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

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.