Britannia under the Waves

Despite my last name being Gallagher, I’ve always been something of an Anglophile. I took two years of English History during my long-ago college days and when I graduated I took a six-week backpacking trip around England. I never ventured any farther north than Wales, but along with hanging out in pubs, I did manage to take what I called the Castle Tour. Starting with the grim fortress of Dover Castle overlooking the English Channel, I visited Arundel Castle, Carnarvon Castle, Conwy Castle, Harlech Castle, and Caerphilly Castle with its still-intact moat.

My travels weren’t just confined to castles, however. I visited the British Museum, where I viewed one of the early copies of the Magna Carta, which contains Articles 39 and 40, two of the foundation stones of our modern freedoms. I also visited the Imperial War Museum, the Tudor Palace of Hampton Court, Sir Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Westminister Abbey with its walls covered with plaques honoring Britons both famous and obscure.

Among those famous Britons is Elizabeth I, who shepherded her country through the crisis of the Spanish Armada in 1588. There’s the mid-18th century prime minister, William Pitt the Elder, who led his nation to total victory in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the conflict that made Britain the dominant world power until the 1899-1902 Boer War.

After the fall of France in May-June 1940, Winston Churchill refused to seek terms from Hitler and kept Britain in World War Two. By fighting on alone against Nazi Germany, England may have degraded German military strength enough to prevent the German dictator from overrunning Russia when he launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Margaret Thatcher allied with Ronald Reagan to help win the Cold War. Unfortunately, her 11-year stay at 10 Downing Street only temporarily halted the UK’s ongoing decline.

Britain’s contributions to humanity’s treasure house of knowledge have been enormous. Adam Smith gave us the basis of modern economics with the 1776 publication of The Wealth of Nations. George Orwell warned us of the dangers of totalitarianism with 1984. And of course, we can’t forget Sir Issac Newton with his Laws of Motion and his Theory of Universal Gravitation, even if he wasn’t actually knocked on the head by that famous apple.

Edward Jenner, along with Benjamin Jesty, pioneered the modern development of the smallpox vaccine in the late 18th century, which finally led to the official eradication of the dreaded disease in 1980. In 1765, The Scottish engineer James Watt ironed out the kinks in the early steam engine (crude models had been in use since the early 1600s), which kicked the Industrial Revolution into high gear. RAF Commodore Frank Whittle is credited with building the world’s first working jet engine in the late 1930s.

In the early 20th century, with his discovery of the atomic nucleus and his theories of radioactive decay, the New Zealand scientist Earnest Rutherford founded the field of nuclear physics. Building on the work of earlier researchers, American Biologist James Watson and English physicist Francis Crick in 1953 announced their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, the foundation of all modern genetics. Both men conducted their revolutionary research at Cambridge University.

Britain’s contributions in politics and law still form the basis of how much of the world is governed. I’ve already mentioned the Magna Carta of 1215’s Articles 39 and 40. An even more seminal contribution to expanding civil rights was the 1689 Parliamentary Declaration of Rights. Growing directly out of the political turmoil that engulfed England throughout most of the 17th century, the Declaration contains clauses protecting freedom of speech, banning excessive bail, and putting the power of the purse firmly in the hands of Parliament. The Declaration of Rights is often regarded as a proto-constitution that helped inspire its later, more detailed American cousin.

British law and political principles helped create the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, pre-1997 Hong Kong, Singapore, Kenya, and modern India. Today, approximately 2 billion people are governed at least in part by the legal and political ideas created in Britain.

We also can’t forget about the spreading of English, the Latin of the modern world.

The UK has had one hell of a ride, but now the situation in the nation that helped invent the modern world seems to be veering from merely distressing to catastrophic. And the new Labor Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, seems intent on hurrying his nation into the dustbin of history.

In an August 10, 2024 interview on the BBC, Keir Starmer’s biographer, Tom Baldwin, said free speech has never been an “absolute right.” He then pointed out that the BBC is regulated and “is the better for it.” After making these horrendous comments, Mr. Baldwin then stated that the press “is worse for not being regulated,” and that more regulation is required.

I wonder if Mr. Baldwin has ever had small children, and if he did, did he read passages from Animal Farm to them as bedtime stories?

Aside from assaulting basic British freedoms, PM Starmer’s Labour Party is a long-time champion of mass immigration. In 2009, the British newspaper, The Telegraph,reported that the Labour Party leadership had embraced mass immigration to create a “truly multicultural country,” and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.”

But allowing vast numbers of immigrants in the UK wasn’t just a Labour Party project, the Conservatives chipped in because they wanted cheap labor. In 2023, a year when the Conservatives still controlled the government, 685,000 people entered the UK, and that’s just the ones who came legally.

Most Ricochet readers know the mess such mass immigration caused. The UK was afflicted by the decade-long Rotherham sex grooming scandal, in which seven Muslim men were finally convicted of abusing young girls, and this summer’s UK-wide anti-immigration riots, which were the culmination of years of native British citizens’ frustration at the UK Uniparty’s refusal to tackle the immigration crisis.

The previous Conservative government floated what was called the Rwanda Plan, which, as you may have guessed, involved shipping many of the illegals to that tiny African country for resettlement. After much legal wrangling, the plan was finally approved in late 2023. Immediately after coming to power, Labour canceled the Rwanda initiative, leaving Britain without any coherent plan for dealing with the flood of migrants streaming into the country.

With the announced intention of cracking down on the gangs that run the cross-channel illegal immigrant trade, Labour has offered its own plan to curb illegal immigration, the Orwellian-sounding Border Security Command, While this sounds like a positive step, it tackles only one aspect of the problem—the maritime dimension. By the beginning of this September, 22,000 people had crossed the English Channel in small boats, 8,000 of them since Starmer became PM last July. Another problem is that 90% of these seaborne migrants are young males with no proof of their identity.

Along with immigration and the attack on civil liberties, the economy also threatens to lay the UK low.

The UK economy has been drastically underperforming for years. For 24 out of the last 30 years, Britain has occupied the bottom rung of the ladder for business investment among the G7 states. What’s more, the UK ranks 28th out of the 31 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries when it comes to business investment. Embarrassingly, smaller European nations like Hungary, Slovenia, and Latvia have higher levels of private investment as a percentage of GDP than the UK.

What private sector investment there is in the UK will likely be cut even further if the Greens’ Degrowth Movement latches onto the country’s economy. Degrowth means exactly what you think it means: deliberately cutting a nation’s rate of GDP growth to nothing or less than nothing to conserve resources and make a society more environmentally "sustainable." Degrowthers also push the policy as a way for the developed West to more "equitably" share the Earth’s resources with the Global South, formerly known as the Third World. In an article in The Guardian, the eco-author, Jason Hickel, claimed that degrowthing was “wildly popular.”

Far from producing the equitable Green utopia its advocates hope for, degrowth is more likely to produce increased economic stagnation and social stratification. Plus, as the true magnitude of Britain’s economic and social fossilization becomes apparent, social unrest like this summer’s anti-immigration riots could become the norm. Regime supporters like the previously mentioned Tom Baldwin will certainly have their work cut out for them trying to suppress growing numbers of angry Britons.

Despite its world-beating past, the prognosis for 2024 Britain looks grim. Naturally, this leads to the following question: can the land of the Mother of Parliaments be salvaged?

The answer is, just barely. Recently, there have been signs of what may be a modest turnaround in the UK’s tenuous situation. In a late September interview on the BBC, the Anglo-Nigerian Conservative MP, and possible future Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, pointed out to her interviewer that “Not all cultures are equally valid,” and that she wasn’t “talking about cuisine.”

Another sign of a potential revival are the rising fortunes of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. In July’s general election, Reform UK only won five parliamentary seats, but garnered 14.3% of the vote. Since the election, however, buyer’s remorse has apparently set in among some UK voters over their support for Labour. UK Reform now polls at 20%, trailing the Conservatives at 25% and Labour at 30%.

But even if the above indicators are the start of a turnaround, will it be enough? After all, the UK has been in the grip of an expansive welfare state since the late 1940s, and weaning people even partially away from its cloying embrace will create a level of political pain that most UK politicians will automatically reject.

So while people in the USA worry about the outcome of the November 5 election, don’t forget to spare a thought, or a tear, about the fate of the nation that helped jumpstart modernity.