I Intend To Escape ......................And Come Back

What no Culture Wars? "Which Way? Thirteen dialogues on choices facing Britain"

I recently purchased a golden oldie in the form of "Which Way? Thirteen dialogues on choices facing Britain". Edited by Michael Ivens and Clive Bradley, it was published in London by Michael Joseph Limited way back in 1970.

The format is simple - take a writer or politician from left and right, and invite them to write a short essay on issues such as nationalisation, tax, housing, education through to international issues. Each writer is also allowed a brief reply to their opponents text. The format works beautifully and there are some big names - Enoch Powell and Ian Mikardo being the most obvious. Some of those 1970 debates continue - most notbaly there is a chapter headed "Common market or NAFTA?" particularly apt as Keir Starmer appears set to drag the UK as close to the European Union as he feels he can get us. Others - such as the Cold War "East versus west" have been dated for a generation, although it is stimulating to be reminded of a time when Moscow and Beijing were on poor terms.

Most of the authors of course are no longer with us, although Michael Wynn Jones (better known now as Mr Delia Smith) enjoyed a high public profile until 2024 as one of the owners of Norwich City. One of the best-written commentaries is by T Dan Smith described as "Chairman of the Northern Economic Planning Council" who writes on government, parliament and technology. In 1970 Smith was just a few years from being brought down in a corruption scandal that led to his imprisonment. There is enough here in his cogent arguments on the importance of planning and development to suggest that this was an outcome that was far more than a personal tragedy.

What is notably missing from "Which Way?" is anything resembling the type of culture wars which so dominate contemporary debate. Perhaps we were more serious then, as a people? Arguments about transexuals, statues, renaming roads or decolonising school curriculums were peripheral in the early 1970s, if they existed at all. Identity politics in that era primarily meant one thing - class - the subject, naturally of a chapter all to itself.

The final section - "What kind of future?" features the late Conservative journalist T E Utley. Here I think we find some structure for the debates of 2025 and beyond. Utley writes:

"In Britain the nation does not exist by virtue of the State; the state exists and is capable of activity by reason of the fact that it presides over a nation." (p.261)

When even a north London leftie lawyer like Sir Keir Starmer begins to realise that this country has been changed too much, too fast, by immigration, Utley's words carry weight. Until we work out how to be a nation again, we are some years away from producing an update to the type of debates in the pages of "Which Way?" They can only really feature in societies with a degree of commonality.

The Tragedy of Striving

"A tragedy cannot be written about creatures of the jungle, only about those who try to get out of it - or those who succumb to it knowing that it is possible to transform it".

The writer Alan Sillitoe, in his introduction to Robert Tressell's "The Ragged Trousered Philantropists." (Panther: St Albans, 1983), p. 9 - 10. The beauty of this quote is that it applies so aptly to our greatest comedies, most notably Steptoe & Son.

There's no such thing as Starmerism - and that's the problem

As Labour gets a hammering in the polls, what is the problem with Sir Keir Starmer?

The most simple answer is that it is obvious what Starmer is against, but unclear what he is actually for.

Having won the Labour leadership as the continuity candidate, he quickly decided he was opposed to Corbynism. As the Conservatives vote collapsed, he won the 2024 general election by being opposed to Rishi Sunak, but standing on a largely empty mainfesto. Nearly a year on, and not much has changed, and now it is Labour tanking votes.

As Michael Gove wrote in The Spectator of 5 April: "The reason Labour finds itself in this abject and indefensible position is because it failed to develop a coherent political economy in opposition. It had no theory of change for the state, no industrial strategy worth the name, no philosophy of public service reform, and no account of why the Conservatives failed other than that they were, well Tories."

Hence today's results. It is also why Blue Labour is now having a degree of influence and public recognition. They at least have a programme and some thinkers, while Starmer has power, but no idea what he actually wants it for.

It's nonsense, but its nonsense of its time

Browsing the website of the charity Global Justice Now, I happened to land on the list of its council, and the pen portraits of those who govern this campaign group.

Global Justice Now is one of the groups campaigning against a trade deal between the United States and the United Kingdom. If you want to begin to understand these bizarre times, look at what our well-meaning campaigners do, not what they say. The trajectory of Global Justice Now's Mohammed Elnaiem speaks volumes. We are told:

Mohammed is the founding director of the Decolonial Centre, a political education project of the Pluto Educational Trust. He has been involved in the struggle for democracy in Sudan, and is now based in St Albans.

We don't need to ask how the struggle for democracy turned out in Sudan. Or that it is far easier, and far nicer, to live, work and campaign in St Albans rather than there. What we need to ask however, is this. Whether that 'lived experience' should lead anyone to think that the values of St Albans needs to be challenged and dismantled, which is what'de-colonised' means in practice.

I can well understand why Mr Elnaiem, and many other campaigners of similar stripe, wish to be here. But what do we gain in return?

Mankind No Longer Travels to the Moon

Reading footnotes is a good habit to get into. The following quote is from Tariq Ali's 1970 book "Pakistan: Military rule or People's Power?"

"The debate on what exactly an Islamic state is continues to this very day and all the bourgeois parties in Pakistan take part. We shall touch on this debate in later chapters - but only briefly: we are nearing the twenty-first century,and man has reached the moon." p. 33, fn 14.

Mankind has not been on the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Islam meanwhile is thriving. Indeed, so important is it in the UK that there is now a working group, under the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, to establish a definition of Islamophobia.

I am not sure anyone, writing in 1970 or 1972, thought that was the future.....

Scruton on faith

Over the holiday season I enjoyed Roger Scuton's book "Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life".

Less a memoir than a series of essays on particular chunks of his life or matters of importance, Scruton grasps faith perfectly here:

"Faith is not simply an addition to our repetoire of ordinary opinions. It is a transforming state of mind, a stance towards the world, rooted in our social nature and altering all our perceptions, emotions and beliefs."

Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 220

The Importance of Confidence

The biggest single difference between working class people and middle or upper class people? At an individual level - confidence. I look at some of the interns I have met in Westminster, and they have more confidence in their late teens or early twenties, than I had in my late thirties.

"I truly believe that confidence is learned. No one is born confident. I think confidence is dependent on how your brain functions and what you have experienced in your life. I have not read or studied anything to back this up. This is just what I think from my experiences. If you want references and scientific evidence you need another book. I think people are born with different levels of chemicals in their brain which affect levels of anxiety and stress and depression. The levels of these chemicals will make it easier or harder to learn to become confident, but you still have to learn. I totally reject the idea that some people are born confident."

The comedian Rob Beckett in his book "A class act: Life as a working class man in a middle class world" (London: Harper Collins), p. 221

The Joy of Old Books - What's Tucked Inside The Greatest Treason: The Bizarre Story of Hollis, Liddell and Mountbatten?

My current reading is this 1990 title, by the late espionage writer Richard Deacon.

I am only 60 pages in, but it does seem this is an apologia for MI5 and a rebuttal of the view that the Service's Director General from 1956-65, Roger Hollis, was a Soviet spy. How else to take a book which claims one of Hollis' greatest rivals and chief inquisitor, Peter Wright "served in MI5 for a relatively short period" (p.6) Wright actually served for 21 years, being recruited as the organisation's principal scientist, going on to specialise in counter-intelligence.

One joy of buying and reading second hand books from thirty plus years ago, is that they so often come with news cuttings and other bits and pieces tucked away inside them. In this case it is not a news clipping or an obituary, but a series of comments written on the previous owners bookmark.

No one using a kindle will ever know the pleasures of such random discoveries. May they be preserved for ever!

More in Common?

I have just finished Douglas Murray's "The War on the West: How to prevail in the age of unreason" and was struck by these lines, towards the end of the book:

"In the absence of anything else, the only public ethic in the West that people are encouraged to unite around is opposition toward itself." (p.265-66).

It raises a very pertinent question - if Britain is divided, on what can it unite?

The Islamic Republic of ...............Torsa?

There's not much to laugh about at the moment, but there was some light relief last week at the suggestion Shia cleric Sheikh Yasser al-Habib wished to buy the Scottish Island of Morsa, currently home to two holiday lettings and not a lot else.

I was quoted in the Daily Telegraph article on 30 July, which called the whole idea absurd:

"Paul Stott, head of security and extremism at Policy Exchange, added to the chorus of concern sparked by the reports."

“It’s bizarre, but not totally bizarre, in that religious communities have bought up land in rural parts of Britain before,” he told The Telegraph.

“But I can’t remember a Muslim group doing so before. If you look at al-Habib, he is a contentious figure. This would involve a part of UK territory becoming the land of a contentious religious grouping. I think that requires public debate before it can go ahead.”

The Conservatives have failed to conserve our environment

One of themes which dominates my thinking is decline, and the signs of decline that are all around. One of the most obvious, especially when you get out of the city, is in our rivers.

"I began to realise that this country is peppered with thousands of little community groups comprised of decent, ordinary people who know their river is not the way it was in their childhood. Decent people who put their trust in the Environment Agency and the water regulators , and trusted that they would nurture, protect and conserve these rivers. And the system's been doing none of that for decades."

Feargal Sharkey interviewed by Chris Packham in the Radio Times, 20 April 2024, p. 14.

I find Packham tedious, but his interview with Sharkey is important for these very arguments.

For St George's Day

It sometimes takes an Irishman to remind us of our greatness. Discussing books, the Count states:

"Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her."

Bram Stoker, Dracula.

When football was football

I always rather liked Joe Kinnear, who died at the weekend aged 77.

For an insight into football from another era, his obituary in The Telegraph discussed the bonus he got for winning the 1967 FA Cup final with Tottenham:

"His Cup bonus came to £2,500: he gave his mother £500, his sisters £30 and a new outfit each, bought his grandmother in Dublin a TV and an armchair, and himself a new Ford Corsair for £600. He then took his extended family for a six-week holiday in Ireland until the money ran out. “I couldn’t get rid of it quick enough,” he recalled."

While it is easy to dismiss the Kinnear of his Newcastle period as a buffoon, he managed Wimbledon to sixth spot in the top division, and two top ten finishes. Well anyone ever do that again?

One region where change will come in 2024

As the stalemate in Ukraine continues, it is hard to imagine the public will tolerate a repeat of 2023 throughout the whole of the new year.

Zelensky, and Ukraine, cannot win. There needs to be a deal. The alternative is maintaining a conflict whereby taxpayers keep throwing tens of millions of pounds to US arms companies, something as obscene as it is pointless.

In his 17 December Mail on Sunday column, Peter Hitchens wrote:

"At last it is becoming possible to say relatively sane things about Ukraine. After Russia's stupid and lawless invasion, many people reacted by developing a strange admiration for Ukraine. But it is in fact a corrupt, ill-governed and increasingly unfree country, not all that different from Russia in many ways. This enthusiasm prevented them from thinking, and so millions in the West placed huge hopes in Ukraine's offensive against entrenched Russian positions during the summer. I kept my mouth shut because apparently impossible things can sometimes happen, but it seemed to me more likely that the attack would stall. It has duly done so."

Hitchens goes on to add:

"The general refusal to admit that this was so has cost vast numbers of young men's lives on both sides. Many, do not forget, have also been permanently maimed or disfigured, perhaps the worst such aftermath since the horrors of the First World War."

Lacking both an independent security or an independent foreign policy, the UK is unlikely to act upon such lessons wrought by experience, until Washington decides for us. With US Republicans underwhelmed by the war in Ukraine, and Trump the Presidential front runner, that decision could come quicker than many realise.

Way back in 1971, the then US serviceman, later Democrat politician, John Kerry, famously asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee how you could ask a man to be the last man who dies in Vietman?The last man to die in the Ukraine conflict is perhaps in the Russian or Ukrainian trenches as we speak, or waiting to celebrate New Year in Kiev or St Petersburg.

Hitchens finishes his article with a poignant question 'And what have we gained by these deaths, exactly?'

London's housing crisis

This story was the lead in the Evening Standard's business section today - foreigners own £55bn of London homes as buying spree set to climb.

The second paragraph is breathtaking:

"There are 103,425 homes in the capital, including houses and flats, that are currently registered with an overseas correspondence address or an overseas company."

This is nearly 13% of the stock in Westminster, 10% in Kensington and Chelsea, and 2.76% of London's overall stock.

How difficult would it be to limit multiple home ownership in the UK by foreign nationals? Or to prohibit ownership by overseas companies?

Are there any political parties willing to take a stand on these issues?

The cultural revolution

How is it that the Conservative party keeps winning general elections, but the day to day running of our society appears to reflect an entirely different set of values entirely?

From Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday:

"People who would have laughed at 'loony Left' councils 30 years ago now use language and follow rules which they once mocked when Ken Livingstone and his allies proposed them. Those who claim to despise Jeremy Corbyn often follow the ideas he helped devise in his decades in London town halls.

And it is not just that they join in. They are afraid to criticise. Huge areas of opinion are now closed off from discussion, for fear of cancellation, advertising boycotts, and generally being cast into the outer darkness.

With gathering speed and completeness, a total revolution in thought and morals is taking hold of Western societies, just at the moment when they should be girding themselves against pressure to become more like China."

On Accepting Transgender Athletes

"Men posing as female weightlifters isn't the biggest problem western civilisation faces, but it's an ominous symptom of deeper rot. When the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. The entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. After a while, no one can see a crisis, or even admit one exists."

From Tucker Carlson's Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. (New York: Free Press), p. 201.

A Quote To Leave 2020 On.....

Just before Christmas I finished reading Paul Embery's 'Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class'.

It is very good, although I fear that the people who need to read it, and to learn from it, will not. Embery risks that cruellest of fates, being a Prophet in his own land, destined only to be heard from those outside his own tribe.

These are some of the lines on which he finishes the book:

We have learned that any drive to create an 'open' 'diverse' and 'progressive' nation will alienate a large part of the populace if it is forced upon them too rapidly, violates their sense of order and belonging, and comes at the expense of social solidarity and stability.
The British working class has found its voice. Politics in our country is realigning at speed as the old tribalisms crumble. The Left, if it is to halt the slide towards irrelevance, had better start listening.

I suspect this overstates the extent to which life may be breathed into a corpse. But that politics is realigning, is self-evident. And it is genuinely exciting.