If news reports are accurate, by the time you read this, Keir Starmer may no longer be the prime minister of the United Kingdom. Depending on the source, he has either decided to resign or is seriously considering it. In any case, the events in Britain over the last few weeks—the murder, enabled by the police, of Henry Nowak by the Sikh Vickrum Digwa; the attempted beheading of a man in Belfast by a Muslim immigrant; the release of a report on the systematic and protracted rape of young women and girls by Muslim “grooming gangs”; the subsequent (and understandable) renewal of unrest over largely unchecked immigration; and the government’s increased efforts to limit and control speech—have likely doomed Starmer and the Labour Party, making it impossible for them to maintain or regain the trust of the people.

None of this should really surprise anyone. In a narrow context, Starmer has been on this course for some time, likely since the very start of his premiership. He was never especially well-liked and always seemed to be the wrong man for the moment. In a broader context, Starmer’s agenda, which pits the ruling class against the rest of the country, has agitated the rest of the country for years. The catch, of course, is that “Starmer’s agenda” isn’t really his at all. It’s the agenda of the ruling class more generally. Again, in a narrow context, immigration, plus speech suppression, plus net-zero green madness, has been the agenda of both British major political parties for the entirety of the 21st century. In a broader context, the often unintentional but always unremitting annihilation of the uniquely British identity has been the agenda of the British ruling class since the end of World War II.

Forty-two years ago, the British rock band the Kinks released their 21st studio album, titled Word of Mouth. It was a mostly unremarkable record—with one exception, the Dave Davies composition “Living on a Thin Line,” which has become a cult classic over the decades (thanks, in part, to its use in an episode of The Sopranos). The song is moving, if somewhat depressing, while Davies’s lyrics are pointed, profound, and, it would appear, rather timeless:

All the stories have been told
Of kings and days of old,
But there’s no England now.
All the wars that were won and lost
Somehow don’t seem to matter very much anymore.
All the lies we were told,
All the lies of the people running round,
Their castles have burned.
Now I see change,
But inside we’re the same as we ever were.

Now, the remarkable thing about this song isn’t that it was recorded and released more than four decades ago. What’s remarkable is that the conditions in the UK were such that more than four decades ago, the song wasn’t all that remarkable. Davies wasn’t singled out for his “over the top” laments or condemned as anti-Thatcher (by the right) or anti-immigrant (by the Left). The circumstances Davies identified were so widespread and so widely acknowledged that “Thin Line” drew almost no criticism whatsoever.

Even more remarkably, this song was rightly understood as a typical part of the Kinks’ legacy. Pete Townshend, the co-founder and guitarist of The Who, once described the Kinks’ songs—mostly written by Dave Davies’s brother and the band’s usual lead singer, Ray—as “English novels in three verses.” By this, he meant that the songs were akin to the works of Dickens, Hardy, or even Orwell, social documentaries charting the emotional landscape of class and nostalgia. In 1966, the Kinks were banned from touring in the United States (due to a labor union dispute, ironically enough), thereby sidestepping the universalization of their music that affected other British bands, like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. They remained uniquely British. The result was a string of albums and singles (Face to Face, Something Else, Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur, Muswell Hillbillies) that amounted to a sustained, semi-autobiographical portrait of English working-class and lower-middle-class life: corner pubs, Sunday roasts, music halls, Victorian terraces being bulldozed for tower blocks—in short, the creeping homogenization of postwar modernity.

In 1971, the Kinks released an album titled Muswell Hillbillies, which documented the plight of the residents of Muswell Hill, the part of North London where the Davies brothers grew up. At the time, much of the area was being bulldozed under, rebuilt, and “modernized” in the name of “progress.” The entire album is a lament for lost identity and the pains of loss associated with contemporary society. The song “Here Come the People in Grey” was especially poignant and resonant:

I got a letter this morning with serious news that’s gone and ruined my day,
the borough surveyor’s used compulsory purchase to acquire my domaine,
they’re gonna pull up the floors, they’re gonna knock down the walls,
they’re gonna dig up the drains.
Here come the people in grey they’re gonna take me away to lord knows where,
but i’m so unprepared i got no time to pack and i got nothing to wear,
here come the people in grey,
to take me away.

Regular readers may note that I have written about the “macadamizing tendency” of modernization more than once in these pages, noting the contemporary destruction of community and the takeover of a centralized, homogenized society. Regular readers may also note that, in so doing, I have cited brilliant conservative thinkers like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. As magnificent and effective as quotations from the likes of Kirk and Nisbet can be, however, they don’t have the cultural punch that the Kinks have. They don’t create the instant, inarguable, and honestly identifiable emotional connection that the Davies brothers do.

Nevertheless, they’re all telling the exact same story. Ray and Dave Davies might be befuddled to be included among the greats of American political philosophy, but in the end, they’re all making the same argument. They’re all lamenting the slow but steady loss of the intermediary institutions that made Anglo-American societies so different from their Western counterparts. They are all seeing what Burke saw and what he believed distinguished the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution—revolutions “not made but prevented”—from the grotesquely bloody French Revolution. They are all noting the prior existence and present unbearable loss of Tocqueville’s “thousand other kinds” of civil associations: “religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small.”

For years, I’ve wondered—and tried to write about—the eventual end of the European ruling classes’ obsession with unbridled immigration, especially from the Islamic world. I’ve wondered what might trigger a backlash, how bloody that backlash might be, and where it would begin. I suppose I should have known that it would start in Britain. There have been signs along the way, after all, the most notable of which was Brexit. The British ruling class is powerful, has an agenda that purposefully destroys institutional opposition, and has far more power to do as it pleases than the American ruling class does. At the same time, though, Britain does still have some institutional memory of what things were like before and what they were always supposed to be. Its institutions may be corrupted, turned against the people for the benefit of their “betters,” but they do still exist, and they do still profess, at least, to uphold the rule of law. As prescient and stirring as Dave Davies’ lyrics were, he was wrong about one thing. There is still an England now. It is mostly dead, to be sure, but as any schoolboy knows, ”there’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.”

Whether Keir Starmer has already resigned or is still mulling it over, the fact that he is in this position at all is a testament to the “mostly dead” theory of British democratic institutions. This is good news—just as Brexit was. It proves that Britain still has hope, still has a chance to redeem itself and, perhaps, to retain or regain some of its lost identity. That doesn’t mean that Britain will return to the way it was before the great homogenization, but it does mean that the institutions that literally created the modern world and, in fact, created the United States might still be resuscitated.

It also means that Britain’s great immigration catastrophe might still be resolved peacefully. The bad news is that such a resolution is unlikely anywhere else in Europe. As I have also noted in these pages, the Anglo-American tradition is significantly different from the continental tradition. The former tradition is, as implied by the Burke bit above, far less violent, far less volatile, far less arbitrary, and far more dedicated to negative liberty.

The French Revolution and the Holocaust are the two violent bookends of the continental era of modernization. They show, in pitiless detail, what happens when intermediary organizations are targeted or when they have been fully destroyed over time.

That alone should be cause for concern. The unwillingness of the continental ruling classes even to consider the opinions of the rest of their nation is another. Unlike Britain, where a handful of popular protests have possibly toppled the government, the ruling classes of France and Germany appear especially obdurate in the safeguarding of their agendas. Consider, for example, the rise of the Le Pen family in France or the AfD in Germany, both of which show a true surge in populist sentiment. Consider as well the lengths to which the establishment parties in both countries have gone to discredit and undermine their new challengers. In the end, the populist backlash will be slower to arrive on the continent, but it will likely be far more brutal when it finally does.

The British people won’t miss Keir Starmer when he’s finally gone. They should be grateful, though, to know that they can still force their leaders to leave without bloodshed. That’s impressive, and hardly universal, even in the West.