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Private property and the environment: competing or reconcilable objectives?
When it comes to the question of the environment and what to do about it, there are a number of assumptions—the outcome of which does, for the most part, map nicely—with respect to who will be saying what about it. For example, that a Leftist is more inclined to refer to themselves as an ‘environmentalist’, coupling their ideological convictions of social progressivism with concern for ecological damage, is, for the most part, true. Equally, that a right-winger is less likely to refer to themselves as an ‘environmentalist’, is also, for the most part, true. I suspect that the inclination of the latter is more out of reaction to the prevailing Leftist narratives around environmental protection, rather than a genuine indifference or lack of concern around the matter considered in itself. Certainly, with respect to myself, as I refer to myself as both a Right-libertarian (of the more ‘reactionary’, as it’s often called, conservative inclination) and an ‘environmentalist’, I seek to present the case in favour of private property and environmental protection as being reconcilable, not hostile or competing, objectives. This I aim to do without too much of a foray into the dense political-philosophical and economic-statistical thicket, where one can get lost rather easily and squarely miss the point.
As a matter of first principles, it almost goes without saying that the Right-libertarian stance is one which emphasises the importance of private property, and therefore of property rights by default, in all human affairs. It is a case of ontological significance for the human being to be able to determine the boundaries and limits, the inclusion and the exclusion, the ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ before one is able to situate themselves appropriately in dealing with the community. In other words, a distinction between what is private, and therefore one’s own, and what is not, is antecedent to one’s proper place in wider society. This is not simply a matter of distinguishing between ‘personal’ and ‘private’ either—a case of semantic hairsplitting if ever there was one—but is a statement of profound significance. That which is privately owned implies not only the antecedent distinction foregoing one’s entry into the community, but further implies the differential of being able to realise gain from peaceful, contractual exchange of one’s goods based upon a value matrix of temporal, or time-based, considerations. It asks: will you defer gratification now for a higher reward at some future date? Some prefer immediate consumption, others delayed gratification; it is the latter case which tends towards a realisation of gain, as foregoing consumption now can provide higher gains, or profit, in the future. Whereas in the case of the former, one values immediate consumption more highly, and therefore does not delay gratification appropriately enough to contribute the necessary goods or assets towards more time-consuming, labour-intensive, and developmental pursuits which tend to appreciate in value. This important factor of time-consideration (referred to in Austrian economic theory as ‘time preference’) is a universal a priori such that it will play a role in any given economic situation. The socialist collective will still include those who prefer to delay gratification and co-ordinate for future returns, and it will most likely be those who form the body of bureaucrats which oversee, and yet do not have a proper investment in (qua non-owners), the administration of things.
From here, the question becomes: who is the right person to which the task may be deferred? There is a lengthy index of things which most of us are happy to defer as a responsibility of someone else. For example, while I could butcher a chicken if required, I would rather not, and am happy to defer that responsibility to another who is paid to do so, providing me with what I need to make dinner. Likewise, I will, in my paid work, take on responsibilities over people and things which others do not wish to do, and are happy to leave to me. Our products or services may be exchanged peacefully through the medium of money (even if, as it currently stands, the money used is horrendously unstable, inflated, untied to anything with a real asset value, etc—fiat currency) and there is no further cause for concern. Similarly, both of us will make our own time-based valuations of goods and capital. Both of us will have to consume immediately at least every day to stay alive and gain some enjoyment of idle time, but one or the other of us may display a greater preference for delaying more capital, in the form of savings and investments.
Carrying this same question over to the issue of the environment, when it comes to making firm judgements with suitable incentive structures, who is the right person to whom the task may be deferred? If the stewardship of the environment is between government agencies and private property owners, then in both cases the task has been deferred to someone else. But who is the better, and why? The Right-libertarian, and therefore my own, case is that environmental concerns are better, as a mutual factor of justice and probability (qualification and quantification), left in the hands of private owners. Those who are more stringently tied to ownership titles are, by default, more inclined to sustain a profound concern over the capital values of assets held.
This principle is equally as applicable to land and what’s on it as it is to anything else in a private economy. At its most basic level, one wishes to realise a greater return on future goods when consumption of them in the present is delayed—why are factors such as land, and how it’s employed, be any different? In the case of government ‘owners’ (nonowners, or ‘caretakers’), there is no stringent incentive structure, and therefore no same level of concern for anything except that which may be looted in a shorter term when held relative to the long-term returns desired by the private owner. These government nonowners may have a concern by way of public law—perhaps some vague notion of ‘value for taxpayer money’ or something to that effect—but this concern alone is not enough, particularly because they do not bear the full cost of waste, inefficiency, destruction, and so on. For example: if 100 people utilise a piece of land and even ten of them trash it, who will foot the bill? Although the clean-up operations will, as things currently are and all else equal, be organised by a local council, there is no proper structure in place to deter or disincentivise such trashing from even occurring. The council clean-up team, and the administrator-bureaucrats who sent them, do not personally front the cost of such measures, and instead rely on a predetermined budget. This means that there is nobody who is personally affected or put out by the presence of trashers. However, were the land privately owned, there is a personal tie (the owner’s) to the asset value of the land, and therefore destructive trashing behaviour will be thoroughly accorded with the appropriate measures, such as compensation, restitution, or expulsion. Equally, the owner being subject to the full-cost principle, will have an interest in keeping down insurance premiums and clean-up costs, and will therefore put in place stringent conditions, e.g. payment-for-entry, as well as security teams charged with monitoring the use of the land by the consumers on it at a given time. A very simple yet very effective yardstick to measure the validity of my claims here—and one which would be satisfactory for those empirically inclined—would be to watch and average the behaviour of consumers when occupying ‘public’ property against utilising space which they have paid to enter and is administered properly, such as private gardens or grounds.
Conditions in place, where does environmentalism factor in? Care for and stewardship of the land imply moral/ethical qualia, and therefore a wholly subjective assessment, of what it means to engage with the natural world, itself a changing and at times dubious human construct. In the economic assessment alone, as outlined (albeit briefly) above, there is little intrinsic merit in saying that any one given moral judgement should be imported into the calculations of profit and cost, capital value and loss, asset utilisation and non-utilisation, etc. For example, one private owner of land may realise greater returns on selling up huge swathes of land for environmentally destructive purposes, such as factory- or house-building. (To be sure, these uses are required and, in the instability of the globalised-state economy, probably desirable to some extent.) Yet in this case, what’s to stop him? It is a matter of two further economic injunctions (before we move onto the place of appropriate moral judgement): opportunity cost and insurance premiums. In brief, land is usually a sought-after investment as a way to stabilise one’s portfolio due to its nature of slow-but-sure growth potential; therefore, if one is set to realise greater returns, and a greater opportunity thereof, for maintaining and even increasing the value of the land in the direction of soil quality for agriculture, forestry for timber, pasture land for animals, and so forth, then the sacrifice made in selling up for more environmentally-destructive measures will not seem worthwhile. In a climate where all roads are leaning former—high soil quality for domestic agriculture and high quality timber are increasingly sought after goods, for example—it is only a matter of time before the former outweighs the latter, the opportunity costs favour the preservation, rather than tarmacking of, land. Likewise, one’s insurance premiums are likely to skyrocket if the behaviour and activity conducted on one’s land threaten pollution, despoliation, or threat to quality of life or even, in extreme cases, to life itself. If everything around the piece of land in this imagined scenario is privately owned—including waterways, hedgerows, and so forth—then the constant threat of legal action, coupled with hiking insurance premiums, altogether disincentivise such behaviour. Externalities are more difficult to slip under the proverbial rug if one is surrounded by other owners, with an interest in appreciating returns (all else equal), who are capable of and empowered to take action and injunctions against undesirable behaviours.
Objective considerations aside, what about the moral/ethical injunctions? Admittedly, these being more subjective, it is usually left to a matter of aesthetic taste and criteria for such moral judgements to hold ground. This is much more suited therefore to the realm of opinion, further away from the domain of tangible economic fact. However, it is worth pointing out that many do, annually, seek retreats (either long, short, or permanent), relief, and respite in the aesthetic beauty of the countryside. Lucrative property portfolios, parks, gardens, walkways, vineyards, orchards, woodlands, campsites, activity centres, trusts, etc spring up, suggesting that there are many who are keen to escape the noise, pollution, smog, dust, and psychologically-overbearing atmosphere of the big cities, and instead find some solace amongst birdsong and woodland.
Likewise, there are increasing reports detailing the way in which certain practices are negatively harming the human population, such as bio-chemical engineering, microplastics, and pollution, to borrow a couple of examples. (To refer briefly to an economic consideration: should these reports prove correct, as I suspect they will, then one’s own insurance premiums for engaging in this sort of consumption will go up, and therefore have an average impact of disincentivising the consumption of goods which are, by all accounts, harmful to both oneself, others, and the environment.) I, as a rural dweller myself, am entirely sympathetic to this need, understanding the desire to maintain the balanced, steadier, quieter pace of rural life itself. It is one of those situations more dialectical insofar as if we didn’t have it, and therefore didn’t know any better, then fine—but we do have it, do know better, and therefore should, in my estimation at least, have some concern for its preservation and well-being.
In the absence of any clear governmental responsibility or concern, and in the absence of any trustworthiness for government programmes (and, I argue, rightly so), the purpose of this piece has been to demonstrate that one can indeed hold tight to two convictions which are not mutually exclusive. The first is the conviction that private property rights are essential to human civilisation and peaceful relations, and the second is the conviction that there are reasons, both objective and subjective, for being concerned about the state of the environment. Human stewardship and responsible management have been practised for centuries, and it is worth resurrecting these practices, both economically and morally, before it is too late, without leaning too heavily on tax-funded, unpredictable bureaucrats to do the job.
The latter situation is akin to asking a bank robber to ensure that ten percent of his loot is donated to a charitable cause, and on this condition he will be let off the hook. It is time to reassess the role of private property rights in this equation, without dipping too heavily into the hysteria around total alarmism—although I appreciate that in the span of this article I have only been able to do so cursorily, and therefore have not given a total treatment of the matter.
Can Britain do business with Taliban-led Afghanistan?
I can’t say I’ve ever hosted the Taliban, although if presented with the opportunity, the Worshipful Company of Brewers wouldn’t have been my initial choice of venue.
This irony wasn’t lost on Daniel Evans, frontier markets and technology investor, co-founder of the Gibraltar Stock Exchange Group, and Chairman of the newly-founded Afghanistan Advisory Council (AAC).
Evans joked the venue would allow him to lay claim to successfully organising a piss-up in a brewery, although it must be said the event wasn’t a piss-up at all – partially because the drinks were appropriately alcohol free, but mainly because the foundation of the AAC marks the first actual step at rapprochement with Afghanistan since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.
All-in-all, a pretty serious affair. Serious enough to receive a written endorsement from Nooruddin Azizi, Afghanistan’s Minister of Industry and Commerce:
“On behalf of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, I want to emphasize that the investment environment in Afghanistan is feasible, with strong security and government policies focused on economic development. As many know, Afghanistan is an untapped country with significant business and investment opportunities across various sectors, including energy, industry, infrastructure, mining, agriculture, and health.
We welcome any proposals and investments in Afghanistan, assuring you that the government will fully protect and support all initiatives.”
The launch was attended by businessmen from a variety of interested parties; railway construction, petrochemicals, international finance, and so on. Michael Mainelli, current President of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry and former Lord Mayor of the City of London was among those present, as well as Miles ‘Lord Miles’ Routledge, adventurer-turned-YouTuber-turned-junior member of the AAC.
Among other ambitions for a hospital, a hotel, a logistics centre, and a railway terminus, the AAC’s flagship proposal of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), set to be attached to Kabul airport, has won the backing of Mohammad and Zahid Asif, Owner and Managing Director of Walid Titan Ltd respectively, who are providing the land for the zone.
The precise details of the SEZ have yet to be fleshed out, although it’s clear that the AAC is looking to Dubai’s International Finance Centre (IFC) as a model; a demarcated zone where the norms and customs of international commerce prevail, and regulations are to be drawn up on the advice of the AAC.
The SEZ is one of several projects set to be funded by a new National Growth Fund, which will provide resources to develop a diverse range of industries and projects, such as a far-reaching hospital construction programme. One of the hospital centres will be located in the SEZ. The AAC has been given the mandate to advise the creation of the fund.
One might ask why the Taliban would allow any of this. If one reads between the lines, the SEZ would allow what are essentially Western standards of conduct to take root in an otherwise Islamic theocratic state. Sure, it’s not exactly going to be Amsterdam but it’s hard to square such a proposal with the totalising ‘Islamofascist’ caliphate prophesised by thought leaders of the dilapidated pantheon of liberal-humanitarian interventionism.
The simple but surprising reality of the matter is the Afghans seriously want to get down to business. In fact, it’s becoming clear the Taliban are more eager to do business with the British than vice versa, and not without valid reason. They’re highly suspicious of the Americans, their opinion of the Russians isn’t much better, relations with Pakistan have massively deteriorated within the past year alone, and China and Iran look more like regional threats than potential allies.
As bizarre as it sounds, the Taliban’s view of the British continues to be informed by the Empire, which they regard in a similar manner to how many of us Moderns regard the Roman Empire; that is, as a milestone in human achievement. The British are viewed less as hated enemies and more as honourable and accomplished adversaries. If that’s not soft power, I don’t know what is!
As one would expect, the Afghans have zero appetite to be controlled by a foreign power, but they’re not completely isolationist; they’re quite happy to enlist the help of foreigners with the know-how required to stabilise their war-battered economy, having endured invasions from the USSR and the US-led coalition, ongoing skirmishes with groups like ISIS-K, and incoming Pashtun refugees from neighbouring Pakistan.
It’s a matter of political ideology whether it’s preferable to live in a less-developed but comparatively liberal country over a more-developed but comparatively illiberal one, but – as a general rule of thumb – it’s better to have functioning railways, roads, and hospitals than to not have them at all. Some things aren’t exactly ideological touchstones. Is it really so polarising to believe that Afghanistan should have a reliable supply of currency, rather than making do with sheets of borderline dust held together with glue and tape?
Beneath debates on the political and religious destiny of Afghanistan lies an economy which needs to be run regardless, and the AAC hasn’t so much muscled into this gap, but waltzed into it; partially because the organisation seems to be ahead of the curve on this issue, but also because its founding members felt they had nothing better to do.
On his release from jail in October 2023, having been arrested for not having his papers in order, Routledge – who described the experience as “the best networking opportunity I’ve ever had” – received an email from Evans with the subject line “Bored/gold mine lol” – a proposal which snowballed into setting up a full-on, nation-wide development fund with the blessing of the Afghan government.
Overall, the AAC is filling the vacuum left by a regime that doesn’t know what to do with Afghanistan. One suspects it’s pretty hard to see a path forward with that much egg on your face!
For the past two decades, Britain’s political system has stuck to the same playbook; a hodgepodge strategy of attempting to nag and bomb Afghanistan into becoming a liberal democracy with little-to-no regard for local idiosyncrasies and so forth.
Indeed, no country is a blank slate and Afghanistan is no exception, but more than an investment opportunity – that itself is laden with several obvious benefits; Afghanistan is rich with natural minerals – but a real chance to rehearse discombobulated statesmen and commentators in the virtues and practices which factor into good nation-building; which I cannot help but feel is the spiritual mission of the AAC, even if not said so outright.
Keir Starmer, take notes!
The Worst Case Scenario
It may actually be possible for the right to be sleepwalked back into the arms of the regime. This might strike you as an impossibility, but I am increasingly unconfident in the rigidity of our opposition to the regime and the system it imposes on us. I still believe it to be highly unlikely that this occurs, but its absolute incredibility as a vision of the future has ceased. But how exactly are they working towards this aim, unknowingly or not, and what exactly am I referring to? I will try and articulate myself as clearly as possible, lest we continue to mope around in the gloomy shadows of doomed projects, forever dissatisfied with our lack of meaningful progress. As someone who continues to self-assuredly profess the inevitability of revolution in Britain, what I fear most are attempts to delay this eventuality – and more importantly attempts to prevent it. A nominally right-wing, authoritarian government could quietly emerge, restore popular comfort with the idea of Britain being a diverse, liberalised country and resolidify the British people’s pessimistic, defeated attitude towards politics, race, and the fundamental structure of the economy. More importantly, it could cause the right to accept the improvements as “enough”, maybe even claim them as the final victory (the battle that has been “won”), and see us de-escalate our efforts. We are entering stage three, the bargaining stage, and many wish to go, cap-in-hand, with offers to negotiate. This is the regime’s perestroika moment, and it absolutely must not succeed.
When you have a non-democratic and ideological regime, as we do in Britain – as most White countries also do, there are many things that it will do before compromising on its ideological tenets. To undo the core pillars that define the regime would be to invalidate the legitimacy of the regime itself, so – despite the societal breakdown and rapid deterioration in living standards – things continue on as they always have, irrespective of popular sentiment. Public services rot at the bone, the police stop functioning beyond their utility as apparatchik tools, etc. So long as the Pravda and Stasi remain competent and efficient the rest can wither and die and those in power won’t care. The Chinese Communist Party was able to transition their country into a quasi-nationalistic yet fundamentally capitalist country whilst preserving the iconography of Karl Marx and the hero worship of Chairman Mao. For many reasons, I doubt that our regimes in the west could have this kind of fluidity of form to persevere – but they may be able to work within the restrictions of their own resolute determination to maintain mass-immigration and the liberal, capitalist status quo.
Since 2016, the western establishment has become more totalitarian in its governance of the countries it occupies. The Leave vote in Britain’s EU referendum and Donald Trump’s election in the USA made our establishment paranoid and defensive (a defensiveness Rory Stewart alluded to in his own deluded way). Those in power will continue to try their best to maintain the status quo to the letter, down to every last miserable and humiliating detail. For that purpose, the Brezhnevian conservative Keir Starmer has been appointed as our Prime Minister to do absolutely nothing but maintain progress at its present pace, no faster no slower and without a single railroad switch change in site. But there will be those that work in the shady halls of power more fidgety than the rest who are especially concerned about the future of their project (the project being a global, totalitarian, technocratic panopticon where a small corporate elite rules over a coffee-coloured serf class – forever). They will be playing wargames where we win and they lose and considering how to defang the right before we are capable of animating the British away from their agenda and towards a fundamentally different trajectory (which ultimately is what Brexit actually represented but, thanks to Dominic Cummings and the December 2019 General Election, that rebellious movement in the zeitgeist was snuffed out and forgotten to history). What is hypothetically possible is a small concession to dissident right positions on race and inequality to refine the status quo, just as communist regimes historically used fascist methods and policies to keep their countries afloat in times of, usually self-inflicted, crisis. This would mean a form of multiracialism that is genuinely “fair”, or at least as fair as it sells itself, that is more palatable both to the general population as well as the right. A truly colour-blind and meritocratic system that punishes criminals adequately, rewards hard work and enacts planning reform to end many of the negative externalities mass immigration is causing – does this sound familiar? It is the outcome ‘ProgNats’ and the like are agitating for – a more effective and efficient Presidium-operated country that will have accomplished making it even harder for people to articulate a legitimate case for an authentic nationalist position.
There is reason to believe that the average person will go along with this soft transformation of society from an overtly egalitarian and explicitly anti-White one to a society that has quietly resigned itself to accepting some degree of hereditarianism (but a society that has only done so to preserve the globalist project). In fact, this transformation is already happening in real time, without any input from above causing it. I had the misfortune of being at a McDonald’s in Leeds just off a motorway and was shown a small microcosm that represented this trajectory. It was a grimy, dirty, noisy square with bright white lights and three interactive telescreens for ordering from. I decided to go forward into the open space between these telescreens and the counter to talk to one of the cramped Maccy’s girls and asked if I could order from her directly with physical cash (a request which she granted me). What I soon realised; stood in my Argosian slumber awaiting the proclamation of my order number, was that there were actually two queues. One had a huddle of immigrant slaves with their corporate rucksacks ready for retrieval (rucksacks which I feel are brightly coloured either to be demeaning or to mask the repulsiveness of the services they are having to render) and the other had a larger group of dishevelled, unkempt White Britons, awaiting their own personal orders. I stood in disbelief, wondering to myself “Are people okay with this? Are liberals okay with this?” and then went on with the rest of my day. Those immigrant wage slaves will work those jobs, and jobs like it, for the rest of their lives – their children will be born into slavery arranged by a Darwinian free-market. They have denied themselves the dignity of working in their own homeland as part of their own strata and been granted their monkey’s paw wish of better wages and better living for themselves – serving in heaven.
There may be the odd moment where someone finds the old liberal, egalitarian conditioning bubbling up again from their subconscious – a White woman might be stood at a bus stop and witness a panting, emaciated Somali riding a bike with one of the aforementioned rucksacks at 6AM and think twice about what is happening to our country (that is a real anecdote) – but ultimately “the bulk of people conform to the energies and pressures that they now feel themselves living under”, and our people will either accept the newly-imported caste of service sector slaves but not collaborate or they will actively, decadently indulge this newfound luxury. The point of bringing these things up is to say that if the right-wing can be made to feel comfortable with, and accepting of, a multi-ethnic society that is allowed to be freely arranged along racial lines, they will have done so with the same impulse as the lumpenaristocrat normies who subconsciously enjoy ordering slaves to their door. It might not even solely be contentment either, given that the right is increasingly unprincipled and no more moral in personal actions than the average person, they too may enjoy the illusion of prosperity that this new feudalism grants them just as much as anyone else. The only possible difference is that the act of a right-winger ordering a Caribbean Wecasa maid to their home may also come with it a post-service “ironic” gigachad tweet boasting of how cool and racist they just were.
As is increasingly pointed out, the liberal consensus is becoming one of ambivalence to the natural order. Likewise, there is no considerable pushback against any of this from those on the left who enjoy the costume of performative socialism. This is because of the very obvious fact that the left’s primary cause at the present is anti-Whiteness; it participates in an inter-ethnic conflict which is ongoing, rather than a class struggle that has been lost. Any criticism of these trends might be construed (rightly) as a critique of mass-immigration itself, might nudge open the heavy eyelids of the sleepy Saxon. We can’t have that, can we? Even if it means pretending the squalor that third-world immigrants create for themselves and the barbarism they make our own people suffer under is an acceptable arrangement for everyone. Because of this fevered fear of the “far-right”, we have a left-wing in Britain and elsewhere that is religiously dedicated to defending everything the liberal status quo does – doing so to quell their own anxiety about a legitimately anti-establishment force from the right which would unravel the regime’s fundamental underpinnings.
Brought to its inevitable conclusion, you end up with a strange consensus that everyone is generally happy with. The left-wing gets their “post-colonial” dissolution of whiteness, the liberals get their Pret a Manger serfs, and the right-wing gets their… [pending peace treaty]. We are hurtling into a rerun of 20th century liberalism where Whites and non-Whites of all political walks all enjoy the zany sheninigans of KSI and Kai Cenat but for very different reasons. This is different to what has been the norm currently, what I am describing is a society where hierarchy is more apparent, in which group differences are more apparent and part of an unconscious acknowledgement of what makes the status quo acceptable to everyone; a hierarchy sustained by a shared sense of relief among those who sit above lowest-of-the-low in the new economic caste system. Maybe liberals are the real slave owners, or maybe we are the real liberals for seeing anything wrong with this so-called progress. This Brave New, Bell Curve-ambivalent, World… a Libtartheid state.
Let us go into the dreams of the compromisemaxxers, those who wish to retain our present texture of life, our liberal, capitalist economic structure and even Britain’s current affliction. Ponder a future in which there is, with the gracious consent of some Bill Ackman-like figure, an end to the Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion that the 2010 Equality Act, 1970 Equal Pay Act and 1965 Race Relations Act have brought – but also the continued assurance that Britain would continue on with its current course of Brazilification. This timeline, though delusional and unlikely – is more likely than mass-immigration slowing or being halted without a meaningful revolution. This alternative world where a government comes to power and makes our national demographic transformation as acceptable as possible is a recipe for turning revolutionary fervour into consigned resignation that the future is impenetrable and our fate sealed – save only for the hope that a White Bumiputera system could be implemented someday. “Okay, a homogenous, White British Britain might be over, but maybe we can have a Rhodesian style government” is essentially a sentiment being passed around now in once-nationalist circles, as the new generation works to dilute opposition to the demographic problem. “Okay, well maybe the American Empire will allow us to be like the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Japan or Israel even! We’ll still bow down and maintain occupation policy on the economy and migration, but the immigrants will be guest workers without rights” – as appealing as a British Gastarbeiter might conceptually be to our friends in middle-class management jobs who work adjacent to power in the centre of London, this silver bullet is in fact a poison pill. This immigration policy might have failed West Germany and lead to Germany having a large and expanding Turkish minority, but I am sure we could make it work here with our own immigrant population. I can see it now, Prime Minister ProgNat declares all immigrants as now being non-citizens, but residents in perpetuity – no push to return Britain to the state it was in when our grandparents were born, but instead the beginning of a giddy rock throwing competition with hornets’ nests as targets. This would transition us to the most tolerable post-majority arrangement but would further breed resentment in the immigrant population – assuring our doom as a people further down the line. Do we want done to us here in Britain our very own Zanzibar revolution? Having delayed the radicalisation of the masses by several decades, it would degenerate inevitably back to the present status quo but with much worse demographics to contend with. We would be scattered specs of diasporic blood across the global windscreen of progress, without any hope of homogeneity ever returning, the final nail in the coffin which holds within it our distinction from every other nation in the world, especially what defines us – our root-nation homeland in Europe. This is not the kind of country I want to live in, or the kind of country I want my descendants to live in. Whole areas lived in exclusively by immigrants – guest workers or not. Bus systems, roads, infrastructure all constructed and maintained to facilitate a large immigrant population – guest workers or not. The status is not the issue, their rights and position as citizen-equals is not the issue, the issue is these enclaves being here at all. Again, compromises are dreamt up in the hope of mitigating the problem, of dampening its consequences and the issues that come with it. But if the problem continues to exist it will endure, and if it endures it will win. Reform will not lead us to victory.
It is as if all revolutionary thought and visions of a brighter future are incomprehensible now to most, to such an extent that even within the realm of a hypothetical fantasy of taking over our country, we still affirm even within our own minds the promontory confines of what can and cannot be done – as rigidly set by the establishment. For the last four years or so we have seen the emergence of a Menshevik/Bolshevik split on the right, a split between those who wish to reform the current system and those that wish to see it all swept away – driven by (I would argue) a widening class divide. This class divide is a new one, caused by the excesses of 21st century capitalism, the continued fallout from the 2007-2008 financial crisis and Covid-19 Lockdown policies – all of which led to the consolidation of plutocratic power over Britain. To further pursue liberalisation of the economy (as if everything that came before now “Wasn’t Real Growth”) would only sharpen the worsening quality of life and living standards of the White British working class. The necessity is greater now than at any other point in our nation’s history for a radical, class-collaborationist economic system that puts the interests of the nation as a whole first – perhaps a form of Corporatism or a modern rendition of Syndicalism. The details are less important than the essence, which is that nationalism is no longer compatible with capitalism (if it ever had been). We need an economic system that doesn’t just benefit the middle class in the South of England (a section of our population that continues to successfully avoid radicalisation due to being economically shielded from most of the repercussions of capitalism).
What might often seem like ankle biting on the Twitter timeline is at its core a division over the basic fundamentals of how our nation should be organised. I am trying to make the case that a middle class-dominated right is currently leading us down into dead ends, pitfalls and off ramps to deradicalisation. There is now within the right a reframing of the issues that places Whites (in the pan-European, London-centric demographic sense) as an exclusively middle-class demographic (comparatively), pitted against a disproportionately black and brown underclass beneath them – a top-down class war with total disregard for the White working class caught in the market forces crossfire. From this line of reasoning, Thatcherite arguments have intruded themselves into our circles – with a broad racialism as their justification. Many on the right now seem to be willing to throw poorer, less-intelligent Whites into a third-world underclass wilderness to compete and struggle against the new slave caste (imported here to undercut them as workers and replace them as people). An example of what I describe occurred not too long ago, when a redpill on the racially-disproportionate occupancy rates of social housing in London was contorted into a dilution of the anti-immigration agenda and support for “selling off of social housing”. Not to state the obvious, but selling off social housing would only accomplish a geographic integration of the immigrant population, in line with explicitly stated regime aims, softening the urban BAMElaw which acts as an eternal reminder of the glaring incongruence between the Britain that was and the Britain that now is. This factitious right-wing continues to be fuelled by centre-right establishment journalists such as Sam Ashworth-Hayes and propped up with power-adjacent backhand deals granting them access to – maybe not the halls of power – but the cloister outside of them.
Our future depends upon reconnecting with the severed ends of our endangered White British working class. The remnants of them that are still out there have been deprived of everything but their blood – their nation is all they have left. Their country, their communities, their jobs, their trade unions, their dignity – all stripped from them as if they were no longer needed. So they wander the post-industrial wastelands, as they have for over thirty years, Ahasverus’ of Albion – longing for the homeland they knew when they grew up, constantly being told that it is not only dead but that it was evil and that it never really existed anyway. What is the liberal right’s answer to these people? What of the generation of White British people born into this post-industrial wasteland? Many have now become Gridlockian, Macra-like shadows of their former glory – anti-social, loutish; addicted to drugs, alcohol, and readily-available techSoma. It follows that the liberal right identifies more with their class than their nation. This is one sign among many that capitalism is ultimately a left-wing force, as is liberalism – perpetuating a materialist worldview that breaks down national bonds and turns individuals with homelands into consumers with shopping malls. This goes back to my earlier point about the desire to make the displacement process “fair” rather than to abolish it entirely; the result is a people that identify more with their class in a revitalised capitalist hierarchy. The new right-wing rejection of any and all criticisms of capitalism as a system comes from an animosity towards the White British working class for still being able to perceive things through a communitarian lens, which is itself a holdover from the trade union movement – which had kept the White British working class economically collectivist in their outlook (with that same tribalism now increasingly taking a populist orientation). Poorer, less-intelligent Whites could only have deportations, an end to immigration in principle and the abolition of capitalism as its survival/victory condition – this solution can never become conscious if the issues are allowed to be oriented around a middle-class class-consciousness purely driven by personal, material self-interest. An atomised, materialist right without a communal and spiritual element, regardless of form or flavour, continues to be stillborn because it lacks the ability to evoke a higher calling or bond that calls the people upwards. A higher calling that would offer higher values beyond their personal, material self-interest is something the White British working class is more open to now due to having had their class-consciousness broken by liberal capitalism. By giving up national economic decision making to shareholder capitalists and market forces, we have cut off our legs to spite our body, the national body, and the liberal right retroactively justifies the real economic contractions and trauma of deindustrialisation as a necessary (even positive) act of policy.
Britain, by every real metric, has ceased to have a meaningful, sovereign national government. We are now an economic zone with the apparition of a state attached – a state which on paper has the absolute authority to do anything in the country through parliament, but which in practice has no such authority. Government bankruptcy is irrelevant to a system that will always want an ever-expanding pool of labour to increase the number of consumers, keep the value of labour down and chill workers’ rights. We once had a mercantilist economic system, with the Navigation Acts and Corn Laws – great guarantors of our national wealth, until the Manchester vision of our country took hold and facilitated the creation of an international business elite that would eventually become greater in power and influence than the nation states themselves. This is the essence of capitalism – a materialist, internationalist system that values only money, productivity and growth – could this really be preferable to communism? It sounds identical to communism, actually. Mass immigration being, in part, not only a symptom of the finance capital growth model but a policy which this system depends upon (especially as it breaks down and self-cannibalises) is proof enough that we must strive for a fundamental alternative. The liberal right can write this off in little quips as much as they like but their solutions are evidently not workable for meeting the current moment. We are capable of organising a new system beyond the EconGrad consensus. We can step over the noxious vision of a nominally right-wing Britain that would be using a vaguely racialised comparative advantage theory of labour to justify the necessity of third-world slaves, second-world professionals and first-world transnational elites.
We are up against self-professed liberals who are incapable of answering their own version of the breakfast question – “What if liberal capitalism and nationalism were mutually exclusive?” – even though it is plainly obvious by now that they are. But maybe the globalists will grant them a scrap from the table down to their comfortable tier on the ivory tower, above the sea of sludge they are generally free from interacting with – like the limousine driving through the favela. Is this not what Milei and Wilders represent? These are surely establishment plots to sell artificial right-wing figures that are still controlled by the interests of capital so that liberalism can be maintained but with an authoritarian update that cleans up the bugs and issues. This only works if the right allows itself to become part of the regime apparatus of control, by the co-opting of dissident online right-wing culture and its domestication into a harmless playpen on the fringes – a playpen where naive, grumbling, headline-quote-tweeting toy soldiers cooperate unwittingly with the status quo. It seems to me the right-wing has found itself desiring only to be pandered to again, wishing for superficial wins to brag about online: like videogames having sexy female characters again or the adverts being trad. The shattered, retreating sentiment of “Maybe we never really wanted a meaningful change to the social, cultural and economic status quo, maybe the texture of our lives in modernity is fine, maybe multiracialism is okay – for they have stopped humiliating my people and our beliefs daily and have begun nominally cooperating with us” completing the total political convergence of left and right on a reformed regime that a depoliticised population can receive some newfound benefits from. That is what I mean when I warn of the perestroika of our time. We must hope and pray this stalls, failing at the hands of conservative figures such as Keir Starmer or prevented by reactionary figures such as J.K. Rowling.
It is time to acknowledge a paradox of 21st century politics, one which only figures like Matthew Goodwin and Glenn Greenwald have alluded to – we are the heirs to the socialist cause despite not believing in equality or a materialist worldview. There has been a “collapse of the far left in the last 20 to 30 years”. Communism as a conscious, ideological force no longer exists. It fell as if it were a cursed ring, melting into the Soviet Union’s now-extinct volcano. The mantle which we take up now is the conservative tribalism which the trade union movement represented in Britain – which once organised workers and communities to struggle against the shifting sands of progress imposed by capital. Just as such tribalism must return to our people through a deeper pulse that reaches beyond the defeat at Hastings to our Anglo-Saxon primordials, the right must also return to the radical anti-capitalism aspired to in previous right-wing movements before its compromises whilst in power. We must now move away from the eternally sliced pie where oligarchs expect their tithe and piece of the nation to run amok with. To meet this moment, it is crucial for us not to lose the thread of working towards an authoritarian, centralised state power – a state that would be mounted firm across the whole of the British Isles, shielding the British people and their liberty from the volleyed shots of moneyed interests. The plunder will end.
Our people can do better than this. We do not have to settle for anything. We do not have to make the most of a bad situation. We certainly should not delight in occupation delicacies. By present trends, our people might earnestly snatch at any offer for improvement without undoing the principles that are baked into our being which caused the problems in the first place. That for me is The Worst Case Scenario – where not only the apolitical masses, but the left, the liberals and even the right reach a pitiful mindbreak akin to the conclusion of Winston’s journey in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. The quiet deflowering of our stagnant present into something far more dangerous – a system that can survive long into the future – is something we must reject with all of our energy no matter how spent we may feel currently. A genuine alternative is possible, it always has been, that is what they fear the most – our recognition of this fact – and why there is any talk at all of the possibility of, or desire for, reform within the establishment. The revolution can and will happen irrespective of potential economic and social turbulence. We can triple the wages and double the pensions of policemen and soldiers; we can do what is demanded of our country even if it will likely hurt our country in the medium-term. A fox gnaws at its leg when it is caught in a trap. The civil strife which is coming is inevitable, but luckily the establishment won’t succeed in its hypothetical reforms – our society might transmogrify into one which is more ambivalent to ethnicity as every group recedes into their own private spaces away from each other – but our western governments are far too dug in to ever consider a change to the present course, even if it could mean the perpetuation of their power (even in spite of suspicious actors on the right trying to make this a reality). Given the foreign policy ongoing in the Middle-East and Eastern Europe, it seems to me that those presently in power would rather see total nuclear oblivion to human civilisation than see their ideological and political grip on the world slackened in any way.
Let us go forth with wind in our sails, with our own form of ambivalence – ambivalence to the radical solutions which we take to be self-evidently necessary. Imagine the spectacular and triumphant scene of a fresh-faced vanguard declaring victory at the signing of a British Lausanne Convention; imagine the sensation of crossing the threshold into a restored nation and rebalanced world, one free of the impending burden of serfdom in a foreign land. We must stamp out the cockroach-like pessimism of skirted-edge 20+ year projects. Embrace the greater you that exists beyond your consciousness and reach within for the fated Anglo-Shintoism that will lead us home to sweeter pastures. The Samurai turned to Ceorl, the Wakizashi turned to Seax – meet your greater form with outstretched arms and welcome yourself back into the fold as a true Englishman, ready to step over this purgatorial dichotomy and the squabbles of then and now and forge something entirely new and yet also distinctly old and true to ourselves. Reject this world in its current form and not only break free of each and every one of its tentacles but severe them like the second labour of Hercules so that our progeny may be freer, safer and more prosperous than we ever will be. Survival depends on the sheer will of men willing to dedicate themselves to the cause, men who we know not the names of now but who will emerge in the eleventh hour and forge the new England, the new Britannia, summoned up as reincarnated spirits of forgotten heroes. All was once over in the 9th century too when all was to be lost and yet was then formed anew. No man is willing to suffer or die for planning reform and means-tested pensions; much less the privatisation of social housing or the lowering of corporate taxes for Tesco and Amazon. Reject the pending peace treaty; reject those that wish to negotiate with power to help it kick our can further down the road. This is our struggle, not our children’s or children’s children’s. Our time is now, and everything is on us. Believe in yourselves and believe in Britain.
Against assisted dying
It is unsurprising the government is rushing through ‘assisted dying’. Having decimated what little political capital it possessed after a hollow election victory, Labour is clearly desperate to shore up as many achievements as quickly as possible; successes which can be fashioned into something resembling a coherent and tangible legacy at a later date, showing little-to-no regard for the common good.
What is surprising is how limp-wristed and tepid the opposition to this policy has been, especially from Britain’s commentariat. In no uncertain terms, the assisted dying bill is one of the most radical proposals for social liberalisation in decades, yet our opinion-having class has alarmingly little to say, at least when compared to other matters. Those eager to broadcast their intelligence on other issues – which they’re similarly unqualified to write about (that’s not a bad thing, by the way; far from it!) – are inexplicably scared to take a crack at this offputtingly complex but highly important matter which affects us all.
What little discussion has occurred in the commentariat (never mind Parliament) has revolved around the foreseeable practical issues of such a policy, typically pointing to the results of Canada’s assisted dying policy (MAID; Medical Assistance in Dying), the initial proponents of which say is being abused. As such, opponents of assisted dying in Britain essentially oppose it on the basis of negative and unintended consequences, specifically the gradual loosening of safeguards overtime, killing people who should’ve received non-lethal forms of care.
None of this is wrong per se, although it’s hard to treat this angle as anything other than unsatisfying. It does not bode well for a civilisation that its only barricade against its destruction is the ineptitude of the barbarians.
More than a total lack of faith in anything improving at all, it suggests that we are caught between our reluctance to end life yet struggle to justify such an instinct; we retain the form of a society which professes something like the sanctity of life, but lack any of the substantial belief, frightened to unlearn that which can’t so easily be relearnt once lost to history as another primitive superstition.
It’s difficult to be truly hard-line on something like assisted dying because it elicits so much sympathy. No right-minded person wants people to suffer, never mind be made to feel that they are forcing people to suffer. After all, humans are motivated by aversion to pain more than most things. However, advocates of assisted dying use this fact to strongarm more hesitant individuals into agreeing with assisted dying in principle, disagreeing solely on the technicalities of implementation.
More often than not, support for assisted dying is couched in the idea that if you’re in ‘unbearable’ pain, you might as well be given the choice to end your life, especially if you’re going to die in six months anyway. Putting aside the remarkable precision of such a prediction, it never occurs to advocates that if you’re going to die in six months anyway, you might as well tough it out, if not for the sake of yourself or your loved ones, then for the sake of ensuring that society-at-large doesn’t suffer the wrath of short-sighted policy.
Of course, this is assuming unbearable pain is the main reason for assisted dying, contrary to plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.
According to data from places where it’s already legal, the main reasons for assisted dying are the inability to fulfil day-to-day tasks and engage in ‘meaningful activities’. Even abstract notions like autonomy and dignity are cited as more important than pain. Even fear about being a burden on one’s family is reportedly just as common.
A real shame, that’s for sure. There are few greater exertions of autonomy than refusing to die for someone else’s benefit, and there is nothing more ‘undignified’ than having so little sense of self-worth that you sacrifice yourself for others in your most intimate and personal moment. If we can’t reserve ourselves for our own death, it’s no surprise that things like sex and marriage continue to lose any sense of exclusivity.
Concepts like ‘anarcho-tyranny‘ and ‘two-tier policing’ are typically used in discussions surrounding criminal justice, but the underlying logic surely applies to a system which releases unrepentant, serially violent criminals as it provides the sick and vulnerable – many of whom needlessly swell with guilt over their condition – with the option to end their own life. This sense of guilt will only become stronger when someone in a position of medical authority – in a culture which reveres expertise, even when it fails us – tells them they can make it go away. That which is legally a ‘right to die’ will feel like the duty to die, and by extension, those expected to sign-off on the procedure will feel as though they have a duty to kill.
Far from acting as a safeguard, medical professionals will act as affirmers to something which they’ve been told is not theirs to dictate in the first place. When the option is available, like the patient, the fact something can be done will weigh down upon them, and whilst they may be motivated by a desire to alleviate or prevent suffering, those once hesitant are now incentivised to act with urgency.
Indeed, the same can be said of the patient’s family, the consultation of which is notably absent from the bill’s supposedly stringent requirements, although they’ll certainly weigh on the patient’s conscience. If patients don’t feel burdensome to their loved ones, they’ll absolutely feel burdensome to the NHS, an institution our country continues to revere with mindless zealotry.
Courtesy of the selfish (but outwardly generous) nature of our present culture, the patient’s expectation of good care risks being outweighed by the ’empathy’ we demand them to have for others in a different position. Assisted dying is not yet legal and yet many already feel (perhaps not without reason) that the elderly are spitefully overstaying their welcome on this mortal coil.
Advocates of assisted dying (similar to advocates of abortion) like to believe that leaving something up to choice absolves the decisions made of any and all comparable virtue. Far from removing an ideological imposition on society, this notion that we have no choice but to leave everything up to choice, that all options must be on the table, is one of the most duplicitous and tyrannical value systems afflicting contemporary society; so much that life itself is ceasing to be the default, becoming just another option for which one is cruelly judged behind a veil of strained, artificial tolerance.
Extending the comparison, liberalising assisted dying doesn’t just implicate those who’ll be inevitably and unjustifiably killed in the name of healthcare, it devalues death outside of the circumstances in which assisted dying would be viewed as an option. When abortionists downplay (or functionally deny) the value of the child, they’re implicating any baby which (for whatever reason) doesn’t make it. A procedure once permitted for the sake of saving the mother’s life, balanced against the life of the child, is now a simple matter of preference, exalted as a form of empowerment.
Followed to its conclusion, an involuntary miscarriage, rightfully treated as a tragic incident deserving sympathy, can only be regarded, in all sincerity, as ‘tragic’ as receiving a bad hand in a game of Blackjack. Of course, insincerity is the essence of civility, and therefore integral to any tactful interaction, but this is not the same as having a genuine moral compass. The tragedy lies in the fact we know something deeply valuable has been lost. We say “I’m sorry for your loss” not “better luck next time” for a reason. As such, unless you intend to engage in mental gymnastics to suggest “terminating” highly viable babies past the legal limit is worlds apart to killing newborns, the recent movements for decriminalisation should be concerning, even if wholly in-step with our opponents’ revealed attitude towards the unborn.
In a similar vein, if assisted dying should be liberalised to alleviate suffering on the basis that our life is ours to use as we see fit, then suicide becomes just another expression of individual choice which needs to be destigmatised. After all, why should we need to suffer? Why would such a precondition exist if life didn’t have an inherent value, and if life has an inherent value, how could we justify a policy like assisted dying in the first place? Because the suffering outweighs that inherent value? How would you know when suffering outweighs this value? After all, suffering is extremely subjective. You can make this assessment for your own quality of life, but not for another person’s. Confronted with the potential suicide of another person, there’s not a lot you could do. You needn’t assist the act or condone it, but you’d be a hypocrite for showing or feeling anything more than defeated indifference. After all, who are you to judge? Again, it’s not your life. In order to override them, you’d need to believe life has a value beyond quantification, which it certainly does.
If one’s suffering is one’s business, then it becomes one’s business to deal with it, using their preferred option of the many made available. Although plausibly convenient, it makes life less rich, for what good are the virtues of mercy, assurance, and even heroism itself? More than rendered obsolete by consent-based ethics, they are contorted into acts of undue, arbitrary interference.
Life is worth suffering, not merely because of what can be done between our birth and death but due to its facticity; it is given, not chosen. Nobody derives meaning from the things they consciously choose; at least, not for long. There will always be the sense that relying on such things feels constructed, inviting us to seek something more essential. We don’t choose our nationality, our sexuality, our name, our family, and so forth, and so the importance of these things is heightened in an era with an abundance of choice.
The present political landscape serves as testament to this fact, not solely in the form of progressive-left identity politics. Regardless of how his economic prospects ebbed and flowed, the Englishman could rely on having won the lottery of life. He was born into a community with just cause and proficient capability to take his welfare seriously, as well as provide him with a sense of rootedness in an otherwise changing world. He had a cultural heritage which suggested he was part of something greater than himself; any belief in his abilities was well-founded and any shortcoming would surely be redeemed by the successes of his kin. Confronted with large scale demographic change from immigration, he feels himself in revolt against a class which has not yet taken everything from him, but is in the process of trying to destroy his few but cherished saving graces.
Even things which aren’t pleasurable, such as personal tragedies, supply us with a greater and much needed confrontation with the involuntary nature of our existence than even the most high-brow, profound, and enriching pastimes.
It is often said that the value of life lies in its depth, not its length; in other terms, life is about having a good time, not a long time, and whilst there’s certainly truth in this idea, it detracts from the distressing fact that we have time at all; a fact we tend to avoid truly thinking about until we’re out of it. Indeed, I suspect many have thought about how they’d spend their last day on Earth before resuming their lives as if their mortality was part of the hypothetical. The fact death takes us without our prior consent frightens us; it goes against what we regard as the basis for permissibility, so we’re inclined to ignore it.
The simple fact of the matter is that assisted dying is never abused; it merely comes to better embody the spirit in which it was introduced. The process misconstrued as the ‘slippery slope’ is nothing more than a superficially innocent argument being carried to its garish but logical conclusion. The ever-ambiguous safeguards aren’t meant to shield against improper uses of the system, merely to shield against uses which haven’t achieved mainstream acceptance, and could be used as a justification to prevent (or outright reverse) its full implementation. Things called insane right-wing conspiracy theories today will be referred to as inevitable and necessary progress tomorrow.
So, let’s cut to the chase. Instead of obsessing over regulations which will be altered or subverted, let’s be very frank about our fundamental and irreconcilable differences, and eagerly embrace the intellectually demanding and morally sensitive nature of this matter.
Those in support can make their case for life’s essential hollowness, and that our time on Earth is nothing more than taking the path of least resistance to the grave, filling our time with surrogate activities until it becomes too much, at which point we hop-off the existential ride. As for those opposed, we must more staunchly make the case for death as it comes for us, as it does. Just as we can gain value from being born here rather than there, from being this rather than that, the same must be said of our death. We do not view life as an empty vacuum to be filled with things that matter. The fact we do what we do, in the knowledge that our time is finite, makes what we do meaningful. Life gives meaning to our activities, not the other way around.
The advocates of assisted dying are right about one thing. We don’t get to choose what we do with our life, but it is because of this fact that our death remains our own. Therefore, the only way to ensure our death remains truly ours, something indivisibly belonging to us as individuals, free of aggregated social pressures and bouts of false consciousness, immune to last-minute bargaining and uncontaminated by ambiguity over cause-and-effect – altogether free from the risk of coercion – is to prevent it from being turned into a choice in the first place.
Is Keir Starmer really the PM?
Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure that Keir Starmer is definitely the Prime Minister?
It wouldn’t be unusual if he isn’t. Does anyone even remember who Joe Biden is? And he’s supposed to be way more important.
It doesn’t really feel like Keir Starmer is the Prime Minister, does it? Maybe Esther Rantzen (who?) is the Prime Minister? Better do what she says. Promises were made, after all. Is Keir Starmer even sure he’s the Prime Minister? July, September, October. What a silly hostage.
OK. Enough of that.
Does he even really want to be the Prime Minister?
Whether it’s the debacle of sending Labour staff to campaign in the US, or the free gear, or obviously nepotistic appointments, there’s only one excuse he ever gives. Don’t blame me, it may look really corrupt, but it’s still just about within the rules. The rules run things, not ol’ Keir Starmer. Not responsible. The rules are. Got it. Maybe they’re the PM?
The failure to treat governing seriously is just another sign that these people are student politicians. They like the idea of governing, of being in office but not necessarily in power. They like the trappings, the pomp, the mincing about, and the throbbery but are they actually interested in the real substance of governing?
You will continue to get shallow “leaders” until the consequences match the severity of their civilisational level failures.
And they are at a civilisational level.
Another way of wriggling out of being Prime Minister is to give away all the land over which you’re supposed to govern. Bye bye, British Indian Ocean Territory. Yes, yes, overseas territory, short term lease, etc. cut the midwittery. The grug-brain/genius unity here is the unambiguous surrender of territory, which is bad.
Giving away the country is surely a sure sign that he doesn’t want to govern it?
Reparations? Don’t believe him when he says it’s not happening. Why sign to the commitment to discuss it at all, as if it’s even remotely reasonable, at the Commonwealth leaders meet up? Giving away land, giving away money. Is this what all the imminent tax increases in the budget are going toward? What is he going to entertain giving away next?
An aside, why is our government about to increase taxes to give it away to foreigners, while the likely next President in the US is promising to tax foreigners and abolish their income tax? Why can’t we have that?
Never mind Keir Starmer. And speaking of the Caribbean, does the cabinet want to want to govern this country either? Or are they more interested foreign interests as far and wide as the Caribbean, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East? What is in Britain’s interests? If you want to be a minister in a British government, shouldn’t you be totally beyond reproach? Why are otherwise obvious questions around conflicts of interest, such as dual nationality, not at all concerning? If free gear is enough to cast suspicion, why isn’t the protection, kinship, and privileges of a whole other country not even more suspicious? There are levels of security clearance you’re not allowed to hold if you have dual nationality, but you can still govern? Whose side are you on?
If they really wanted to govern, why didn’t they prepare for it?
Why do virtually no politicians spend any time honing the skills needed for executive decision making, administration, structuring, oversight, team-building, etc. etc. etc.? In what other professional walk of life would you expect to get to the top by merely being old enough, without criminal record (for at least 5 years), filing some paperwork, being gobby on TV, and winning a popularity contest among people who are also not qualified?
Does this look like a government? This post is slightly out of date, but close enough.
Really, it’s worse than this. As this is being written, the budget is coming up in a couple of days. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is in fact not even close to being a junior banking analyst. She is not an economist (anyone can call themselves an economist – the dismal science indeed), she lied about being any sort of chess champion, and it looks like the book she wrote was plagiarised.
Is it any wonder this sort of person is focussed on small and petty things like the gender of people in portraits? There’s no intelligence or imagination or frame of reference there for great acts of statesmanship.
There is only itty-bitty titties and a bob.
If you don’t want to be talked down to, Rachel, don’t lower yourself so. Or become genuinely great.
In the meantime, readers, you are governed by inadequates, by middle managers.
If they wanted to govern, they would have spent the time and effort to become capable of governing.
Let that be a warning to you too, readers, you cannot just be gobby on GB News or assorted podcasts. I see you. Sure, Kemi Badenoch is a flop, but Robert Jenrick? What are you doing? Have some self-respect!
Do you even want to govern?
Anyway, with all that, just look at the state of Labour.
Is Keir Starmer even going to last until 2029?
Kino
Can Britain do business with Taliban-led Afghanistan?
I can’t say I’ve ever hosted the Taliban, although if presented with the opportunity, the Worshipful Company of Brewers wouldn’t have been my initial choice of venue.
This irony wasn’t lost on Daniel Evans, frontier markets and technology investor, co-founder of the Gibraltar Stock Exchange Group, and Chairman of the newly-founded Afghanistan Advisory Council (AAC).
Evans joked the venue would allow him to lay claim to successfully organising a piss-up in a brewery, although it must be said the event wasn’t a piss-up at all – partially because the drinks were appropriately alcohol free, but mainly because the foundation of the AAC marks the first actual step at rapprochement with Afghanistan since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.
All-in-all, a pretty serious affair. Serious enough to receive a written endorsement from Nooruddin Azizi, Afghanistan’s Minister of Industry and Commerce:
“On behalf of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, I want to emphasize that the investment environment in Afghanistan is feasible, with strong security and government policies focused on economic development. As many know, Afghanistan is an untapped country with significant business and investment opportunities across various sectors, including energy, industry, infrastructure, mining, agriculture, and health.
We welcome any proposals and investments in Afghanistan, assuring you that the government will fully protect and support all initiatives.”
The launch was attended by businessmen from a variety of interested parties; railway construction, petrochemicals, international finance, and so on. Michael Mainelli, current President of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry and former Lord Mayor of the City of London was among those present, as well as Miles ‘Lord Miles’ Routledge, adventurer-turned-YouTuber-turned-junior member of the AAC.
Among other ambitions for a hospital, a hotel, a logistics centre, and a railway terminus, the AAC’s flagship proposal of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), set to be attached to Kabul airport, has won the backing of Mohammad and Zahid Asif, Owner and Managing Director of Walid Titan Ltd respectively, who are providing the land for the zone.
The precise details of the SEZ have yet to be fleshed out, although it’s clear that the AAC is looking to Dubai’s International Finance Centre (IFC) as a model; a demarcated zone where the norms and customs of international commerce prevail, and regulations are to be drawn up on the advice of the AAC.
The SEZ is one of several projects set to be funded by a new National Growth Fund, which will provide resources to develop a diverse range of industries and projects, such as a far-reaching hospital construction programme. One of the hospital centres will be located in the SEZ. The AAC has been given the mandate to advise the creation of the fund.
One might ask why the Taliban would allow any of this. If one reads between the lines, the SEZ would allow what are essentially Western standards of conduct to take root in an otherwise Islamic theocratic state. Sure, it’s not exactly going to be Amsterdam but it’s hard to square such a proposal with the totalising ‘Islamofascist’ caliphate prophesised by thought leaders of the dilapidated pantheon of liberal-humanitarian interventionism.
The simple but surprising reality of the matter is the Afghans seriously want to get down to business. In fact, it’s becoming clear the Taliban are more eager to do business with the British than vice versa, and not without valid reason. They’re highly suspicious of the Americans, their opinion of the Russians isn’t much better, relations with Pakistan have massively deteriorated within the past year alone, and China and Iran look more like regional threats than potential allies.
As bizarre as it sounds, the Taliban’s view of the British continues to be informed by the Empire, which they regard in a similar manner to how many of us Moderns regard the Roman Empire; that is, as a milestone in human achievement. The British are viewed less as hated enemies and more as honourable and accomplished adversaries. If that’s not soft power, I don’t know what is!
As one would expect, the Afghans have zero appetite to be controlled by a foreign power, but they’re not completely isolationist; they’re quite happy to enlist the help of foreigners with the know-how required to stabilise their war-battered economy, having endured invasions from the USSR and the US-led coalition, ongoing skirmishes with groups like ISIS-K, and incoming Pashtun refugees from neighbouring Pakistan.
It’s a matter of political ideology whether it’s preferable to live in a less-developed but comparatively liberal country over a more-developed but comparatively illiberal one, but – as a general rule of thumb – it’s better to have functioning railways, roads, and hospitals than to not have them at all. Some things aren’t exactly ideological touchstones. Is it really so polarising to believe that Afghanistan should have a reliable supply of currency, rather than making do with sheets of borderline dust held together with glue and tape?
Beneath debates on the political and religious destiny of Afghanistan lies an economy which needs to be run regardless, and the AAC hasn’t so much muscled into this gap, but waltzed into it; partially because the organisation seems to be ahead of the curve on this issue, but also because its founding members felt they had nothing better to do.
On his release from jail in October 2023, having been arrested for not having his papers in order, Routledge – who described the experience as “the best networking opportunity I’ve ever had” – received an email from Evans with the subject line “Bored/gold mine lol” – a proposal which snowballed into setting up a full-on, nation-wide development fund with the blessing of the Afghan government.
Overall, the AAC is filling the vacuum left by a regime that doesn’t know what to do with Afghanistan. One suspects it’s pretty hard to see a path forward with that much egg on your face!
For the past two decades, Britain’s political system has stuck to the same playbook; a hodgepodge strategy of attempting to nag and bomb Afghanistan into becoming a liberal democracy with little-to-no regard for local idiosyncrasies and so forth.
Indeed, no country is a blank slate and Afghanistan is no exception, but more than an investment opportunity – that itself is laden with several obvious benefits; Afghanistan is rich with natural minerals – but a real chance to rehearse discombobulated statesmen and commentators in the virtues and practices which factor into good nation-building; which I cannot help but feel is the spiritual mission of the AAC, even if not said so outright.
Keir Starmer, take notes!
Is it Possible to Live Without a Computer of Any Kind?
This article was originally published on 19th May 2021.
I am absolutely sick to death of computers. The blue light of a screen wakes me up in the morning, I stare at another computer on my desk for hours every day, I keep one in my pocket all the time and that familiar too-bright glow is the last thing I see before I close my eyes at night. Lockdown undoubtedly made the problem much, much worse. Last year, a nasty thought occurred to me: it might be the case that the majority of my memories for several months were synthetic. Most of the sights and sounds I’d experienced for a long time had been simulated – audio resonating out of a tinny phone speaker or video beamed into my eyes by a screen. Obviously I knew that my conscious brain could tell the difference between media and real life, but I began to wonder whether I could be so sure about my subconscious. In short, I began to suspect that I was going insane.
So, I asked myself if it was possible to live in the modern world without a computer of any kind – no smartphone, no laptop, and no TV (which I’m sure has a computer in it somewhere). Of course, it’s possible to survive without a computer, provided that you have an income independent of one, but that wasn’t really the question. The question was whether it’s possible to live a full life in a developed country without one.
Right away, upon getting rid of my computers, my social life ground to a halt. Unable to go to the pub or a club, my phone allowed me to feel like I was still at least on the periphery of my friends lives while they were all miles away. This was hellish, but I realised that it was the real state of my life – my phone acted as a pacifier and my friendships were holograms. No longer built on the foundation of experiences shared on a regular basis, social media was a way for me to freeze-dry my friendships – preserve them so that they could be revived at a later date. With lockdown over though, this becomes less necessary. They can be reheated and my social life can be taken off digital life support. I would lose contact with some people but, as I said, these would only be those friendships kept perpetually in suspended animation.
These days large parts of education, too, take place online. It’s not uncommon now in universities, colleges and secondary schools for work and timetables to be found online or for information to be sent to pupils via internal email networks. Remote education during lockdown was no doubt made easier by the considerable infrastructure already in place.
Then there’s the question of music. No computers would mean a life lived in serene quiet; travelling and working without background sound to hum or tap one’s foot to. An inconvenience, maybe, but perhaps not altogether a negative one. Sir Roger Scruton spoke about the intrusion of mass-produced music into everyday life. Computer-produced tunes are played at a low level in shopping centres and restaurants, replacing the ambient hum and chatter of human life with banal pop music. Scruton believed that the proper role of music was to exalt life – to enhance and make clear our most heartfelt emotions. Music today, though, is designed to distract from the dullness of everyday life or paper over awkward silences at social events. He went so far as to say that pop consumption had an effect on the musical ear comparable to that of pornography on sex.
The largest barrier, however, is the use of the internet for work. Many companies use online services to organise things like shift rotas, pay and holidays and the entire professional world made the switch to email decades ago. How feasible is it to opt out of this? Short of becoming extremely skilled at something for which there is both very little supply and very high demand, and then working for a band of eccentrics willing to accommodate my niche lifestyle, I think it would be more or less impossible. Losing the computer would mean kissing the possibility of a career goodbye.
Lockdown has also sped up the erosion of physical infrastructure required to live life offline as well as accelerated our transformation into a ‘cashless society’. On average, 50 bank branches have closed every month since January 2015, with over 1000 branch closures across the country in the last year alone. It also seems to have wiped away the last remaining businesses that didn’t accept card payments. The high street, already kicking against the current for years, is presently being kept alive by Rishi Sunak’s magic money tree while Amazon records its best quarter for profits ever. It’s no mystery to anyone which way history will go.
I’m lucky that my parents were always instinctively suspicious of ‘screens’. I didn’t get a smartphone until a good way into secondary school and I got my first – and only – games console at the age of 16. I keenly remember getting a laptop for my birthday. I think my parents gave it to me in the hopes that I would become some kind of computing or coding genius – instead, I just played a lot of Sid Meiers Civilisation III. My dad would remind me that nothing on my computer was real, but that didn’t stop me getting addicted to games. If it wasn’t for my parents’ strong interventions I would likely have developed a serious problem – sucked into the matrix and doomed to spend my youth in my bedroom with the blinds down.
All year this year I have wrestled with my media addiction but been unable to throw it off. I told my friends that I was taking a break from social media, I deactivated my Twitter account, I physically hid my phone from myself under my bed, and yet here I am, writing this on my laptop for an online publication. When I got rid of my phone I turned to my computer to fill the time. When I realised that the computer was no better I tore myself from it too… and spent more time watching TV. I tried reading – and made some progress – but the allure of instant reward always pulled me back.
I’m not a completely helpless creature, though. On several occasions I cast my digital shackles into the pit, only to find that I needed internet access for business that was more important than my luddite hissy-fit. Once I opened the computer up for business, it was only a matter of time before I would be guiltily watching Netflix and checking my phone again. It’s too easy – I know all the shortcuts. I can be on my favourite time-absorbing website at any time in three or four keystrokes. Besides, getting rid of my devices meant losing contact with my friends (with whom contact was thin on the ground already). Unplugging meant really facing the horrific isolation of lockdown without dummy entertainment devices to distract me. I lasted a month, once. So determined was I to live in the 17th century that I went a good few weeks navigating my house and reading late at night by candlelight rather than turning on those hated LEDs.
And yet, the digital world is tightening around us all the time. Year on year, relics of our past are replaced with internet-enabled gadgets connected to a worldwide spider web of content that has us wrapped up like flies. Whenever I’ve mentioned this I’ve been met with derision and scorn and told to live my life in the woods. I don’t want to live alone in the woods – I want to live a happy and full life; the kind of life that everyone lived just fine until about the ’90s. I’m sick of the whirr and whine of my laptop, of my nerves being raw from overuse, of always keeping one ear open for a ‘ping ’or a ‘pop’ from my phone, and of the days lost mindlessly flicking from one app to the other. Computers have drastically changed the rhythm of life itself. Things used to take certain amounts of time and so they used to take place at certain hours of the day. They were impacted by things like distance and the weather. Now, so much can occur instantaneously irrespective of time or distance and independent from the physical world entirely. Put simply, less and less of life today takes place in real life.
The world of computers is all I’ve ever known and yet I find myself desperately clawing at the walls for a way out. It’s crazy to think that something so complex and expensive – a marvel of human engineering – can become so necessary in just a few decades. If I can’t get rid of my computers I’ll have to learn to diminish their roles in my life as best I can. This is easier said than done, though; as the digital revolution marches on and more and more of life is moved online, the digital demons I am struggling to keep at arm’s length grow bigger and hungrier.
I’m under no illusions that it’s possible to turn back the tide. Unfortunately the digital revolution, like the industrial and agricultural revolutions before it, will trade individual quality of life for collective power. As agricultural societies swallowed up hunter gatherers one by one before themselves being crushed by industrial societies, so those who would cling to an analogue way of life will find themselves overmatched, outcompeted and overwhelmed. Regardless, I will continue with my desperate, rearguard fight against history the same way the English romantics struggled against industrialisation. Hopeless my cause is, yes, but it’s beautiful all the same.
What I’ve Learnt as a Revolutionary Communist
This article was originally published in November 2021.
I have a confession to make.
A few months ago I was made an official member of the Revolutionary Communist Group after being involved as a participating supporter for about a month and a half. The RCG are, in their own words, Marxist-Leninist, pro-Cuba, pro-Palestine, internationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist. They believe that capitalism is causing climate change, which they refer to as the ‘climate crisis’, and that socialism/communism is the only way to avert catastrophe.
They believe that the twin forces of imperialism and capitalism work today, and have been working for hundreds of years, to enrich the Western capitalist class by exploiting the labour of the proletariat and plundering the resources of the ‘Global South’. They publish a bi-monthly newspaper entitled ‘Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!’ which acts as an ideological core around which centre most of the groups discussions.
After two months of twice-weekly zoom calls, leafleting in front of busy train stations and protesting in front of embassies, I was finally invited to become an official member. I rendezvous-ed with two comrades before being taken to a door which was hidden down a dark alleyway and protected by a large iron gate – certainly a fitting location for a revolutionary HQ. Inside was an office and a small library stocked with all manners of communist, socialist and anti-imperialist literature including everything from Chavs by Owen Jones to The Labour Party – A Party Fit For Imperialism by Robert Clough, the group’s leader.
I was presented with a copy of their constitution, a document about security and a third document about sexual harassment (the RCG has had issues with members’ behaviour in the past). It was here, discussing these documents for almost three hours, that I learnt most of what I know now about the RCG as an organisation and the ecosystem it inhabits.
The RCG is about 150-200 members strong with branches across the country – three in London, one in Liverpool, Manchester, Norwich, Glasgow and Edinburgh and possibly more. In terms of organisation and decision-making they use what they call ‘democratic centralism’ – a sprawling mess of committees made up of delegates that appoint other committees that all meet anywhere between once every two weeks and once every two years. They’re also remarkably well funded, despite the fact that their newspaper sells for just 50p. They employ staff full time and rent ‘offices’ up and down the country. They draw income from fundraising events, members dues, newspaper and book sales and donations (both large and small).
Officially, the RCG is against the sectarianism that famously ails the Left. However, one zoom call I was in was dedicated to lambasting the Socialist Workers Party who, I soon learnt, were dirty, menshevik, reactionary Trots. We referred to them as part of the ‘opportunist Left’ who routinely side with the imperialists.
The RCG doesn’t generally maintain good relations with many other major leftist groups. Central to RCG politics is the idea of a ‘labour [small L] aristocracy’ – a core of the working class who have managed to improve their material conditions just slightly and so work against the interests of the wider working class, suppressing real revolutionary activity in order to maintain their cushy positions. The RCG sees the Trade Union movement as the bastion of the labour aristocracy. They see the Labour party also as their greatest enemy – ‘the single greatest barrier to socialism in Britain’.
The RCG takes issue with the SWP specifically over their attitude to Cuba. They believe that most Trotskyists are too critical of socialist revolutions that have occurred in the past and so are not real communists – after all, no revolution will be perfect. The RCG’s issue with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) is that they resent how the CPGB claims to be the main organisation for communism in this country and uses its coziness with the trade unions as a signifier of legitimacy. However, the RCG believes that this makes the CPGB not much more than an extension of the Labour party, which it despises.
The CPGB-ML (Communist Party of Great Britain – Marxist-Leninist), on the other hand, are much closer politically to the RCG. They also share the same view on the Labour party. However, the CPGB-ML has recently taken a loud anti-trans position and so the RCG wants nothing to do with them.
Socialist Appeal are a group that has organised with the RCG in London before but the two do not get along due to, once again, the former’s (until recent) support for the Labour party every election. The RCG also shares views with Extinction Rebellion but XR now no longer wants anything to do with the RCG because of the RCG’s insistence on selling its communist newspaper at every event its members attend. The RCG insisting on trying to recruit members at every event it attends, including events co-organised with other groups, is a major source of friction and one of the reasons nobody wants to organise with them. It’s also one of the reasons why the RCG has stopped organising with LAFA – the London AntiFascist Assembly.
LAFA, I was told, are a chaotic bunch. They staunchly oppose all forms of hierarchy and make decisions on a ‘horizontalist’ basis. In true anarchist fashion, there are no official leaders or ranks at all in LAFA and decisions are made sort of by whoever takes the initiative. Unfortunately this means that those who become unofficial leaders in the group are accountable to absolutely no-one because they are not technically responsible for anything, and naturally issues arise from this quasi-primitivist state of affairs. Ironically, this makes the London AntiFascist Assembly kind of based.
Interestingly, one organisation with which the RCG has never had any problems is Black Lives Matter. The RCG and Socialist Appeal were (apparently) the only two groups out on the streets in solidarity with BLM last summer – BLM even allowed RCG members to speak at their events. The RCG enjoyed quite a close and amicable relationship with BLM right up until BLM decided at the end of last summer to effectively cease all activity, with the reason given to the RCG being just that ‘the summer has ended’. Presumably, the bulk of BLM’s activist base either had to go back to school or just got bored.
Although the RCG strictly prohibits any illegal activity at any of its protests, one clause of the constitution is ‘a revolution clause’ requiring members to leave their jobs and move house at the discretion of the RCG. I was told this clause has never been invoked and isn’t expected to be invoked for decades at least but is there in case a genuine communist uprising were to take place somewhere in the country and RCG leadership decided that it needed members to move into the area to help. The RCG is intent on staying firmly on the right side of the law for the foreseeable future – supposedly until class consciousness is raised to such a level that the time for revolution arrives. Whether or not history will pan out the way they think it will, only time will tell.
Perhaps most curious was the group’s confused stance on lockdowns. They are fiercely pro-lockdown and pro-mask, but also highly critical of the government’s approach for reasons that are quite vague. Why a communist organisation would want to place unprecedented power in the hands of a government – a Tory government no less – that it thinks operates as the right arm of global capital is beyond me. When I brought this up, a lone voice of dissent in my branch, I was told I had made a ‘valid point’ and that the group needed to discuss the matter further, but that was it. The only explanation I could arrive at was that unfortunately the RCG, and I think the Left generally, are deep in denial about being anti-establishment.
The RCG’s modus operandi is the weekly stall: three or four communists will take a table and a megaphone to a busy location and try to hand out leaflets and sell copies of the FRFI newspaper. The idea was that people whose values loosely align with those of the groups could be contacted and organised by way of these stalls. The law of large numbers means that these stalls are curiously successful – one two-hour stall at the weekend can sell a dozen newspapers and enlist a handful of people to be contacted by the group at a later date. The process of collecting people and funnelling them down the contact-member pipeline is a slow one with a low success rate, but they’re relentless.
Interestingly though, I believe their decades-old activist tradition is actually one of their biggest weaknesses. Ironically, so-called progressives are stuck in the past. The RCG has a very minimal online footprint – it uses its profiles on twitter and Instagram only to post dates for upcoming events. The RCG have so much faith in their traditional method of raising ‘class consciousness’ (translation: spreading communism) that they’re losing the internet arms race and thus their grip on young people – their traditional base. The fact that the group has a large proportion of older members might have something to do with it.
However, Leftists are good at street activism – they’ve been doing it for decades. Leftist activist groups have ingrained in their traditions social technology – sets of practices, behaviours and attitudes – that have developed over time and that their opponents would do well to familiarise themselves with, like looking at the homework of a friend (or in this case, an adversary).
The RCG believes that it is one of very few, maybe even the only, Leftist group in Britain today committed to maintaining a substantial street presence. One of the conditions for membership, after all, is promising to attend at least one street protest a week. The RCG no doubt take their activism seriously, with a comrade even describing the group to me as being made up of ‘professional revolutionaries’. They believe that they are growing and will continue to grow in strength, propelled by financial and then ecological crises. They are very excited for the collapse of the Labour party, which they believe is all-but imminent, because they think it will cause swathes of the Left to lose faith in a parliamentary means of achieving socialism and take to the streets, where the RCG will be waiting for them.
My time as a revolutionary communist has been challenging but what I’ve learned is no doubt valuable. I strongly encourage others to do as I have, if only just for a few weeks or so. Join your local leftist organisation – pick a sect, any sect! Expand your knowledge, see a different perspective and gain skills you might not gain anywhere else. Speak to people with a completely different viewpoint from yours and learn how they think, you’ll be a slightly better and more knowledgeable person for it.
Quote: Leftists are good at street activism. They have ingrained in their traditions social technology that have developed over time and that their opponents should familiarise themselves with.
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Can Britain do business with Taliban-led Afghanistan?
I can’t say I’ve ever hosted the Taliban, although if presented with the opportunity, the Worshipful Company of Brewers wouldn’t have been my initial choice of venue.
This irony wasn’t lost on Daniel Evans, frontier markets and technology investor, co-founder of the Gibraltar Stock Exchange Group, and Chairman of the newly-founded Afghanistan Advisory Council (AAC).
Evans joked the venue would allow him to lay claim to successfully organising a piss-up in a brewery, although it must be said the event wasn’t a piss-up at all – partially because the drinks were appropriately alcohol free, but mainly because the foundation of the AAC marks the first actual step at rapprochement with Afghanistan since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.
All-in-all, a pretty serious affair. Serious enough to receive a written endorsement from Nooruddin Azizi, Afghanistan’s Minister of Industry and Commerce:
“On behalf of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, I want to emphasize that the investment environment in Afghanistan is feasible, with strong security and government policies focused on economic development. As many know, Afghanistan is an untapped country with significant business and investment opportunities across various sectors, including energy, industry, infrastructure, mining, agriculture, and health.
We welcome any proposals and investments in Afghanistan, assuring you that the government will fully protect and support all initiatives.”
The launch was attended by businessmen from a variety of interested parties; railway construction, petrochemicals, international finance, and so on. Michael Mainelli, current President of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry and former Lord Mayor of the City of London was among those present, as well as Miles ‘Lord Miles’ Routledge, adventurer-turned-YouTuber-turned-junior member of the AAC.
Among other ambitions for a hospital, a hotel, a logistics centre, and a railway terminus, the AAC’s flagship proposal of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), set to be attached to Kabul airport, has won the backing of Mohammad and Zahid Asif, Owner and Managing Director of Walid Titan Ltd respectively, who are providing the land for the zone.
The precise details of the SEZ have yet to be fleshed out, although it’s clear that the AAC is looking to Dubai’s International Finance Centre (IFC) as a model; a demarcated zone where the norms and customs of international commerce prevail, and regulations are to be drawn up on the advice of the AAC.
The SEZ is one of several projects set to be funded by a new National Growth Fund, which will provide resources to develop a diverse range of industries and projects, such as a far-reaching hospital construction programme. One of the hospital centres will be located in the SEZ. The AAC has been given the mandate to advise the creation of the fund.
One might ask why the Taliban would allow any of this. If one reads between the lines, the SEZ would allow what are essentially Western standards of conduct to take root in an otherwise Islamic theocratic state. Sure, it’s not exactly going to be Amsterdam but it’s hard to square such a proposal with the totalising ‘Islamofascist’ caliphate prophesised by thought leaders of the dilapidated pantheon of liberal-humanitarian interventionism.
The simple but surprising reality of the matter is the Afghans seriously want to get down to business. In fact, it’s becoming clear the Taliban are more eager to do business with the British than vice versa, and not without valid reason. They’re highly suspicious of the Americans, their opinion of the Russians isn’t much better, relations with Pakistan have massively deteriorated within the past year alone, and China and Iran look more like regional threats than potential allies.
As bizarre as it sounds, the Taliban’s view of the British continues to be informed by the Empire, which they regard in a similar manner to how many of us Moderns regard the Roman Empire; that is, as a milestone in human achievement. The British are viewed less as hated enemies and more as honourable and accomplished adversaries. If that’s not soft power, I don’t know what is!
As one would expect, the Afghans have zero appetite to be controlled by a foreign power, but they’re not completely isolationist; they’re quite happy to enlist the help of foreigners with the know-how required to stabilise their war-battered economy, having endured invasions from the USSR and the US-led coalition, ongoing skirmishes with groups like ISIS-K, and incoming Pashtun refugees from neighbouring Pakistan.
It’s a matter of political ideology whether it’s preferable to live in a less-developed but comparatively liberal country over a more-developed but comparatively illiberal one, but – as a general rule of thumb – it’s better to have functioning railways, roads, and hospitals than to not have them at all. Some things aren’t exactly ideological touchstones. Is it really so polarising to believe that Afghanistan should have a reliable supply of currency, rather than making do with sheets of borderline dust held together with glue and tape?
Beneath debates on the political and religious destiny of Afghanistan lies an economy which needs to be run regardless, and the AAC hasn’t so much muscled into this gap, but waltzed into it; partially because the organisation seems to be ahead of the curve on this issue, but also because its founding members felt they had nothing better to do.
On his release from jail in October 2023, having been arrested for not having his papers in order, Routledge – who described the experience as “the best networking opportunity I’ve ever had” – received an email from Evans with the subject line “Bored/gold mine lol” – a proposal which snowballed into setting up a full-on, nation-wide development fund with the blessing of the Afghan government.
Overall, the AAC is filling the vacuum left by a regime that doesn’t know what to do with Afghanistan. One suspects it’s pretty hard to see a path forward with that much egg on your face!
For the past two decades, Britain’s political system has stuck to the same playbook; a hodgepodge strategy of attempting to nag and bomb Afghanistan into becoming a liberal democracy with little-to-no regard for local idiosyncrasies and so forth.
Indeed, no country is a blank slate and Afghanistan is no exception, but more than an investment opportunity – that itself is laden with several obvious benefits; Afghanistan is rich with natural minerals – but a real chance to rehearse discombobulated statesmen and commentators in the virtues and practices which factor into good nation-building; which I cannot help but feel is the spiritual mission of the AAC, even if not said so outright.
Keir Starmer, take notes!
Against assisted dying
It is unsurprising the government is rushing through ‘assisted dying’. Having decimated what little political capital it possessed after a hollow election victory, Labour is clearly desperate to shore up as many achievements as quickly as possible; successes which can be fashioned into something resembling a coherent and tangible legacy at a later date, showing little-to-no regard for the common good.
What is surprising is how limp-wristed and tepid the opposition to this policy has been, especially from Britain’s commentariat. In no uncertain terms, the assisted dying bill is one of the most radical proposals for social liberalisation in decades, yet our opinion-having class has alarmingly little to say, at least when compared to other matters. Those eager to broadcast their intelligence on other issues – which they’re similarly unqualified to write about (that’s not a bad thing, by the way; far from it!) – are inexplicably scared to take a crack at this offputtingly complex but highly important matter which affects us all.
What little discussion has occurred in the commentariat (never mind Parliament) has revolved around the foreseeable practical issues of such a policy, typically pointing to the results of Canada’s assisted dying policy (MAID; Medical Assistance in Dying), the initial proponents of which say is being abused. As such, opponents of assisted dying in Britain essentially oppose it on the basis of negative and unintended consequences, specifically the gradual loosening of safeguards overtime, killing people who should’ve received non-lethal forms of care.
None of this is wrong per se, although it’s hard to treat this angle as anything other than unsatisfying. It does not bode well for a civilisation that its only barricade against its destruction is the ineptitude of the barbarians.
More than a total lack of faith in anything improving at all, it suggests that we are caught between our reluctance to end life yet struggle to justify such an instinct; we retain the form of a society which professes something like the sanctity of life, but lack any of the substantial belief, frightened to unlearn that which can’t so easily be relearnt once lost to history as another primitive superstition.
It’s difficult to be truly hard-line on something like assisted dying because it elicits so much sympathy. No right-minded person wants people to suffer, never mind be made to feel that they are forcing people to suffer. After all, humans are motivated by aversion to pain more than most things. However, advocates of assisted dying use this fact to strongarm more hesitant individuals into agreeing with assisted dying in principle, disagreeing solely on the technicalities of implementation.
More often than not, support for assisted dying is couched in the idea that if you’re in ‘unbearable’ pain, you might as well be given the choice to end your life, especially if you’re going to die in six months anyway. Putting aside the remarkable precision of such a prediction, it never occurs to advocates that if you’re going to die in six months anyway, you might as well tough it out, if not for the sake of yourself or your loved ones, then for the sake of ensuring that society-at-large doesn’t suffer the wrath of short-sighted policy.
Of course, this is assuming unbearable pain is the main reason for assisted dying, contrary to plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.
According to data from places where it’s already legal, the main reasons for assisted dying are the inability to fulfil day-to-day tasks and engage in ‘meaningful activities’. Even abstract notions like autonomy and dignity are cited as more important than pain. Even fear about being a burden on one’s family is reportedly just as common.
A real shame, that’s for sure. There are few greater exertions of autonomy than refusing to die for someone else’s benefit, and there is nothing more ‘undignified’ than having so little sense of self-worth that you sacrifice yourself for others in your most intimate and personal moment. If we can’t reserve ourselves for our own death, it’s no surprise that things like sex and marriage continue to lose any sense of exclusivity.
Concepts like ‘anarcho-tyranny‘ and ‘two-tier policing’ are typically used in discussions surrounding criminal justice, but the underlying logic surely applies to a system which releases unrepentant, serially violent criminals as it provides the sick and vulnerable – many of whom needlessly swell with guilt over their condition – with the option to end their own life. This sense of guilt will only become stronger when someone in a position of medical authority – in a culture which reveres expertise, even when it fails us – tells them they can make it go away. That which is legally a ‘right to die’ will feel like the duty to die, and by extension, those expected to sign-off on the procedure will feel as though they have a duty to kill.
Far from acting as a safeguard, medical professionals will act as affirmers to something which they’ve been told is not theirs to dictate in the first place. When the option is available, like the patient, the fact something can be done will weigh down upon them, and whilst they may be motivated by a desire to alleviate or prevent suffering, those once hesitant are now incentivised to act with urgency.
Indeed, the same can be said of the patient’s family, the consultation of which is notably absent from the bill’s supposedly stringent requirements, although they’ll certainly weigh on the patient’s conscience. If patients don’t feel burdensome to their loved ones, they’ll absolutely feel burdensome to the NHS, an institution our country continues to revere with mindless zealotry.
Courtesy of the selfish (but outwardly generous) nature of our present culture, the patient’s expectation of good care risks being outweighed by the ’empathy’ we demand them to have for others in a different position. Assisted dying is not yet legal and yet many already feel (perhaps not without reason) that the elderly are spitefully overstaying their welcome on this mortal coil.
Advocates of assisted dying (similar to advocates of abortion) like to believe that leaving something up to choice absolves the decisions made of any and all comparable virtue. Far from removing an ideological imposition on society, this notion that we have no choice but to leave everything up to choice, that all options must be on the table, is one of the most duplicitous and tyrannical value systems afflicting contemporary society; so much that life itself is ceasing to be the default, becoming just another option for which one is cruelly judged behind a veil of strained, artificial tolerance.
Extending the comparison, liberalising assisted dying doesn’t just implicate those who’ll be inevitably and unjustifiably killed in the name of healthcare, it devalues death outside of the circumstances in which assisted dying would be viewed as an option. When abortionists downplay (or functionally deny) the value of the child, they’re implicating any baby which (for whatever reason) doesn’t make it. A procedure once permitted for the sake of saving the mother’s life, balanced against the life of the child, is now a simple matter of preference, exalted as a form of empowerment.
Followed to its conclusion, an involuntary miscarriage, rightfully treated as a tragic incident deserving sympathy, can only be regarded, in all sincerity, as ‘tragic’ as receiving a bad hand in a game of Blackjack. Of course, insincerity is the essence of civility, and therefore integral to any tactful interaction, but this is not the same as having a genuine moral compass. The tragedy lies in the fact we know something deeply valuable has been lost. We say “I’m sorry for your loss” not “better luck next time” for a reason. As such, unless you intend to engage in mental gymnastics to suggest “terminating” highly viable babies past the legal limit is worlds apart to killing newborns, the recent movements for decriminalisation should be concerning, even if wholly in-step with our opponents’ revealed attitude towards the unborn.
In a similar vein, if assisted dying should be liberalised to alleviate suffering on the basis that our life is ours to use as we see fit, then suicide becomes just another expression of individual choice which needs to be destigmatised. After all, why should we need to suffer? Why would such a precondition exist if life didn’t have an inherent value, and if life has an inherent value, how could we justify a policy like assisted dying in the first place? Because the suffering outweighs that inherent value? How would you know when suffering outweighs this value? After all, suffering is extremely subjective. You can make this assessment for your own quality of life, but not for another person’s. Confronted with the potential suicide of another person, there’s not a lot you could do. You needn’t assist the act or condone it, but you’d be a hypocrite for showing or feeling anything more than defeated indifference. After all, who are you to judge? Again, it’s not your life. In order to override them, you’d need to believe life has a value beyond quantification, which it certainly does.
If one’s suffering is one’s business, then it becomes one’s business to deal with it, using their preferred option of the many made available. Although plausibly convenient, it makes life less rich, for what good are the virtues of mercy, assurance, and even heroism itself? More than rendered obsolete by consent-based ethics, they are contorted into acts of undue, arbitrary interference.
Life is worth suffering, not merely because of what can be done between our birth and death but due to its facticity; it is given, not chosen. Nobody derives meaning from the things they consciously choose; at least, not for long. There will always be the sense that relying on such things feels constructed, inviting us to seek something more essential. We don’t choose our nationality, our sexuality, our name, our family, and so forth, and so the importance of these things is heightened in an era with an abundance of choice.
The present political landscape serves as testament to this fact, not solely in the form of progressive-left identity politics. Regardless of how his economic prospects ebbed and flowed, the Englishman could rely on having won the lottery of life. He was born into a community with just cause and proficient capability to take his welfare seriously, as well as provide him with a sense of rootedness in an otherwise changing world. He had a cultural heritage which suggested he was part of something greater than himself; any belief in his abilities was well-founded and any shortcoming would surely be redeemed by the successes of his kin. Confronted with large scale demographic change from immigration, he feels himself in revolt against a class which has not yet taken everything from him, but is in the process of trying to destroy his few but cherished saving graces.
Even things which aren’t pleasurable, such as personal tragedies, supply us with a greater and much needed confrontation with the involuntary nature of our existence than even the most high-brow, profound, and enriching pastimes.
It is often said that the value of life lies in its depth, not its length; in other terms, life is about having a good time, not a long time, and whilst there’s certainly truth in this idea, it detracts from the distressing fact that we have time at all; a fact we tend to avoid truly thinking about until we’re out of it. Indeed, I suspect many have thought about how they’d spend their last day on Earth before resuming their lives as if their mortality was part of the hypothetical. The fact death takes us without our prior consent frightens us; it goes against what we regard as the basis for permissibility, so we’re inclined to ignore it.
The simple fact of the matter is that assisted dying is never abused; it merely comes to better embody the spirit in which it was introduced. The process misconstrued as the ‘slippery slope’ is nothing more than a superficially innocent argument being carried to its garish but logical conclusion. The ever-ambiguous safeguards aren’t meant to shield against improper uses of the system, merely to shield against uses which haven’t achieved mainstream acceptance, and could be used as a justification to prevent (or outright reverse) its full implementation. Things called insane right-wing conspiracy theories today will be referred to as inevitable and necessary progress tomorrow.
So, let’s cut to the chase. Instead of obsessing over regulations which will be altered or subverted, let’s be very frank about our fundamental and irreconcilable differences, and eagerly embrace the intellectually demanding and morally sensitive nature of this matter.
Those in support can make their case for life’s essential hollowness, and that our time on Earth is nothing more than taking the path of least resistance to the grave, filling our time with surrogate activities until it becomes too much, at which point we hop-off the existential ride. As for those opposed, we must more staunchly make the case for death as it comes for us, as it does. Just as we can gain value from being born here rather than there, from being this rather than that, the same must be said of our death. We do not view life as an empty vacuum to be filled with things that matter. The fact we do what we do, in the knowledge that our time is finite, makes what we do meaningful. Life gives meaning to our activities, not the other way around.
The advocates of assisted dying are right about one thing. We don’t get to choose what we do with our life, but it is because of this fact that our death remains our own. Therefore, the only way to ensure our death remains truly ours, something indivisibly belonging to us as individuals, free of aggregated social pressures and bouts of false consciousness, immune to last-minute bargaining and uncontaminated by ambiguity over cause-and-effect – altogether free from the risk of coercion – is to prevent it from being turned into a choice in the first place.
“Silence is violence” is control
Across England and Northern Ireland, riots broke out following the killing of three young girls in Southport. The accusations of two-tier policing that followed were expressions of a frustration that the police choose to be harder on anti-immigrant protestors than on pro-Palestine protestors or any protests initiated by similar causes.
By and large, accusations of two-tier policing are anecdotal, but that of course does not erase their existence or their validity. Putting aside the reality that ‘selective policing’ is a Marxist sociological-theoretical concept, the fact that academics have pointed to the existence of two-tier policing as a consequence of profiling (racial or otherwise), and that long-standing objections to stop-and-search focus on the discriminatory and (by extension) two-tier nature of the policing, the government and policing forces have denied two-tier policing.
Yet the most flagrant examples of an uneven application of the law seems to have come out of Belfast, where a judge “has warned that anybody present at a riot will be remanded in custody, even if they were only a ‘curious observer’.” It is not entirely clear why the judge feels that merely observing disobedience amounts to participation, but the consequences of this for journalists are yet to be fully explored. It would suggest that, unless a journalist observing a riot was to vehemently disown the riot, then they are unable to report on it taking place.
Where has this come from? How on earth could a judge have arrived at such a conclusion?
Two phrases have come to determine the Left’s attitudes towards the expression of “hateful comments”: first, “silence is violence”; and second, “it is not enough to not be racist, you must be anti-racist”, with “racist” of course being interchangeable with any sin you may think of or derive from consulting the Equality Act (2010).
The latter of these came most to the fore in the fever-dream era of Covid from 2020 to 2022, when many publications, writers and politicians condemned those who did not support, implicitly or otherwise, the riots conducted by Black Lives Matter:
To effectively defeat systemic racism — racism embedded as normal practice in institutions like education and law enforcement — you’ve got to be continually working towards equality for all races, striving to undo racism in your mind, your personal environment and the wider world.
In other words, you’ve got to be anti-racist.
Whilst many people agreed with or were at least sympathetic to the causes behind the riots, fashionable voices urged all who opposed those who disagreed with BLM’s principles (or actions, for that matter) to take action. It is not enough to not participate in racist behaviour, you must participate in anti-racist behaviour.
It was, without being subtle or pretending to be neutral, a call to action.
The former, meanwhile, has two similar impulses behind it, that make something seemingly nonsensical into a comprehensible idea. After all, how can silence be violent? The rational human understanding of violence is something active, something like hitting someone. I’m not of the opinion personally that speech is violence, but many are – yet even if we acquiesce to that premise, it does not address the point. How can silence be “violence”?
The answer, whilst it may seem unintelligent (and certainly unintelligible) actually derives from a paper written by Wilden in 1985, ‘In the penal colony’. In this paper, Wilden argues that violence expresses itself not just actively – being offensive or causing legally recognised forms of harm such as actual or grievous bodily harm – but passively as well.
Wilden’s paper rests on the intellectually-acrobatic argument that to not actively address circumstances and structures that do not allow for or facilitate an individual’s’ achievement of their highest form of potential is to be violent towards that person or persons.
Say, for example, a person benefits from the privilege of is class, but does not speak out in recognition of or opposition to that privilege, then he is not supporting the plight of those who such privilege works against. Silence is seen as a tacit support for the system that prevents some people from achieving their full potential and is therefore violent towards those people.
Silence, in this instance, is violence.
Now, the problems with this theory aside – least of all the epistemic difficulty of knowing what the ultimate achievement of someone’s ‘potential’ looks like – it seems to have been adopted by the Left wholesale, and even crept into popular vernacular. After all, mates don’t let mates perpetuate misogynistic attitudes, or so I’m told.
The most iconic image of these twin beliefs on the internet is of an unfortunate young man at a protest, holding a sign that recite the mantra of “silence is violence”. Yet, he is also wearing a shirt that says, “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?”
Typical responses to this picture fall into one of two camps. Either people look at it and mock him, asking how someone can be such an idiot as to say two contradictory statements in the same breath; or, they point out the hypocrisy, as if that the “typical Leftist” thing to do, to be inconsistent.
What these two responses miss is the very point: this is not about hypocrisy, or logic, but power and control.
The logical mind reacts in only one way. If one command is that you cannot say things you may believe (and some people certainly do believe things this man would call racist etc.), then you would prefer to say nothing. But if a countermanding command, then tells you that saying nothing is undesirable, you are left with one choice: to say what you are expected or demanded to say.
There is only one (acceptable) route out of this conundrum: the only way to not be violent is, apparently, to be positively affirming of whatever the oppressed do.
This logic lurks wherever the aggrieved assert themselves. For example, in the trans debate (and coincidentally the reason Professor Jordan Peterson shot to stardom), the expectation of the controlling logic above is that, even if you do not agree that a man can become a woman, you cannot say so, but you certainly cannot be silent about it, so to avoid being violent, you must affirm the identity of the person in question.
We may ask, why has this judge made this ruling now, if this belief has been so prevalent on the Left for so long? And surely judges are independent arbiters of the law? The only answer I can give is, it is never the fact of a Labour parliamentary victory that conservatives should be wary of, but the forces such a victory emboldens.
The judge’s ruling coming out of Belfast will have deep and far-reaching consequences for the policing of protests in this country – if only for the forces it will embolden.
It’s not the economy, stupid
Although it seems so distant, the current political landscape is a direct product of 2016. Without specific reference to the victory of Donald Trump, the Brexit referendum, and the rise of anti-immigration parties across the Western world, it’s impossible to sufficiently contextualise the obvious sense of insecurity characteristic of contemporary left-leaning politics and political analysis.
Every twenty years or so, the Western Left convinces itself it can finally do away with its native working class supporters and fully re-align itself along socially liberal lines, catering to the interests of ethnic and sexual minorities, immigrants, women, graduates, the underclass, and the progressive elements of the haute bourgeoisie.
These attempts at fully actualising a rainbow coalition of the oppressed and their allies rarely work out, backfiring and resulting in catastrophic electoral defeats.
Realising it’s jumped the gun on their replacement, the Western Left is once again begrudgingly going cap-in-hand to those it momentarily considered obsolete, hoping to win them over for election time, and hold onto them whilst in government.
The Left’s ‘bipolar’ relationship with its traditional voters has arguably been the central driving force behind its ideological development for the past 40 years. Categories like ‘Blairite’ and ‘New Democrat’ can’t fully be grasped without reference to the strategies by left-leaning parties to ease the anxieties of native working and middle class voters.
In a similar way, Keir Starmer and Joe Biden have undertaken initiatives of their own. The former is scarcely filmed or photographed without a Union Jack whilst the latter plays into his roots in order to present as a scrappy, charmingly cantankerous working class Irishman. As Biden’s successor, Kamala Harris clearly intends to continue this process, leaning heavily on V.P. pick Tim Walz’s ‘White Dude’ minstrel act and various forms of cosmetic patriotism.
However, whilst the comparative lack of political imagination is evident, and the general disinterest in being ideologically creative is obvious, ongoing rapprochement strategies are desperately trying to formulate a convincing counter-narrative to scupper the enduring threat of the populist right.
Confronted with an insurgent New Right on both sides of the Atlantic, the counter-narrative of the Third Way suggested the liberal revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s had crystallised. Despite the profuse sense of hopelessness, the Left had successfully dislodged the traditional moral and cultural tapestry which underpinned Western societies. Rather, they claimed that the activists had simply grown-up, encumbered with adult responsibilities and considerations, which (until fairly recently) went hand-in-hand with fiscally conservative politics.
Of course, this narrative was never entirely true. In no small part, the rise of the New Right was a reaction against the excesses of the social movements of previous decades, although this tendency was sub-ordinated by the right’s shift towards socalled neoliberalism; social conservatism was a present but ultimately secondary characteristic.
Grappling with a new threat from the right, similarly drawing on cultural discontent and siphoning support from the native working class, the Left is trying to use the same playbook, minus any of the context which gives it any credibility or sense.
Bemoaning the alleged capitulation of the centre to the so-called far right in The Guardian, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown argued:
“Sooner rather than later, the far-right poison will have to be countered with a progressive agenda focused on what matters to people most: jobs, standards of living, fairness and bridging the morally indefensible gap between rich and poor.”
Brown’s article is one of many left-wing think pieces and op-eds which have tried to recast right-wing populism – a movement motivated first and foremost by opposition to immigration and its demographic ramifications – as a misdirected reaction to a cluster of ‘real’ problems which the Left tactically concedes to have ignored: declining standards of living, economic inequality, deindustrialisation, social mobility, and/or a lack of educational opportunities.
Typically, the primary factor is something economical, although a social issue that specifically isn’t immigration can be thrown into the mix too, such as the spiritual deficits of secularism, emasculation anxiety, social alienation, and unaddressed mental health problems.
In their own musing on the issue, Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani concluded deindustrialisation, consumerism, and cultural Americanisation (in other terms, not immigration) should be primarily blamed for the loss of social cohesion, oddly using the provincial towns of Southern France and Northern Italy (that is, the strongholds of the National Rally and the Brothers of Italy respectively) as places with a sense of community severely lacking in England.
Putting aside the fact the concept of community is treated as abstract and present-tense in left-wing commentary, or the fact it’s OK to talk about the scourge of foreign culture insofar it originates from America, or that England has its loose equivalents, the fact these picturesque settlements are voting for anti-immigration parties indicates how the inhabitants (either based on an influx of arrivals in their community or elsewhere) can infer that immigration is a threat to the very delicate and complex social harmony required for such places to exist. You could say good things are hard to create but easy to destroy!
Whatever the specifics, the Left is caught between its true constituents (immigrants and their descendants) and its tactical constituents (working and middle class ethnic natives).Not wanting to speak ill of immigration out of fear of offending the former, yet realising the importance of the latter to the integrity of its temporary (but necessary) coalition, it needs to decrease the salience of immigration by shifting the public’s focus, leveraging its media influence to push politically-convenient revisionist narratives.
The vote to leave the European Union was initially written-off as an emotional spasm, which was redefined as a more sympathetic but ultimately instinctive bout of political discontent, before finally being redefined as a desperate but rational economic decision motivated by declining living standards (as understood in purely materialistic terms).
Some attributed this to deindustrialisation, others attributed it to housing prices; some touted austerity whilst others pointed to the cost of living. Whatever the case, it didn’t really matter. Politics was being neatly steered back to safe, technical questions, the likes of which could only be solved by the same managerial class which felt threatened by the result.
A similar process happened following Trump’s victory. The White Male backlash at having a Black president (and the plausible threat of having a female president) became another iteration of the paranoid style in American politics, which was revised into a vague disaffection with Washington, finally boxed as an unrefined but understandable protest vote against the offshoring and automation of American industry and jobs.
Consequently, the Biden administration quietly left many of Trump’s trade policies in place and seriously started to entertain decoupling from China, making it a central and pronounced component of the Democrats’ party platform, alongside a more visible association with trade unionism.
Following the riots in the UK and the state election results in Germany, in which the Alternative for Deutschland won in Thuringia and achieved very close seconds in Saxony and Brandenburg, attempts at misdirection have already begun, from Starmer’s flat-out denial that discontent over immigration created circumstances ripe for public disorder to the sudden recasting of the German right’s successes as a reaction to regional inequality and name-calling, rather than Germany bearing the brunt of unwanted immigration into Europe.
In all the aforementioned instances, it’s not that the primary factor behind was initially misunderstood. The Left attacked voters as racist and xenophobic prior to these events and in their immediate aftermath, so they evidently understood the ethno-racial motivation.
Nor can it be said that the cluster of various socioeconomic factors attributed as the driving force of recent rightward shifts in the electorate are being plucked at random. The calculated selection is part of the style.
Right-wing populism is obviously motivated by economic discontent, but so is every political uprising. Even at the best of times, the economy matters to everyone, so it can’t sufficiently explain the behaviour of specific subsets of the electorate on its own.
Rather, it’s the fact that these concerns are secondary to immigration is not publicly acknowledged by the Left, even after ten years of political development, and attempts to revise the motivations behind these movements persist with such stubborn tenacity shows the modus operandi of contemporary left-leaning so-called ideas.
No insights or solutions, only new and innovative ways to distract from the elephant in the room: immigration. Primacy matters, especially when political capital is finite. We needn’t let the importance of economic reform fall by the wayside, but we shouldn’t allow it to be used as an obvious mechanism for deferring a major issue, wrapped-up as level-headed, ‘sensible’ analysis of current political circumstances.
Labour’s Plans for Constitutional Reform
First principles
We need to begin by understanding what a constitution is and what it ought to do. The history of the constitution as a political idea is one in which a single term came to be associated with the twin principles of the “spirit” of the people over whom politics is exercised, and the “health” of the body politic from whom the government is drawn.
It is no coincidence that the word “constitution” emerged in politics to refer to the central laws (written or otherwise) that govern a community, during a period of increased use in the medical community to mean “health”.
A simple Ngram chart shows that, whilst “medicine” and “constitution” have an established history of coterminous use, from the mid-1720s onwards – a time of increasing popularity of focusing on constitutions in the modern sense as a written set of basic rules upon which all laws should be based – the use of constitution skyrockets.
Carl Schmitt wrote in the 1920s that a constitution ought to be a reflection of the people, as they exist simultaneously above and below the political order that seeks to represent them in the world. Above, because like Hobbes’ Leviathan they tower over all political figures in judgement; below, because they are the very foundation upon which all political institutions can be built. If a people ceases to exist, then the institutions become hollow machines turning and maintaining themselves for nobody but themselves. And it must be remembered that institutions, as all things incorporated in some way, become entities in themselves.
A constitution is, therefore, simultaneously the spirit and mind of the people. The spirit, because it captures what Montesquieu attempted to identify in L’Esprit de Loi, the spirit of the laws; the truth that there is something intangible behind the tangible laws by which political institutions operate. In other words, rather than analysing the laws that existed, Montesquieu asked why those laws existed, rather than some other set of laws, in the political community in which they were practised. Why did the English have the common law, when the French had parlements? Etc.
The mind, because the constitution moves beyond unthinking instinct and into the strategic realm of forward thinking, extended temporal existence and predictable security. As Montesquieu feared of tyranny, and as Hegel recognised of Spirit in Man’s infancy, when the law becomes the domain of a single person, fear is the spirit of the legal order because there is no predictability, no consistency. Arbitrariness becomes the basis of decision making. It was not fear as fear of the government itself, but fear of the inability to know what the consequences from the government might be.
A constitution, then, speaks the unspoken sentiments of a people and does so in a consistent and unifying way.
The question that arose in the enlightenment over whether this speaking constitution should move to the page and transform from an unwritten to a written document was, of course, central to what Yuval Levin called the great debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Whilst Paine railed against what he saw as the “tyranny of the dead” when Burke defended tradition and custom, Burke gently replied that it is the very dialogue that thrives between the living and the dead that produces freedom; just as a traveller in a forest might wander from the beaten path and find a lush grove, so too might he get lost in a swamp. Innovation and the freedom that experience brings with it is possible only when there is a point from which you begin.
Instead, said Burke, it was that very tyranny – of a dead set of people from a particular moment in time – that would be cemented in a written constitution. Rather than allowing for the continual expression and interrogation of custom and tradition that comes with an unwritten constitution, a codified one would narrow the temporal horizon of a people into a strict moment in time in an attempt to speak forever. Some of the American Framers argued that a way around this would be to revise the constitution at the end of every generation – roughly 19 years or so. Sir Roger Scruton put the problem very (and typically) eloquently when he said that the Treaty of Rome was written in a year that’s gone for a circumstance that has passed by a group of people that are dead.
The two great constitutions that emerged in the late-1700s – in America and in France – had two very different goals that determined the direction in which they moved. America, said the political historian Hannah Arendt, framed a constitution on a set of institutions that already existed expressing a people that already had a heritage. For that reason, the American constitution can be said to have achieved those two goals around which this briefing note has thus far revolved: the expression of the spirit and mind of a people. France, on the other hand, attempted to create a people through the act of constitution: the Bretons, the Provencals, the Roussillions, the Orleanais, all were to be washed away and the remnants dissolved in the universal humanity of la France. The French constitution preceded a people; the American constitution expressed one.
Yet the constitution that has thrived where even the American one has failed has – or had – been the British one.
In their obsession with formalism and written rules, most psephologists have made the mistake of thinking that Britain’s constitution, uncodified though it is, can be found in the many documents that stretch from Magna Carta through the Bill of Rights to the Act of Union to the Great Reform Acts to the Parliament Acts to the Human Rights Act. No – to do so is to mistake a man’s words for the man himself. These are not Britain’s constitution, but the consequences (and in many places, the mutilation) of the constitution itself.
What is Britain’s constitution?
It is the Parliament itself.
Parliament, in the synecdochal slip of the tongue common in modern politics, is not the House of Commons, nor the House of Lords. Not even is it the building in which those assemblies meet. Parliament, as understood by Bagehot, Dicey, Maitland and all the eulogists of Britain, exists when the three traditional branches of British government are assembled in one place: the Monarch; the Lords; and the Commons. Hence, the momentous occasion when the Monarch delivers his speech to the Lords and Commons, Parliament is said to be together.
But why is Parliament Britain’s constitution? Because, properly understood, Parliament is the voice of people in all of its aspects. The Monarch is the people embodied, a singular head of state who gives to the constitution the only missing ingredient from spirit and mind – a body. He is the body of the politic. The Lords are the people as understood by Burke, as a transtemporal entity who speaks for the country as a physical entity – hence why it was tied to land – and a spiritual entity – hence the Lords Spiritual – and a legal entity – hence the Law Lords. The Commons, finally, are the people as understood by Paine, as the vocal element of the constitution, demanding changes in the moment and transient in its demands.
The British Parliament is, and always has been, the constitution. The doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty reflected this fact, that no power exists above Parliament – as the Monarch, Lords and Commons in one.
Labour’s constitutional reforms: past and present
This was undone entirely by New Labour. The greatest acts of constitutional vandalism – the creation of the Supreme Court, the Human Rights Act, the project of devolution, the reforms to the House of Lords – all committed by the forebears of the current administration upended this balance in a way none but constitutional historians loyal to the idea of Britain could have predicted.
Each of these deserves an invective all their own, but the simple fact is that each of these altered the operation of Britain’s constitution in different ways, but creating a legalistic straightjacket around Parliament: the Supreme Court subverted the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty; the Human Rights Act made that Supreme Court loyal to a power beyond the boundaries and popular
control of Britain; devolution created parallel laws applying to the same citizens at different times and in different places across the country; and the neutering of the hereditary aristocracy resulted in an upper chamber dedicated to ambition, avarice and cronyism.
Thus the supreme entity of this nation – Parliament – has ceased to act as a unitary government and now must act as one amongst many. And by extension – and by design – the constitution has died.
This is the scene into which the new administration enters, ready to finish the job through solutions to a problem of its own making. One of the greatest architects of this situation, Gordon Brown, penned a document aimed at creating a “Reformed United Kingdom” by empowering the different regions of the United Kingdom to be competitors to the central government in Westminster, whilst the absurd phrase of “devolution deserts” now seeks to spread the insanity of an unequal legal landscape across the whole map of the British Isles.
These plans will make a legal reality the idea that Westminster is the English parliament and merely one amongst many. When Brown began his document by stating that “the crisis we face in Britain is not just short-term – it is deep-seated”, he did so without a hint of irony.
Why?
The reader might be left thinking, why? Why did New Labour do all of this, and why does Labour now seek to carry us further down this road?
By design or not, the New Labour government destroyed the constitution of this country because it blew apart the unity needed to underpin the idea of a people. Alongside the administrative vandalism of devolution – which exacerbated the delusions that the Scots and the Welsh, whilst culturally different to the English, are not legally the same nor subjects of the same crown – the surrendering of the nations courts’ abilities to mediate between its citizens to a foreign power only made worse the emerging sense of dual loyalty that was gestating in an increasingly multicultural Britain. The amazement that integration has ceased in Britain whilst the legal tradition of this country has been hollowed out has never yet joined the dots to arrive at the simple conclusion that integration is impossible in the current administrative state masquerading as a constitution.
Yet this is not the only reason Labour now pursues these goals. Indeed, it does so because it must. We have moved from circumstances in which a constitution might have been written to express a people that already existed – indeed, the people, understood properly as a transtemporal entity, never old or dying nor young or being born, that has occupied these islands for centuries – to circumstances in which a constitution must be written to summon a people into being.
We are France at the height of the revolution. The idea of Britain is being re-written, and re-constituted, because Britain has died. The elegists – Scruton in his England, an Elegy; Hitchens, in his The Abolition of Britain; and Murray, in his Strange Death of Europe – mourned a people that has passed away. Labour must now begin the process of constructing a new one, based on “values” and “identity”. And it must do so because it began this process 25 years ago.
With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?
Several months have passed since Hamas orchestrated the surprise attacks against Israel in the notorious and brutal events of October 7th, one of the bloodiest days in Israel’s modern history, with over a thousand people killed or kidnapped by Hamas – consequently launching the war in Gaza, and the prolonged campaign of Netenyahu’s government against Hamas and its supporters.
Needless to say, the Israeli response to such an outrageous and devastating attack against civilians has been swift. Combined strategic responses of aerial bombardments, drone strikes, and ground forces swelling into Gaza have been unrelenting, like a jackhammer.
Since October 7th, and the resulting war that followed, social media has erupted with images and videos coming out of Gaza detailing the quite dire humanitarian crisis currently occurring. It’s hard to estimate how many civilians have been killed during the war, but it is likely within the tens of thousands, with more and more adding to the body count as each day passes.
The position of Gaza has also made the situation even more difficult to control, as civilian aid is becoming harder and harder to access through narrow strategic corridors and lack of proper organization and distribution. Vital resources like food, water, and medicine aren’t ending up in the hands of the people that need it the most – if the bombs and the bullets don’t kill the people on the ground, the lack of resources will.
The shock and fury felt across the world after being confronted with this crisis has become a key issue in the West, with countless organized protests at universities and in the streets of capital cities, all demanding that Western nations stop funding the Israelis as they continue their military campaign in the heart of Gaza. This pro-Palestine movement, which is quite broadly supported by those with left-leaning ideologies and intersectionalists, has become an impressive political bloc – especially since it is an election year for both Great Britain and the United States.
Which is frankly quite funny, as most of the people in the pro-Palestine camp, chanting the mantras and songs of Hamas would be shunned by the very same groups they feel the need to protect. In fact, many already have.
Meanwhile, especially amongst “Christian conservatives” in the media and online, there has seemingly been a blank check of support given towards Israel – especially Netenyahu and his Likud government.
After all, Hamas is a terrorist organization, and anything that stops Islamic fundamentalist terror is worth supporting, right? We simply have a moral duty to support Israel, regardless of how blatantly horrific the situation is on the ground. Tax dollars and civilian casualties are a small price to pay for FREEDOM and the protection of “Judeo-Christian” values.
It’s exhausting, but no matter which way you look at it, this will be a defining political issue for the next decade, if not even longer.
And, as always, instead of being able to approach the issue with any level of nuance or recognition that both sides in this conflict seem to be as equally awful and hostile to us as they are to each other, we will once again be put into this binary choice of being “with” or “against” either side. The arguments will be circular, and the cycle of destruction will continue while only a handful of people end up benefiting – mainly weapons contractors and political donor groups.
Before I jump into the beef of this piece, I want to express my outright condemnation of terrorism and terror groups. I feel as if I am obliged – although I think it’s entirely self-evident – to say this, because undoubtedly there will be those who take what I have to say next as an endorsement of Hamas or other fundamentalist Islamic radicals in their war against the State of Israel.
It isn’t. Read the last two paragraphs again if you are confused about where I stand on this issue.
So now that terrorism has been condemned, let’s continue to condemn and reevaluate our unconditional alliance with Israel; because frankly their accusations against Hamas and Palestine is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Don’t believe me? I doubt many have had the chance to delve deep into this issue, so let’s start with a little history lesson, shall we?
To understand the Israel of today, you don’t just go back to the partition of Palestine and founding of the State of Israel in 1947, you have to go back a little further in the century, back when the land we now know as Israel was a part of the Ottoman Empire.
Back at the start of the 20th century, when the world was rapidly changing, and revolutionary attitudes were spreading like wildfires, small groups of militias and rebels were beginning to emerge in Palestine.
“In fire and blood did Judea fall; in blood and fire Judea shall rise” was the motto of the group known as Bar-Giora (later “Hashomer”).
Originally this paramilitary organization’s goal was to defend Jewish settlements in the Ottoman Empire from attacks by local Arab populations.
Seems noble enough at first glance, and perhaps it was in intention, but this paramilitary organization, which was led by young, often Marxist-aligned rebels, did not just intend to play defense, but rather grow strong enough and large enough that they could create an effective offense against their Arab neighbors. And judging by their slogan, one can piece together that they weren’t exactly willing to compromise or negotiate peacefully in order to fulfill their goals of establishing permanent Jewish settlements in the region.
After World War One, as the British took control of Palestine, thus leading many members of Bar-Giora/Hashomer to join the Jewish Legion of the British Army in Palestine, as well as assuming positions in the local, British-backed law enforcement.
During the Arab riots of 1920-21, many Jewish settlements and Palestinian Jews suffered attacks at the hands of Palestinian Muslims. Believing that the British were unwilling, or unable, to confront the Muslim majority, these now formally-trained soldiers splintered off and founded “Haganah”.
Haganah went from being a rather unorganized militia to a funded, armed, and large underground army within a matter of years, and would serve as the foundation for what we see as the IDF today.
Again, while noble in intentions – to protect Jewish settlements – you’re only as good as the bad apples in the basket. It didn’t take long for splinter groups to form out of Haganah, namely Irgun, Palmach, and Lehi.
These groups all had a common resentment towards the British authorities – especially because of the White Paper declarations in 1922 and 1939 that sought to limit the amount of Jewish Europeans emigrating to Palestine, in order to not disrupt relations with the local Palestinians and allow for a slow-bleed assimilation of Jews into the region.
An idealistic approach, and perhaps a fool’s venture – but given the current state of things in the region, I’m sure the policymakers of the Empire had good reason to do so.
Palmach was a more formidable armed force, which was allied with the British in WWII and fought against Axis powers in the region. Eventually, after the war, the British ordered that the independent Palmach was disbanded, but operations simply moved underground, and Palmach found a new enemy with the British Mandate – they conducted several operations, including bridge bombings and night-time raids, against British assets in the region – all in response to the White Paper policies.
Irgun started in the late 1930’s as an offshoot of Haganah, and much like Haganah was initially a defensive force. However, after a prolonged period of Arab attacks and Irgun-conducted reprisals, the organization became more focused on arming, training, and conducting operations against anyone deemed a threat – this included the British authorities, who were trying to control the anarchy and fighting that was constantly breaking out in Palestine between factions of Jews and Arabs.
Lehi was founded by Yair Stern as a splinter of Irgun, and was composed of the more radical and violent Zionists of the time – some of whom even sought alliances with Hitler and Mussolini as they saw the British as a larger threat to their existence. They were self-described terrorists, as outlined in their underground newspaper, He Khazit;
Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: “Ye shall blot them out to the last man.”
Charming mantra, to say the least.
Now, let’s take a look at a couple of notable examples of Zionist terrorism at the time, such as the King David Hotel Bombing.
The attack, which took place in July 1946, was carried out because the hotel was the headquarters of the central offices of the British Mandatory authorities of Palestine, as well as the British Army in the region. The bombing was in retaliation of the British conducting search and seizure operations of arms against the Jewish Agency in Palestine and to stop Palmach sabotage operations.
This attack claimed the lives of 91 people – Arabs, Jews, and indeed Britons – as well as injuring 46 others.
Another example, shall we?
The Deir Yassin Massacre – April 9th, 1948. Igrun and Lehi fighters raided the village of Deir Yassin in the morning, killing civilians with hand grenades and guns, indiscriminately. Around 110 villagers, including women and children were killed in the attack – some of whom were kidnapped and paraded in the streets of West Jerusalem before being executed.The village was then seized, the rest of the villagers expelled, and the village was renamed Givat Shaul.
How about political assassinations?
Walter Guinness, The Lord Moyne, was shot and killed in Cairo along with his chauffeur on the 6th of November 1944 by two members of the Lehi terrorist organization. Guinness was targeted as he was seen as responsible for Britain’s policy in Palestine, and was accused of being sympathetic to the Arabs.
Or, Folke Bernadotte – Swedish diplomat and a man who almost single handedly negotiated the release of 450 Danish Jews and thousands of other prisoners from the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp during WWII. Folke was appointed to be the UN Security Council’s mediator for the Arab-Israeli conflict, and was shot and killed by Lehi members while conducting his duties to end the conflict.
There are many, many more examples of explicit acts of terrorism, targeted assassinations, kidnappings, and other quite ghastly actions conducted by these radical Zionist groups, but now I think it would be constructive to see the legacy that these groups left, and a few notable Israelis were sympathetic, or a part of these organizations.
After the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, Lehi was formally disbanded and its members were arrested by the now established State of Israel. Happy ending, right? Wrong!
Lehi members were given a general amnesty right before the 1949 election, and in 1980 the Israeli government commissioned a military decoration named after the group, called the Lehi Ribbon, an “award for activity in the struggle for the establishment of Israel”.
Irgun, the group responsible for the King David Hotel bombing, was absorbed into the newly created IDF in 1948. While the paramilitary organization was formally disbanded in 1949, its members would later become the founders of the Herut Party – Herut would later merge into the Likud Party, one of the largest political parties in Israel, and the party that currently holds power.
David Ben-Gurion, 1st Prime Minister of Israel, supported the bombing of the King David Hotel, although later he publicly condemned it. While Ben-Gurion was a leader of the Jewish Agency, he did little to help the British in stopping the operations of Lehi and Irgun.
Menachem Begin, 6th Prime Minister of Israel, was an active member of Irgun, and became a commander of the terrorist organization in 1943. He was the founder of the Herut Party in 1948 (which later became known as “Likud”).
Yitzhak Shamir, 7th Prime Minister of Israel, was a leader of the Lehi terrorist group during its operational years. Shamir was responsible for plotting the assassination of Lord Moyne, and of Folke Bernadotte during his tenure as the leader of Lehi. In 1955, he joined Mossad, where he orchestrated Operation Damocles – targeted assassination of German rocket scientists assisting Egypt’s missile program.
Fascinating, to say the least. Some absolutely dreadful people, who ended up in the highest office of their country, and, somehow, allied with Britain, the very power they sought to expel from their nation. I can only imagine how awkward those Israeli meetings with the various Prime Ministers of the UK must have been – that is, of course, if those Prime Ministers had actually known or cared about what crimes these people were responsible for, and the British blood that they shed in order to achieve their goals.
Because, fundamentally, this nation is hostile. Not only to its immediate neighbors in the Middle East, but to us in the West as well.
Does anyone in their right mind think that almost a century of ideology, propaganda and leadership by vehemently anti-British, and by extension anti-Western political figureheads and former terrorists somehow is just washed away with time?
It is ludicrous that somehow, the political party that is in power, which was founded by the very terrorists who conspired and successfully carried out attacks against the British, has simply forgotten or somehow changed its foundational core values.
These roots run deep – and by observing the current administration of the Israeli government, we can see that the most important positions are occupied by hardcore, uncompromising Zionists who undoubtedly share the same values as their predecessors.
If this was an issue which was only relegated to the Middle East, I doubt anyone in the West would need to care. But unfortunately, due to the billions of dollars of donations from Israeli-aligned political groups, the billions of dollars of weapons deals done with Israel, and the overindulgent culture of philo-Semitism in Western governments, we in the West are unfortunately tethered to this country, its issues, and the repetitive cycle of destruction and death that it generates.
We are told that we have a moral obligation to support Israel, out of vague notions of protecting the “only functional democracy in the Middle East”, or through beating the drum of Holocaust guilt that, somehow, if we don’t stand by Israel and its campaigns of “self-determination” (i.e. constant expansion) we are somehow antisemites and no better than the Nazis.
Our governments even flirt with, if not having already passed legislation, that will limit our free speech in our countries if we dare criticize the Israelis for taking their war and destruction against a severely outgunned Palestine as being a little too far. The United States House just recently passed a bill that would severely curtail the ability to criticize Israel and its actions, under the guise of trying to stop anti-semitism on college campuses.
Especially on the cusp of important elections in the UK and the United States, how can any patriotic, nationally-minded voter bring themselves to the ballot box and vote for politicians and parties that are so explicitly Zionist that they take their mandatory trip to the Wailing Wall as soon as they are elected for a photo op and a corny declaration of allegiance to a foreign nation?
So here we are. Our fates tied to the ambitions of a small nation in the desert. While they continue to expand violently and push outward, as was the vision of the founders of their country, we in the West are meant to just sit back, and fork over our tax dollars to let it happen over some very unclear obligation that we are told we have.
Israel has demonstrated that it is only willing to participate in a friendship with the West that is one-sided; where they reap the benefits of lucrative weapons deals and endless political support while giving no concessions or compromise in return. Outwardly showing resentment to the hand that feeds it when something as simple as a ceasefire is asked for so that the humanitarian crisis on the ground can be properly dealt with.
If we are to look at this in a completely pragmatic sense in regards to foreign policy, we gain nothing from continuing to unconditionally support a historically hostile entity, and we lose nothing if we are to cut these imaginary ties and treat them as we treat any other nation.
There’s an old saying, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”.
Thankfully, especially amongst younger voters – both liberal and conservative – many are already starting to reevaluate that unquestioning love for a foreign nation that has a long and violent history towards its current allies.
What we must take from Marx
Britain is a nation that enjoys making light of its peculiarities and eccentricities. We enjoy having a laugh over a slightly self deprecating and scathing analysis of the fine-points of our society. We are keenly aware of the little things that set us apart – most famously the class system.
Unblemished by the tumults of the continent, we never saw fit to put whole socio-economic stratas to death, and such, on this isle has evolved a range of economic classes; that at times can seem whole cultures within themselves. The topic of a good Harry Enfield sketch, the plethora of verbal inflections in dialect, or what one tends to do on a Sunday, to general mannerism and pattern of speech – there is much that can set one into working, middle, or upper class. We view class not through a reasoned analysis, nor through a simple review of how much money is in one’s wallet – in fact, these tend to be quite secondary thoughts when judging someone’s place in the hierarchy.
Class is understood through a range of social signifiers, all of which have their root in one’s upbringing, which have their root in the upbringing of one’s father, and his father, and his father, and so on.
No matter how much money you win for your coffers, no matter how noble and high your method of work is, no matter how much you may put on a rendition of received pronunciation – you cannot really change your class. You may own a country estate, go shooting pheasants with the lads on Sunday, you may call your son Tarquin, but if your Dad came from a pit village, and passed down the speech, mannerism, and sentiments of said pit village to you – you’ll never leave the place. You may be able to win your son a jaunt up the social ladder, Joseph Chamberlain’s little known son called Neville transcended his father’s position in the middle class by growing up far away from his Dad at Eton, managing something of a different upbringing thereby.
The ultimate result of this strange institution is an utterly cartoonish understanding of class. It is entirely possible in this view of things, that a well-born feckless son from a manor in the home counties could spend his days shepherding pit-ponies around mineshafts in South Wales, and still outrank Gwyn Jones who was born in the pit village just adjacent, and made enough money to buy that very country estate mentioned.
Do not suppose that I write against such cartoons, they are quite wonderful, and I wish not for some Jacobin iconoclasm to mandate state-approved classes based upon occupation. These things make brilliant Harry Enfield sketches, however, when we seek to understand British society, and thereby create a successful right-wing movement, we have no time for the twee cartoons of such a sketch. We can not begin to engage in a successful right-wing, or nationalist political program without a firm understanding of how social classes interact in this country, every political movement must find itself between a class antagonism, lest it fail. Hence, we must begin to integrate Marx’s view of class into our thinking. Marx, despite standing in near complete contradiction to us, is the only thinker from which we can concretely define and analyse the real and tangible class divisions within the British people, beyond the thesis of a sketch.
Marxist class analysis centres around how one relates to the means of production. Totally ignoring someone’s salary or mannerisms – Marx defines class purely through the manner in which one works. We all know of the two main classes of industrial capitalism he expounds upon – the proletarian, and the bourgeois. The bourgeois class owns means of production (in Marx’s time this could be a cotton mill or a steelworks) he holds this capital, and purchases wage labour in order to produce goods with it. The Proletarian class are the folk from whom wage labour is purchased, not owning any means of production themselves, the working class sell their labour-power in order to make a living.
Furthermore, Marx introduces the petit-bourgeois class. Marxists (who cannot for the life of them agree on anything) disagree on what exactly this class is, and whom makes up its ranks. Simply, it could be said, the petit-bourgeois class may own alternative forms of capital (such as a small shop) but are unlikely to purchase labour power in the working of this capital, and wherein he does, he likely works side by side with the proletarians he pays.
Now, Marx does not ramble on like this all day, and he eventually gets to the point: antagonism. The ultimate purpose of delving into these social relations is getting to grips with the separate desires and interests each class works toward. To put it simply, the proletarian seeks to labour as little as possible for the greatest wage. The bourgeois, inversely, wishes for the proletarian to labour as much for the smallest possible wage.
In this, we find Marx’s most valuable lesson. In taking up his understanding of class, we need not blanketly throw his particular analysis of the Victorian urban sprawl onto our day, we need not even use the word bourgeois and such – in fact, the economic relations of our day can be said to have deviated so much from Marx’s day that such terms are useless. We must centre in on the antagonism between the classes, while also putting key caveats on our understanding of it.
If one is to ignore this doctrine of antagonism, then one is to ignore nearly all of British political history. Is not the rift that has dominated our nation since even before the Civil War that of Whig and Tory? One cannot separate these two groups from their diametric class antagonism. The Tory of the country, who profits from agriculture, who finds himself well off in the ancient landed hierarchies. The Whig who profits from the city, who thrives in more modern and capitalistic relations of the mill and steelwork. There are few debates of British political history that can be fully understood without getting to grips with this specific sociological battle. We cannot look to Peel’s full thrust support for the abolition of the corn laws, and championing of free trade thereby, without understanding that the Whig sought out this reform in order to ensure the flow of cheap grain into urban centres, and the mouths of their proletarians, at the expense of the Tory landowner and his tenant. Without this economic antagonism, there is no movement to abolish the corn laws.
Now, this is not to say that all hitherto history is that of class struggle, we should not assume that Peel was consciously plotting to pull the rug under the Tory landowner – no one thinks this way, in fact, class antagonism while informing these political disputes can sometimes enter the sub-conscious. We can understand this doctrine without becoming totally affixed to it.
Principally, we must maintain that class is not the prime fraternity of man. There is no international working class or the like, and such is a fanciful idea. Ultimately, one’s nation and ethnicity trump their class identity. Leftists like to imagine that they have more in common with a working class Chinaman than a billionaire of their ethnic kin, but while Richard Branson may have vastly different economic interests; you can share a conversation in your mutually native language, you celebrate the same festivities every year, you probably share the same cultural references and tidbits. Man is much more than his economic interests, and his identity goes much beyond what he’d like to be paid at work – such a totalising view of class ignores the depth that makes up men’s lives.
Nonetheless, we can simultaneously hold that ethnos is the prime fraternity of man, while recognising the inherent divisions within such a thing. Without a comprehension of these differences, we will remain ignorant as to how to effectively mobilise our people in a political movement. Blindly assuming that if we put forward a political program that broadly seeks to better the condition of the native Briton, that such will rally all sections of our people will lead us to ruin.
While it is true that in ‘diverse’ societies, democracy simply becomes an ethnic headcount (see South Africa) such diversity is concentrated in certain areas of our country. Areas such as Bradford fit this model much more, wherein the diametric antagonism between the native and immigrant groups naturally trumps the bounds of class, however in other areas of the nation this is not such. (Ironically, it is class antagonism that brought this into being. Former industrial areas are highly saturated with immigrant groups due to the importation of cheap labour into mills and cotton works, for example.) Thereby, we must understand the class antagonisms we can ride, and the classes with whom we have appeal.
To illustrate this, let us think to the average voter in the 1983 general election, the man who voted for Thatcher, and the man who voted for Foot. The man who voted for Thatcher, 38 years on, has likely benefited from the deindustrialisation of the country, much more attuned to a neoliberal regime of international finance and services. He is likely insulated from the demographic issues of the nation, perhaps he will scoff at some anti-social behaviour on the tube, but he is not bound by public transport. Let us think now to the man who voted for Foot, he has seen the industries his family worked in for generations crumble before his eyes, and the economic impetus of his town dry up. Equally, he has seen an unprecedented swamping of its demographic character in mere decades. He has lost his home, and his work at the behest of short sighted, shock doctrinaire neoliberalism.
Who is more likely, do you think, to support a nationalist cause? We all know that the working class tend to be more right-wing in our day, but if we do not understand the antagonism (being in this case, deindustrialisation) that this tendency has its roots in, then we shall fail to harness this support. Once we comprehend this, we will understand that nationalism has no future among the jungles of the free market, it must entail economic nationalism, and an active role of the state in economic affairs in order to steer the economy toward the national interest.
Without being at the parapet of class antagonism, that fuels all successful political movements, we march aimlessly into bogs and marshes. We must understand that nationalism has to be a movement in the interests of the disenfranchised native working class, that acts in the interests of that class. Without this, we are but ideologues barking into the wind.
Photo Credit.