As yet another scandal of Britain’s ruling class betraying the country is revealed, it is tempting to attribute these treacherous decisions to pure hatred towards Britain on the part of its architects. Surely they must seethe with what Roger Scruton called “oikophobia”.
But this is a lazy and shallow critique. Casting politicians as possessed by pure evil and hatred, or concocting conspiracies about them being controlled by some shadowy force, obscures any kind of understanding about why they keep making such harmful decisions, and therefore how a continuation of these self-harming policies can be avoided in future.
In a sense, the true motivations are far more banal — composed of a series of sentimentalist moral commitments that place a low salience on ensuring the well-being of the British people, and a high priority on “doing good” around the world, whatever the cost. Britain’s political class, and especially its NGOs, have a view of the role and moral purpose of the British state which is quite different to the population at-large. Rather than being an entity sustained by the British people to act in its interests, the British state is viewed as a vehicle to improve people’s welfare, in part in Britain, but also all around the world. A variation of this worldview is occasionally made explicit, such as when Gus O’Donnell, the former Cabinet Secretary, confided: “When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration…. I think it’s my job to maximize global welfare, not national welfare.”
Such a worldview may seem, prima facie, reasonable enough; raising global welfare seems a noble aim, and if it can be done in tandem with improving British welfare, then what’s the problem? But trade-offs quickly emerge, and for too long this worldview allowed Britain’s ruling class to engage in their own paternalistic pet projects at the expense of the British people. In more benign cases, it led to farcical endeavours, like paying for NGOs to gallivant around one of the poorest regions of the world and teach confused Afghans about the importance of Duchamp’s Urinal. However, things quickly get a lot less funny once that blasé attitude towards British welfare means that policies certain to cause enormous harm to the country, beyond just their fiscal cost, are recklessly pursued.
The revelation that Britain has been covertly resettling Afghans into the country at a cost of up to £7billion, kept secret under a super-injunction, shows just how extreme the prioritisation of the welfare of those outside of Britain, coupled with a complete disregard for the welfare or interests of the British people, has become. In his meek attempt to explain away the scandal, Sir Ben Wallace, the then-Defence Secretary, explained “that the first priority was to protect all those that might be at risk. My primary concern was their welfare. My priority was not the UK government, nor politics, it was the veterans and those who we needed to get out”.
At no point did it seemingly occur to Britain’s Defence Secretary that perhaps his primary concern ought to be the defence of the British nation. Instead, amidst a hysteric political climate in which all sorts of obscenely onerous obligations to the Afghan nation were floated, Wallace made the welfare of Afghans his utmost priority, happy to embark on an unprecedented cover-up of the government’s actions in the process. Indeed, those operating from a worldview guided by unmoored sentimentality seem particularly prone to acquiescing to the ridiculous demands of whatever moral fad happens to be passing by, always keen to signal that they are “good people” and often twisting whatever principles they may have claimed to hold to remain on the right side of the latest issue. Coupled with a fickle intellectual fortitude, it results in people like Wallace earnestly claiming that when Allied troops bravely stormed the beaches of Normandy, “they did so so that Black lives would matter”.
Though his actions displayed a reckless and unforgivable disregard for the British nation, it would be disingenuous to claim that Wallace was motivated in any way by hatred towards his own country or a desire to destroy it. In fact, his reasoning was simple enough: he believed Britain had an absolute moral obligation toward guaranteeing the welfare of this cohort of Afghans, and pursued actions to that end. In a similar vein, many of the most ludicrous cases involving foreign criminals being allowed to remain in Britain, often at great risk to the British people, are a result of a moral worldview that believes in and then prioritises a set of obligations on the part of the British state towards people from all around the world. These obligations are held to be absolute, and any harm that comes to British people in their pursuit is treated as acceptable collateral damage. Dissent from this view — the belief that those obligations have a hard limit or can be reneged upon — lies at the crux of the debate on issues like leaving the ECHR or how small boat crossings are to be dealt with.
The whole ethos of the British state needs reorienting to the view that it has a primary obligation towards the welfare of the British people
Demanding that Britain’s ruling class be deposed and replaced by one that simply doesn’t hate its own country is an appealingly simple way of skirting around the true cause of so much that has gone wrong with Britain: unbounded sentimentality. An alternative vision should be honest from the outset about how it differs from the currently dominant one and how this will actually serve the interests of the British people, rather than retreating to a false dichotomy between people who love the country and those who hate it. This means being blunt about where the British state’s obligations end — for example, stating clearly that Britain doesn’t have an obligation to every mercenary it once employed to resettle them and their families and forever guarantee their welfare.
In other words, the whole ethos of the British state needs reorienting to the view that it has a primary obligation towards the welfare of the British people above all else, with any other obligations taking a secondary role and only valid insofar as they are congruent with the former. This would represent a complete inversion of the dominant moral worldview that has held sway over Britain’s ruling class for decades and become deeply embedded into every level of every British institution. Achieving such a volte-face is so monumental a task as to make one wish the problem instead was as simple as Britain’s ruling class hating its own country.
