Killing a Kingdom. Britain is great no more.

By Bruce Bawer

I dreamed the other night that I was wanted by the British police. And in the dream I wasn’t even in Britain. I was in New York, where I’d attracted the attention of British authorities by putting up a political poster, or something like that. But even though I was outside of their jurisdiction, the British police were after me. They were going to arrest me, put me on trial, and have me jailed for my opinions. I was apparently facing two to three years in the hoosegow. Such, in my dream, was the reach of British “justice.”

It was a nice dream to wake up from.

The reason for my dream is obvious. These days, even if you’re not living in Britain, you’ve got to be terrified by the speed with which British liberty is going down the tubes.

And it’s not just liberty, of course. Pretty much everything British is being dismantled – in many cases by the very people who are responsible for preserving it.

In Shakespeare’s hometown, Stratford-upon–Avon, the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust has decided that it’s necessary to “decolonize” the museum devoted to the Bard’s life and work. The museum experience, they’ve said, needs to be more “inclusive.” Shakespeare’s plays, you see, promote “white European supremacy,” and something  needs to be done about that.

This announcement comes two years after the Globe theater in London, modeled on the playhouse in which many of Shakespeare’s works were first performed, warned patrons that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is awash in “misogyny and racism.” Several theatergoers have written articles complaining that the texts of the Shakespeare plays performed at the Globe these days have been radically revised to avoid offending and to make politically correct points.

Then there’s the National Trust, which is charged with maintaining hundreds of historic properties in the UK. In recent years, it’s been laboring overtime to destroy Britain’s good name. You’ve heard of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which sought to depict American history as being irredeemably tainted by the evil of slavery? Well, the National Trust has tried to do exactly the same thing for Britain, commissioning a report which concluded that the trafficking of black slaves by evil white men was central to the formation of today’s Britain.

Never mind that it was Britain whose Royal Navy, staffed by white men, put an end to the Atlantic slave trade – a noble and selfless pursuit that they carried out at great physical risk to themselves and great economic expense to their country. Two centuries later, slavery continues to exist in many majority non-white countries – a fact that organizations like the National Trust refuse to acknowledge.

So dishonest is the National Trust about these and other matters that a group called Restore Trust was founded some time ago to address its systematic denigration of everything that those stately country houses and gardens stand for.

But it’s the loss of British liberty that is most striking to an outsider. Some of us have known about it for quite a while. Others were unaware of it until Vice President J.D. Vance delivered his now famous Munich speech on February 14. He cited worrying examples of clampdowns on free speech in several European countries, but, quite rightly – given the special ties between the U.S. and UK and the speed with which our Mother Country is destroying itself – he saved the UK for last, and dwelled on it the longest.

In Britain, warned Vance, “the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.” He discussed the case of an Army veteran named Adam Smith-Connor, who’d been fined thousands of pounds for “standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.”

Vance could have mentioned hundreds of similar cases. Actor-turned-activist Laurence Fox highlighted one of them just the other day. In a video, a Times Radio producer named Maxie Allen told about how he and his partner, Rosalind, had been arrested in front of their three-year-old daughter on grounds of “harassment and malicious communications” and hauled off to jail. The supposed grounds for the arrests: critical comments about the child’s school that they’d both posted on a private online group for the school’s parents. The whole experience, Allen said, was “Kafkaesque,” “surreal,” “bizarre.”

Fox’s comment on the video was blunt: Britain’s police, he wrote, “are gangsters and thugs” who are “drunk on their own pathetic sense of importance” and who “use intimidation and harassment as their weapons.” This from a man who, in better days, played a cop – a good cop – on the TV series Inspector Lewis. “Do not allow yourself to be bullied,” Fox urged. Alas, most Brits seem, even now, to be able to live with the knowledge that their fellow citizens are being bullied by their government.

Which brings us back to my dream. The proximate reason for it, I realize, was a March 28 report by GB News. It concerned Prime Minister Keith Starmer, who since assuming office last July has repeatedly denied claims that he presides over a system of “two-tier” policing – i.e., policing that lets Muslim rapists off lightly but that punishes non-Muslims severely for publicly acknowledging the reality of Muslim rape. In a recent article for FrontPage, Daniel Greenfield provided several examples showing that the British police and courts now routinely treat sane criticism of Islam “as a vicious hate crime” but regard statements like “curse the Jews” as inoffensive.

Now, it appeared that Starmer had decided to own up to this approach.

Here’s what happened. The Sentencing Council, one of the notorious “quangos” that operate independently from the British government but that wield extraordinary power when it comes to establishing official rules and policies, recently set new guidelines that would make “two-tier” policing the explicit law of the land, with white men, in the words of a GB News reporter, being “treated a lot tougher” than other demographic groups in courts of law.

Starmer has the authority to close down the Sentencing Council – which would be a cause for celebration – but instead he made it clear to an interviewer the other day that he might well allow the council’s guidelines to be put into place.

Yes, “two-tier” policing in Britain is already standard practice. But to make it obligatory – to put it in writing – would be a chilling step away from equality under the law.

And it’s a step that’s been a long time coming. It was way back in 2013 that FrontPage’s Robert Spencer, a world-class expert on Islam, who’d been scheduled to speak on that topic in London, was banned from Britain because Home Secretary Theresa May decided that his entry into the country would not be “conducive to the public good.”

Meanwhile, who isn’t banned from the UK? Meet Hamid Patel. He’s a mufti (a sharia jurist) who until recently was the headmaster of a school in Blackpool where, as Giulio Meotti reported, he was “the first in the country to ask pupils to wear the hijab outside of school, to ‘recite the Koran at least once a week’ and to ‘not carry stationery containing non-Islamic images.’ And while he was at it, Patel also invited a Saudi imam to speak badly of Jews, which never hurts.”

Patel is not only free to live in the UK –  he’s just been named the head of Ofsted, Britain’s powerful Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. Meotti quoted a French imam, Hassen Chalghoumi, who is famous for having supported Nicolas Sarkozy’s burqa ban, as saying that Patel is so far out there ideologically that you’d “never see such an appointment in the Arab and Muslim world, except in Afghanistan and Iran.”

Patel isn’t alone. As the British writer Ian Andrew-Patrick lamented recently: “Our political parties, law courts and councils are almost completely controlled by first or second-generation foreigners.” This is unquestionably truer of the UK than of any country in Europe.

Beside Starmer’s statement, there’s another likely reason for that dream of mine. On March 21, England’s High Court refused to allow Tommy Robinson to lodge a protest against the conditions of his imprisonment at HMP Woodhill, where he’s serving an 18-month sentence for contempt of court after a transfer from HMP Belmarsh. Tommy wanted to challenge the fact that he’s been kept in solitary confinement since last November – a situation that has resulted in a worrying decline in his physical and mental health. But the judge had no mercy.

Friends and supporters of Tommy who’ve visited him are seriously concerned that he may not survive his current term of imprisonment. In fact, Tommy dying behind bars seems to be the plan. The British establishment recognizes Tommy as a symbol and spokesman for all British citizens who don’t approve of their country’s Islamization. The establishment, for its part, seems to be divided among cowards whose goal is to make the transfer of power as painless as possible, fools who still don’t see where their country is headed, and Muslims who will be the country’s new top dogs when the transfer of power is completed.

As things get progressively worse in Britain, I keep returning to the same question: Why? Yes, all of Western Europe is headed down the same road. But in other countries, there are significant numbers of people who are trying desperately to put on the brakes. Even established political parties on the Continent have recognized that their countries are in trouble. (It was fifteen years ago that Angela Merkel publicly admitted that multiculturalism had failed.) But in Britain the madness continues unabated.

Decades ago I studied English at both the undergraduate and graduate level, which involved reading both British and American literature – and becoming even more steeped than I already was in the history of both countries. I was intensely aware of the many differences between the U.S. and the UK. But on some level I thought of us as all being fundamentally the same, with (among other things) a shared devotion to Magna Carta and common law and a shared popular culture, from the Beatles to Monty Python to James Bond.

But oh, how wide the Atlantic really is! Recently I’ve been poking through Becoming a Londoner (2013), which is the American novelist David Plante’s diary of his life in 1960s London, during which he learned a good deal about the changes he’d have to make in himself in order to fit in.

“Dear boy,” the poet Stephen Spender chided him, “you do have an American way of asking questions that are too personal. If you are to become truly British, you must understand that we British do not indulge in the personal.” Spender granted that Plante was well-mannered, but added that when it came to British manners, he had “more to learn” – for example, about the proper placement on dinner tables of silverware, placement cards, and finger bowls. Later in the book, Plante laments that he’s “incapable of that utter distancing of feeling from death, even from grief, which I think of as English.”

Needless to say, these generalizations are more true of Britain’s elites than of its working class. Still, it’s fair to say the following. First, manners are big in the UK, and also in places like Italy and France (where you’re expected to initiate even the most trivial transaction by saying “Bonjour, madame…”), but not in the Low Countries and Scandinavia (where there’s barely a word for “please”). Second, emotional distance is big in the UK and northern Europe, where next-door neighbors can remain strangers for years, but not in the Mediterranean countries, where, over drinks, strangers can become friends in a moment.

Which raises the question: could it be that the uniquely British combination of these two things, manners and emotional distance, is partly responsible for the uniquely colossal failure of the British to deal with the unpleasant reality of Islamization? In other words, does that unpleasant reality at once demand of them that they be more unmannerly than their own standards would permit, and at the same time require of them more emotional engagement than they’re capable of? Just a thought.

First published in Front Page Magazine