More From The Country That Gave Us Fabian Socialism

Here's what Rowan Williams said about the "grooming gangs," in a recent piece for The Guardian. You'll note, first of all, that he put the phrase in scare quotes, because, of course, he doesn't really believe there actually are organised groups of Muslim men deliberately… https://t.co/6CXZhMfa4K pic.twitter.com/W8h9O03Q1A

— RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) April 17, 2026

Now and then, most recently here and here, I've reviewed the late 19th century idea that the best strategy to counter the threat of world proletarian revolution was to temporize with working-class demands, but nevertheless gradually capitulate to them. This was a product almost exclusively of the UK bourgeoisie. According to Wikipedia,

As one of the founding organisations of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, and as an important influence upon the Labour Party which grew from it, the Fabian Society has strongly influenced British politics.

A few figures closely associated with the movement were working class, like Ben Tillett, or titled nobility, like Bertrand Russell, but their overall social alignments were more consistent with what Marx and Engels called the bourgeoisie, which most in the movement authentically were. It's always puzzled me that working-class members of the Labour party seem never to have been remotely suspicious that members of the bourgeoisie were making policy putatively intended to benefit the working class.

I've argued here that once the classic threat of world proletarian revolution a la the Soviet Union in 1917 dissipated with the collapse of the same Soviet Union in the late 20th century, Fabian socialism became a solution in search of a problem. In addition, the outcome of the 1926 General Strike in the UK was an indication that the traditional tools of the working class short of revolution, strikes, were ineffective and alienated the bourgeoisie.

But also, the bourgeoisie effectively co-opted the Labour Party from the start; The UK writer Peter Hitchens has come to recognize this strain of opinon. According to Wikipedia,

Previously a Marxist-Trotskyist and supporter of the Labour Party, Hitchens became more conservative during the 1990s. He joined the Conservative Party in 1997 and left in 2003, and has since been deeply critical of the party, which he views as the foremost obstacle to true conservatism in Britain.

At the same time he made these moves, the focus of the class struggle moved from the traditional conflict between the working class and capital to the damage government policy on immigration is doing to the working class. Peter Hitchens is certainly aware of this:

Straight from the horse's mouth

“When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible. It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain.”

—Peter Hitchens pic.twitter.com/KG41rDWVKl

— The Knowledge Archivist (@KnowledgeArchiv) April 19, 2026

But I'm not sure if even here, he understood the problem: it wasn't that the bourgeois wannabe "revolutionaries" in the universities didn't really like Britain, it was that they didn't like the UK working class. This was, after all, the real subtext of the 1926 General Strike, and it still seems to be an underpinning of UK bourgeois attitudes.

Take, for instance, the opinion of Rowan Williams, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, and whose views seem utterly typical of UK bourgeois leftists. The X post embedded at the top of my post here calls out Williams's position on "grooming gangs", an outcome of bipartisan UK immigration policy since the immediate postwar period:

Here's what Rowan Williams said about the "grooming gangs," in a recent piece for The Guardian. You'll note, first of all, that he put the phrase in scare quotes, because, of course, he doesn't really believe there actually are organised groups of Muslim men deliberately targeting white working-class girls for abuse and even murder because they're white and not Muslim.

What he believes, rather, is that there have been "events," mere brute facts, like the interaction of particles at the atomic level; something for which, ultimately, there can be no human blame. There were "institutional failures," which might as well be a description of a sewage overflow caused by mismanagement of a local drainage system.

Curious, I asked Chrome AI mode, "Are the girl victims of UK grooming gangs working class?" It answered,

Yes, research and official inquiries consistently show that a large majority of the girl victims in UK grooming gang scandals come from working-class or impoverished backgrounds.

Reports from high-profile cases in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford identify several common socioeconomic factors among victims:

Working-Class Backgrounds: Victims were predominantly from working-class families, often characterized by reviewers as coming from "marginalized" or "deprived" areas.

. . . Institutional Classism: Inquiries, such as the Casey Review, found that "classist attitudes" among police and social workers often led to victims being dismissed as having made "life choices" or leading "risky lifestyles" rather than being recognized as children under threat.

Targeting of Vulnerability: Perpetrators frequently targeted girls they perceived as being from less stable or supported backgrounds, using gifts of alcohol, drugs, or mock affection to groom them.

Experts and commentators on platforms like Al Jazeera and LSE Blogs argue that the intersection of class and race played a critical role in why these crimes went undetected for so long.

In other words, while I've already pointed out that a largely unmentioned consequence of UK high immigration policy was to keep working-class wages down, another consequence was more directly to oppress the working class by setting up conditions whereby its daughters would be raped by the immigrants, while both media and police agencies minimized the problem. And national bien pensant spokespeople like the Archbishop of Canterbury seem to endorse this whole strategy.

I'm beginning to think that the problems of class conflict as asddressed by Trump and the MAGA movement are substantively different from how they're addressed in the UK. The US bourgeoisie simply doesn't hate its working class; bourgeois media figures like Mike Rowe respect its work and support its interests, while the UK bourgeoisie doesn't just want to keep them down, it actively oppresses them. And this simply isn't new, it's been there at least since the 19th century. The UK has problems that a Trump, or a Trump-like figure, can't solve.