Tom Armstrong
Just an old fashioned romantic libertarian conservative at heart. Or maybe a romantic conservative libertarian, depending on the stages of the moon.
If these words survive, let them stand as a last testament from a man who once called England home. I write in haste and in fear, by the thin light of a shuttered window in a place I will not name.
The Muslim Council rules Britain now. They hunt men like me still. White patriots, the last stubborn remnant who would not bend the knee, convert, or flee. Some of us were forced to the mosque under the sword. Others were banished to Russia, the only Christian country left that would take us. The rest were taken in public squares and beheaded for the cameras, their blood washing the old cobbles while the crowds cheered the new order. I am one of the hunted. I do not expect to see another winter.
Today, the 14th of October, the rulers marked what they call Muslim Conquest Day. It was the 1000th anniversary of the Norman Conquest, twisted into a great mocking pageant of power. His Most Islamic Majesty’s government declared a national holiday. From London to the northern cities, from the Welsh valleys to the Scottish lowlands, places that still bear English names on old maps, the parades rolled out. Black flags, green banners, the crescent and star everywhere. Loudspeakers blared verses and victory chants. Armoured vehicles, once the King’s, now flying the colours of the Islamic Republic of Great Britain, ground through streets that once held Remembrance Day processions.
Children in little robes were marched along singing of the end of the cross. Priests who had not already fled or converted were dragged out for spectacle. The message was clear and deliberate: Christian Britain is finished. All forms of Christianity are banned. Churches stand empty or converted into mosques. The cross is a criminal emblem. Sharia is the only law. The old common law, the statutes, the quiet assumptions of a free people – gone.
I was a writer once, nothing more. I loved the language, the history, the damp green fields and the stubborn humour of these islands. I watched the change come not as a sudden storm but as a long, patient tide. Decades of migration, of political cowardice, of courts that punished the native for noticing what was happening to his streets, of churches that apologised for existing and schools that taught children to be ashamed of their fathers. The old parties competed to surrender faster. Speech laws tightened. “Islamophobia” became the unforgivable sin. Mosques multiplied while parish churches closed for lack of congregations. Parallel societies grew, then claimed the right to police themselves. Demographics shifted. Birth rates among the native stock fell; among the newcomers they did not. By the 2040s the major cities were already lost in all but name. Then came the final elections that no longer mattered, the emergency powers and the formal declaration of the Islamic Republic.
The council rules now. They are efficient. They keep the trains running and the shops stocked for those who submit. For those who do not, the punishments are public and final. Conversion is offered once. Refusal means the blade or exile. Russia takes those who survive the perilous journey. It is the last Christian power of any size, hard-pressed and armed to the teeth, watching the borders of the old continent with cold eyes. The rest of the continent has gone the same way we have. The Islamic Kingdom of Great Britain is a full member of the UEIE, the Union of European Islamic Emirates. Its capital is no longer Brussels in any recognisable sense. They call the place New Mecca, in the Islamic Emirate of Belgium. From there the UEIE administers the emirates that stretch from the Atlantic to the Russian border.
The UEIE itself is a component part of the larger North Atlantic Caliphate. That caliphate is at war with the Caliphate of the Persian Empire. Two great Islamic powers, Sunni and Shia in the old labels, tearing at each other across the Mediterranean and the near east while the last Christians cling to the Russian steppe and the frozen north. Britain is a prize and a province in that larger struggle. Our rulers send young men to fight for the Sunni Umma and call it holy duty.
I remember the last Christmas that still felt like Christmas. There were fewer lights each year. Then the public displays were restricted “for community cohesion.” Then they were banned outright as provocative. Easter became a private, whispered affair. The old hymns were dangerous to sing even behind locked doors. Neighbours informed. The council’s auxiliaries – young men raised on grievance and certainty – raided houses looking for Bibles, crucifixes, anything that smelled of the old faith. I buried my own father’s prayer book in a field one night and marked the spot only in my head. I do not know if the book is still there.
The parades yesterday were the final insult. They chose the Norman anniversary with care. William the Conqueror’s landing was reframed as a precursor, a half-measure. The true conquest, they said, was theirs – peaceful at first, then complete. Speakers in every city declared that the age of the cross was over, that the islands had returned to the proper path. Fireworks cracked over the Thames. In Manchester and Birmingham the crowds were densest. In smaller towns the demonstrations were thinner but no less triumphant.
I watched from a distance, hooded, heart hammering. When the speeches ended, they broadcast executions of a few remaining holdouts who had been caught trying to leave for the Russian ships. The message needed no translation.
I write this not for glory and not for revenge. Revenge is a luxury of the living and the free. I write so that someone, someday, in whatever world survives the wars of the caliphates, may know that there were those who refused. We were not saints. Many of us were late to the fight, distracted by comfort, slow to see that the things we took for granted could be taken away. We argued among ourselves while the ground shifted.
When the laws turned against us, we still trusted the old forms – courts, elections, petitions – long after those forms had been turned out. By the time the council dropped the pretence, the numbers and the guns were against us. Some fought in the early years. Most of those are dead. The rest of us learned to move at night, to trust almost no one, to keep the old stories alive in our heads because the paper and the screens were watched.
Russia is the only place left that still rings church bells without fear. The ships that take the banished leave from hidden coves under cover of fog and bribery. I have not taken that ship. Pride, or stupidity, or the stubborn belief that a man should die on the soil he was born to. The council’s hunters grow better at their work. Informants are everywhere. A wrong word, a face recognised from an old photograph, and the door is kicked in. I have seen the bodies in the streets after a raid. The heads are displayed for a day as warning, then cleared away so the markets can open.
Christian Britain did not fall in a single battle. It was argued away, legislated away, shamed away, and finally conquered by those who never accepted the old settlement. The churches emptied. The schools taught a different history. The media repeated the same phrases until dissent sounded mad. When the demographic tipping point came, the rest followed with the logic of power. Sharia courts that began as “community arbitration” became the only courts that mattered. The police looked the other way, then joined, then enforced. The army was purged of the unreliable. The flag changed. The calendar changed. The language of the law changed. Yesterday they danced on the grave of a thousand years and called it progress.
I do not know who will read this if anyone does. Perhaps it will be found in a wall or a forgotten hard drive long after the present rulers have been replaced by some newer faction in the endless wars of the caliphates. Perhaps a Russian scholar will translate it one day as a curiosity from the lost West. Or perhaps it will burn with me when they come. I write it anyway. The old country deserved better than the silence that is settling over it. The green fields are still green. The rivers still run to the sea. But the people who named them, who built the villages and the cathedrals and the common law, are being erased or scattered. The survivors will speak a different tongue in the mosques that were once churches. Their children will not know the hymns.
I am tired. The light is failing. Outside, the evening call to prayer rolls across the rooftops that once held weathervanes and cross-shaped weathervanes. I will hide these pages and move again at first dark. If I am taken, let this stand. Christian Britain ended not with a last stand on a hill but with parades and proclamations and the quiet obedience of the many. The few who refused are being hunted still. I was one of them. Remember that we were here. Remember that we did not all consent.
May God, if He still listens in these islands, have mercy on what remains.
A writer in hiding
England, such as it is
14 October 2066.
This article was originally published by the Free Speech Backlash.
