By Dr Fredrick Wolf.
This essay poses a question through a lens from the North American side of the Atlantic. It is written by one who spent more than a few years in Britain and received much of his postgraduate education in its institutions. The hope here is to do justice to the essay’s title.
Britain has long carried a moral sense of unity between its people and its government. Since the Allied victory in the Second World War, a kind of “moral tension” has existed between the British people and their rulers.
The Crown and its subjects – together – had prevailed over what they perceived as an existential threat to their nation. This sense of unity fostered a belief among the populace that government generally acted in their best interests. Yet today, this belief may have become a false sense of security.
For the first half of the twentieth century, the moral culture of the British elite – and thus those who wielded power through government – operated broadly in line with the moral culture of the British people. By and large, they agreed on what constituted the will of the nation.
Beginning in the 1960s, however, academia on both sides of the Atlantic came under the sway of postmodernism, multiculturalism and, in time, globalism. Generations of the British elite were shaped by these new ideologies, and successive governments have since moved progressively to embed them in policy. The sociopolitical upheavals playing out in Britain today are a testament both to the influence of these ideas and to the reaction of a sizeable portion of the public against them.
A new moral culture
The British populace has yet to fully appreciate that a new moral culture has taken root within government, one that is used to advance political agendas with which the majority of people do not necessarily agree. Britain has been subjected to deliberate immigration policies introduced years ago, with communities now transformed by rapid demographic change. These populations are protected and encouraged by government as a way of legitimising both its foreign and domestic policies.
Most people continue to interpret this as the result of incompetence or inefficiency in government — a short-term aberration that will eventually be rectified after the next election. The problem, however, is that this is not accidental: it is an ideology-driven policy consciously conceived and now actively policed to sustain. Its underlying justification lies in structural problems within the British economy — a low birth rate, a shortage of cheap labour, excessive public debt and a growing debt-servicing burden. Governments of both parties have justified immigration as a way to increase population and tax revenues simultaneously, thereby offsetting fiscal pressures created by continued deficit financing of the welfare state.
What the public often fails to see is that these policies are not merely pragmatic economic measures, but the expression of a broader ideological project. They are designed to promote the postmodernist, multicultural and ultimately globalist orientation of the British elite. This has been particularly pronounced under Labour governments.
Thus far, the general public has either been unaware of this phenomenon, or unwilling to confront it, since doing so would mean accepting that government is no longer acting in concert with the people to achieve what is best for them.
It seems clear that this new moral culture is not shared by most Britons. Yet the realisation that government has set itself in opposition to the will of the majority has not fully “achieved consciousness”. As a result, the public remains in a kind of moral holding pattern: unable to mount a serious collective resistance to what is being imposed upon them, and uncertain how they might halt it.
A British identity?
It has been over 220 years since Nelson, at the Battle of Trafalgar, famously signalled: “England expects that every man will do his duty.” Today, however, Britons seem to struggle to connect their modern communities with that historical continuum of what it means to be British.
Generations of Britons had “British values” informally instilled through their schooling. But controversy has arisen over whether the 2014 legislation requiring that such values be explicitly defined and embedded in curricula is in fact harmful to minorities by promoting “Britishness”.
By comparison with more robust Celtic, Continental, Hindu or Muslim identities, the very nature of “British identity” may now appear thin and fragile. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the idea of being British was increasingly subsumed into the broader civic identity of the “United Kingdom”, ostensibly to prevent minority communities, particularly the Celts, from feeling marginalised within the body politic.
Britain today seems wearied by the erosion of objective truth under postmodern relativism and its rejection of national traditions and cultural history. Multiculturalism’s bias towards globalism rather than sovereignty has further weakened the ability of the nation to reclaim the centre ground of public life, or even to argue that there should be a distinct, objective and quintessentially British locus of affairs.
So can it be said that the British people have lost the community life that once nurtured their sense of national belonging? Has the idea of British identity withered to the point that the very notion of debating what it means to be British feels alien to public discourse, if not to national existence itself?
The greatest concern for Britain is not necessarily the number of migrants arriving on its shores, but the ideology of postmodernism driving the political class — left and right alike — to promote multiculturalism’s ultimate aim of globalism at the expense of sovereignty, of the people, and of their understanding of what it means to be British.
The people of Britain must never lose — or, God forbid, have taken from them — their sense of what it means to be British.
- Fredrick Wolf, Ph.D., is former USAF Intelligence (Lt.Col.) and professor of philosophy (U.S. and South Africa). He is director of a research organisation (The Fulcrum Institute) on both sides of the Atlantic, focusing on U.S. foreign policy as it relates to NATO, BRICS+ and the Middle East. Dr Wolf He taught philosophy and humanities in the US and S. Africa before retiring from university.
- The Fulcrum Institute is a new organisation of current and former scholars, which engages in research and commentary, focusing on political and cultural issues on both sides of the Atlantic. Their interest is in American foreign policy as it relates to the economic and foreign policies of the NATO countries, the BRICS+ nation-states and the Middle East. They work towards an economic and political world in which more voices and less bombs are heard – with America playing a less interventionist role in that regard.
