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“Britain is a nation more intent on self-destruction than any I’ve ever seen.” —Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam
Tough love dominates my writing about Britain in recent years, and today — in addition to where the U.K. might go following the outrage over Henry Nowak’s death — you’ll learn why.
As these things so often do with impressionable young American boys, it starts with Monty Python.
For whatever reason, Mom let 11-year-old me watch a couple episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus on St. Louis’ KETC-9 during a special PBS pledge-drive marathon. Sure, I had little or no context for most of the jokes, but the ones that landed, landed hard.
Take any reasonably bright kid around that age and show him or her (but more often him) the Dead Parrot sketch, and odds are they’ll get hooked. Next thing you know, they’ll devote a week of their lives to memorizing the Cheese Shop sketch instead of studying for school, making noises like the Knights Who Say “NI!”, or demanding to know what the Romans ever did for us.
I certainly did all that, and so did my sons shortly after I showed them the Dead Parrot sketch. There’s no better place to start a young person on the Pythons’ uniquely absurdist humor, and you don’t exactly need to be steeped in the Magna Carta or the Brontë sisters to laugh hysterically when John Cleese’s posh English accent hits an unexpectedly high-pitched crescendo with “This is an EX–PARROT!”
Like all of Monty Python’s other classics, the Dead Parrot sketch is easily found as a stand-alone clip on YouTube. There’s something to be said for being able to have the YouTube algorithm serve up one favorite after another, but there was perhaps something better to be said for sitting down and watching entire episodes, one after another, until you’d seen them all. Like I did, starting about five minutes after buying the DVD box set more years ago than I’d care to admit.
If my mother made a mistake that night, it’s when she told me I wasn’t allowed to watch KETC’s final gift that night: the distinctly not edited-for-television version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. That was a piece of forbidden fruit I’d taste just a few weeks later at the house of a friend with a VCR and even less supervision than I had.
But, yeah, when Sir Galahad arrived at Castle Anthrax — home of many pretty maidens and light spankings followed by… you know — I totally got why Mom turned off the TV that Sunday night.
Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, and even Benny Hill’s show soon followed. “Yakety Sax” and ample British décolletage took on improbably outsized roles during my tween years.
Don’t get me wrong. Even back then, I knew that Benny Hill was by far the least sophisticated of the British humor I’d fallen in love with. In fact, “sophisticated” and Benny Hill might never have appeared in the same sentence before this one and the one immediately preceding it. But if there was ever a middle-aged man who knew how to target humor at 12-year-old boys, his skills were nothing short of genius.
And Another Thing: True story. A good high school friend’s dad was also our history teacher. He took us to see Monty Python’s Meaning of Life on the big screen in 1983. Dave and I were about to die of embarrassment during the Sex Ed. sequence, but I had never heard a teacher laugh so loud at all the things that schoolboys will ignore in class. Brilliant, even though I didn’t really quite get the point at the time.
My early love of British fare was no short-lived fling, either. Of all the American stuff I must have watched in the first half of my 20s, the only shows I still remember watching were all British: Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes in the never-to-be-equaled Granada productions, all four incarnations of Blackadder (even the almost unwatchable first season, but only once), and of course, Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.
I maintain to this day that everything even an American needs to understand about politics, the bureaucracy, and the media can be found by watching James Hacker spar with Sir Humphrey Appleby — with Bernard Woolley often standing in for the sensible British everyman caught in between.
Observe:
That bit is from 1987, and its truths — however bitingly funny they are — remain essentially unchanged.
If I spent the second half of my twenties soaking up as much Russian culture as I could, as detailed in a previous Thursday Essay, my formative years were dominated by our island cousins on the other side of the Atlantic. It took a determined Literature professor to pry me away from PBS — and The Young Ones reruns on MTV that semester — long enough to read some Jane Austen, but he gave me an A for my essay arguing that Darcy was the real victim of Pride & Prejudice.
It’s always fun when you stake out an almost indefensible position just to annoy somebody, only to have them appreciate it. I might still try to do that sometimes, but I’ll never admit to which columns. Anyway.
I promise to get to the newsy stuff momentarily, but first we need to go a little deeper into why every liberty-loving American should fear and hope for British culture the way I do.
And Another Thing: Sure, I respect the French and the Italians for their food and wine, but their broader cultures never came anywhere close to grabbing my attention the way the Brits’ and the Russians’ did.
Before there was — before there even could be — a self-evident truth that all men are created equal, there was this strange notion, peculiar to just one medium-sized island, of English liberty.
Its circuitous founding goes back to 1215 and the signing of the Magna Carta, which put some limits on the absolute powers of a (most unwilling) King John. It established, or at least laid the foundations of due process, habeas corpus, and no taxation without consent — at least for the barons who forced John to sign it.
From there, English liberty developed fitfully through common law court precedent, the rise of Parliament, the bloody Civil War of 1642 to 1651, and the much tidier Glorious Revolution of 1688, which produced the English Bill of Rights and cemented parliamentary supremacy over the crown.
Liberty was for a long time considered a uniquely English attribute, like the Russian penchant for manic-depression or Italians playing grab-ass. I kid, I kid. (Mostly.)
When our Founders took up arms against Britain in 1775, they did so to protect their rights as Englishmen. A year later, with a big assist from Thomas Jefferson, they made the philosophical leap that rights are inherent in all men, not just those lucky enough to be born English.
They were also smart enough to write it all down in a Constitution, sparing us — at least so far — the worst of Britain’s statist encroachments.
There’s no First Amendment in Great Britain. No Second Amendment, either. And it shows in ways that might have King George III siding with George Washington, if he knew then what’s happening in Britain now.
And Another Thing: The real-world application of the Founders’ philosophical revolution was woefully incomplete, and there’s some language in the Constitution that in retrospect should have been much tighter. But they still worked wonders unmatched even now in the realm of real-world politics.
By now you must know the story of Henry Nowak all too well.
The 18-year-old student was stabbed five times on a Southampton street following an altercation with a British Sikh man. As he lay bleeding out, trying to tell the police he’d been stabbed, killer Vickrum Digwa told police that Nowak was a racist. So police cuffed the dying victim.
Digwa and his brother knew exactly what to do even before the cops arrived. “We’ve just been attacked by…” Gurpreet Digwa told police dispatchers with a pause, “someone racially.”
Vickrum was just convicted of murder and sentenced to a minimum term of 21 years, but the Southampton police have yet to face any consequences for their behavior. In today’s Britain, it’s basically impossible.
Almost 250 years after Americans codified British notions of liberty, Britons returned the favor, so to speak, by institutionalizing the American left’s liberty-destroying racial grievance spoils system.
“To understand how we got here,” Konstantin Kisin wrote for The Free Press this week, “you have to understand what the post-[George] Floyd ‘reckoning’ actually did to British institutions—especially the police. The response to Floyd’s death wasn’t merely emotional, nor was it just symbolic. It was ideological, and it was systematic.”
I could run through the litany of what Britons have had to endure for two decades, under both Tory and Labour governments that just don’t give a damn about actual Britons. “The worst might be the Muslim grooming gangs and mass rapes endured by working-class British girls,” I wrote earlier this year, “left unpunished to assuage the guilty consciences of the country’s upper crust.”
“Guilty of what?” you might ask. Guilty of being British.
The groomers, the police response to Nowak, and last summer’s crackdown on patriotic displays are the inevitable results of a decades-long experiment with erasing the shame its elites carry for the country’s colonial history by erasing the country’s entire identity. British so-called elites do so largely via the mass importation of non-assimilating Third World Muslims, and then corrupting the police and courts to establish a “two-tier justice” system tipped heavily in favor of newcomers.
The state-run media plays along.
To conservative Americans like you and me who never thought the race card held much value, it’s almost impossible to comprehend how it’s come to trump virtually everything in 21st-century Britain. Or how thoroughly various governments have used it to corrupt the country’s police forces.
In Southampton at least, a number of Britons have had quite enough. Watch this video of some British-looking chaps — a proper rowdy protest, you might say — taking their displeasure straight to the unaccountable local police.
Riot erupts in Southampton between police and protesters as Henry Nowak protest turns ugly. Full video on YT. #henrynowak #Southampton pic.twitter.com/ItfF9XNBIm
— Urban Pictures (@Urban_Pictures) June 3, 2026
You’ll have a much easier time as an American with full access to X of seeing that video than you would as a loyal subject of the Crown.
“The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Nowak,” Kisin continued in that Free Press essay, but there’s more to it than official silence. His Majesty’s Government is working to silence protesting Britons in real-time:
The live streams just went dark.
British citizens protesting the death of Henry Nowak. YouTube shut them down mid-broadcast. Starmer’s government is actively censoring protests about a child who died in police handcuffs while his killer walked free.
This is happening now.… pic.twitter.com/CRP9REuT7p
— Christian (@InTheTrenchesUK) June 2, 2026
“A British Prime Minister is silencing his own people to protect a narrative that kills children,” Christian continued. “Let that sink in. Then scream.”
But in Britain, no one can hear you scream — not while Keir Starmer is Prime Minister, anyway.
Starmer is a curious case. His Labour government came into power in 2024, due almost entirely to public disgust with the Tories, and not because of any particular affection for Starmer or his party. Labour won with just 33.7%, the lowest ever, but then proceeded to govern as though Labour had won in a landslide popular vote.
Today, Labour polls at 17% on a good day, and having helped to squash British patriotism, nationalist sentiment is on the rise in the form of Reform UK and increasingly assertive street protests like the one Starmer wants to memory hole.
The only thing keeping Starmer in power is that his party is too fractured to ditch him. That, and they aren’t required to hold another election until 2029. Whoever the winner turns out to be, the results will be brutal for Labour. A quick query of the search engine or LLM of your choice will return a long list of “End of Labour” reports.
Yet Starmer hangs on, his methods increasingly and necessarily Orwellian.
If Starmer’s authoritarian misrule does prove to be Labour’s last gasp, let the Tories go with them. These are not Margaret Thatcher’s Tories. They aren’t even (cursed be his name) John Major’s. Today’s Tories are as useless as the corpse of Gervaise Brook-Hampster winning Python’s Upper Class Twit of the Year contest.
And yet at least one surviving Python yearns for those Upper Class Twits of yesteryear. “The people in charge now have no idea at all,” John Cleese said about the state of comedy in post-British Britain. “The writers deserve better than this. The British people deserve better than this.”
Indeed, they do deserve better, but the generation of elites that Monty Python once mocked finally gave way to a new generation bent on outlawing mockery.
It’s an irony the Python men would recognize, and then skewer.
Last Thursday: We’re in the Endgame Now… Unless…
