What is Left of England and the English People?

Reflections on "this England" as the latest empty vessel Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, resigns.

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise...
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

-Shakespeare, Richard II

On a recent visit to London I spent days wandering around my favorite spots in South Kensington, Chelsea, and Mayfair, and many happy hours strolling in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. I had lunch in the Orangery of Kensington Palace, high tea at the Goring Hotel in Belgravia, and met a friend for lunch at the Savile Club.

One day, an old English friend who happened to be in town for a few days — before returning to his more affordable home base in Kuala Lumpur—joined me for a long walk through Bloomsbury, Soho, and Mayfair. We popped into the Lamborghini showroom on Berkeley Square to gawk at cars. A very young and handsome Dutchman was already there, flirting with the beautiful young woman who worked in the showroom.

“Are you thinking about buying a Lambo?” I asked him.

“Uh, yeah,” he said indecisively, glancing at the girl.

“Are you a scion of an old Dutch East India Company fortune?” I asked.

'Uh, I think so,” he replied.

From Lamborghini, we walked over to James Purdey & Sons to look at handmade shotguns.

“Who are your biggest customers these days?” I asked the man who worked in the main salon.

“Mostly Americans,” he said.

We left Purdey’s and walked to my friend’s club for a beer.

“Say what you want about London, it’s still an incredibly wealthy city,” I observed.

“Yes, but little of the wealth you observe belongs to English people,” he replied. “Few Englishmen can afford these fancy places and products on display in London. In fact, only about thirty-six percent of the population of London is ethnic English.”

One night, at a swanky rooftop birthday party for a City banker, I fell into conversation with a man who took a different view of the matter.

As he told me, “Your rightwing American pundits—guys like Tucker Carlson—are totally exaggerating our problems in this country. All the chatter about excessive immigration and crime and political dysfunction is wildly overblown.”

“I am mainly concerned about the infringement of free speech in this country,” I said.

“There is no infringement of free speech in this country,” he replied.

I mentioned a report in the Times last spring that over 12,000 people had been arrested in Britain in 2023 for online speech violations.

“That’s not true,” he replied.

So, what is the truth about Britain? Survey data of the primary concerns expressed by people in England, Wales, and Scotland are the following:

1. Cost of Living and the Economy

• Prices: High inflation and expensive energy bills remain major worries, leaving households dealing with high debt.

• Growth: The government is trying to increase the country’s weak productivity and find the money to repair crumbling public services.

2. The National Health Service (NHS)

• Wait times: Long delays for routine hospital treatments and emergency care are major concerns.

• Funding: The health service faces high demand from an aging population while managing limited budgets.

3. Immigration and Borders

• Asylum system: Debates over how to process asylum seekers and control illegal border crossings remain dominant political issues.

4. Housing

• Shortages: A lack of affordable housing and high rent prices make finding suitable homes a widespread problem.

5. Climate Change and Energy

• Green transition: Moving to clean energy while keeping household utility costs down is a difficult policy balancing act.

These problems apparently proved too much for Sir Keir’s government, prompting to announce his resignation today. He will likely be replaced by Andy Burnham, who previously served as the Mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017 to 2026 and MP for Leigh from 2001 to 2017. Before becoming mayor, he held several cabinet positions, lastly as Secretary of State for Health from 2009 to 2010 under Gordon Brown. He identifies himself as a socialist and part of the soft left faction of the Labour Party.

If I were advising Burnham, I would tell him to start by abolishing the suicidal policies of Green Energy and Russian Bear-Baiting. As I point out in my forthcoming book, Mind Viruses, the irrational obsessions with “climate change” and the Russian bogeyman are extremely profitable for certain financial, industrial, and military interests, but are massively deleterious for the great majority of citizens.

I suspect that Burnham is another globalist stooge who—like Mark Carney in Canada an Friedrich Merz in Germany—will continue the same destructive policies of his predecessor until he, like Starmer, resigns after only a couple of years in office.

I often think of my old professor, Roger Scruton, who died on January 12, 2020, just before the Covid pandemic, and I wonder what he would think about Britain today.

The last time I spoke to him was in November 2018, when I congratulated him for being appointed chair of the UK government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

“I doubt I’ll be allowed to keep the position for long,” he replied. “There are many people who don’t want me in it.”

A few months later, on April 10, 2019, I wasn’t surprised by the news that he was fired. His sacking occurred after a journalist named George Eaton, formerly the deputy editor of the New Statesman, published an interview with him. Eaton used partial and edited quotes—wildly out of context—to frame Scuton as a racist and homophobe.

Following the firing, Eaton posted an Instagram picture of himself drinking a bottle of champagne with the caption: “The feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government adviser.”

Scruton spent much of his professional life trying to define and defend England in accordance with his distinctly conservative worldview. Lord Salisbury (Prime Minister 1885 – 1892 and 1895 – 1902) was his ideal British statesman.

Sir Roger knew that his life’s work was an uphill battle. Once, over dinner at his farm, he explained to me that the idealistic project of trying to conserve a culture is doomed by the fact that we only become fully conscious of a culture worth conserving when it is already passing away. To illustrate his point, he cited Hegel’s famous remark in his preface to the Philosophy of Right.

. . . only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only with the gathering of the dusk.

In plain English, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”