One of the toughest things in politics is trying to explain that, yes, things are bad, but no, they are not quite as bad as you think. I have yet to find a way to make that argument without it being misunderstood or caricatured.
It is an argument that almost every British conservative now finds himself having with American rightists. Yes, things are bad. We have no First Amendment. We had a needless surge of immigration, much of it illegal and involving some seriously bad hombres. Our public sector is riddled with the kind of wokery that has been in retreat stateside since 2024.
At the same time, though, no, things are not that bad. Although dim-witted cops disgracefully feel people’s collars over social media posts, these visits almost never result in prosecutions, let alone convictions. We are not at the point of imposing sharia law on a country that is 94% non-Muslim and in which, even among the 6%, there are plenty of secularists. Crimes by minorities are not systematically covered up.
This last point is perhaps the most difficult to make. The abuse of white girls by gangs of men, mainly of Pakistani background, in Northern and Midlands towns, was a scandal. Social workers, terrified of being accused of racism, did not investigate as vigorously as they should have. Police officers, for the same reason, hung back. In some cases, victims were not believed. There may even have been pressure from local officials not to pursue some suspects.
These things are shameful. The writer Ed West, who doggedly pursued the story from the start, likened it to the child sacrifices demanded by the Canaanite deity Moloch. Anti-racism had become a kind of god to elements of the British public sector — a cruel and hungry god.
It is not true, though, that the crimes were overlooked. The investigative reporter Andrew Norfolk ran a major feature on them at the start of 2011, the first of many front-page stories in the Times. Prosecutions followed, and in 2012, the first gang members were convicted. Was the story as big a deal as it ought to have been? No. The Trumpian vibe-shift had not yet happened, and it was still considered not quite the done thing to dwell on crimes by minorities against white people. When Elon Musk revived the issue on X in 2024, many Brits felt sheepish about not having made more of a fuss earlier. Still, to claim that the story was repressed is nonsense.
Even worse is to make exaggerated claims on behalf of the victims. Rupert Lowe, an MP who broke away from Nigel Farage’s Reform to found the more hard-line Restore party, has just published his own “Rape Gang Inquiry Report”, which begins with a false quotation from Einstein and carries on in a similar vein, mingling genuine crimes with implausible allegations. He asserts, as so many U.S. commentators now do, that 250,000 girls were abused — a figure that has no basis in reality, but was plucked from the air by a UKIP politician. It presents the assaults, not as sexual crimes, but as a kind of jihad — even though every imam has condemned the criminals.
This perception gap might explain Lowe’s popularity among mainstream Republicans. I have noticed that U.S. drama generally recognizes only two British accents: posh and cockney. Lowe is in the first category, with his beautiful suits and silk ties. Tommy Robinson is in the second (the difference between his Luton accent and a properly London one would be missed by many Brits).
Neither man has anything like the reach in Britain that most U.S. conservatives imagine. The first leads a fringe party that will not break into double digits. The second is seen as off-limits by hardcore anti-immigration campaigners because of his repeated run-ins with the law, which he somehow gets away with presenting in the United States as being about free speech.
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Both men paint an apocalyptic picture of life in Britain, one that no one in the United Kingdom recognizes, but that confirms the impressions of those whose chief source of news is X. That is why both men have much larger followings in the U.S. than in their own country.
To repeat, none of this is to say that Britain has no problems. Its society is balkanized, its education system continues to foster division in the name of anti-racism, and, more immediately, its economy, already ropey before its excessive lockdown, is now a total mess. But it is not descending into civil war in the way that the Lowe and Robinson followers imagine, nowhere near. I told you it was a hard argument to make.