British culture from an outsider's perspective (or, From Common Law to Clapham Common)

A response to Ash Sarkar

I committed a crime in Italy. I bought a frappuccino at 11:30am and did not sit down outside to enjoy it with my friends. Instead, I left hastily, plastic cup in hand, like an uncultured American. Sitting outside and gossiping with your mates over coffee all morning is what they call la dolce vita. This is unique to Italy, apparently, and one Italian even suggested to me that it’s unfortunate Britain doesn’t have the sort of culture where people can ever congregate outside to have a chat over many beverages. For a brief moment, I wished that Britain had followed the policy recommendations of ‘Gaylussite’ and spent all of the Concorde money on al fresco dining spaces and a full-scale pedestrianisation of the M25.

Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar agrees. I will dissect a widely-shared clip from a podcast featuring Sarkar and the seemingly omnipresent Aaron Bastani, who can be seen vigorously nodding along to such profound statements as ‘…the Americanisation of our culture’ and ‘the loss of local identities’.

Sarkar blames Boomers and Hollywood for the supposed total corporate takeover of leisure and entertainment, and goes on to ramble about French kids playing football on the streets of Marseille. This, we are told, is ‘French culture’ (apparently insulting one European country’s culture wasn’t enough); by contrast, in Britain, kids are forced by NIMBYs onto AstroTurf Powerleague pitches or — worse yet — grass on a field with actual goalposts. She claims that in the south of France, there is dancing, food, wine, and loud music late into the night. Sadly, in Britain, there is no such dancing, food, wine, or loud music late into the night because everybody’s brain has been fried by Netflix and Fox News, and also because Margaret Thatcher shut down all the coal mines. Nobody on this accursed isle has ever had any fun, or at least they haven’t since Cromwell (their Hitler before Hitler) banned it.

She then reminisces about some village festival she once saw in Italy (thereby insulting a third European country):

…in Italy, where you’ve got such a strong sense of identity, I ended up in a conga line around the village square because they were celebrating the priest having been there for fifty years and they were having a big party… these are the things that have been destroyed not by immigration, but by capitalism and secularism. What are the things which preserve a sense of really, really specific local identity?

From the symptoms outlined above, my diagnosis is that Ash Sarkar is suffering from an illness that the scientists call old age (prognosis: terminal). This is analysis drawn from a TikTok video, not a serious observation of another culture. I am apparently to believe that Italy is culturally superior to Britain because a bunch of Boomers ran a conga line in a public space; a form of dance, it should be added, that is originally from Cuba and was exported to the rest of the world by Hollywood itself. She goes as far as to say that it is ‘their village thing’. Now, it cannot be their local village thing given that you can, if you so wish, also join a conga line at every other provincial karaoke bar in Britain. And who on Earth is she appealing to except the very same Boomers she’s lamenting anyway? In 2024, the youth of Italy don’t want to dance on village squares with the dinosaurs condemning them to penury, or to pay homage to a decrepit Roman Catholic Church. They want neo-fascism, or a job at Notes Coffee in Canary Wharf — or both.

Sarkar also complains of the ‘Claphamisation’ of London, whatever that means. This, once again, shows her age: it is no more than the petty ressentiment of a millenial geriatric culturally stuck in a ’10s time warp, much like her politics is. It must irk her that the youth do not care for her North London socialist mafia, their Game of Thrones watchalongs, or the rustic gastropubs in Camden and Shoreditch that they now frequent. The centre of the capital’s yuppie culture is now in Clapham; the land of milk and honey, and an example for the rest of London to follow. The kids want a sixty-second clip scoring a schooner, Gail’s, and Embargo Republica, and that is to be celebrated.

She then harps on about the erasure of ‘local identities’, demonstrating both her ignorance and her subversiveness. The relatively weak ‘local identities’ in Britain can easily be explained without any reference to something that is relatively recent; to ‘neoliberalism’ and the like. England, by virtue of being an unusually unified country since as early as the tenth century, is the most genetically, linguistically, and culturally homogeneous of the major European nations. I mean no offence towards Italy when I point out the simple fact that it is much easier to single out ‘local identities’ in a country which has been unified for scarcely more than one-hundred-and-fifty years, and that, partly because of this, is visibly less homogeneous than Britain (and especially England) in all respects.

By contrast, someone like Ash Sarkar would never be able to make a genuine distinction between the supposed ‘identities’ of a man from Penzance and a man from Berwick-upon-Tweed. While there may indeed be some (basically trivial) differences between them that could be excavated by a highly astute analyst, she certainly wouldn’t be able to find them just by looking at them, and almost certainly not even after quizzing them on their supposed ‘culture’ or ‘values’ in the abstract rather than the specific. Indeed, she probably wouldn’t get anywhere at all, no matter how misguided, so long as you banned her from being able to hear their accents, which have become overloaded with supposed (mostly fake) cultural meaning in this country. This relative cultural homogeneity in England (and indeed Britain as a whole) is not a recent phenomenon; nor is it a bad thing.

It seems clear enough to me that the leftist idea of ‘local identity’ and ‘local culture’, and their motive for promoting them (or bemoaning their supposed ‘erasure’), is ultimately derived from Scousers. Scousers are only marginally culturally distinct from the rest of the English, but by virtue of being a sacrosanct caste within leftist cosmology (as well as having a massive chip on their shoulder), they sometimes claim to be ‘Scouse not English’. Sarkar seeks to extend this obvious absurdity — purely driven by relatively recent (given that Liverpool still voted strongly Tory until as late as 1972) political grievances — to everyone in England.

Leftists weaponise these so-called ‘local identities’ by trying to emphasise their supposed distance from other ‘local identities’ in England. In the process of doing this, they (if only tacitly) also try to decrease the distance of these ‘local identities’, and indeed Britain as a whole, from genuinely foreign cultures: ‘a Cockney, a Brummie, and a Pakistani; all totally unique, but all Very British in their own way.’ An alternative, though slightly different, formulation of this strategy can be found in the attempt by left-wing Welsh nationalists to completely distance ‘Welsh’ from ‘English’, while readily accepting people into ‘Welshness’, no questions asked, with zero connection — ancestral or otherwise — to the British Isles as a whole. It is telling that one of the favourite pastimes of these socialist deviants is to have ethnic minorities put on a performance for them, getting them to memorise a few words of their funny language, entertaining the Welshmen while also stroking their egos. This is quite obviously unethical behaviour, although no-one has called them out for it yet.

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So if British culture isn’t kicking a ball about on the street, and isn’t geriatrics dancing in celebration of a priest’s long tenure of employment, what is it? To answer this question, we must first define ‘culture’ on our own terms. To Ash Sarkar, ‘culture’ is everything involved in the ‘Wholesome Chungus’ village aesthetic of saying ‘good morning’ to everyone you meet on the street, women in big dresses selling fruit and vegetables at a farmer’s market, and an old man playing the accordion all day on the town square. But the hard truth is that the only victim of ‘Americanisation’ here is in fact Sarkar herself, because only your average American tourist with more money than cultural nous would see Europe through such a Disneyland-esque lens.

You will often find imbecile rent-a-gobs like Bushra Sheikh and Narinder Kaur baiting right-wingers by asking them what ‘British culture’ actually is. This question crops up during Notting Hill Carnival in particular. Some will take the bait: answering along Ash Sarkar’s lines, they unfortunately begin listing actual village traditions like Morris dancing, the Atherstone ball game, and cheese-rolling. While there is nothing wrong with these traditions per se, this moves the debate into territory which is not only rhetorically disadvantageous, but is for the most part intellectually only of use to the charlatan, the sophist, and the subversive.

If you were to ask these people to describe their own culture, once again using Sarkar’s definition of ‘culture’ (which, for obvious rhetorical reasons, they prefer anyway), they’d probably mention food and hospitality traditions; some might also mention religion, which is rather closer to the mark, but even this is far from a given. There is, in fact, a reason for describing their own culture in this way: it is very difficult for them to come up with anything else, or at least anything else that could be portrayed as positive, especially if they are from a country whose borders were drawn by colonial administrators seven G&Ts down by the time they got around to Kashmir.

What you must always remember is that you don’t need to discuss culture on their own terms. When they say, ‘Asian GCSE results’, you must always retort, ‘Concorde’. When they say, ‘seasoned food’, you say, ‘fine dining at Mach 2’. Concorde (to give just one example) was not merely an aircraft, but the product of over a thousand years of cultural evolution. It was contingent upon values that are completely culturally alien to the majority of the world.

Whenever anyone bleats on about the evils of individualism, it is always treated as some kind of ‘neoliberal’ innovation that Thatcher imported from America. There’s an assumption by people like Sarkar (as well as many post-liberals) that before the 1979 General Election, Britain was some kind of communitarian paradise, where after a long day toiling in the coal mines for precisely eight hours, everyone up and down the country would then go back and grab pints with all their trade union mates, denounce the bad, bad, Tory toffs-at-the-top, and discuss deindustrialisation, with Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen playing on a jukebox in the background. Besides the pints, none of this is real, but I suppose this is merely Sarkar projecting her deeply strange pub experiences onto Brits from half a century ago by adding an old-timey ’70s BBC aesthetic to her own fond memories.

Naturally, she decries the erosion of trade unions and working men’s clubs as the root cause of ‘social atomisation’. Yet if you were to ask her what she thought of football firms, which provide a similar sense of ‘community spirit’, she would obviously denounce them as ‘fascist thugs’. You see, for Sarkar, it’s our ‘noble working men’s clubs’, but their ‘barbaric hooligans’. ‘Community spirit’ in itself is not what is being valued here. It is just yet more politics.

If there ever was such a thing as a ‘British value’, it would be the freedom to associate, organise, and have relations with people of your own choosing. From relatively early on in this country’s history, British (and especially English) society has primarily been organised through voluntary associations; that is to say, through contract, not status. This may sound trivial, but this ‘British value’ in fact underpins capitalism, liberalism, innovation, and just about everything that Britain has ever accomplished. To my mind, the East India Company represents the logical conclusion of such an idea: people pouring in money to fund a venture on the other side of the world requires an extraordinary amount of ‘trust’; something that, perhaps paradoxically to some, can only work when people get to entirely choose who they do business with. Meritocracy itself is obviously impossible without such a ‘value’.

Consider the fact that the freedom most hated by the Left in all countries, and usually the first to be seriously undermined, is not freedom of speech; nor, in fact, is it the ‘right to bear arms’ (sorry Americans). The freedom most hated by the Left is freedom of association, and they hate it for good reason. Not only is it almost inherently inegalitarian; in many ways it also defines the English-speaking peoples whose identities leftists so desperately wish to undermine — two for the price of one from the point of view of the subversive.

By way of contrast, observe the businesses run by the various ‘communitarian’ demographics with ‘strong family values’: fast food takeaways and barbershops; in other words, establishments that do not require any high-quality human capital, or for you to raise much money when you’re starting out. In a world where there are obligatory religious, tribal, and familial allegiances, labour allocation is stunted, and any business that requires genuinely skilled labour can never prosper. Yes, a fried chicken joint can still function because Uncle Ahmed can wed his daughter to his nephew back home, get all the relevant permits for him to reside and work here, thus acquiring cheap labour for work that is unskilled and makes use of very little capital, and, given that they’re related, in the end all the money is circled right back into their immediate family or community anyway. Doing something more grand than this, however, is very difficult indeed if you are forced to continue with such cultural practices. There is a reason why people around the world, if only because they are under pressure from rapacious imperialists, have gradually adopted many elements of ‘British culture’ in order to protect themselves.

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It is odd that Sarkar — a self-proclaimed ‘revolutionary Marxist’ — seems to mourn the slow death of Christianity in Britain, all the while championing the culture of France, the inventor of state atheism (or at least state anti-theism), in the very same clip. It should also be noted that nowadays, Italy is a basically secular country (although not as much as Britain), with less than a fifth attending services weekly despite the vast majority still identifying as ‘Catholic’.

Now, to state the obvious, Sarkar doesn’t actually care about church attendance. But it’s a useful line if you’re trying to placate idiotic ‘Red Tory’ types on X while skirting around the big fat elephant in the room that is immigration. Consider also the time period that Sarkar seems to be feigning nostalgia for: the ’60s and ’70s, when every social cultural norm was either under question or being openly defiled — and yet the Church of England did nothing, which is telling.

To what extent is religion actually central to ‘British identity’? Is secularisation the fundamental problem for the preservation of our ‘culture’ that Sarkar claims it is? It would be churlish to totally deny religion’s importance, especially in how it has divided up the main regions of the British Isles. But while it is indeed true that Christianity has profoundly shaped the cultural and intellectual norms of this country, as well as being important in creating (or hardening) many political divides — just as it has in every European country — we should not pretend that the Church has ever had the sort of dominant social influence that ‘tradcaths’ would like to claim (or at least advocate for), or even the kind of influence that Sarkar seems to be claiming of it here. For the most part, in England, secular — that is to say, royal or parliamentary — governance has prevailed over the ecclesiastical. Don’t believe their hype: the ‘tradcath’ dream of priests in their flowing robes lording it over impoverished, illiterate serfs on minor points of personal morality which they have no business interfering in, with total moral and judicial authority to back them up, is simply unreal. British culture clearly survived secularisation, given that this process began in this country at a relatively early date.

Indeed, if anything, we could define ‘British culture’ as being the opposite of the moral tyranny of priests and one’s ‘community’. The shedding of superstition and mysticism, and the reconciliation of biblical morality with a healthy sense of empiricism, individualism, and pragmatism, is central to this country’s success. Whiggish this may be, it is clearly ‘British culture’.

Such ideas are still nowhere near as ubiquitous as you might think. You don’t need to fly out to see what the opposite looks like: you can encounter mystic practices right here in London. A large subsection of many BAME demographics believe in such things as ‘Djinns’, while others practice ‘banging juj’ (black magic). Seems harmless enough, until you remember that a sincere belief in black magic has led to several high-profile murders of West African children in Britain and France. People seriously believe in this stuff, even some of those who were born and raised here. You cannot take such things as a given.

There are many supposedly ‘right-wing’ commentators who justify immigration from Britain’s former colonies on the basis that immigrants are pious, churchgoing, family-orientated people who can revive ‘social conservatism’ in this country. They will opine that, at some point in history before the construction of One Canada Square and the invention of mortgage-backed securities, ‘family values’ in Britain were much stronger than they are today. Dilly Hussein of the hardline Islamist news site 5Pillars likes to push these ideas whenever birth rates are discussed. A blatant subversive boosted by the biggest idiots on the ‘dissident right’, he’ll boast of the advantages of extended families (something that has been foreign to Britain for centuries), cite something about how happy Muslim women supposedly are (unlikely), and conclude that Britain needs Islamic values to save ‘the family’. Gone are the days of the classic, 4-4-2, no-nonsense Islamism of Anjem Choudary.

A previous article (‘Rakib Ehsan and the “natural conservatism” of British Muslims’, Volume XI (August 2024)) has already discussed this at some length, but here I will briefly set the record straight in a few dozen rather than a few thousand words. There are many morons on X claiming that Islam has an ‘evolutionary fitness’ to it on no other grounds than birth rates and personal piety. These people are cuckolds: do not let them demoralise you. The ‘traditional’ extended family that Dilly Hussein speaks of would crumble tomorrow if the welfare state was abolished.

Even beyond the fact that these groups are far from self-reliant, their behaviour is hardly admirable. Indeed, once we drill down to understand what is going on, we can see that it is inherently at odds with the ‘culture’ that is native to this country, and indeed that has made this country great. ‘Have more kids’, many on the Right will say, pointing to these ethnic groups as some kind of example. But what they don’t tell you is that these groups will often happily stuff as many children as can physically fit into a room without a care in the world (except when they are begging the British state for a bigger free house), because they do not fundamentally believe that it matters whether or not whether a child has their own personal space. This, of course, betrays their total lack of concern for the child as an individual: not necessarily in the material sense — which is one thing, and sometimes occurs among white British people as well, especially if something has economically derailed them — but in the spiritual sense. And of course their contempt for the child as an individual betrays their contempt for the individual more generally, and thus their contempt for English culture. As such, while we can criticise ‘Striverism’ on the grounds of excessive investment in (and the excessive burden of expectations placed upon) a very small number of children, we must also remember that the opposite extreme can be just as spiritually damaging to a society.

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Whisper it if you must, but the unspoken truth is that non-Western familial structures are typically held together not by ‘family values’ per se, but rather by an obscene amount of guilt-tripping and the use of heavy pressure — often financial and psychological, and sometimes even physical — to intimidate those who wish to defect into staying put. There have been a number of suicides of Pacific Islander rugby players in France and Australia who, despite winning a big contract, had to live in abject poverty because seventy-five percent or more of the money they earned ended up getting siphoned off to support indolent family members back home. Such great responsibility squarely on one man’s shoulders meant that any serious difficulties in their career could be too personally devastating for them to bear. The Telegraph writes that

…wherever a Pacific Island player ends up, they will be expected to support their family and sometimes their entire village. It is common for players to send home 75 per cent of their wages in remittances. That can place a huge strain on an individual who finds himself in an alien environment unable to grasp the language or culture…

“It is a big thing not just in Fiji”, [Fijian defence coach] Rauluni said. “Their family think they will fund them but it is tough for the boys. Sometimes the family needs to realise they need to step back and let them get settled first so they can get set up. There have been a few suicides by Islander players in Australian rugby league because of that pressure. They just felt stress and ended up taking their own lives.”

Nor is this a specific quirk of the Pacific Islands: Theodore Dalrymple gave a similar example, noting the enormous gap in living standards between white and black doctors in Zimbabwe. This was not because their salaries were different; rather, the problem was that the latter, as a successful black man, was expected to give a large cut of his salary to his extended family, and perhaps even to the village as a whole. People like to talk a lot about ‘family values’ and ‘community spirit’ — and the virtues of maintaining (and perhaps enforcing the maintenance of) the ‘unchosen bonds’ that are required to sustain them — in the abstract. But now that we have demystified these ‘values’, we must ask: does having your blood sucked for the rest of your life by ‘unchosen’ parasites really sound that appealing?

As an aside, it’s always worth remembering that perceptions of ‘the white British family’ are heavily informed by noughties poverty porn on Channels 4 and 5, soap operas, and reality TV. This is true of both whites and non-whites. There is also the simple fact that, when it comes to non-white perceptions more specifically, the white British people who non-white people in this country typically encounter are usually negatively selected in some way, providing a distorted picture of the ethnic group as a whole. In reality, the percentage of ‘lone parent’ (rather than merely cohabiting, but unmarried) households among the white British population is 19%. While it is true that this is somewhat higher than the Pakistani (14%) and Bangladeshi (12%) rate, the difference is nowhere near as big as most people would assume. Sadly, this is a classic case of a Blairite media ecosystem coupled with Britain’s fondness for self-deprecation being weaponised and used against the white British population.

Many readers will have an inkling as to what goes on in the sort of ‘communities’ that have been black boxes in this country for decades, but I suspect the British state does not. Whenever the nuclear family is mostly absent in favour of communal childrearing, children are at the mercy of tribal elders and village matriarchs. The result? Forced marriages, female genital mutilation, involuntary deportations back to Nigeria for being gay, and sometimes outright ritual murder. Domestic abuse from the husband, mother, and mother-in-law towards the (grand)children and the wife/daughter-in-law simply cannot be policed anymore. We talk about ‘two-tier policing’ as disproportionately affecting native Brits, but for every native British victim of ‘two-tier policing’, there are probably dozens upon dozens of ‘Women of Colour’ who have no hope of justice when it comes to the disproportionate sexual and physical violence they suffer.

This is probably one of the reasons for why so many family members of grooming gang members cared so little about the crimes of their relatives. You may have seen an article recently about them crying in the courtroom upon hearing the sentencing of some of these rapists, but it’s even worse once you read the text messages being sent by the wives to the rape victims, deriding them as ‘prostitutes’.

You would, however, be mistaken to think these ethnic groups are genuinely patriarchal: in fact, their private sphere is often more matriarchal than it is patriarchal, and often women are the progenitors and custodians of all these objectionable customs, passed on from mother and mother-in-law to daughter and to daughter-in-law. For anyone who has been to university, you will already know just how brittle their cultural standards of ‘modesty’ and ‘piety’ are as soon as you eliminate the very real threat of physical repercussions. Their notions of ‘hospitality’ are just as pitiful: in reality, ‘hospitality’ is always coupled with the expectation of a favour somewhere down the line (like a bride). This, then, isn’t actually ‘hospitality’ at all: it’s an options contract.

Don’t feel too pessimistic. If you force these people to live at the mercy of the market, you’ll find that they’ll stop discussing the ideal mahr (a kind of reverse dowry) payment on X all day long, and will be forced to change their ways for the better. If this still isn’t enough, then allow me to recommend something more therapeutic. Open up TikTok and start watching footage of Concorde take-offs, or a Falcon rocket landing upright to the cheers of thousands. Then pause for a moment to remember that in the slums of Inner London, there are thousands upon thousands of people who spend all day discussing what the ideal size of a nikah (Islamic marriage contract) ceremony is on X. Entire cultures whose highest calling is marriage and reproduction: life for the sake of life. Wherever you are in your life, remember that it always could be worse.

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I write this, outside, smoking cigarette after cigarette while drinking the very same espresso for the last three hours, shivering in the wind, the cold, and the drizzle, attempting to emulate the culturally superior Italians. Unfortunately, there aren’t so many attractive women to sit and stare at here, but I decide to try to make do anyway.

So what is our main conclusion for today? ‘Culture’ is a state of being. British culture is all that created the Industrial Revolution; British culture is all that is contained within Concorde. It is not something that you can ennumerate in the way that leftist charlatans demand; it is not something you can just learn by reading enough Scruton (okay, I haven’t read him, never will), or by pegging your ‘identity’ to a defined set of activities. Fundamentally, ‘culture’ is not something as simple as food and drink, hospitality, or even religion; nor is ‘culture’ how you pronounce your vowels, whether you put jam or cream on your scone first, or what type of cheese your village uses for the cheese wheel in their cheese-rolling contest, or at the very least this is only one dimension of ‘culture’, and a basically trivial one at that.

Whenever a subversive asks you about ‘English culture’ (or ‘British culture’), or if they start discussing the various, supposedly profound, ‘local identities’ that supposedly divide the country up into innumerable and unintegrable parts, don’t take the bait. Don’t allow them to move the conversation onto the equally disadvantageous and disingenuous terrain on which they want it to take place. Don’t let them keep the conversation fixated on such irrelevant matters as jollof rice or spicy, spicy curry. And, if they start talking about the value of their ethnic group’s supposed ‘community spirit’ or ‘family values’, be sure to interrogate them about what precisely they mean by this, and the (often terrible) consequences of their approach to social organisation.

A gust blows the cigarette out from between my fingers and onto the wet ground. As I pick it up to throw it into the bin, a West African guy towers above me on my chair. ‘I am about to get mugged’, I thought to myself, and I was right: it was one of Keir Starmer’s NES officers, who slapped me with a £150 fine for ‘littering’. Keep your outdoor food stalls and your al fresco dining, Ash: I’m off to the pub.

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Image credits: Diliff, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

This article was written by regular Pimlico Journal contributor Henry Reynolds Skelton. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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