until 2010, largely I think because Gordon Brown was of course Scottish. Ed Milliband the London lawyer with two kitchens cost Labour their Scottish fiefdom. And Alex Salmond was an effective political leader.
As you no doubt have pointed out already, this is not going to end well.
The Labour Party has for many years now, consistently committed High Treason in an intellectual, moral and spiritual form.
But has it committed High Treason - or any similar offence - from a legal point of view ?
Can any prosecution (which, sadly, will have to be a private one) bring this home to an increasingly shameless nest of traitors ?
"Ethno-narcissism, and its less pathological variant, ethnic pride, is the norm almost everywhere in the world. Europeans are very unusual in consciously rejecting it and viewing it as a sin, a product – more than anything – from the shock of 1914-45, which effectively vaccinated them against this human emotion. "
To use a recent Curtis Yarvin quote:
"At the dawn of the industrial war which destroyed Europe, most Europeans actually still believed in Mars. Every country had its chanting crowds ready to go to battle. We understood the immense value of traditional warfare in building culture and society. And then—the best aristocrats of the continent found themselves physically destroyed by industrial death machines. An artillery shell can’t even tell the difference between Achilles and Thersites."
https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/04/25/the-orbital-authority/
War is dysgenic - it kills off the heroes first and most.
Thersites, no.
He runs a media operation appealing for recruits.
There are still idiots pretending that battles like The Somme and Passchendaele didn't wreck Britain, although many of the Western Front heroes hadn't yet fathered children (or only one).
The heroism of WW2 was the West's last gasp; and won by the West's pulverising superiority in science, technology and industrial production far more than by courage. And with the Soviet Union and China doing the heavy lifting.
After 1945, with Hitler dead, impoverishment of the gene pool has made its presence felt throughout the West. And a weary, kneejerk cynicism (the inevitable consequence of governments and establishments herding young men into the 1914-18 slaughterhouse) has become universal.
unbelievably good writing
Thank you!
Excellent substack Ed
The infamous Neather quote is one I’ve longed brooded on, I think it was the unspoken but psychologically intended purpose of the New Labour period of migration to essential make Labour the permanent party of government. In the process of doing so, it essentially destroyed the grassroots purpose of the Labour itself, moving away from its working class base to being much more a coalition of rival interest groups (much like the Democratic Party). I remember thinking how in the 2010s Labour just couldn’t win back its northern heartlands thanks to this migration and how it was effectively out of government for a long time to come. What I could never foresee is how Boris ruthlessly betrayed his Brexit base by having an even more extravagant and irresponsible migration policy thanks Blair’s. It was without question the most cynical political betrayal that I have ever since in British politics and it’s impacted is going to be far greater than Brexit ever will be. The Tories willing chose political suicide and keeping SW1 happy rather than biting the bullet and changing immigration policy. I would laugh if it wasnt for the despair I feel for the future
Thanks Joseph. I was an early bregetter, but my feeling was that, in or out, the consequences of EU membership are going to be minuscule compared to the immigration policy being pursued by countries across western Europe. I found it utterly strange to see people emotionally torn about this assault on their sense of identity while either oblivious or complicit in a far bigger - and irreversible - change.
It is always interesting to see the right wing approach to a national problem. Islam is coming up to its millennium and a half, roughly where Western Europe was in 1519 when the great divide happened. Before then the Catholic Church could arrest anyone it considered heretical and torture them before finally burning them in public. We spent 200 years fighting each other. In one incident involving the Spanish Army besieging a city, the officers asked how they would distinguish Catholic from Protestant. The commander replied, “kill them all, God will know his own”. Islam may have to go through this period as it is inevitable that many of the restrictions imposed by the Quran may not be acceptable to generations born in the West. This is certainly true of Jewish people born in the West. I was a Catholic myself at one time when its leaders thought the increasing birth rate of Catholics would enable them to dominate English society. What a surprise when the next generation of Catholics failed to go to Mass and restricted their families to two children.
And the last time that sectarian politics was an issue in England was Liverpool where the Irish Party had an MP until 1929. The English have a tendency to forget history but the sectarianism that blighted Northern Ireland was very much an issue in parts of England, let alone Scotland, before the First World War.
Curiously, although I cannot find the map now, support for Farage in his UKIP days in the Lancashire area mapped on to Irish Catholic settlement a century or so before. The historically Irish parts were still much less attracted - don't know if that is still true.
England isn’t a state. The United Kingdom is. The Scottish National Party? Plaid Cymru?
Brexit being done, and the Dublin riots I think changed things.
The issue of power in Northern Ireland was always going to cause trouble. There is a historian who explained the problem in terms of the Scottish Clans who were transplanted to NI by James 1. The Scots always allowed the majority Clan to impose its will on the minority, and accept that the majority party/Clan may in time become the minority. In NI there was no chance that the Catholics, who were the majority before most of them were forced out (to Hell or Connacht, as Cromwell said.) The resolution of the NI issue in 1998 was the acceptance by the Unionists that the Catholic majority should be allowed a share of power.
There isn't yet a Catholic majority, and contrasting Catholic with Unionist is comparing a religious identity to a political identity.
Christians betrayed or forsook their faith.
Muslims have taken careful note of the West's resulting decadence and now, collapse. Certainly, most are careful not to imitate our apostasy.
There won't be a West - for demographic reasons, plus the West's Money and Power are evaporating.
So Muslims born in the West will be loyal Muslims.
Remember that it has taken the West over 500 years to get to this state. It is possible that Islam may avoid what you call apostasy but most Christians and Jews take a more nuanced view of the existence of God. We are getting better off every generation and more peaceful so the possibility that we will sink into some form of non-existence is highly unlikely.
Jews and Christians take a simplistic - not a nuanced ! - view of the existence of God.
More peaceful ? Yes, the West is increasingly incapable of defending itself.
Many things are bringing the Age of Abundance to its close. We will be fortunate if we avoid catastrophic global famine.
The West is perfectly capable of defending itself, especially against most of its known enemies. China will never go to war against the West as they have over 2000 years of civilisation behind them to demonstrate that it is easier to deal with your friends rather than your enemies. Russia has 140 million population and the GDP of Australia with 35 million people.
China doesn't regard us as its friends, nor are we.
Nuclear world war would be the end of everyone, hence universal defeat..
But non-nuclear world war, say the West versus the Rest, would probably result in the West's defeat.
"Among the descendants of recent newcomers, there are many integrated, liberal secularised urbanites, but they are too small in number to be significant in a democracy"
This passage is intriguing. 'Integrated' here is assumed, unquestioningly, to mean 'liberal and secular'. Does a latent Whiggery emerge from beneath the trappings of Toryism which the editorial of this publication sometimes seems to wear? Or is it merely ventriloquising for Progressivism?
Many people who consider themselves conservative in this Kingdom are really, at heart, displaced Liberals. Their creed is the MIllsian principle that the law has no business interfering with private acts that harm nobody else and that the law should not enforce moral norms.
Many muslims, and all conservatives, on the other hand, hold Baron Devlin's view that "society means a community of ideas; without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics no society can exist". The soteriological and legalistic differences between Muslims and Christians are paper thin compared with the gulf that separates both from Godless Materialists.
The Hart-Devlin debate is the true dividing line. Do you believe that the state has a right to legislate on the basis of universal, religiously based, moral laws, or do you believe individual liberty and private conscience should have the greater influence?
"The Labour Party has come to rely on the votes of sectional groups who have no real interest in liberal or progressive politics, merely using them as useful allies against a Right which is less welcoming but psychologically closer"
This second passage, I die pronouncing it, is the riddle of British politics into the next generation.
The new 'Eastern Question'. Whoever can forge the Blue-Green synthesis of the future, unite the ordered, hierarchical, conservative, disposition of the British Islamic constituency with the place-specific patriotism of the British Conservatism would have the world before them.
I admit openly to being a child of liberalism, even if I'm not a Whig (too pessimistic). Julian the Apostate wished to return Rome to the old gods but in his worldview and ideas he had become Christianised. The same is true of most modern conservatives.
from an integration point of view, the children of immigrants joining the Church of England and becoming ardent fans of the Book of Common Prayer would probably be optimal, but becoming deracinated secular urbanites comes close!
Integration of sincere Muslims isn't even the faintest possibility.
They detest our civilisation in both its Christian and secular guises. They have marked it for destruction.
"...beoming deracinated secular urbanites comes close!"
I'm not so sure.
I believe that your spirited paraphrase of Christopher Caldwell, on an earlier posting, really pinned the issue to the wall. I immediately felt its truth and wrote it down at the time.
"What secular Europeans call “Islam” is a set of values that Dante and Erasmus would recognise as theirs; the collection of three-year-old rights they call “core European principles” is a set of values that would leave Dante and Erasmus bewildered.’ Schools across the land – including my children’s – came to define ‘British values’ as ‘tolerance’ and opposition to homophobia and transphobia, something which would have left even a generation earlier completely mystified."
There is a challenging Protean truth in there that we must all wrestle with in this generation.
The disquieting 'Foreignness' of the Islamic ethos in this country, it strikes me, is foreign chiefly in the sense that L.P. Hartley understood it - in that "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,".
You are leaping from Dante (died 1321) to the ghastly vapourings of today's liberals, as if nothing at all happened in- between.
In reality, Islam is a theology, a religious faith, wholly inimical to Christianity and the core Christian values of mercy and forgiveness. That both faiths agree on much lesser values like diligence and sobriety, is irrelevant.
And if Islam is so compatible with Christianity - why does Dante place Islam's founder in an especially dreadful predicament in the "Inferno" ? And why did people die to defend Christendom from Islam, if Islam is simply the near-Eastern form of traditional Toryism ?
I do not say Islam is 'so compatible', I merely say that it is more compatible, and I offer only a personal view, gleaned from life in the Modern Babel that is South London.
I entirely agree with you that the much of the ethic of Islam, particularly its attitude to religious violence, is utterly opposd to the message of Christ.
Personally I am privately persuaded that Islam is an early Christian Heresy. Indeed, the worlds most succesful Christian Heresy.
That said, when I speak with my Muslim neighbours about the human condition, and our understanding of an ordered universe and our duties and obligations to God and neighbour we are talking about the same thing.
When I speak with Godless Materialists - self-wrought, unaccountable and and uncreated - we are not.
Re: What secular Europeans call “Islam” is a set of values that Dante and Erasmus would recognise as theirs
Not really. There were significant ideological and cultural differences at the time of the Crusades. The split between state and church (even when they were entwined and all up in each other's business) had no parallel in Islam. And European women's status and their occasional involvement in public affairs was also distinct.
I suppose the point Prof. Caldwell was making is that the Islamic worldview, its anthropology and its ethics as well as its theology, would have been recognisable to Dante and Erasmus rather than to argue the finer points of jurisprudence or what we call 'gender relations'.
An ordered, hierarchical universe, bounded by a Divine Creation and an eventual Millenium, Birth, Death and Judgement, all undergirt by a special and providential role for mankind under an immanent natural law, written on the heart of all living men.
That is what is truly anathema marantha to Western Progressivism.
The Koran is truly anathema to any thinking Christian.
In the opinion of Muslims, the natural law written on our hearts, compels us to submit to the message of Islam.
And thus we are much at fault - and may be eternally condemned - simply for not being Muslims.
Dante had Mo in Hell though. (Inferno, Canto 28.) He may have seen that there were similarities between Islam and Christianity, but that was taken as evidence for the falsity of Islam. Mohammed is the Eighth Circle of Hell, the one "for those who have committed fraud; specifically, he is placed in the ninth bolgia (ditch) among the sowers of discord and schism." (Wikipedia)
Good grief there's a lot of tripe on the internets about this—"academic" papers that show their bias by referring to "the Prophet Mohammed" and Dante and trying to suggest DA nicked the idea and the form of "The Divine Comedy" from Islamic writers. (He did, in the same way that Michelangelo pilfered the design of the Sistine Chapel ceiling from Islamic painters…)
Well, the blame then belongs to modern science which revealed a vastly different universe than the old medieval
picture painted.
That is precisely the position that liberalism has taken since the 1860s.
But it is not a conservative position.
Would, if it were even remotely possible.
Speaking personally, as a practising Catholic, Islam's denial of Jesus's divinity (and of His crucifixion and resurrection) horrifies me infinitely more than the vapidity of JS Mill or Richard Dawkins.
Mohammed is a far more serious opponent - esp now that Western secularism is dying; inevitably, since it is only the result of Western power and affluence, now in their death throes.
Muslims detest non-Muslim things, conservatism included. The idea that they will make an alliance with kaffirs is absurd.
And what price a dismal conservatism / Conservatism (which are both in many ways a mockery of Christ, hence the Revolutions of 1517, 1688, 1789 and 1917) in our apocalyptic and Apocalyptic era ?
Thank you for your challenging response.
You are of course correct in much of what you say in principle. But then being a man-made chimera of different earthly instincts, dressed in the borowed garb of Divine Revelation, Mohammedanism is an unstable and fissile compact. it is, essentially, a spitirual closed loop. Self destructive and self-consuming
So I have no fear of Islam, or of Mohammeds legacy.
But in the sublunary world of political economy, if one needs must make oneself a friend of the Mammon of Unrighteousness, if we are commanded "as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men" and if we find ourselves having to look for friends on the PTA as our childrens schools drift into nihilism and anomic libertinism - we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves on the same side of the room as our Muslim neighbours - rather than our Godless fellow countrymen.