Politics: securing the base

By Richard North - March 11, 2024

In the run-up to WWII, it had become a given in official circles that, in the event of war, Britain would suffer sustained and potentially catastrophic aerial bombing from which, it was deemed, there was no defence.

Thus, the doctrine of “the bomber will always get through” drove defence strategy in the pre-war years, with the focus on building our own bomber fleet to take the war to the enemy in the hope of deterring an attack.

One dissenter from this received wisdom was Hugh Dowding who argued that the first task of the government in time of war was to “protect the base”. In the teeth of official opposition, it was his vision which brought us early warning radar, the equipment and operational structure of RAF Fighter Command and the massive network of Anti-Aircraft Command.

Mulling over this, it struck me that Dowding’s precept is part of the reason why so many of us find the succession of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London and elsewhere so disturbing.

Instinctively, most of us share the great man’s thoughts that the first step to security is to protect the base, and the sight, week-on-week, of aliens in great numbers parading through the streets of our capital with their hate-filled slogans brings it home to us that our base is no longer secure.

As a rider to that, for most of our lives we in Britain have harboured the illusion that the police have been on our side. This is a comfortable fiction that has never really been true – and less true for some than others – but it is one of those foundation myths that contribute to our sense of well-being.

Then to see multiple and continued examples of police favouring the alien demonstrators in our capital, right up to last Saturday when we saw another egregious display of two-tier policing, is deeply disturbing.

This is not just an issue of the inadequate policing with which we have become so familiar. It strikes at the core of our relationship with the police where, at the very least we expect policing to be even-handed, with street justice to be dispensed with a sense of fairness.

For that reason, I don’t think the “Hamas is terrorist” episode is going to go away in a hurry, and already the Telegraph has run a follow-up piece headed: “Met Police accused of ‘emboldening’ the mob after ‘Hamas is terrorist’ counter-protester arrested”.

The piece has Robert Jenrick, the now voluble former immigration minister, launching an attack on the Met for their handling of the incident. He asserts, not without justice, that officers were failing to tackle “the mob” and putting free speech at risk.

“This shameful incident is the logical endpoint of consistently prioritising ‘community relations’ over even-handedly enforcing the law”, he says. “The mob is emboldened and free-speech is threatened”, he adds: “It’s a chilling inversion of what law-enforcement is about. Two-tier policing must end”.

That’s fair enough as far as it goes, but it is going to take a lot more than addressing this particular episode. The failure goes right to the heart of a societal malaise, the roots of which are complex as they are deep.

Something of this was rehearsed in a weekend essay in The Times by David Goodhart, who works at the Policy Exchange think-tank. His title tells the story in a nutshell, declaring: “No wonder Britain is so divided – we’re too diverse”, where he warns of the effects of “the tension between mass migration and a healthy society with common values”.

In the longer term, Goodhart thinks we will adapt, but he does warn that scale and speed matter if the adaptation is to happen without conflict and resentment. In 2004, he reminds us, the proportion of the UK population that was not white British (ie including white minorities such as Poles) was about 9 percent; today it is around 26 percent. Taking England alone it will, thanks to the post-Covid immigration surge, soon be touching 30 percent.

Here he then makes some interesting observations. To the generation now in power – the people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s – “ethnic diversity” meant a few black or Asian people in their schools, a smattering of difference, most visible in London and on television, on top of a high degree of continuity.

Because the number of incomers was relatively small there was a centripetal force to adapt and integrate, with the exception of those enclaves of pious Muslim settlement. Thus, he concludes, ethnic diversity, especially for the middle classes who experienced it less directly, “was a colourful cherry on the cake of British life”.

However, even by 2004, that was no longer the case in places that were becoming majority-minority: London, Birmingham, Leicester and Luton (he doesn’t include Bradford, which is an odd omission). Now this “diversity” is long gone. When minorities establish a critical mass it becomes easier to remain separate from the mainstream, reinforced by modern communication bubbles.

And there he puts his finger on the problem. The political and media class, shaped by that earlier era – and, I might say, cocooned in their London-centric bubble – do not experience the changes which have overtaken so many parts of Britain.

It is easy to speak out for “multiculturalism” when you are enjoying the cosmopolitan buzz of life in the highly diverse capital. But out in the sticks, it is not diversity that we see, but monoculture, mainly with the steady, insidious march of the mosques, as Islam takes over the street and the burqa-clad women start to proliferate.

Goodhart writes of the highly educated people who he calls the “Anywheres”. They, he says, are generally too comfortable with change and openness to comprehend the misgivings of others. Most of them have been mobile since their teens, thanks to residential universities, and have identities derived from educational and professional achievements, so can fit in anywhere.

Nothing if not ego-centric and permanently insulated by their metropolitan bubble, these dominant “Anywheres” have tended to conflate their own detached, individualistic priorities with those of the nation.

This, Goodhart believes, is an understandable failing – although others might be less forgiving. He reasons that the situation arises because their assumptions are reflected back at them in the broader culture.

And yet, he concedes, this dynamic has been to the great detriment of our politics. For most people, whom he calls the “Somewheres”, stability in everyday life has a higher value and a bigger part of their identity is attached to the places they come from and groups they belong to.

This, he says was the nub of the issue in 2004, and remains so today. Rapid demographic change is discomforting to many people not because they are racists but because they are human beings who prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar.

What he does not confront, though, is that this basic human preference is not going to change. It is part of the human condition that we should seek to live amongst our own – as someone has written recently, the source of which isn’t readily to hand, we seek a home, not a hotel.

And this is not just a UK issue. It is common to every nation in the world, and more so when wholly different cultures are juxtaposed, where the pressures militate against integration – as happens especially when large Muslim communities take residence.

What is fascinating is that we are seeing the same dynamic in India, where increasing ghettoisation is an increasingly common feature of this nation, with numerous studies and articles exploring the phenomenon.

This particular article is typical of many. Obviously phrased in terms of the Indian experience, it tells us that Hindu, whether or not s(he) is religious and a Muslim, whether or not s(he) is a practicing one, have access to big mosques and grand temples.

They, the article says, have community leaders and protectors of their “interests”. And of course, there are communal conflicts. Not necessarily in their neighbourhood, not necessarily where they could be affected, and maybe at a much farther place, which they may not have even heard of before.

But, it says, the impact of all this is nearly the same. Any such strife is enough to bring a sense of insecurity in them and they think of shifting to a “secured” place, thus creating more and more ghettos, which continue to expand even in times of peace.

We can sit loftily above this, secure in our belief that we are a developed, secular society, and dismiss the idea of it happening here. But under the very noses of the “Anywheres”, it is already happening, and people are getting seriously worried.

Those “Anywheres” can come up with any number of palliatives and clever-dick solutions, but the fact of the matter is that large-scale Muslim immigration is not compatible with our secular society, and no attempts at integration are going to succeed.

As it stands, the situation is going to get worse, as it has been doing for decades, and it is already at the level where people are feeling that their base is no longer secure. The “Anywhere” activists know not what they do, and there will be a price to pay.