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The Western Surrender: English liberty has been sacrificed to silence critics of immigration

No. 3: The British state has little tolerance for those who dissent from liberal orthodoxies

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All that is great about western civilization is being undermined by a progressive political and cultural project that aims to reject and rewrite our history, prioritize group identity above the individual and embed this agenda into our laws and institutions. Welcome to The Western Surrender, an NP Comment series ranking the five Anglosphere countries by their adoption of these ideas. Today we feature No. 3, the United Kingdom.

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LONDON — The English have long found the sugary effusions one encounters at public events in, for example, the United States, slightly embarrassing and therefore best avoided. We seldom crank our sentimentalism to 11, and generally prefer things running at six or seven.

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Even as the United Kingdom has changed profoundly, this vestige of Englishness has, in the round, held firm. I suspect this is partly why wokeness manifests in subtler ways here than it does in other corners of the Anglosphere. Public figures took the knee for George Floyd, but there was no Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey-style performative sobbing; nor did we declare for anarchist “autonomous zones,” as in Seattle.

As the majority of the population are those indigenous to the British Isles, there is no fretting over indigenous English land; indeed, such talk remains taboo. I suspect even if there were, Australia’s National Sorry Day would be a little too on the nose for us; our scientific journals would be wary of Indigenous “ways of knowing”; and one hopes we would not follow in Canada’s footsteps by inventing an Indigenous genocide.

This, dear reader, is not for a want of trying. The soul is willing, but our cheeks are too prone to blushing. Britain may not be as bedecked in LGBTQ flags as other countries, but our institutions are not to be underestimated. They are stocked with technicoloured men (and women), with technicoloured hearts, who are all too willing to use their lanyards as a garrote around the neck of a centuries-old tradition of English liberty, free speech in particular. This process is arguably all the more sinister for the lack of attendant frippery.

The Western Surrender: The U.S. unleashed wokeness on a world incapable of handling it

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