America can’t afford to lose Britain — again
The Labour government that rules the United Kingdom is hardly a year old, but its time is already coming to an end. Its popular legitimacy has collapsed, and it is visibly losing control of both the British state and its territories.
Every conversation not about proximate policy is about the successor government: which party will take over, who will be leading it, and what’s needed to reverse what looks to be an unalterable course. What is known, however, is that the next government will assume the reins of a fading state after what will likely be the final election under the present, failed dispensation.
We should equip our friends on the other side of the Atlantic with the lessons of the new right’s ascendancy and of a nation-first government in America.
The Britain birthed by New Labour three decades ago, deracinated and unmoored from its historic roots, is unquestionably at its end. Its elements — most especially the importation of malign Americanisms like propositional nationhood — have led directly to a country that is, according to academics like David Betz of King’s College London, on the precipice of something like a civil war. That’s the worst-case scenario.
The best case is that a once-great nation made itself poor and has become wracked with civil strife, including the jihadi variety. It is a prospect that will make yesteryear’s worst of Ulster seem positively bucolic.
American policymaking is curiously inert in the face of the dissolution of its closest historic ally. This is not because Britain’s decline is anything new: the slow-motion implosion of that nation’s military power has been known to the American defense establishment for most of the past 20 years. Ben Barry’s excellent new book, “The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975–2025,” offers many examples to this end, including the 2008 fighting in Basra in which American leadership had to rescue a failing British effort.
The knowledge that Britain is facing a regime-level crisis has remained mostly confined to the establishment. Outside of it, the American right has mostly dwelled on an admixture of Anglophilia and special-relationship nostalgia, obscuring the truth of Britain’s precipitous decline.
The American left, of course, entirely endorses what the British regime has done to its citizenry — from the repression of entrepreneurialism and the suppression of free speech to the ethnic replacement of the native population — and regards the outcomes as entirely positive.
It is past time for that inertia to end. The last election will redefine the United Kingdom — and therefore America’s relationship with it. Even before it comes, the rudderless and discredited Labour government has placed Britain into a de facto ungoverned state that may persist for years to come.
The United States has an obligation to protect its own citizenry from the consequences of this reality. It also has what might be called a filial duty to assert conditions for Britain to reclaim itself.
That duty means taking a series of actions, including denying entry to the United States to British officials who engage in the suppression of civil liberties. American security and intelligence should focus on the threats posed by Britain’s burgeoning Islamist population. The U.S. should give preferential immigration treatment to ethnic English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish who are seeking to escape misgovernance or persecution in the United Kingdom.
Furthermore, the United States should make it clear that the robust Chinese Communist Party penetration and influence operations in U.K. governance will result in a concurrent diminishment of American trust and cooperation.
Also necessary is the American government’s engagement with pro-liberty and pro-British elements within the U.K. This means working with Reform U.K., which presently looks to gain about 400 parliamentary seats in the next election. Its unique combination of a dynamic leader in Nigel Farage, intellectual heavyweights like James Orr and Danny Kruger, and operational energy in Zia Yusuf makes it a compelling and increasingly plausible scenario.
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Although the Tories are polling poorly and have had their reputations battered by their substandard record in government over the past decade, they nonetheless merit American engagement.
America’s role here is not to endorse, and still less to select, new leadership for Britain, which would be both an impossibility and an impropriety. However, we should equip our friends on the other side of the Atlantic with the lessons of the new right’s ascendancy and of a nation-first government in America.
In the fraught summer of 1940, the American poet Alice Duer Miller wrote, “In a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.” The island nation has not feared its own end at foreign arms for a thousand years. But its crisis today is from within, carrying existential stakes.
The current British regime is nearing its end, and the last election is coming. So too is our decision on how to engage it in the years ahead.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.
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