PREVENTATIVE MEASURES

As Enoch Powell famously stated, ‘the supreme function of statesmanship is to protect against preventable evils’. Now it seems our statesmen are more eager to protect the nation against those who dare say ‘steady on, there’s rather a preventable evil over there.’ Consider the facts we are increasingly forbidden to notice, ethnic minorities account for a far higher proportion of suspects, arrestees and prisoners for violent crime. Grooming-gang scandals in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Oldham, highlight the same pattern, predominantly Pakistani heritage men abusing white working class girls, while local councils, social services, and plods are paralysed by fear of racism accusations.

Speak of these things out loud and suddenly an avalanche of hate speech acts, non crime hate incidents, and College of Policing guidelines descend upon you like a swarm of locusts waving clipboards the size of coffin lids, all while violent prisoners are released early to make room for the next batch of wrong thinkers.

When Galloway stormed Rochdale on a Gaza ticket last year, the very next day, Rishi Sunak looked like a man who had just discovered his house is on fire and decided to lecture the smoke alarm, emerging to inform the nation that Islamists and the “far right” are symbiotic extremists who feed off each other. Michael Gove, not to be outdone, produced a brand new definition of extremism so finely balanced you could use it to weigh moonbeams. Three weeks ago the Home Office crowed that “extreme right-wing” referrals to Prevent now dwarf the Islamists despite sixty per cent of the actual terrorists locked up are Islamists, with three-quarters of MI5’s case load remains filled by the same crowd.

At root lies the liberal belief that man is infinitely reprogrammable whose every sin is the fault of his surroundings, his worst impulses simply the fault of the environment, like a moist robot waiting for the right software update. The man who blows up the pop concert or rapes a thirteen year old behind the chicken shop is merely reacting to native pathologies. The true carrier of the plague, the real bio hazard, is the ordinary decent Englishman who still insists on noticing that the wheels have come off.

Even within what passes for British ‘conservatism’ there is a tragic generational schism. Many older conservatives, particularly those who came of age in the high-trust, overwhelmingly homogenous Britain of the 1950s–80s, genuinely believe that “Britishness” is an institutional achievement rather than a demographic or cultural one. In their mental model the nation is defined by Parliament, the common law, the monarchy, the BBC, the NHS, a set of abstractions that supposedly float free of the people who actually inhabit and operate them.

Younger men on the dissident right have never known a Britain in which the demographic make up of their country could be taken for granted. We have watched institutions bend, mutate, or simply ignore reality in real time to accommodate rapid ethnic and cultural change. We see that these institutions are downstream of demographics. If you change the people radically, you eventually change the institutions, or discover they were never the essence of the nation to begin with. One generation believes the soul of the nation resides in its forms and processes; the next knows those forms and processes are only as resilient as the people who inherit them therefore “the institutions will save us” attitude has become the most dangerous complacency of all.

Many older conservatives can survey decades of grooming-gang cover-ups, authorities paralysed by fear of racism accusations, thousands of girls abandoned for years and will confidently conclude that the eventual, belated prosecutions prove the system still functions. The wig went on, the gavel fell, Britishness is safe. All the cowardice, delay, and continuing refusal to record ethnicity properly is waved away as mere detail.

Imagine a future in which demographic replacement has proceeded to its conclusion and a new majority, perfectly legally, votes to amend the statute book – introducing, say, sharia-compliant family law or blasphemy statutes. Every institution would continue to function with impeccable procedural correctness. The Speaker would still wear the tights, judges would still bow to the royal coat of arms, By the institutional definition, Britain would be “working” but would it still be Britain, old boy? Or will it just be Karachi with drizzle, compulsory halal bacon and stoning on the village green on alternate Saturdays?

Until this changes, “diversity is our strength” will remain the hollowest slogan in British public life repeated ever more desperately to drown out the evidence that, in practice, it has become our greatest weakness. And the supreme function of statesmanship? Still waiting, I’m afraid, while the Prevent vans circle the cul-de-sac and the equality commissars polish their pronoun badges and limber up for another dawn raid on a pensioner’s Facebook page.