British Establishment Imperialists and Neo-Imperialists alike selfishly like to assert that their ideology is justified because the only alternative to a Great Britain is a Little England, an isolationist, xenophobic and inward-looking little country of ignorant and narrow-minded insular bigots. Such gerontocrats are living in the past. The age of Imperialism for the island of Britain has long since gone and it is not going to come back. Indeed, today Great Britain has dissolved into a Little Britain, an often shabby country that nostalgically but incongruously recalls the lost glorious past in an extremely inglorious and often downright vulgar, tasteless and styleless present.

We English Orthodox do not hope in either Great British or a Little British Imperialism or Neo-Imperialism, nor do we place any hope in a Little England. Our hope is in a Great England. By Great we do not have in mind some secularist, imperialist reality, but a spiritual one. When did Great England live? It lived in the seventh and eighth centuries, when our greatest national asset and our greatest export was not the cheap tin trays of the past or the financial parasitism of the present, but our saints. This greatness, laid low by paganism, was revived by the saintly King Alfred the Great (note, the Great, not the Little) in the tenth and early eleventh centuries.

However, since then, for more or less a thousand years, we have not had spiritual greatness. In that time we have for the most part exported war and trade, death and things in exchange for profit, so losing our souls. True, we have also exported ideas, but only the ideas that God is not our Creator and that there will be no Judgement for our iniquities. The path to greatness must therefore start by repentance for the past, which is just the opposite of what today’s Little Britain does. Such small-mindedness will have no part to play in the Great England of tomorrow, for only by returning from insularity to the worldwide Church can England ever become Great again.