England Is a B***h

The news is as appalling, infuriating, sick-making, inexcusable, and earth-shaking, but one thing it isn’t is surprising. The revelation that one of the chief financiers of the principal forces arrayed against Britain and the West in general is the British government is all too much in keeping with the suicidal leftism we have seen from that government (whether the Tories or Labour are in power) for years now. So of course they’re funding ISIS. What else would they do? And the rot is even deeper than that.

The Daily Mail reported Monday that the British government “gave more than £28 billion in taxpayer cash to its enemies over six years, a leaked government dossier revealed last night.” And not just any enemies, either. If the British government had really given 28 billion pounds to its enemies, it would have forked over the dough to Tommy Robinson. But instead, the learned solons in London gave the money to their friends. You know, like ISIS.

The Mail states that “terrorists such as the Islamic State in Syria group, hostile states including Russia and criminal gangs received the vast sum from foreign aid, Covid relief loans and the benefits system, which an expert said was an ‘ATM for terrorists.’” And as these things always do, it gets worse. The report “revealed that Britain helped companies linked to the Chinese military pursue their own research between 2015 and 2021.” The Islamic State, Russia, China, and criminal gangs: all on the British taxpayer dole.

How could this have happened? Pondering that question called to mind a phrase I have not heard in decades, since the days when I was a young Marxist enjoying the benefits of an expensive university education: “Inglan is a b**ch.” (“Inglan” is, of course, Jamaican patois for “England.”) This pungent phrase is actually the title of a catchy little song, the handiwork of a Jamaican “dub poet” named Linton Kwesi Johnson, who has lived in the land for which he has such contempt since 1963 (he is now 73 years old).

Linton Kwesi Johnson penned this classic tune about the miseries of living in his adopted homeland in 1980, and one of my fellow employees at Revolution Books, the Revolutionary Communist Party’s bookstore, introduced me to it not long after that. It never occurred either to her or to me that it was ironic in the extreme for Johnson to be complaining about Britain from Britain; after all, if he hated it there so much, why didn’t he just move back to Jamaica?

For whatever reason, he didn’t, and his choice to remain in the country he calls a “b**ch” has been rewarding indeed. He said in 2018 that he became a “dub poet” as a “way of expressing the anger, the passion of the youth of my generation in terms of our struggle against racial oppression. Poetry was a cultural weapon in the black liberation struggle, so that's how it began." He claimed in the same interview that “it was a myth that immigrants didn’t want to fit into British society. We weren’t allowed.”

Without a trace of irony, that same interview notes that Johnson “became only the second living poet to have his work published by Penguin Modern Classics, and was the 2012 winner of the Golden PEN award for his ‘distinguished service to literature.”

Another laudatory profile details some of the numerous honors Johnson has received in the UK: “LKJ was awarded the C Day Lewis Fellowship in 1977. He became the writer-in-residence for the London Borough of Lambeth for that year. He went on to work as the Library Resources and Education Officer at the Keskidee Centre, the first home of Black theatre and art. He has been made an Associate Fellow of Warwick University (1985), an Honorary Fellow of Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1987),” and on and on.

Yeah, wow, “Inglan” is really a “b**ch,” eh? Britain didn't persecute Linton Kwesi Johnson. It didn't consign him to menial work or deny him work altogether. Instead, it made him a celebrity, a wealthy, cosseted giant of literature and music. What a b**ch!

Laden with honors, treated with unstinting respect and deference in his dotage from the British intelligentsia, Linton Kwesi Johnson is just one of many cultural heroes in the West who hate and denigrate the very cultures that celebrate them. The UK, the U.S., Canada, and continental Europe have made revered figures out of numerous people who heap contempt on the native people and their culture and civilization. The situation has advanced to the point that one can hardly expect to have a voice in the culture at all unless one despises that culture.

In light of that, is it really all that shocking that the British government would be handing over taxpayer money to ISIS? This wasn’t just appeasement on the order of “We’ll pay you not to hurt us.” It was an act of self-abnegation of an inferior toward a superior. The British government is filled top to bottom today with people who have grown up on the idea that the native culture is rotten. Why shouldn’t they hand over the money British citizens have earned to people who are not tainted with Britishness? The Jamaican transplant Linton Kwesi Johnson, hater of the land that welcomed him, his head bowed down with the weight of his medals and honors, is the symbol of contemporary Britain. And it looks as if he was right all along: "Inglan," financier of the Islamic State, really is a b**ch.

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