A long time ago in Baltimore, I sat outside an Immigration office with my pal, Tom Welsh, ready to answer questions about my worthiness for American citizenship. Because of my mother’s international bank job, I’d spent 20 years since arriving from Cuba as a U.S. resident rather than a citizen. Now a young adult, I looked forward to my entry into the winner’s circle. Tom was there to testify ahead of me that I deserved the high honor. Being slightly less conservative than me, he and I got into a heated political argument. When the Immigration woman came out and called his name, Tom glanced at me and said, “I don’t know now … ”
All my life, I’ve loved the culture, history, courage, and literature of the little island that conquered the world.
All ended well. I became a citizen and am still best friends with Tom. But the funny incident also gave me a valuable early lesson on the right to disagree in a free country. It’s a lesson the once great nation, Great Britain, has quickly forgotten.
It has only been one month since the anemic Conservative Party got deservedly routed in the last UK election. They’d spent the past five years squandering their 2019 landslide by flagrantly ignoring the will of their voters to stem the mass inflow of Muslim immigrants — the vast majority of them hostile to Anglican Judeo-Christian culture. According to the Ministry of Defence, twice as many British Muslims joined ISIS in 2014 than their host nation’s military.
Yet the alien waves kept coming, with little impediment from four successive Conservative Prime Ministers — Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak. Even worse, during the COVID pandemic, Johnson mandated some of the most repressive lockdown measures in Europe. His scandalous personal evasion of them led to his resignation.
Pre-election 2024, the people understood the Labour Party would be a disaster. Yet they could no longer reward a government that insulted their intelligence while blatantly ignoring their top priority. So previous Conservative voters stayed home in July, effecting the lowest electoral turnout since 2001 (barely 60 percent), and producing a Conservative wipeout.
This had to happen due to the Conservative betrayal of the citizenry, as did the nightmare that quickly resulted. For the Labour Party under new PM Keir Starmer bears as little resemblance to that of Tony Blair (1997-2007) as the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton does to today’s mutation under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Both parties have gone full socialist.
Public obeisance to the COVID overlords showed each the infinite power of statism to oppress people and quash dissent. Because for most of Johnson’s and Donald Trump’s terms, the Left had total media control, very much including social media. Anyone who questioned medical or political dictum since proven detrimental — first, lockdowns, vaccines, masking, school and church closings, social isolation, and later the Wuhan Lab COVID source, the Hunter laptop story, and the 2020 election itself — was permanently suspended from every platform without recourse, even the President of the United States, Trump. In every case, the critics were proven right.
In Britain today, Muslim thugs strut the streets, attack women, and menace the “infidel” majority with near absolute impunity. And the government treats them with kid gloves while threatening to crush the opposition. This dichotomy could not hold. Late last month, a Muslim teenager attacked a girls’ Taylor Swift-themed dance class with a knife, killing three little girls and wounding ten more.
The butchery provoked riots all over the country. Government and police officials condemned not Islamic violence but the reasonable people protesting them.
Starmer appeared on video doing a natural impression of an English twit. “I’ve asked for early consideration and the earliest naming and identification of those involved in the process, who will feel the full force of the law,” he said. Then, Starmer really crossed the line into Orwellian 1984 territory, if forty years late, adding, “And thirdly, I’ve been absolutely clear, the criminal law applies online as well as offline.”
Because that’s become the bee in the statists’ bonnet, the difference between yesterday’s hegemonic media tyranny and modern reality: online freedom, courtesy of Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter in 2022 to liberate speech in America minus fear of censorship. Since then, he has become the bane of dictatorships around the world — in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, and now Britain.
Musk’s X is driving the Labour leaders absolutely bonkers, making them international laughingstocks, which only infuriates them further. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, another twit (calling Inspector Morse), particularly beclowned himself last weekend by actually threatening to extradite and imprison American citizens for unwelcome social media posts. “Whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the street or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” warned Rowley. “Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law.”
British troopers are certainly welcome to try. It’s been 250 years since Americans taught them a painful lesson, and they’re long overdue for another. But the sad self-induced decline of once Great Britain makes me very sad. All my life, I’ve loved the culture, history, courage, and literature of the little island that conquered the world. I was with King Arthur in Camelot, Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, Gunga Din in India, Sherlock Holmes on the Yorkshire Moor, and James Bond all around the world.
I hope someday the sun will rise again over the British Isles. Until then, I’ll refer to the UK as the UKSR.
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