Vance, in short, is rediscovering political gravity. And yet he remains the Right’s most viable and promising leader, and will likely retain that status regardless of what happens in November 2026 — or even 2028. Post-Trump, he is the only figure who can hold together a Republican Party that could otherwise easily splinter into four or five mutually suspicious factions. He has maintained bridges to each of these factions, and has learned to address himself acutely to the one anxiety all share, a fear that recently found a name — France.

France functions for America’s various conservative factions as a kind of crystal ball. In the looting, arson, and rioting that tore through major French cities over the past fortnight, America’s conservative groupings see their own future: that is, unless mass migration is halted and, at least to some extent, reversed. In France, they see the tipping point already past. So many culturally incompatible newcomers have piled on, in their telling, that society, properly speaking, is no more. What remains is an agglomeration of strangers, arrayed now in hostility, now in cold peace.

Several years’ worth of public and private conversations with Vance have convinced me that this is his central animating cause, the source of both his fears and his ambitions. The various factions on the Right, he feels, might have their disagreements — among themselves and with the Left — over issues ranging from tech policy to social welfare to war and peace. But all those other discussions must take second place to the complex of issues around immigration, assimilation, demography, and social cohesion.

For Vance, those other disagreements determine the shape of the polity — whereas the migration issue determines whether Americans have a polity at all. As he has repeatedly told me, it’s impossible to build up social solidarity “if society is always in flux”.

Turmoil in France has served as a foil for American statesmen going back to the two nations’ launch as twin revolutionary republics founded on Enlightenment ideals. Among the founding generation, Thomas Jefferson went furthest in championing the French revolutionary cause. As he saw it, the Jacobins had unleashed in the Old World the same spirit that had inspired American colonists: the spirit of a freedom that could no longer accept the yoke of kings and priests.

Yes, Jefferson wrote in a 1793 letter, the French Revolution had had its excesses: most notably, the killing of “guilty persons” without trial (how had they been judged guilty without trial? Jefferson didn’t say). But these excesses were par for the course in a “struggle which was necessary”. So necessary, in fact, that “rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated”, with only “an Adam and Eve left in every country”.

Others of Jefferson’s generation disagreed. Alexander Hamilton, speaking for the conservative Federalists, followed news of the Reign of Terror with great distress. Directly contradicting Jefferson, he argued in 1793 that the difference between the American and French revolutions is “no less great than that between liberty and licentiousness” — between orderly self-government and mob rule.

The French Revolution’s assault on religion didn’t seem to bother Jefferson one bit. But to early American conservatives, it was not only blasphemous, but self-defeating. While far from orthodox in their personal religious belief and practice, the more conservative-leaning Founding Fathers saw virtue as a necessary precondition of self-government, and they held up religion, in turn, as an indispensable support to virtue.

Thus, John Adams observed of revolutionary France: “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.” On National Fast Day on 9 May 1798, instituted by President Adams amid deteriorating relations with the French republic, the head of Yale University, Timothy Dwight, took to the pulpit to warn that “to destroy us, our enemies must first destroy our Sabbath” — as they already had in Paris.

As has often been the case since, America’s geopolitical interests dissolved these ideological boundaries. When it became undeniable that the French Revolution had empowered a new emperor with an appetite for world domination, Jefferson shrank from his earlier Francophilia. In 1802, and now President, he described Napoleonic France as “our natural and habitual enemy”. France’s encroachments on New Orleans, and along the Mississippi on what was then the western frontier, should prompt the Americans to “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation”.

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Through the 19th century, France’s image in America more or less solidified into what it is today: as a place that riots a lot, and whose politics seesaw between the extremes of revolt and reaction. There was an undeniable element of hypocrisy in this reception. Americans had their own volatile divisions, which escalated into civil war in the middle of the century, claiming some 600,000 lives. Class struggle in Gilded Age America and in the early 20th century didn’t look so different from the Paris Commune.

Then again, which quarrelsome couple doesn’t feel better about itself while listening to the family shouting match in the apartment next door? American conservatives have long framed their society’s internal contradictions and domestic rancor as foreign. An entire genre of US conservative thought is devoted to uncovering the European — specifically German and French — roots of progressivism, to the neglect of its origins in Anglo-American liberalism.

Which brings us to today’s French anxieties on the American Right: to US fears of immigrant “no-go zones” and seething multitudes apt to riot when their “paper” country — France — defeats their real homes — Algeria, Morocco — in a football match. Fear of ill-assimilated banlieues encircling major cities like Paris and Marseilles. Fear of Islamo-gauchisme, with the white Leftists mouthing the lofty slogans and the Arab or African toughs doing the nihilistic looting, all while making it clear that their political attachment to France is all but nonexistent.

It’s easy to caricature these fears as overblown, ignorant — or, at any rate, irrelevant. American immigration and assimilation dynamics are different from those in France (and Western Europe more generally). Unlike with the French or the British, Americans haven’t struggled to define a place for the descendants of former colonial subjects — they haven’t had to deal with the transition from empire to nation-state. And it’s a cliché but nevertheless true that US culture is easier to assimilate into precisely because it’s relatively “thin”: the culture of a commercial empire with a voracious appetite for labor and dynamism.

All the same, it’s a mistake to dismiss wholesale the American Right’s current French anxieties. For starters, there is more than a kernel of truth to the American conservative diagnosis. There are sensitive areas in France where the police must tread carefully. There are mosques and imams whose preaching casts into severe doubt the very possibility of expecting political loyalty of certain communities. Take a walk through Parc Georges-Valbon and Saint-Denis into central Paris — I did so at Christmas last year — and you can’t help but feel that the rate of demographic churn is so high that, in certain areas, majority-minority distinctions completely break down, leaving only different minorities mustering different levels of street-level and institutional “strength”. France, such as it is, is something vestigial in these areas, marked only in streets named after long-forgotten saints, kings, novelists.

Riots aside, this generates what I’ve described in these pages as diversity stress: a kind of constant, low-grade anxiety associated with having to negotiate normative and linguistic differences, public-resource competition, and simple unfamiliarity. It challenges people’s expectation of order and familiarity, which is just as much a part of being human as is the taste for novelty.

While the nature and source of the migration differs between Europe and the United States, moreover, the underlying dynamic is the same: the mass movement of people from the Global South to the Global North that began in the postwar decades and was turbo-charged beginning in the mid-2010s (coinciding, for an obvious reason, with the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic)

Why so many in the past decade — more than a million to Europe under Angela Merkel’s Wir schaffen das regime, and some eight million in the Biden wave? Partly to shore up aging demographics and the pension systems that depend on fresh labor; partly because migration is another form of wage arbitrage for employers; and partly (above all, perhaps) because migrants can more easily reach the West, thanks to prosperity in the Global South that allows a growing subset of people to cross vast distances relatively cheaply and quickly.

The upshot of all this is that the migration anxieties that twice catapulted Trump to the White House will long outlast his messy reign. A majority of Americans might disapprove of his handling of immigration, recoiling from the performative cruelty of ICE. But those same majorities still tell pollsters that they prefer the same or lower levels of migration as today (when Trump has already sealed the southern border and drastically cut legal migration and naturalization).

The result is that immigration restrictionism will remain the American Right’s top concern for the foreseeable future. It is the one cause upon which an otherwise notoriously fractious movement can converge even after Trump leaves the historical stage. Today, the movement is divided between five main factions. We might call them the Restorationists, the Tech Accelerationists, the Christian Nationalists, the Populists, and the Catholic Solidarists. All demand less migration, albeit for different reasons and in a different tone.

Start with the Restorationists, those who hope to restore the GOP’s old ideological fusion of pro-business libertarianism, foreign-policy hawkism, and moral traditionalism. Historically, this group was the most amenable to mass migration, not least because it’s what the pro-business donor class insisted upon. But things have changed. For one thing, this faction has been chastened by the rise of Trump and Trumpism, and its most classically liberal elements have more or less defected to the Democratic Party (where they will have to contend with an ascendant democratic socialism).

More important, supporters have come to view mass migration as one of the main drivers of anti-Israel sentiment — and they’re not entirely wrong. Politicians with names like Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani are products of post-1965 immigration, when the United States threw open the gates to newcomers from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The children and grandchildren of those migrants attended US universities where various grievance-studies courses were commonplace, where questioning American exceptionalism was de rigueur, and where campus activism meant backing Students for Justice in Palestine if you, as a member of, say, the Asian and Pacific Islander group, hoped to win support for your own pet causes. This is also why Vance, in a leaked address to the Republican Jewish Coalition, argued that anti-Israel sentiment could be mitigated by cutting migration. He was pushing on an open door: the remnants of the old-school GOP today are far less hospitable to migration than were their predecessors in the Reagan or Bush era.

Which brings us to the Tech Accelerationists — those who believe fervently that America’s salvation lies in staying ahead of China when it comes to artificial intelligence and other frontier technologies. This group, too, could historically be expected to support certain kinds of immigration to fill positions in research, data science, and the like with STEM workers from the developing world who’d work for much less than their American-born peers — and who didn’t dare demand higher wages or organize into unions, since their right to stay was often tied to a single employer.

But this, too, is changing. Like the Restorationists, the Accelerationists have been chastened by the populist tide. Insofar as they wish to remain part of the Right, they have to bargain and compromise with populism, just like every other faction. In December 2024, one of their chief spokesmen, Vivek Ramaswamy — a vocal champion of guest-worker programs — was attacked online after he blamed American cultural mediocrity for tech firms’ reliance on foreign labor (the subtext being that America still needs visa schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Asian, and specifically Indian, tech workers).

Then, too, the rise of AI and automation is rendering many lower-level tech jobs redundant, and an automated economy doesn’t need endless low-wage migrants. Here, too, Vance can bridge the gap between populists and Big Tech: as he told me in a 2024 interview for the New Statesman, immigration restrictionism is the “tech-forward” position, since the easy availability of cheap labor in certain sectors discourages firms from investing in efficiency boosting technologies.

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Of the Populists, not much need be said, since they are the most likely to oppose all immigration, legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled, for reasons that range from economic and cultural to nativism and outright racism. The Christian Nationalists form an adjacent and overlapping faction. They once served as the evangelical backbone of the old GOP but have now gone their own way, having concluded that the bargain with pro-business libertarians and foreign-policy hawks wasn’t worth the candle (the libertarians got their tax cuts, the hawks got their wars, but the Christians who marshaled the votes got… much less).

Largely because Protestantism is Christianity nationalized, this group has never been as comfortable with pro-migration moral universalism as Catholics. In places like Texas, this group’s economic anxieties about migration have blended with cultural concerns over the rapid build-out of mosques and Hindu temples associated with recent migrant flows. When Vance addresses the civilizational discomfiture brought on by mass migration in Europe, he hits this group’s sweet spot.

That leaves the Catholic solidarists (or the Common-Gooders, if you will). This group — in which, cards on the table, I count myself — isn’t exclusively made up of Roman Catholic intellectuals. But they tend to prevail and set the tone. Their objections to mass migration aren’t racial or identitarian — apart from anything else, Catholic doctrine bars that — but practical: mass migration undercuts the wages and bargaining power of American-born workers, squeezes welfare systems, and makes it harder to foster class-based solidarity. Union density in the United States is inversely proportional to migrant flows; for good reason, Whole Foods uses “heat maps” to track the risk of unionization at its stores, with those in diverse, high-migration areas seen as lowest risk, while those in relatively homogenous areas register as high-risk.

Here, again, Vance appears as a bridge figure. His Catholic conversion memoir, Communion, published this year, is in many ways a critique of the old religious Right that preached personal virtue and uplift while neglecting the material and political-economic foundations needed to shape virtuous souls. At one point in the book, he even favorably cites Herbert McCabe, an Irish Dominican friar who sympathetically engaged with Marxism and who once wrote, “The class struggle is not something we are in a position to refrain from. It is just there; we are either on one side or the other.”

Vance’s answer to those who criticize the second Trump administration for neglecting its pro-labor promise is, more or less: stop immigration first. That might be self-serving. But it isn’t illogical, for the same reason that most of the Right’s Solidarists emphasize restrictionism. At any rate, it’s what Vance believes the half of the country that elected him wants.

The danger in this tying of everything to immigration should be obvious. It can look like — and, perhaps for some, it is — an attempt to evade the domestic, homegrown sources of American malaise. But after decades in which discontent with high migration flows was pooh-poohed or written off as bigoted, there remains a lot of political space for addressing what nearly all of the Right’s factions view as a generational crisis. The negative example thrown up by France this month has been too urgent and searing to ignore.

At first sight, there is not much new here: after a decade or so of street violence, from the demonstrations of the Gilet Jaunes to the recent protests against pension reform, taking in the 2023 riots against the police killing of young North African in a Paris suburb along the way, the French public is now accustomed to scenes that in any other country would look like freeze-frame snapshots from a war zone.

It is, however, the vicious quality of the violence from young people which has been genuinely shocking. Notably, in Paris, a lone young trainee female police officer was pursued, tripped and then battered on the ground by a gang of youths. In Belfort, a city in northeastern France, a plain-clothes officer was almost killed by a “lynch mob” — so-called by the press — of hooded teenagers who pinned him to the ground and repeatedly kicked his head. And in Marseille, a young woman at a bus stop was sprayed in the face by an improvised flamethrower wielded by a laughing kid.

Equally terrifying is the eerie, almost incomprehensible way that the violence, which has erupted outside schools all over France, from Lille to Marseille, came apparently out of nowhere. So far, over 1,000 secondary schools have “mobilized”, which means student strikes, barricades and fires in school buildings. The damage will cost millions of euros to repair. Over 3,000 arrests have been made, mainly of young people.

The unrest began at the end of September, taking the form of a series of reasonable protests in the Paris region by school pupils. They decried the degraded state of the French educational system, making legitimate complaints about poor timetabling, lack of teachers, and rotten buildings in a state of Soviet-style shabbiness: freezing in winter and unbearably hot in summer heatwaves. It is not only the students but also the teachers who have been complaining about these conditions. My friend Laurence has taught science in a variety of Parisian schools over the past 10 years and testifies that she has never seen conditions so bad or students so angry. “It is as if the government actively despises us,” she said.

Student anger has also focused on the “Parcoursup”, an online system that, in 2018, replaced the old university application system. Parcoursup offers students the ability to apply to many more universities than previously, and allows universities to rank applications via perceived merit rather than allocating them by lottery, as its predecessor did. But the basis of the rankings is opaque, with the Left arguing that it privileges better-off students, that France is not a true meritocracy, and that this is an assault on the core concept of “égalité”.

This has been one of the rallying cries of the radical Left party La France Insoumise (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The party is the closest challenger to the Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, who is currently leading the polls for the presidential elections next year. The LFI has been courting school-age students and teachers for years, with their strategies for further investment and a reshaping of university policies, controversially opening up elite colleges to educationally disadvantaged students. But this is the first time that the Macron government has explicitly pointed to the LFI’s role in deliberately stirring up subversion. This at least was the view of the Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, who, while calling a crisis Cabinet meeting last Friday, pointed the finger directly at Mélenchon, stating that “the LFI and its ultra-Left proxies are at the origins of this movement”.

His accusation has been given substance by the sight of the LFI Mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, jubilant and dancing in front of the burning shell of the Lycée Paul Eluard. There have also been calls by the LFI activist Ritchy Thibault “to march on the Elysée Palace and burn it down”. Intelligence agencies for the police have also spent much time tracking preparations for the disorder on social media since early September, noting among the calls for “armed action”, the language of the far-Left — notably “the end of neo-Liberal democracy”, “disrupting the social order”, “challenging state violence”.

Mélenchon has been, as ever, mercurial, playing both sides at once. He has called for a “march of peace” today, with students, teachers and parents, united in wearing white hats or caps, coming together to show their disgust with the government. At the same time, LFI rhetoric argues that in all its forms, from bad schooling to police brutality, “state violence is not legitimate”. The students have a right, says Mélenchon, even a duty, “to take revenge”. He has publicly denounced both Lecornu and Valérie Pécresse, the centrist President of the Île-de-France region who wanted to charge Bagayoko’s administration €100,000 for the damage caused, as “racist”, leveling the same charge at the news channel BFMTV, which has shown some of the most graphic images. The present democratic structure of France, says Mélenchon, is loaded with “white privilege” and part of “an already obsolete present”. He calls for a “citizen’s revolution”, driven by “the force of numbers”, and led by the new postcolonial generations to come. (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or less.)

Unsurprisingly, the student protests are now conflated with Gaza, Palestinian flags are everywhere, and there are calls for a “Sixth Republic” — effectively rewriting the present constitution — and “a New France”. Mélenchon’s overall aim is a revolutionary one: to create a France for the 21st century, one that is constructed out of its new second and third generation of immigrants. The aim is not assimilation into an old order, but destroying it altogether.

All of this has the potential to backfire on Mélenchon. Two years ago, the Minister for Justice, Gérald Darmanin, identified the overall LFI strategy as “bordelisation” — a word that is hard to translate but roughly means in slang terms “deliberately creating chaos”. More recently, Bruno Retailleau, former Minister of the Interior and a presidential candidate for 2027, described the LFI as “an absolutely seditious party with a fascination for violence” and called for a debate on banning the LFI. Mélenchon’s slyly sarcastic response to Retailleau was that this was “absurd” and that not a single LFI document could be traced to recent disturbances, unless he had incited them “by telepathy”.

Mélenchon is smart, but he also underestimates the extent to which conservatism, in a political or simply a social sense, is still a force to be reckoned with in the “Old France” — which still makes up the majority of French people. With his strategy of organized disruption, Mélenchon is clearly playing once again into the hands of Le Pen, whose agenda is the opposite of Mélenchon’s. A recent poll in the newspaper Le Figaro found that 78% of French people thought that the LFI was “aggressive”, and 70% thought they were actively “dangerous”.

The precedent for all this violence and rebellion is of course the near-revolution of 1968, still a nostalgic meme for Old Leftists. Students and school kids who were in revolt angered the older generations so much that they effectively delivered Right-wing governments until 1982.

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But the 21st century is a totally different political landscape in France, shaped by tensions over race, religion and ethnic identity as much or more than the neo-Marxist dreams of revolution cherished by the LFI. This is why Le Pen also has a substantial youth vote to match or even overtake the LFI, a youth which craves order and discipline over anarchy. I have been to enough RN rallies over the years to see how Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s young and handsome protegé and president of the RN, is greeted with pop-star style adulation when he speaks to an often hip and well-informed young audience. We are a long way from the fascist brutes of the old days of the Front National, the predecessor of today’s RN.

Le Pen has now come out on national television, accusing Mélenchon of stirring up trouble in the schools. Her prescription, sidestepping the issue of immigrants, is for new, stricter laws to punish so-called “casseurs” — the most destructive of the rioters.

None of this stops Mélenchon from invoking the specter of “fascism” when he talks about his opponents, and especially Le Pen and the RN. The more he does this, however, the more even centrists and those on the Right, normally opposed to Le Pen, see the sense in her analysis of the situation. Put simply, the harder Mélenchon drives the strategy of chaos, the more deeply retrenched even the milder conservatives become, scared of the forces yet to be unleashed and what their country might look like if Mélenchon ever comes to power.

It would be a savage irony if the LFI, the party of insurrectionary challenges to the “bourgeois order”, also turned out to be the party that opened the way for an RN presidency.

Yet as more and more people arrived, a man with a quizzical look approached me. He asked if I was a journalist. When I said I was, he told me that this was a private event, and that nobody would talk to me anyway. The meeting’s outcome, he added, would be publicized on social media. When I asked where exactly, he smiled and answered glibly. “The same channels where you found out about this meeting.” I wasn’t going to argue, shuffling past a thronged mass of conical turbans towards the door.

I had come to the Shri Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji Chauni Temple, in a quiet Coventry suburb, in search of the Nihangs: a fearsome Sikh warrior order. You likely haven’t heard of them — but you’ll almost certainly have heard of Vickrum Singh Digwa. He’s the man who stabbed Henry Nowak on a Southampton street last December, and whose resulting conviction for murder has generated one of Britain’s periodic fights about multiculturalism and belonging.

These debates have now raged for weeks, but one thing has remained largely unnoticed: a passage in Judge William Mousley’s sentencing remarks, where he paused to explain that Digwa belonged to the Nihangs, the same Sikh group I’d encountered in Coventry. This matters, and far beyond Vickrum Digwa — for the Nihangs are in many ways a symbol of our troubled moment.

Only about a quarter of the world’s 25 million Sikhs are baptized. These so-called Khalsa are the only Sikhs required to wear the religion’s “five Ks”, including uncut hair (kesh), the steel bracelet (kara), and the now-infamous kirpan blade. The Nihangs are a minority within this minority. Today, there are estimated to be somewhere between a few hundred thousand and a million worldwide, concentrated in the Punjab. In the UK, the movement has a few hundred adherents.

The word “Nihang” itself means “crocodile” in classical Persian or “without attachments” in Sanskrit. Both translations evoke the order’s martial roots. Formed in the 18th century, as a vanguard against Muslim Mughal persecution, the Nihangs embodied an ethos that fused spirituality with steel. “When all other means have failed,” wrote Gobind Singh, the tenth and final living Sikh guru in 1705, “it is righteous to unsheathe the sword.”

And so it proved, with the Nihangs long acting as the shock troops of Sikh military power. These irregular formations fought the Mughals, held mountain passes against Afghan invaders, and were so notorious that the British later issued shoot-on-sight orders against them. G.H. Hodson, a colonial officer who fought them in the mid-19th century, described how one Nihang “rushed to meet me like a tiger. I never beheld such desperation and fury in my life.”

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Clothing was crucial to this fiery reputation. Their appearance, then and now, is extraordinary. The traditional Nihang outfit is deep navy blue, the color chosen by Gobind Singh after campaigning against the Mughals at the turn of the 18th century. Over this, and as I saw in Coventry, Nihangs wear towering conical turbans, the dastar bunga, ringed with steel quoits called chakram. They have a special, almost theological, relationship with steel itself, which they call sarbloh, the “all-iron”. Crafting their weapons from steel, they even eat their food with sarbloh utensils, viewing the metal as infused with divine strength and martial purity.

It’s precisely this glimmer of violence that makes the Digwa case so distinctive. The killer carried two knives the evening he stabbed Henry Nowak. The first — a small, curved kirpan under his clothing — is the ceremonial blade required of all Khalsa Sikhs. Its carrying is protected under British law, provided the blade doesn’t exceed nine inches. This is familiar territory: even before the Nowak case, and all the public debate that’s followed, the kirpan exemption had been debated, defended, and litigated for decades. What made Digwa unusual was that second knife. It was an 8.2-inch pesh-kabz, a straight-bladed dagger designed to pierce chainmail armor and worn visibly. Though it’s also sometimes worn by other Khalsa Sikhs, this other blade is especially associated with the Nihang. Digwa himself wore it to work. He wore it in public. He had told himself that this was part of who he was.

Professor Gurnam Singh, a sociologist at the University of Warwick who gave evidence at the trial, said that over the last 30 years there has been a trend among younger Sikhs towards wearing the kirpan with pride. Many, he explained, see it as an act of resistance to erasure — a way of insisting on a visible identity in a country that often wants minorities to be present but inconspicuous.

Other commentators have linked this resurgence to the “manosphere” phenomenon of young men looking for meaning, not dissimilar to those Muslims drawn to jihad. I heard hints of this in Coventry, as I listened to the chatter among excitable teenage Nihangs, a group affectionately known as bajungis (young snakes). “Well, I’m with the bumbaclaart Buddha Dal,” one proudly told his mate. He was referencing his Nihang sub-order, but the strange blend of Jamaican street talk and Punjabi hints at a boy in search of an identity. “Well look at me,” I heard another kid say, like everyone else dressed in Nihang robes. “Do you think any gora [white man] is going to approach me now looking like this?”

Of course, it’d be wrong to equate Vickrum Digwa with all Nihangs, let alone all Sikhs. To wear that second blade without discipline, without years of study and submission to the order’s internal hierarchy, is a kind of borrowing that the tradition itself would not easily recognize. No less important, carrying the kirpan symbolizes a duty to defend the weak, meaning it should never be drawn lightly, or used on the unarmed.

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Judge Mousley, to his considerable credit, understood this distinction, and indeed made it the crux of his sentencing. He accepted that carrying the pesh-kabz under Nihang tradition might initially have constituted a good legal reason for having it — a religious and cultural justification sufficient to meet the threshold of the knife-carrying exemption. But, he added, that reason must have come to an end the moment Digwa removed it from its sheath. He used it offensively. Then he lied about it, letting Henry Nowak die handcuffed on the street.

Little wonder Kamalroop Singh, a Sikh scholar and representative of the Buddha Dal Nihang order, says that though Digwa often turned up at Nihang events, he was not an official member — describing him instead as a “fantasist Nihang”. Other Sikh leaders make a similar point. “We’ve seen all Sikhs of whatever background or order roundly condemn the actions of Digwa,” says Gurpreet Anand of the Khalsa Jatha British Isles, the country’s oldest Sikh temple, “and there is a concerted effort to ensure nothing like this happens again.”

Yet these fair-minded condemnations don’t change the fact that for Khalsa, even those who only wear a single blade, the kirpan remains non-negotiable. Shamsher Singh, of the National Sikh Youth Federation, which supports the creation of a Sikh homeland in Punjab, describes the knife as a sign of “Sikh sovereignty”. “If the Government wants to ban the kirpan,” he says, “many Sikhs would continue to wear it, as our right to wear the kirpan doesn’t come from English law, it comes from our own sovereignty which predates our encounter with the British.” It’s a view echoed by another prominent Sikh leader, who tells me he’s personally informed Keir Starmer that if the kirpan were banned “the UK’s jails will be filled with Khalsa Sikhs”. The Nihang tradition is even more uncompromising. Not merely a cultural identity, but a martial order with a code of conduct, its weapons are instruments of a discipline that is both physical and spiritual.

All this is taking place in Britain, a country where arms are politically and legally charged in ways that headdress or dietary practices obviously aren’t. Taken together, the Nihangs are an object lesson in the challenges of balancing minority rights with the demands of the liberal state — especially when some members are political far beyond the kirpan.

In India, Nihangs have occasionally attacked Christian pastors and worshipers. In Britain, some have gravitated towards Tommy Robinson, which is ironic given his self-declared Christian credentials. A few even joined the now-defunct English Defence League in its short-lived “Sikh Division”. Any links are tenuous, issue-specific and individual rather than institutional, especially given the Nihangs are traditionalists by nature. The nexus that does exist stems primarily from shared opposition to radical Islamism. Sikh street gangs, like the Shere-Punjab in Birmingham, were originally formed to fight white racists in the Seventies. In later decades, though, some elements morphed into a vehemently anti-Muslim campaign amid fears that Sikh girls were being groomed and forcibly converted, especially at so-called “Daytime Bhangra” music gigs. More recently, groups like Sikh Youth UK have openly supported Robinson, claiming they’re fighting Muslim grooming gangs.

Once again, more mainstream Sikhs are keen to distance themselves from these trends. “This alliance is limited to a vocal minority of Sikhs,” emphasizes Shamsher Singh, “some of whom were members of the English Defence League, much to the horror of most Sikhs. It’s a short-sighted strategy by these misled Sikhs who are only serving to divide their own communities.” All the same, a sect born resisting Islamic persecution in India still finds itself entangled, in its fringes, with anti-Islam currents in Britain, while also being associated with a killer whose actions have damaged the broader Sikh reputation as a “model minority”.

So what of the future? One possibility is that the shock of the Nowak case nudges the Nihangs closer to the Sikh mainstream, away from performative militancy and into a quieter, more clearly bounded expression of faith. Another outcome, though, is that the fringe hardens, drawing strength from grievance, street culture and ever-stronger alliances with Britain’s anti-Muslim Right.

Whatever happens next, I find myself returning to those overheard conversations in Coventry. The slang, the bravado, the football talk, the half-played identities — it all felt like the talk of boys trying on a future, measuring themselves against one another, against history, against the gaze of strangers. In that sense, the Nihangs are not only an old warrior order but a contemporary one too. That isn’t because they’ve solved the problem of identity, but because they embody just how unsettled identity has become. Here was a tradition built for a world of empires, still speaking in the language of honor and swords, now being carried forward by young men in a Britain shedding all its old certainties. Whether that leads to greater integration, harder fragmentation, or some uneasy balance between the two may depend less on theology than on what those boys decide they’re trying to become.

The British state will eventually need to decide whether it wants firmer legal clarity around the kirpan, or whether it prefers the current ambiguity, in which a sacred object can become a lethal weapon. That decision will matter beyond the Nowak case, for it digs to the core of what multicultural Britain is prepared to tolerate, what it is prepared to regulate, and whether pluralism can survive without some common rules that even the most distinctive traditions must respect. In our country’s restless search for cohesion, steel alone can’t forge belonging.

Fox believed that England could be a united and peaceable land, almost a preview to heaven. But some four centuries on, we have Pendle instead. A council area in eastern-most Lancashire, it contains all the failings of modern Britain. In the top 10% of most deprived areas in the country, it also suffers a 53% employment rate. Yet as it elects new councilors today, its story is anything but local. Its atomization and apathy portents, perhaps, of England’s future too.

Last year, the Mail called Pendle “Britain’s valley of strangers”, mostly on account of the town at its center. Nelson is a place with one pub and 19 mosques. The high-street shops are either shuttered or bear Urdu script (of people whose first language isn’t English, 38% of the borough’s residents speak little-to-no English). And yet drive a mile or two out of the town, towards the hill, and it’s quixotically different — an “undiscovered” Cotswolds, frequented by travel supplements, with “quaint” limestone cottages and “cozy” inns.

This was once a placidly apolitical bellwether seat, a testament to the two-party system. But today, its fractured political landscape houses everyone from middle-class Starmerites and Restore-curious farmhands to long-established British Asians and more recent migrants — to say nothing of Nelson’s beleaguered white working class. Out of work and in despair, the latter are often in the town’s last remaining pub: the Station Hotel, a detached and convoluted late Victorian building on the edge of a carpark.

“It’s just a dying town,” Sean tells me, dragging on his cigarette in the pub’s carpeted portico. It’s mid-afternoon on a Friday, and it’s raining emetically. Sean has lived in Nelson all his life and eagerly rehearses the statistics of its decline. “Loads of mills, 13 pubs, and six nightclubs,” the best of which hosted the Stones, Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix. Now there’s only karaoke night at the Station. “Can’t hate them for it, but Asians don’t drink,” he says. “That’s why there’s no pubs or nightclubs and so many mosques. Getting robbed of our culture; I don’t mean it nasty.” He drops his cigarette on the carpet, and slouches inside towards the bar. “This place is just too old to bother.”

Sean was born in 1960, by which point Nelson had already stopped bothering. The town, which had sprung up to accommodate local millworkers in the mid-19th century, had little to offer once the mills closed. And as Britain’s cotton industry died, the number of looms in Nelson dwindled in sympathy, from 22,000 to 10,000 in the half-decade to 1964. To cut costs, the few remaining jobs were filled by an influx of lower-wage, skilled laborers from Gujrat in Pakistan, who moved here in the Sixties for a better life. All that remains of Nelson’s former glory is a statue of a weaving shuttle, which some kids scrutinize like an alien object. “It’s a pencil,” one says. “No, it’s a Muslim thing,” chimes another. According to the 2021 census, certain wards in Nelson have populations over 85% British Asian.

“I don’t know whether I would use the term ‘divided constituency’,” Jonathan Hinder, the local MP, tells me as we walk through Nelson. Almost everything we pass — the mall, the roads, even the pavements — is scaffolded, awaiting demolition, or else under construction. Hinder was born on the other side of the hill, in a village near Clitheroe. He’s still getting to know Nelson, but Nelson resists knowing him. Only one man, who works at the train station, stops him to talk, grumbling about the timetables.

Whatever Hinder might claim, that struggle to be heard hints at Nelson’s deep divisions. With the town already split between a demoralized white rump, and the Sixties Pakistanis and their children, the past 15 years has seen even greater change. Between 2011 and 2021, Nelson’s population increased by 14.8%, its Asian population climbing especially. This growth was largely driven by newcomers the locals call “Europeans” — migrants of Pakistani heritage, who moved from Portugal, Italy and elsewhere in southern Europe to join their families in the last days of EU free movement.

These latest arrivals were not met kindly by the more longstanding British Asian community, yet another tear in Nelson’s social fabric. “They are nothing,” says Fozia, 44, who sells pakoras in Nelson Plaza, one of two neighboring bazaars on Scotland Road. “They are originally from Pakistan, but they’re not really educated people… They are claiming new benefits in the UK, which is not fair on us.” They have, she insists, changed the character of the town. “It used to be more like an English town,” Fozia says, “now it’s more like an Asian one.” According to the 2021 census, certain wards in Nelson have populations over 85% British Asian, which accounts for the number of mosques in the town — one of which is the Masjid Sunnah Nelson, attended until recently by the Manchester synagogue attacker Jihad al-Shamie. In 2024, it was reported for “fuelling antisemitism” after the imam Abul Abbaas Naveed linked the Gaza conflict to “the plotting of the kuffar against Islam”.

There are louder tensions too. The noise starts at 6pm most days: a murder of sportscars rumbling down Regent Street. Sometimes, there’s drag races, other times it’s just showboating. Pete, lounging at the bar in the Station Hotel, shrugs: “Ferraris, Lamborghinis — I don’t know where they get them, but they hire them and scream around.” In the past few weeks alone, two Lamborghinis have crashed — one in Nelson, the other in nearby Blackburn. Pete says he could cope if it were just the cars, but it’s not. A little  later the fireworks start. “It’s not meant to aggravate anybody,” Pete says, as he explains that they’re being let off at wedding parties. Others disagree. “It’s the younger Asians,” says 64-year-old Karl. “They have no respect for their own culture.”

Little wonder, given such animosity, that Hinder believes controlled borders are essential if Britain’s fragile civic nationalism is to endure. But he worries: this town has challenged his previous faith in integration. He describes how he sometimes knocks on doors in Nelson which are opened by young Asian women who can’t speak English. “A young Asian woman,” he says, hesitantly. “That’s the key thing for me; it’s not the elderly, who you might be more… kind of…expecting to be… kind of… unable to speak English or whatever. It’s people that are more recent… um… who have come over and haven’t necessarily… really… kind of… integrated.”

Pendle’s politics splits sharply along the community fractures. Since 2024, the local council has been run by Gaza independents in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, which seems likely to remain the case after today’s elections. Before that, though, it was the last stronghold of the BNP, with councillor Brian Parker presiding over the Marsden ward for 12 years until 2018. More recently, it’s been flagged as one of the places in Britain most vulnerable to Right-wing extremism.

Today, though, there’s little sense of a pending nationalist revolt in the town of Nelson. A solitary St George’s cross hangs limply from a streetlight on Scotland Road. Most people I meet are like John, a former publican who hasn’t voted since the Nineties. He tells me that they’re all the same — even Reform, which is “corrupt” and “piss in the same pot”. Few people I speak to seem unaware local elections are on. Even fewer know Hinder is their local MP.

But not everyone in this valley is similarly apathetic. Five miles from Nelson, in the hilltop village of Trawden, locals are struggling with a profusion of boy racers. A blacked-out BMW nips past the Trawden Arms, a community-owned pub that serves smoked pheasant chips. One man, an army veteran, spills his pint as he angrily launches himself from his picnic table to chase after the car, shouting: “Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!” He then returns to his seat, only to be set off again by another passing car. He won’t say his name, but he does tell me that Nigel Farage is a “faggot”. (He tells me I’m one too.)

Strikingly, though, people here seem energized by politics. The former soldier tells me he’d like Rupert Lowe to be the prime minister because he’d bring back “hangings for murderers and rapists”. He smiles. “Better make sure I don’t kill someone myself then.” Once a predictably Tory electorate, Trawden’s wealthier voters now split between the Liberal Democrats and Restore Britain. There is, though, a begrudging acceptance of the area’s British Asian community. “There’s not hatred here,” says one man at the Trawden Arms. “Just two ways of life.” One woman said that Nelson’s existence was handy. After all, it means there’s a supermarket open on Christmas Day.

To be fair, Hinder does have some grudging supporters — or his party does anyway. These centrist dads can be found at — where else? — the Parkrun on the hill above Colne, a well-to-do town up the road from Nelson. One run marshal, stretching by the course, is bemused by the clash between Nelson’s longer-standing migrants. It’s always been the same, he tells me. “People always complain about migrants taking their jobs.” Having said that, he never goes there. When I press him, he explains: “because of the shops. They have their own shops.” He doesn’t know who he’d vote for if Labour axed Starmer. Maybe the Lib Dems, he says over his shoulder as he trots off.

In his 1977 essay “The English Enigma”, Tom Nairn foresaw the death of Britain’s ancien régime, squeezed between the “combined pressures of external collapse (e.g., breakdown of currency) and internal upheaval (whether as national or as social revolt, or as the two at once)”. But what Pendle suggests is something more concerning — that the ancien régime will stumble on for some time yet. More than that, it’ll be bolstered by the very upheavals Nairn foresaw: sequestered communities, begrudgingly tolerating one another, their flirtations with radical politics canceled out by their neighbors. Come the General Election, it seems unlikely that any single politician will muster the popular strength to patch together enough support to rule these varied and intractable tribes — whether in Pendle or anywhere else.

* 7 May 2026: This article has been amended to correct the statistic on English speakers in Pendle.

The three rival conceptions can be identified as creedalism, multiculturalism, and pan-white tribalism. For creedalists of the center Left and center Right, the West is a supra-national community of individuals who, regardless of race or religion, share a personal devotion to a universal creed of human rights and liberal democracy.

For Left-wing multiculturalists, meanwhile, the West is made up of European and North American countries with shared legacies of white supremacy and colonialism, countries that ought to be internally remodeled into multicultural societies in which “culture” is used as a synonym for biological race: to fulfill this model’s promise, whites must be deposed; “black and brown folks” lifted up.

Finally, for many, though not all, conservatives and Right-wing populists, the West is an ethno-religious community defined by pan-ethnic white racial identity and pan-Christian or Judeo-Christian religion. Some edgier varieties exclude either Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, or more than one of the three. Still more exotic ones hark back to paganism, viewing Christianity as a Jewish imposition on Viking vitality.

Partisans of all three visions have struggled to reconcile their preferred model with the actually existing political communities of the West, and they view this failure as a “crisis” of the West. It isn’t. Rather, demographic reality simply defies their neat, ideologized picture. Culture and nationhood still matter, but what anchors them are shared language and customs — not Enlightenment philosophy (as the creedalists would have it), not anti-European resentment (as the multiculturalists would), and not blood-and-soil devotion (as the ethno-sectarian Right would).

Start with the creedalists. In April 2016, then-President Barack Obama warned that if UK citizens in the Brexit referendum voted in favor of leaving the European Union, Washington would collectively punish them, sending Britain to “the back of the queue” for any future trade deals.

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In the language of trans-Atlantic centrist creedalism, Obama praised the European Union as one of “the international institutions” that enabled those in its sphere “to institutionalize and internationalize the basic values of rule of law, and freedom, and democracy, that … benefit our citizens as well as people around the world.”

These warnings notwithstanding, a decisive majority of Britons voted to leave. Today, returning to the European Union is the quixotic fantasy of a minority, often belonging to the upper professional classes. Creedalism has suffered many other defeats, including the backlash on both sides of the Atlantic against the disastrous global crusade for democracy of Tony Blair and George W. Bush, who in his messianic second inaugural address declared: “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one…. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation … now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.”

Then there is Left multiculturalism, which mounted its strongest showing during the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Although policing and race relations in Britain and the rest of Europe are very different from American conditions, BLM spread beyond US shores, underscoring the movement’s (anti-) civilizational ambition.

Inspired by the American Left, activists in European countries vandalized or pulled down civic monuments, rewrote university curricula and museum exhibits, and demanded racial preferences.  The BLMUK manifesto parroted the rhetoric of Left-wing American activists: “We’re guided by a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy, and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain and around the world.”

Yet this version of Western “civilization” likewise failed to take hold and exhausted itself. Today, Americans look back on that period — so-called peak woke — almost as a bad (if also oddly humorous) dream. And while such trends take longer to dissipate in the imperial periphery than in the core, it’s unlikely that European-style woke-ism will last much longer. Indeed, in Europe the crises of immigration and assimilation are, in some ways, far more acute, and are likely to discredit the multicultural model for a generation or more.

The Right’s answer to the creedalism of the liberal center and the race-based multiculturalism of the Left is a kind of trans-Atlantic nativism, in which the West is defined as a civilization by racial and religious “heritage.” In 2025, for example, the Trump administration implicitly argued for an ethno-religious definition of the West in its National Security Strategy.

The document contains lines about the importance of Europe as a military ally and a trading partner that could have appeared in any American state paper. But it weaves these into a lurid narrative of Europe and the United States as parts of a single embattled trans-Atlantic ethno-religious community, with shared ancestry and culture as a basis for US-European relations — a concept that would have startled generations of Americans who drew a sharp distinction between the Old World and the New.

Using apocalyptic rhetoric common on the far Right but hitherto unknown in American state papers, the NSS warns that Europe faces “civilizational erasure.” According to the NSS:  “Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” The NSS gets as close to outright racism and anti-immigrant white nativism as an American state paper can go: “We want Europe to remain European.”

 The subtext: Europe doesn’t look European any more, with all those dark-skinned invaders like former British Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, and former Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar.

According to the Trump administration, the good news is that the “growing influence of patriotic European parties” — that is, Right-wing nationalist parties opposed to mass immigration and the European Union “indeed gives cause for great optimism.” Implicitly identifying “America” with white Americans of European descent, the document states: “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent — and, of course, to Britain and Ireland.”

This would be news to many Americans, including many British- and Irish-Americans, whose ancestors fled poverty or persecution and have no interest in this or that old country. And the idea that sentimental Europhilia is an important part of American culture is hard to square with the intense resistance on the part of many Americans to US involvement in the two world wars. 

The language of Trump’s NSS reflects the worldview of pan-Western American paleoconservatives who idolize the likes of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. Orban has described his ideal as “illiberal democracy” and, in July 2022, declared: “We [Hungarians] are not mixed-race: we are simply a mixture of peoples living in our own European homeland.… We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.”

Religion-mixing, rather than race-mixing, is the target of other defenders of an ethnic conception of the West. In 2025 Andrew Beck, a fellow of the Claremont Institute, which has sent dozens of fellows and staffers into the two Trump administrations, denounced the construction of a Hindu “idol” in Texas and asked in The American Mind: “Are we permitted to determine whether the foundation we build upon remains a distinctly Western, Christian civilization that assimilates outsiders into its mold?” 

Another Claremont fellow, Jeremy Carl, may have doomed his chances to be confirmed as Trump’s nominee to be assistant secretary of state for international organizations with his past statements about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as an “anti-white weapon.”

During a hearing on his nomination, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) asked Carl to define “white culture”: “You have made several statements about your worry regarding the erasure of white culture in America,” Murphy said. “You know, I understand Irish-American culture. I understand Italian-American culture. I maybe don’t understand white culture, as well. Tell me the values, the white values, that you believed are being erased by the current American government or the prior American governments.” 

Carl, Trump’s nominee, mumbled and struggled to respond, before finally thinking of an example unrelated to immigration and based on race: “I would say that the white church is very different than the black church in terms of its tone and style on average.”

OK, good luck to the populist Right in the quest to frame the black church as the big civilizational threat. Indeed, it’s pandering to the likes of Carl and those further to his Right that will likely break apart Trump’s diverse coalition in the 2026 midterms and beyond.

As Carl’s statement suggests, moreover, while uniting fellow adherents in the United States and Europe, each of the three conceptions of the West is used to divide people within countries between “Westerners” and “non-Westerners.” For the ethno-religious nationalists, American society is divided between “authentic” Americans, who are white and Christian, and Hindus and blacks and many others, who will always be outsiders, even if technically they are US citizens. 

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By Anatol Lieven

For their part, American multiculturalists agree that “Western” means “white” by the US Census definition, so that “decolonizing the curriculum” can mean the inclusion of black American authors who by definition are “non-Western,” even though their native language is American English, their religion is Protestant Christianity, and their ancestors have lived in the United States for centuries. 

For creedalists, meanwhile, racists and religious nativists are “un-American” because they don’t share a universalist, ideological conception of Americanism. Belonging to the liberal center, creedalists also typically reject Left multiculturalism, albeit usually with much less vehemence than they reserve for the racial Right.

What’s notable about these three versions of “Western civ” is that none has a deep historical pedigree. Rather, all three coalesced in the aftermath of World War II, during the civil-rights revolution of the 1950s and ’60s. Before then, America’s elite tended to define the American nation as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant community, an offshoot of the Germanic Protestant family of nations.  

Of the three versions, the only one that resembles what most Americans for most of American history thought is today’s white nationalism. But here’s the irony — by including white “ethnics” like Irish-, Polish- and Italian-Americans in the category of authentic Americans, contemporary American white nationalism is by historic standards liberal, inclusive, and diverse. 

In contrast to what might be called the new nativism, adherents of the old American nativism assumed that the white race was composed of distinct sub-races with hereditary cultural and personality traits. Anglo-Americans (the majority of US citizens until around 1900) were thought of by leading scholars and politicians as members of a Germanic tribe that was superior to barbaric Celts like the Irish, hot-blooded Latins like the French and Italians, and primitive Slavs like the Russians and Poles.

For two centuries after the Founding this was the elite view, not an eccentric one. For example, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson proposed that the Great Seal of the United States depict “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.” Like the radical Whigs of 18th-century England, Jefferson believed that Anglo-American ideals of freedom and self-government originated with Dark Age Germanic tribes. Later in 1825, Jefferson, the co-founder of the University of Virginia, established the first course in Anglo-Saxon in the United States, which he considered the language of liberty. Up until World War I, historians like Columbia’s John W. Burgess continued to promote the “Teutonic germ [seed] theory” of American liberty.

US immigration policy from the beginning was based on a racial conception of membership in the American nation. The Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by a Congress that included many of the drafters of the Constitution, outlawed the naturalization of immigrants who were not “free white persons,” a prohibition on citizenship for nonwhite immigrants which lasted until the mid-20th century.

In 1923, the Supreme Court, in the case United States v. Bhagat Thind Singh, ruled that a Punjabi immigrant from India was not a “white person” and therefore was ineligible to become a naturalized US citizen. Writing on behalf of a unanimous court, Justice Sutherland rejected the claim that Singh was a “Caucasian” or “Aryan” by anthropological standards: “The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to ‘any alien being a free white person’ it was these immigrants — bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh — and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind.” The test was the viewpoint of America’s Founders, and every member of the Supreme Court agreed that the Founders would not have considered Mr. Singh “white.”

America’s white-only immigration policy was tightened up by a series of Asian exclusion acts in 1882, 1892, and 1917. The Immigration Act of 1924 made all Asians ineligible for US citizenship (Arabs were “white” and eligible, but Iranians came from the “Asiatic Barred Zone”)  and created the national quotas to favor Northwestern Europeans among white immigrants. The 1924 Act was signed by President Calvin Coolidge, who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1921, had explained to the readers of Good Housekeeping magazine: “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully.  With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.” Coolidge and many other old nativists would have taken a look at some contemporary American nativists like part-Mexican Nick Fuentes and shaken their heads.

After World War II, needless to say, equating Americans with Anglo-Americans and describing them as a Teutonic nation sounded Hitlerian. By then, under pressure from the civil-rights movement at home and competition with the Soviet Union for the favor of former European colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the American establishment, still dominated by WASPs, hastily promulgated a new definition of American national identity, the “American Creed,” based on natural rights (the Declaration of Independence) and a term rarely used before the Cold War, “liberal democracy.” Anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish quotas in the WASP-dominated Ivy League universities were gradually eliminated (though legacy admissions remained to favor the right sort of WASPs). The 88th and 89th Congresses enacted the 1965 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished nearly two centuries of official white nationalism.  

During the Cold War and the civil-rights revolution, the liberal center rewrote American history to claim that the American Revolution had been fought not only for the universal ideals of human rights and popular sovereignty, but also for the ideals of colorblind immigration and civil and political rights for people of all races. Liberal creedalists airbrushed out embarrassing details like Jefferson’s Anglo-Saxonism and the support for colonizing freed black ex-slaves abroad shared by Jefferson with James Madison, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln. 

For example, in 2017, Daniel Fried, an arch-creedalist, declared that “we are not an ethno-state, with identity rooted in shared blood. The option of a White Man’s Republic ended at Appomattox.”

Fried quoted an 1858 speech in Chicago, in which Abraham Lincoln noted that “perhaps half our people” were (white) immigrants who shared no blood with what was then the Anglo-American majority. Nevertheless, he said, they have the right to claim the ideals of the Declaration of Independence “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the men who wrote that declaration, and so they are.” 

According to Fried, this proves that “Lincoln defined Americans as a nation formed by belief, by faith, a credo nation and a new nation, truly ‘novo ordo seclorum.’” Lincoln was indeed sincere in arguing that the Declaration of Independence was relevant to “the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.” But “everywhere” was not necessarily the United States. In a debate with Stephen A. Douglas on Oct. 15, 1858, Lincoln called for America’s western territories to be “an outlet for free white people everywhere the world over” and named as examples “Hans and Baptiste and Patrick.”

In 1864, as president, Lincoln signed an act to encourage immigration that was limited to recruiting immigrants from Europe who, unlike nonwhite immigrants, could become naturalized citizens under existing federal law — “voluntary white labor” in the words of the bill’s author, Sen. John Sherman of Ohio.

In August 1862, during the Civil War, Lincoln, a long-time advocate of colonizing freed blacks abroad, met with a group of black leaders and urged them to lead free black Americans out of the United States to Liberia in Africa, or else to Central America, telling them: “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss; but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think.”  

Lincoln exhorted them to sacrifice their personal comfort to the heroic mission of leading their fellow black Americans out of the country: “General Washington himself endured greater physical hardships than if he had remained a British subject, yet he was a happy man because he was engaged in benefiting his race….” (Whether Lincoln completely abandoned support for colonization by his death is disputed by historians.)

There were black and white reformers at the time like Frederick Douglass who argued in public for a multiracial and mixed-race American nation and a non-racist immigration policy. Abraham Lincoln was not one.

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By D. Graham Burnett

The mid-20th century creedalist conception of American identity invites an obvious question: if the ideals of the Declaration of Independence really require a colorblind society and race-neutral immigration policy, why did almost nobody realize this until the 1960s? Like it or not, until the mid-20th century, many educated and well-intentioned white Americans without contradiction could believe that slavery and tyranny were evil and also that all human beings have the same basic human rights — but nonwhite people should seek to realize their human rights in other countries, not in the United States, a “white man’s country.” 

Notwithstanding the falsity of its historical narrative, from the 1960s until the 2010s, public schools and political oratory spread the new interpretation of American identity as a creedal nation whose membership is defined solely by subjective personal belief in 18th-century Enlightenment liberalism. But postwar liberal creedalism was contested from its origins after World War II by racialist identitarians on both the Left and the Right.

Naturally, creedalism was rejected by Marxists, for whom the United States was just the biggest capitalist country. But their influence was negligible. More important was the split among black leaders between liberal integrationists like Bayard Rustin and proponents of Black Power like Malcolm X and Floyd McKissick (Martin Luther King, Jr. was strategically ambiguous). In the 1970s and ’80s, Jesse Jackson, the most influential black American leader, promoted race-based quotas in jobs and hiring, and the redefinition of America as a “rainbow coalition” whose colors implicitly did not mix. He led a demonstration against a Western civilization course at Stanford University, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” 

Black Power served up the template for future identity-politics movements in America, including radical feminism, the Left wing of the gay-rights movement, and the trans movement. “Multiculturalism” means “multiracialism.” Instead of having a common identity, the United States is envisioned as a multinational state, whose several permanent, unmixing “cultures” are the official races defined by the US Census beginning in the 1970s: black Americans, so-called non-Hispanic whites, Hispanics/Latinos, Asian and Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans. Instead of getting a separate-but-equal realm of their own, under the post-1970s racial preference, in defiance of the intent of Congress when it passed the color-blind Civil Rights Act, non-Hispanic white Americans have been penalized by design in college admissions, job applications, and government grants.

Like multiculturalists, American conservatives after World War II rejected the idea of the United States as a creedal nation (that is, with the exception of some neoconservatives who were former midcentury liberals or socialists). Many on the Right defended Jim Crow in the South until the mid-1960s but usually avoided crude racism. Barry Goldwater invoked federalism (it was about the states’ right to discriminate against blacks, you see). And William F. Buckley, Jr. invoked “civilization,” notably in 1957 in the pages of National Review, in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” in which he defined black Americans and Kenyans as part of the same uncivilized group. “The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage,” he wrote. (To be fair, Buckley also proposed that the suffrage should be denied to the uneducated of all races).

The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 put an end to such talk on the mainstream Right.  Such was the dominance in public discourse of post-1964 liberal creedalism that for half a century, many multiculturalist Leftists and pan-white Christian conservatives alike strategically engaged in double talk. Both the identitarian Left and the crypto-racist right invoked the universalist ideals of the American Creed in statements intended for broad public audiences, while appealing to their constituencies and audiences on the basis of racial tribalism. Creedalism in the streets, racialism in the sheets.

On the Left, multiculturalists claimed that race-based preferences — camouflaged by bureaucratic euphemisms like affirmative action, goals and timetables, and diversity, equity, and inclusion — were nothing more than temporary remedial measures that were perfectly compatible with the American Creed. Meanwhile, following the demise of Jim Crow, racial preferences were attacked by the mainstream conservatives, like those around Buckley’s National Review, as betrayals of the ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr. — as though the Right hadn’t vilified those very ideals just a few years earlier.

From the 1960s onward, Buckley and other gatekeepers of mainstream conservatism purged blatant white supremacists and overt anti-Semites like Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran, who became known as “paleoconservatives.” But the exiled paleocons said aloud what many respectable “movement conservatives” thought. After all, the single most influential public-policy thinker on the American Right in the last quarter of the 20th century was Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, whose books Losing Ground (1984) and The Bell Curve (1994), co-authored with Richard Herrnstein, provided pseudo-scientific support for what many conservatives, mainstream and paleo alike, already believed — that the welfare state encouraged the government-dependent and disproportionately black poor to outbreed taxpayers, and that blacks are intellectually and genetically inferior to whites. 

By the second decade of the 21st century, the post-1945 creedalist orthodoxy has weakened to the point that the racialist Left and the racialist Right have felt empowered to drop their masks.  In How To Be An Antiracist (2019), Ibram Kendi declared: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” — that is, permanent and society-wide discrimination against white Americans, including those born long after the end of Jim Crow.

Around the same time, in the 2010s and 2020s, the racist and anti-Semitic right learned to use Twitter and podcasts to circumvent the gatekeepers of establishment conservatism and infiltrate the Republican Party at the highest levels. For example, in February 2025, Marko Eliz, a 25-year-old staffer who shared pro-eugenics, anti-racist and anti-Indian material online, was forced to resign from DOGE — and was then reinstated. In January 2025, the Department of Labor posted a video with the text evocative of Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”

Another Labor Department social-media campaign depicted American workers as heroic, idealized white men — and only white men. An ICE recruitment post on X (formerly Twitter), meanwhile, portrayed a lone cowboy on the frontier beneath a stealth bomber with the phrase “We’ll have our home again,” the title of a white-supremacist song, “By God, we’ll have a home again.”

Despite their differences, both the multicultural Left and the racialist Right tend to equate race and culture. Both have racialized Latin Americans and Muslims as “brown.” For the nativist Right, Latin Americans and Muslims belong to the brown and black hordes besieging the pan-white Judeo-Christian West. For the multicultural Left, they are part of the nonwhite global majority oppressed by Europeans and Euro-Americans beginning with Columbus in 1492.                    

Fortunately, both the racialist Left and the racialist Right are doomed by demographic trends on both sides of the Atlantic. Increasing rates of interracial marriage are blurring the stripes of the rainbow coalition. As mixed-race Americans increase as a share of the population, the elaborate post-1970s system of official races and race-based preferences is likely to collapse as a result of its own incoherence, if it isn’t swept away by the courts and Congress first.

Thanks to demographic change, the racialist Right’s definition of “real” Americans as part of a trans-Atlantic white Judeo-Christian West is already anachronistic. Among Americans under the age of 18, only 47% are non-Hispanic whites. Only around 40% percent of Americans are non-Hispanic white Christians. And only 48% of Americans between 18 and 24 in 2023-4 identify as Christians. Post-white, post-Christian America is here.

Elsewhere in the West, Christianity is already a minority religion in Britain (46%), Germany (42%), and France, where 51% are areligious “Nones.” In the world as a whole, the largest group of Christians are Africans, followed by Latin Americans, with Europeans in third place. Will European and American conservatives advocate re-Christianizing Western civilization by importing fellow believers from Nigeria, Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia to the United States and Europe?

Don’t count on it. Shortly after bombing ISIS in Nigeria in the name of protecting Nigerian Christians on Christmas Day 2025, the Trump administration froze visa processing for immigrants from 75 countries outside of North America and Europe, including Nigeria. Earlier, in October 2025, Trump slashed refugee quotas and prioritized them for white South Africans, so the majority of new refugees to be admitted by the United States will be white.

In theory a racial and religious national identity in the United States and Europe might be fabricated, in the same way that the Judeo-Christian identity was invented in the middle of the 20th century to accommodate Catholics and Jews alongside the former WASP regency. Perhaps self-described white Hispanics and “white-adjacent” Asian Americans might informally be included in a neo-white racial identity.  Islam and Hinduism could also be included, to make a new category of “theism” (mono- and poly-). But defining American or Western identity as “neo-white” and “theist,” leaving out only black people and atheists among others, is so remote from the self-perceptions of ordinary Americans and Europeans that it would be unlikely to be effective as a Right-wing rallying cry.

Can creedalism be revived as a unifying force in twenty-first century America? Probably not. Creedalists are right to object to claims, like those of The New York Times’s 1619 Project, that anti-black racism has been the central factor in all of American history. But the creedalist fairy tale, in which American history is a series of tragic lapses from the supposed colorblind idealism of 1776, is just as bogus. 

Creedalism offers illogical political theory as well as bad history. It answers the question of how Americans should govern themselves, but not the question of who Americans are. American identity can’t be defined merely by belief in the Enlightenment ideals of the American founding. The ability to passionately recite the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address does not entitle foreign nationals to US passports. Conversely, law-abiding Americans cannot be stripped of US citizenship and deported if they reject the American Creed for illiberal ideologies like communism, fascism, or Islamism; an American monarchist is still an American.

A nation is a bounded, particular community, not a multicultural hotel for permanent foreign diasporas or the creedal base camp for a global democratic ideological revolution. And contrary to the nativist agenda, the cultural boundaries that distinguish one nation from another need not be racial or religious — and, indeed, can’t be in a diverse and religiously pluralist nation.

Fortunately, little is necessary to distinguish a modern cultural nation from others beyond a common language and a few national customs and mores shared by otherwise different subcultures. Most countries wisely prefer to forget their awful political histories and controversial dead politicians and to base national identity instead on a national language and widely-shared customs. 

The idea that people will not fight and die for such a “thin” linguistic-cultural nationalism is based on the mistaken idea that citizen-soldiers fight to promote this or that abstract ideology, including the American Creed, rather than to avoid dishonor in the eyes of family and neighbors or government punishment. In the US conflicts widely regarded as the “good wars” — the American Revolution, the Civil War, the world wars — state or federal military levies and drafts were required, because there were not enough volunteers to risk life and limb crusading for American ideals, however defined.

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The best replacement for creedalism, multiculturalism, and pan-white tribalism might be called “melting-pot multi-faith nationalism.” Government policy would be strictly neutral with regard to religion and race. The Census would stop labeling Americans on the basis of arbitrary, pan-ethnic official races. Race-based affirmative action would be abolished.  

In foreign policy, crusading liberal creedalism would be rejected, but so would the manifestly false idea that the 21st-century world is divided among homogeneous “Western,” “Oriental,” “Muslim,” and other “civilizations.” Relations between Washington and countries in Europe and elsewhere would be based on mutual national economic and security interests, not ties of blood or faith or belief.

As for religion, politically motivated attempts to pulverize different denominations and religions and blend them into a single synthetic identity — pan-Protestantism, pan-Christianism, pan-Judeo-Christianism, pan-Abrahamism — would have no place in a melting-pot multi-faith America. All creeds in the United States — including variants of Islam, Hinduism, New Age sects, neo-pagan heathenism, and organized atheism — would be guaranteed autonomy, within basic legal limits: kosher and halal meat yes, human sacrifice no.

Views of religion in post-Christian America might resemble those that were held in pre-Christian Rome, according to Edward Gibbon: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”

Unlike creedalism, multiculturalism, and pan-white Judeo-Christian tribalism, this vision of American identity is aligned with what most Americans actually believe. According to a Pew Research poll in 2017, 70% of Americans believe that to be considered a true member of the American nation one must speak English; and around half of both Republicans and Democrats say that sharing national customs and traditions is important. But only 32% believe that being born in the United States is part of being American, while a mere 29% of all respondents — and only 43% of Republicans — think that being Christian is part of being American.         

A more recent (2025) Pew survey found that only 26% of Americans, including 62% of white evangelicals, believe that only one religion is true, while 48% think that many religions may be true, and 25% believe there is little or no truth in any religion (1% did not answer). Sixty-one percent of all Americans, and 62% of white Americans, say that the declining share of the white population is neither good nor bad. 

Maybe American policymakers and public opinion leaders should adopt the conception of American national identity that most Americans already share. 

Alibi, a bar in Altrincham, Cheshire, recently made the news for banning solo patrons after 9pm. But it’s worth noting what else the landlord frowns upon — or rather, who else. “No sportswear/trackies,” wrote the landlord, Carl Peters. “No Stone Island. No ripped/frayed jeans. No baseball caps. No roadman vibes.”

Roadman? To the uninitiated, the term generally refers to a young, working-class black Londoner wearing a black puffer jacket, a dark tracksuit, black Nike Air Maxes. The look fuses the casual with the athletic. He might be carrying a manbag and wearing a face covering of some sort. He mostly listens to grime and drill music and he speaks a kind of Multicultural London English (MLE), often sneered at as “roadman English”. Yes, that guy.

In the 2000s, the roadman had a negligible presence in the mainstream. He was very much associated with grime culture (Run the Road, a seminal early grime compilation, was released in 2005). Since the 2010s, however, the figure has stepped into the mainstream, thanks to films and TV shows like Anuvahood and Top Boy, and the rise to prominence of drill music. Michael Dappah’s caricature of a roadman in his satirical 2017 song “Mans Not Hot” was a turning point. It turned the figure of the roadman into a meme, made him loveable even, pushing many signature phrases into everyday speech and opening the door to TikTok trends like the “roadman parliament” and “roadman translation“. Luxury fashion brands, always keen to make money from black-originated trends, have put out streetwear inspired by roadman chic. So what was once a niche, underground, street identity and sub-culture associated with inner-city black youth has morphed into a mainstreamed, commercialized aesthetic and memeified trope.

Take, for instance, Stormzy’s McDonald’s advert from earlier this year. The advert encouraged people to “order like Stormzy”: to march up to the counter and use his distinct roadman English lingo: “mandem”, “ting”, “fam” and so on. The joke, of course, was that white English people, especially those who don’t live in London, don’t talk like that, perhaps even aren’t supposed to. I wonder how it would go down if Harriet from Oxfordshire strolled into her local McDonald’s and tried speaking like this.

But the roadman — or as British-Nigerian comedian Nabil Abdulrashid’s referred to him in a skit, “the gentleman of the road” — is an authentic British figure, part of a subculture that grew within a much wider multicultural urban milieu. The term derives from Jamaican patois — to “run di road” is to be in control of a particular area — signifying its origins within black Caribbean culture. His ancestors are the “rudeboy” and the Yardie, who were for a time the bogeymen of black criminality in British society. The rudeboy, forged in the street-gang-infested shanty towns of Kingston, symbolized the rebellious culture of Jamaica’s post-independence youth, who crossed the Atlantic into Britain in the Sixties and Seventies through the post-Windrush immigration wave. Known for their sharp suits and pork-pie hats, and immortalized in the ska and rocksteady music of the era, the rudeboy archetype soon became at the center of sensationalized discourse around mugging. In the Eighties and Nineties, the Yardie, likewise a product of the Jamaican diaspora, became the evolution of the stereotype, encapsulating all the fears white British society harbored about black British youth. For the writer Jeffrey Boakye, the Yardies were seen as “ostentatious gunmen obsessed with cars and jewelry, speaking in broken English from a former colony and completely unconcerned with the safety of the majority white public.”

More specifically, and as its etymology implies, to be a roadman is to be someone who is “on road” — the British equivalent of being “hood”. This means that the roadman operates in the mean streets of the post-industrial urban metropolis. To “do road” may mean to sell drugs, to be involved in petty street crime, to play drill music loudly in public, and to keep an eye out for the “opps” — gangs of rival roadmen. The roadman’s calling is not a glamorous one. “Doing road” means struggling and hustling to survive in an unforgiving world by any means necessary, which will take its toll. The rapper Berna, who was raised in an East London council estate, put it this way: “And the gang do crimes cause crime pay / Can’t wait for the day we don’t have to / But if one don’t die it’s a nice day / So I always gotta watch how I move”. The roadman knows his life is a vulnerable one, that he always has to look over his shoulder: but he knows he cannot admit weakness.

In this sense, being a roadman is both an accusation and an achievement. Yet he is also a figure of parody, derision and pity. The roadman exists within a hierarchy within the criminal underworld — alas, for him, he is at the bottom of it. He is just entry level. A few echelons above him in his social ecology is the badman, who lives by his own code. Being called a badman is an accolade. The badman is tough, fearless and dangerous. His reputation for violence and dominance earns him respect on the road. He is discreet, but everyone knows not to mess with him. It’s like being an alpha: something you can call someone else, but never yourself.

Plenty of roadmen talk a good game and think they’re a badman; that is until they meet a real badman. In Guy Ritchie’s film The Gentlemen, there’s a scene where one of the main protagonists, played by Charlie Hunnam, confronts a bunch of machete-wielding roadmen who have a phone containing crucial information. They refuse to give Raymond back the phone, even as he offers money for it. With some bravado, they warn him to go away or they’ll cut him up — until he pulls out a compact sub-machine gun to demonstrate who really is the apex predator. The scene has spawned a small internet subgenre of “roadmen meet real gangsters” compilations.

Still, due to social media and general cultural commodification, the roadman “look” and the roadman lifestyle have somewhat become divorced from each other. Many young people, and not just in the main cities, adopt the roadman aesthetic, speak a multicultural English dialect, and listen to grime and drill without being a part of that life.

And if London was the social laboratory where the roadman was born, the phenomenon is no longer contained to the capital.  The roadmen of Birmingham will speak “Multicultural Birmingham English” (MBE); similar to its London equivalent but adapted to a Brummie context. The chav subculture of the 2000s (racially coded as white and out of London) has largely been subsumed by roadmanism. You even have white poshos from the Home Counties who cosplay as roadmen to appear more “authentic”. Indeed, the racial imagination has always been fascinated with blackness as a source of Dionysian vitality: from minstrel performers to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G. To connect with “blackness” is supposedly to connect with one’s elemental impulses — a momentary means of escape and rebellion from a repressed white, Protestant, bourgeois mode of existence.

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It’s tempting to reassess the roadman in this light. Given that “integration” is a consistent if vexed topic in our national discourse, it has been argued that roadman-ism might be one of the few (sub-) cultures within Britain that can easily integrate, or rather assimilate, newcomers. For one, it has a low barrier of entry. It’s genuinely inclusive and open to new influences. To be a roadman doesn’t mean assimilating into blackness. It is really a pan-ethnic subculture, in many ways the default youth culture of the super-diverse cities that immigrants and their children encounter. For second- and third-generation immigrants who are alienated from both the mainstream national culture and the native culture of their parents, being a roadman offers an identity, a surrogate tribe (a mandem), something to “belong” to. Perhaps, then, roadmanism is the closest thing there is to a British melting pot.

But I’m not sure this is a model of integration that should be championed. The roadman is also a champion of ignorance, parochialism and shallow machismo. Newly minted roadmen who plunge deeper into that life will aspire to be a badman, often laboring under the delusion that doing “badness” is how you express just how masculine you are — and that you become “someone” through inflicting damage on the “opps”. That inevitably will lead to bloodshed and devastate communities. Crime and urban violence is a young man’s game and it is young men who are its biggest loser: 83% of teen victims of homicide were killed by stabbing in 2024; young men (aged 18-24) were eight times more likely to be killed by stabbing compared to young women.

The function of roadmanism, as Mark Fisher once wrote of hip-hop, is to operate as an “anti-mythical myth”. The Weltanschauung of the roadman has no room for sentimental idealism. It reveals life for what it supposedly really is: a social Darwinist struggle where only the fittest survive. Why was Henry Hill so enthralled by the gangster life in Goodfellas? It wasn’t just the money and flashy goods. It was a sense of freedom and excitement — of no longer being a non-player character in a dead-beat job.

And so the roadman “vibes” have transcended their working class black British origins to become the cosmopolitanism of the lumpenproletariat. The best remedy for it is a dynamic civil society that inspires young people to reject this nihilism. To translate their talent and graft into society’s gain. To realize that they can be free in society rather than acting against it. To discover meaning and purpose. Until such a thing exists, the roadman life will be the life that purposeless young men fall into. White middle-class people may laugh at the memes — but out on the road, baleful consequences will follow.

This robust approach to criminal justice was duly backed by Lowe: “Now you’re talking”. In truth, though, the broader political currents Hussain represents are likely less pleasing to his fellow backbencher. For in his enthusiastic declaration of Islamic values, especially as a balm for the nation’s woes, he is the avatar for an increasingly prominent kind of British Muslim: educated, self-confident, political. Echoed across the country’s cultural life, and indeed in its birthrates, men like Hussain could soon shape life far beyond the internet, with vast consequences for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Perhaps the best place to understand the rising power of Britain’s Muslims is not Westminster, or even Hussain’s Blackburn — but my hometown of Luton. It’s safe to say the place that hosted the Islamist “Butchers of Basra” demonstrations, and is the birthplace of the EDL, does not have the finest reputation. Over recent years, in fact, it’s become a kind of negative poster boy for the terminally online Right, what with its Islamic schools, halal butchers and peri-peri chicken joints. Its once-thriving pubs, meanwhile, are becoming a thing of the past, and though there’s a Christian revival of sorts, it’s mostly immigrant-inspired.

That’s hardly the best news for people like Rupert Lowe, anxious over ethnic and racial change. Yet the fact is that where Luton leads, the country is heading. According to the most recent census, after all, 3.8 million Muslims now live in England: a sharp rise from 2.7 million in 2011. From 2001 to 2021, England’s Muslims have risen by nearly 150% in terms of number of people, and grown by 116% as a proportion of the national population. A sharp decline in Christian identification has only hastened these trends, as have Muslim birthrates. Think, again, of Luton. It’s now a majority-nonwhite town where one in three residents are Muslim. More than that, it’s the baby capital of England, with Slough, Oldham and much of East London following closely behind. Judging by the recent data, the demographic trajectory of England will be increasingly shaped by Islamic social conservatism.

Behind the headline growth, however, or the vivid streetscapes of towns like Luton, Britain’s Muslim population remains strangely complex. Studies suggest that the country’s Muslims believe in the richness of Britain’s opportunities — yet aren’t particularly impressed with the society they live in. Once again, the numbers here are telling. Though over 85% think this is a good place to live, over three in five feel that most Britons put themselves over their families or communities. Strikingly, this number rises even higher among British Muslim millennials.

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That last figure strikes at the heart of the so-called “integration paradox”: the idea that as ethnic and religious minorities become more integrated into the economic and social mainstream over the generations, they will do away with their ancestral and faith-based identities. This optimistic theory has been blown to smithereens by the British Muslim experience. Just like Adnan Hussain, a former solicitor born in Burnley, younger Muslims are not only more likely to be born in the UK, educated at British universities, and work as white-collar professionals than their elders — they are also more inclined to identify with their faith.

Compared to their elders, younger conservative Muslims are generally more aware of the excesses of social liberalism in mainstream Britain, even as they fail to share their cultural connections with ancestral homelands. It’s in Islam, not Kashmir or Sylhet, that they find a true sense of belonging, a trend that will only continue as Muslims from different ethnic communities intermarry. All the while, younger Muslims tend to have greater expectations and demands of the nation’s politics, certainly compared to foreign-born elders who were often just grateful to escape conflict or corruption.

That shift, in turn, makes younger British Muslims more prone to disappointment with the nation’s institutions, especially over issues with an implicitly religious character, notably Palestine. There is also the ironic possibility that by being more integrated — economically, educationally — younger socially conservative Muslims are more exposed to secular trends not to their liking. Young Muslim YouTubers shaming the social mainstream over perceived forms of moral degeneracy are hardly in short supply, even as figures like Hussain are tougher on deportations than many white liberals.

All this works to reinforce the religious identity of British Muslims. And if that encourages many to “selectively” integrate — being decent neighbors and working hard without fully immersing themselves in the country’s culture — that still leaves a stark divide with the non-Muslim majority, especially around women’s rights and mixed-sex interaction. Consider the case of Maheen Kamran. An aspiring medical student who won the seat of Burnley Central East in last year’s local elections, she ran on a platform which not only called for an improvement in school standards and public cleanliness — but also encouraged public spaces to prevent “free mixing” between Muslim men and women. More recently, the East London Mosque organized a fun run which barred female participation.

The mosque’s decision caused predictable outrage from liberal politicians. But that still leaves the question of how eager British Muslims are to take advice from the mainstream on matters of gender equality, especially given its struggles over even defining what a woman actually is. That’s broadly been Hussain’s own line. More than that, British Muslim traditionalists, whether in Luton, Blackburn or elsewhere, may well argue that Western-style empowerment has contributed to the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family unit, and has fed the fertility crisis which means Britain now faces an economic timebomb. And all this in a country where a fifth of people routinely report that they have an unfavorable view of Muslims as a group.

These tensions may even get worse, as upwardly mobile British Muslims begin to hold more positions of influence in business, the public sector, and larger civic associations. Indeed, there are growing signs of religious co-ordination across sectors, with the new Muslim Impact Forum (MIF) having a central mission of “uniting Muslim leaders and institutions across politics, charity, and business to move ideas into collective action”. This hints at a broader point. While the ever-growing British Muslim population has been caricatured by some as an undereducated and welfare-dependent monolith, one which has colonized Britain’s social housing stock, the reality is somewhat different.

In truth, it’s a relatively youthful population, one defined by its upward social mobility — and which is increasingly assertive across national life. Young British Muslim sportspeople, notably England’s Pakistani-heritage cricketers Shoaib Bashir and Rehan Ahmed, have not shied away from expressing the centrality of their Islamic faith. Something similar can be said of Tottenham Hotspur’s Djed Spence, who in September became the first recognized Muslim to play international men’s football for England during their 5-0 win in Serbia.

Hussain aside, the most obvious recent example in politics is Shabana Mahmood’s appointment as home secretary. Her arrival in Marsham Street was met with disquiet by some on the Right due to her religious background, and the fact that she was allegedly the first Muslim to take up the post. Not quite: Sajid Javid, who was the first home secretary of Pakistani Muslim origin, appears to have been memory-holed — which tells us much about changing attitudes. It almost feels as if, as a “hyper-integrated” Muslim, one with a white British wife and who once said that Christianity was the only faith practiced in his home, Javid didn’t count as a real Muslim. Yet if Javid was the kind of “sanitized” Muslim more acceptable to the political mainstream, he is far from the norm. Echoing Hussain and other Muslim MPs, Mahmood has told The Times that Islam is the “centerpoint” of her life.

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Faith aside, Mahmood has plenty on her plate. Consider the small-boats crisis, a thoroughgoing national emergency, and one largely down to the unchecked importation of younger males from Muslim-majority countries: exactly the kind of person Hussain and Lowe would like to send back home. At the same time, Labour recently announced a national statutory inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, with Mahmood finally announcing Baroness Anne Longfield as the chair. That’s a start, but as a minister of Pakistani-Muslim heritage herself, Mahmood will be under pressure to make sure the inquiry thoroughly investigates the cultural and societal drivers behind the abuse, especially when men of her own ethno-religious background are disproportionately involved. Then there’s the looming threat of Islamism, with antisemitism partly promoted by Britain’s segregated Muslim communities.

Whether fair or not, anyway, Mahmood will be under extra pressure to deliver as home secretary because of her ethnic identity and religious affiliation — which exposes the growing tendency to hold British Muslims “collectively responsible” for problems surrounding security and integration. Mahmood, like many of her peers, has another major headache too: the rise of religio-political mobilization within traditionally Labour-voting British Muslim communities. In her seat of Birmingham Ladywood, she was run close in the last general election by pro-Gaza independent candidate Akhmed Yakoob, who also performed well in the last West Midlands mayoral election. British Muslim voters have deserted Labour in droves under Starmer’s leadership; before being elected as an independent, Adnan Hussain was a Labour activist.

Here’s yet another irony: British Muslims have become so socially integrated, and politically disillusioned, that they’re now mobilizing along religious lines, electoral shifts which be devastating for Labour in Muslim-dominant parts of the country. That’s especially if Your Party, the Greens, and George Galloway’s Workers Party for Britain, as well as the wider pro-Palestine independent movement, are all able to organize coordinated electoral pacts. All this varied activity could transform British politics, particularly if backed by traditional ethnic-minority habits that pool resources for community projects.

It’s clear, then, that the country is entering uncharted territory, with several of England’s provincial towns effectively becoming political battlegrounds between traditional British nationalists and Islamic social conservatives, with the only thing they share being a hatred of the so-called “legacy parties”. Some of the results from the local elections earlier this year provide a flavor of what is to come. Despite Reform UK taking control of Lancashire council, its candidates were beaten by independent Muslim candidates across Burnley and Preston. Whatever way you look at it, Britain is changing — and not necessarily in a direction Rupert Lowe will welcome.

A work of great subtlety, Imagined Communities was fated to be skim-read by two generations of students, in the process coarsening its careful analysis of the spread of nationalist sentiment in New World creole societies into something far more destabilizing to Old World nations. The “imagined” was taken to mean “imaginary”, and thus “fake”. The laborious deconstruction of their own national identities by Twitter bores — the lower-middlebrow purveyors of “St George was a Turkish migrant” and “fish and chips were invented by Jewish refugees” discourse — are all, in their own strange and sub-literate ways, downstream of this undergraduate misreading. Indeed, in his autobiography Anderson himself takes pains to stress that his researches on New World nationalisms were completely inapplicable to the Old World, a warning that has passed by most of those who invoke him. Yet this misreading is so widespread, and so destructive, that it is worth looking at Anderson again, beyond his most famous and misrepresented book, to determine what his analysis of nationalism as a category in general can offer, in a country undergoing its own new and particular nationalist ferment.

Like his brother Perry (whose real name, Benedict gleefully reveals in his autobiography, is the firmly Gaelic “Rory”), Benedict O’Gorman Anderson was a product of De Valera’s Ireland. Raised in Waterford, for which city his great-grandfather Major Purcell O’Gorman had been the Irish nationalist MP, Anderson would later recall a small-town world of huddling in the cinema, “along with shawlies, shamefaced young priests, mothers and snivelling children seeking some warmth in winter”. He also remembers fighting local Catholic boys, “who took us to be snobby, half-English and Protestant” on his way to and from his Quaker prep school. His Catholic ancestors, he was proud to relate, “had a long history of political activism against English imperialism and colonialism in Ireland”, being centrally involved in the failed 1798 Rising, and the later and more successful campaign for Catholic emancipation.

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His Anglo-Irish Protestant side, on the other hand, maintained the long record of British imperial service customary of their tribe. “Had my father not been Irish,” Anderson reflects, “I might have been raised in England and fought overseas for the Empire.” Instead, reaching adulthood, and having been mocked at Eton for his “Irishisms”, Anderson chose an Irish national identity, unlike his brother Perry/Rory, who remains, in practical terms at least, a loyal subject of what he would later call “Ukania”. “I felt that I owed it to my father, who on my birth gave me the ‘tribal’ O’Gorman name, to apply for Eire citizenship,” Benedict later mused, a choice made for Leftist and anti-imperialist “political as well as personal reasons”. Anderson’s later intellectual work on the conflicted loyalties of colonial elites, and the politicized choice between national identities made by creole aristocrats, more or less openly derives from this ambivalent Irish family milieu.

Is it lazy biographical shorthand to derive a writer’s thinking from their ethnocultural hinterland? If it is, it is a sin Anderson himself happily engaged in. He observes that the great British theories of nationalism with which Imagined Communities was written to engage all derive, in differing ways, from the ethnic backgrounds of their proponents: “Almost all were written by Jews, though of widely different political outlooks.” For the Iraqi Jewish Elie Kedourie, writing from the political Right, as well as the Austrian Jewish Eric Hobsbawm and Czech Jewish Ernest Gellner, writing on different wings of the Left, nationalism was an irrational and disruptive force, breaking apart the tolerant cosmopolitanism of the great multinational empires. Such a viewpoint was natural from their situations: all were refugees from nationalisms of one form or another. Indeed, as Anderson remarks, all became “attached to the UK, partly because it was largely uncontaminated by fascism and violent anti-Semitism, and partly because the state, including England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, was felt to be more like supranational (if now defunct) Austro-Hungary than standard European nation-states such as France, Italy and Sweden”.

Yet unlike these wistfully cosmopolitan deconstructors of nationalist passions, Anderson himself was more enthused by the Scottish nationalism of Tom Nairn, which saw the Habsburg parallels for the British state not as a strength but as proof of the United Kingdom’s frailty. Coining the term Ukania for the United Kingdom, directly inspired by the Austrian writer Robert Musil’s Kakania for the polyglot and dysfunctional Habsburg state, Nairn saw the United Kingdom, just like its Austro-Hungarian analog, as destined to be broken up by the nationalist sentiment of its homeland peoples. Nairn’s The Break-Up of Britain, Anderson observes, “was strongly attacked, especially by Hobsbawm, who declared that no true Marxist could be a nationalist”. Anderson himself disagreed: “I liked the book very much, for its own sake, but also as an Irishman (Southern Ireland, after centuries of English colonial rule, had only won its independence, by armed struggle, in 1922).”

Indeed, writing in the Field Day Journal, the influential Derry-based Irish nationalist intellectual review, Anderson would observe, with some satisfaction, that “the UK, one of the victors of World War I, lost one quarter of its ‘home’ territory, what came to be Éire, within five years of the war’s end”. The Western victor of the Great War had experienced a territorial dismemberment, in the face of nationalist revolt, otherwise only experienced by the war’s losers to the East, and for Anderson this outcome was both natural and just. Rather than a cosmopolitan deconstructor of nationalism, as his lazy adherents today assume, Anderson was, in his urbane and Marxist way, an Irish nationalist, who saw in nationalism great liberatory potential from the sprawling dysfunction of the great multinational empires. Happy to derive the anti-nationalist positions of his intellectual peers from their ethnic self-interest, Anderson’s own nationalism, he was pleased to report, was entirely rational and enlightened. A cynic may demur, just as a cynic would say that Nairn’s own quixotic support for Ulster’s Loyalists, which he struggled to bend into a Marxist shape, was more convincingly derived from instinctive tribal loyalty to his Scottish kin across the water than it was from any of the socialist principles he dubiously assembled.

Where does this leave us today? Unlike Hobsbawm, who famously claimed, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, that the age of nationalism was drawing to a close, Anderson correctly perceived its resurgence in a new era of internet communication and mass migration. Rather than ushering in its demise, the new world of globalization was set to turbocharge nationalism. As he observed in his essay “Long-Distance Nationalism”, mass migration from the Third World into the West was bound to create an ‘“ethnicization” process, one sure “to draw a sharp line between the political nation and a putative original ethnos. Even if a black in the United Kingdom was born there, went to schools and university there, pays taxes there, votes there, and will be buried there, for the National Front he or she can never be genuinely English.” The interminable debates now happening online, on the Englishness of otherwise of Frank Bruno, Rishi Sunak, and David Lammy, were prefigured by Anderson’s appreciation that nationalism is not eroded, but instead created, by the mingling of peoples. For just as capitalism, in its sponsoring of transnational migration, creates the colonial settler, so does it create the native as a category, whose nativeness is directly constructed through comparison with the incomer: “Nationalism’s purities (and thus also cleansings) are set to emerge from exactly this hybridity.”

This process, for Anderson, is not merely a malady of the displaced native. Technological advance, particularly the ease of long-distance communications, meant that incoming peoples could no longer be assimilated, as in the case of the 19th-century New World: the American “melting pot” was a one-time only process, already in reversal even in the United States itself. The Greek migrant in Frankfurt, or Sri Lankan migrant in London, is now unable to set aside his homeland as his 19th-century predecessor could, instead living, beyond its borders, in an idealized, and politically radicalized homeland of his imagination. In this “long-distance nationalism”, Anderson divines “a probably menacing portent for the future”: one which has now become our present. “One emblem of the American variant is perhaps the espionage trial of Jonathan Pollard a few years back,” Anderson notes, referring to the US intelligence analyst who spied for Israel. “In the age of classical nationalism, the very idea that there could be something praiseworthy in an American citizen’s spying on America for another country would have seemed grotesque. But to the substantial number of Jewish-Americans who felt sympathetic to Pollard, the resentful spy was understood as representing a transnational ethnicity.”

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For the newly unassimilable migrant, this engagement with the politics of the ancestral homeland is the means through which “an embattled ethnic identity is to be fashioned in the ethnicized nation state that he remains determined to inhabit. That same metropole that marginalizes and stigmatizes him simultaneously enables him to play, in a flash, on the other side of the planet, national hero.” One thinks here of the Middle Eastern or South Asian migrant in the West, demanding, with no apparent trace of self-awareness, that Israelis “return” to Poland: the blood-and-soil certainties of “home” rest on unstable ground. The result of all this, for Anderson, was the growing power of ethnic identities over assimilatory national ones, from which dynamic, he observes, “has emerged the ideological program of multiculturalism, which implies that a simple nineteenth-century version of Americanism is no longer adequate or acceptable”. Multiculturalism, Anderson correctly perceives, is simply the proliferation of more meaningful ethnic identities, weakening the assimilatory power of the host nation. And so, rather than dissolving age-old ethnic bonds, as nationalists assume, instead “capitalism, in its eternal restlessness [is] producing new forms of nationalism.”

Yet, turning his anti-imperialist sentiment to the great hegemon of the time, Anderson welcomes this outcome, if in a qualified way. Rather than heralding a new age of multicultural fluidity, he suggests that globalization is just a new, sprawling, polyglot imperial order to be challenged. “What is really unprecedented,” he writes, “is primarily the current hegemony of the United States… ‘globalization’ is simply an academic-bureaucratic euphemism for that hegemony.” Briskly dismissing the humanitarian justifications given for empire by its post-national cheerleaders, Anderson observes that “Hegemonic powers tend to posit ‘human rights’ as a universal, abstract and global value to be invoked at their liking”. Ultimately, in resisting “the barrenness of neoliberalism and hypocritical ‘human rights’ interventionism”, then whether one wishes it or not, “one of the most powerful weapons in the struggle is nationalism.” Indeed, “for all its weaknesses, the nation-state remains an indispensable institution through which those who so wish can work to restrain today’s ‘evil empire’.”

Wrongly deployed as intellectual ballast for post-national, globalized, multicultural projects by those who have misunderstood him, Anderson instead stands firmly against all these things: globalization and human rights discourse are simply fig-leaves for an imperial order that will, as all its predecessors have done, crumble in the face of a nationalist wave it has itself created. Indeed, he observes, the intellectual animus against nationalism is directly attributable to imperial requirements. “Like all empires, the American empire needs enemies. ‘Dangerous nationalism’ (which of course did not include American nationalism) emerged to fill the vacuum left by the evaporation of ‘the communist threat’.” Instead, it is the nation-state, for Anderson as for his Marxist Brexiteer brother Perry, that enables human flourishing, even if the excesses of nationalism must be restrained. As Anderson puts it: “This is why what is increasingly needed is a sophisticated and serious blending of the emancipatory possibilities of both nationalism and internationalism.” Rather than its dismissive obituarist, anyway, it is time to reclaim Benedict Anderson as nationalism’s humane advocate — and its prophet.

Few recent stories illustrate this better than Zohran Mamdani. A 32-year-old democratic socialist, born in Uganda and raised in Queens, Mamdani last week won the Democratic Party primary for New York’s mayoralty. In doing so, he’s well on his way to validating what astute observers could feel for weeks: the man could become the “real Obama”, even as he dodges the 44th president’s vacuous “nation-of-immigrants” mythos in favor of progressive policies from housing to transport. Yet if Mamdani has the charisma, vision and social media savvy to be the future of American politics, he first needs to prove his Americanness.

That’s proving to be a struggle. Last week, Congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee drafted a formal letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding that Mamdani — an elected official representing a district over 850 miles away from his own — be denaturalized and deported because he is a potential “terrorist supporter”. Earlier this week, when White House officials were asked about that possibility, none offered a clear denial. All of them, including President Trump himself, seemed quite open to the possibility. And though, of course, they were loath to bring up Mamdani’s background explicitly, The New York Times has proved itself similarly suspicious, its editorial board arguing that the candidate didn’t even “deserve” a spot on the ballot. It all speaks to the struggles politically active Americans outside the Protestant, small-state mainstream continue to face — and how identity and economics conspire to impede alternatives to the status quo.

One of the odder features of American political self-perception is that Americans, both Left and Right, wholly believe the myth that the country is “multicultural”. But multiethnic and multicultural are not the same thing. Even by 1830, more than two centuries after the Puritans landed at Plymouth, roughly 90% of American society remained Anglo-Protestant. This included denominations like Congregationalist, Anglican and Baptist, alongside various Puritan offshoots and an emerging network of black churches. As late as the Civil War, the population was still roughly three-quarters Protestant — over nine-in-10 of whom were some variation of Anglo-Protestant.

The mythology surrounding the country’s post-Sixties embrace of superficial “multiculturalism” has, in many ways, become a conceptual prison. It greatly hampers Americans’ ability to understand the true character of their own nation, so much so that few seemed to notice the actual religious composition of the 118th Congress, elected in 2022: where over 55% of its members identified as Protestant, about a third as Catholic, 6% as Jewish, and just 1.6% as Mormon. Today — over 400 years after the 1619 date The New York Times so loves to reference as our national start date — more than 93% of Congress generally comes from just four religious groups, with Anglo-Protestants still comfortably dominant.

From the vantage point of 4 July, this is unsurprising: Anglo ethnopolitics still greatly define the identity of this former British colony. Yet our demographic story is hardly a relic of history. From a political culture standpoint, the United States is the most ideologically policed nation in the liberal democratic world, and it’s not even close. It is a nation that’s been controlled by a two-party cartel for going on two centuries. This cartel rigorously works in harmony with allied media operations, and the higher-education apparatus, to prevent any ideas outside the Anglo-liberal consensus from ever being understood, much less taking root. Mamdani directly challenges this consensus — particularly its Anglo-liberal deification of markets, individual responsibility, and limited-government concepts that make citizens feel like they must beg for welfare state programs like a street panhandler.

Mamdani’s Muslim faith, Indian ancestry, and Ugandan birth combine to expose what might be called the “LASP” nexus — the “Liberal Anglo-Saxon Protestant” framework that has shaped the American political imagination since the Mayflower. The United Kingdom, of course, has also been heavily influenced by Anglo-liberal and Anglo-Protestant thought. But, unlike its wayward colonial offspring, it at least has a major political party with roots in the labor movement, not to mention the historical influence of the Fabian Society. In contrast, the United States has never had a major political party whose formation can be tied to labor organizing.

The Democratic Party, after all, dates back to the founding of the republic, when it was still called the “Democratic-Republican Party”— the party of Thomas Jefferson and, later, Andrew Jackson. It reflected their love affair with the “yeoman farmer”, and a democracy of smallholders. This ideal was totally incapable of reconciling itself with industrialization, as evidenced by the fact that the Democrats fought a civil war clinging to slavery long after much of the rest of the world, including Britain itself, recognized its abomination.

Due to the legacy of slavery, colorist concepts of ethnicity — along with the enduring “nation of immigrants” folklore — have so thoroughly dominated our historical narrative that modern Americans operate with almost no awareness of the cultural homogeneity that defined their country for the first 300 years of its existence. The reality is that non-British immigrants did not begin arriving in numbers that threatened the country’s Anglo supremacy until the second quarter of the 19th century. By then, the so-called American “experiment” was already two centuries old, and well on its way to congealing into a rigidly Anglo-Protestant and Anglo-liberal nation. Yet when waves of Irish and German Catholics — as well as proto-socialists and abolitionists fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848 — began arriving by the hundreds of thousands, the Anglo-Protestant majority swiftly rejected them as fundamentally un-American, just as today’s establishment routinely recoils in horror at people like Mamdani.

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All across the US, nativist mobs formed to prevent Irish and German immigrants from voting or holding office, meeting them at polling stations with bats and brass knuckles. They assaulted nuns and clergy, torched Catholic churches, and vandalized immigrant schools and meeting halls. What was happening was simple: white Protestants threatening non-Protestant whites, demanding they assimilate politically and morally into the country’s dominant LASP worldview — or face severe violence. These now-infamous but poorly understood “Know Nothings” operated as the shock troops of the American Party. Initially known as the “Native American Party”, at its peak it controlled nearly a third of Congress, either openly or covertly, as well as six governorships, all at a time when the union included only 31 states.

When this white-on-white violence is acknowledged in modern scholarship, it’s often framed as a racial problem — based on the now-common claim that the Irish weren’t yet considered “white”. As it is, though, that’s the assessment of the blinkered modern mind. So consumed with colorist conceptions of ethnicity — and ignorant of comparative political ideals, not to mention the history of intra-Christian prejudices — that it completely misses the Anglo supremacism that 19th-century nativists sought to protect religiously, politically, and culturally. After all, Irish and German immigrants were initially deemed unfit for office for the same reasons Mamdani is now: not just because they were foreign, but because their ethnopolitical ideals threatened an entrenched framework elites openly claimed as exclusively American.

Historically, indeed, politicians outside the LASP mold have only gained acceptance by first affirming the cultural dominance of Anglo-liberalism and Anglo-Protestantism — as Obama himself did, early in his career, by fighting to establish his bonafides in the mainline Protestant United Church of Christ in Chicago. Even then, suspicion and coded nativism remained thorns in the side of this decidedly conformist (and careerist) former Harvard Law Review president. Obama’s lengthy efforts to prove his Protestantism were still not enough to prevent him from having to fend off the “secret Muslim” label that dogged him for much of his first term.

Despite the paranoia of “Birther” nativism, which Trump helped lead, no openly Muslim candidate has ever been elected to the Senate. The same goes for Buddhists and Hindus. The lower chamber has been only marginally more inclusive. Just three Muslims have ever entered the House, all in the last 20 years: Keith Ellison, André Carson, and Ilhan Omar. The latter, in particular, has faced relentless xenophobia, with members of the GOP regularly smearing her as “un-American” and “terrorist sympathizer” — very similar to the alienating labels Mamdani has faced today.

Muslims and non-Western religions aren’t the only groups that have been met with prejudice by the country’s Anglo-Protestant majority either. Even the Mormons, arguably the whitest — and most Middle American — of heterodox religious groups had to abandon its practice of polygamy and dismantle their vast communal economic system before the Utah territory could be admitted as a state. Yes, Catholics, Jews, and Mormons were eventually welcomed into the American mainstream during the 20th century. But that only happened after a full century of cultural, and political, Anglo-centric assimilation. Each group had to prove they embraced Republican versions of democracy, Anglo-liberal “free” market economics and, no less important, Anglo-Americans’ unique take on the Protestant work ethic, which equates state support with personal failure.

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Mamdani, though, is clearly cut from a different cloth, and is about as far from the Wall Street-friendly Obama as you can imagine. Even so, would Mamdani be considered “radical” outside the rigid Anglo-liberal boundaries that still define American politics in the 21st century? Whether it’s his proposals for rent control, his plan for free public transit, or even the idea of state-owned grocery stores — nearly all of these proposals would be politically unremarkable in much of the developed world and, increasingly, many parts of the global south too.

In American political culture, however, the establishment has eagerly worshipped “wealth creators” while demeaning wage workers as lazy or entitled. This occurs regularly despite the fact that the US has, by far, the weakest labor protections and stingiest welfare state among wealthy industrialized nations. This mentality emerged early in the industrial era, as elites embraced a Robber Baron-style capitalist triumphalism, intertwined with the survival-of-the-fittest ethos promoted by Social Darwinists like William Graham Sumner. The only serious resistance ever mounted against this ideology was the New Deal coalition, built on Franklin Roosevelt’s political genius and relentless popular appeal. The American establishment hysterically condemns Mamdani because they can sense he might have that same potential.

Despite Roosevelt’s unparalleled four-term popularity, when the New Deal coalition collapsed in the Seventies, the role of labor unions and the state in building up middle-class stability began to disappear from the national narrative. In its place, identity politics rose up to become the face of American “Leftism”. As the language of identity replaced the language of class, the establishment’s long-standing worship of wealth and material success became stronger still. That ultimately paved the way for Wall Street plunder and modern Silicon Valley hyper-feudalism where, since 1975, approximately $79 trillion has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American workers to the top 1%.

This astoundingly regressive wealth redistribution must, of course, be justified by ideology. That’s where the Social Darwinism of thinkers like Sumner come in, offering a uniquely American cauldron of disdain for the needy and indigent, what Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra once dubbed our “kill the poor” mentality. To put it differently, New Yorkers can’t have the free childcare that much of Europe takes for granted — not because the city lacks resources but because, as Sumner would argue, they don’t “deserve” it.

Many Americans, especially among the poor and working class, have internalized these low expectations. Mamdani, as some have noted, performed the worst among voters with little or no college education. So yes, his recent electoral success might be due primarily to an influx of college-educated groups. Yet that hardly explains why Donald Trump received 30% of the Big Apple’s presidential vote in 2024 — nearly double what he received in 2016.

Even in New York, then, wokeness seems to have crested. It may still dominate faculty rosters in America and many parts of the media landscape, but it doesn’t explain Mamdani’s rise. Despite the bemoaning of Mamdani as nothing more than a spoiled woke socialist, his surprising political success derives from his rejection of identity-victimhood fixations and — like FDR before him — his refusal to accept the elite dogma that the state is powerless to improve the economic conditions of everyday people.

Mamdani is routinely portrayed as a demonic immigrant antichrist for the same reason the German 48ers were declared an existential threat, despite their small numbers and political irrelevance. These early rebels openly challenged America’s LASP norms and dared to advocate for a different — multicultural and multi-ideological — vision of the country. Mamdani seems set to do the same. Whether or not you support his policies, the intensity of the reaction from the national media and Right-wing influencers toward a mayor’s race, in a place most of them openly hate, reveals something deeper, almost unconscious.

Rather, the ritualistic scapegoating of Mamdani across the US press arises because everything about the man stands outside America’s now-entrenched LASP boundaries: he’s not Anglicized morally and doesn’t pretend otherwise; he’s not Anglo-liberal in the “classical” free market sense; nor is he “Protestantized” in terms of the moral economy. Instead, he’s an open critic of Anglo-liberal politics, unapologetically pro-statist in his economic vision and a Muslim — a westernized one, yes, but a Muslim nonetheless.

Taken together, Mamdani is an avowed non-LASP — or indeed an anti-LASP. That doesn’t just make him a “radical”, it makes him an outsider, a contaminant, and a threat to the body politic. Should he ultimately win the mayor’s office of the nation’s largest city, it will be seen by many as a breach in the national fortress, a challenge not merely to our latently Anglo vision of multiculturalism, but also to the Anglo supremacist nexus that still dominates the American mind — nearly 250 years after declaring independence from Britain.

Today, Darwin’s conundrum has returned to Parliament. Richard Holden, the MP for Basildon and Billericay, has proposed a bill to ban first-cousin marriage in the UK. While the bill is highly unlikely to pass, it follows similar debates in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and reflects a swelling interest in the subject on the British Right. According to Holden, cousin marriage creates problems in three areas: health, freedom, and our national values. Muslim communities, particularly Pakistani ones, have been at the center of these debates due to their high rates of cousin marriages. Around 27% of the women in the most recent cohort (2016-2019) of the “Born in Bradford” study were married to their first cousin.

Is this sudden interest in cousin marriage driven by genuine concern for the communities involved? Or does it — intentionally or not — fuel anti-Muslim sentiment, fostering division by presenting cousin marriage as an unnatural and foreign practice?

Cousin marriage isn’t unnatural: it has been practiced around the world for thousands of years. But could it pose a health risk to the resulting children? If Darwin were alive today, he might be surprised to discover that, despite our better understanding of genetics, significant gaps in our knowledge remain. Roughly, the baseline risk of unrelated parents having a child with a major birth defect is 3%; for a child of first cousins, this risk increases to 6%. This means that the vast majority of children born from consanguineous marriages will be healthy. Of course, if there are known genetic disorders within the family, then this risk increases, and successive generations of cousin marriage can also compound the likelihood of having a disabled child — but this is by no means inevitable.

Nevertheless, these additional risks can be offset through prenatal genetic screening, which is currently offered to other at-risk groups. Older pregnant women, for example, are screened for Down’s syndrome, as are couples who are carriers of cystic fibrosis. We don’t ban these individuals from marrying or having children, and we don’t consider them a burden on the healthcare system.

Nor is it only the children of cousins who are at risk. The likelihood of health problems is increased whenever there is a higher chance that two individuals share genes. This can occur in small populations or in any close-knit community that marry among themselves — such as the UK’s Jewish community, or else the Amish in America or French Canadians. Would Holden also support banning marriage within other ethnic communities? I suspect not.

Beyond birth defects, the risks of cousin marriage are difficult to calculate. The Bradford study suggests that consanguineous children access health care at higher rates, and may also struggle more at school. The children of unrelated parents have a 7.4% probability of having speech and language difficulties; this figure rises to 11.3% for the children of first cousins. Yet we shouldn’t leap to conclusions. One issue with this analysis is that cousin marriage often correlates with poverty, which has an independent effect on health. Many of the areas in Britain with high rates of cousin marriage are extremely deprived, and while this analysis does control for poverty, it is unlikely to capture all aspects of socioeconomic disadvantage — making it unclear the extent to which genetics ultimately matter.

Holden’s second argument against cousin marriage — that it undermines the freedom of women — is similarly simplistic. He, along with other commentators including journalist Matthew Syed and researcher Patrick Nash, suggest that cousin marriage is often forced and harmful to women. They argue that cousin marriage produces a “clannish” inward-looking culture, which leads to strict control over the behavior of group members. In the case of women, this can mean having no choice over their husbands, and being subject to honour codes that dictate appropriate female behavior. Nash even argues that clan institutions are “known to condone abuses [including] spousal violence”.

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Firstly, there are many forced marriages that do not involve cousins. So why target them indirectly via a ban on cousin marriage? That aside, the relationship between cousin marriage and women’s freedom is far more complex than Holden implies. There is a large body of research that suggests that exogamous marriage — that is, marrying outside one’s community — can actually damage a woman’s status and undermine her freedom. Across the world it has been, and still is today, much more common for women to move away from their natal kin to live near her husband’s kin. When a woman marries “out”, she often leaves her support networks behind; in moving into her husband’s household, she enters a community where she has little established status, reputation, or family protection. This isolation can reduce her bargaining power, and without nearby family support, she becomes vulnerable to exploitation by her husband and in-laws.

But when a woman marries her cousin, this separation from family doesn’t happen: and she may have greater status than if she hadn’t. In a survey from Bangladesh, almost 80% of respondents say that a key benefit of cousin marriage is that wives have influence over their in-laws. Men say something similar. In Lila Abu-Lughod’s 1986 ethnography of Egyptian Bedouins, men described how they could trust their cousin-wife because they “care about you and your things because they are hers” and that “after all she is my father’s brother’s daughter”.

These dynamics have been shown to protect women. In studies of domestic violence, including my own, women married to their cousins report less intimate-partner violence. This is arguably because the family connection creates accountability that may not exist in marriages between unrelated individuals. Though the results could also reflect a hesitancy to admit to domestic violence. Nonetheless, it is overly simplistic to say that cousin marriage is inherently oppressive to women, and it is telling that even when individuals have free choice over their marriage, many still choose cousins as partners, as documented in Bangladesh.

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But let’s be clear: cousin marriage typically occurs in conservative communities, where women frequently have low status and where interaction between men and women is restricted. For women navigating these environments, marrying a cousin can provide a degree of certainty and security in an otherwise potentially risky proposition. For many, it could be a strategic choice. The critical question — does cousin marriage create gender restrictions or simply exist alongside them? — is rarely addressed by those who condemn the practice.

Yet as mentioned, critics like Nash and Syed argue that cousin marriage not only encourages domestic violence, but also creates honor codes that can lead to honor-based violence — a punishment enacted for dishonoring the family through actions that can range from leaving the house without a male chaperone to premarital sex. It differs from intimate-partner violence, in that it is often perpetrated by a woman’s immediate family, such as her father, brothers, uncles, and cousins. My own research has tested this association, and finds that societies that have practiced higher rates of cousin marriage also tend to have stronger honor cultures.

Yet this connection should not determine modern policy, for several reasons. Firstly, even if cousin marriage historically contributed to the emergence of honor systems, banning it won’t necessarily dismantle them. Cultural norms can persist independently of their origins — and if men are intent on controlling the behavior of women, and the honor code is a useful tool with which to do that, then they will continue to use it. This might explain why, even as cousin marriage rates have declined around the world, honor codes have remained entrenched.

Neither has this theory been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. It is certainly not established enough to justify restricting personal freedoms, and much like many singular theories of human culture, is unlikely to ever be. Anyway, basing individual rights on scientific theories is fundamentally problematic; all theories should remain open to challenge and revision, and are unsuitable foundations for determining laws — as these very laws would be undermined as science gets updated.

In the end, emotive calls to ban cousin marriage accomplish little beyond sowing distrust towards certain ethnic groups. Concerns relating to health and violence against women would be better tackled by other policy levers. That would leave the intimate decision of marriage up to the individual, rather than the state.

The grooming gang story is often framed as something that happened far away, in the North, in the bad old Nineties and 2000s. But this is a story about what is happening right now.

Ellie’s abuse began in 1996 and carried on for another four years. And as we know now, this wasn’t an isolated incident. The systematic abuse of literally thousands of children was taking place in Rotherham, Bradford, Derbyshire, Huddersfield, Oxford, Rochdale, and Bristol, among others. We only know about this because of brave victims, dogged whistleblowers and the resulting prosecutions. But while many resilient women have come forward, so many others remained silent — ashamed, disbelieved, ignored.

In January, Elon Musk targeted our country’s failings when he posted on X that: “[Keir] Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for six years (2008-2013)”, demanding that he “face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”. It was in response to Jess Phillips’ remarkable decision, as minister for the safeguarding of women, to reject a national public inquiry into the grooming of children in Oldham.

Whatever his motivation, Musk was right in his analysis. This is a scandal that has been swept under the carpet for years. I’ve been following grooming cases for almost my whole career. Over the decades, a succession of inquiries and reports has indicated the nature and scale of the catastrophe, yet nothing has been done to address the underlying problem, let alone fix it.

In 2014, we had the Jay Report and Operation Bullfinch. There have been independent reviews into the failings of Greater Manchester, Bristol and Derby, among other cities. And it has been three years since the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which concluded that the current system is fundamentally flawed and incapable of protecting vulnerable children.

Yet despite the money, effort and desperate testimonials poured into each of these investigations, little has changed. The Conservative government was tasked with implementing the 20 recommendations of the final IICSA report. It did nothing, save passing the burden of responsibility on to Labour after last July’s election.

At the start of this year, it looked like something might be done. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced a £10 million plan for a series of local inquiries into grooming gangs, as well as a rapid review of the current scale of exploitation across the UK. To lead the review, Cooper appointed Tom Crowther KC, who chaired the inquiry into child sex abuse in Telford. Published in 2022, Crowther found that more than 1,000 girls had been abused in the Shropshire town over a period of 30 years, amid “shocking” failures by the police and local council. Hopes rose that, finally, the Government was taking the problem seriously.

And yet, barely three months in, the wheels are already coming off. Crowther has expressed frustration with the little progress that has been made: the Government isn’t collaborating, the process is being watered down, and the political will simply isn’t there. That matters, and not just historically. Without asking why justice has come so slowly, and without attempting to understand why the grooming happened — and still happens — nothing will change. Communities will continue to be demonized, gangs will continue to operate with impunity, and a steady stream of offenders will continue to be released back into the community, many back into the very areas where their victims still live.

***

Almost 30 years ago, in 1996, I visited a tiny charity in the center of Leeds. There I met Angela*, a hard-working single mother, who described how she had discovered her daughter Jane*, 14, was being picked up in taxis by Asian men, who then used her for sex.

Her mother was desperate, on the edge of tears. “She stays out late and she’s been seen with older lads in the town center,” Angela told me. “I’ve given [the] police a load of car number plates and names but they say she’s choosing this lifestyle and there’s nothing they can do.”

Angela and her daughter lived in Keighley, a market town in West Yorkshire small enough for everyone to know your business, and a place infamous as the so-called ground zero of the grooming gangs. It was here, back in 2002, that Ann Cryer, the town’s then Labour MP, first exposed how groups of predominantly Pakistani men were preying on predominantly white girls. And it was in Keighley, a year later, that the first grooming gang conviction was secured.

I had long been aware of organized gangs targeting vulnerable girls. But it was only through meeting mothers of victims that I realized how little the authorities cared about these girls.

Even in those early days, the pattern was clear. The victims were generally vulnerable children from impoverished towns with high unemployment and racial disharmony — and society tended to see them as worthless. Even the police described them as “troublesome” and “slags”. Their families, if they had any, were seen as disreputable. All the while, social workers talked blithely about “personal choice” and “consent”.

There was another factor too: race. Throughout the 2000s, I was one of a handful of civilians invited to attend the annual Police Vice Conference, where experts in child sexual abuse and exploitation shared intelligence. It was at the 2004 conference that I heard, from one of the most senior police officers in attendance, that fears of “race riots” were growing — as more and more information came in about the predominance of Pakistani Muslims in child abuse and pimping gangs across the north of England.

This added another complication to the toxic mix: politics. In the absence of mainstream political support, other political agents would run to “rescue” — or weaponize — victims. This was certainly the case when Charlene Downes went missing from her Blackpool home in November 2003. Blackpool has always been a hotspot for child abuse, and a growing immigrant community back then was the source of much local suspicion.

Early on in their investigation, police became aware that Charlene, then 14, had along with various other girls been targeted by abusers active in the town, swapping sex for food, cigarettes and affection. It was a modus operandi that was becoming familiar to those who were following the escalation of these cases. “I found out,” her mother told me back then, “that Charlene was getting chips for a blow job. How can those bastards do that to kids?”

During the hunt for Charlene, police uncovered Blackpool’s open secret: Muslim men, from Southeast Asia and the Middle East, had latched on to the opportunities afforded them by the nighttime economy. Taxi drivers and takeaway workers would prey on girls, passing them around to each other, inviting friends and business associates to come to the back rooms of kebab shops, and the offices of mini cab firms, to have sex with them. This was organized, a business, run for money, with the perk of on-tap sex with terrified victims.

While it was by no means certain that Charlene was being solely abused by immigrants, far-Right political parties saw an opportunity. The BNP, with the support of Charlene’s family, latched onto her case as an example of the problem caused by Pakistani Muslim men “invading” Britain. Once they got hold of her, the narrative was set.

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The pernicious effect of the BNP could be seen months after Charlene’s disappearance. In 2004, Edge of the City, a documentary about gang grooming in Bradford, was due to be released. Abuse cases had been surfacing at an alarming rate, and the filmmaker Anna Hall was the first to expose the pattern we now know as gang grooming. But the BNP gleefully leapt on the film, describing it as “a party political broadcast” for its local election campaign. West Yorkshire Police, fearing a racist backlash, advised Channel 4 to withdraw the film from transmission at the last minute. Community cohesion took precedence over the rape of kids.

It’s something we’re still seeing. Since most of the worst cases we know about involve gangs of Asian, Muslim men pimping out white women, a reluctance to act is supercharged by fears of being accused of racism. In the past, authorities would rather have turned a blind eye. Today, despite everything we know, the same thing is happening. Only last week, Sir Trevor Phillips claimed that the Home Secretary was failing to push ahead with local reviews “because of the demographic of people involved… largely Pakistani Muslim background, and also in Labour-held seats and councils who would be offended by it”.

Meanwhile, back in the early 2000s, Charlene remained missing. I kept an eye on her story, wondering if she’d ever turn up. By 2006, when the evidence of her being horrifically abused by multiple men had been exposed, I pitched the story to my then editor at The Guardian, Katherine Viner. She acted much as the authorities did. She called me and said: “We would be called racist if we publish this.” So I wrote it for The Sunday Times magazine. The day after it was published, I was added to the Islamophobia Watch website.

All the while, the politicization of the grooming gangs continues. Over the years, EDL poster boy Tommy Robinson has used the issue to further his own political agenda against “radical Islam”. Neither an expert in abuse, nor a particular champion of children or women, he has if anything made things worse for victims. In 2019, Robinson was imprisoned for contempt of court after breaching reporting restrictions on one rape trial and jeopardizing due process. Notwithstanding his motivation, he has been trumpeted as a hero by Musk and many others for his propagandizing of the issue. In the justice vacuum, bad actors spy an opportunity.

In the end, Charlene’s body was never found. The hunt for her has been one of Lancashire Police’s longest-running missing person inquiries. But, many years after her disappearance, rumors began circulating around Blackpool that her body had been chopped up and used as kebab meat, sold from the very takeaways where she and other girls were abused.

***

Court 1 at Preston Crown Court is the biggest in the building: the press bench is full, and the public gallery is packed with survivors and supporters, including Ellie Reynolds and myself. It is January 2025, and we are here to see the sentencing of three monstrous brothers who raped, sold, abused and tortured a succession of vulnerable young girls between 1996 and 2010. It has been 30 years since these men started committing their crimes.

Amran Miah, 49, Alman Miah, 47, and Shah Joman Miah (known as “Sarj”), 38, were violent predators who targeted girls in abusive family homes or care and foster placements. Some of their victims were as young as seven. The girls were lured in by promises of romance, rides in fast cars, vodka, cigarettes, cannabis and the freedom to hang out at the men’s apartments: they leapt at what they thought was a chance to escape. A life where someone cared. The promises couldn’t have been further from the truth, as they were prostituted from cars, on streets and in apartments across Britain. Often locked in rooms with nothing but a filthy mattress, they were forced into violent sexual acts, sometimes with several men at once.

Refusal to comply would mean being beaten with dog chains, forced to drink their own urine and tortured. One of the Miah victims showed me cigarette burns on her legs, stomach and arms. “[The pimp] used me as an ashtray,” she tells me, “and a few times when I was asleep he’d piss all over me, not bothering to go to the toilet, then make me get up and wash the sheets while he went back to sleep.”

Another girl, who was not in court but followed the proceedings by video link, was abused over a period of five years, from the age of seven. “He ejaculated into her mouth,” the judge tells the court. “She said that when [he] ejaculated she began to cry and make a noise and [he] replied, ‘Stop it or we’ll get found out’.” She was raped, filmed and photographed.

Elizabeth*, another girl, is in court that day too. During the lunch break, she tells me that she knew of at least one of the victims in the trial considering withdrawing their evidence because they were convinced they wouldn’t be believed. Elizabeth was a witness to the grooming gang activities, including seeing girls being taken to the room above a takeaway to be raped, some still in their school uniforms. She was a key witness for the prosecution, but after she reported what she had seen, word soon got around. “They smashed my windows,” she says of the threats she received. “I feel scared despite the police promising I am protected.”

In court, defense barristers make valiant attempts to introduce mitigation: one defendant suffered with depression, another has an autistic child, and each of the brothers has a work ethic and is “loyal” to the others. But the judge reminds the court of their depravity: “You threatened to tell [a witness] that if she said anything to the police you would set her house on fire. She spoke of attending hospital due to anxiety. I am satisfied that each of you acted in a predatory and pedophilic manner… You saw your victims as vehicles to be used and abused at your will and when you wanted to. You treated them with utter contempt.” The robust sentencing reflected the seriousness of the crimes: all three men were sentenced to at least a decade in prison. Facing the stiffest sentence, Shah Joman Miah was sent down for a minimum of 21 years and 232 days.

These children were treated as disposable rubbish by the men who raped and pimped them. But a similarly appalling punishment was meted out by the authorities tasked with protecting them.

***

For years, Sara Rowbotham was a sexual health worker in Rochdale. As the coordinator of the Crisis Intervention Team, a body linked to the NHS, from 2003 to 2014, it was her job to identify young people who were vulnerable to child sex exploitation.

Rowbotham repeatedly tried to alert police and social services, from as early as 2004, to the fact that girls were being systematically abused by gangs of older Asian men. She made over 100 referrals, none of which was actioned. During her time as a sexual health worker, she made something she called the “Boyfriend Book” — in which she kept records of all of the perpetrators, and their details as given by their victims. The book was eventually used in court as evidence. It is still being used today, at the ongoing trials at which she is called as a witness, some 20 years after the abuse first happened.

Rowbotham went on to provide key evidence that ended in the conviction of nine men in 2012, and 10 more in a separate investigation in 2015. “It was my job to keep those girls safe,” she tells me. “I tried to do that, I kept referring cases to police, to social workers, and they did nothing. They ignored me. They turned against me and shut me out.”

This reluctance among authorities to believe the young victims is borne out by research by Sarah Hall, who has been involved in child protection for 20 years. The social workers understood sexually exploited girls as being able to make choices, supposedly unlike girls abused in the home. Hall says she often heard the phrasing “putting themselves in risky situations”.

Because these girls were widely viewed as “sluts”, they were often ignored. “They were all Pakistani, except one who was Algerian,” Fiona tells me, recounting her abuse at the hands of a gang in 2008, back when she was just 13. “But the police denied they existed.” Fiona was in care, and staff knew from very early on what was happening. “They would have multiagency meetings but no one would turn up. They said, ‘Well she goes missing all the time so she must enjoy it’.”

Vulnerable, confused and angry, Fiona could only lash out. “Because I wasn’t getting listened to and my mental health was deteriorating quickly, I ended up getting done for assault on the staff and criminal damage on the care home… So my criminal record is all to do with criminal damage and assault of care home staff and police officers.” Think of it: this girl asked for help to escape her rapists, and ended up with a criminal record herself.

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Damningly, the serious case review conducted by the local authority, when it happened, found 18 instances of sexual assault or rape that the care home had failed to report to the police. Fiona has been fighting for “justice and accountability” for the past decade. Amber* was similarly criminalized. Barely 14 when she was first targeted in 2007, she was already on the child protection register in Rochester in Kent. The men lured her in, groomed her and then subjected her to repeated and violent sexual abuse.

That nightmare should have ended with the arrest and trial of the perpetrators. But instead, the police, CPS and even social services treated Amber as a criminal. In 2009, when she was 16, uniformed officers came to her mother’s house, arrested her and took her to the police station.

Because, like all the other girls, Amber had been told she had to bring her friends along to meet some of the gang members, she was portrayed as an assistant pimp. When nine of the men were eventually put on trial for crimes relating to Amber and other girls, she was part of the case — but not as a victim. The prosecutors had put her name on the indictment as one of the offenders.

Though she was neither tried nor convicted, the media described her in court as a “honey monster”. Nor did her ordeal end when the men were sent down. Social services pursued her with a view to removing both her very young child and her unborn second baby. The case dragged on for 18 months before the judge dismissed it. Five years passed before an apology and compensation came from social services. “It’s absolutely outrageous that none of them have still been charged for me, none of them have even been prosecuted,” Amber tells me. “I still can’t get my head around that after all these years.”

Two decades on, Sarah Hall insists little has changed. “There’s still lots of victim blaming,” she tells me, “blaming of parents, stereotyping, and young people are deemed to be making a choice and the systems back that up. Depending on where and by whom you are raped and sexually assaulted in this country as a kid, you will either be safeguarded or you won’t be.”

***

It is raining in Manchester when I arrive at the Crown Court, where eight Asian men from Rochdale stand accused of treating two girls as “sex slaves”. They are charged with 56 sexual offenses, include grooming, sexually exploiting and raping two 13-year olds between 2001 and 2006. It is February 2025.

There are police outside, sent from Rochdale to make sure “there are no security issues, due to the sensitivity of the case”. But the case is 25 years old, I say. “It is old,” replies one of the officers, “but unfortunately it’s still happening today.”

There are eight men in the dock, all Pakistani Muslim, ranging in age from 39 to 66. They are accused of rape and other sexual offenses against two girls between 2001 and 2006. Girl A and Girl B, both abused from the age of 13, were in court, surrounded by family and friends. The women are in their 30s now, but wear the look of deep trauma. Giving evidence, Girl A said that she had been abused by at least 100 men, but when she then mentioned the figure of 200, she was challenged by one of the defense barristers, implying she was lying. “There could’ve been more to be fair,” she replied. “There [were] that many it was hard to keep count.”

The abuse began when the girls, in local authority care, started hanging around the market, where Mohammed Zahid, one of the men on trial, had a lingerie stall. Both girls were casual workers on the stall, paid in clothes, cigarettes and alcohol. They were also expected to have degradingly sadistic sex with Zahid (known as “Boss” or the “Knickerman”) and his associates.

Though Girl A told local children’s services about “hanging around” with older men in 2004 — as well as drinking and using drugs, and having sex with men introduced to her by “Boss” — neither her school nor social services made any reports to the police. Instead, one of the girls was labeled a “prostitute” at the age of 10. Rowbotham was ignored when she reported it to police and social services. As she puts it: “I can only imagine how many other girls they went on to harm.”

Rowbotham tells me about one of the mothers of Girl A, back in 2005, before police were even acknowledging there was a problem. “Girl A’s mum was out of her mind trying to get the cops to do something — she phoned them constantly and I encouraged her to keep doing it even if they didn’t respond,” she says. “And she was not the only one desperate to get them to act.”

This particular case only came to trial after one of the girls tracked an abuser down on Facebook and spotted a second “selling fruit and veg out of a van near a school”. So many of these men are still prowling the streets. There are dozens known to have been active gang members who have never been arrested, or spent a day in prison. And those hundreds of men who paid to rape the girls remain invisible.

***

The number of abused girls we know about is easily in the tens of thousands. This dwarfs the number of convictions. Between 2005 and 2017, only 264 men were found guilty. Every historic review includes evidence that social services teams and police officers were reluctant to pursue groups of Asian men for fear of being accused of racism. It also seems likely that police feared civil unrest among the white population, not least given the rise of the BNP and the race-baiting of Tommy Robinson. Once again, these fears are surely relevant today too, especially given the disorder last summer.

Yet whatever the grim political logic, this attitude is hard to justify, especially when you consider the words of perpetrators themselves. One example is Shabir Ahmed, the leader of one of the Rochdale grooming gangs, who was convicted in 2013. During his trial, Ahmed made his feelings clear. “We are the supreme race, not these white bastards… You destroyed my community and our children. None of us did that. White people trained those girls to be so much [more] advanced in sex.”

As that statement implies, race is yet again a factor here, something also clear from the statistics. Of the few hundred men convicted between 2005-17, 84% of them were Asian. In the Rochdale abuse scandal of 2012, the men involved were primarily British Pakistani men. In Telford, according to the independent 2022 inquiry there, the abusers were also men of “southern Asian heritage”.

While white men are certainly involved in child exploitation, then, the continued predominance of South Asian men in grooming gangs is undeniable. Data released in January 2025 has found that Pakistanis are up to four times more likely to be involved than the general population. And figures from all 43 forces in England and Wales show that 13.7% of child sexual exploitation in the first nine months of 2024 involved Pakistani men, a rise from under 7% in 2023.

But it’s a mistake to think that these rapists restrict themselves to white victims. Zlakha Ahmed, a survivor of gang abuse in Telford, is testament to this. Now 62, her abuse happened when she was just seven. “It was two men who were close family members,” she tells me. “I was taken to a park one day and I was raped by a gang of men.”

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Farida*, for her part, was the victim of a gang of largely Pakistani men operating in Oxfordshire, 21 of whom have since been convicted. Between 2010 and 2020, 18 victims gave evidence in six trials about abuse spanning from the late Nineties to the late 2000s.

Zlakha Ahmed told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA): “It feels as though BME women and girls are shrugged off by statutory services, which are staffed by predominantly white individuals. When it comes to Asian children in particular, a lot of white workers bury their heads in the sand and then we are blamed as a community for not coming forward.”

It was the same for Farida. When she reported being raped and kidnapped by grooming gang members to police in Oxford, they did not believe her. “Because I am Asian and with a Pakistani name,” she says, “I didn’t fit the stereotype for this officer.”

The stark reality, then, is that police and prosecutors have a dismal record when it comes to dealing with the sexual abuse of girls, whatever the class or ethnicities of the victims and perpetrators. Data from the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse shows that during 2023-4, only 12% of reports were subject to any criminal justice intervention, and around two thirds of investigations were closed because of “evidential difficulties.”

***

Kevin Hyland is a former Metropolitan Police Officer, the UK’s first Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, and an expert in human trafficking and sexual exploitation. He understands organized gang abuse and how to get the best results during investigations. More than that, he is keen to explore how law enforcement can stop gangs getting access to girls in the first place.

“If entire groups believe they can operate with impunity and start to target young girls but then feel the weight against them, it will deter some from offending,” he says. “That weight should be societal, it should be legal, it should be from their own backgrounds and culture.”

Maggie Oliver makes a similar point. Credited with exposing the Rochdale grooming gang scandal, in 2012 she left Greater Manchester Police in protest at its handling of the town’s grooming trial. She tells me that gangs are still active in Manchester, Telford, Rochdale, Rotherham, Blackpool and Leeds. More to the point, Oliver insists that the grooming gang phenomenon is linked to a belief system of people who don’t share the same values as the British public generally — “that this will just continue to explode unless we get a grip of it as the root cause of this sort of abuse.”

For Hyland, though, pushing the line that any type of crime is committed exclusively or even predominantly by one particular group allows those outside the demographic to hide in plain sight, and for law enforcers and social workers to fail to follow leads. As he says: “One of the big challenges we’ve got is that policing has become so complex, so politically correct, so influenced by outside measures, that the focus on the bigger picture is compromised.”

Not that there seems much appetite to address the problem. Amber, the victim from Rochester, tells me that men arrested in Rochdale are “still there, still delivering takeaways, still driving taxis.” She’s even given some names to police “but [they] don’t go and arrest them. I think it’s too much effort for them.”

All the while, how grooming happens is changing. Smartphones and the internet now mean that men no longer have to sit and wait outside a victim’s home. Instead, they can make initial contact through an online platform, which means less risk of being caught.

As Oliver explains, men will increasingly befriend girls online, pretending to be a younger boy, before coercing the child into sending explicit photographs — which will then be used as blackmail. The targets, anyway, are the same: vulnerable girls who feel as though they’re being treated like grown-ups, even as they’re forced to engage in terrible sexual activity.

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Oliver is well aware, through work at her eponymous foundation, that state complacency means grooming gangs are as entrenched as ever. No wonder, then, that this week she’s launching #TheyKnew, a new campaign aiming to bring legal action against officials who failed to act in the face of terrible abuse. Alongside Oliver are two survivors of grooming gang abuse, Elizabeth* and Samantha, both of whom I’ve met, a heartening reminder that some victims are managing to turn round their lives.

Unfortunately, good news is hard to come by, with Robbie Moore, the current Conservative MP for Keighley, worrying that the problem is actually worsening. “[W]hat we’ve unfortunately got here in Bradford is the local authority not willing to trigger that process of having an inquiry,” he says. “But Bradford, from the evidence I have seen, has a far bigger problem even than the likes of Rochdale.”

I know from bitter experience that where crime flourishes, so too does exploitation of women and girls. And child sexual exploitation has followed the growth of county drug lines. One policeman I know in southeast England says he constantly hears how the gangs are now dominated by pimps running girls. “I have taken statements from half a dozen girls, from age 14 to 18, in the past six months who want to bring charges against men who are, effectively, grooming gang leaders. The perpetrators are usually from immigrant groupings, and operate taxis and takeaways, but they also supply some of the drugs to the runners, and keep the girls for themselves to share around and sell to business associates.”

Resources aren’t usually made available to deal with the sexual exploitation element of these crimes, with officers encouraged to focus on drugs and weapons. One senior officer very recently told me that the victims are part of the problem and know exactly what they are doing — it’s the same old harmful narrative being trotted out again.

One recommendation from the 2022 IICSA report is that data should be collected on exploitation networks. Shockingly, it’s yet to happen. Another suggestion is the mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse at school or the GP. Both of these recommendations, if properly implemented, would make a difference. But to date, nothing has happened.

While all the victims would welcome further scrutiny of the scandal, meanwhile, most of all they want to see broad improvements to the criminal justice system. What’s in no doubt is that it’s currently unfit for purpose: neither detecting perpetrators nor keeping victims safe.

Meanwhile, our politicians seem determined to keep looking the other way. Though Cooper announced those new local inquiries at the start of the year, Jess Phillips — allegedly the minister responsible for safeguarding women and girls — is already backtracking. At the start of April, she said there would be a more “flexible approach to support both full independent local inquiries and more bespoke work, including local victims’ panels or locally led audits of the handling of historical cases”. Translation: the $5 million set aside for the inquiries was no longer being allocated. It also meant that politicians, rather than independent agents like Tom Crowther, would drive the investigations.

This announcement was met by horror from many. That includes Trevor Phillips, who described the response as “shameful” because, he said, it was so obviously politically motivated. Robbie Moore, for his part, is “completely infuriated” by the Government’s update, arguing it’s an admission that pretty much no progress has been made. Let’s not forget: these inquiries were supposed to have been launched by Easter. Trevor Philips is right. It’s shameful that Jess Phillips, a self-styled advocate for abused women and girls, appears to have suddenly lost enthusiasm for dealing with one of the biggest child sexual abuse scandals in modern British history — likely for fear of being branded a racist. What hope is there for girls being abused right now, if our politicians still refuse to even admit the problem exists?

***

John’s* daughter Evie* was 14 when she was targeted by a gang of taxi drivers. He is now helping support another 14-year-old girl who remains under the control of some of the same men. Evie reported her abusers to the police, after eight months of rape, sexual assault and degradation. “She was made to strip naked and then dance for the abusers,” John tells me. “And she says money changed hands. They would have sex with her. She was just a kid.”

Sophie*, another girl, one day turned up on John’s doorstep in the northwest of England, having heard that one of Evie’s abusers had been convicted of rape, and realizing that the same gang was targeting her.

“I have told the police, repeatedly, that this gang is in operation right now, that that some of the same men that raped my daughter are now doing it to others,” John tells me. But despite going to the police in December last year, he says nothing has happened so far.

Sophie, for her part, is desperate, and has asked for help from the local domestic violence service to offer support along with a safety plan. But she is “shit scared to leave, and to report them,” John says, “because if the police don’t lift them, but they find out she’s dobbed them in, she’s dead.”

Twenty three years after Ann Cryer first spoke out about the widespread gang-related abuse of children in her constituency, little has changed — except that countless more girls have had their lives destroyed.

***

*Names have been changed.

The phrase “sleeping with an elephant” has come to define US-Canadian relations in the minds of many Canadians. But since President Trump launched his second term in Oval Office, the elephant has been neither friendly nor even-tempered. In fact, its twitches and grunts have recently become more like angry kicks and menacing roars, especially with Trump’s imposition of a 25% tariff on most goods from Canada.

Rather than meek acceptance, however, the response in Canada has been a surge of nationalist sentiment. Only, at the helm of this patriotic revival is a new prime minister, Mark Carney, for whom the substance of Canadian identity amounts to little more than . . . globalism, multiculturalism, and liberal proceduralism.

Trump has offered varied justifications for his punishing tariffs. He alleges an uncontrolled stream of illegal immigrants and fentanyl pouring across the border, notwithstanding the Canadian government’s serious efforts at interdicting such flows. He is on much firmer ground when he points to the trade imbalance between the two countries, with Canada running a significant trade surplus with the United States; about 20% of what Canada produces is consumed by Americans.

At a meeting in Mar-a-Lago, Justin Trudeau, the recently ousted prime minister, protested that such tariffs would “kill the Canadian economy”, eliciting from Trump a suggestion that Canada would be better off as the 51^st state. This line was initially heard by most people as a jest, but Trump has become fixated on the idea. Remarks about the US-Canadian border as an “artificially drawn line” have fueled fears that his real endgame is annexation.

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Perhaps Trump is just trolling, something that certainly wouldn’t be out of character for him. But a recent post on his Truth Social website signals that he may mean business. “The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State”, he wrote. “This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear”. Trudeau, for one, takes Trump at his word, stating that he believes the real aim of the tariffs is nothing less than “a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us”.

Trump’s tariffs and his annexation rhetoric have had consequences that he surely did not intend. Canadians have never been big flag-wavers, but sales of Canadian flags have skyrocketed, American liquors are being pulled from store shelves, grocery stores are slapping labels on domestically produced items, and many people are scrapping travel plans to the United States. A movement to boycott US goods is underway.

The tariffs have also been a godsend to the governing Liberal Party. Trudeau’s plummeting approval ratings threatened to deliver his party a crashing defeat in the election to be held later this year. But when Trudeau’s unpopularity prompted his resignation, the Liberals were forced to replace him as party leader and prime minister. Mark Carney, an economist and banker with no previous experience in elected office, won in a landslide in the party vote. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the Liberals are now inching their way back up in the polls, though they still face a steep uphill climb.

Carney’s victory speech on 9 March tapped into the rising nationalist sentiment. Switching back and forth from English to French, Canada’s two official languages, he called out Trump for “trying to weaken our economy”. But more than the Canadian economy is at stake, he warned: “The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country. If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life.”

What exactly did Carney mean by the phrase “our way of life”? Hockey, maple syrup, Tim Hortons, and politeness come to mind. But the features of Canadian identity that Carney highlighted were all political or institutional, such as universal health care and the country’s strong tradition of social programs and wealth redistribution. He also lauded Canada’s much-vaunted policy of multiculturalism: “America is a melting pot. Canada is a mosaic.”

“America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever, will be part of America in any way, shape, or form”, he declared to an enthusiastic audience. He made it clear that the future of Canada now depends on pivoting away from economic integration with the United States to seek more “reliable” trading partners.

Carney also sought to attach the odor of Trump to the opposition party, insinuating that the Conservative standard-bearer Pierre Poilievre “worships at the altar of Donald Trump”. To accuse Poilievre of kneeling before the US president may be an overstatement, but he has voiced support for many of Trump’s policies and has a reputation of being cozy with MAGA types. He recently accepted the endorsement of Elon Musk, an action that may come back to bite him.

Still, Carney is an unlikely champion of Canadian nationalism. Born in the Northwest Territories, he spent most of his adult life outside Canada, studying at Harvard and Oxford, then working for Goldman Sachs in London, New York, and Tokyo. After a stint as the governor of the Bank of Canada, he in the same role at the Bank of England. He holds both British and Irish citizenship, making him an EU citizen.

From the perspective of nationalism, it is noteworthy that he stoked controversy at the helm of the Bank of England when, prior to the Brexit vote, he decried leaving the European Union as the “biggest domestic risk to financial stability”. Many interpreted his remark as a political intervention that overstepped his job description.

Carney also has strong ties to globalist elites, with memberships in the G30, the World Economic Forum, and the Bilderberg Group. In short, he is the quintessential Davos Man, a cosmopolitan technocrat and financial bureaucrat with a newfound fondness for nationalist rhetoric.

Arguably, what Carney defends as “our way of life” is a vision of Canadians as good global citizens pulling their weight within the rules-based international order that Trump seeks to dismantle. As Canadian political scientist Tyler Chamberlain has observed, “Canadian identity is bound up very closely with multilateralism, international organizations, and free trade. That’s the kind of nationalism that is playing well today”. Meanwhile, Canadians watch American television, cheer American sports teams, and “think like Americans in many ways that really matter — but we have health care.”

Carney is a specimen of what Canadian political philosopher Ron Dart calls liberal nationalism, which is of relatively recent vintage, the chief precedent for the present moment being Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s trade disputes with Richard Nixon. “Liberal nationalism usually emerges from a position taken by the United States at a given moment that threatens certain elements of the Canadian economy”, says Dart. It tends to be reactive and narrowly focused on economics.

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It differs from what Dart calls High Tory nationalism, “which comes from a much deeper grounding in the Canadian soul”. Its most prominent exponent in the 20^th century was the philosopher George Parkin Grant, but it harks back to the founding of Canada as a nation that sought to preserve British and French traditions that were foreign to the society taking shape in the United States. Instead of placing a premium on liberty and individualism, like the Americans, the Canadian High Tory tradition aspired to a more orderly society oriented toward the common good of the whole.

Over time, however, Canada was transformed into what Grant called a “branch plant satellite” of the United States, a supplier of raw materials to the superpower that had emerged postwar as the “spearhead” of the dynamic liberal capitalist order. As early as 1965, Grant lamented that Canada was ceasing to exist as a sovereign nation. Dependent on the United States for both markets and defense, Canada was being absorbed, culturally and economically, into the behemoth to its south. Canada’s formal political independence might still persist for some time, Grant thought, but only due to a kind of inertia.

Grant believed that Canada was being swallowed up into an emerging global order helmed by the American hegemon. In a surprising twist, the American republic that now threatens Canadian sovereignty is a nation in open revolt against that liberal hegemonic order. Living within the gravitational field of the United States, Canada has always retained ties to its older roots in Europe. Ironically, Trump is now forcing Canada to become more internationalist in the name of Canadian nationalism.

But Dart believes this current upsurge of liberal nationalism is shallow. Though intensely felt at the moment, it is also likely to be ephemeral, lasting only as long as MAGA’s reign, since it is motivated by an external threat rather than a living memory of older Canadian traditions. “If you have no memory of anything”, he says, “then what holds you together? What holds Canadians together at this point is anti-Trumpism.”

Mainly set in the ethnically diverse working-class area of Willesden, Smith’s multigenerational saga traces over 30 years the intertwined lives of three families: the Anglo-Jamaican Jones’, the Bengali Muslim Iqbals, and the secular Jewish Chafens. The novel mainly explores the ambiguities and anxieties of the immigrant experience, but what is particularly striking is the sanguineness throughout — a sense of possibility that seems quixotic in a post-Rochdale, post-BLM and post-Southport Britain. Even if it wasn’t wholly emblematic of contemporary Britain at the time, the book seemed to reflect what Britain could become. Reading White Teeth today feels like discovering an artifact of what the late social theorist Mark Fisher called a “lost future”.

Like any good post-modern novel, White Teeth is anarchic. The search for a pure, uncontaminated identity is flung aside and so is the past — “what is past is prologue”, writes Smith in homage to Shakespeare. As Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi had already tested, the immigrant experience in multicultural Britain with all its contradictions was the right subject for the post-modern novelist. But by White Teeth, cultural hybridity is not only normal but almost mundane. The O’Connell pub where Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones regularly meet is owned by an Arab Muslim immigrant. Children have names such as Danny Rahman and Quang O’Rourke, while the dialogue incorporates Creole and Bengali.

Around halfway through the novel, the narrator declares “this has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white”. A far cry from the high days of empire when the vexed questions of pluralism and difference were relegated “over there” in the colonies. Now those questions were coming to the metropole itself via migration, and transforming it. As Stuart Hall put it: “One day the world is going to wake up and discover that whole areas of life in Britain, in spite of Conservatism and Little Englandism, have been transformed… a kind of hybridization is happening to the English, whether they like it or not.”

White Teeth did at least acknowledge the cost of this cultural hybridization for both the native majority and the immigrant communities themselves, the latter of whom fear “dissolution, disappearance”. But the book should be read above all as the literary apotheosis of Blair-era multiculturalism. It was written in that brief age of innocence after the “End of History” and before “the age of horrorism” inaugurated by 9/11. In this narrow window, neoliberal globalization seemed triumphant and irrefragable, propped up in the academe by Homi Bhabha’s notion of “cultural hybridity” and the Blair government’s transformative immigration policies. This was an occasion to be celebrated.

Britain was steadily redefining its identity and national narrative to take into account its changing demographics. It was recast as a “nation of immigrants”, with white Britons transformed from longer the universal subject of the nation to one ethno-racial group among a host of others. “Britishness” evolved from an imperial identity tainted with racism to a civic national badge that, like Americanism, could accommodate hyphenated identities. The HMS Windrush was reimagined as a Mayflower-like ship, founding the “new” multicultural Britain. In the same year as White Teeth came the Parekh report. Commissioned by Runnymede Trust, it called for Britain to officially declare itself as a multicultural nation composed of a “community of communities”. This notion of multiculturalism went beyond a descriptor of pluralism in British society and was turned into an ideological principle and political creed to manage this plurality. For Runnymede, multiculturalism proclaimed to provide a broad framework of a new common belonging where “all citizens are treated with rigorous and uncompromising equality and social justice”, but “cultural diversity is celebrated and cherished”.

What better figurehead for this exuberant age than Zadie Smith whose debut unleashed genuine hysteria upon release? Growing up on a council estate and ascending to Cambridge University, she was the perfect example of the “multicultural writer” fit for modern Britain. Unlike her saggy-faced, hoary predecessors, the then 24-year-old mixed-race Smith was culturally versatile, writing as splendidly on Dostoyevsky and E. M Forster as on hip-hop and Game of Thrones. It’s easy to see why The Telegraph dubbed her “the George Eliot of multiculturalism”.

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And herein lay the appeal. For all of its multicultural reputation, White Teeth comfortably fits within the tradition of the English novel — how reassuringly English it feels at every step. Like generations of refined English authors before her, Zadie Smith had read her Eliot, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Her humour, too, is mordantly English — the proletarian wit of her North London background tempered by Oxbridge bookish irony. Some assumed that White Teeth was subverting the traditional English novel, through themes of race, gender and colonialism which expressed a new multicultural subjectivity, creating a sense that Smith was possibly radical and edgy. But for anyone who dares to set aside her ethnic origins, it’s clear that Smith’s cultural context is as establishment as it gets. She became a fellow at Harvard while still in her 20s.

Smith has long been a privileged transatlantic liberal. So much is clear from the positions she takes whenever she wades into politics. She publicly supported Obama, the political apogee of what she had been writing for years in fiction. She then opposed Brexit, scolding Corbyn for his Euroscepticism. But perhaps the illusion was finally shattered last year when her New Yorker essay went viral. Writing about the pro-Palestine campus protests in America, she called the protesters “cynical” and “unworthy” for not considering that Jewish students may find their actions threatening and for promiscuously labeling their enemies Zionist “as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith”. Her long-standing admirers accused her of rationalizing genocide and being a “liberal both-sider”, with novelist Michael Magee summing up the mood: “we lost Zadie.” A mixed-race author of novels that meditated on the post-colonial condition turned out to be insufficiently anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine. In other words, they discovered she was just another liberal — but she always had been.

This is why, at the turn of the millennium, White Teeth was comforting for British liberals anxious about this unprecedented epoch in British history. A novel that both hypothesized, and by its own existence seemed to prove, that not only could multiculturalism truly succeed, but that it could succeed without making Britain any less recognizably British. The collision of different peoples and cultures once separated by geography and history but drawn together by imperialism and globalization would, so the story went, bring about something new yet familiar. But 25 years later, such hopes seem misplaced. Multiculturalism is now “dead”, no longer seen as a source of freedom and unity but as a harbinger for ethnic conflict and sectarianism. Like a shrine to Jupiter in the decadent years of Imperial Rome, multiculturalism appears now as a relic of a civic religion that virtually everyone has ceased to believe in.

Formerly in the historical deep freeze, it’s the fact that cousin marriage occurs disproportionately in British Muslim communities that has turned it into a hot button issue. Syed — himself of Pakistani extraction — first drew attention to its prevalence in an influential column last year, reminding us that where cousin marriage is practised over several generations, it exposes couples to a significantly heightened risk of bearing children with autosomal recessive disorders. Obstetricians in isolated rural communities have always known this, and now modern access to gene mapping is emphasising the risk.

But the real meat of Syed’s initial case was not medical but cultural — or at least, a bit. It lay in the claim that consanguinity increases the separation of certain ethnic and religious groups from mainstream UK values, encouraging them to be “clannish” and to become “ever more detached from the moral trajectory of wider civilisation”. Controlling patriarchs often have the upper hand in such environments, he suggested. Things like female genital mutilation and so-called honour beatings are more likely to take place there, along with corruption and a tendency towards groupthink.

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And talking of the latter, in this week’s piece Syed adds a third complaint: the reticence of UK academics to discuss the problems, which he takes as yet more evidence that a culture of political correctness, timidity, and fear reigns in academia. As a result, he argues, information in the public interest, essential to the well-being of immigrant communities, has not been disseminated or even gathered properly in the first place. Researching the links between consanguinity and forced marriage, Oxford academic Dr Patrick Nash has related to Syed how he would be taken aside by colleagues and warned off the subject. And as the columnist himself looked into the available medical evidence, he says he struggled to find geneticists who would risk their careers to talk to him about it.

I have no doubt this bit is true. Still, I disagree with Syed’s assertion that the studied silence of British academics in this area reveals liberalism’s “unspeakable face”. On the contrary, I think it shows academics in quite a good light, relative to things they easily might otherwise be doing. Gender Studies lecturers — as far as I know — are not positively trying to destigmatise cousin marriage in the name of deconstructing oppressively hegemonic Western norms, which comes as something of a relief when you know their modus operandi. Equally, although it is not unusual to find philosophers arguing that physical disability is mere difference, socially constructed to be “bad” —  perhaps with the chaser that such construction maintains colonial and racist power games — few have been so bold as to go out to bat for the essential value neutrality of life-limiting haemoglobin disorders or congenital deformations. Weirdly, or perhaps not when you think about it, the job of dismissing the harm of birth defects seems to have been left to libertarian commentators, upping the ante by arguing that siblings should be free to marry too.

The best the progressive mindset can do in this respect, it seems, is to put the physical risks associated with consanguinity in context, by comparing them to risks with which the general public are apparently much more culturally comfortable. And so we find the authors of a report from a Bradford NHS Trust equating the risk of birth defects to married cousins with those of white women getting pregnant “at or after the age of 34” as a result of “choosing lifestyles embedded in liberal values such as preferring jobs, careers, bodily fitness and individualism”. Now, if you factor in cousin marriage happening generation after generation, this comparison isn’t right. But the deeper implied point is that, if girlboss white women can happily run risks to future offspring without attracting moral censure, there should be no particular problem for brown ones. Interrogating the avoidable harms of career-delayed motherhood in women is a bridge too far, it seems, even for the boldest of critics of the British way of life.

And there is another way in which Syed is wrong about the harms of cousin marriage being “unspeakable” — at least if we are being literal-minded. If it really was impossible to talk about such things, liberalised societies with high immigration such as Sweden and Denmark would not now be moving to ban cousin marriage; Robert Jenrick wouldn’t be seizing the moment to argue for the same thing in the Commons; and Syed himself would not be writing well-received columns about it. In fact, decrying cousin marriage is now apparently one of the most socially acceptable means of expressing disquiet about the legacies of immigration in liberal societies. And it might be worth examining why.

One reason seems to be that the two prongs of Syed’s argument bring unashamed social conservatives and shy sensible centrist types together in an unusual way. For those in the latter much larger category — normally wary of engaging in any discourse that would explicitly pit subjective British or Western values against those of immigrants — there is the objective shield of scientific data to protect them from anxieties about accusations of racism. As long as we are using technical-sounding words like “homozygosity” and “autosomal inheritance patterns”, and assessing quantifiable health risks to physical bodies, it seems clear that we are in the world of Rationality and Data — and who could argue with that? Equally, since physical health, in the basic sense of freedom from serious disease, is a prerequisite for doing nearly anything else, it is hard to imagine a contemporary value system that wouldn’t recognise its importance.

Equally, though, precisely because the acknowledgement of disease-free health as a basic good is foundational to most conceivable worldviews, it won’t get you very far in articulating a positive moral vision for society; and nor will it furnish much material for cultural critique. David Hume’s dictum that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is” is not quite right: some activities are obviously bad for us and limit well-being, given facts about human nature (severely limiting contact with other humans, say; staring at screens in dark rooms for most of the day; starving yourself, or cutting off physically healthy flesh). But what is true is that the recommendations thereby produced won’t be very detailed, confined mostly to ought-nots.

Meanwhile, turning to the more explicitly cultural arguments mounted by Syed, it seems they too are designed to attract nervous initiates in the art of sticking up for a specifically British way of life. For on closer inspection they hover mostly in the realm of the abstract. As noted, there are concerns about “clannishness” and “insularity” and the negative consequences upon “integration” with the mainstream, with only limited forays into naming specific objectionable practices like forced marriage or FGM. And perhaps this degree of distance from unpleasant particulars further helps incipient social conservatives, gingerly dipping toes in fraught culture wars, to feel less like they are engaged in full-frontal confrontation.

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But at the same time, this still vague critique threatens to cloud the bathwater and so lose the baby. For — as has long been argued by post-liberal thinkers and is now becoming obvious even to civilians — the choose-your-own-adventure neoliberalism we now have in much of the UK, while pretending to be value-neutral in the public realm, is actually partisan as hell. Though theoretically speaking, liberalism pretends not to favour any subjective conception of the good, in practice elements of the British “mainstream” tend to champion malignly impersonal activities (replacing skilled workers with machines, breaking up mothers’ bodies for surrogacy parts, “assisting” frail and vulnerable people to die, etc) while simultaneously undermining the sorts of institution that enrich local social life for many (small businesses, public libraries and swimming pools, pubs, church congregations etc).

Much of this wrecking is done explicitly in the name of secularism, not religion. And in this context, a bit of “clannishness” and “insularity” among dissidents goes along way — or at least, when rebranded more positively as “showing solidarity”, and “building strong moral boundaries against the prevailing neoliberal tide”. Trade unions, parishes, and grassroots political organisations can be clannish and insular too, in both good and bad ways, yet as a society we would surely be much worse off without them.

Squeamish as some recovering liberals are to criticise immigrant practices directly, there is a temptation to zoom out a bit before taking aim, hoping that some of the generalised argument then sticks to the right targets. But the danger is that valuable things are destroyed in friendly fire. Literally incestuous communities definitely pose a problem for British society, but metaphorically incestuous communities may or may not do: it all depends what exactly goes on there. If we don’t want British Muslim girls to be forced into marriages, genitally mutilated, or beaten for perceived apostasy, there are quicker and less ambiguous ways to say it.

The commonalities across the Irish Sea and the English Channel — severe disquiet over immigration, the continued rise of populism, and the spread of extremist discourse, especially online — reflect the similarities of the challenges. The question of how to accommodate plural identities is a pressing one.

As the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe wrestle with societal and national fragmentation, it is worth looking at how some of the most diverse states coped with difference in the past. And it would be hard to find a better example than the Habsburg Empire, or Austria-Hungary as it was known during the last phase of its existence. Of a total population of 51.4 million in 1910, 23% mainly used German, 19.6% Hungarian, 12.5% Czech and 9.7% Polish. The rest mainly used Italian, Croatian, Ruthenian, Romanian, Slovak and Slovene. It was a veritable Babel and reflected, roughly, the profound national divisions between the peoples who made up the empire. Yet thanks to a series of expedients the Habsburgs were able to muddle through — fortwursteln — without a catastrophic internal breakdown until defeat in the First World War.

Because of this long-term survival, some in the UK saw in Austria-Hungary a solution for their own problems of how to reconcile the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish. As the historian Alvin Jackson points out in his ground-breaking study of these issues, when Prime Minister William Gladstone tried to address the “Irish Question” in the late 19th century, he studied the “compromise” reached between the Habsburgs and the Hungarians very carefully. Arthur Griffith, who founded Sinn Féin in 1905, even hailed that agreement as the “resurrection” of Hungary which could serve as an example for a dual Anglo-Irish monarchy.

Both the United Kingdom and Austria-Hungary emerged out of early modern composite monarchies, polities where the crown ruled over territories which were governed in very different ways. In the British case, the solution was found in the establishment of a parliamentary union, in 1707 and then expanded upon in 1801, in which everybody was represented on an equal basis — according to the franchise of the time — at Westminster. England, Scotland and Ireland ceased to exist, politically; Wales had been abolished some time earlier. This arrangement facilitated the basis for the rise of one of the most powerful states the world has ever seen.

The Habsburgs took the opposite route. After various experiments of their own they settled on a “composite democracy” with a monarch at its head. In 1867, Emperor Franz Josef’s Ausgleich — “compromise” — divided the empire into two halves, both with parliamentary representation. Despite making up only 40% of the population of the “Hungarian” half, the Magyars lorded it over the “subject” Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs and Croats. The other half had no official name but had a plurality (about 37.5%) of German speakers mainly in Bohemia, Moravia and present-day Austria. Because the two parts were divided by the river Leitha, they were known as Cisleithania and Transleithania.

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Both the United Kingdom and the Habsburg Empire faced the onslaught of late 19th-century European politics: rising nationalism with the resulting identity politics over language, education and employment, and class conflict. Both saw demands for solutions based on partition, and both were subjected to the rigours of the First World War. But they coped very differently.

Austria-Hungary staggered from crisis to crisis as it tried to cope with what the historian Steven Beller calls a “witches’ brew” of competing demands and hatreds. Vienna sought to keep the lid on things through a series of “compromises” in Croatia, Moravia, and Bukovina and Galicia. Governance, as the veteran Prime Minister of Cisleithania Viscount Eduard Taaffe once remarked, was a matter of keeping the various groups in a state of “well-tempered discontent”. For example, the “compromise” with the Poles was at the expense of letting them dominate the Jews and Ruthenes of Galicia. Parliament was a zoo. The capital city, home to a huge immigrant population, especially Slavs from all parts of the Empire and Jews particularly from Galicia, also spawned a vicious xenophobic and antisemitic discourse. It was no wonder the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus referred to the empire as a “Laboratory for World Destruction”.

The United Kingdom performed far better at managing tensions between its territories. Most of the British Isles developed an ideological, rather than national, form of politics: the Conservatives, Liberals and later the Labour Party won support across three of the four nations. Only in Ireland, where differences between Catholics and Protestants continued to play a major role, did nationalism come to dominate. But, despite their best efforts to obstruct and disrupt parliament, Irish nationalists never managed to bring Westminster to the same state of confusion as Czech, Polish, Slovene, Italian and even German nationalists inflicted on the Reichsrat in Vienna.

Moreover, unlike the Habsburg Empire, which collapsed in 1918, the UK emerged from four years of conflict in the First World War as a victor, losing only the Irish Free State in its aftermath. Six of the nine counties of Ulster remained in the United Kingdom. Partition was traumatic to be sure, but remained a largely contained event which did not affect the rest of Europe much. In fact, the separation of the 26 counties was made possible by the British victory over Germany, because it was hard to envisage how a separate state on the western flank would present an immediate military challenge.

Despite the relative success of the British model, when compared with its European alternatives, the demand for national recognition grew throughout the late 20th century. In Northern Ireland, the introduction of a devolved parliament in 1920 facilitated discrimination against the Catholic population. After the end of the Cold War, and the apparent passing of strategic threats to the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Tony Blair introduced devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There were now representative bodies across the Irish Sea, on the other side of the Wye River, and beyond the Tweed, which dealt with matters not “reserved” to Westminster. Some, such as the Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, George Roberston, predicted that “Devolution will kill Nationalism stone dead”.

The British Ausgleich was also lopsided. It gave expression to the nationalism of only three of the four nations. England had no separate parliamentary assembly, and politically was defined by being non-devolved. All of England’s laws were voted on by representatives from all four nations, but the country had no say in the laws passed by the devolved assemblies. The largest nation seemed to be left out.

The UK, then, in the 20th century seemed to draw on the experience of the Habsburg Empire — but its legacy is disputed. The failure of the successor states, whether fascist or communist, put things in perspective. As they stewed in the Soviet Bloc, many Central European intellectuals developed a nostalgia for a framework which had allowed them to coexist in relative freedom. Shortly after the end of communism, the renowned Hungarian historian István Deák argued in his 1990 book, Beyond Nationalism, that the “Habsburg Experiment” in supranational organisation should be revisited. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that we can find here a positive lesson while the post-1918 history of central and east central European nation-states can only show us what to avoid.” The historian Solomon Wank, by contrast, pointed out in 1997 that the empire had simply “stoked the fires of national rivalry” which ultimately consumed it.

Either way, it is not obvious what the UK now can learn from the Habsburgs today. First, because they had little useful to say about immigration, one of the main preoccupations of the recent riots. Indeed, the mayor of Vienna Dr Karl Lueger famously exploited antisemitic hatred of Jewish migrants for personal political gain. Secondly, as we have seen, because the Austro-Hungarian leadership aggravated national differences, as much as they mitigated them.

What the UK can do is learn from the mistakes of the Habsburgs. State indulgence of nationalism before 1914 simply increased the chaos. Likewise, the introduction of devolution in the UK, far from “killing” the demand for separation “stone dead”, actually whetted appetites. In Scotland, the establishment of the assembly in Edinburgh increased calls for separation from the United Kingdom so much that London was forced to concede a referendum in 2014 which at one point it feared to lose. In Wales, interest in independence, though still weak, grew after the introduction of devolution. In Northern Ireland the devolved institutions may have helped bring some form of peace, but they also facilitate continuous squabbling between the two communities. We therefore have enough, and perhaps too much, devolution — we do not need any more compromises.

The UK Union is based on the assumption that we have four nations whose members are English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish, but also — if they want to be — British as well. If the UK followed the Austro-Hungarian example any further, the result might be the “resurrection” of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and even England — but it would also be the death of Britain.

On one side, there is a growing belief that an open borders policy is a vital moral response to the economic inequality between countries. In these milieus, national citizenship within a bounded community in the Western world is increasingly seen not as a birth right but as just another unfair advantage. As the political theorist Joseph Carens puts it, Western citizenship is “the modern equivalent to feudal privilege — an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances [that] is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely”. And just like feudal privileges, they should be cast aside.

On the other side, meanwhile, the vox populi disagrees. Polling consistently shows that most Western citizens want less immigration, a sentiment that has risen in recent years in the US, UK, France and Germany. Faced with the elite-approved “human right” to unlimited free movement, popular opinion responds with an emphatic no.

With die-hards on both sides, it’s no wonder the Senate border bill has become such a point of contention. For Democrats, the problem is not that too many foreigners are abusing asylum claims in order to immigrate illegally; it’s more that, with an election coming up, news coverage of chaotic conditions at the border doesn’t paint Biden in a good light. For the rest of us, meanwhile, the problem is the assumption that everyone in the developing world has a moral right to claim asylum in the US.

This is not to say that immigration should be stopped entirely; but rather that unlimited immigration is incompatible with the right of a bounded community to durable political self-determination. This, in turn, is a far weightier moral consideration than the self-interest of any given economic immigrant. As the political philosopher Christopher Heath Wellman put it: “[n]o collective can be fully self-determining without enjoying freedom of association because, when the members of a group can change, an essential part of group self-determination is exercising control over what the ‘self’ is.”

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But how can a community control its “self” in a world of open borders? Inevitably, a subsection of immigrants will acquire the right to vote in their new home. Over time, their presence will change the composition of the electorate, or, in other words, the “self” part of “self-determination”. And eventually this will alter the outcome of political decisions taken by the demos — for immigrants typically don’t share the same preferences or identity as the existing citizenry. Give a large group of outsiders the vote, and you may find that voting patterns start to change. To prevent this, claims Heath Wellman, the demos must have a right to say “no” to radical, unwanted alterations to the citizen body.

The open border advocates would naturally dispute this, insisting that no self-determining group of citizens has the right to protect itself from such change. After all, who’s to say that the next generation of voters won’t also revolutionise politics? Radical change doesn’t just come from abroad. We wouldn’t choose to disenfranchise our rebellious children, even if they threaten to overturn our political decisions. By the same token, we cannot deny the vote to immigrants with conflicting values or interests.

This analogy, however, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Generational changes in the electorate arise from citizens voluntarily exercising their basic human rights: in this case, the right to form a family and the right to freedom of conscience. By contrast, the replacement of the electorate through unwanted mass immigration occurs wholly involuntarily and is facilitated by governments acting entirely morally ultra vires.

What’s more, education and upbringing tend to ensure a large amount of continuity between the preferences, interests and identity of one generation and the next. A parent and child have far more in common than a person born in the US and a newly arrived immigrant. This is especially true under conditions of mass migration across great civilisational distances, and even more so when the state insists on multiculturalism, rather than integration. While new arrivals will be subject to some cultural pressure to adopt the norms of their host society, contemporary liberal democracies encourage immigrants to celebrate their ethnic identities and, increasingly, their grievances. These groups then ask for policy shifts to accommodate their cultural preferences.

We have seen this play out in America, the UK and Europe, where — contrary to those who talk of the natural conservatism of immigrants — new arrivals tend to vote well to the Left of non-immigrants. Over time, this can start to distort the political system. As former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once observed, “in multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion”. This can eventually lead to an aggressive style of ethnopolitics evident in many countries around the world from South Africa to Malaysia.

Even if this doesn’t happen, mass migration can warp democracy in other ways. As Robert Putnam argued, “ethnic diversity” can reduce both “horizontal” interpersonal trust and “vertical” trust in political institutions, leading residents of all races to “hunker down”. We can see this in the way social trust had steadily declined since mass non-Western immigration began in the mid-Sixties, while political polarisation has conversely increased. Some have blamed this on the rise of cable news or social media — and indeed, both probably play a part. But the timeline of America’s deteriorating social trust and the geographical distribution of that trust — highest in homogenous places such as New England and the Midwest, lowest in the Southwest and in New York — are consistent with the diversity-trust hypothesis.

While declining trust probably won’t result in societal collapse, it will certainly weaken our political institutions. A high-trust society can afford the sort of deliberative democracy that offers fair consideration of all affected parties. This system presupposes that political parties play fair, keep their promises and work together for the common public good. But it is easily distorted, and can swiftly morph into a low-trust society with a Lebanon-style “consociational democracy” and a system of zero-sum tribal bargaining. In such a scenario, political outcomes are determined by the balance of power between representatives of different ethnic and religious communities. This makes redistributive economic policies difficult to pass, as warring factions care little about each other’s welfare.

As a result, it’s hard to see how open border advocates would enjoy living in the world they propose. They would be poorer, unhappier and exposed to conflict. What could be more immoral than that?

***

A version of this article was first published on Restoration.

But is it fair to castigate the police? A closer look at the Met’s history reveals that the officer in question was less displaying prejudice, than applying principles the force has upheld since its formation in 1829. The decisions taken by the Met officer in the controversial clip appear, in this context, less evidence of Met bias or leadership failure, than the logical consequences of shifts in the capital for which the Met bears no responsibility, and the way these changes mesh with the Met’s longstanding model of policing.

The origin-story of this model, which still largely governs London’s Metropolitan Police, lies back in 1829. Then, Sir Robert Peel’s Act for Improving the Police in and near the Metropolis replaced the older patchwork of night-watchmen, constables, magistrates’ enforcers and freelance “thief-takers” (themselves often also criminals) that previously maintained some semblance of order amid London’s rapidly-growing and notoriously violent, gang-ridden streets.

The “Blue Devils” of this new body were initially treated with suspicion. Citizens feared the “bobbies”, named for Peel’s forename, would swiftly become a militarised enforcement wing of the government. Peel sought to combat this adversarial attitude with three core ideas aimed at ensuring alignment to, and cooperation with, law-enforcement officers and the public.

Policing, he insisted, should be preventive; this presupposed community support, and support required winning the trust of the community. To this end, Peel imposed strict new rules. “Bobbies” were almost always unarmed. They were held to high behavioural standards: half of Peel’s initial recruits were sacked and replaced for alcohol-related offences within two years. They were paid a salary rather than a bonus for arrests, to minimise the risk of corruption. And they were discouraged from forming relationships in the underworld: the Met’s official history describes how (unlike previous enforcers) bobbies were prohibited from entering pubs, speaking to prostitutes or cultivating informants among known criminals.

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Peel’s approach was a success: crime fell continuously for a century after 1829, and his model swiftly spread to other parts of Britain. But the Britain of Peel’s era reached considerably beyond these shores — while the Peel policing model emphatically did not. Across Britain’s colonies, a far more militaristic model of policing prevailed: a pragmatic adjustment to the reality that you’re unlikely to have the same success with “community policing” among resentfully subjugated foreigners than your fellow countrymen.

The standard template for this approach to colonial policing was founded less than a decade after the Met: the Royal Irish Constabulary. As historian Georgina Sinclair shows, colonial Ireland was “the official and unofficial training ground for colonial police officers”. Such forces tended to take a more top-down and coercive approach than the Met, with armed officers in military-style uniforms, and typically adopting a two-tier, hierarchical and racially stratified structure, with gazetted English officers commanding local rank-and-file police. This adaptation to “divided-society policing”, as Sinclair calls it, reflected the reality that such forces were “involved more in dealing with political protest than the prevention and detection of crime”.

Initiated in Ireland, this model swiftly propagated among African and Indian police forces under the British Empire. Ireland became a key training-hub for imperial police officers, and Irish officers often later took up policing posts elsewhere in the empire. After the First World War, the colonial model was also exported to Mandatory Palestine; as the RIC was disbanded in 1922, the year Britain gained the Mandate for Palestine from the UN, several senior RIC officers took up posts in Palestine.

Over the century since that date, Britain’s empire has disintegrated. In more recent decades, though, succeeding domestic governments have embraced a vision of Britain as still somehow encompassing that imperial reach — but in microcosm, via the embrace of “multiculturalism” and, latterly, escalating mass inward migration. The justifications for this vary considerably, but include economic expediency and (for some) post-colonial guilt or payback.

It even appears, sometimes, as though a subset of our political elites feels (though they’d never admit it) a secret sadness at having missed out on the colonial adventure. Whose yearning for imperial status and cosmopolitan subjects is such that, in the absence of an empire to rule, they’ve set about recreating its pluralism and racialised hierarchy within the confines of the British Isles. Were this so, the epicentre of this model-railway replica of imperial diversity would indisputably be London. As of 2022, scarcely above a third of London’s population is white British — down from an estimated 97% in the Sixties. Data from the Trust for London indicate, meanwhile, that what’s left of that demographic in London overwhelmingly clusters in the wealthiest areas of the capital. In other words: London has become a replica of the former empire’s economic and racial stratification and segregation.

It’s popular among London’s elite to view this pluralism as self-evidently a feature, rather than a bug, and such individuals regularly boast about how “diversity” is London’s “strength”. And this may well be true in many respects. But that diversity meshes uncomfortably with the Met’s longstanding policing model, as initially established by Peel. For the Met’s “bobbies” were always intended to serve by consent, as last-resort enforcement for a shared, culturally specific moral framework. And while it’s true that, as its proponents often remind us, ethnic pluralism means more varied restaurants, one inescapable consequence of multiculturalism is, well, multiple cultures. And this includes diversifying attitudes to the law, and diversifying willingness to be policed as per Peel’s approach.

What happens, then, when a policing tradition predicated on high baseline moral and cultural alignment is applied to a population so diverse that such alignment can no longer be taken for granted? The “openly Jewish” debacle highlights what this looks like in practice. For Peel’s insistence that policing should be community-based and representative has already politicised the force along identitarian lines, while driving ethnic hiring quotas in growing tension with other recruitment priorities. And against this breakdown of consensus on what policing should even mean, or who should be doing it, the Peel principle of preventive, community-based policing has mutated into a minimalist policy of containment.

Here, the priority is maintaining superficial peace. In practice, this means appeasing the most volatile “communities”, while the most law-abiding are also the most harshly constrained, simply because they offer the least resistance. And in this context, it’s easy to understand the officer’s rationale in seeking to keep Gideon Falter away from the Palestine march, however terrible it looked in the video clip. The officer correctly identified Falter as representative of one London “community”, and the protesters as a different, potentially hostile “community”. Tasked with preventive policing, he foresaw a potential breach of the peace should these come into collision. And he set out to forestall it, by applying pressure where it was most likely to be successful: a single individual, from a generally law-abiding demographic. The same happened a month ago, when Robert Jenrick accused the Met of “two-tier policing” after a counter-protestor was arrested at another Palestine protest.

Another version of the same pragmatic policing of “communities” was in evidence yesterday, when footage emerged of riot police laying into St George’s Day marchers — a head-on confrontation that would have been unimaginable at a Palestine protest but which here seemed perfectly consonant with “community policing”. But perhaps this makes sense, given the different demographic involved: one that, as noted, has long since moved out of the capital. Winning the trust of London’s communities, following the Peel principles, logically therefore means treating these outsiders more harshly than those for whom, numerically speaking, the city is now predominantly home.

But what about this evidently asymmetrical treatment of different groups? Didn’t Peel say the Met should be impartial? Certainly the skew is clear enough, and the overall picture is unlikely to make a positive contribution to our fraying national civic harmony. But faced with a pluralistic public in which no overall ideological alignment can be assumed, and that — as with the Palestine protests — sometimes advocates mutually exclusive political aims, it would be a brave bobby who ventured an opinion on what “impartial” even means, beyond maintaining order by any means necessary — however asymmetric the policing decisions required to do so.

Thanks to the policy choices of Britain’s (largely London-based) political leaders, the capital is now too diverse for the historic Met policing model. And given how proud Londoners generally seem to be of the city’s pluralism, the likelihood of its micro-colonial pluralism re-homogenising seems vanishingly low. But the same leaders have yet to update London’s policing model in line with their imperial forebears’ pragmatic approach to colonial law and order.

Instead, they prefer to castigate the Met for trying to keep the peace within a set of policing guidelines designed for an entirely different London. Rather than calling for heads to roll, our leaders should be supporting the Met in policing the London we have now.

What the modern sensibility reveres is the marriage of hearts and minds — not of legal entities, or strands in the social fabric. Being admitted to this institution, via its bureaucratic rituals — interrogation by a council official, signing a register, publicly exchanging vows with a wording enshrined, to my surprise, in statute — reminded me of the civic nature of marriage. Deciding to get married, and whom to marry, is in addition to being a personal choice, a political one. It involves much larger questions than simply the conundrum of desire: questions about community, and where we slot into the society around us.

With this sudden realisation, I wondered what it meant that every couple waiting at the registry office was of the same race. All appeared to have “married in”. I should not have been surprised. In multicultural Britain, most marriages are still between members of the same ethnicity. Only 10% of households comprise an “inter-ethnic cohabiting couple”, to use the ONS vernacular. Perhaps, for the white majority, it’s simply the likeliest outcome to fall for someone of the same race (only 4% of white people do otherwise). But ethnic minorities marrying primarily among their own, rather than into the generality, is quite against the odds. Yet that is what transpires. British-Asians — of whom 90% marry in — are the most exclusive, compared with 60% of black Britons. Among all minority groups, though, something greater than the free play of attraction seems to be at work in the choice of a life partner.

I’m a British-Asian; so is my wife. Our marriage wasn’t arranged, and is thus what Indian-English calls, often with a hint of scandal, a “love marriage”. We’re both journalists, and since the society around us is our subject-matter and our audience, we’ve had to be pretty well-integrated into it. We are not entirely secular, since we do practise a religion — not a popular one these days — but in a fashion our peers would approve as “moderate”. Our marriage followed Western norms of individual choice more than South Asian norms of parental orchestration. Nevertheless, we have done as most ethnic minorities do: we married in.

Why does this matter? “Ethno‐religious intermarriage is regarded as the most complete form of social integration,” the demographer David Voas has said. “Its frequency is therefore of public interest.” If marriage is an institution, it’s apparently a segregated one, which surely offends Left and Right equally. That liberals trumpet diversity while conservatives favour assimilation normally results in disagreement, but on this issue, their values lead to the same conclusion; ethnic in-marriage is a failure of diversity and of assimilation.

For a long time, popular culture has therefore been unanimous in promoting a vision of all ethnicities coming together through intermarriage in society’s great melting pot. That phrase itself we get from a play by the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill. The Melting Pot — from 1908 — sees a Jewish refugee from Russia, David, falling in love with a Christian woman, Vera. He writes a symphony celebrating the melting away of distinctions between “East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross.” Vera is so moved that she marries David.

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Much of what I watched, while growing up, told the same story: classic movies like West Side Story and Pocahontas, Hollywood franchises like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the breakout films of the South Asian diaspora, Mississippi Masala and Bride and Prejudice. All insist that the model minority integrates through marriage. The cultural signals were often more subtle. By the time I got to university, for instance, the message was underscored in the notion of “hybridity” — then all the rage in literary theory — which saw culture itself as the fruit of crossbreeding. Our future was hybrid, we were told, and race, like gender, was a boundary to be transgressed.

So I did my part. My relationships exemplified the liberal ideals of multiculturalism and mobility. There were romances in various corners of Europe. During that high-water mark of Britain’s membership of the EU, so many of my generation pursued ever closer union, quite intimately. And for most Westerners, integration in relationships continues to hint at a grander political project. Hence the outrage over the government’s salary threshold for spousal visas, prompting one commentator to declare: “Western liberalism was built on the principle of marrying out.”

It was during the Enlightenment that the West began to adopt the ideal of marrying out, alongside other beliefs about the individual’s freedom from communal constraints. By the 19th century, as exotic women caught the eyes of imperial adventurers, Western intellectuals were promoting intermarriage as a form of progress, something the more benighted races were incapable of. “Savage nations,” Alexander von Humboldt wrote, “form no intermarriages”.

Anthropologists actually tell us the opposite. What they call exogamy — marriage outside the group — originated in primitive societies where wives were practically slaves. It was therefore treacherous to inflict marriage on one’s own; brides were captured from elsewhere. Once civilisations accorded women a higher status, they tended towards endogamy — marriage within the group. A woman’s right to inherit property, for instance, provided an incentive to keep her wealth within the clan and dignified her with a lucrative hand to be vied for.

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Consider the world of Jane Austen. Her quintessentially English novels document the workings of a basically South Asian-style endogamy. The landed gentry scheme to find suitable claimants to their daughter’s dowries while their daughters scheme to find companionship. Literary critics call it the marriage plot. This, in the critic Tony Tanner’s famous definition, is how “society attempts to bring into harmonious alignment patterns of passion and patterns of property”. The marriage plot isn’t fiction: it described the norms of the elite, an in-marrying cadre of Cecils, Churchills, Darwins, Huxleys, Macaulays, Thackerays: the great scions of Britain’s classic liberal age, which was built, in fact, on the principle of marrying in.

Outraged by such rampant endogamy, George Bernard Shaw argued that one of the goals of politics should be “to keep the entire community intermarriageable”. Intermarriage was being posited then as a remedy to class division, much as it would later be promoted to prevent ethnic ghettoisation. But Shaw himself married within the Anglo-Irish intelligentsia, just as Israel Zangwill, even as he was writing The Melting Pot, couldn’t help but marry a fellow Jew. Those who preach inclusive political ideals have often been the most scrupulous in-breeders. For a while my MP was an exemplary socialist whose father and mother were both Labour MPs. He also married a Labour MP, herself the sister of yet another Labour MP.

Intermarriage is an ideal everyone professes but few practise. Of course, not living up to an ideal is no reason to discard it. But many other cultures, including those foundational to the West, do seem to have had a more realistic view of human behaviour. The citizens of Athens, the first democracy, could not marry non-citizens, much as Romans would not marry so-called barbarians. Such laws have, fortunately, been abolished. Today, they would be indefensible. But our habits haven’t changed all that much in the intervening millennia, even if our ideals have.

In my newly married life, I have been wondering what, after a youth of romantic hybridity, changed for me. In The Right to Sex, the Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan argues that attraction isn’t what we think it is, something ultimately private and “pre-political”. Instead, our deepest desires are conditioned by politics and — this is her aim — subject to critique. By my mid-twenties, it was only to women of my own ethnicity that I was drawn. This shift, on reflection, appears to me political, or at least politicised.

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If my interethnic relationships took place in an era of intercultural optimism — of free movement, free trade, open borders — my yearning to be with a woman of my own “kind” coincided with the counterrevolution against that world. In Eden, before tasting the bitter fruit that exposed their otherness, Adam and Eve loved freely; the explosion of identity politics across the West marked the end of another innocence — our innocence about distinctions of race. From Black Lives Matter to Trump’s “Muslim ban”, the rhetoric of interracial suspicion permeated the entire Anglosphere. As politics became more identitarian, so did my romantic inclination.

In a framing that has caught on since the West’s post-liberal turn, people are supposed to be Somewheres or Anywheres. The Somewhere is rooted in a close-knit community, sceptical about change, about outsiders, while the Anywhere is cosmopolitan, embraces change, celebrates the other. Recent years have seen the Somewheres in revolt. And my marriage, I now realise, was in league with that revolt against the precarity and flux of Anywhere. In an uncertain world, I retreated to the safety of Somewhere, moving with my wife back to East London, where we can without embarrassment dine nightly on curry and rice.

Marriages, intrinsically, involve a vision of being rooted somewhere. The “Anywhere” catchwords — freedom, mobility, change — all run counter to it. That’s why the greatest liberal philosopher, J.S. Mill, equated marriage with slavery: it was an insult to human autonomy. (He still wed.) This contradiction, between an institution based on constraint and a culture that valorises freedom foremost, is keenly felt today. For the first time in history, fewer than half of adults in the UK are married. The impetus of the Enlightenment that first promoted intermarriage as an ideal has since led to all sorts of alternative relationship patterns, in which many have found fulfilment. But for ethnic minorities wishing to stick to matrimony, to marry into familiar territory is to follow the unavoidable logic of the institution itself.

If marriage within ethnic limitations reflects the “Somewhere” ethos, the “Anywhere” ethos can be encapsulated in dating apps, with their unlimited romantic possibilities, wherever you may be in the world. At first this seemed ideal for my generation. But several years down the line, the same people often long for some kind of alternative. Popular culture is becoming more and more fascinated by ethnic minorities who spurn the apps in favour of something a bit more traditional. Many a Netflix-viewing Anywhere has been addictively streaming the hit show Indian Matchmaking (and the spinoff, Jewish Matchmaking). In the recent Rom-com What’s Love Got to Do with It?, a white woman finds herself fascinated by her neighbour’s arranged marriage to a fellow Pakistani. It was written by Jemima Goldsmith, formerly Khan, who knows well the challenges of a mixed marriage.

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In my own “Anywhere” days, I was only dimly aware of such challenges. There was an unease I felt that I could not properly account for. I recall once awakening from a dream about my future children, in which I could not speak to them in my mother tongue, the only language of familial intimacy I know. There was also the occasional nuisance of cooking two differently spiced meals over dinner. If no diplomatic solution could be found for a conflict over seasoning, what hope was there for much more vexed religious and cultural disagreements, between, as Zangwill put it, “the Crescent and the Cross”? Only now do I realise that there was always a kind of political unrest brewing within otherwise romantically compatible relationships.

Marriage is political, and choosing whether to marry in or out has been like choosing between citizenships. But there are no citizens of the world in marriage; whenever you choose someone, I feel, you are also committing to Somewhere. For those of us who have been shipwrecked on these shores by the odyssey of migration, the need to feel at home is all the more acute. A marriage must feel like home. After all, what is the home, the nostos, that Odysseus ventures to return to?

It isn’t a state, nor even really a place; it is a marriage. And if I can put it in a word, with my wife, I feel at home.

The aggregate feeling of having been left by our leaders to rot amid a disintegrating social contract is not a confection of the Right-wing press. It’s a mutinous consequence of visible deterioration. It’s echoed across the media, with reports coming thick and fast of a nationwide shoplifting epidemic, and a documented rise in petty destructiveness such as vandalising shops and restaurants, monuments, or hire bikes. Is this just cuts, or the cost of living? Racism, perhaps? Not enough youth clubs? The causes of crime are complex; but when TikTok is full of video content from across the Anglosphere, in which people — usually young women — boast about their “borrowing haul”, the suspicion arises that some at least are breaking the law simply because it’s fun, and because no one is stopping them.

As we shamble toward a General Election next year, I suspect all prizes will go to whichever politician manages to convince the electorate of their ability to reverse this sense of pervasive decay. But this will be difficult, for it requires us to confront a central cognitive dissonance. That is: the delusion that we can enjoy low-touch policing, alongside the pluralism and rebelliousness that run through post-Sixties Anglophone culture like letters through a stick of seaside rock. For while economics, policing strategy, sentencing policy and the like no doubt have a part to play in crime rates, these beliefs do as well. And together they have chipped away our social order.

For some decades now, Britain has turned away from strong social norms toward pluralistic values and a celebration of the individual. It is received opinion now that the right to be individualistic and even contrarian improves both individual happiness and also the overall social fabric. These beliefs underpin countless platitudes: “Everyone’s different”; “Just be you”; “Each to his own”; or indeed “Diversity is our strength.” Any contemporary reflections on the contribution shared values make to public safety tend to disintegrate into bitter arguments over this last: “diversity”. Which is to say immigration. Over the past week, Home Secretary Suella Braverman reignited that bin-fire, drawing fury from progressives and her own side alike for speeches that framed both the pluralistic values implied by multiculturalism and also mass immigration itself as risks to public safety.

But this has it at least partly backwards. We embrace literal diversity at least in part because we set such stock by pluralism, and so little by shared values. Only a polity that so values letting everyone do their thing and denies any need for such things as shared social norms would fail to anticipate that political and cultural clashes may arise when you fail to integrate culturally distinct sub-populations. In this sense, the immigration debate is only one particularly ugly subset of a wider question that implicates us all. For while we left social conformity behind long ago — some time ahead of the recent rise in immigration, in fact — we stayed committed to a low-touch policing model that relied on that conformity.

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Then, having entrenched pluralism and personal freedom as sacred values, we’re left with a conundrum: how are we to respond to those whose values are so divergent from the mainstream that they exercise their freedom by disrupting the status quo for fun, in ways that make things worse for everyone? Our sacred values make it politically difficult to respond with a strong-arm approach. Quite the opposite: activists respond to such behaviour not with calls for stronger policing but for an even less of it.

In the vacuum this produces, the response to hobby lawlessness we appear to be converging on, by default, is a kind of weary acceptance that there’s nothing that can be done — for doing so would mean attacking personal freedom or values such as pluralism, or calling for (gasp) “authoritarian” policing. Outside the liberal West, states such as Dubai and Singapore solve the equation quite differently. Both these states are pluralistic: in Dubai, nationals comprise only around 15% of the population, while Singapore’s population is around 40% immigrant. And yet both have low crime levels — because leaders in these geographies are considerably less troubled than we are by heavy-handed policing. Dubai retains the death penalty for crimes such as murder, treason, and espionage, for example, while Singapore hangs drug dealers on a regular basis.

It’s possible, then, that the most direct way of achieving a society that’s both multicultural (albeit unhappily so) and low-crime is through brutally authoritarian policing. To date, though, Britain’s tradition of liberalism has rendered this an unappealing prospect — at least for those who make British law. Could this change? Well, I suspect any British politician who delivered Singapore-like levels of public safety would be popular with the British electorate — even if this came at the overall cost of less cuddly policing.

But there’s a marked class divergence on this issue. This becomes visible if we take the death penalty as a crude proxy for an authoritarian stance on public safety: a 2022 poll showed considerably greater support for the measure in the C2DE (working and lower middle-class) bracket (49%) than the 35% of ABC1 (middle and upper class) voters who support capital punishment. Rage and desperation, though, can drive support for stern measures: a recent survey suggested six in 10 voters supported reinstating it.

Meanwhile, in another non-Western polity, the autocratic measures taken by El Salvador’s leader Nayib Bukele to crack down on criminal gangs have both shocked Western advocates of civil liberties and democratic norms, and so drastically reduced the murder rate as to deliver a reported 93% approval rate among Salvadoreans. I doubt Britain will go full Bukele any time soon. But rampant crime cuts through across the electorate like nothing else; I and probably most of my town will most likely vote, next year, for the political party that advances the most convincing strategy for ending the epidemic of petty crime.

I suspect, though, that doing so will mean looking again at our long-cherished trifecta of pluralism, individualism, and light-touch policing. For if we want space to be contrarian, alongside light-touch policing, that’s going to mean less pluralism. Such a settlement won’t function under the thin shared belief that we don’t need common values. In turn, this would probably mean heeding the warnings of Braverman and her ilk, and making more concerted efforts to slow the pace of demographic change, so a sufficiently robust baseline of shared social norms can emerge in order that public life can once again largely police itself. It’s a long shot. So perhaps instead we could opt for pluralism plus light-touch policing. Then we’ll have to accept that this comes with a clampdown on freedom of conscience. In other words: the soft tyranny of “nudge unit” style nanny-statism, employed by leaders terrified of direct authority, in an effort to manipulate everyone into good behaviour. (Some might argue we’re a good distance down this road already.)

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Conversely, a polity that allows both freedom of conscience and pluralism can only be kept from spinning out of control by far tougher law enforcement than we’re accustomed to in Britain. Values pluralism is a done deal in this country, for now; if we can’t bear to let go of our contrarianism with that change, the only way we’ll enjoy low crime levels as well is with law enforcement that more closely resembles Dubai or Singapore than the traditional British bobby.

What about those who insist that there’s no need to choose? Maybe there’s still some way we can have personal freedom, anything-goes values pluralism, and a police force more interested in dancing at carnivals than arresting persistent criminals? Well, yes, there is. And if we take this route, nothing immediate will happen. Over time, though, this public-safety cakeism will also deliver an ongoing acceleration of every contemporary trend that’s currently making life measurably worse for everyone, everywhere in the country.

That is: unsafe streets, mounding litter, smashed public amenities, rampant petty criminality, and a steady drain of public-spirited people from civic participation. It will mean, in a word, the end of civic life. If that’s not the country we want to be, we’re going to have to stop pretending we can have it all.

This isn’t the siege of Aleppo, it’s a scene from Romain Gavras’s Athena, set in one of France’s burning banlieues. Amid the smoke grenades, police and Athenians engage in brutal fighting at close quarters, with metal rods and batons. Later, the police use fire ladders to scale the walls of a tower block. Athenians on wheels circle around a beleaguered police testudo, firing makeshift mortars at point blank range. Men on both sides are visibly shell-shocked.

Athena, a fictitious banlieue, has taken up arms following the death of 13-year-old Idir, apparently at the hands of local police officers. A viral video seemed to confirm it. But rather than being just another anti-cop movie protesting police brutality, Athena never makes it clear whether the police did actually kill Idir. The audience is denied a clear, anti-racist, political message. We are left to choose our own villains.

While the police lay siege to Athena, Idir’s three brothers select very different paths. Karim, the youngest, becomes Athena’s general and messiah, railing against police brutality, masterminding the looting of a nearby police precinct, and manning the defences of Athena. Mokthar, the eldest, is just trying to save his drug empire amid the chaos. The middle brother, Abdel, is a decorated veteran who fought with the French army in Mali, and wants justice for Idir but without bloodshed. The movie is driven by this central tension: between the vengeful idealist, the violent cynic and the honour-bound poster child for French assimilation.

Athena is a dramatisation, shot in Évry-Courcouronnes, just south of Paris — but it could be a documentary set in any of France’s toughest neighbourhoods. Over the past few years, the police have been expelled from these areas (only to come back in massive numbers, for short periods of time, and preferably never at night). Évry-Courcouronnes itself has been rocked by a series of gang-related murders and unspeakably violent clashes. Across France, newspapers overflow with stories of ambulances, firetrucks and police cars being bombarded with fridges, pétanque balls or Molotov cocktails in similar neighbourhoods. The authorities are powerless, just as they are in Athena. As one Athenian boasts while looting the police precinct: “we are the police”.

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The banlieues are ruled by drug cartels, which thrive where economic opportunity is lacking. They generate an estimated €4.2 billion annually in France (the publishing industry, for comparison, generates €3.75 billion) and employs a total of around 21,000 full-time workers. Over the last four decades, successive French governments have poured tens of billions of euros into extraordinary plans banlieues and other “Marshall Plans” to renovate these neighbourhoods and attract businesses, but these territories remain deeply segregated and unattractive. Drug-dealing remains one of the few steady jobs.

Take Kassim from a Marseilles banlieue, interviewed for the BFMTV documentary “Marseilles, the drug war”: he describes his stable, well-paying job as a chouf (who keeps an eye for the police or rival gangs, from the Arabic “to watch”). He is adamant that he is not a gangster, and is proud of the long hours he puts in: “I work just like everyone.”

The cartels are not the only separatist force in these neighbourhoods. The rise of radical political Islam has further alienated parts of the banlieues from the French state. According to the scholar of Jihadism Hugo Micheron, more than 2,000 individuals in France are considered to constitute a direct Jihadist threat, while another 20,000 are closely monitored by French intelligence. But there’s a much larger group of up to 750,000 who sympathise with radical Islamist ideas, according to the pollster Jérôme Fourquet. The Islamist movement is far from united, but it nevertheless educated a significant portion of the next generation to defy the infidel (French society) — a rejection tracked by polls over the last decade.

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In Athena, as in reality, the rebels’ attachment to France fluctuates. After looting the police precinct, a young Athenian in a stolen van proudly waves the tricolore, hinting that the young insurgents seek to do more than avenge the slain Idir. It’s tempting to see the insurrectionists as heroes fighting for a fairer French Republic. But later in the movie, some rebels with a taste for war reinforce the “us and them” narrative. Karim calls his war-hero brother Abdel a “whore in uniform for France”. For having fought for the French army in Mali, Abdel is accused of being an Uncle Tom, a traitor to his “real” community — which sees itself as outside the nation. Are the banlieues even part of France?

French culture seems obsessed with this question. There is currently a proliferation of movies depicting civil wars in banlieues. One of France’s top-grossing movies in 2021, Bac Nord — based on a true story — depicts a confrontation between police and local gangs in the rough north of Marseilles. And Athena itself grew out of 2019’s Les Misérables, which staged a similar banlieue uprising, from the cops’ point of view. It was directed by Ladj Ly, one of the main screenwriters on Athena, and although the confrontation between the police and the locals does not escalate into an all-out war, Gavras has explained: “The idea with Athena was to start with the next riot” — following the events of Les Misérables — “the spark of a confrontation that has not yet happened and that could unfortunately lead to the beginning of a civil war.”

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The French are haunted by their history of civil war. The last one was only 60 years ago: its embers are still warm — something Gavras alludes to by including the occasional Algerian flag in Athena. Some on the French Right, notably Eric Zemmour, have long capitalised on this anxiety, by predicting a new civil war between the “true” French and the Islamised youth. More recently, such fears have spread beyond the far-Right. The country has been seriously rocked by a series of brutal attacks by Islamist terrorists. Last year, polls showed that while only 45% believe that France will soon have a civil war, 86% believe that in some cities and neighbourhoods, the laws of the Republic no longer apply, and 73% that French society is disintegrating.

A year ago, two open letters, written by dozens of retired general and then-anonymous serving soldiers, warned of the looming civil war. They called for the government to reinstate the authority of the state in these neighbourhoods — or, as they called them, these “lost territories of the Republic”. While most officers remain strictly apolitical, the letter got sizeable public support, with 58% of the French backing its authors.

Even centrist politicians wield this kind of rhetoric these days. “Separatism” or “Islamist separatism” are terms commonly used to express concern about these territories. Macron’s former minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb, delivered a resignation speech in which he worried that while the French were currently living “side by side”, they might soon be “face to face”, given that in many banlieues, “the law of the drug dealers and of the radical Islamists replaced that of the Republic”. Former President François Hollande admitted that he believed there is a “problem with Islam”, and that France is on the path towards “partition” because of the nation’s inability to integrate a “never-ending” flow of migrants.

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By Michel Houellebecq

Macron himself, once more of a centre-Left multiculturalist comparable to a young Tony Blair, has steered significantly to the Right on matters of identity and immigration. In a controversial attempt to win support from voters to his Right, he gave an interview in the staunchly Right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles, in which he suggested a need “deport those who don’t belong here”. Following the assassination of Samuel Paty, the Macronist-dominated Parliament passed a bill which, among other provisions, considerably enhanced the state’s capacity to oversee the organisation and financing of religious associations. It was soon dubbed the “separatism law”.

While some fear civil conflict, others desire it and prepare for it. In Athena, the threat of far-Right groups is ever-present, waiting to capitalise on the chaos. The French state claims that such groups ran a false flag operation to frame the police for Idir’s death. In real life, these cells seem currently too disorganised, or embryonic, or under too much surveillance, to pose a real threat in the short-term. But there’s a distinct possibility that under-the-radar groups or individuals will decide to blindly assassinate those they consider a threat. In 2019, an 83-year-old man tried to burn a mosque in Bayonne, only to get caught red-handed by local parishioners. He shot them on the spot. Gavras did not have to invent much to depict a French society caught between the anvil of Jihadis and the hammer of the far-Right.

It’s hard to imagine any immediate improvement. In fact, things are likely to get much worse, as inflation and the cost of living crisis put even more pressure on France’s poorest neighbourhoods. Politicians on the Right and far-Right will exploit the crisis and imitate the recent successes of Giorgia Meloni and the Swedish Democrats. But policy ideas are few and far between. For a country that spends so much producing stunning civil war narratives, there’s a distinct lack of potential solutions in play. Those being offered range from the laughably insufficient — limiting immigration flows by opposing international trade deals — to the horrifyingly drastic — creating a ministry for “re-migration”.  Athena will not be the last movie of its kind: under a flailing government, the French will continue to fear, and fantasise about, civil war.

The reality is that the true Vikings were far stranger to modern sensibilities than we wish to acknowledge, a fact reflected in our aversion to the highly realistic but alien world on display in The Northman — which enjoyed less-than-stellar box office returns. By contrast, Vikings did brilliantly, despite taking many dramatic liberties with both history and anthropology in service of today’s culture war. It’s clear that nobody is interested in watching a visual dissertation on Scandinavian Iron Age culture.

The pagan raiders in Vikings reflect the passions and priorities of the modern world. This perhaps explains their attraction: Vikings can be reshaped to our sensibilities in a way the more concrete Christian European civilisation that they ravaged could never be. We know the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas, the heart of the troubadours, while the God of the medieval world still reigns supreme even today. But the Vikings are comparative ciphers, mostly perceived through the mute witness of archaeology and the propaganda put down by their Christian enemies.

The sequel to Vikings, Vikings: Valhalla, highlights and extends the series’ malleable vision of reality. It is firmly grounded in rich historical detail and actual figures from the late Viking Age, but it rearranges and transmogrifies them to a large extent. The series revolves around the interlocking relationships and entanglements between three characters, Lief Erickson, Harald Hardrada and Freydís Eiríksdóttir. Yet the execution is not of true Viking history, but a fictional drama set in a Viking-themed universe of our imagination. Erick the Red’s children were born 45 years before Hardrada, and we know Lief died when the future Norwegian king was five years old. Vikings: Valhalla glosses over these details, as Lief becomes Harald’s younger protégé and Freydís Harald’s enthusiastic but troubled lover.

But these are not the only liberties taken in the show. Freydís becomes a shield-maiden, one of the ubiquitous female warriors from the original series. Though there are descriptions of female warriors in the sagas, the extant historical and archaeological evidence does not reflect a surfeit of women bearing arms in the Viking world. Fighting was generally the affair of men in the Viking Age, and raiding, in particular, was the province of adolescents who had to establish their bonafides and make their way in the world.

The presence of shield-maidens in the two Vikings series is due to 21st-century Western penchant for “butt-kicking babes” in film, often inexplicably depicted by svelte model-actresses like Frida Gustavsson, who plays Freydís. Gustavsson as an archer is a striking image, but standing 185cm high and weighing 61kg, her fighting prowess against large powerful men is totally implausible. At least Gwendoline Christie, who played Brienne of Tarth in the genuine fantasy series Game of Thrones, seems a creditable warrior, weighing 25kg more than Gustavsson.

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If the sexually liberated shield-maidens channel 21st-century liberal feminism, then the character of Jarl Estrid Haakon, who rules the fictional multicultural trading city of Kattegat, reflects 21st-century Western racial progressivism. Estrid Haakon is played by Caroline Henderson, an actress of mixed Swedish and black American heritage. Setting aside the fact that there is no evidence of women rulers during the Viking Age, the controversial aspect of Jarl Haakon’s character is her racial identity, especially considering that elements of her biography seem drawn from the life of Haakon Sigurdsson, a 10th-century ruler of Norway. The stereotypical Viking is blonde and fair, the epitome of the Nordic ideal. Jarl Haakon in Vikings: Valhalla is none of those things, while her mercantile city reflects her own racial cosmopolitanism.

Though Kattegat is fictional, the idea that there might be a Viking trading entrepôt with racial and ethnic diversity is not entirely constructed out of thin air. Nearly 1,000 years ago a woman who was likely Indian was buried in a cemetery in Zealand, the island on which modern Copenhagen is situated. Additionally, vast caches of Middle Eastern and Central Asian coins are found across Baltic ports, the consequence of a rich Eurasian trading network extending as far west as northern Scotland with ties to the Islamic Caliphates to the south.

But the past is a different country. Today when we think of global trade we couple it with mass migration and multiculturalism, as the three are necessarily connected. This was not the case 1,000 years ago when Vikings roamed the world as raiders and traders. Though L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is the most famous Norse site in North America, it seems likely that these western Vikings ranged into the Arctic, with artefacts found on Baffin Island. And in 913 AD, 500 Rus ships ventured down the Volga and into the Caspian, raiding the Persian city of Gorgan, on the border of modern Iran and Uzbekistan. There is a distance of nearly 10,000km between Newfoundland and Iran, 25% of the earth’s circumference.

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And yet the Norse from the Atlantic to the Caspian were united by a common culture, a set of folkways, language and religion that likely had its roots as far back as the Scandinavian Bronze Age 4,000 years ago. In The Northman there is a scene where a woman is sacrificed on a burning ship with a horse to honour the passing of a nobleman, in line with the Arab Muslim Ibn Fadlan’s account of a ship burial in 10th-century Tartarstan, in the Volga basin. But aspects of these death rites are far older, with the killing of the horse in particular a cultural remembrance of a primal Indo-European ritual. In another scene, The Northman depicts an Indo-European warband induction, with howling young men wearing wolf and bear skins around a fire, reminiscent of the Vedic Ekāstakā mid-winter ceremony, when 16-year-old boys were initiated as roaming “dog warriors”.

The deep roots of Viking culture should not be surprising: genetics make it clear most of the ancestry that we today associate with Scandinavians arrived in the wake of the original Indo-European expansions out of modern Ukraine 5,000 years ago. After 500 AD, DNA evidence points to subtle differences between the peoples who we would later term Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes. (The term Viking points to an action rather than an ethnicity, as tribes like Danes, Geats and Swedes would go on Viking voyages to distant shores to hawk their wares and plunder booty.) And yet despite the ethnic and genetic distinctions that arose, the world of The Northman is unified in being an organic outgrowth of the Nordic Bronze Age, itself one of the innumerable children of the Indo-European expansions.

This Viking world was not the antithesis of Latin Christendom, as depicted in Vikings: Valhalla, where the sexually liberated pagan religion of the Norsemen (stand-ins for tolerant modern pluralistic Westerners) is set against the intolerance and brutality of the new Christian faith. Rather, it was a parallel universe of primal Indo-European religion and culture untempered by the sophistication of Mediterranean Europe. It was as if Hindu India was stripped away of the philosophical sophistication of the Puranas, the religious revolution of Buddhism and the introspection of the Bhagavad Gita.

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In this the Norse were unique in western and northern Europe. Even the Irish and the Germans were influenced by Romanitas at a remove: the former adopting the Roman religion without threat of conquest, the latter turning the famous Roman limes into a porous and profitable border that stimulated cultural synthesis. Before Hermann led his Germans against Augustus Caesar’s armies, he was Arminius, who learned Latin, received Roman citizenship and served in the Roman army.

The Vikings did not have any truck which such hybridity. They swarmed out of their dim peninsula covered in tattoos, worshipping gods that would not have been out of place in the Iliad or the Vedas, and honoured them with sacrifices of horses. Whereas the men and women in Vikings distill sensibilities of the New Age tempered with helpful dollops of choreographed mass violence, the true Vikings, as depicted in The Northman, were creatures of an old age, a prehistoric world that somehow persisted down to the edge of history, witnessed with horror and incomprehension by the believers in the God of Abraham.

And even if in our age God is dead, the old instincts are strong, and we cannot bear to confront the strangeness of the pagan past head on. Today, the Vikings remain an enigma: we see them only in shadows and glimmers, turned into didactic instruments in the service of culture wars they would not have comprehended.

The French are decreasingly guarded about exposing their dislike of the emerging demography of France — where a large and growing North African population inhabits suburban rings around the tiny cores of many historic cities from the Mediterranean to the Channel. I thought of my hostess from 40 years ago when travelling with my wife near Rheims last year. Our hotelier, a woman with an elegant home and her own family mark of champagne, told us enthusiastically about the wonderful Monsieur Zemmour, an intellectual writer and broadcaster who had not at that stage declared himself as a presidential candidate but who she thought might just save France.

Arriving in the village in the Pyrenees Orientales where we spend much of our time, we heard the same from our elderly, highly cultivated neighbour and an artisan friend of hers. Of course, neither would actually vote for Zemmour if he stood, they assured us (not entirely convincingly), but he was very impressive. And had we noticed the first veils arriving in the nearest town and occasionally in the village itself?

This is a region that Pepin and his son Charlemagne captured from the Moors in the late ninth century, a fact attested to by a series of local Romanesque chapels dating from the following two centuries. Our neighbour and her friend felt they were witnessing a reversal of the Carolingian handiwork: an area once wrested from the Muslims by the Christians was being wrested back, not through warfare but through migration and a higher birth rate.

The French have long been obsessed by demography — and with good reason. When Napoleon dominated the continent early in the nineteenth century, his population was at least half as large as Britain’s — even including Ireland — and also half as large again as what was to become Germany. In its glory — in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — France was Europe’s population behemoth.

But whereas in the century before the outbreak of the First World War, France’s population grew from around 30 to around 40 million, Britain’s rose from around 25 million to around 45 million, despite the massive emigration by which people of British origin had settled vast swathes of the globe, from California to Tasmania. Over the same period, not only was Germany unified, but its population rose from a little over 20 million to around 65 million. Industrialisation was also slower in France than in Britain or Germany, in part due to the lack of raw materials; the best iron deposits were lost to the Germans with Lorraine. But it was a lack of manpower which proved decisive, whether in the factories or at the front.

It was clear long before the bloodiest battles on the western front that France was a second-rate power dependent on British and Russian allies just to hold its own. The defeat of 1870 at the hands of the Prussians and their allies was a national trauma; the ignominy of the lost lands beyond the ligne bleu of Alsace and Lorraine were deeply etched on French consciousness. And population — or lack of it — was blamed. As early as 1849, a French parliamentary deputy saw national decline as rooted in demography: “The first element of power is population, and on this point … France is in full decay.” By the time of the outbreak of war in 1914, more than half of French parliamentarians were members of the Parliamentary Group for the Protection of Natality. French family sizes had shrunk long before those of other European powers, for reasons till not entirely clear. We know enough to understand that the cause was a comparatively low birth rate, though, rather than a high death rate: perhaps the French peasants figured out how to limit their procreation earlier than people elsewhere.

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But if defeat in the Franco-Prussian war excited a demographic alarm, the travails of 1914-1918 turned the problem into a source of despair. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau may have got a lot of what he wanted in the Treaty of Versailles in terms of punishing Germany, but he declared: “The treaty does not say that France must undertake to have children but it is the first clause which should have been included in it … One can take all of Germany’s guns, one can do whatever one likes, France will be lost because there is no more Frenchman.”

Inter-war, the French made efforts to boost their numbers. Prolific mothers were offered medals. The Alliance pour l’Accroissement de la Population française advocated larger families. It also supported immigration of Europeans, ideally Catholics, who could be absorbed into the French nation. Hundreds of thousands of Poles, Belgians and Italian came to live in France between the wars; France had a foreign-born population three times as large as the UK’s in the 1930s (almost six times if the Irish are excluded from the UK figure).

And yet, in 1937 Paul Reynaud, a minister and later prime minister, still lamented: “There is a single factor which dominates everything: the demographic factor. Forty-one million Frenchmen face sixty-seven million Germans and forty-three million Italians, these last two countries linked by the Berlin-Rome axis.… As far as numbers are concerned, we are beaten.” Germany’s fertility rate had plummeted as well, but the enemy over the Rhine was still far too numerous for France to compete. Population pessimism was a critical component in the general atmosphere which led to the collapse of 1940.

After the Second World War, things looked up — demographically and in every other way. France had its own baby boom, moderate though it was, and although fertility rates have fallen in recent decades, they are still higher than in most other European countries, not least Germany. A residue of Catholicism as well as an atmosphere conducive to women combining parenthood with a career seem to have helped.

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The French population also swelled with the arrival of people from the former colonies, first the pieds noirs fleeing the conflict in Algeria, then Algerian Muslims and migrants from the once vast French Empire south of the Sahara. But here lay the rub. Earlier migrant groups had been quite easily absorbed. In the Pyrenees Orientales, for example, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fled Franco’s advance in 1939, and today their descendants have completely merged with the locals who share their Catalan identity. But although France’s republican and secular ideology demurs from formally categorising citizens, those from more distant cultures have not integrated to the same extent.

That’s not to say that France completely failed in its efforts to absorb this new wave of immigrants. A survey from, admittedly 17 years ago, showed Muslims in France much more likely to identify primarily with their nation than with their religion — when compared with those in Germany, Spain and the UK — and more likely to hold favourable views of Christians and Jews.

But, since then, France has suffered particularly acutely from Islamist terrorism. The attacks on the Bataclan and the Charlie Hebdo offices are just the most notorious examples; similar incidents in a Jewish school and a supermarket, as well as the murder of a teacher offending Islamic sensibilities, have angered and stirred up the country. Around half of French Muslims report experiencing discrimination and two thirds believe their religion is negatively perceived by their fellow citizens.

Moreover, though the French state avoids and in some cases bans the collection of data by religion or ethnicity, there is plenty of evidence — both anecdotal and statistical — that French Muslims are more prone to deprivation and unemployment than their non-Muslim fellow citizens.

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Now, the political rhetoric around French demography is as charged as it was 100 years ago. Today the worry comes not from across the Rhine but from over the Mediterranean. A demographic pessimism hangs over France much as it did back when Reynaud despaired in the face of a larger German population. More than 60% of French people believe that white Christians will be rendered extinct by Muslims. There is talk of lost suburbs where women and men are increasingly separated in public. A French journalist who worked on a story of no-go Islamic zones recently received death threats and is under police protection. Around 20 retired generals have warned that Islam is taking over parts of the country and have raised the possibility of a racially-driven civil war.

In this febrile atmosphere, it is small wonder that two of the leading candidates in the fast-approaching presidential election are explicitly anti-Islam. Zemmour has said he is standing “to save France from Islam” and has called on Muslims to abandon their religion. Marine Le Pen has proposed a headscarf ban and compared Muslims praying in the street with the Nazi occupation. Not to be outdone, the centre has followed the lead of the Right: President Macron has vowed to fight “Islamic separatism” and his interior minister has taken an activist line in controlling Muslim political associations. Although the Left is generally more sympathetic to minorities, it has a strong tradition of secularism (laïcité) which often rubs up against Muslim practice.

The consensus is that Macron and his associates will succeed in stealing the thunder of the two far-Right candidates and that he will emerge as the clear winner. Despite the enthusiasm of my interlocutors last year, Zemmour seems to be sinking while Le Pen rises. She will have to do much better in debates with Macron than she did in 2017 if she is to stand a chance of not being trounced; Macron’s superior intellect counts a lot with the French, who are unapologetic about their respect for brain power.

But bear this in mind: when Le Pen’s father faced Jacques Chirac in the second round in 2002, the far-Right candidate received just 18% of the vote; 15 years later, his daughter got almost 34%. In a France once more obsessed by its own demographic decline, the unthinkable is increasingly becoming thinkable; the unsayable becoming sayable. Nothing can be discounted.

Many conservative voters, and brightest intellectuals, have become disillusioned with the Republican Party’s long-standing combination of laissez-faire economics, aggressive foreign policy and “family values” targeting abortion, gay marriage and other social issues. The Trump presidency revealed that traditional Republican political elites still hold too much of this platform, even as their base rejected it — and them. Meanwhile Trump’s alternative agenda, pitched initially as a rejection of both “globalism” and culture-war issues, collapsed amid blustering incompetence.

Canada is often cast as a more progressive version of the United States: less nationalistic and religious, more accepting of diversity and more generous in its welfare programs. But according to Michael Cuenco, a sharp-eyed young political analyst, Canada offers important lessons for the American Right.

Cuenco draws on the work of those American thinkers who have most cogently articulated the case for a “pro-worker” post-Trump conservatism, such as Michael Lind, but departs from them in critical ways.

His most original, and provocative, proposal for a new conservatism relies on a heterodox rereading of Canadian immigration policy, which is often cited as a model by reform-minded Americans on the Right. In a two-part series of articles for American Affairs this spring, Cuenco noted that American conservatives have long envied Canada’s “points system”, whereby the majority of immigrants are classed and selected on the basis of their potential economic contribution.

In this way, Canadians can avoid having to make what Americans would describe as a difficult choice between having a robust social safety net or an open labour market, between high levels of immigration or civic peace. But, Cuenco insists, America has failed to recognise that the Canadian system also requires what he calls a “civil religion” — one that is founded on a politically useful untruth.

The “civic religion” that enables this peculiarly effective immigration policy, Cuenco argues, is “multiculturalism”. However, this “noble lie” was told not to facilitate immigration, but to ensure social cohesion by smothering potentially dangerous domestic tensions. Indeed, it was conceived by prime minister Pierre Trudeau, father of the current prime minister, to contain and gradually dissipate the threat of francophone separatism. People insisting on their personal rights or identities may seem to be resisting hegemonic power, but they are really demonstrating that their characters and worldviews have been thoroughly shaped by it. The conservative mission, rightly understood, would not be to bemoan the hidden “religious” dimension of contemporary liberalism or undo false consciousness of its believers, but to better direct that process of shaping.

Against Quebecois claims to being one of the two founding nations of Canada (the French and the English), Trudeau promoted the idea that Canada had always been and must remain a “mosaic” of diverse communities. By emphasising a “multi” rather than “bi” cultural perspective, French Canadians’ particular status could be diluted, and the hegemony of the English-speaking political and economic leadership class (the so-called “Laurentian elite”) secured.

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In Canada — and, one might argue, throughout the Western world — the official political culture of the past two generations has increasingly become a kind of pageant of “difference” in which citizens are solicited to remember the far-flung origins of their compatriots, the important contributions of immigrants, the richness of their “communities” and other such clichés. One might see this sort of compulsory “multiculturalism” as a cynical means for reducing genuine differences in groups’ worldviews and long-standing historical grievances — which have the potential to generate irresolvable conflict — into a pacific dramaturgy where different identities are paraded.

But that’s a good thing, says Cuenco. In his formulation, Canada’s civic religion of multiculturalism makes for a political culture that is “Left in theory, Right in practice”.

There are many contemporary thinkers who wish to overcome the political division of Right and Left, and share Cuenco’s ambition to bring together progressive and conservative critics in defence of the working and middle classes. But Cuenco proposes something more interesting and more radical than a horse-shoe shaped coalition of the discontented.

He argues that the polices and values of one side (the Left) must be placed in service of the ultimate aims of the other (the Right). What we need, he proposes, is a group of elites who both recognise the legitimacy of populist resentment and the need to convert its demands not only into feasible policies but also into the language of liberal and progressive values.

And so Cuenco offers us a new articulation of the classic defence of liberal democratic civil religion proposed by Emile Durkheim, who argued that our form of government promotes human rights as a kind of worship through which we affirm and renew our membership in a national collective — one that is made all the more binding because we imagine ourselves to be autonomous individuals.

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This “noble lie” by which liberal states seem to dissolve themselves into a shapeless mass of isolated individuals — through their emphasis on rights — is in fact the religion by which such states master fractious societies and persevere in being. What could be more conservative?

By returning to Durkheim and casting multiculturalism as a civic religion, Cuenco also reveals a number of paradoxes on the Right and Left. Thinkers on the Left usually understand themselves as pursuing the transformation of society in line with a substantive vision of equality, as radicals opposed to supposedly dominant ideologies and institutions. Yet these are the very values that have shaped America since its foundation — values which are hegemonic throughout all major political, cultural and economic institutions. From Marxist professors to progressive human resource managers, the Left is a party of order and tradition.

On the Right, meanwhile, conservative intellectuals, particularly those of a populist bent, insist today that America must be saved from the excesses of the Left, which include everything from the Civil Rights movement of the Sixties to the Progressive era of the early 20^th century. The views of many (indeed most) living Americans, along with vast portions of American history, and their ideological foundations, appear to such ostensibly America-loving conservatives as unworthy of conservation. A number of venues on the post-Trump right, such as American Mind and American Greatness, have recently called for an “American Caesar” or “Salazar Option” by which a dictator might sweep away America’s supposed internal enemies, and with them, much of what defines America.

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In contrast to such puerile fantasies, Cuenco urges the American Right to see the real conservative potential of the policies and values of the Left. Reducing income inequality and reigning in the tax-evasion of our financial elites would reduce the political power of the latter to shape American media, culture and politics around their peculiar and increasingly racialised understanding of ethics. It would provide capital for programmes of reindustrialisation and infrastructure development that was promised, but never achieved, by Trump in his first campaign. Likewise, reorganising the US immigration system along Canadian lines, coupled with the renewal of a civic religion that gives a progressive veneer to a calculus about the probable economic impact of any would-be immigrant, would soothe culture wars over immigration and national identity.

Success on both fronts requires conservatives to make peace with the state, bureaucrats and experts — and to distinguish their specific critique of our current elite’s depredations from an overly sweeping and inherently self-defeating opposition to the very existence of elites.

It also requires conservatives to learn, as Pierre Trudeau did, to take up the language of the Left, and instrumentalise it towards the end of holding society together — rather than trying to drag it back into a vanished past or impotently raging at its continued disintegration.

So wrote the Mongol leader Hulagu Khan to the Mamluk ruler of Egypt in 1260. Two years earlier, the nomadic horsemen had sacked Baghdad, the river Tigris running black with ink as its libraries were destroyed, ending the city’s golden age with pyramids of skulls built from the slaughter.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Mongols have rather got a bad press from historians, so it seems counterintuitive that a newly published book praised in the Economist cites them as potential role models for the 21^st century. Yet it also says something about our time.

Johan Norberg’s Open: The Story of Human Progress makes the argument that many empires were forces for openness, encouraging the spread of ideas and people, along with a certain amount of social mobility. As well as the Roman Empire, which unarguably brought many benefits, Norberg praises Genghis Khan for domestic policies that “would today open him up to accusations of being a politically correct, latte-drinking virtue signaller”. So, when people tell me “I’m just right of Genghis Khan” they actually mean it as a comment on my moderation.

“The Mongols practised ethnic and religious tolerance,” as an Economist review puts it sympathetically: “which is one reason why they were so effective. They promoted skilled fighters, engineers and administrators of all backgrounds. Of the 150,000-strong horde that invaded Europe in 1241, only around a third were ethnic Mongols. Habsburg soldiers were surprised to find that one captured officer was a middle-aged literate Englishman, who had fled persecution for heresy at home and sought refuge among the more open-minded Mongols.”

This line of argument is an interesting indication of where current thinking is moving, since over the course of the 21^st century there has been growing sympathy for imperialism among sections of the intelligentsia — and with good reason.

This might seem an odd claim, since on one level empire has never been more controversial. Less than three years ago, some 170 academics signed a letter condemning Oxford University even for presenting a “balance sheet” on the British Empire, stating that they were “alarmed” by such an exercise which lacked “scholarly legitimacy”.

Then there was the case of Bruce Gilley, a political science professor who was published in the peer reviewed journal The World Quarterly arguing that there were many advantages and benefits to colonialism. The article was swiftly retracted, after 16,000 people signed a petition led by fellow academics.

Yet these controversies are not about empires as such, but race and racial supremacy, the most offensive idea to 21^st century westerners. Non-European empires often receive quite sympathetic hearings, including two relatively recent BBC documentaries on the Ottomans — and that is because the values of the 21^st century global elite align far closer with pre-modern imperial rulers than with the 19^th and 20^th century rulers of nation-states.

The modern era proper, which we might approximately date from the Battle of Waterloo or the first railways, was the age of the nation. During this period, politics aligned largely on class lines, with a working-class Left pushing for redistribution and equality, and a largely upper and middle-class Right favouring order.

Over the course of the past couple of decades, that has decisively shifted — a process known as the “great realignment” — so that politics is more about values. The leading Right-wing party is now more working-class than the leading Left-wing party, which would have been an absurd idea 20 years ago, but not 200 years ago when the wealthy were less conservative than the masses — as has been the case throughout much of history.

This new divide is sometimes characterised as being between “open” and “closed” societies, the one favouring more freedom of ideas, trade and immigration, the latter opposing outside influences like the proverbial castle raising the drawbridge. It’s an imperfect distinction because of the pejorative undertones of the term — no one thinks of themselves as “closed-minded” — and that is partly why it is so favoured by advocates of globalisation and liberalisation.

Yet there is something to it, and liberals — as opposed to socialists or progressives — are more likely to favour free exchange of ideas, free movement of capital and goods, and especially free movement of people.

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And historically, there has been one form of government above all that has done this — empire, the most effective form of globalisation and cultural cross-pollination. The author Laurence Bergreen described the Mongols as “early practitioners of globalisation, seeking to connect the entire world. They were conquerors and marauders, but more than that, they were unifiers.” And because empires are defined by diversity, their mix of languages, cultures and religions, so it is natural that supporters of globalisation might seem more sympathetic. Genghis Khan today would most certainly have read the Economist, even if their solutions might have appeared a bit technocratic for his tastes.

Empires have always been cosmopolitan. Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt describes the country in the centuries after Christ as a mixture of influences, a place “where people married across the religious and cultural divide; where reliefs in Egyptian temples could depict strange, winged creatures from Zoroastrian mythology; and where second-generation Persian immigrants could adopt Egyptian nicknames… a dynamic melting pot of peoples and traditions.”

Or there was Spain under the Umayyad Caliphate, where “the emir was served by a well-run cadre led by Umayyad relatives and staffed by Syrians, muwalladun, [Muslims of Spanish descent] Jews, and Mozarabs [Arab-speaking Catholics]”. And yet, as David Levering Lewis of Moorish Spain, its people “coexisted in a flammable symbiosis”.

The Ottoman Empire is perhaps the most cancel-proof: open to racial mixing, with little sense of ethnic supremacy compared to later European empires, and even with powerful people of colour, women and even intersex people right at the top: among the most important figures at the Topkapi Palace were the Chief White Eunuch and the Chief Black Eunuch, and the latter was more powerful (claps).

And yet, like all such empires, it was authoritarian and conservative. People could practise their religion and indeed minority religious leaders were given quasi-official status — so long as they accepted the status quo. Like empires before it, it was a society terrified of changes that might throw the whole delicately-weaved network of peoples into imbalance. With good reason.

It was the very diverse nature of these imperial societies that made them unpromising ground for the political ideas that appeared in the West — liberalism, representative democracy and freedom of religion (and freedom from religion). That these novelties emerged in the far more ethnically-homogenous societies of England, the Netherlands and Scandinavia is not a coincidence, since the nations adjoining the North Sea were characterised by strong institutions, high levels of trust and little fear of competing nationalisms, or what we would now call “identity politics”.

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The correlation between diversity and low trust is well-established, and trust is crucial in the formation of civil society and of capitalism, which require strangers to share risks outside of their extended families. Over the 18^th century, 130 types of society were created in the British Isles, and some 25,000 clubs sprang up in the English-speaking world. A German resident of London wrote: “Everyone may choose his company according to his liking” and there was nowhere “where a man may live more according to his own mind, or even his whims, than in London”.

The imperial age would begin its decline with the French Revolution and the rise of nationalism, which was originally a modernising and liberal force; as Krishnan Kumar wrote in Visions of Empire, nationalism was allied “with the noble causes of spreading freedom and enlightenment in the world”. Nationalists wished to counter the rule of clerics and princes, who had always seen themselves being above such petty concerns as national identity. As Count-duke Olivares of imperial Spain wrote: “I am not nacional; that is something for children”. This, as Kumar put it, was an “expression typical of the imperial mentality”. The old aristocracy were beyond such low-status beliefs as nationalism — just like their 21^st century successors.

Most of all the age of nationalism was tied to the rise of the middle class, just as today nationalism’s fall is linked to its decline, and with the rise of a new globalised tech and finance aristocracy.

Though once aligned with liberalism, nationalism would become intolerant and violent, and its legacy was disastrous for minorities in particular. Today the cities of Eurasia are littered with the ghosts of long-established communities wiped out in the 20^th century, in Jewish Krakow, Orthodox Constantinople, Christian Baghdad and elsewhere.

On the treatment of minorities, empires can certainly claim to have a better record than nation-states. European Jews enjoyed great freedom and tolerance under the Habsburgs but when that empire fell, the results were catastrophic. Tragedy also afflicted the Greeks in Alexandria and the Arabs and Persians in Zanzibar, all of whom had to flee when the age of empires came to an end (among the latter was a young Farrokh Bulsara, whose family home in Middlesex had a picture of their former protector, the Queen of England, on the wall).

Today, while national identity is in steep retreat in the west, it has come to be replaced by a form of patriotism for an idea, the “British values” coined by New Labour and repeated by Keir Starmer last week.

As Tony Blair said in 1997: “I am a British patriot…The Britain in my vision is not Britain turning its back on the world. We are a leader of nations or nothing.” Yet what he is patriotic for is a set of values, an imperial, not a nationalist, idea. As Krishnan Kumar put it: “Imperialist ideologies are universalistic, not particularistic. That difference has to be borne in mind. Imperial peoples do not, unlike nationalists, celebrate themselves; they celebrate the causes of which they are the agents or carriers.”

Likewise if America is defined by a creed — “it is who we are”, as Barack Obama said of diversity — then that makes it less recognisable as the nation of the founding fathers and more what Rashid Dar called “a progressive caliphate”, a polity arranged around a belief system.

Nations don’t have “values”. In Nationalism and the History of Ideas, John Breuilly observed that “Nationalists are highly inward-looking. They tend to celebrate themselves — ‘we English,’ ‘we Germans,’ ‘we French’ — simply for their good fortune in being who they are, rather than for any cause or purpose in the world that might justify their existence.”

So as western societies become multicultural, they have also come to resurrect imperial models of government, with officials working among the “community” performing a similar role to that of the Ottoman millet system — repressing ethnic conflict and injustice while also imposing ideological conformity and loyalty to the empire. Faith leaders are not just tolerated but given sway over their self-appointed communities, but anyone who offends the values of the state — by, say, expressing opposition to homosexuality too openly — is deemed beyond the pale.

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Because of their vulnerability, multicultural empires must also become less hospitable towards dissenting ideas. As the United States has become more imperial, so Americans have become much less tolerant of opposing beliefs because majority ethnic nationalism, usually described as racism or “white supremacy”, threatens the fabric of society just as it haunted past empires.

That today empire is such a controversial issue is not because the rule of sultans or khans offends our principles, but because of the same ethnic politics that once plagued multicultural empires and now play a large part in American and European political life.

Everywhere, as western nation-states have evolved into modern empires, so liberalism and democracy have begun to diverge, with populist movements arising to defend “the people”, the ethnic majority, against elites who resemble imperial governors trying to protect social peace (and their own interests).

As Kumar wrote: “In the case of empires, one of the most important is to recognize the danger of nationalism, not just of the subject peoples but, perhaps even more, of the ruling people themselves. The moment the ruling people start stressing their own national identity, whether as Turks, Austrians, Russians, English, or French, that is the moment empire begins to decline… The national principle denies the imperial principle.”

And it is this question, between the new imperialism and the old nationalism, that now defines western political life in the 21^st century.

Most of the people killed in the war were from a particular ethnic group – the Igbos – who had attempted to secede from freshly-independent Nigeria and were brutally prevented from doing so. Nigeria’s post-war leaders thus believed it in the interest of “national unity” to speak as little as possible about that particularly painful episode in the country’s history.

There is some logic in the strategy, since how do you teach a nation an aspect of its history that is inherently divisive? Years later, when I asked my British university class what they had learned at school about colonisation, “Nothing really!” was the chorused reply. “In A-level history, I learnt a bit about the British Empire, all positive stuff,” one student offered. “There was a little on colonialism in India, but nothing about Africa.” I teach a pretty mixed bunch, coming from various parts of Britain, and the suggested education gap on this subject strikes me as problematic.

The calls to “decolonise” the curriculum have returned this year, intensifying in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd and the attendant heated debate about race. But with something as consequential as British colonialism, I think the question should not be whether to teach it — yes — but rather how to teach about it.

This presents no small challenge, the problem being that Britain is inhabited both by the descendants of those who were conquered, and those who did the conquering. One’s story of victorious expansion is the other’s reminder of humiliating subjugation.

My Nigerian secondary school teachers had it easier on this front. Everyone in the school — teacher and pupil alike — was Nigerian. We were thus all automatically united on one side of the colonial divide, the side of the colonised. This provided teachers with a clear perspective from which to teach colonial history, with an emphasis on prominent Nigerian anti-colonialists, stretching from the early 19^th-century resistors to the pro-independence leaders of the Fifties. It was obvious to us all who the heroes of the colonial story were, and who were its villains (the British of course).

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But the demographics are different in the UK; unsurprisingly, so are attitudes towards Empire. According to a 2019 YouGov poll, 32% of Britons are proud of the British Empire, 19% are ashamed of it, 37% are neither proud nor ashamed, while the rest don’t know what to think. On top of this, 33% of Brits believe former colonies are “better off” for being a part of the British Empire, compared to 17% who think them “worse-off”.

There clearly exists an expectation among some scholars demanding more education about colonialism that this would dramatically shift British public opinion against Empire. I wouldn’t be so sure.

This expectation underestimates the human desire to feel strong, the powerful psychological appeal for many, not just in Britain, in taking pride in the conquests of their ancestors. It offers a sense of collective strength they can tap into as individuals. If they, of whom I am one, could be so triumphant in the past, surely I too possess triumph in me?

The morality of taking pride in ancestral conquests involving the killing and subjugation of other human beings is questionable, but its psychological appeal is undeniable. People want to feel strong and they often grab at whatever gives them that feeling of strength. According to YouGov, as many as 50% of Dutch people feel proud of their past Empire; the French are only slightly less proud than the British of theirs, and less prone to shame about it.

This is not just a white people thing; the same YouGov survey showed that only one in five Japanese today are ashamed of their imperial past, despite its disastrous consequences. Turks enjoy emphasising their role in the powerful Ottoman Empire, with current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan even declaring modern-day Turkey a “continuation” of the Ottomans.

Hence, while I think it important to teach about British colonialism because of its consequences for present-day history and while it is difficult for me, the son of a Nigerian father, to view colonialism and Empire positively or even neutrally, I understand why some (white) Britons feel differently. However, what complicates matters for me somewhat is that some Africans who actually experienced British colonialism had mixed feelings about it, a theme rarely explored in current debate.

I emphasise that British colonialism is what I am referring to. No one was ambivalent about the barbaric rule of the Congo by the Belgian King Leopold II, whose savagery cost some 10 million lives, as documented in Adam Hochschild’s heart-wrenching King Leopold’s Ghost. I cried reading that book, and experienced intense feelings of animus towards white people, even though my own mother, being Polish, was white.

But in a country like Nigeria, Britain’s largest African colony, feelings towards colonialism were more complicated. In his 1947 book Path to Nigerian Freedom, Obafemi Awolowo, considered one of Nigeria’s Founding Fathers for his role in the independence struggle, offered a frank assessment of the challenges in mobilising his compatriots against British rule at the time. “Given a choice from among white officials, [Nigerian] chiefs and educated Nigerians as the principal rulers of the country, the illiterate man today would exercise his preference for the three in the order in which they are named. He is convinced, and has good reasons to be, that he can always get better treatment from the white man than he could hope to get from the chiefs and the educated elements,” Awolowo wrote.

According to this, while Nigeria’s educated elites wanted Britain out as fast as possible so they could start running their country, many regular Nigerians seemed to sense a fairness in the British exercise of power that they were not so sure of in their own leaders. Awolowo did not put this down to what was called “colonial brainwashing” but said that he felt many Nigerians had “good reasons” to think this way.

Of course, because British colonialism was hypocritically justified as stemming from concern (bless their good hearts) for the supposedly “savage” conditions of life in pre-colonial Africa, African anti-colonialists had little strategic choice but to construct a counter-narrative strongly negating this depiction, one portraying Africans in a positive light. This led to what Nigerian historian Toyin Falola described as the “simple but seductive thesis that Africa used to live in peace and innocence until its contact with Europeans”. And so the one-sided, sweeping colonialist narrative was countered with a one-sided, sweeping anti-colonialist narrative. But this did not mean that regular folk on the ground lost all memory of the past.

Obviously, as Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s famous 1958 book, Things Fall Apart, brilliantly portrayed, the disruption colonialism brought to the lives of everyday Nigerians was massive, and in my view, ultimately indefensible. Imagine foreigners come to your homeland, kill some of you, and tell the rest everything you ever believed is rubbish. Your religion is rubbish, your traditions are rubbish, your values are rubbish, the way you organise your entire economy and life is wrong.

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The assault on African ideas was so severe that the continent is still trying to recover its identity; still trying to figure out an idea for modern Africanness that would not be an imitation of Westernness or so focussed on resisting Eurocentrism it ends up defining Africans in opposition to Europeans, thus ultimately being Eurocentric itself. Post-colonial Africa is still searching for an identity that explains who Africans are, not who they are not.

Yet in an interview a few years after independence, the same Achebe who had highlighted colonialism’s disruptive nature stated: “I am not one of those who would say Africa has gained nothing at all during the colonial period…this is ridiculous – we have gained a lot. But unfortunately, when two cultures meet . . . what happens is that some of the worst elements of the old are retained and some of the worst of the new are added.”

Intellectuals such as Achebe clearly recognised the identity crisis colonialism triggered. They also knew about British atrocities such as the looting and destruction of the ancient Benin Kingdom in southern Nigeria, among others. Yet on the other hand, Achebe believed that Africa benefited from the introduction of Western education, technology and medicine, as well as liberal European ideals such as “democracy” and “equality”, which had not necessarily been popular beforehand.

It is, however, important to emphasise that even between British colonies, there were significant differences in the actual practice of colonialism. It was significantly more brutal in Kenya than in Nigeria, for instance, with the former witnessing bloody events such as the Mau Mau Uprising in which thousands of Kenyans were slaughtered as late as the mid-20th century.

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I know some fear that if we start allowing for nuances in our assessments of colonialism, then we are opening the door for white people to shed any guilt whatsoever over the entire affair. That even more Britons will start asserting, humiliatingly for us, that colonialism left our ancestors “better off”. That saying anything “positive” about it is tantamount to justifying it.

I understand this line of reasoning, but I ultimately refuse to live my life in fear of what some people may say or think. That is the quintessential post-colonial complex: living dominated by anxieties over how white people see us. Instead we should liberate ourselves from the shackles of these historical complexes that yes, were thrust upon us, but that only we can shake off ourselves; those complexes that limit what we feel we can say about ourselves once white people are listening. Discussing colonialism frankly is a sign of strength, not weakness.

So for British teachers wondering how to teach the subject, it is important to cite various perspectives, including, crucially, the perspectives of the colonised; not in a wholly arbitrary manner seeking to buttress this or that grand narrative, but in a way revealing the complexities and contradictions of Britain’s colonial encounter with Africa.

This does not mean truth-seeking can be an excuse for insensitivity. The reality is that colonialism is an inherently emotive subject for millions of black and brown people in this country. We need more frank and open debate about it, definitely, but that debate should always serve the ultimate purpose of helping build this nation rather than tearing it apart.

Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more

Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation

So there must be some truth in it…

I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 29, 2019

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, amid the furore, tweeted his own view: “Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proudly the English capital, a European city and a global hub.”

So how English is London? Well that depends very much on what is meant by  ‘English’. A significant problem with the word is that its ethnic and national meanings are often confused or blurred.

Ethnic groups, for instance, are large-scale communities which consider themselves to be descended from common ancestors, are attached to a particular ‘homeland’ and are distinguished from other ethnic groups by cultural markers such as religion, language or appearance. Nations, on the other hand, are territorial-historical communities with a degree of political aspiration. They are different things, though the same word is used to describe them.

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‘English’ is both an ethnic and national designation. The English, for example, are the largest ethnic group in most of the more populated parts of English-speaking Canada, in the American state of Utah and in northern New England (see light purple shades on the linked map). They are also an overwhelming majority – around 70% – of the population of England. In London, however, they make up no more than 45% of the total.

Cleese, then, was right – if he was talking about ethnicity.

Equally, those of English national identity are also a majority in England, but not in London. Of England’s residents, 60% said they were ‘English Only’ in the 2011 census. In London, this was only 37%. This is because more than any other groups, ethnically English people also claim their national identity to be ‘English’.

And while ethnically English people tend to claim Englishness as a nationality, minorities lean towards a British identity.

Even though, according to the ONS Longitudinal Study (ONS LS), minorities under 30 are increasingly identifying as ‘English’, it is still accurate to claim that London is not an English-majority city in either ethnic or national terms.

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But was it ever thus?

No. In fact, over the course of Cleese’s lifetime, there has been considerable change in London’s ethnic and national composition. While it’s true that London has always received immigration, this has typically been on a small scale. Jewish immigration, for example, was only about 5,000-10,000 per year at its height in the late 19th century.

And while no ethnicity question on White Britishness was asked until 2001, we can use the ONS LS to track 2001 and 2011 London residents back to the 1971 census. This method finds that London was around 86% White British in 1971: an ethnically-English city with a modest minority. By 2011, the ethnic English were in the minority. These dates track the period from Monty Python’s debut to Cleese’s retirement. Living through that transformation no doubt influences his perspective.

Source: ONS LS 1971-2011

So, in these strict terms, it seems Cleese is on pretty solid ground in making his claim that London “isn’t an English city any more”. It is only English in the sense that it is located in England. But if we were to follow that to its conclusion, then all accents heard in London must be English ones, which would be an absurd thing to say.

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Can we, therefore, dismiss Cleese’s critics as overreacting? Well, not necessarily.

There is nuance to this story. There is a sense in which London is still English: the majority of its population is native-born. The UK-born (nearly all English-born) formed nearly 80% of the city into the 1980s, and while this had dipped to 60% by 2011, natives remain a majority.

Source: Hechter, M. (1976). UK County Data 1851-1966 (UKDA ref#430); Census of England and Wales 1971-2011.

Is being born in England enough to qualify as being English? Yes, say 85% of those asked in the BBC-YouGov 2018 Englishness survey. On this logic, London is still an English city, but if it passes the 50% foreign-born mark – like Miami, Dubai or (almost) Toronto – then it would cease to be so.

But even though London may still be (marginally) English by birth, if its inhabitants think of their ethnicity and nationhood in non-English terms, then Cleese’s point stands.

But what if there are people – notably ethnic minorities or white liberals who claim to be British rather than English – who have an English national identity but who don’t explicitly acknowledge it? As Daniel Kahneman writes, people “aren’t rational, they rationalise”. Their subconscious impulses drive them, but the deliberative part of their brain constructs a story about why they behave as they do – which often bears little relationship to the underlying motivations.

If this is the case, then a good test of what nationality ‘British not English’ Londoners hold deep down would be to see if they back the English football team, or feel defensive about the anti-English barbs levelled by relatives in Wales or Scotland, or care when they hear that Scotland gets more out of the Treasury than England. If they do, they quite possibly do have an English national identity. Though because they imagine a white, traditional Englishness, rather than the more modern version, they consciously reject it. On this measure there are only a few Londoners who aren’t English – unconsciously or otherwise.

It’s possible these Londoners also have English symbolic attachments. When people, regardless of whether they identify as English or not, were asked in the same Englishness survey how strongly England’s ‘diverse cultural life’ contributes to ‘your English identity’, for instance, 75% of non-white Londoners replied ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ strongly. This is also true for 73% of White British Remain-voting Londoners, though only 45% of Leave-voting White British Londoners concur.

When it comes to the English landscape, things veer the other way: this is important for 85% of White British Leavers in London, 73% of White British Remainers but just 54% of non-white Londoners. There is nearly as great a divide on the importance of English ‘history and heritage,’ with almost 90% of White British Leavers in London saying this is important for their English identity against 77% of White British Remainers and 63% for minority Londoners.

But while minorities are not quite as keen on landscape and history, a majority still consider these to be an important part of English identity. And on English sport, Christian traditions, poetry and dance, there are only small differences between white Londoners and non-white Londoners. If these people really didn’t identify as English, would they still reply that these symbols were important to ‘their English identity’? It seems that when you probe a little, many who claim not to be English are significantly attached to its key symbols.

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So where does this leave Cleese? For conservative whites, such as Cleese, English ethnicity blurs into their concept of nationhood. Being ethnically English makes it more likely that they will identify their nationhood as English which, in turn, shapes the symbols (landscape, history) that make up the image of England in their head. Ethnicity is the lens through which they view the nation; it seems inseparable from their national attachment.

When confronted by an ethnic minority person, therefore, who possesses English characteristics (attitudes to sport and Scotland, say) Cleese’s reflex may be to consider such a person not ‘truly’ English. Not because he wishes to exclude minorities from the nation, but because he has no vocabulary for distinguishing his ethnic identity from his national one.

I’m not convinced Cleese has a sinister desire to exclude minorities from national membership. I can’t know for sure, but, as an expat living in the Caribbean, he may simply wish to express his diaspora English ethnicity, as well as his attachment to an England in which his group forms a majority, but not the entirety of a nation in which minorities are equal members.

In my book Whiteshift, I call this ‘ethno-traditional’ nationalism, as distinct from exclusivist ethnic nationalism, which seeks to limit national membership to members of the ethnic majority while repatriating, or discriminating against, minorities.

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Meanwhile, as John Denham argues, Englishness is becoming more inclusive. Ideally, English national identity would be what I call multivocalist, a kind of Englishness-as-menu which would permit some to attach to England through the nation’s landscape, ancestry and history, while others can relate to its ‘diverse cultural life’, sports, vibrant economy or popular music.

So Cleese should allow that the ethnic English no longer have a monopoly on English nationhood; native-born minorities are just as English, but imagine their nation differently. Equally, Sadiq should allow that Cleese has a right to identify with his English ethnicity, and to cherish his own conception of London – and England – as opposed to the cosmopolitan one promoted by the mayor’s office.

London has become less English since Monty Python premiered, and is no longer ethnically English. But a majority of its residents are English-born and most identify with some version of English national identity. So is London still an English city? Well that, of course, depends what you mean by English.

This week the bovine stampede found its target in John Cleese. Not for a freshly expressed opinion, but referring to something he had said eight years ago. Then, in an interview with Australian television, Cleese had said that London is “no longer an English city”.

The remark was made in the aftermath of the 2011 riots – during which several nights of violence paralysed the capital and briefly spread to other parts of the country. The point Cleese was making was obviously based on personal observation and said not in a spirit of venom or demagoguery but merely one of observation and regret. Which in any sane and normal world would have been an end to it.

But these are neither sane nor normal times. And, so, when Cleese this week referred again to those comments, saying: “Virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation. So there must be some truth in it…” the herd’s hooves twitched.

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Eight years ago, when Cleese made his original comments, the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, criticised the comedian and his points about London feeling like a foreign city, insisting that “we should celebrate” the capital’s diversity. Likewise, on this occasion the present Mayor of London, also criticised Cleese for wrong-think. With startling originality and humour Sadiq Khan hilariously said “These comments make John Cleese sound like he’s in character as Basil Fawlty. Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength.”

Other people pointed to the fact that John Cleese these days lives in the Caribbean, as though this proved that his argument was either invalid or fallacious. Morning talk shows discussed whether Cleese’s comments were racist, while Twitter and other social media platforms seemed to agree that of course they were.

Time to ‘cancel’ him.

As though it remotely matters, I suppose I should declare my hand here. John Cleese is not a man with whom I am always in 100% ideological alignment. Some years ago, he backed a version of proportional representation being introduced into the UK voting system. Later he was a vocal supporter of the Leveson process, which threatened to detrimentally neuter the free press.

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That said, I can see why a reasonable person might have arrived at these views. And in mitigation he is John Cleese, and it would be a very sad world indeed if I ever interrupted my constant pleasure at masterpieces like The Life of Brian or Fawlty Towers for a dispute about Alternative Voting systems. But the herd does not detain itself with such finely tuned considerations. It just belts towards the target.

Still, there is clearly something especially forbidden about the other particular hornet’s nest of an issue that Cleese has now prodded twice in one decade. I suspect that is because there is some truth in there, and one of the reliable guides for gauging that you have trodden on some truth is that people start losing their reason and chanting mantras while you are trying to have a discussion.

You would get the same response, as I have explained in my last book, if you were to remark upon the official findings of the 2011/12 UK census. Which found that people who identify as ‘white British’ are a minority in London.

Whether it is Conservative or Labour politicians in charge, after the initial outrage, the mob always comes back after any such observation is made: “Diversity is our strength.” This means, then, that the progression of their general argument in relation to the demographic and cultural make-up of London goes something like this: 1) You can’t say that. 2) It’s not true. 3) It is true but it’s great.

Whenever anybody discusses the findings of the last census, this is the response: don’t mention it; you’re lying; it’s true so deal with it. Since the next census is unlikely to find an enormous reversal of those trends, we must perhaps expect only an escalation of those shrieks that emanate whenever anyone remarks upon the facts in the official documents or what they see before their eyes.

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Anyhow, since we need to find reason to be optimistic where we can these days, it is perhaps worth saying that there is something rather wonderful about this latest episode of herd mentality as it has encountered John Cleese.

It is that, true to form, the 79-year old comedian has stuck to his guns. In 1979, when ‘The Life of Brian’ was released, Cleese and his Python partner Michael Palin were memorably involved in a television debate with the then Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, and the then prominent Catholic convert Malcolm Muggeridge. The debate can still be seen through the miracle of YouTube. It has generally been agreed in the intervening years that Stockwood and Muggeridge did not win the argument.

In that studio, 40 years ago, Cleese and Palin stared down the clerical, po-faced, literalists, one of whom was of course literally wearing clerical gowns. On that occasion, Cleese made an especially impassioned and precise defence of the rights of comedians and anybody else to say what they liked even about those things which other people held to be sacred.

And he also, crucially, insisted on sticking to the significance of facts. So, when his debating partners in 1979 pretended that they knew what Cleese and the rest of the Pythons had been doing in The Life of Brian and those studio opponents were wrong, Cleese told them so.

Likewise, this week Cleese refused to back down. As the Twitter herd stampeded, Cleese insisted that people shouldn’t misrepresent his 2011 remarks. He pointed out that he was concerned about culture, not race. And he pointed out that it is perfectly “legitimate” to prefer some cultures over others.

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Cleese said, “I prefer cultures that do not tolerate female genital mutilation. Will this be considered racist by all those who hover, eagerly hoping that someone will offend them – on someone else’s behalf, naturally?”

In the world of social media mobs, this is an un-returnable move. To not prostrate yourself before the mob is an unforgivable move. To behave like an independent adult, with a mind of your own, confident in your own opinions and receptive (though dismissive when necessary) of the opinions of others, is something the herd cannot deal with.

Well good. Forty years ago Cleese’s opponents actually wore clerical frocks. Today, they might as well. Forty years ago they talked of “heresy” and “blasphemy”. Today, they talk about “diversity” and its “celebration”. They are the same breed, these opponents. Always scolding. Always unamusing. Always hypocritical. What a glorious sight it is to see that while the clerical class has entirely changed over the last 40 years, John Cleese has not.

The other day he was abused from the stands by a Chelsea fan during Man City’s defeat at Stamford Bridge. It appears to have been racial abuse, although one of the fans in question denies that.

It was a sordid affair. Sterling, though, rose above it with aplomb, and later, on Instagram, issued a thoughtful critique of how the media treats black and white footballers. Understandably, it’s led to some soul-searching in the media (though not enough, in some quarters). And it’s raised the question, once again, of whether Britain is getting more racist.

I wanted to look at that question in a bit more depth and ask how we measure a society’s levels of racial prejudice, and what you find when you do measure it. Are we getting more racist? Since the 2016 referendum, a lot of people have wondered whether racists have become more emboldened: is that true?

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The question is, it turns out, not easy to answer. It’s really hard to measure racism, or any form of socially unacceptable prejudice, because people don’t tend to admit to it. For a while people thought that the Implicit Associations Test, which (in one version) measures how quickly you associate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ words with black and white faces, was a sort of window into our souls; it led to all sorts of claims (including by Hillary Clinton) about how unconscious bias is everywhere. But it turned out not to really work. People who score highly on the IAT do not seem to behave in more racist ways than people who don’t. It’s not much use as a predictor of behaviour.

There are other ways, though. The most obvious is, simply, to ask them. But where it gets really interesting is what you ask them.

If you ask people: “Are you prejudiced against people of other races?”, or something along those lines, you get a response of about 25 to 30% saying: yes, yes I am, thanks for asking. That makes headlines most years because the National Centre for Social Research, NatCen, asks a similar question in its annual survey. And every year, the response is about the same. It has never dropped below a quarter in the 30 years they’ve been doing it. So, certainly it looks like Britain isn’t getting any less racist, right?

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But, it’s a bit more complicated than that. “Are you prejudiced” is a very abstract question; there’s no objective standard to compare yourself to. If you ask something more concrete, like “would you mind if your child married someone of a different ethnic background?”, you get a picture of dramatic decline. In 1983, according to NatCen’s British Social Attitudes survey, around 50 to 60% of Britons said that they would mind; by 2013, that had dropped to a little above 20%.

That’s not to say that things are perfect – one in five people is still quite a lot – but it’s definitely an improvement. There hasn’t, as far as I can tell, been a significant survey since 2013 asking that question, but Rob Ford, a political scientist at Manchester who studies these things, told me that (for reasons we’ll come back to) it’s reasonable to assume that the trend has continued.

Also, if you break that data down by age, you find that people born before 1940 are far more likely to be against interracial marriage than people born in the 80s and 90s. You can find similar stories when you ask people if they’re comfortable with a black or Asian boss, or (in the US) if they’d be happy voting for a black president.

The problem with all of this is that there is a thing called the “social desirability bias”. That is, people tend to answer surveys – even anonymous ones – in ways that would make them look good. Being racist doesn’t make you look good, on the whole, so people are likely to understate the extent to which they’re uncomfortable with, say, interracial marriage. The downward trend may be real, but it may underestimate the true level.

Suggested reading

How should we respond to the rise of mixed-race Britain?

By Sunder Katwala

There are other ways to look at prejudice. One is experimental: you treat the issue like any scientific question, and set up a randomised control trial. You test some hypothesis and change a single variable.

For instance, you could send out loads of job application forms, but change only whether the names on the forms are stereotypically black or white; or you get black and white flat-hunters to go and visit potential landlords, and see whether white ones are more likely to be accepted.

When you do that, you tend to find that there is prejudice: black people are less likely to get callbacks for jobs, for instance. But these experiments are time-consuming and expensive – especially until recently; online applications and things have made them somewhat easier now – so there haven’t been all that many of them, and it’s hard to use them to establish a trend. According to Ford, the evidence “cautiously” points to a decline, but that it’s hard to be sure.

Another way is to examine how we actually behave. For instance, regardless of whether you or not you say that you’re OK with mixed-ethnicity marriage, if you actually marry someone of another race, that’s a pretty robust indicator that you’re broadly OK with people of that race. If you beat someone up in a racially motivated attack, that’s pretty good evidence that you’re not.

Suggested reading

Why we can't ignore the challenges of immigration

By Trevor Phillips

If you look at mixed-ethnicity marriages, they’ve been going up for years. Nearly one couple in 10 was of mixed ethnicity in the 2011 census, up from about one in 14 in 2001. And you can see it in the ethnic makeup of the population. About 1.2% of the population self-identified as mixed heritage in 2001; that had almost doubled, to 2.2%, by 2011. Research for the BBC suggests that that is a massive undercount and that the figure might be double that again.

With things like racially motivated assault, or racial abuse, it’s not so clear whether it’s gone up or down. There has been a clear increase in the statistics – a near doubling of reported assaults in England and Wales since 2012/13 – but it’s very hard to be sure whether that’s real or not. As racial issues become more salient, the police get better at recording them and people become more likely to ascribe racial motives to an attack; and as members of ethnic minority communities come to trust the police more, they may become more willing to report. The police themselves say that they think there was a real rise, not simply a statistical artefact, around the 2016 referendum, though.

Where does this leave us? In a complex situation. There obviously are a lot of racist people out there. And a lot of the statistics are hard to make sense of, because they’re messy. But where the stats are able to show a trend, they show a declining one: Britain is less racist now than it was 10 years ago, and that was less racist than 10 years before that.

What’s more, there is a good theoretical basis to believe that we’re less racist. One of the more robust findings in social psychology is that exposure to outgroups promotes more positive views of those outgroups. Each generation of white Britons since the Second World War has had more exposure to ethnic minorities than the one before, at the shops, at school, in work.

Suggested reading

How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

And there’s more indirect contact, as well. Our football teams and newsreaders and actors and lawyers and doctors are more diverse. Given all this, you would expect to find that Britain is getting less racist, and in fact when you ask people whether race is important to nationality, you get “a really steep generational gradient”, according to Ford. Young people are much less likely to think that “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack”.

An important caveat: this is all about the average person. It doesn’t rule out the possibility that, while Britain as a whole is getting more inclusive, a minority has become more vocal and aggressive, emboldened by internet subcultures, Brexit, Trump, Breitbart or whatever. And that could mean that the experience of people of colour is not getting better: it only takes a small number of loud people to make a lot of noise.

And if people are yelling abuse at you in the street, or following you home at night, then it’s probably not a lot of comfort to you to learn that on average, people are more in favour of mixed-ethnicity relationships than they were 10 years ago.
Still, it’s probably fair to say that our society has improved on this issue. And to return to football for a moment, you can see this, even though the Sterling case has brought it back to our minds.

In Nick Hornby’s memoir of football fandom, Fever Pitch, published in 1992 and leading up to Arsenal’s dramatic league win in the 1988/89 season, he writes about how racism was common on the stands then. Less so, for Arsenal, as a London team with a large multiethnic following, but lots from away fans, and still sometimes from his fellow Gooners. An opposing black player misses a chance or something, he wrote, and “some neanderthal rises to his feet, points at Ince, or Wallace, or Barnes, or Walker, and you hold your breath … and he calls him a cunt, or a wanker, or something else obscene, and you are filled with an absurd sense of metropolitan sophisticate pride, because the adjectival epithet is missing … It’s not much to be grateful for, really, the fact that a man calls another man a cunt but not a black cunt.”

That wasn’t all that long ago. Compare that to now: the men who allegedly racially abused Sterling will never see the inside of a Premier League stadium again. It’s far from perfect. But it’s definitely an improvement.

These freedoms are fundamental to liberty, and a society that imposes restrictions on them will inevitably be less free. But as Britain and other Western nations experience deepening problems of societal fragmentation and atomisation, a serious assessment of the role of the State in facilitating integration and social harmony is crucial. In particular, consideration of the effects of the policy of State-sponsored multiculturalism is overdue.

Conventional wisdom has it, of course, that multiculturalism is an inherent good: progressive, inclusive, enlightened, the essence of equality. Sceptics are dismissed as reactionary nativists.

And yet a philosophy designed to break down barriers and bring people together has in fact achieved the very opposite. Modern Britain is dotted with monocultural ghettos whose inhabitants often live an utterly parallel existence to their compatriots dwelling in some cases just a few streets away.

Further reading

The fascist tendency sweeping the world

By Bidisha

Is it perhaps because the active promotion of separation and difference – for that, ultimately, is what State-sponsored multiculturalism amounts to – drives wedges between people and is inimical to integration? Might it be that we took a wrong turn when we opted for the salad bowl over the melting pot?

Cultural solidarity is hard-wired into the human psyche. People naturally gravitate towards those with whom they feel a sense of cultural understanding and attachment, and the societies most at ease with themselves are those in which deep and enduring common bonds exist, developed organically over generations through shared customs, language, institutions, religion and social mores. Indeed, these cultural ties, through which reciprocity and mutual obligation to fellow citizens are best nurtured and sustained, were instrumental in developing and shaping the nation state – still the best model of government ever created.

The promotion of multiculturalism has the effect of unpicking this. It starts from the point that nothing that went before has any greater relevance to what exists now, that no culture or tradition should be elevated above others, and that the State should be if not an uninterested then certainly a disinterested party in the cultural life of the nation. In doing so, it dismisses an entire history, and violates the sense of belonging felt by those whose lives, as well as those of their ancestors, were so profoundly shaped by that history.

Further reading

How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

That the establishment’s adoption of multiculturalism as public policy coincided roughly with the emergence of rapacious globalisation helped to create a perfect storm in which communities experienced significant upheaval and millions became disorientated and resentful.

The political elites like to kid us about all this, of course. So they constantly preach the gospel of multiculturalism while ignoring its deleterious effects. Thus, we are invited to take pride in the fact that ‘Britain is a diverse, multicultural society.’ Well, parts of it certainly are. But much of it isn’t.

You could travel to Cornwall or Norfolk or the Scottish Highlands and be largely untouched by multiculturalism. What do the inhabitants of these areas feel when they hear politicians and commentators describe their homeland in a way that simply doesn’t resonate with them? It is another example of the elites looking out from their vantage points in the cosmopolitan cities and concluding that the entire country looks the same.

Further reading

Labour’s conspiracy of silence on immigration

By Paul Embery

These champions of multiculturalism will fiercely upbraid those who argue against their creed. There are the usual insinuations that opponents must be motivated by racism – a logical fallacy which conflates culture and race, and ignores the obvious fact that one can be a committed multiracialist without embracing multiculturalism.

In their minds, there is something ignoble and chauvinistic about striving to develop common cultural bonds among the population. But are nations and communities that defend a monoculture any less content than those which don’t? Japan, for example, is no less prosperous or happy for its deep cultural homogeneity.

Should the Amish be forced to accept a dose of diversity? Would a Western liberal dream of telling a Native American or Indigenous Australian that their bitterness over cultural erosion was unfounded and ‘nativist’? Proponents of multiculturalism do not seem to see the hypocrisy in respecting ancient cultures and civilisations elsewhere while neglecting and derecognising our own.

The liberal and cultural elites’ experience of multiculturalism is, of course, different to that of most people. If you’re a well-heeled professional living in a trendy part of town, you will see the best of it. But for those residing in the grittier parts of the country, for whom place and belonging mean so much more, it can mean loneliness and isolation.

Further reading

Liberalism has broken us – we need a new party to call Home

By Giles Fraser

So what should be the approach? Outlaw the speaking of foreign languages? Ban mosques? Shut down Italian restaurants? Of course not. Only the truly despotic would ever consider such unconscionable assaults on personal freedom. However, if we are to promote real integration and overcome the divisions that bedevil our society, we must start by ensuring that every lever of the State is used to cultivate the deepest, unforced cultural consensus among our disparate communities.

This would mean, as a simple example, promoting only the common language. It is astonishing that well-meaning people ever thought it was wise for public bodies to translate official documents into dozens of foreign languages. It removes the incentive for newcomers to learn the native tongue, which in turn impacts their ability to find work, to truly integrate, to understand and feel part of the country they now call home.

It means drawing on our cultural history in every area of life and unapologetically setting it above all others, promoting it proudly, inviting every citizen, regardless of where they came from, to share in it – yet all the while unremittingly defending their individual liberty to make their own choices.

Societies are fracturing around us. Establishment politics is changing before our eyes. The old order is collapsing. Across the West, the liberal and technocratic elites are on the defensive as never before. The reason can be summed up in six words: we forgot the politics of belonging.