There are moments in a nation’s life when the electorate, like a man who has drunk three bottles of supermarket Merlot and discovered Tinder, decides to do something spectacularly self-harming for the sheer novelty of it. The general election of July 2024 was one such moment. We looked at fourteen years of Conservative government (admittedly a period that had all the grandeur of a damp firework) and concluded that the remedy was to install Sir Keir Starmer with a majority so large it could have its own gravitational field. History will record the decision with the same puzzled admiration it reserves for the captain of the Titanic ordering 'full speed ahead' after the first iceberg sighting.
The economy responded with the enthusiasm of a turkey at Christmas. Growth promptly committed hara-kiri. Inflation, having been tamed to the point where it almost looked house-trained, was released back into the wild with a cheery wave from the Bank of England. Rachel Reeves, our new Chancellor, discovered a £22 billion black hole with the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, except the rabbit was dead and the hat was the taxpayer’s pocket. National Insurance on employers was hiked, capital gains tax was sharpened, and non-doms were invited to become non-existent. The City, never a sentimental place, began pricing offices in Frankfurt with the keenness of a man checking Rightmove the morning after the wedding.
Still, money is vulgar. Let us speak instead of higher things: culture, identity, the quiet certainty that when you ring 999 someone will eventually turn up who was born within fifty miles of the crime scene. All that has been reorganised with the brisk efficiency of a Soviet agriculture. Net migration, already running at levels last seen when the Romans popped over for a long weekend, was encouraged to new heights. The English Channel became the world’s busiest pedestrian crossing. Small boats arrived in such numbers that the RNLI began issuing loyalty cards. Many of the new arrivals are, of course, doctors, engineers, and future Nobel laureates temporarily employed as Deliveroo cyclists. Others have more specialised talents. The courts have been kept busy with an apparently endless supply of young men whose cultural enrichment consists of gang rape, knife crime, and a robust indifference to the concept of consent. The statistics, when anyone can be bothered to collate them, are so grotesque that even the Guardian has taken to printing them in very small type on page 47, next to the Sudoku. Two-tier policing is no longer a conspiracy theory; it is an operational manual.
Meanwhile, on the foreign desk, Sir Keir has discovered the joys of escalation. Long-range missiles are dispatched to Ukraine with the airy assurance of a man posting a letter bomb because the stamp is pretty. Putin, not renowned for his sense of humour, updates his nuclear targeting list and wonders aloud why Britain imagines itself exempt from the laws of physics. The Ministry of Defence quietly calculates how many young British men would be required to hold the Fulda Gap and reaches for the smelling salts. The combined effect is a slow, methodical castration of the native British male. He is taxed until he cannot afford children, educated until he is ashamed of his forefathers, policed until he dare not defend his own daughter, and finally, when the balloon goes up over Donetsk, invited to die in a war that began as a Twitter spat. It is demographic replacement with the paperwork filed correctly and a foreword by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
If only we had voted differently. Picture it: a turnout of 85 per cent instead of the usual apathetic shuffle. The shy Reform voter unsheathing himself in the polling booth. The Conservative remnant remembering why anyone ever voted for them in the first place. A parliamentary arithmetic that forced even a Labour government to notice the existence of the English. Borders would have been closed with the polite finality of Fort Knox. Deportations would have resumed at the pace of a Victorian workhouse. The Treasury would have confined itself to mere incompetence rather than ideological looting. And when the next Russian ultimatum arrived, a British prime minister might have replied with something more robust than a strongly-worded letter to The Times. The churches would still be open. The pubs would still be full. The streets would be safe after dark. Young men could afford mortgages, young women could walk home without rehearsing their self-defence classes, and the phrase 'cultural enrichment' would have returned to its proper place in the anthropology syllabus.
In Bulgaria they have taken to the streets because their government tried to sell the country twice—once to Brussels, once to the Kremlin—and the people decided they would rather not be sold at all. They have stood in difiance of the technocratics, and reminded Europe that the Balkans still possess a pulse. Meanwhile, our government wobbles like a jelly on a hot plate. There is, perhaps, a lesson there. The British are slow to anger, but when they finally move they tend to move all at once, like a glacier that has suddenly remembered it has an appointment in the valley. One day before 2030 (perhaps on some drizzly Saturday when the Wi-Fi is down and the football has been cancelled for climate reasons) a few million people may gather in London, quietly, politely, but quite immovable. They will not ask for much: merely the return of their country, intact and recognisable.
Until then one nurses the faint, ridiculous hope that history is not yet finished with us. That the Long Stupidity of 2024–29 will one day be spoken of in the same tone we now reserve for the South Sea Bubble or the Children’s Crusade. That a schoolboy in 2040 will tug his grandfather’s sleeve and ask, “Grandad, what was there really a time when we let strangers run the place?” And the old man will smile the thin, wintry smile of a survivor and reply: “Yes, lad. We did something very silly indeed. But we came to our senses in the end. Just in time, as usual.”
If only we hadn’t voted Labour.
And if only, please God, we soon stop.