There is a Rudyard Kipling poem about a landowner who is frustrated by a tenant who keeps poaching his game. He decides not to prosecute his tenant’s flagrant lawbreaking after he reflects on the many generations of this man’s family who have seen all the other landowners of this patch come and go, from the present reaching back to Roman times.

His dead are in the churchyard—thirty generations laid.

Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made;

And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line

Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

I thought of this poem when I saw a viral video of a former member of parliament disputing the very existence of the English ethnicity. The former Labour MP Sion Simon called out the talking head across from him on a news show for contrasting English anti-immigration rioters with Muslim pro-Palestine rioters: “It’s not legitimate to distinguish between Muslims and English. It’s not legitimate to say ‘ethnic English’ versus ‘Muslims.’ We don’t talk like that in this country anymore.” When the man struggled to understand what was offensive about his factual description, Simon prodded him, “What’s ‘ethnically English’ mean?” 

Perhaps the former Labour MP has not fully grasped the meaning of “Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made.” To spell it out: William the Conqueror commissioned the Great Survey a thousand years ago, which is a very long time, yet many English families that still exist today were as ancient to him then as he is to us. It does not get more indigenous than that.

People throw around the G-word flippantly, but surely this deserves to be called genocidal. Americans are frequently told by Kiev’s partisans that it is genocidal rhetoric when Vladimir Putin says Russians and Ukrainians share a common heritage as brother Slavic peoples. Even if he had never killed a single Ukrainian, it would still be genocidal, we are told, because it would deny the Ukrainians their right to a distinct peoplehood. This denial of Englishness is far more sweeping. 

The purpose of this erasure is to render unsayable all the positions that a British government that did not hate its own people would take as a matter of course, such as: “White British” people are less than 37 percent of the population of London; they have been driven from their own capital by people who arrived only the day before yesterday; no government housing should be given to foreigners until native British are back in the majority in the city their grandfathers built. 

That should be the commonsense moderate position. Instead, the most conservative opinion permissible on London demographics is that the slow eradication of English people from the city is a fact of life, like the weather, on which the people’s government may take no position for or against. The current Labour government is further to the left: It has just announced that it will scrap a proposed residency requirement for government housing giving priority on the waiting list to those who have lived in the UK for at least 10 years.

Kipling could not bring himself to be angry at the poacher in the poem, however brazen his lawbreaking. In the same way, I cannot bring myself to feel outrage over the lawbreaking of the rioters and gesticulators whom the British police are now packing off to prison with such alacrity. But that does not mean rioting is wise.

It is tempting to argue that, as long as Britain is descending into ethnic balkanization, English people should be able to do the same thing every other group does: sow a little rowdiness in the streets, then reap government favors both rhetorical and material. Alas, British people will never be just another minority, even 40 years from now when, demographically, they are. They will always be the legacy majority whose demonization justifies everyone else’s cushy sinecures and community outreach splash-outs.

Truly it is unfair that every other group, from Bengalis to Gypsies, gets to riot and then have their demands met, while British natives with legitimate grievances (such as not wanting little girls to get stabbed to death) get punished for the same behavior that in others is rewarded. But this two-tier treatment is fundamental to the whole ideology of the diversity state. It is the moral bedrock on which everything rests. No appeal to fairness can hope to put a crack in it. 

Street protests should only be done with a clear purpose in mind. One alternative purpose, if shaking goodies out of the government doesn’t apply to English people, is to make like-minded citizens know they aren’t alone. The British public has been subjected to a staggering amount of propaganda in the last 20 years designed to make multiculturalism seem like a vast consensus and to make anyone who objects to it feel demoralized and outnumbered. If the silent majority knew how many people thought as they did, for example by seeing thousands take to the streets in the name of ending mass immigration, they might be emboldened.

But here, again, the terrain of battle is not favorable. The British government has extensive experience in astroturfing “anti-racist” protests, and they reached into their bag of tricks again last week in order to make a show of strength on behalf of the regime. In publicizing this display of power, the regime had the help of even the Daily Mail. It is obviously desperately important to the government that any silent majority stay demoralized.

Two weeks ago, three little girls aged 6, 7, and 9 were hacked to death at a Taylor Swift–themed dance class by a teenager with a curved kitchen knife whose parents moved to the UK from Rwanda in 2002. Is it legal for a British resident to write a social media post saying that Axel Rudakubana should never have been in this country in the first place? That the correct number of refugees Britain should accept per year from the machete-murder capital of Africa is zero? Would the government ever disclose it if the perpetrator admitted the reason he chose a Taylor Swift–themed dance class of all places was because he thought it would be full of white people, or would that detail be suppressed? 

Hopefully the answers to those questions will be made clear soon. This has been a depressing month in British history, and it is hard to see what the good guys can hope to achieve in the near term. But at least we are learning a great deal about where things stand.