The last time I saw Liz Truss as Prime Minister, we were discussing our mutual love of South London.
Truss lives in Greenwich, and I’m in nearby Blackheath. Her elevation to Downing Street had spawned a number of articles focusing on her social circle and, in particular, on her affection for Deptford, the capital’s latest food hotspot.
‘Deptford’s fantastic!’ she told me, before launching into a list of her favourite eateries and watering holes.
Sadly, Liz Truss doesn’t love Deptford anymore.
That’s because our former Prime Minister has joined the ranks of the ‘Union Jack Catastrophists’, that swelling band of cranks and conspiracy theorists who claim the United Kingdom in general, and London in particular, have become a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.
Truss’s hometown was now a haven for ‘an elite that hates Britain’, she told American Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro.
The opening ceremony to our 2012 Olympics – which she had warmly praised at the time, and which featured as its centrepiece James Bond, the late Queen, an appreciation of Britain’s role in the industrial revolution and the creation of the NHS – did not represent ‘the average Briton’, she claimed.
It was time to energise the British ‘patriots’ who ‘generally don’t live in London’, she urged.
According to according to Keir Starmer ‘the NHS is broken. And the Conservatives broke it’
To be fair, this was at least a more sophisticated analysis than that proffered by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe.
Having spent last week chasing after four charity rowers he believed were illegal migrants, the member for Great Yarmouth declared on X that London was now a ‘crime-ridden dump’.
In the wake of these increasingly hysterical and apocalyptic interventions – primarily from those on the fringes of the Right – the liberal intelligentsia has begun to mobilise.
Last week, Times journalist Fraser Nelson penned a lauded piece which claimed, ‘the populist narrative of a migrant-driven crimewave is catnip on social media and oil to the wheels of Reform. But it is so far from the truth that we’re in danger of losing sight of the country we live in’.
And it is indeed important that the Union Jack Catastrophists are challenged. Britain has many problems, and they are mounting. But they are driven primarily by the fact that, to many people, the United Kingdom is actually an incredibly desirable location.
The breakdown in our immigration system and the attendant pressures on housing, the NHS and other infrastructure is testament to British success, not failure.
Similarly, London is bearing the brunt of many of those pressures. But it is still one of the world’s great cities. And has to an extent been insulated from the post-industrial neglect and decline that has blighted a number of other UK regions.
So, the sudden scramble by the progressive Left to counter this malign narrative is necessary. But it might be a touch more effective if that same progressive Left hadn’t itself spent the past decade-and-a-half practising its own brand of Red Flag Catastrophism.
Yesterday, Education Minister Jacqui Smith invited ridicule after attempting to claim the Government was indeed failing to tackle the migrant crisis, but pointing the finger of blame squarely at the previous government. Which perfectly encapsulates the problem
Take the issue of crime. Over the past week, social media has been awash with charts and graphs and tables showing crime rates have actually been falling over the past two decades.
In some categories crime has indeed declined, though in others, there has been a rise. So, the truth is that the picture on crime is complex.
But until recently, it wasn’t at all complex. Not, at least, according to the champions of the Left.
Over the past decade, the nation’s ‘sense of security has been badly eroded. Serious violence is too high. Growing numbers of young people are drawn into gangs, drug dealing and violence at ever earlier ages. Antisocial behaviour blights our town and city centres. Fewer criminals are being caught and punished. More victims are being let down.’
This nightmarish vision wasn’t peddled by Nigel Farage. It was Keir Starmer’s, in his 2024 election manifesto. The wheels oiled by this rhetoric weren’t Reform’s, but Labour’s.
At every election you will hear the same mantra, as if snatched directly from the pages of the Buck Rogers fantasy comic strip: ‘Vote Labour tomorrow. You only have 24 hours to save the NHS!’
According to Keir Starmer last July, ‘The NHS is broken. And the Conservatives broke it.’
And not just the NHS. Peruse the speeches of shadow ministers over the past 15 years. The education system. The transport system. The judicial system. Our armed forces. Everywhere you look, Britain has purportedly been run into the ground.
Red Flag Catastrophism plumbed such depths that even the most senior members of the Government have been forced to admit they had spread the poison too far.
So doom-laden were Labour’s economic prognostications immediately before and after the election, that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were forced to finally acknowledge the concerns of business leaders. That’s why they suddenly – and frantically – began to talk up Great Britain PLC, instead of claiming it had disappeared into a Tory black-hole.
Over the past two decades the picture the Left have painted of Britain hasn’t simply been one of a nation suffering from poor governance. But of a country undergoing a complete social, economic and moral implosion.
Soon after being elected, Labour leader Keir Starmer wrote an article for the Guardian in which railed against the ‘corruption’ he claimed was eating away at the heart of the British state.
‘Last week, the prime minister was pontificating on why the Roman empire collapsed. He notably failed to mention that one of the main factors was that the people grew tired of the arrogance and corruption of their rulers,’ he stormed.
People talk about the hyperbole of the populist Right. But until recently Keir Starmer was perfectly happy drawing parallels between Boris Johnson and Nero, and comparing Britain’s problems with the Visigoths’ sacking of Rome.
At the heart of the current liberal backlash is a perception the Union Jack Catastrophists are using their lurid prophesies of impending national collapse to stir up tensions around immigration and race. Again, with some justification.
And again, that criticism would have greater validity if the liberal Left hadn’t its own proclivity for hyping up social friction.
In 2021 a report commissioned by Downing Street into Race and Ethnic Disparities had the temerity to suggest that, in recent years, the United Kingdom had actually become more ‘open and fairer’.
It was immediately pounced on as being ‘divisive’. Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, said the commission behind the report had ‘chosen to deny the experiences of black and minority ethnic workers’.
A National Audit Office report in January might have been more to her taste. This claimed that Britain is in the midst of an ‘epidemic of violence against women and girls’. It echoed a narrative that has been promoted vigorously by those on the Left, with Keir Starmer making the issue a key focus of his administration.
Until last week, that is, when two of Labour’s political opponents, Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick, themselves took up the cudgels and began to highlight a statistical link between crimes of sexual violence and certain migrant groups.
At which point they were denounced by the Left as hatemongers and buried beneath a blizzard of statistics showing crime rates are actually plummeting.
Yesterday, Education Minister Jacqui Smith invited ridicule after attempting to claim that Government was indeed failing to tackle the migrant crisis – while pointing the finger of blame squarely at the previous Conservative government.
Which perfectly encapsulates the problem.
For years, it suited the liberal Left to talk down Britain, framing us as a nation in cataclysmic decline. But now the boot is on the other foot.
So, yes, the Union Jack Catastrophists must be confronted.
But to do that, the gloom-mongering liberal Left must first acknowledge its own complicity – and hypocrisy.
