The song “English Civil War” feels very British. It deals with rising political tensions in England in the 1970s and was written by The Clash, one of the most famous English rock bands of all time. But it’s set to the tune of an American song, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” centered around America’s Civil War.
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The connection, perhaps inadvertent, is nonetheless telling. The song plays a major role in The Haxton Review, author Joshua Knapp’s debut novel—which is without question a very British novel. It is by a British author, set in a small town in northern England, and deals with the horrifyingly relevant racial struggles between native white Englanders and their new, Middle Eastern neighbors. But Americans would do well to give it a read, because the struggles faced by Adam, the book’s main character and narrator, are not so different from the struggles faced by Americans today across the country.
The book centers around Adam, who finds himself slowly drawn into a local religious dispute. Adam is no hard-right populist. He voted for Nigel Farage’s populist Reform Party in 2024 “through gritted teeth,” a vote more out of distrust—or disgust—with the establishment parties and less out of a dedication to a cause. The natives of Lantyrn Royd, who are among the last white holdouts of Coxthorpe, a town which has slowly Islamified, wish to hold a “rush bearing” procession, an ancient English parade in which plants—rushes—are brought to a church. But following the original path of the town’s rush bearing parade will take it through a now-Islamic area. And the parade features the presence of a knight, representative of a crusader, which offends the Muslim population.
The rush bearers of Lantyrn Royd are, unsurprisingly, vilified in the media. The narrator’s brother—an arrogant, liberal columnist who presents himself as a regular bloke familiar with Northern, working-class ways but who has broken free from them and moved onwards and upwards to high-society London—pens a column arguing that the parade should be diversified and inclusive so as to represent modern Britain.
This pushes Adam—who has already shown signs of leaning toward the plight of the rush bearers—over the edge, inspiring him to start an OyTube channel (one assumes that “YouTube” could not be used for copyright purposes), “The Haxton Review,” which features interviews with the rush bearers, humanizes them, and pushes back against those who would prefer to see the parade shut down.
The plot unfolds in a thrilling way, with tensions coming to a boil as the date of the procession gets closer. But the story is told for a purpose, and clearly is meant to represent more than a story about an upcoming divisive festival. In Adam’s OyTube videos—comprising several chapters spaced throughout the book—along with conversations between key characters, Knapp paints a tragic, but true to life, picture of England and the entirety of the wider West: a civilization populated by atomized individuals living in their own ruins, disconnected from their history, and manipulated by those who truly, desperately, wish to see it disappear, replaced with dreams—or nightmares—of a melting pot.
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The first Muslim whom Adam speaks to in the book is friendly. In fact, all of his conversations with Muslims are friendly. These, and past friendly interactions, cause Adam to feel guilty for supporting the rush bearers. At one point he considers the Asians—Britain’s word for what Americans call South Asians, which in this case means mostly Pakistanis—who will be hurt by his support for the rush bearing.
Those who are supportive of multiculturalism, in the book and in real life, understand the power that such guilt has, and they use it frequently. Oftentimes this guilt comes in the form of government force. Last year, many American conservatives were disturbed to learn of the existence of the Community Relations Service within the United States Department of Justice, which has a history of meeting with white families who have been victims of crimes committed by minorities and urging them to put out statements decrying racial tensions. Britain’s Police Family Liaison Officers play a similar role.
These dual realizations, on both sides of the Atlantic, helped to explain why statements from victims’ families always seem written in a specific way. Take the statement issued by the family of Stephen Ogilvie, a Belfast man who was nearly decapitated earlier this month by a Sudanese migrant:
[Block]We are aware of the tensions and talk of protests following this incident. We want to make it absolutely clear that overnight unrest is not welcome, and peaceful protest is the only way forward. We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector, and we depend on them to make our country work. We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility.[end]
In the past, such statements would have incurred no raised eyebrows. But now they come off as sinister, almost eerie; one struggles to imagine why a horrified family would take the time to highlight the fact that migrants work “in our healthcare system and hospitality sector” unless they were prodded to mention it. The proliferation of social media sites like X, Rumble, and YouTube channels similar to Adam’s has helped to remove the glossy sheen of the “melting pot” which had been painted over the eyes of so many for decades.
This sinister, almost bizarre feeling pervades Adam’s experiences and the novel itself. At points, The Haxton Review reads almost like a Soviet-era book—Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita comes to mind—in which characters understand that certain things cannot be said, and others can only be said in certain ways. And while it would go too far to suggest that modern Britain is akin to the Soviet Union—Brezhnev never needed to worry about losing an election to a Russian Nigel Farage, let alone a Russian Rupert Lowe—it is hard to escape the feeling that modern Britain is simply not a free country.
Police visit Adam’s workplace because of his channel, reflecting the real-life Britain’s arrests of over 12,000 people in a single year for online posts. Adam’s boss, an ally of his, nervously asks him, very indirectly, if he said or did anything which may cause the powers that be to take an interest in him.
But there are global forces at work too. Spanish banks pay for pro-Muslim and pro-LGBT parades. Even those on his side confuse him, such as one group which is strangely just as against migration as they are supportive of Israel.
But it is his interactions with religion which are particularly concerning. At one point, a Catholic friar tries to reach out to him by comparing the plight of Muslims today to the plight of Catholics in the UK in the past, warning Adam that he is threatening his soul with his support for the rush bearing.
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But the friar’s trepidations pale in comparison to those of the Anglican priest, who is horrified by Adam’s suggestion that the English nation could be seen as a family (as that would imply England’s history as a white country is in any way truthful). The priest, a woman named Lavinia, at one point says priests are “not here to be God’s referees.” She speaks frequently in paeans to love but never, careful readers may notice, about the actual truth of the Gospel. Her faith, it appears, is empty, coming across as only designed to undergird the establishment’s need for a multicultural society. When Adam challenges her on this—that the Church of England has mostly served to support the establishment’s views—her attempted refutation fails to convince.
This is contrasted with Catholicism, which Adam struggles with. Aside from the friar—who arguably represents the older, more liberal generation of Catholics—Catholicism is represented as what once held the West together. At one point, speaking of the Eucharist, Adam comments that “the blessed sacrament, that little bit of whiteness, built a whole civilization, once upon a time. It built my civilization, or at least the one I identify with.”
Adam’s statement underlines the difficulty faced by modern England: the church it is left with, though still populated by many priests who are truly believing shepherds of their flocks, is trending toward an empty paean to multiculturalism. The church that built the West, in contrast, is not even English.
What being English actually is remains another question entirely. At one point Adam is told, “You don’t get to define what English is.” Americans will hear an echo of their own recent debates over the subject, in which ludicrous statements such as this, from Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) proliferate: “immigrants from all over the world, Somalia, India, wherever they’re from, Latin America, Africa . . . immigrants have built this country and make this country what it is today.”
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There are moments when less plugged-in readers may think the author is going too far in his attempts to demonstrate how truly insane, for lack of a better word, England has become. At one point, crossbow bolts are fired from the roof of a mosque at white protestors. This may strike the reader as a bit silly: England has a famous knife problem, but crossbows?
Or at least, it seems silly, until news stories like the one from earlier this month, in which a Saudi-born student shot someone with a crossbow on an English university campus. Which is the most frightening thing about the events of the novel: while they are fictional, they are also very, very real.
As the novel progresses, the entirety of English and global society appears to be working against the rush bearers. History is twisted against them. The crusading knight is portrayed by England’s media, government, and religious figures as wholly unnecessary and deeply offensive to the Muslims whose ancestors were supposedly brutally attacked by crusading forces.
Nowhere is it ever mentioned by any of these opponents that the Crusades were a series of fundamentally defensive wars, fought to save the Christian Byzantine Empire from Islamic attacks and wrest control of the Christian Holy Land back from the Muslim invaders who had captured it a few hundred years before. Why the Crusades have somehow been twisted in Western discourse as having been offensive wars remains an open question.
England, and the English, are never allowed to defend themselves. Any defense of their own culture, history, or identity is registered by the establishment instead as an attack on the multicultural, diverse 21st-century England.
It is precisely here that Americans should feel a particular kinship. “It’s sad that even our best people have so little sense of their own history,” a character says at one point.
This lack of a sense of history, on both sides of the Atlantic, is driven by a constant establishmentarian argument that there is no American history. Real English and American history cannot be told, because there is no “real” England or America. Both are ideas, amorphic, constantly changing concepts which will—in the hopes of the diversifiers—eventually simply reflect the entire globe.
It is this idea—that the West only exists so that it can absorb the world—that the rush bearers of the novel, and the populist movements active across the United Kingdom and America, are working against. Whether they will succeed is an open question. As Winston Churchill said the last time England was in grave jeopardy, “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”
Across the West, there have already been countless innocents who have already choked on their own blood, struck down by those not from here. Innocents shot by crossbows, blown up by bombs, stabbed with machetes and knives. These rivers of blood, prophesied by another famous British politician, have led to boiling tensions—in the Coxthorpe of the novel and in small towns and cities from California to Washington to London.
Time will tell if they simmer down or boil over entirely.
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Anthony J. Constantini is the policy director at the Bull Moose Project and a columnist at Brussels Signal.
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