Woke Agenda Backfires in Britain

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Britain per capita is experiencing the problem that we had—similar to the problem we had under the Biden administration—massive influxes of illegal immigrants, without audit or background check. Whereas, in our case, they came from south of the border, in Britain’s case, they’re inordinately from the Islamic Middle East.

And they’ve had a series of controversies and incidents and scandals in which Pakistani illegal immigrants have been grooming young British girls in the sex trades. And this was apparently known to authorities. But they felt that it was politically correct, in the age of DEI and woke, to seriously pursue any legal ramifications, until the public was outraged.

And this is in addition to the beginning of massive demonstrations, on the part of the British, Scottish, Irish, Welsh public, to perceived indifference from the United Kingdom Labour Party to the plight of their own citizens. In other words, they’re censoring thought, dissent of British citizens, but not in the same manner they are of illegal aliens. And this translates into some very Orwellian and absurd incidents.

For example, people either showing the Union Jack or the flag of St. George are harassed by authorities, as if this is somehow white chauvinism or insensitive to immigrants’ sensitivities. But it’s OK for immigrants, then, to appear equally chauvinistic, waving a Palestinian flag or mobbing in support of Hamas or practicing their religion in an ostentatious fashion.

But it comes in a larger canvas, and that is Europe, including Britain, is in crisis. Their fertility rate is about 1.4%. Their borders are open. They’ve had millions of people come from the Middle East, unlawfully, without audit. That unassimilated, non-integrated population probably makes up 15% to 16% of the German population, maybe 8% to 10% of the French population, and 4% to 8%, now, of the British population.

So, they’re not able to handle their borders. Their fertility rate is falling. They don’t have the capital or money to defend themselves. They just barely squeak by making the 2% NATO contributions. There’s no way in the world they’ll fulfill their 5% obligations, unless they radically transform their economies. And more importantly, they have a suicidal energy policy of green solar and wind power, at the expense of plentiful and available natural gas, coal, oil, nuclear, hydroelectric.

And so, the result is Europe is in an economic, social, demographic crisis. And one of the manifestations of this is these governments don’t know how to handle criticism, these left-wing governments that gave Europe this problem. They’re under intense pressure from traditionalists to change their policies. They won’t. And it manifests itself in a variety of crazy ways. It’s a strange world.

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