Some 60,000 British people marched through London last weekend. In a crowd of that number, there will always be varied motives. But the overriding ones last Saturday were fear that the British are losing their country, frustration with governments that stoke it with mass multicultural immigration, and hope that it is not too late to reverse course. The march was the cry of a people in pain.
So it was natural that people held aloft the national flag. The Union Jack, as it is commonly known, combines the crosses of St. George, St. Andrew, and St. Patrick, and it made the streets of London a flowing tide of red, white, and blue.
Recommended Stories
The national flag and those of the patron saints of England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have, for years, occasionally been brandished by thugs, especially at soccer matches; I know them from painful personal experience, having once been beaten up by five Scottish hooligans on a London street in 1976 for the offense of being English.
Such associations supply ammunition to critics, chief among them Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who wants it believed that the patriotic marchers are animated by racist bigotry and must be defeated rather than listened to. This is false but is lent superficial credibility by the fact that the principal organizer of the march, Tommy Robinson, was himself a soccer brawler, a fraudster, and other nefarious things.
Starmer said the march was a “reminder of what we’re up against in the battle of our values. The organizers, including convicted thugs and racists, are peddling hatred and division, plain and simple.”
But it is neither plain nor simple, and it is a disgrace that the leader of a national government should say what Starmer said. Robinson is not the ideal representative of British patriotism. His style, accent, and background cause “aesthetic injury” to the opinion-forming classes, as Gad Saad perceptively noted recently to Piers Morgan. But the movement in which Robinson is prominent is a good and decent one, and what he says about Islamic immigration, Islamic culture, and the Islamist motivation of thousands of terrorist acts every year is true, and no different from what has been said by more erudite and articulate pundits such as Douglas Murray and the late Christopher Hitchens.
The fact that Robinson, with his ugly history, has risen to such prominence defending the decent preference of British people for their own culture is, indeed, a measure of how utterly the governing class has failed the country by deprecating such ideas. Starmer and his ilk have tried somewhat successfully to push Britishness beyond the pale of polite society. They talk as though it is racist for birds of a feather to flock together, bigoted for people born into it to want to keep it, and to prefer it to a deracinated society, the imposition of which is not something about which they have been consulted, and to which they have not given their approval.
It is important to understand that even if the London marchers were not from the ruling classes, nor were they thugs out for violence, nor vandals bent on defacing the city, nor haters trumpeting bigotry. They were decent people, old, young, and everything in between, who rightly feel they are being robbed and betrayed. They certainly were not, in their masses, anything like as unruly or destructive as pro-Palestinian terrorism marchers who desecrate cities across Britain so frequently.
There was also a strong Christian element in the march. Many people carried wooden crosses. For them, opposition to mass immigration and the preservation of the national culture are bound up in the need for a Christian revival. This, too, is gall and wormwood to the opinion-forming establishment, which has long depicted Christianity as backward and bigoted.
The Left always denies that Britain is a Christian country and points out that only about 1 in every 10 British people go to church each Sunday. But this is a flimsy argument.
First, Britain is a Christian country right to the very core of its constitution. The monarch is head of the Church of England. He is the “defender of the faith,” although the current king laments weakly that he cannot be simply “defender of faith.” But as a matter of law and custom, Britain is a Christian nation, and there can be nothing wrong with the people of that nation making their voices heard, crying out that it should remain so.
More importantly, when people say Britain is a Christian country, they do not mean it is highly religious. They mean that it has its own traditions and ways that come from being part of what was known as Christendom. Christianity produced the cultures of Europe (and America), and they are wholly different from the cultures produced by Islam throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
HUGO GURDON: THE LEFT DECLARES CONTEMPT FOR WEALTH CREATORS
When marchers cry out that Britain is a Christian country, they are thinking not mostly of Sunday worship but of their laws, customs, and all the other social norms that make their country their country and not someone else’s. They are culture, laws, customs, and social norms that could not have been produced by Islam. And the indigenous population, inheritors of Christendom, fear that the irruption of Islam into their midst will destroy — is destroying — what they love.
The socialist Starmer government, like previous Labor and Conservative governments, is drenched in angst about Britain’s colonial past. It means it dislikes the culture of the country it leads and will not defend it. This refusal is creating a dangerously volatile social mixture.
