BY STEPHEN PAX LEONARD
Let’s face a few difficult facts, the kind of facts that trigger that ever so British response: “Oh, well, we had best talk about something else” (before ‘heating the pot’ in the hope of redirecting the conversation to less saturnine matters). Over a short period of time, our country has become in parts unrecognisable. The apple orchards have been replaced with ugly housing estates; the fields that once yielded wheat and barley are now covered in solar panels and the “blue remembered hills” are now crowned with wind turbines. In my book, these are all unforgiveable errors and the first is by far the most objectionable. None of these scars (let’s call a spade a spade) will heal or ever revert to what they were previously. We are told that we have a falling birth rate and an ageing population and yet Britain’s population is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. When Blair came to power and the true decline of Britain started in earnest, the population was 58 million. Today, it is 70 million and projected to go much higher. The ugly housing estates that have sprung up all over the country are for the migrants. Nobody else. Britain’s hedges and pastures were shaped in the image of the people that tilled the land, but now the countryside is being spoilt to make way for millions of people who will, I suspect, never be hefted to this place. What is more, some of them are even openly hostile to our way of life. For many decades, Britain’s decline felt subliminal, but now it feels disconcertingly tangible because ancient networks of trust and belonging are being compromised.
Consecutive British governments have wanted it to be this way and it would be naïve of us to assume otherwise. We have been too naïve for too long. Along with its recent predecessors, this government is arguably an enemy of the British people. Migrants first, Britons second – that appears to be the maxim of twenty-first century Britain. For years, every aspect of institutional public life has been gearing up for this perverse objective. Britain’s universities were once esteemed places of learning, but now most of them serve as little more than migration centres. A friend of mine teaches at a business school at a once respectable Home Counties university. Ninety-eight percent of the students are from overseas. They pay three times as much as Britons in terms of tuition fees, so there is no incentive to give a place to a Briton. Charles, Henry and Camilla have all gone to the US where they are not treated as second class citizens. Will they ever return? Their university places in the UK have been taken up by ‘students’ who have not only a feeble grasp of the English language, but whose knowledge of the land seldom extends beyond naming a few Premier League mid-fielders. They will all graduate with distinctions. They are paying after all.
As corrupt migration centres, many of Britain’s universities teach courses whose only purpose is to promote the woke, multiculturalist agenda. Students pay tens of thousands of pounds for their Gender Studies course taught by a bearded gentleman donning fake strap-on breasts and who goes by the name of Sharon, and they won’t be going home afterwards.
They are in the system and for many that is the only reason why they came to the UK in the first place. Serving as migration centres, the ‘universities’ facilitate the mass migration process and ensure the migrants get the requisite woke indoctrination on the way. This is how the ‘new Britain’ is being built. And then another English field – that exquisite ordered harmony – is lost to house the Gender Studies graduates with their multiple offspring. And so, the “dappled things” of Manley Hopkins’ “Glory be to God for dappled things” feels ever more elusive.
In the rare case of the pusillanimous Briton not wishing “to talk about something else”, the conversation now typically turns to the thorny subject of civil war and how that would pan out. As many of the towns and cities come to resemble Islamic ghettoes, Britons will retreat to what is left of the countryside. But, the Government will do everything possible to ensure that is not a safe space either with their Sha’ria inspired dog-free zones and halal only menus. Make no mistake about it – you, the ethnic Briton whose ancestors “plotted and pieced” the landscape, are at the bottom of the Government’s shopping list. Their only purpose is to import voters, and they will do that at any cost. What follows further down the road will be sectarian violence, apartheid, the militarisation of the police, the normalisation of crime, no-go zones etc. And all the time, the likes of Piers Morgan will from the safety of his middle class, West Sussex bubble continue to tell us that all this is a ‘narrative’, that somehow we imagined that entire suburbs are now Bangladeshi or that churches are being burnt down and replaced with mosques.
To fully address the catastrophic errors of a decades long open-borders policy, you would probably need some kind of suspension of democracy. Things could get ugly. The best thing a Restore or Reform Government could do would be to immediately remove all the incentives for a migrant to come to Britain in the first place. Every single one of them. As a part of that process, the ‘fake’ universities would need to be closed down. Britain could then begin to ‘restore’ its higher education system; housing for young Britons would become affordable again in the unlikely event that millions were deported; people’s living standards would rise as the astronomical welfare bill was slashed and Britons would no longer have to speak in hushed tones in cramped railway carriages. That is surely the kind of Britain that most wish to regain: a free, prosperous country whose inhabitants are rooted to the land and not an authoritarian, socially and economically bankrupt welfare state where the collective consciousness has been completely undermined.
Stephen Pax Leonard is a writer, linguist, traveller. His book Noble Sentiments for an Exile and Other Writings has been published and is now available here.