In the annals of British understatement, few events can rival the quiet efficiency with which a man of Syrian descent chose Yom Kippur— that most introspective of Jewish holidays, when one is meant to atone for sins rather than dodge them—to mount an assault on a Manchester synagogue. Picture the scene, if you will: the faithful gathered in Heaton Park, murmuring prayers under a sky the colour of oversteeped tea, only for the reverie to be shattered by the obliging roar of a car engine and the subsequent enthusiasm of a knife. Two men, Adrian Daulby, fifty-three, and Melvin Cravitz, sixty-six, lay dead by the end of it, their final acts apparently heroic enough to keep the worst of the carnage at bay.
One of them, we learn with that peculiar British blend of apology and inevitability, may even have been despatched by the very police marksmen who arrived to save the day, a detail that adds a touch of farce to the tragedy, as if the scriptwriters for this national production had briefly nodded off over their Earl Grey. The attacker, a chap already under investigation for rape—because why not layer the ironies?—had been released on bail, naturally, in keeping with our enlightened policy of treating potential terrorists as if they were merely overdue on a library fine.
It was, in short, a hell of a situation, as Dr. Philip Kiszely put it in a tweet that same afternoon, his words landing like a well-aimed custard pie in the face of institutional complacency. "The government and institutions," he declared, "are anti-British, anti-Semitic and anti-Western—in something like that order. They also loathe the white working class." One could almost hear the collective shuffle of discomfort in Whitehall, that familiar rustle of trouser legs as the great and good adjust their progressive halos. For Kiszely, a cultural historian with the air of a man who has read too many footnotes to suffer fools gladly, this was no mere outburst but a cri de coeur from a nation teetering on the edge of its own irrelevance. And who could blame him? In a country where the response to slaughter in the streets is to urge the cancellation of a pro-Palestinian march the following weekend—lest the grief of British Jews be overshadowed by chants of solidarity with their would-be exterminators—we have perfected the art of moral arbitrage to a degree that would make even Pontius Pilate blush.
Let us pause here, dear reader, for a moment of sardonic reflection, in the manner of those Edwardian essayists who could dissect a social ill while sipping their hock. Britain's establishment, that creaking edifice of Oxbridge alumni and think-tank apparatchiks, has long prided itself on a tolerance so boundless it verges on self-parody. We are, after all, the nation that once ruled a quarter of the globe not through brute force alone—though there was plenty of that—but through the subtle alchemy of tea, cricket, and the firm belief that everyone, deep down, secretly yearns for a spot of Anglican restraint. Yet here we are, in the autumn of 2025, watching as our open borders disgorge not the huddled masses of Emma Lazarus's poem, but a procession of cultural incompatibilities that make the arrival of William the Conqueror look like a neighbourhood block party. Consider, if you dare, the grooming gangs, those spectral horrors that haunt the pages of our tabloids like unquiet ghosts from a Dickensian nightmare. Just two days before the Manchester outrage, seven men—predominantly of Pakistani heritage, though the press is careful to whisper it—were bundled off to prison for a collective 174 years, their crimes a grim litany of rape and exploitation visited upon two vulnerable girls in Rochdale, starting when they were a tender thirteen.
Rochdale: the name alone evokes a shudder, a syllable freighted with the memory of scandals past, from the Jay Report's tally of 1,400 victims in Rotherham alone to the systemic blindness that allowed such abominations to fester for decades. And what was the institutional response? A shuffling of feet, a murmured apology for "lessons learned," and then—poof!—back to the business of inclusion. Sexual abuse, it seems, is a reasonable price to pay for multiculturalism, much as one might tip a sommelier for a flawed vintage. Kiszely nails it with brutal economy: "They just shuffled uncomfortably at the Pakistani gang-rape of white children." Indeed, the authorities did more than shuffle; they pirouetted, rebranding predation as a "safeguarding challenge" and the victims as collateral in the grand narrative of diversity. One imagines the Home Office mandarins, gathered around their PowerPoint slides, nodding sagely as they recalibrate the optics: "Yes, the rapes are regrettable, but think of the vibrant street food!"
This is not, of course, to single out any one community for calumny—God forbid we descend into the very bigotry the bien pensants so tirelessly police—but to observe, with the dry detachment of a coroner's report, how our leaders have elevated denial to a high art. Muggings, knife crime, honour killings, first-cousin marriages, female genital mutilation: Kiszely lists them like items on a particularly depressing menu, all washed down with the bile of "third-world hell on earth" now routine in London, Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham. And why not? We have open borders, after all, that leaky sieve through which the world's unfiltered detritus pours, unchecked by anything so vulgar as policy. The white working class—those gammon-faced relics of a bygone empire, sneered at in the pages of the Guardian as if they were evolutionary cul-de-sacs—bear the brunt, their neighbourhoods transformed into no-go zones where the Union Jack flutters like a distress signal. "They sneer and call us gammon," Kiszely writes, and one can picture the liberal elite, ensconced in their Islington townhouses, chuckling over their oat milk lattes at the very thought.
Yet it is the antisemitism that cuts deepest, a venomous undercurrent that has surged through Britain's veins since the Hamas atrocities of October 2023, turning the streets into a theatre of the absurd. The Community Security Trust, that vigilant watchdog of Jewish safety, recorded over 4,000 incidents in the year following the attack—a 147% leap that would make even the most optimistic actuary reach for the smelling salts. Marches for Palestine—those vast, baying processions of keffiyeh-clad enthusiasts—snake through London week after week, their chants a discordant hymn to intifada, even as synagogues shutter their doors and Jewish schoolchildren learn to scan the crowds for threats. And on the very day of the Manchester slaughter? Why, the faithful were out in force again, or so the timetable suggests, their placards fluttering like confetti at a funeral.
"They allowed Jew-hate marches on the same day Jews were slaughtered in the street," Kiszely laments, and one cannot help but admire the precision of the phrase, evoking as it does the ghost of Enoch Powell's rivers of blood, now augmented with the acrid tang of petrol and cordite. Ah, but to accuse the state of outright antisemitism would be to grant it a coherence it scarcely possesses. No, this is something altogether more insidious: a reflexive anti-Westernism, a loathing for one's own inheritance so profound it masquerades as virtue. The institutions—those cathedrals of bureaucracy from the BBC to the civil service—have internalized the dogma of intersectionality to the point where Jews, inconveniently non-oppressed in the narrative, become expendable. The white working class? Even more so, their patriotism dismissed as 'far-right xenophobia', their concerns about cultural erosion waved away as the grumblings of the unenlightened. It is a hierarchy of hatreds, as Kiszely astutely orders it: anti-British first, then antisemitic, with anti-Western bringing up the rear like a tipsy uncle at a wedding. And so we arrive at the heart of the matter, that desperate triad of imperatives with which Kiszely concludes his jeremiad: "I want the rotten edifice to come crashing down. Let’s rip it up and start again. Look to a completely different future—that holds to its heart something of our wonderful past."
There is poetry in the plea, a echo of Shelley’s "Ode to the West Wind," but laced with the grim realism of a man who has seen too many footnotes turn to ash. Rip it up? One imagines the spectacle: Parliament reduced to rubble, the Home Office repurposed as a car park, the liberal commentariat scattered like confetti in a gale. A new future, yes, but one mindful of the old—the scones and the sonnets, the stiff upper lip and the sly understatement that once made us the envy of less fortunate isles. Yet herein lies the sardonic twist, the punchline to this national joke. For if real change does not come—and let us not hold our breath, given the current incumbents' talent for inertia—then Kiszely and "millions like me" will have no choice but to leave. Emigrate to the sun-kissed shores of Australia, perhaps, or the orderly burghers of Canada, there to sip flat whites and reminisce about the old country over barbecued prawns. "I don’t want to exist in Mogadishu, UK," he writes, and the image lingers: minarets piercing the fog of the Thames, halal butchers supplanting the chip shops, and the last red phone box repurposed as a call to prayer. It is a vision not merely dystopian but defiantly absurd, a Britain unmoored from its moorings, adrift in a sea of its own making. In the end, one cannot help but laugh, albeit through gritted teeth, at the spectacle.
We, who once exported civilization like a particularly fine claret, now import its contraries with the zeal of converts. The attackers sharpen their knives, the marchers raise their voices, and the institutions shuffle on, ever polite, ever progressive, ever blind. It is Clive James himself who might have summed it up best, in one of those late-night reveries on the telly: "The British genius for compromise has finally compromised us out of existence." Or, as Kiszely might rephrase it over a pint in some imagined pub of the future: "F**king hell, let's not even think about it." But think we must, lest the only future we salvage is one where the past is but a whisper, and the present a very long scream indeed.