What Should Be Done About Britain’s Impending Collapse?

There is a rising sense, on at least our side, that the world, and, specifically, the United Kingdom, is in a state of crisis, collapse or incipient civil war. What should be done?

We have significant figures who argue for various things that should be done. The things are more important than the people who advocate them. But it is hard to hold onto thoughts. Concrete is more memorable than abstract. So I want to identify the things that we should do with those who, it seems to me, are arguing for them the hardest. Saying what should be done is a collective activity, and I see many people contributing to it. But we should all row together, as in a college eight.

A college eight is a boat rowed by eight men, or eight women, as in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. In this piece I am playing cox: trying to suggest that everyone row in time. I have to put this in my own words, so I apologise to any of the rowers, should they read this. You can check their own words, as they exist in book form, or, more usually, now, in videos to be found on YouTube. I think it is regrettable, to some extent, that in our age speech is favoured over the written word, but perhaps speech does enable truth to be told, because untruth when vocalised sounds so hollow, whereas the written word, unless used very well, conceals much sin. Anyhow, here are the eight.

1. Dominic Cummings

We have to strip out the Civil Service and the Cabinet Office – the established and fixed orders that hide behind politicians and actually order everything – since they are dominated by deranged political views. In other words, we have to defenestrate the deep state. This is the serious part of what Cummings says. I think he still has an inadequate view of the politically-fabricated pandemic, and that his enthusiasm for technology misleads him or, let us say, leads him in an excessively rationalist direction that has to be countered by some other elements, which I list below.

2. Toby Young

We should establish an equivalent of an American First Amendment, so that freedom of speech is encouraged rather than discouraged, and ultimately recognised as part of our established order. The corollary of this is that we have to recognise that what we used to call ‘political correctness’ is now an official ideology, that it is dominant in education, administration, the media and even corporations, and that it should be destroyed.

3. Jon Moynihan

We should attempt to restrict taxation, spending and regulation for the sake of the economy and entrepreneurialism and, in the last instance, survival.

4. Jonathan Sumption (and Noel Malcolm)

We should encourage a return to a sense that English politics is only inadvertently a matter of law and legislation, and originally was, and should be, a matter of convention. Convention is a matter of culture, especially political culture. We cannot fix everything by law, which is naïve. We certainly need to evade the ‘living instrument’ policy whereby the European Court of Human Rights is usurping political function.

5. John Gray

A hyperbolic liberalism or even hyper-progressivism has taken over all our institutions, and the only way back to good order is to restore power to Parliament, to affirm a Hobbesian state – that is, to assert as a fundamental constitutional principle that the rule of law is secondary to the existence of a capable and responsible state. If the state farms out its functions to subsidiary bodies, then the rule of law will be worthless and, indeed, sclerotic, like an expensive cancer, though a very odd cancer that can only be treated, it seems, with more cancer, adding medication to metastasis.

6. David Starkey

We need to understand history. The history of England embodies a valuable tradition of caution and conservatism. We have always tended to avoid disorder and its supposedly positive analogue, revolution. Our only real revolution, Oliver Cromwell’s, was almost immediately reversed but through subtle modification. Indeed, the Magna Carta, the great charter itself, was originally a revolutionary document, an attempt to establish a committee of public safety, which was happily soon republished in an edited form, by William Marshal, to become in effect a conservative reform. What is needed, practically, is a restoration that will enable the grand Fortescue-Halifax tradition of politics and trimming to continue wisely into the future.

7. Jamie Franklin

We have to recognise that England is being destroyed by secularity, and that there needs to be some sort of restoration of not only a Christian sensibility but also a Christian establishment. English is a language, and it is in part a secular language, but in its medieval roots, and in the Tyndale-Coverdale-Authorised translations, it was ultimately a religious language. Stripped from those roots, it will become a second language of a deranged and demoralised universality.

8. Nigel Biggar (RIP Roger Scruton, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Oakeshott)

I don’t quite have a name for this of someone who is alive, as I have not seen many people thinking about it on the scale it requires. However, Biggar may be considered the tip of a spear. As Biggar notes, decolonisation is a problem, and fixation on historic slavery is a distraction, a vast moral distraction that supports a frivolous moralism in the universities. We need to reform the entire academic system, so that we reverse engineer a frivolous and fragmented literature, and begin a reversal whereby we recreate a unified though diverse cultural order in which contributions can be made which are serious and which are heard. This would involve diminishing the status of academic literature until it comes out of its many caves. It would involve attempting to teach not only science but sensibility. This would mean a restoration of classics, of literary studies and history, including the history of ideas, argument and utterance. But above all we need philosophy and an interest in truth.

This is what should be done. And NB almost all of these arguments are restorative. John Gray is highly critical of any sort of politics of restoration, but, ironically, he himself urges the restoration of one thing.

So everyone will differ about what sort of restoration is needed. Starkey, Cummings and Moynihan explicitly use the status quo ante of 20 or 30 years ago, not necessarily as a reactionary or nostalgic ideal, but as a familiar image of a world that worked better than the world does now. This works to some extent, but does not work insofar as the rot itself has deep roots, and insofar as things were in fact set in motion in the 19th century and 20th century, especially in the 1940s as a black-and-white welfare state was established, and in the 1960s as it became a colour welfare state. The glories of late English culture in music and drama obscured the fact that the material improvements of our time overlaid a spiritual collapse. The suggestions, especially when they are asserted by their exponents, come into conflict. Starkey would not agree with Franklin etc.

But most simply:

Either

we want the globalised, mediocre, educated-elite culture to perpetuate its universal, irresponsible, legal-fantastical, gated and immigrant-supported community beliefs of LGBT, Covid-and-climate-and-wokery order, leading to the breakdown of all responsible government

Or

we do not.

Many do, it seems. Almost all my old friends I think do – I do not know, since I no longer hear from them. But if we do not then we have to:

• restore the efficiency of the state bureaucracy (strip out the deep state),
• restore freedom of speech (to prevent stupid ideologies taking over our order),
• restore the economy (cut government, cut taxes, cut regulation),
• restore conventions (restrain law and civilise politics),
• restore the state as a decisive and properly political entity
• restore a sense of history (in order to ensure all other restorations are carried out wisely)
• restore religion (and a balanced yet firm establishment)
• restore education (for the sake of a high common culture)

The rest is… details. The Boats, Stonewall, Net Zero, Assisted Dying etc. are actually side problems, and easily stemmed or corrected (they are epiphenomenal): though they are now colossal in their consequences. The deeper changes required are the eight I have listed. It should go without saying that climate policy should be discussed in terms of whether it is necessary or wise. All policy should be. But we are now at the point where we cannot discuss policy without discussing the conditions in which we discuss policy. Fashionable suggestions of the sort we find in mass publication books – suggestions which involve more law, more state, more tax, more regulation, less freedom of speech, more academic research, less religion, more born-yesterdayness – should be not only be ignored but condemned. Until the condemnation of folly is louder than folly we are unlikely to live in a very good order: all the good will be what it has always been under tyrannies, simply a matter of private and not public life.

Perhaps I should have added that we should restore something like a traditional sexual and marital doctrine. This could be a ninth suggestion. The reification of sex is one of the great astonishing developments of the last century, and we have all suffered from it, more or less. I have no idea how we could restore a world in which sex was seen again to be a means to something other than itself, something to be disciplined and trained and structured in terms of responsibility. I am in no position to lecture anyone on this. But it seems that something should be done here too. Perhaps it would follow naturally from the restoration of other aspects of good order.

Finally, it is possible that technology and AI has already entrenched our folly too far. I think hostility to them, in principle, is valuable. All I can say about this is that there should be some sort of vigilance and moral responsibility, applied to how we continue to make sense of this. But, be that as it may, neither vigilance nor responsibility can flourish if we are ruled by a deep state dominated by a stupid ideology sanctioned by a compliant academy living off the proceeds of an extractive almost bankrupt state.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.