The White Uprising

ONE OF THE MOST intriguing, and at the same time unsettling, experiences of my very long stay in England— out of sheer habit, the entire island remains England to me—was a Christmas I spent with a flatmate’s family in a small town in Hampshire, southern England.

It was on Boxing Day, after everyone had devoured the remains of the previous day’s Christmas lunch, that a few neighbours dropped in to meet my friend’s mother. In due course, as invariably happens when meaningful conversation is in short supply, it was decided that we would all play Scrabble. For the video games generation, Scrabble was a word game based on possessing a vocabulary, having some basic skills and, of course, a decent element of luck.

The neighbour in question was a working-class, white Briton employed in one of those biggish manufacturing units that have since disappeared. He prided himself on his Scrabble skills and was a bit put off that I beat him with a needless show of insouciance. The idea of an Indian man whose mother tongue wasn’t English could prevail in Scrabble proved completely indigestible to him. With a bellyful of alcohol shaping his mood, he soon started becoming abusive, no doubt helped by the fact that I sported a sly grin throughout his outburst. It was at the point he was becoming racially offensive that my friend gently wheeled him to the door and suggested to his wife that a good night’s sleep was what the doctor ordered.

Over the years, I have thought many times of this encounter. Was the man a closet racist who saw every ‘darkie’ as an inferior being, just as the white colonials were taught to do? Or was he just upset at being upstaged at a word game by someone who was taught to “speak slowly and loudly”? I really don’t know the answer. However, there is no doubt that there was an undercurrent of resentment in the man that only needed a prod to come out into the open.

Last week, London witnessed one of the largest protest marches by white Englishmen seeking to reclaim their country. That some of the protesters were crude racists is undeniable. However, and I am basing this on the observations of English friends who weren’t on the march and wouldn’t dream of walking the streets with a Union Jack or Cross of St George in tow, there was an explosion of anger that had hitherto not been acknowledged by the Establishment. The contention of the tens of thousands of decent folk who marched that Sunday was that unregulated immigration of people who had very different cultural assumptions had changed the character of England unrecognisably. To cap it all, places such as London had become crime centres, unsafe for all.

The fear of immigrants stealing jobs that should rightfully have gone to native English people has been a frequent gripe. In the 1930s, it was the motivation behind Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts who used to terrorise Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Jews have now risen to the very top of the economic pile and anti-Semitism (often expressed as solidarity with Gaza) has now acquired a different character. In the 1970s, the target of resentment were Asians and Afro-Caribbeans. Today, most of those Asians are extremely successful, having even produced a prime minister. Asians are also seen as extremely law-abiding, with the possible exception of Pakistanis who are believed to be responsible for grooming gangs.

However, the so-called populist upsurge that England is witnessing through the spectacular growth of the Reform UK party, is also being witnessed all over Europe. It is causing a political earthquake that may in future lead to the destruction of the very woke-inspired European Union. The disqualification of Marine Le Pen may not stop the march of the National Rally to power. President Macron is presiding over a shambles, reminiscent of the final days of the Third Republic. In Germany, attempts to paint the AfD as a successor of the Nazis is having limited appeal. The real anger is directed at the lawless refugees who were injected into the German bloodstream by Angela Merkel. Indeed, if you are German, accustomed to the post- 1945 peace and stability, the new Europe the Germans had built so painstakingly, resembles a horror show. The immigrants and refugees have imported their cultures, their traditions and their disputes to Germany.

To describe the white uprising throughout Europe as racist is to view the phenomenon in a very limited way. I would rather see it as Europeans reclaiming their continent from those who don’t share their values and assumptions.

BlackshirtsEnglandEuropegeopoliticsIndiansOswald MosleyWhite racism