Tucker Carlson is worried about Britain. The “Yookay”, as he now likes to call it, offers a troubling glimpse into his own country’s future. Once the entire world sat at our feet; we were mightier even than the Americans are now. Now we are left with what Carlson terms a “sad, soggy welfare state”. The culprits in his narrative in a new monologue, adapted by The Spectator World, include Winston Churchill and Tony Blair. Above all, mass migration is to blame.

Carlson laments that Britain’s culture has been changed, “some might say destroyed”, by immigration. Curiously, however, he is eager to stress his feelings of warmth towards the immigrants themselves. He thinks he has much in common with London’s Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. He praises them for their masculinity, as evinced by their homophobia, their self-confidence, and the fact that they don’t tend to get abortions.

Throughout his recent interview with Piers Morgan, he stresses that he prefers them to the liberal journalist class, with whom he would not deign to break bread. He goes on to call Boris Johnson a “fascist”, though, so he might have more in common with “staff writers at the Guardian” than he realises.

His favourite analogy for Britain’s present state is that we are like the Native Americans — a “defeated people”. His argument is that Britain is in the throes of an “internal crisis”, proved by statistics pertaining to drugs and alcohol abuse and the fact that people are “no longer as well-kept”.

In fact, however, America has a higher rate of deaths of despair than Britain does — one of a number of factors which keeps American life expectancy a good few years lower than ours. The statistics where Britain really trails behind America, and which ought to serve as a dark premonition, tend to be economic in nature; but Carlson’s deep suspicion of GDP, the financial sector, and economic growth precludes him from venturing too far in that direction.

Likewise, he argues that Britain’s low fertility stems from the same suicidal impulse that underlies its immigration policy. This is difficult to reconcile with his admiration for Japan, which he explicitly celebrates for its homogeneity (it provides proof, too, that growth doesn’t matter). Britain’s total fertility rate is a troubling 1.6, Japan’s an even worse 1.2.

Carlson overplays his hand, too, when — parroting the academic and political adviser James Orr — he says that there are more arrests for speech crimes in the UK than in Putin’s Russia, “so Britain is much more authoritarian”. Needless to say, this is an absurd inference, not least because Russians have better reasons than Britons do to self-censor. One is reminded of that old Reagan joke: you can get close to Downing Street or the Palace of Westminster and shout “I don’t like the way Sir Keir Starmer is running my country,” and you can probably freely go up to the Kremlin and shout “I don’t like the way Sir Keir Starmer is running his country.” It is possible to abhor Britain’s illiberal speech policies, and the people responsible for what has happened to Graham Linehan, Lucy Connolly, and those who pray outside abortion clinics, without carrying water for Putin. Here, Piers Morgan, whom Carlson bills as the man who has “done more for free speech than any other Briton”, sets a good example.

Morgan, for his part, looks increasingly baffled as Carlson holds forth on “globohomo” (“a concept that you need to understand”) and tries to browbeat him into saying the word “faggot” on camera. Both men’s voices can slip into soprano, punctuated by Carlson’s distinctive maniacal laugh; the more impassioned moments in the discussion sound like foxes in the night.

Towards the end, Morgan invites Carlson to a London pub, so that he may see firsthand that Britain isn’t “lost”. The least auspicious thing to be found there, one suspects, is a £7 pint — further proof, if any were needed, that Britain’s problems are more material than spiritual.

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Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian.

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