For three centuries, the claim that England's elite was a foreign occupation was the radical left's founding story. Today the same argument is coded far right. The evidence, inconveniently, never moved.
Crossbencher · 18 July 2026
George Orwell spotted the symptom before anyone had named the disease. In The Lion and the Unicorn, written in 1941 while German bombers worked overhead, he observed that England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles, he wrote, it was felt there was something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and a duty to snigger at every English institution. He was describing his own side. He wasn't joking.
What Orwell may not have known is that the condition he described - a ruling stratum estranged from the people beneath it, holding them in faint contempt - already had a name in English politics. It had carried it for three hundred years. The name was the Norman Yoke.
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