The Folk Beliefs of the Postliberal I: The myth of 'imperial policing'

Anti-white racism explains the response of the police to the Pakistani rape gangs, not a misguided attempt to manage intercommunal tensions

This article will hopefully be the first in a series on ‘The Folk Beliefs of the Postliberal’, in which I will criticise a number of beliefs originating with postliberal writers which have now become commonplace across the political right. The inspiration for writing this series of articles comes from Will Solfiac’s excellent series ‘The Folk Beliefs of the Upper Normie’.

The introduction to his first article describes folk beliefs as ‘sayings and stories about the world that are widely held yet not grounded in fact’, and says that ‘much of the upper-normie worldview [is] a collection of these folk beliefs’. The system of folk beliefs of postliberals differs only from those of ‘upper normies’ in that these beliefs originate in a diffusion of tweets, podcasts, articles, and blogs originating from a small group of authors in the last ten years rather than ‘academia, the media, the cultural industries, governments and NGOs over the long twentieth century’.

Postliberalism — a heretical post-Marxist innovation of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre — found its first political manifestation in Britain in Maurice Glasman’s ‘Blue Labour’ movement. Blue Labour seeks to reform the Labour Party towards a communally-orientated socialism, which combines the bonds of reciprocity within traditional institutions like the church, family, and nation, with the solidarity of the labour movement and local political institutions. The belief in the complementary nature of socialism and tradition offers a critique of the right’s alloy of individualist capitalism and social conservatism.

Postliberalism has become a popular ideology on the British right since the migration of working-class voters from Labour to the Conservative Party (and now Reform) since the political realignment. The postliberal right is conservative and comfortable with forms of inegalitarianism, but maintains a critical stance towards capitalism and it perceives that both right and left have prioritised individual autonomy at the expense of our common bonds and the welfare of the working class.

Postliberalism’s purest expressions are found in UnHerd and Spiked. But it has become an influential ideology found in the pages of every right-wing publication in Britain. It claims to speak for the voters responsible for the convulsions of Brexit, the 2019 election, and the rise of Reform, and is the obvious ‘successor ideology’ to Thatcherism, whose adherents have either converted or become irrelevant. Thus, the postliberal worldview deserves the utmost scrutiny, and my motivation for writing this series is that its ideologues often fall short of the rigour one should expect.

In practice, the ideology pushes a less coherent form of woke in which class inequality is assumed to be evidence of classism, but racial or gender inequality is not assumed to be evidence of racism or sexism. Postliberals believe there is a snobbish metropolitan elite lurking around every corner, and that sincerely held left-wing beliefs are motivated only by hatred of the (white) working class. The belief that society is suffused with classism is often the mirror of the woke belief in the miasma of racism.

Postliberals have often had a poisoning effect on discourse because they tell their audience ideologically convenient lies, which serve as deradicalisation memes. The nativist movements across the West are recast as working-class movements in a class conflict. Postliberals claim globalisation impoverishes the working-class but enriches the elite, who benefit from cheaper labour while retreating behind walls and barbed wire into white enclaves (even though this is only infrequently applicable to wealthy Labour or Green voters in Britain). This can be fixed, however, by electing a sensible centre-left (or centre-right) mainstream political party like the Danish Social Democrats, who will cut immigration while avoiding the noise and mess of radical populist parties. This is particularly objectionable because it avoids the correct — but repugnant — conclusions about the nature of population replacement in favour of flimsy but printable myths that this problem can be solved without paradigmatic change in politics.

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The first myth I will challenge in this series is the idea that British police forces have adopted an imperial model of policing to deal with inter-ethnic conflict between the native British and ethnic minority groups.

This view has been advanced by Ed West, Louise Perry (also here), Tom Holland, and many others who breathed the miasma of postliberal received wisdom. They argue that British police forces prioritise the prevention of inter-communal violence and the preservation of harmonious inter-communal relations, rather than the pursuit of justice, and this explains police inaction against, and collusion with, Pakistani rape gangs, as well as other examples of so-called ‘two-tier policing’. Bringing the perpetrators of the rape gangs to justice would have inflamed ‘community tensions’ and led to reprisal attacks on Pakistanis, tit-for-tat violence, rioting, and ultimately a much more challenging policing environment. It is unclear whether proponents of this theory believe Britain arrived at this mode of policing through imperial boomerang or environmental convergence.

I should say for the avoidance of doubt that none of the people I mention approve of this method of policing. Most have done good work on immigration and would have been opposed to the immigration of Pakistanis in large numbers. At most, some may accept higher levels of immigration alongside authoritarianism to ‘integrate’ Pakistanis into the British nation. But all of them imply in this narrative that there is an understandable and partially defensible logic to the way British police and local government responded to Pakistani rape gangs.

This theory of police behaviour fails for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that racially-motivated rape constitutes inter-communal violence in and of itself, so any police force which prioritised the prevention of outbreaks of inter-communal violence would show a greater priority in policing these crimes, rather than ignoring them. It’s a category error to exclude the crimes of the rape gangs when calculating the state’s approach to inter-communal violence. Leaving the crimes unpunished also provided a justification for vigilantism, which risked a spiral into anti-Asian violence as occurred in Oldham in 2001 and in parts of the country in the summer of 2024. If ignoring the rape gangs was intended to prevent inter-communal violence, it clearly failed.

But the more fundamental, and theoretical, reason why this explanation fails — beyond the fact that this supposed ‘strategy’ clearly did not actually work in practice — is that ‘imperial policing’ or ‘managing community tensions’ allows latitude with intra-communal offences, not inter-communal offences. This is the exact opposite of the approach taken by the authorities to the grooming gangs crisis. A hypothetical imperial police force overseeing a multiethnic province East of Suez would clamp down hard on any inter-communal crimes before the victimised group felt the need to take the law into their own hands. There would even be a temptation to suspend the operation of impartial justice to find someone from the offending group guilty in order to satiate anger from the other community, even if the person held responsible was in fact an innocent scapegoat.

Under multicultural or imperial policing, there is usually a contrasting latitude shown to intra-communal law, whether formally or informally. In Singapore, Muslim men (i.e., Malay men) are allowed to marry up to four wives under the Administration of Muslim Law Act, so long as the women are also Muslim. The marriages are registered at the Registry of Muslim Marriages, a public body established under the same Act. Indian, Chinese, and European men in Singapore are limited to just one wife. This might uncharitably be considered ‘two-tier justice’, but this legal peculiarity applies only to members of the same community.

This, of course, is an example of actual legal particularism. But even where the law itself is identical for all communities, this model of policing often assumes that communities can substantially police themselves. This may imply different standards and rules between groups — a decision that could be criticised on numerous grounds — but it does not imply that those different standards and rules may be used as an excuse to abuse, exploit, or even offend people from other groups. In countries with large Roma populations, illegal child marriage within Roma communities has often been treated by the authorities as an internal communal practice rather than as an ordinary criminal offence. Yet if such a marriage involved a child from the ethnic majority, the response would almost certainly be very different (that is not to say that the differing standards in the case of the Roma in these countries have not, in practice, permitted Roma to exploit people from other groups; it is merely a comment on the typical response of the authorities to child marriage).

Attributing the decision of the British police to turn a blind eye to Pakistani grooming gangs to so-called ‘imperial policing’ is especially galling when this form of policing does, in fact, currently exist within the United Kingdom’s borders today. Northern Ireland is an actual (and very striking) example of policing to prevent inter-communal violence, and it bears no resemblance to the policing of English towns like Rochdale or Telford. Nor does it apply to the one-sided repression of British national sentiment during the riots of 2024. In Northern Ireland, the leaders of formerly active paramilitary terror groups are given leniency in offences against the state and offences against others from within their own communities. The South Armagh PIRA is one of the most profitable criminal organisations in the UK and Ireland. One estimate (albeit from 2013) suggested they evade €150m in diesel taxes owed to the Irish government every year. On the other side of the sectarian divide, every month six UDA brigadiers collect the yearly salary of a Championship footballer in ‘membership dues’ from ‘members’ of their organisation who are not allowed to leave under threat of assassination. Senior politicians meet with these figures, thus turning a blind eye to the violence they inflict (or threaten to inflict) on their own community, while privately abandoning the pretence they are ‘community leaders’.

But the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) directs enormous resources into preventing the outbreak of inter-communal violence and solving hate crimes. According to a 2014 estimate, 34% of the PSNI’s budget is spent on matters relating to sectarianism. The PSNI would not turn a blind eye to a theoretical Republican or Loyalist grooming gang sexually exploiting vulnerable girls from the other community. This would be obviously stupid, just as it would be obviously stupid to not arrest members of a Pakistani grooming gang in Rochdale or Telford if your aim was to prevent inter-communal violence. This is what ‘imperial policing’ or ‘managing a multi-ethnic empire’ looks like in practice. Crimes within communities or against the state are overlooked in order to prevent crimes from taking place between communities.

The correct explanation of why the Pakistani rape gangs were allowed to abuse white girls is that anti-white racism pervades society. The ideology is highly sensitive to the mistreatment of non-white groups by white people, but refuses to admit any instance of mistreatment of white people by a non-white group. For example, the In Our Time episode on the Haitian Revolution did not mention the slaughter of almost all of the remaining white population on the island in the aftermath of the revolution. On another episode, there was similar reticence to concede any racial element to the Barbary slave trade, with much apologism made for this form of slavery in particular. The murder of Stephen Lawrence is a large fixture in our national folklore, and Lawrence’s mother was made a peer of the realm, while the racially-motivated murders of Richard Everitt, Ross Parker, and Kriss Donald would be familiar to few people outside of right-wing X.

Regime ideology views the ethnic British as a coherent group when considering historical injustices relating to colonialism or the transatlantic slave trade, or when defining the native population in a negative image in referring to ‘BAME’ people or ‘ethnic minorities’ when it wants to engage in racial and ethnic discrimination. But where the interests of this group are asserted, for example, against demographic change caused by mass immigration, its very existence is denied. This is eerily similar to how chauvinistic and even genocidal regimes treat minority groups alternatively as citizens of an errant province astray from the nation or an eternal enemy, depending on political utility.

The police are no exception when it comes to the influence this ideology has over our institutions. During the August 2024 riots, a ‘police liaison officer’ in Stoke negotiated an amnesty with a group of armed Muslim men outside a mosque, telling the men that if they left the weapons they had inside the mosque, the police would not arrest them. There is footage from what appears to be earlier in the day of armed Muslim men attacking unarmed white protesters. One white female protester says, ‘they’ve got knives, they’ve got knives’, before turning and running away from the Muslim mob. Fourteen people were imprisoned for their role in the riots, thirteen of whom were white and one of whom was Muslim. The article notes that some members of both sides carried weapons — which I have no reason to doubt — but it’s clear from the footage that white protesters were less likely to be armed, but have been prosecuted more harshly despite this.

A more well-known example of this phenomenon occurred in Birmingham, where false rumours of a far-right protest in Pakistani East Birmingham caused Muslims to pour out onto the streets with weapons, attacking a Sky News crew and marching eastward until they could find a white person to attack at the nearest pub. The West Midlands police refused to confront the mob, and a senior police officer defended this approach on the basis that they had coordinated with ‘business and community leaders’ who were ‘policing themselves’. It does seem that the intelligence gathered at the protest led to at least one arrest and further investigations of criminal damage. But as the Sky News journalist suggested, it is unlikely an armed EDL protest would have received this degree of latitude. It’s also likely many more arrests would have been made (whether immediately or in the aftermath), and much criminality would have been prevented in the first place, if the police had treated the group the same way as they would an armed mob of white men.

It’s hard to integrate these examples from the riots into a model in which the police consider the minimisation of inter-communal violence to be their greatest priority. The anti-white racism theory is much more consistent with police behaviour. So it’s no surprise that the authorities would allow the sexual exploitation of white girls by non-white men to persist for so long, and to be so obstinate in refusing to ascribe a racial motive to anything that took place once they had conceded prosecutions needed to take place.

A senior police officer in the South Yorkshire Police described the child sexual abuse which took place in Rotherham under his watch as ‘Paki shagging’ and said, ‘With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.’ He also claimed that the police failure was informed by a desire not to inflame ‘racial tensions’. But what episode in post-war British history has poisoned race relations more than the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal? Councillors were reluctant to report abuse for fear of being seen as racist, and one social worker who did was then told by police she was ‘going against the perpetrators’ human rights… rocking the multicultural boat… [and] being racist’. Extreme ‘anti-racist’ ideology — a refusal to concede white people can be racially victimised by non-white people, a desire to preserve the racial mythology of ‘white people evil, non-white people good’, and a wish to suppress the group instincts of white people — all of this explains why the police and other authorities were so permissive of the ‘grooming gangs’ which took hold across so many towns and cities. The need to preserve harmonious community relations is just a convenient alibi.

Proponents of the imperial policing model make one persuasive counter-argument. Being by far the largest group, white people (or the native British) cannot be treated as a community with its own ethnic interests, similar to how other ethnic groups are treated. If they were, their interests would completely dominate all others. Superintendents ‘listening’ to the ‘concerns’ of white ‘community leaders’ would mean allowing the white majority to set policing policy in every town and city in the country because of the weight of population those views would hold. So instead the state pursues ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’, which differs substantially from the imperial policing model that most postliberals invoke.

But there’s no evidence or reason to believe Britain’s majority would demand racialised policing that would come close to the injustice perpetrated against white girls in Rotherham and other towns. There’s a value judgment being made that a European ethnic group being ‘supreme’ in its titular nation state is an offence against mankind. Another defence of the ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’ model is that the state needs to prevent the white population from rioting more than it needs to prevent other groups from doing the same because of the unique costs white rioting can impose. This explains the refusal to recognise the existence of the native British as a means of dampening ethnic consciousness. But would authorities seeking to obstruct the formation of militant white identity groups not police without fear or favour, rather than acting with brazen discrimination?

The contradictions contained within the imperial policing model and the parsimony of the anti-white racism model urge us to ask why the postliberal theory ever became consensus on the right. The answer being that, despite its flaws, the belief is adaptive, even if it is untrue. Journalists like to come up with novel explanations of phenomena to set themselves apart from the crowd. To explain the state’s failure to prosecute Pakistani rape gangs targeting white girls as simply another instance of the anti-white racism we have become familiar with since the 1960s would be too obvious and too simple. Comparing Britain to the Ottoman or Habsburg empires is much more original, and allows the journalist to portray themselves as a historical guru perched above the fray, watching the forces of empire inevitably turn in on themselves.

Postliberal folk beliefs also play an important role in the discourse as deradicalisation memes. If rape gangs were allowed to persist because of anti-white racism, that would seem to suggest that we should embrace a certain degree of white racial consciousness in response. If rape gangs were allowed to persist because of an ‘imperial model of policing’, that would seem to suggest we should more honestly strive towards a true liberal colourblindness. Journalists understand this, and their moral opposition to the acknowledgement of white ethnic interests is why there is so much stigma against the correct view, in the same way there is a stigma against hereditarianism.

The postliberal safety valve is a crucial part of the Overton cage. UnHerd, Spiked, and even The Spectator can now escape punishment for saying truths which were punishable by public disgrace fifteen (or even ten) years ago, which has admitted a measure of public catharsis. But to avoid the consequences of ‘naming the issue’, they have to wrap the truth in a regime-stabilising myth. Instead of accepting that the localised prevalence of grooming gangs is related to the number of Pakistanis (with all of the unsettling implications that would raise) and supporting an immigration moratorium and a policy of repatriation, they call for braver policing. Our responsibility is to break free from the cage and tell the truth.

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This article was written by Walter Angleson, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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