It’s twenty-one years since the original, failed
Thus has History moved on. Where is it bearing us? As we
accelerate into these rapids, there are some who hear the roar of a great
waterfall ahead. Taking a larger view, we all know very well that since the
1980s, other rapids of disintegration have brought about general ruin and
unresolved conflicts, in Indonesia, Eastern Europe, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. So
why not here? The most generally debated scenario along these disastrist lines
goes something like this. The
On the analogy of Serbia or Russia, a resentful and demoted (or even humiliated) elite will then try to preserve its privileged role and, if unsuccessful, obtain revenge by other means. Populist ‘What about us!’ sentiment will be worked up in the notorious British tabloid manner, and is likely to be politically appropriated by otherwise bankrupt or down-at-heel parties and leaders. It’s not clear who is cut out to be Belarus, Bosnia or Chechnya in this perspective. But what is pretty clear is that anybody easily identifiable as an internal enemy or fifth column would have a hard time of it. The big immigrant minorities of England would occupy the most exposed positions here. There could be a malignant growth of what Darcus Howe in The White Tribe called ‘the Dover mentality’ (‘the mark of the beast’); I’ll return to the question of that growth, and what might foster (or arrest) it.
Sometimes this is called the ‘four-nations’ formula, with reference to the supposed four main ethnic countries of the archipelago.footnote2 To sum up: the four-nations formula can be seen as suggesting that, perhaps before too long—while thousands cram into Heathrow on their way home to Jamaica or Pakistan—Jean-Marie Le Pen will be on his way over to address the House of Commons. His chosen theme is ‘Duc Guillaume jusqu’à Guillaume Hague: racines d’une vraie alliance européenne’. Later in the same day Mr. Le Pen is expected to don ermine and join Vladimir Putin as an Honorary Lord of the restructured Second Chamber.
Too easy to mock, I know, when real fears are involved, reinforced by hooligans with knives, by firebombs and institutional discrimination. So what is the alternative? What optional scenarios might more usefully be occupying our minds for ‘after Britain’, or ‘beyond The White Tribe’? More particularly—what most people want to know—are any of these more hopeful and more probable?
Here we encounter a strange problem. Not only is there such an
alternative, there are so many of the damned things that you already need a
dictionary of futurology to help out. Those dazzling blueprints invariably
portray a tidied-up archipelago and globe from which the ogre of nationalism
has been exorcized. In more recent examples the World Trade Organization is
exorcized as well, and history as we know it has indeed ended. Unfortunately at
the same time—and rather worryingly—what Ted Hughes called ‘the salt
taste of reality’ has somehow ended as well. All round Regionalism;
Subsidiarity (in the liturgy of the European Union); Federalism and its
fifty-seven subspecies (asymmetric, hierarchical, confederal, consociational,
and so forth). However wildly different on paper, all such plans are deemed
better than the dreary, out-of-date nation-state. All are guaranteed to satisfy
and so eliminate the supposed atavistic impulses of unrestrained ethnic human
nature:
I’ve made no secret of a personal preference towards a
restructured archipelago (and Europe) of smaller-scale