The Sun Finally Sets
The End of Empire

2,230 words

A ceramics business in Stoke, in the Midlands of England, closed this month. Moorcroft Potteries’ problems were economic, but they were not failings of the business itself, rather the imposition of new financial strains on the company which it could not support. Facing the highest energy prices in Europe (by some margin), carbon taxes with which other countries do not have to weight their prices for British import, and yet another rise in National Insurance contributions (which has always been income tax by another name), the old and respected company went into official receivership, the executioner’s block of the business world. This looks like yet more bad economic bad news for an embattled government, but Keir Starmer will be pleased with his work.

Stoke was, at one time, at the heart of the ceramics industry in Britain and arguably the world. Stoke’s nickname is “The Potteries”, its football team affectionately known as “the Potters”. It is, or it was, a part of England’s industrial heartland. Moorcroft Potteries was established over a century ago, gaining Royal patronage in 1928, and reportedly a favorite with British prime ministers and American presidents. Its founder, William Moorcroft, was able to set up business with the help of the famous London fashion and homeware store, Liberty. It was, then, an English, heritage-based company set up with no need for government intervention, and employing white, local workers. This kind of English traditional business is exactly what the Labour Party wishes to put an end to. It is bitterly ironic that, had the company struggled on, they could have cut costs by employing Indian workers. Starmer has just signed a trade deal with India whereby Indian workers arriving in Britain will pay no National Insurance for three years. That would have suited the government, too. If an English company can’t be forced out of business by restrictive legislation and deliberately inflated energy tariffs, the next best thing is to leave it no economic choice but to put white British workers out of work and replace them with foreign nationals. The Empire strikes back.

When “the British Empire” is mentioned, which is constantly by the left, what is really meant is “the English Empire”. The Scots, Welsh, and Irish were involved, of course, but England was the dynamo of empire, and this is why it is the main target of a British government who cannot see white historical achievement as anything other than a driver for revenge. The East India Dock Road still exists in London – I used to cycle to work along it – referring to the company around which empire was built in India. The Muslim London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has not got round to changing the name of this famous street (which now teems with Indians) yet, but he is doubtless looking at exotic, non-white alternatives. The British Empire was essentially the product of what we would now call “trade deals”.

Tirthankar Roy, in his Economic History of India, proposes the following explanation for the empire’s being founded in the most populous country on earth (at least now, it having vaulted over China):

Turning the emergence of the empire… into a battle between good and evil creates melodrama; it invites the reader to take sides in a fake holy war. But if good soap opera, it is bad history. The empire was not an invasion. Many Indians, because they did not trust other Indians, wanted the British to secure power. They preferred British rule over indigenous alternatives and helped the [East India Dock] Company form a state… The empire emerged mainly from alliances. It emerged from lands ‘ceded’ to the Company by Indian friends, rather than lands it ‘conquered’… The Company came to rule India because many Indians wanted it to rule India.

Note that in order for a low-trust society to better itself, it requires the intervention of a high-trust society to do so. As always, one quote – even from an Indian about India – does not an argument make, but Roy gives an alternative reading of history to the one made dominant by the modern blancophobic left. The question as to what state India would be in if the British Empire had never occurred is in the realm of thought-experiment, but the legacy of the British remains. The Shakuntala railway, for example, is a 190-km stretch of track which is, unlike most of India’s railway infrastructure, still under British rule, sorry, ownership. (I know there is an expert on India reading this, so I expect to be upbraided if my facts are awry…). But even those British-built (or at least engineered by the British) tracks run by Indian rail companies are still working. For this to be the case, of course, they must have been maintained, and this throws up an interesting dichotomy. There are still a few British-built railways working in Nigeria, for example, yet African languages have no word for “maintenance”. Many of the tracks are no longer serviceable. It is Indians who kept the trains rolling in their country, but unlikely to be Nigerians who did the same in theirs.

So, is the British Empire a prime example of no good deed ever going unpunished? It certainly wasn’t a “good deed”. The British weren’t a Boy Scout troop. It was put in place for financial and commodity advantage, as well as a drive for foreign territory not exactly unknown to European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Holland. Now, however, the days of the Raj are seen as useful only as a bat with which to beat the white, indigenous English. A cricket bat, most likely, the game being adored there as well as in Pakistan. Symbolically, when England has been destroyed, or at least rendered devoid of all but the poorest white English, the ones who can’t afford to run, then the final nail will have been driven through the coffin-lid of empire. But how do you go about, not improving the lot of foreign countries, but reverse-engineering the legacy of empire by dismantling your own? You are faced with two major targets: the urban and the rural.

London, the capital of the (dis)United Kingdom, was around 71% white British in the year I was born, 1961. That has now almost halved, so that the indigenous population of the nation’s capital is approaching one third. The phenomenon known as “white flight” means that its productive whites are leaving as fast as they can, but that does not mean the economy is not booming. The black economy, that is, if the term is still permissible. That is doing very nicely, thank you, as Turkish barber shops and vape shops and Jamaican-style beauty parlors sprout on London streets like morning mushrooms. These are money-laundering exercises, of course, but they fit right in, as London has long been the equivalent of a Chinese laundry if it’s cash you wish to wash. Statues of white dignitaries and heroes are being replaced with those that conform to ethnic quota requirements, streets and pubs are being renamed, and the Mayor’s office recently vetoed a photograph of a white, nuclear family appearing on its website as being “unrepresentative” of Londoners. London won’t be very white for very long.

Birmingham is the nation’s “second city”, and is similarly subject to a replacement of whites, mostly by Muslims. Again, in 1961, its population was 97.6% white, and this had also almost exactly halved by the 2021 census. Again, whites looking to start and support a family will not have Birmingham high on their wish-list. But even the white countryside such a family would prefer is being socially engineered as part of a program which will soon leave whites with nowhere to fly to.

Labour has been in power for less than a year, but has used that time to mount an offensive against those who have traditionally been not just land-owners, but the stewards of the land they own. Labour crippled small farm-owners by the simple expedient of imposing an inheritance tax on property and land worth over a million pounds. That won’t buy you much in the way of a house in modern Britain, and a farm that is not worth that much is essentially a large market-garden. Farming tends to be a hereditary business and overwhelmingly white, and so should be a priority for any government. And so it is, just not in a way that gives any advantage to the farmer. Unlike South Africa, however, where land-grabs and “return” of farms to blacks has led to chaos and further impoverishment, English farmland will be given over to solar panels, windmills, and new social housing for the unending tide of immigrants. Migrants are already being placed in government-sponsored hotels across white, rural England, and the rural great replacement is well underway.

Starmer and his team of spin-doctors recently pulled off something of a masterstroke with regard to immigration. He admitted, in a prepared speech, that the project to open Britain’s borders to limitless immigration was intentional, a part of government policy hidden from the white English in particular. That doesn’t sound too clever, until you realize that he is not claiming it as Labour’s policy, but that of the 14-year Tory government that preceded his tenure. In this way, Starmer attempts to position himself and his party as having to roll up their sleeves and put right the mistakes of the past. This scenario is, of course, entirely spurious. Not only have they no intention of doing anything of the sort, but they have obviously colluded with their predecessors, and for a simple reason. Labour and Tories are two sides of the same coin.

The idea of the “uniparty” is usually understood as being American, but in Britain it goes back at least to 2007’s book by lobby journalist, Peter Oborne, The Triumph of the Political Class. My review of the book was the first piece I ever wrote for Counter Currents in 2018. Oborne writes there that “the real divide in British public life is no longer between the main political parties, but between the Political Class and the rest”. This is so blatantly obvious now that the only journalists who don’t use the phrase “uniparty” are the mainstream ones, and that is essentially because you don’t say nasty things about the boss. The Conservative Party in government, with its succession of Prime Ministers, were only ever the warm-up act for Labour, like a support band at a rock concert getting the crowd in the mood for the main act.

So much for demographics both urban and rural. White culture also has to be replaced, and government can happily leave this in the safe hands of TV producers, historical revisionists in the publishing industry, the music business, and journalists. The history of England looks very different to the way it used to look. Blacks invented everything from the seed-drill to the mainframe computer. There were black Romans, Tudors, and Victorians. The ship Empire Windrush, which brought the first Caribbeans to Britain, was commissioned in order to bring cheap black labour to the home of the colonizer. (If you’d like a nautical comparison, that ship did more damage to England than Hitler’s U-Boats). None of these things are even remotely the case, but history is as malleable as the present to the new cultural commissars. In the present day, TV ads warning young men not to harass young women feature white boys as the aggressors, and non-whites as the voice of conscience. Blacks dominate TV ads, and are always shown in a sagacious and positive light. Iconic TV roles such as Dr. Who have been given to a black man (and gay, to boot). In the recent instance of ethnic psy-op, the TV drama Adolescence  (which Starmer referred to as a “documentary”) was based on the black killer of a black girl. The shows creators race-swapped, for once in the opposite direction, and the killer became a white boy radicalized by the Internet and an exemplar of white, toxic masculinity.

The gloomy Etruscans were said to be obsessed with predicting the end of their civilization, and were in fact absorbed by the founding of Rome. What there is of a right-wing media in the UK is beginning to sound the same auguries, but who might England be absorbed by? There is much talk of the Islamization of Britain – I’ve done a little of it myself – but it seems more likely that there will evolve some sort of power-sharing arrangement, as in Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Submission. But England herself seems doomed to disappear. It had already, since World War 2, become increasingly Americanized, but at least there is a strong element of a cultural bond, given the history of the relationship between the two countries. What will happen to England in the coming globalist order which seems inexorable is unclear, except that it will represent the end of empire, the final movement of something elegiac, and something which echoes in the poem Anthem for Doomed Youth, by the English poet, Wilfred Owen, who died so young, and so close to the end of the Great War:

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.