White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Britain’s Woes and England’s Fears

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By Llewellyn King

England’s problem is English: the language it gave to the world.

In particular, it’s a problem because so many people in the world speak English and would like to live in England, maybe hundreds of millions of them. “We are here because you were there,” says a sign held by an India-born woman at a demonstration. The British Empire isn’t all wound up.

The immigrant stream into England has two principal sources. One stream is from former British possessions, like India, Nigeria and Pakistan. These immigrants are English speakers. In England, they’ll have medical care, welfare, and law and order — and it’s where they feel entitled by history.

The other immigrant stream is from Eastern Europe. These immigrants enter England under the terms of the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union. They want to live and work in England for economic reasons. Once there, they tend to stay and live in expatriate communities.

London, the great sprawling metropolis along the Thames River, is now home to 50 expatriate communities, each with more than 10,000 members. More than 300 languages are spoken in London. According to the 2011 census, 37 percent of the city’s population wasn’t born in Britain. If the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a melting pot, London is that and even more so today.

The UK immigration problem is primarily an English problem. It’s not a Scottish, nor a Welsh, nor a Northern Irish one. England and London are where the immigrants head. Accommodation is at a premium in London, and the situation is getting worse with property speculation an industry in itself.

But immigrants nesting in London isn’t just a problem of migration. It’s also a problem of population density for England. The capital bursts at the seams as the north of the country languishes. Think booming Washington D.C. and hurting West Virginia, so close and so faraway.

The immigration problem is one of two issues that dominate the run-up to a June 23 referendum on whether Britain should stay in the EU. The second issue is of sovereignty, and the belief in Britain — mostly England – that Brussels, the seat of the European administration, is setting up rules and regulations that are untenable.

British Prime Minister David Cameron favors Britain staying in Europe with greater control of its borders and freedom from some Europe-wide mandates. Many members of his Conservative Party want out, including about half of his cabinet. Industry wants in by and large, as do professional groups and the important financial sector.

But the desire to leave Europe, known as “Brexit,” may be gaining with the support of Boris Johnson, London’s popular mayor. Polls have “in” just ahead of “out” and closing.

Pulling out has ramifications for the very integrity of the United Kingdom. Feeling against Europe is very much an English phenomenon and isn’t shared in Scotland, where calls for new referendum on its future as part of the United Kingdom will surely follow a vote for Britain to quit Europe. The last vote in September 2014 went against Scottish independence, 55.3 percent to 44.7 percent. Since then, the nationalistic feeling in Scotland has grown, and Scottish nationalists favor membership in Europe. Wales seems to want in.

Britain’s immigrant problem is more severe than ours in the United States. The population stands at 64.9 million and is rising. The island is 600-miles-long and 271-miles-long at its widest point.

It is one small island that has always left a large imprint on the world, and left its language as its lingua franca. It’s troublesome in today’s world of shifting populations, when hundreds of millions think of you as the mother country. — For InsideSources



Tea Party Inspires Memories of Another Time

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I should feel quite at home at the tea parties. I was present at the last round of them. It was another country and another time, but the anger was as genuine, the sense of betrayal by the political class was as real, and the idea of an endangered heritage was as painful.

Also, then as now, there was a certain disconnect from reality.

The place of these tea parties was throughout the dwindling British Empire. There, middle-aged people, who had spread the concept of British exceptionalism and borne the Second World War, felt everything they had built and fought for was slipping away.

What was seen as a terrible leftward drift was opposed virulently by a phalanx of patriotic organizations, but most notably the League of Empire Loyalists, founded in 1954.

The Loyalists were good yeomen who loved the Britain they believed had existed and was endangered, along with the position of Britain as the world’s dominant power. They believed in Britain’s special writ to civilize the world, police it and sometimes settle it. Compared to the militarists of the 18th and 19th centuries, these were soft imperialists but believers nonetheless, held together in a loose federation throughout the British colonies and dominions.

In Britain, the Loyalists formed a political bloc on the far right of the Conservative Party. They were on the fringe in Britain, but they were taken seriously in the colonies as a legitimate expression of wide discontent with the decline of British traditions, British leadership in business and British moral authority.

Loyalists inside and outside Britain railed against politicians in London, much as today’s Tea Party activists rail against Washington.

In Britain, support for the Loyalists was limited because so much had already changed. The British public had already accepted the dissolution of the empire; after all, its jewel, India, was gone.

Although the Loyalists raged against non-white immigration into Britain, this had not yet been identified by most people as a society-changing occurrence. Mainline British Conservatives feared that the leader of the loyalists, Arthur Chesterton, had been a fascist sympathizer in the 1930s. Even though he had broken with the fascists and written a book about it, he was still suspect.

Where I was in Rhodesia, the Loyalists were seen as the hope for saving Britain, of returning her to greatness and somehow turning the clock back to “the good old days,” whenever they were imagined to have been. Many, including my parents, believed the Loyalists would bring about a glorious new Elizabethan era under the young Elizabeth II, who had been crowned a year before the founding of the League of Empire Loyalists.

For those outside of the British Isles, the league was back to the future. But in London and across Britain, the Loyalists were just a right-wing pressure group (known in Britain as a “ginger group”), claiming support from a handful of Conservative Members of Parliament but shunned by the Tory leadership. In the United Kingdom, they were sidelined as “Colonel Blimps,” a satirical comic figure who ridiculed the conservative middle class and had been enshrined in criticism by George Orwell.

The League of Empire Loyalists lasted 10 years, but its aspirations were sealed after six years with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “wind of change” speech. The league’s domestic issues — the fight against socialism, the uncontrolled flood of immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean, and the growing power of the unions — were taken up by more sophisticated entities, like The Monday Club, operating inside the Conservative Party.

There is a limit to the analogy of the Tea Party movement to the Loyalist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But the people are eerily the same. They share a decency, the sense of being let down and the feeling that something has to be done. In the British case, nothing was done until Margaret Thatcher much later addressed some of the concerns of the Loyalists (unions, state ownership, immigration and global stature). She did not bring back the empire, but she did make the Brits feel a lot better about not having it anymore.

Who will do that for the good people of the Tea Party movement?