Four decades ago I was sitting having a cup of tea in Bramerton Street in Chelsea, just off the King's Road. It was the home of Alan Jay Lerner, author of Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, Gigi, Camelot, and much else. Alan was not as wealthy as he'd been two decades earlier, because he'd carelessly acquired seven ex-wives and was in the umpteenth year of a long-running dispute with the IRS. But I couldn't understand why, as a man awash in Oscars and Tonys and whatnot, he chose to live not in New York but in London, when the former seemed to me (as it did to Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and other impressionable types) far more glamorous. Alan replied that he lived in London because Britain was the most eminently civilised society on earth.
Well, it's not anymore. A two-bedroom house in Bramerton Street will, for the moment, set you back over three million pounds, but no one except a gibbering lunatic would advance the proposition that today's Britain is "the most eminently civilised society on earth". England particularly is increasingly what Trump would call a bleephole - very literally. When its remnants finally go up in flames fifteen years (at most) from now, you'll strain to believe that it could ever have been as Lerner characterised it. Sample headline from an even more expensive part of London:
Migrant camp fury on billionaire's row as travellers drink vodka at 6am and poo in street
My father was very partial to the 1948 Anna Neagle picture Spring in Park Lane, which remains (in terms of ticket sales) the fifth most popular film ever shown in the UK (after Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, Snow White and Star Wars). I can't recall how many times my young self sat there watching it on telly with him, and my memory of the plot details is hazy. But I am reasonably certain that, unlike Spring in Park Lane 2025 hardcore edition, for Dame Anna the charms of vernal London did not include "poo in street".
In the days when I took tea with Alan Jay Lerner, I myself lived in the Barbican, which was nowhere near as pricey as Park Lane or Bramerton Street. But my neighbour was the delightful Benazir Bhutto, since assassinated, whose family was so fabulously corrupt that she would not have lived there had she not found it at least reasonably agreeable. Not anymore:
How a three-star migrant hotel in Barbican became a living nightmare for locals: Blazing mattresses and a TV hurled from windows... and no fewer than 41 'guests' charged with 90 offences ranging from rape to sexual assault, robbery and bag snatching
Back in my day at the Barbican, one still saw the occasional City gent traditionally accessorised with bowler hat and rolled-up brolly. Today, the most popular accessory with English pedestrians is the machete, a word once unknown to the average Englishman outside news reports from Rwanda. Not now:
Two teenagers sentenced to at least 15 years for machete murder of boy, 14, on London bus
There is no political solution to any of the above. The Great Replacement is, as all nice people know, a racist conspiracy theory - and yet, per data from the Office of National Statistics, English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh persons will become a minority within the UK by 2063. In England, it will happen much sooner. In London and other cities, it's already happened.
The "norms" of politics have no way of preventing this, so politics is increasingly irrelevant to anything that matters. Aside from Rupert Lowe, Ben Habib and one or two others, there is little sign of what David Betz calls "elite defection" - which my eye initially read as "elite defecation". Which I assumed was the new term for the strange need of Reform UK's leadership to prioritise in media interviews their ongoing contempt for what Richard Tice sneeringly calls "that lot". It's hard to have "elite defection" when chaps like Tice are still desperate to be admitted to it.
And yet I'm in a pretty chipper mood. Truly I am - if mostly in the Leninist sense that, before things can get better, they have to get worse. The chickens are coming home to roost, and it's raining McNuggets, hallelujah. Two decades ago, when I published my boffo demographic bestseller, it required readers to engage in an act of imagination about where the trendline would lead a generation hence. Today no imaginative capacity is needed: the remorseless ugliness of "diverse" England is there before your eyes, every day, as "the British people" become something other, even at The Daily Mail:
Woman, 28, 'gang-raped by three Brits was bitten all over her body during two-hour ordeal in Croatian beach hotel'
The "three Brits" turn out to be, of course, a trio of Sunni Muslim Kosovar Albanians - because that's what Blair, Cameron, Johnson, May and Starmer decided they wanted to do to you. Think of the British Isles as that poor Croat girl, and the "three Brits" as the entire political elite - Tory and Labour, Reform and Sinn Féin - plus Fleet Street's court eunuchs, who very much enjoy watching it.
Civil war, of one kind or another, is coming. That's the bad news if you're still of an Alan Jay Lernerish disposition. The good news is that, if it's inevitable, the British state is, when push comes to shove, much weaker than generally thought. By way of example, a week of sustained mass protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping has just led a generally craven and pusillanimous council to vote for its closure. Even Kemi Badenoch - leader of the "Conservative" Party, for those who've never heard of her - has been minded to make a rare intervention on something that actually matters, and join the calls for the tolling of the Bell. That's unusual - because, if you watch "mainstream" telly, as Kemi does, the aggrieved mums who don't want their daughters raped are all far-right racists who are irredeemably migrantphobic. Here is the BBC's main concern:
Protests leave asylum seekers afraid to exit hotel
Good. That'll do wonders for the sex-crime statistics. Perhaps next time the Beeb could ask the fourteen- and sixteen-year-old girls assaulted by one of the hotel's residents whether they also feel afraid to leave their homes.
Of course, Two-Tier Keir's proposed solution to the spreading protests is the further shrivelling of what's left of English free speech:
Elite police unit to monitor social media for anti-migrant posts
Because, as a certain "niche Canadian" used to say before he was yanked off the UK airwaves, Britain is the land where everything is policed except crime. From the Brit Wanker Coppers of Norfolk Constabulary:
James Harvey, aged 22, of Linden Drive, Hethersett, has been charged with a racially aggravated public order offence.
Here is the footage of Mr Harvey's arrest:
This is the moment @JamesHarvey2503 is arrested by the @NorfolkPolice STASI. Be in no doubt this is a crackdown on free speech akin to any tyrannical regime.
James' was is charged for sating "stop the boats", "send them back" & "foreign filth" no doubt on the basis of crime. pic.twitter.com/YzSFis4Lx0
— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) July 27, 2025
"Racially aggravating" the Brit Wanker Coppers is very easy to do. Here a poor chap find himself in trouble for having England's national flag visible in his motor car:
Man gets pulled over by the police for carrying England flags for the women's final.
Surely.., you're allowed England flags in England... right 🤷♀️ pic.twitter.com/7SELvDQd9u
— WeGotitBack 🏴🇬🇧🇺🇸 (@NotFarLeftAtAll) July 27, 2025
As you can tell, the Brit Wanker Coppers are openly loathed by ever more of the passers-by at such incidents. As the police become ever more brazenly the wardens of a prison state, I have no doubt that many of these contemptible traitors to Sir Robert Peel's founding principles would be willing to inflict brutality on a public they despise. But do they have the resources to go mediaeval on the mums of Epping? One notes that, for the last two years, as anti-migrant protests have metastasised in Ireland, the Garda Commissioner in Dublin has been obliged to borrow water cannon from the police in Belfast. That's to say, in order to hose down their own revolting masses, the Irish political class requires the assistance of the Brits. Likewise, in Epping, the Essex coppers needed back-up from the Metropolitan Police.
Cynics argue that Starmer is deliberately provoking unrest in order to provide a pretext for a hardline crackdown. It is heartening that in Epping, despite the gaoling of Peter Lynch and Lisa Connolly and Tommy Robinson, the masses still turn out. And, in Essex as in Ireland, I doubt any of these dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt police chiefs has enough water cannon to hand.
As I wrote - here it comes, folks; the first of the week - twenty sodding years ago, in The Daily Telegraph of February 2005:
It's a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog faeces and mix 'em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former.
I see this is known to some as Steyn's Axiom, so perhaps I have not lived entirely in vain. A generation back, I was referring to the United Nations, but the principle is of more general application. Certainly, it holds in societies that decide to go all-in on diversity: in case you haven't noticed, if the state is ever more hostile to lofty abstractions like freedom of speech and practical realities like the safety of schoolgirls, it's because the authorities are assimilating with the immigrants. Starmer understands this, and intends to accelerate it. What's happening in Britain and Europe is not, as many deluded types still think, the accidental consequence of well-intended policy - "cock-up, not conspiracy, dear boy," as Tories used to drawl. Rather, it is, as Eva Vlaardingerbroek says, "all by design".
Another current example: Britain's government has decided to lower the voting age to sixteen. Almost all the commentary has focused on whether schoolchildren are informed or responsible enough to vote. Reading such bollocks is a complete waste of your time. The principal practical effect of sixteen-year-old electors will be to increase the migrant vote long before the formal handover of demographic supremacy in 2063 or whenever. As Richard North writes at The Conservative Woman:
In most Muslim households, it is a dead cert that the heads of the households will use the postal votes of their children to favour candidates pre-selected by the baradari (clan) elders at the mosques.
As someone once said, the future belongs to those who show up, and with Starmer's legislation it shows up early. "Diversity" is not equally distributed: the Zimmer-frame vote is still overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic; among newborns, forty per cent have at least one non-UK parent.
"The past is a foreign country," wrote L P Hartley in The Go-Between. It is the perverse genius of the west's ruling class to have turned the present into a foreign country, from the defecators in Park Lane to the sex predators in Epping. In choosing to criminalise those who notice the faeces and rapes, Two-Tier Keir is making civil war inevitable - because more and more people grasp that "democracy" has not worked for a generation now. As I pointed out often in the run-up to the Brexit vote, for years UK polls had consistently showed that half the citizenry wanted to leave the European Union ...yet not one of their political parties did (not even the Shinners). That's a sign of deep democratic dysfunction. Instead of ensuring that such a situation never arose again, the Uniparty has extended the principle to issues even more basic, such as your government importing a thousand sex fiends every night.
The political class persist in incentivising the conditions for civil unrest and then dealing with it by doubling down. David Betz points out that, were the scale of the "Irish Troubles" in the Seventies to be duplicated across the land, that would be 23,000 dead each year. Starmer feels pretty confident he and his goons could handle that. I doubt it.
This is the first of a series on the coming turmoil. To reiterate:
The bad news is that, as Betz says, in Britain and much of Europe civil war is now inevitable.
The good news is that the class that consciously chose to destroy their "eminently civilised societies" will lose.
Bring it on.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my column on the latest revelations on "the Russia investigation". On Friday evening, our seventy-second Tale for Our Time, Joseph Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness, concluded to general listener approval: for the final episode, click here. On Saturday Rick McGinnis's movie date was a classic from 1980, The Long Good Friday, while my Sunday Song of the Week luxuriated in Summertime. Our marquee presentation was a special edition of my weekend music show featuring me in conversation with the great songwriter Alan Bergman, who died a few days ago.
If you were too busy this weekend berating your far-right neighbour for objecting to the gang-rape of schoolgirls, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
