How Britain’s surrender became a cultural collapse

Key topics:

• MCC clash led to member punishments and sensitivity training

• UK culture seen as degraded, symbolised by Bonnie Blue's fame

• National failure linked to surrender of traditions and value

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By Simon Lincoln Reader*

In July 2023 England hosted the Australian cricket team at Lords, and a moment of curious sportsmanship on the field led to a confrontation off it. As Australia’s David Warner and Usman Khawaja were passing through the storied Long Room at the day’s stumps, a few old MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) members found it appropriate to get up in the player’s grills.

At once this promised to be one of the spectacles I’d spent two decades gagging for: a fight between the descendants of prisoners or Scottish prison wardens, and the descendants of the overlords of those prisoners and wardens. The MCC members were puce and lubed up after an afternoon drinking in the sun – the Australians were fitter and cocky, but to paraphrase Mike Tyson, you’re always cocky until a man in yellow trousers smashes a bottle of Pomerol in your face. 

Sadly, the confrontation came to nothing. Afterwards it was different. 

There were three rows of offending MMC members. The actor Stephen Fry had the year before been elected President of the MCC and tried to put a C into LGBT. Cricket had been convicted of racism in 2021 – despite not being afforded a trial, let alone a defence – so things were touchy.

Members of the first row who had engaged the Australians had their memberships terminated. Members of the second row were given suspended sentences. But the worst punishment befell the third line of members shooting their mouths off to the tourists: they were ordered, discreetly, to attend sensitivity training at a community centre in Camden. So for a week later that year, three of these men – owners of companies, countryside ramblers, gentleman’s club regulars – sat down in a room decorated with Bangladeshi flags to be scolded by a 23-year-old Somali woman, the chief diversity officer for the local council. 

Aim

If the aim was to make these men as comfortable walking down Regent Street during a Pride March in high heels as they were eating Stilton at lunch, it appears to have worked. Last week some rehabilitated members were back at Lords, supporting both Australia (“Cummins’s view on climate change is spot on”) and South Africa (“beastly how Seeril Ramer-pozer was treated in Washington”). 

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They’ve always said that the surrender of men once up for it is a reliable indicator of pending civilisation collapse. From its suburban boomer class, the UK has inherited such vast surrender fatigue that people don’t go out anymore, or they go to bed at 6pm on account of being so exhausted from that day’s capitulation.

It surrenders islands, traditions, quality, opportunity, and worst of all, its senses. After surrender comes failure, and the UK now fails at things it once led the world in – for example, the construction of its major rail infrastructure project, HS2, now suspended in layers of failure by ideology (green tape/zealotry), greed and plain stupidity. Or disbelief. 

Hypothetically, surrender and its natural progressions can be reversed. In the current environment, the UK would probably have to overhaul its political system. It probably wouldn’t survive waiting for this to occur naturally via the passing of the influential boomer generation. Rarely are interventions like this bloodless. 

Consequences

But even if that happened, reversals have no answers to consequences. Things that slip in alongside all the surrendering are barely noticed. One of these dark things was featured in last week’s edition of The Economist. 

I lived on the magazine in my 20s, so I felt that the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was a little unkind when he rubbished it as the “ecommunist” in the early 2000s. Come the teens, and the appointment of an Oxbridge PPE girlboss as editor, it started meeting that threshold. 

But the magazine’s Bagehot column remains one of the English-speaking world’s most prominent presentations, and is still worth occasionally absorbing. Named after Walter Bagehot, a former editor and banker, since 2002 it has been written by a man called Duncan Robinson with views on British public life. And last week Robinson took us into the details of the UK’s fate. 

The column was about Bonnie Blue, the UK’s most famous porn star. On 11 January, Ms. Blue slept with 1,057 men in a single day. These were boyfriends, inner-city gangsters, drug dealers, left-wing journalists, gamers, incels, activists, husbands, and fathers – many wearing balaclavas. Videos of the encounter reveal a queue snaking around the venue, then up and down the fire escape staircases.

The men mostly played on their phones as they waited their turn. Fluffers were employed for the occasion (other OnlyFans personalities), as were cleaners, probably at minimum wage. 

No choice

Degeneracy is not the story here, but the fact that the UK has no choice but to accept this as a feature of its contemporary identity. Ms. Blue, the Bagehot column notes, is the public figure the UK deserves. Through Andrew Breitbart’s eternal wisdom of politics being downstream from culture, Ms. Blue ‘is’ the UK government – because she is now the culture. 

This would make any attempt to reverse the surrender impossible. Citizens who pine for the days when the things they loved – art or sport or natural beauty or literature – hadn’t been fisted by some grievance enquiry, or the synthetic accommodation of trigger warnings, seek not the UK’s previous place in the world but the pride that accompanied it. But pride when damaged by surrender – as Ms. Blue reveals – mutates into its direct opposite. 

This has been a bad week for the UK. Possibly one of the worst. The Home Office audit into Pakistani rape gangs has returned with a shocking feature: such is the scale and history of this crisis that white “anti-racists” no longer have rights of virtue to it, or will be permitted to manufacture false equivalences and get away with them. 

Stepping back three decades, this scandal could possibly be seen as the UK’s greatest surrender, considering the vulnerability of the lives traded. Bagehot cautions that, despite the depravities of Ms. Blue’s rise to prominence, there lies the prospect of some kind of “soft power” emerging. Tell me where. Tell me how. 

This article was first published by DailyFriend and is republished with permission

*Simon Lincoln Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014. In South Africa, he wrote a weekly column for Business Day, then later Biznews.com. Today he is a partner at a London-based litigation funder, a trustee of an educational charity, and a member of the advisory board of the Free Speech Union of South Africa.