One of the quieter ironies of our digital age is how a device no larger than a packet of fags can deliver more existential dread before breakfast than the entire collected works of Schopenhauer. I speak, of course, of scrolling through what used to be Twitter—now X, though the rebranding has done nothing to improve the view—and encountering the latest instalment in the long-running British documentary series High Street Blues. This week’s episode was filmed on Clapham High Street, that once-genteel stretch of South London where, not so very long ago, a man could purchase a decent flat white and a copy of the Guardian without fear of either being trampled underfoot by what the more optimistic among us still insist on calling “youths”.
The footage, helpfully compiled by a chap with the air of a man who has seen one too many Friday afternoons, shows packs of hooded figures swarming the road like starlings that have discovered Red Bull. Traffic is at a standstill. Shopkeepers, displaying the sort of survival instinct one usually associates with gazelles on the Serengeti, are slamming down shutters faster than you can say “diversity is our strength”. The locals—those pale, beleaguered remnants who still remember when Clapham was merely “a bit lively”—scatter with the quiet resignation of extras in a disaster movie who know their lines but have given up on the plot. It is not, the commentator notes with the weary precision of a man reading the small print on his own death warrant, a one-off “youth event”. It is the predictable Friday night special, the sort of thing that happens when you have spent decades importing large numbers of people who appear to regard the civilisation they have colonised with all the affection of a fox in a henhouse.
I am not, I should say at once, a man given to nostalgia. The Britain of my youth had its own share of inconveniences, but we did not, as a rule, require the police to stand around looking helpless while the streets were repurposed as an impromptu adventure playground for the disaffected. In the current production, the boys in blue—or what remains of them—practise a form of community policing that might best be described as “tactical non-intervention”. One suspects the phrase “fear of getting shanked up, init blud” has not yet made it into the official training manual, but it has clearly been absorbed at street level. The constabulary, once famed for their measured truncheons and even more measured tempers, now resemble those Roman legionaries who, in the later days of the Empire, decided that discretion was the better part of valour when the barbarians started looking a bit peckish.
And here, of course, is where the real comedy begins. For the patterns, as they say in the more euphemistic corners of the Home Office, are “disproportionate”. Gangs of one particular hue cause carnage on the streets with the cheerful regularity of a bus timetable. Another group, we are told, has developed a novel approach to traffic management involving high-speed vehicles and pedestrians who had the temerity to be in the way. A third demographic—never named, naturally, for fear of causing offence—appears to have mistaken the country for a particularly poorly supervised dating agency. The excuses arrive with the punctuality of a London bus: “socio-economics”, “boredom”, “the legacy of colonialism”, or that evergreen favourite, “a tiny minority”. One begins to wonder whether the tiny minority in question might not be the one still paying taxes and expecting the rule of law.
It is all terribly depressing, as the original poster observed, and one feels a certain kinship with him. Waking up to this sort of thing day after day is enough to make a man reach for the Horlicks—or, if he is feeling particularly masochistic, the Today programme. The broadcasters, bless their cotton socks, maintain the party line with the serene determination of Victorian missionaries confronted by cannibals. “Integration takes time,” they intone, as though the problem were a soufflé that had merely been taken out of the oven too soon. “We must not generalise.” Quite so. One must never generalise about the fact that certain generalisations keep proving stubbornly accurate. It would be rude.
The great unmentionable, of course, is the one that dare not speak its name in polite society: replacement. Not the sort of replacement one sees in a game of musical chairs, but the slower, more methodical variety whereby entire neighbourhoods are quietly recolonised, street by street, until the original inhabitants find themselves cast in the role of bewildered extras in someone else’s epic. Clapham used to be a decent patch. Now it is another exhibit in the great British enrichment experiment, and the bill, as the man said, keeps coming due. One wonders how many more high streets will have to go the same way before the adults in the room—assuming any are left—admit that the experiment has not so much failed as spectacularly succeeded in producing the exact opposite of what was promised.
The indoctrination, naturally, has been thorough. A good portion of the population has been trained to disbelieve their lying eyes with the fervour of medieval scholastics debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Point out the obvious and you are a “racist”. Suggest that perhaps importing large numbers of people from cultures with rather different ideas about knives, cars, and young women might have unforeseen consequences, and you are “far right”. The rest of us, meanwhile, are invited to celebrate our vibrant new reality while quietly moving the children’s bedrooms to the back of the house and investing in better locks. It is the sort of progressive triumph that would have had Orwell reaching for the gin.
And yet, for all the gloom, there is a certain black comedy to it all. The same people who once lectured us about the evils of empire now watch, with mounting bafflement, as the empire strikes back—in tracksuits. The multiculturalists, having spent decades insisting that all cultures are equal, are discovering that some cultures are rather more equal than others when it comes to public disorder. The politicians, ever eager to triangulate, speak of “tough new measures” while the measures in question consist largely of asking nicely. One almost admires the consistency. It is as though the entire political class has decided that the best way to deal with a house fire is to stand in the garden praising the flames for their diversity.
Will enough ever be enough? The replies to the original post were not encouraging. Some spoke of indoctrination so complete that even the evidence of one’s senses is dismissed as hate speech. Others predicted a slow retreat behind high walls and barbed wire until the final pogrom. A few pinned their hopes on this or that politician who has dared to utter the word “remigration”. I have no great faith in saviours from any quarter. History suggests that civilisations do not collapse with a bang but with a series of embarrassed coughs and a polite request not to make a fuss.
Still, one clings to the small consolations. The shutters on Clapham High Street may be coming down, but the wit of the British people—such as it survives—remains stubbornly aloft. We have, after all, survived worse: the Blitz, the winter of discontent, and several seasons of Love Island. Perhaps the enrichment experiment will one day be remembered as the most expensive practical joke in history. Or perhaps not. In the meantime, I shall continue to scroll, with the grim relish of a man watching his own funeral arrangements being made by committee. It is, as they say, the only show in town. And the tickets, alas, are non-refundable.