The Rise of Hateful Little England

Apparently the UK has its own alt-Right. Should anyone defend British culture in the wake of the immigration wave? Is there a way for the UK to assimilate the new immigrants?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/15/the-rise-of-hateful-little-england.html

The Rise of Hateful Little England
After the Brexit, hate crimes have exploded and Britain’s new government fuels an economic disaster by purging universities and businesses of foreigners.
Clive Irving

LONDON — This city feels like the capital of a country that has been hijacked by a tribe for whom London represents everything that they hate: they hate its prosperity, its cosmopolitanism, its social diversity, its cultural exoticism, its bawdiness and most of all its un-Englishness.
The hijackers are the Little Englanders, a noisome and virulent strain of nativism that has taken power in Westminster. For several generations they had been successfully marginalized. Now they are mainstream, put there by the vote to leave the European Union, Brexit. They dominate the ruling Conservative party and came to power, narrowly, as unexpected winners, gloating.
But the nation has suddenly woken up to a calamity. The Brexiters had no plan for how to proceed. The new government is clueless.

Indeed, Brexit is proving to be the greatest single destruction of economic value ever carried out deliberately as an act of policy by a British government.
In the last two weeks the pound sterling has hit a 60-year low against the dollar (a dive greater than that of the Argentine peso) and economists are warning that by the end of 2017 it could sink to a one-to-one parity with the dollar.
But never mind the metrics, they are bad enough but something more sinister is under way. By far the most decisive issue driving the Brexit campaign was immigration. Anti-immigrant sentiment was first stirred by Nigel Farage, the oleaginous leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP (currently a smarmy camp follower of the Trump campaign). UKIP released the toxin but it soon spread far beyond their constituency and was fueled by opportunist Brexit campaigners on the far right of the Conservative party.
And here we get to the evil banality of the whole movement. The Brexiters are fundamentally delusional. The delusion is a form of patriotism based not on the traditional flag-waving of great power conquests, but on a pureness of nationhood that in order to be preserved must withdraw from all external influences and engagements.
This retreat into a demented xenophobia sits oddly with its opposite: the centuries-long conviction that the world needed to be civilized by the only force enlightened enough to deliver it: English imperialism.
And, in a performance that would be entertaining were it not so consequential, these contradictory versions of English exceptionalism are displayed in one man, the man who more than any other politician was responsible for the Brexit campaign’s narrow win in the July referendum: Boris Johnson.

But then contradiction has never bothered Johnson. As a two-term mayor of London he rode the London economic rollercoaster. On his watch and helped by his gift for boosterism the capital city became a model of outward-looking commercial engagement, the equal of New York as an engine of unfettered capitalism and exceeding New York in its embrace of globalization—the very same globalization that Brexiters blamed for a flood of immigrants that they believed was taking their jobs and contaminating their island culture.
Mayor Johnson became simply “Boris”—a beguilingly nimble player on the national stage, instantly recognized by his thatch of unruly blond hair that was seized upon by cartoonists as visual shorthand — He grew happily into the role of glib clown, always ready be a prop in publicity stunts.
But people who had dealings with Johnson as mayor have told me that beneath the mask of clown there was always a man of ruthless ambition. He was never interested in detail. His management style was hands-off to the point of negligence. And his end game was clear: become prime minister.
He wrote a biography of Churchill and affected Churchillian gestures—forward-looming brow and a fondness for aphorisms.
After leaving the mayor’s office Johnson’s ambition was pretty clear to David Cameron, the prime minister and leader of the Conservative party. Cameron and his circle disliked Johnson and did their best to keep him in a box. But Johnson saw a path to power through the party’s lunatic fringe, a restless right wing of Little Englanders who had always hated Europe.
Apostasy followed. Johnson the champion of the big world view shamelessly became Johnson the rebel and most potent voice of the Brexit movement.

Party insiders believe that Johnson never expected Brexit to prevail. After boldly leading the charge and having a noble defeat he would be established as a party leader in waiting—waiting for Cameron to stumble. Instead, Cameron’s campaign to keep Britain in the European Union failed.
But Johnson was still denied the prize. He was too discredited by his switch to Brexit.
The party instead chose Theresa May. She had not supported Brexit but her support for Cameron had been muted. And one of her first and most inexplicable acts was to appoint Johnson as foreign secretary, a choice that at best was seen as a cynical move to keep the support of the Little Englanders and at worst as a serious error of judgment. The idea of Johnson having your back induces paranoia, not comfort.

Since then an extraordinary thing has happened. It seems that all along there have been two Johnsons living under the same blond mop. There is Johnson the loyal servant of Little England and then there is Johnson the lover of England’s global hegemony. He told his party’s annual conference, to great applause:
“When I go into the Map Room of Palmerston I cannot help remembering that this country over the last two centuries has directed the invasion or conquest of 178 countries.”
The Map Room is in the Foreign Office, today as much a museum of empire as a working office. Lord Palmerston was both foreign secretary and twice prime minister when he directed the final conquests of empire in the Victorian era—he can be imagined strutting the Map Room and pointing a finger at the next piece of the earth that required an imposed dose of civilization.
It may be that Johnson’s apparent schizophrenia does actually embody the real tragedy underlying the Little Englander mentality. They dream of the power that subjugated the peoples of 178 countries but they also accept that it can now only ever be a dream. Simultaneously they accept the diminishment of their country’s world role. It is a price worth paying if it preserves the values they believe to be uniquely English—the values that enabled and underpinned the glory of empire.
Of course, this meets a classic definition of madness—to be able to hold both views and still see them as a reasonable basis of political belief.
It did not take long to see where this kind of madness would take Theresa May.

The London School of Economics is much more than its name implies. For generations it has been an incubator of progressive political and social ideas as well as educating 34 future heads of state and 18 Nobel laureates. Some of its graduates even went on to lead revolutionary movements that ended British rule in the colonies. It was, and is, a symbol of British academic open-mindedness.
Imagine, then, the outrage when May’s government announced that the group of experts who would be advising officials in Johnson’s Foreign Office on the technical details of negotiating British exit from Europe would be purged of anyone who did not have a British passport—even though LSE academics who were not British citizens had already been recruited.
Showing remarkable restraint, the LSE protested: “We believe academics, including non-UK nationals, have hugely valuable expertise, which will be vital in this time of uncertainty around the UK’s relationship with Europe and the rest of the world.”
The appearance of discrimination on the basis of nationality—with all its echoes of Nazi Germany in the 1930s—was reinforced when Amber Rudd, who took over the Home Office (a combination of the equivalents of the Department of the Interior and Homeland Security) from Theresa May, said that more positions in British universities and businesses should be reserved for those of British birth. (About 15 percent of the research and teaching staff at British universities are from Europe.)
Rudd even said that companies should have to hand over lists of their foreign workers to the government. There are 3 million citizens of European Union countries working in Britain who now feel under threat of deportation once the process of Brexit is complete.