Decline redux

On race, decline ... and the Guardian

I have a piece in the Guardian today on the return of declinism, in a new and increasingly racialised form. It’s something i’ve been noting on social media for a while – that every time you open one of the right-wing papers, or click onto Unherd or The Critic, there’s another piece lamenting the demographic collapse of white Brits; how we’re now in the “Yookay”, “the grubby successor state to the country once known as Britain, now possessed by third-world immigrants, alien cultures and mounting anarchy,” in Nick Harris’s words.

In this, as i write:

What we’re now witnessing in the rightwing press is the real-time creation of a new political myth. By calling forth the nightmare of state collapse under the ever-increasing pressure of ethnic conflict and white replacement, the right has managed to cast itself as saviours. The nightmare serves as both a rallying cry and a legitimation: a call to a middle-class base which is feeling the pain of a stagnant economy, that those at fault are the racialised outsiders who bring disorder and drain the state of its already squeezed resources; and a justification for the tough actions needed to stem the tide of immigrants from across the border.

Obviously, there’s only so much you can do in a 1,000 words piece, but it’s important we don’t deny the very real sense of decline in Britain. The economy quite obviously isn’t working, and hasn’t been for the majority for a long time. Same with the state and local services.

One of the clearest signs of this is “the death of the high street”. Venture beyond Zone 3, into the country beyond, and you can’t help but be confronted with a very real degradation of the public realm. The right are in the process of crafting a narrative to explain this – that this economic and social decline is a symptom of changing demographics. We have to resist this, without denying what is actually happening.

You can read the rest of the piece here.