Saving Europe from the Europeans

By Bruce Bawer

The other day, Clive Lewis, who has been a Labour Party member of the House of Commons since 2015 and who was returned to office in this year’s July 4 election, said the following when it was his turn to recite his oath of loyalty: “I take this oath under protest and in the hope that one day my fellow citizens will democratically decide to live in a republic. Until that time, I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles, according to law.”

Laurence Fox commented: “Why we elect in [sic] people into public office who hate our country and institutions, I will never know.” On the one hand, I greatly admire Fox, who is a courageous champion of British values and British freedom, and I understand and respect his take on the rather cheeky way in which Lewis chose to revise his oath. On the other hand, I’m an American who can’t imagine swearing allegiance to a monarch, especially one who believes in homeopathy, subscribes to climate-change ideology, and harbors an intense admiration for Islam. After all, two and a half centuries ago some of my ancestors, and perhaps some of yours, fought in a war to liberate us from the ancestors of the current British sovereign. So I can relate to Mr. Lewis’s longing for a republic.

(To be sure, as of recently I’m also a citizen of the Kingdom of Norway, but nobody asked me to swear allegiance to the king. They don’t do that sort of thing here.)

Alas, whether one shares Mr. Lewis’s wishes or not, it’s looking more and more as if Britain may well end up skipping over the republic stage and go straight from constitutional monarchy to caliphate. And King Charles, if he lives long enough, may well be willing to go along with it. For one thing, such a transformation would mean peace in the streets – “peace,” of course, in the Islamic sense of “submission.” After all, on most (if not all) weekends since the savage Hamas attacks of October 7, the streets of British cities have been crowded with noisy Muslims and their allies, whose antisemitic slogans, scrawled on banners and shouted from rooftops, have been shrugged off by the same police officers who harass lone patriots who dare to respond to the primitive Muslim hordes by waving the Union Jack.

These chilling spectacles have helped swell the ranks of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party, which, of course, is Britain’s long-awaited answer to Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Founded in 2018, it stands for national sovereignty and strict immigration controls. It won an impressive 14% of the vote on July 4 – but, thanks to the Brits’ twisted electoral system, received only 1% of the seats in the House of Commons. By contrast, Labour’s 34% share of the vote translated to 63% of the seats.

As everyone has already commented, the British election results weren’t a vote of confidence for Labour; they were a rejection of the Tories, who during their fourteen consecutive years in power, including a landslide 2019 victory for Boris Johnson, have repeatedly failed to deliver on their promises. As it turned out, Tory appeasement of Islam was scarcely any different from Labour appeasement of Islam. During all these Tory years, indeed, the tendency of British institutions of every kind to bow to Islamic sensibilities has grown apace. Under the Tories, Muslim immigration, both legal and illegal, has soared, and British cops have continued to ignore Muslim felonies while arresting decent citizens for exercising their freedom of speech to criticize those Muslim felonies. It’s under the Tories that Tommy Robinson — whom any proper conservative government would have rewarded with a title or some such British honor – was arrested unjustly, tried in a kangaroo court, and locked up for months in the country’s most Muslim-heavy prison. It’s under the Tories that the above-mentioned Laurence Fox has been put through his own share of official harassment for daring to challenge woke orthodoxy.

To be sure, for all the Tories’ efforts to placate Muslims, the adherents of that faith have tended to vote Labour. This year, however, that party’s failure to be sufficiently anti-Israeli and pro-Hamas offended a good many disciples of the religion of peace, who on July 4, consequently, switched their support to “Independent” candidates whose views on Gaza were more in line with their own. In any event, Labour’s massive win promises that today’s massive influx of Muslims – most of them arriving by the day in small boats from across the Channel – will hardly be abated any time soon. And in the next election the number of those “independent” pro-Muslim candidates will surely increase. Where does this lead? You do the math.

And whither Reform UK? Even the BBC acknowledged the absurdity of this year’s electoral results: “The gap between the share of total votes won by the winning party in the 2024 general election and the share of Parliamentary seats won is the largest on record….This disparity has prompted renewed calls for reform of the electoral system, with Richard Tice of Reform UK complaining on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday of the ‘injustice’ that his party had received millions of votes but only five seats in Parliament.”

The good news, then, is that a few million Brits have not only woken up to the pickle that they’re in but have also decided that it’s not uncouth to admit as much at the ballot box. Yet the British electoral system seems to have been designed in such a way as to keep new, upstart parties like Reform UK from wielding any real power. Wilders is in a not entirely dissimilar position: his party is now the Netherlands’ largest, and by any rights he should be the country’s prime minister, but the Dutch system, too, is a preposterous concoction, enabling a consortium of itsy-bitsy parties to gang up and defeat the will of the electorate.

Then there are the French elections, which have their own screwy logic: they take place in two stages. This year, the first round, on June 30, resulted in a big win for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), which strongly opposes mass immigration and is led by a charismatic young dude named Jordan Bardella who seems to mean business. RN’s victory caused the usual explosions of outrage in the streets of Paris, with socialists, communists, environmental nutbags, trade unionists, Antifa members, activist Muslims, and other progressive types joining in solidarity in their desire to keep the RN from taking the reins of power. They got their wish: before the second round of votes, on July 7, over 200 candidates for opposition parties withdrew from the race, enabling the remaining non-RN candidates to come out on top.

A few weeks ago I wrote here about the results of the European Union elections. They were promising. But the European Parliament wields little power. Those election results indicated that in one European nation after another, parties that stand for individual liberty, national sovereignty, and Western cultural values – parties that, in short, seek to save Europe from total Islamization – are on the rise. The recent national elections in Britain, France, and the Netherlands confirmed that conclusion. But in each of those countries, the political establishment has contrived brilliant ways of keeping these populist parties from being able to do what they want to do, and of empowering, instead, a nefarious red-green alliance of the far left and Muslims who are very, very serious about their faith. If only that brilliance could be applied to the effort to rescue these nations rather than being used to help destroy them!

First published in Front Page magazine