UK

St George’s Day is a moveable feast: this year marked by the political world on its traditional date, rather than on the day next week chosen by an increasingly irrelevant Church of England. But it also shifts in terms of its meaning. A year ago, I remarked that the ghost of English ethnic nationalism, so often fearfully invoked by its detractors, was remarkable mostly for its dormancy. Yet other interpretations are available: just a few months later, Northern England was shaken by its most violent ethnic riots in decades, casting a cloud of doom over the new Labour government from which it has never yet emerged. Today, the country is in an unhappy state, the air heavy with the pressure of a storm about to break. Mild-mannered Telegraph columnists write anxious premonitions of approaching civil war, while the nation’s second city slips beneath the basic expectations of First World governance. Civil war may be unlikely, but that the very idea can be seriously entertained by credible people demonstrates a growing fissure entering British life, one which will take serious political reform to avert disaster: requiring a capacity, and appetite to undertake that the Government does not appear to possess. Translating the nation’s febrile atmosphere to an American audience, the writer Dominic Green observes in the Wall Street Journal that “The mood in England today is eerie. The government can’t govern. The police menace law-abiding people for speaking their minds. The borders are open. The country feels as if it is one Islamist bombing away from eruption.”

England is so fecked.