Politics is now multi-national, even when it happens within only one country. Why? Because politicians these days, in the post-national West, are viscerally torn between countries.
They were born somewhere else; or their parents were; or they feel strongly the ties of religion or race or tribe or clan. When they talk about their distant homeland, they get all misty eyed. They mention ‘our enemies’, for example, when memorialising some ethnic spat a thousand miles (literally and figuratively) and possibly a thousand years away from twenty-first century Britain. Some of them effectively swear fealty to foreign countries to which they have ties of race or religion, under the guise of being the representative of a ‘community’ here in Britain.
It’s a busy gig. Do some work for firms in the old country. Go on all of their media. Talk in their languages at public meetings, languages which the rest of your country of residence can’t understand. It doesn’t matter, don’t worry about it, even in this age of machine translation.
This isn’t a sin, according to the regime. Here’s the official line.
You don’t have dual, divided loyalties: you’re a trailblazer, an inspiration. We need more people like you, and that’s a fact. The fact that you’re not solely British is good. The fact that you don’t think of Britain foremost, it’s good. It’s good. It’s what we need.
The mainstream, the regime, pretends both that all of this doesn’t happen, and that if it did happen, it would be great. For them, the irreversible, vast demographic change of the past three decades hasn’t happened, and it’s also good. Nothing has changed. Britain is as it always is, with a little bit more of a ‘global perspective’. Britain is an idea, an empty vessel without a core. Bring yourself to work, bring your whole self to work.
There are some problems with this approach. Britain, for all its dramatic lack of wealth and power, still has to have a foreign policy. It ought, this foreign policy, to be severely limited by the state’s gaping, glaring lack of capacity. But what policy there is has to be restricted and defined by Britain’s own national interest. That national interest is not philanthropic.
Britain could, for example, run up an enormous additional deficit (on top of the immense one we already have) every year to give tractors and seed corn to Mali. But that would be insane. There’s no reason to do it. The Malian government wouldn’t thank Britain for doing something so strange and didactic. But if the prime minister and much of her cabinet had Malian heritage, and one or two mega-donors were from Mali and wanted to augment their own farm stocks at Britain’s expense — could put together a good powerpoint, really get people around the table — we just might end up doing it. There could be a reason found.
But here’s the problem. There are powerful and increasingly numerous constituencies within the country who want Britain to do exactly that. You hear it all the time. It’s only the youth parliament — a hideous swollen appendage of a body, a national shame, a great disgrace of our sentimental, cringing institutions — but the most recent meeting consisted largely of a wonderfully diverse group standing up one after the other to declare that, to take one of innumerable examples, the status of Kashmir (something Britain has no say over in the slightest, less than zero capacity to act) was the most important question not only in the world, but in Britain’s own politics.
Why did Rishi Sunak decide that Britain ought to solve India’s youth unemployment problems via migration? It’s a real mystery.
Policy is already highly susceptible to foreign lobbying. See how the Elgin Marbles, an immense sideshow, of virtually no importance, has been repeatedly brought onto newspaper pages simply by the brilliantly effective lobbying of the Greek government, which has bought and paid for innumerable past-it politicians of the last decade or so. It’s been impressive to watch. And Britain doesn’t even have that many Greeks!
Britain is now a host, a host to various parties to every ethnic conflict, to every religious dispute, to every struggle between tyranny and representative government everywhere on the planet. Would you reasonably expect people in that position to be quiet? To refuse out of principle to affect the politics of the place they live? No, that’s not how people think or operate. I go for a walk in my neighbourhood and I see PTI and Imran Khan stickers on the back windows of cars. Sit near a middle aged woman of South American appearance on the bus and she may well be liking TikTok after TikTok about Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. People are people, and they do feel loyalty, attachment, to places and people. They’re not blank slates. It is insane to expect any other outcome.
Britain’s debate on the wars in the Middle East is significantly orchestrated along ethnic and religious lines. The regime officially believes it is racist and antisemitic to say so, but it’s the truth. This is something of a problem in a democracy. What do you do with the varying loyalties of millions of your fellow citizens? When your politics is so dramatically decided by demography, by the immigration policies of the past x number of years. How do you avoid sprouting retrograde, rent-seeking ethnic parties like the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire? Can you avoid becoming Yugoslavia without rigidly controlling ethnic politics like Singapore?
It’s something to think about.
(This was really a post about Tulip Siddiq and her family ties to the disgraced fallen regime in Bangladesh, and why it was a terrible failure of Keir Starmer’s not to sack her, and why she ought to have the Labour whip withdrawn. I just didn’t say so until the end.)