By Andrea Widburg
My parents were Anglophiles. Therefore, I was an Anglophile, gobbling up Masterpiece Theater, majoring in British history at college, and spending an utterly delightful junior year abroad in England a long, long time ago. Of late, though, I’ve come to revisit my fondness for England. That’s because England doesn’t really seem to exist anymore. Instead, it’s an increasingly Third World country, complete with blasphemy laws, and a likely collapse of its power grid.
The trigger for this, my latest in a series of essays I think of as illustrating that “there won’t always be an England,” is a paywalled article in the Daily Mail that looks at the city of Leicester.
This Midland city is linked to major events in British history. The Celts were there, as were Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans. The Lancaster dynasty, which gave rise to the Tudors, had a power base there, and Richard III’s body was uncovered in a Leicester parking lot. Because of water, railways, and nearby coal mines, Leicester became a major industrial center in the 19th century.
In sum, Leicester is interwoven with the warp and woof of British history. It’s currently the 11th largest city in Great Britain. And, as the Daily Mail reports, Leicester, “is now among the first of our cities to have a majority non-white population…”
While the City still has classic British architecture, that’s just a remnant. The non-British part of the population is primarily Muslim, with Hindus following behind:
According to the 2021 census – the most recent – Leicester is roughly split in two between white and Asian populations, with 43.4 per cent identifying as Asian and 40.9 per cent as white. Within that, 23.5 per cent of the population are Muslim and 17.9 per cent are Hindu.
But there is another striking trend.
Only 57 per cent of Leicester residents were born in England, down from 65 per cent in 2011. More recently, a mid-2023 estimate calculated that 3.6 per cent of the city’s total population had arrived from abroad in a single year.
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Among 34 Leicester neighbourhoods, at least a fifth of the population can’t speak the language, according to census data. It is almost as if parts of this city now are British in name only.
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In last year’s general election, the sitting Labour MP, Jonathan Ashworth, lost his thumping 22,000 majority to independent candidate Shockat Adam, who ran on a single issue: Gaza.
It’s not just that the most important issue to the residents is a country thousands of miles away that shows Muslim preeminence. Storefronts advertise Halal food or give themselves names with the words Gaza or Jerusalem in them.
And of course, there are always the myriad women dressed like tents. Women are not welcome in any of the Muslim restaurants (which is the same thing that happened to a friend of mine who thought she could have a coffee break at a Muslim-run coffee shop in London). Given that Leicester now has a surplus of people from the non-Western world, it’s incredibly impoverished and violent.
Looking at Leicester, it’s no surprise that, in 2023, the most popular boy’s name in the UK was Mohammed. Admittedly, while non-Muslim boys can have a variety of names, there’s a rule that Muslim boys must have Mohammed somewhere in their name so that the numbers will add up quickly. But still…
It also shouldn’t surprise any of us that the British government is moving in the direction of Sharia blasphemy laws, which are the antithesis of the free speech and worship we’ve come to expect in the West since the Enlightenment. Thus, a Turkish man who burned the Koran was charged with “harassing Islam.” He should be grateful, I guess, that he wasn’t in Pakistan or Bangladesh, where a vigilante mob would have beaten or burned him to death. Soon, perhaps…
And as Britain lapses ever deeper into Third Worldism, it seems appropriate to note that a grid operator says that Britain’s push to Net Zero, which imagines the nation reliant solely on wind and solar renewables, is not only insanely costly as Britain tries desperately to shore up a grid increasingly dependent on unreliable renewables but that it could also lead to “months-long” blackouts as whole power grids collapse. In other words, what happened to Spain and Portugal could happen in the UK, only on a grand, back-to-the-pre-modern-era scale.
The image below is a reworking of a famous British WWI recruiting poster portraying John Bull, Britain’s symbolic version of Uncle Sam. Bull embodied both Britain’s self-assessment of its virtues (honest, plain-dealing, bold, and country-based) and its vices (choleric and temperamental). I’ve reworked the image because I see modern Britain as a Zombie country, still clinging to the trappings of the past (a few historic TV dramas, the tatty Royal Family, etc.), but mostly just a dead country walking.