To say that Britain, wrestling with the consequences of the unprecedented mass immigration of recent years, is an increasingly divided, unhappy country is coming close to becoming a commonplace. The warning signs of trouble ahead are easy enough to see, from the increasingly repressive governance (and the “two-tier” nature that repression can take) to the first entry into Parliament of a sectarian “grouping” (the Gaza Independents) from the British mainland.

Please note that word, the “mainland.” MPs from Northern Ireland have been a notable exception. Speaking of which, writing in The Critic, Aris Roussinos wonders whether it is:

going too far to declare a creeping Ulsterisation of English politics? In a response to their demographic decline, currently mostly focusing on the British state’s loss of control of the nation’s borders one would have expected the English to adopt a similar siege mentality to that of Ulster’s Protestants, whose “conditional loyalty” to the British state has always been dependent on the sense that it was safeguarding their ethnic interests. It now appears that they have.

Roussinos’s article is well worth reading. Is its author right to be thinking that matters could be headed the way he indicates? I’m not fully convinced, and not only because of the care that should be taken with historical precedent. Nevertheless, such ideas cannot just be brushed away. There is a cloud on Britain’s horizon, and it is already bigger than a man’s (red?) hand.

Roussinos:

In England, flags are re-adopting a territorial nationalist or communitarian quality, just as they always have in Northern Ireland and as is increasingly the case with the Palestine flag in South Asian Muslim areas of Britain. Yet the similar ambiguities over the politics of the flag, sometimes civic and sometimes ethnic nationalist, is also true in the case of Scotland and Wales, if there deriving from Britain’s foundational ethnic conflicts. How the new politics of mass migration will interact with the Westminster state’s already fraught management of three existing ethnic separatist movements is so far an unknown quantity. Through its own ineptitude, Britain’s political class has created a situation of almost unimaginable complexity, whose outcome is impossible to predict.

Roussinos’s arguments are careful, clever, intricate, and not suitable for a quick summary in a post, but they will merit more discussion in the future, not least his intriguing analysis of the role played by Nigel Farage’s Reform party.

But when Roussinos writes the following, it is hard to deny that he is right:

The Westminster state has spun itself into a web of legal, moral and essentially aesthetic obligations which it cannot easily escape, in its current form anyway. How can Starmer smash the gangs when the biggest smuggling gang of all — in its lavish inducements to game the asylum process, and its fawning attitude to the rent-seeking and gray economies propped up by mass migration — is the British state itself?

To be clear about this, the “Westminster state” Roussinos describes, at least as I read that word, did not just start behaving this way with the arrival of Keir Starmer’s Labour into power. These problems have been accumulating since Tony Blair’s time, and on the Tories’ “watch” (if that is the best way to describe that continuing exercise in institutionalized — to be charitable — negligence) too.

And the direction of the “state” that Roussinos describes is set by much more than Parliament or government.