In an appearance on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line back in 1980, newly inaugurated President Reagan was asked his thoughts on a number of key issues. His responses, despite now being 42 years old, remain all too relevant.
He argued for long-term investment in expanding the oil economy in the face of rising energy costs, an argument that Republicans are making once again as Joe Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline has driven gas prices up to eye-watering levels, compounded further by sanctions on Russian oil. On the issue of inflation, he pointed out that “since government causes inflation, government’s the only one that can stop inflation,” in stark contrast with Biden who prefers to leap from calling inflation “transitory” to celebrating it to blaming Trump to blaming Russia.
Perhaps Reagan’s most pertinent words of advice were on dealing with aggressors:
“The United States cannot recklessly put itself in the position where the confrontation does take place. The United States… should make it plain that [the Soviet Union] can run that risk of having such a confrontation, if they continue with their imperialism and this kind of expansion.”
He followed this by stating:
“I think one of the foolish things we’ve done going clear back to the Vietnamese war is telling potential enemies the things we would not do. For example, when President Johnson repeated over and over again that, of course, we would never use nuclear weapons there. I don’t think we should’ve use nuclear weapons there. But I think the North Vietnamese should have gone to sleep every night worrying about whether we would. We shouldn’t tell them the things that we wouldn’t do.”
Reagan faced a Russian state spreading its imperial tentacles, acting through its various satellites as well as through its own troops – a situation that is playing out once again.
Biden’s tendency to rule out action represents a major stumbling block in dealing with Putin, who knows all too well that the West is simply not ready, militarily or otherwise, for a major conflict of any kind. At his meeting in Brussels, when asked if his clear unwillingness to go beyond a proxy war had “emboldened” Putin, Biden replied, “No and no,” as if saying it twice would make it any less untrue. Obama made a similar mistake by talking big with his “red line” threat but failing to follow up with any action. One can hardly blame Putin for expecting the same from Biden as he effectively acts out Obama’s third term.
When Biden does propose any action, as he did when he mistakenly suggested that use of chemical weapons would be met with a response “in kind,” the White House quickly performed damage control. The net result was an embarrassed Biden, a bemused Putin and a slightly nervous free world.
Whatever one may say about Trump, his unpredictability lent him a Reaganesque quality, with his talk of consequences for America’s enemies being followed through with appropriate, often severe, action, as was the case with his targeted assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.
What is most alarming is that Reagan’s advice, given in 1980, has not been heeded by Biden and his team despite his being in politics since 1976. If he had paid attention, he may not have been called “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades” by Obama’s defense secretary Robert Gates. Although he had numerous failings, from Iran-Contra to his response to the AIDs crisis, Reagan was the man who helped end the Soviet Union. If history is to repeat itself, as it seems to be doing, perhaps following in Reagan’s example is the ideal course of action.
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The National Scandal That Never Was
In undoubtedly one of the most important and disturbing watches this year, the GB News documentary Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame is perhaps the best examination of this ongoing (and sadly ever-widening) scourge on Britain as a nation. The amount of detail and research Charlie Peters goes into is commendable, simultaneously making the matter horrifying and frustrating, given how little was done to tackle it up until the last decade.
It’s not simply the individual accounts of grooming victims that make it such an uncomfortable watch, nor the vast scale of the scandal that Peters exposes. Rather, it’s the clear institutional failings that occurred, as well as the Soviet-level attempted cover-up by the authorities, including intimidation campaigns against those trying to tell the truth.
It ends with an overall call to action for the government to take this matter more seriously and have more of those involved in the cover-up to be held to account.
Peters’ excellent work is one of several noticeable examples of mainstream culture attempting to shed some more light on the scandal, with others including the equally harrowing BAFTA-winning BBC drama Three Girls and an episode of the Denise Walsh true crime series Survivors where prominent victim Sammy Woodhouse gave an extensive interview on her own tragic story.
However, such contributions are noticeable in how few and far between they actually are. This, in turn, highlights a sinister truth about the scandal as a whole: despite how much of a major problem it was, and continues to be, it never quite gained the status of ‘national scandal’ it truly deserved.
The fact it hasn’t had such an impact is very troubling and should highlight how legitimately broken our current system is, politically and institutionally.
But before that, it’s worth examining a brief history of this scandal.
For several decades now, tens of thousands of young, mostly white girls, have been targeted in numerous towns and cities across the UK by gangs (generally of British Pakistani origin) for grooming, sex and rape.
Such girls would be coerced by various means – offers of drugs and alcohol, psychological manipulation, fake affection – by these gangs, and would later be abused.
Sometimes, those in positions of authority were also accused of engaging in such behaviour themselves, including Labour peer Lord Nazir Ahmed, who was (ironically enough) lauded for a speech condemning it.
To make matters much worse, such crimes were often ignored for decades by the authorities, from the local councils, to the police to the social services. It was later discovered that fears of being called ‘racist’ and ‘politically incorrect’ and ‘undermining community cohesion’ were given as justifications for to the ‘see no evil’ attitude of those in charge, because of the race dynamics of those involved (not least of which the victims themselves, often berated for being white by the preparators).
In a post-MacPherson Inquiry Britain (of which had questionably accused the Metropolitan Police of being ‘institutionally racist’ following their bungled investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s murder), fears around that sort of accusation lingered among many police forces – leading to the direct racist abuse of many white, Sikh and Hindu girls in the process.
Later on, Dan Hodges described those failed in Rotherham as those failed because of crying ‘racism’, as “[Rotherham Council] were standing back because the victims were white and the rapists were not.”
The scandal would remain an open secret for many years, whether it be the working-class mumbling in hushed tones about it or less-than-palatable political alternatives captalising on the problem to gain local support.
This would change in 2012 when Times journalist Andrew Norfolk blew the whistle, following extensive research and corroboration with the likes of Woodhouse. This, alongside further exposure in other areas of the country, brave individuals like Maggie Oliver openly highlighted the matter, further helping it into the mainstream.
How extensive this was and how far back this goes will probably never be known. In terms of time alone, there is much circumstantial evidence. The Sunday Mirror found that the Telford abuse goes back as far as the late 1970s and early 1980s. A Rotherham Advertiser article documented such abuse as far back as 1975. A memoir titled Call The Midwife dates the scandal even further back to 1950s London. During a 2021 Parliamentary debate on grooming, Rotherham’s Labour MP Sarah Champion noted that she had met victims who were 70 years old.
To make matters even bleaker, it seems that there are further revelations still to unfold – as one of the lawyers who helped to prosecute the Telford gangs stated, such matters in the town were simply the ‘tip of the iceberg’ for what was to come.
So if all of this is true, then why is it a scandal that has (once again) gone under the radar, kept on the down-low and sidelined to ‘dissident right’ Telegram chats?
There are several reasons for this, and none of them are good, shockingly enough.
Firstly, the ‘racism’ and ‘far-right’ stings and smears that made many turn away initially are still prevalent when discussing this stuff. Norfolk himself was worried about investigating the story initially when first hearing of it, stating in 2015 that his ‘liberal angst’ about the issue being a ‘dream story for the far-right’ made him nervous about tackling it.
Although such worries were somewhat justified, his reporting was originally dismissed by Rotherham Council as lies of the ‘[Rupert] Murdoch press’. Needless to say, if such concerns could make the likes of Norfolk (a hero in this story by all counts) nervous to start with, then why would anyone else senior want that to be their hill that they died on?
In 2015, when Nigel Farage as UKIP leader travelled to Rotherham to speak on the issue, there was a significant protest – but it wasn’t the gangs they had in their crosshairs. Instead, much hatred was directed against Farage for in part spreading ‘racism’.
Champion herself when calling out these problems in her constituency area in a hard-hitting 2017 Sun article received similar attacks. Beyond the death threats and deselection attempts, she was also criticized for being racist by MP Naz Shah (infamous for retweeting a parody account stating that the grooming victims should ‘shut their mouths for the good of diversity’) and her local Labour Party.
Meanwhile, Peters’ doc itself was targeted on similar grounds with University College London professor Ella Cockbain sending a complaint to Ofcom on the matter, as it promoted ‘racist tropes’ about ‘Pakistani men’ (thankfully to widespread backlash online as a result).
In short, if far-left campaign groups, certain trade unions, much of the Labour Party and academics among many others with ‘privileged’ status are still willing to shut down this debate with racism smears, why would those with much to lose campaign against it?
This highlights the second major reason as to why this never became a national scandal: it didn’t serve the interests of the political establishment at large (not least of which those involved in the original cover up, alongside specific councillors who made horrid remarks on it).
Writer Derek Turner once described political correctness as a ‘clown with a knife’, highlighting its funny aspects of which conceal its sinister totalitarian aims. The grooming gang scandal, alongside the infrequent spats of Islamic terrorism, are the most obvious times of such an idea playing out in such a fashion.
When the political establishment has their eggs in the baskets of political correctness, multiculturalism and mass immigration – policies and ideas of which the proliferation of grooming gangs couldn’t have happened without – why would they seriously want to tackle such a subject matter head on and deal with it?
Instead, they focus on supposed scandals that confirm their prejudices. When the grooming gang scandal was taking off in the mid-2010s, a completely made-up non-scandal was entertaining the eyes and ears of Westminster – that of the VIP pedophile ring alleged by fantasist Carl Beech. Senior MPs gave it Parliamentary space, LBC host James O’Brien gave it copious amounts of attention and many at the Met Police felt that Beech (under his pseudonym ‘Nick’) was ‘credible’. It went as far as then-Prime Minister David Cameron getting involved, with Douglas Murray describing how it created a ‘witch-hunt’ atmosphere in Parliament. Beech was found out later to be a fraud – sadly not before some were made homeless because of his claims and others died before their vindication.
It is easy to see why much of the Westminster bubble was so eager to give it attention, but not the grooming gangs. The Beech affair targeted the old British establishment they despised for their part in a traditional Britain ‘out-of-sync’ with the secular one of the current year they love (and have benefited greatly from).
Persecuting World War 2 generals like Lord Bramall and former MI5 heads, alongside the Tory old guard of Edward Heath and Harvey Proctor was very easy under this mentality. When the crimes and suspects involved violate the principles of secular Britain that becomes much harder to do.
As such, it isn’t surprising that the grooming gang scandal isn’t much use for the establishment at large. This is something blatantly seen with the generally scant media coverage it receives in comparison to other tragedies.
In Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky highlight the various ways in which the media manipulate events and frame stories in a way to set an agenda. This includes the notion of ‘Worthy and Unworthy Victims’, whereby the media will ‘portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal and greater severity by their own government… as unworthy.’
Such an idea can be recontextualised in regards to how the media at large covers certain bleak stories, whether in Britain or abroad. For instance, the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 was given much coverage in the half-decade since the disaster, and rightly so. One would hope this extended to the ramifications of such an event. It was, but not in the way one would think.
Instead of talk surrounding corporate negligence and the neo-feudal implications of the inherent setup, the discussions surrounding Grenfell consisted of how the government had failed the seemingly benevolent ideas of multiculturalism and diversity due to the building’s high-foreign born population, all the while blaming the Tories’ austerity supposedly causing the matter to occur (a blame shared by more than just one political party, it turned out).
In all, brave firemen were more likely to be criticised for the incident than those who built it in such poor conditions, despite endless complaints from the residents about it. Grenfell could therefore be cynically pushed in a way that celebrated diversity and mass immigration, making its victims worthy ones. The grooming gang scandal meanwhile does the complete opposite, hence its victims are unworthy, for the reasons explained earlier. Hence why there was a Question Time episode set in Kensington for the Grenfell anniversary, but none for the grooming gang hotspots.
One can only then, in response, protest. Why can’t we all share in these tragedies together? Why does politicking and ideology have any part of such quandaries? Can we not move beyond politics, sacred cows and petty point scoring to grieve, share anger and unite in such times of darkness? Unfortunately it seems that no, we cannot.
It is for that reason, alongside not being recognised as a national scandal, that in some areas, the problem has only worsened since its exposure a decade ago – not least of which is the fact that Rotherham is still a hotspot for this very crime.
The liberal-left establishment have at best sought to further minimize and downplay it, and at worst once again outright deny it’s a problem. In a particularly blunt instance of anarcho-tyranny in late 2022, one victim (Samantha Smith) was investigated by West Mercia Police for discussing her abuse on GB News.
This vapid ignorance was no better displayed than the reaction by polite society to the 2020 whitewashed Home Office report into the matter. The vested interests wanting the story to go away treated it like gospel, including one Guardian writer who exclaimed that it ‘dispel[ed] myth of ‘Asian grooming gangs’ popularised by far right’.
The fact that some of its contributors were displeased at the report and it left out several key witnesses (like initial whistleblower former Labour MP Ann Cryer and the Quilliam Foundation) didn’t matter. Meanwhile, the recent exposure of the fakery of Eleanor Williams was certainly given far more coverage than something like Telford.
Such attitudes permeate other high places as well from so-called ‘comedians’ who try to make disgusting light of it as well as former respected journalists playing ‘whataboutism’ when confronted with the issue. Other institutions, like the BBC will conduct hit pieces against you if you highlight the matter further.
However, despite all this, there is reason to be hopeful.
Although not treated with the severity it deserves, the matter is at least public knowledge now, and can be dealt with accordingly. The 2017 arrests in Newcastle that were pre-emptive against such gangs (alongside many others in recent years) shows that the police in some areas are getting mildly better at catching the perpetrators of these despicable acts.
Meanwhile, the fact that some high-profile Tories, such as Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman, have made political hay of it in recent campaign and conference speeches is a positive sign – at the very least, it shows how much of a concern it is to many of their voters and the British right in general, even if one may argue its all cynical electoral-politicking.
Similar political concern could be fully seen in the 2021 Parliamentary debate on the matter, where there was clear cross-party support and sympathy to the victims and their plight, indicating the determination of some of them to want to do something to stop this from occurring again. There is circumstantial good news also such as the Rochdale 3 being possibly deported.
Such steps may be in the right direction, but more needs to be done.
The government needs to apologise to all of the victims and whistleblowers it let down, akin to David Cameron’s apology for Bloody Sunday following the Saville Inquiry.
Then, some genuine action needs to take place from the ground up. As Peters’ noted during the documentary, the National Crime Agency needs to do a complete investigation into the matter, especially in highlighting particular areas uncovered as of yet. Genuine accountability against those involved is also required – the groomers themselves should be deported if foreign-born, and if the death penalty can be re-institutionalised, it should be used against those we can’t deport.
Those in local government that were complicit in the cover-up should be removed from their positions, either by the ballot box or other means for officials and some should be imprisoned for perverting the course of justice.
This could all be done. The only thing stopping it is the cowardly Westminster consensus who instead of challenging such problems head-on would prefer to avoid, as Dominic Cummings stated, “awkward dinner party chats in London.”
It cannot be stressed enough that only the victims of this evil could deal with something that slight. Instead, they have their lives turned upside down, and in some cases ruined.
Rudyard Kipling once wrote about the Boer War that, “We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.” The sooner we appreciate that sentiment with the grooming gang problem and tackle it in a serious way, the better we’ll be as a nation.
In the leadup to the GB News documentary, writer Ed West wrote that “There should be a national conversation about it in the way there was after the Lawrence inquiry.”
The time for that ‘conversation’ is now. While the suffering of the victims can not be reversed, we can at least stop such horrors from continuing, not only showing that Britain truly listened to those people, but that it will leave future generations better off as a result.
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The Church has let men like Prince Harry down
The King has allegedly asked the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby to mediate in the current royal drama with a view to repairing things before the Coronation. Reading extracts of Prince Harry’s ‘Spare’ I can’t but help think that though this is intervention is to be welcomed there is a sense in which Harry is typical of a lot of modern men who have been let down by the one spiritual organisation that is meant to guide them over the pitfalls and perils of this mortal coil.
Harry’s complaint is that he is ‘spare heir’ and therefore a marginalised victim of the system, or what the royals dub ‘the Firm’. This is a difficult premise to swallow in the light of a life of opulent privilege. Anyone who takes up the daily recitation of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer will soon be confronted with a different of ‘spare’ that might as well come from another planet because it is so in-modern. “Spare thou them, O God, who confess their faults, restore thou them that are penitent.” If only Harry had been shown how to orientate his life on this concept of ‘spare’ things might have turned out differently.
Tragically Harry’s nuggets in ‘Spare’ betray an arid post-faith intellectual landscape where the classic virtues are absent. Humility, forgiveness, duty, sacrifice are sidelined whereas woke truisms and Californians therapy gobbledigook are at the fore. Did no one at Eton or in his confirmation classes drill in the Mosaic Ten commandments hanging up in many school chapels, least of all “Honour thy father and mother?” (Exodus 20.12) As he plotted with his ghost writer to disclose every petty family squabble did he not stop to weigh up the terrible dishonour it would bring to his father, the now present king? Perhaps those charged with his spiritual upbringing gave up too early? All indications from ‘Spare’ is that the teenage happy-go-lucky cheeky-chappy Harry was early on inhaling the wrong incense and needed a more bespoke approach to his religious instruction. As it is he now declares himself predictably as “spiritual but not religious.” Yawn!
To borrow from the gospel of Mark, for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gaineth the biggest deals with Netflix, Spotify and Random House, and lose his own soul? It’s easy to dismiss religion and then tune out the meatier questions because they do not suit or harmonize with the confectionary lite buffet that presents itself as DIY “spirituality”. What do I know anyway, I’m just a vicar? To Christ’s haunting question “What can he give in exchange for his soul?” (Mark 8.37) Harry’s industrious accountants have “done the maths” and monetized this to a balance sheet of around a quarter of a billion pounds, give or take.
If only Harry had embraced the manly faith of his late grandmother, Her Majesty the Queen, then he wouldn’t be sinking in a quagmire of seances, quack therapists, and crystal healers. They saw you coming, Harry! And, to add comedy to tragedy he is stupendously oblivious to the singular truth that is apparent to everyone else on the planet, ie, that this is not going to end well for him. The ton of cash from the books and TV series will not save his soul from disintegration. It will add to the mental inferno. He now stands at the event horizon of an implosion, a galactic supernova which is the all consuming black hole of his fragile ego. And yet who cannot forget that when his grandmother deployed ‘spare’ it was always in the context of the misfortune of others. “Let us this Christmas spare a thought for those in the world who are less fortunate than us.” Spare indeed.
I feel sorry for Harry because he is a victim. He is a victim not of any antics at Buckingham Palace but a victim of himself and his ego. He is his own worst oppressor. The pathetic thing is that we the plebs are all rather enjoying it. Hands up, I confess this has brightened things up from the rainy normal January blues along with the prospect of paying half my stipend on an exorbitant heating bill. That’s why Spare is flying off the shelves. It’s an Easterenderseque tittle-tattle of royal soap opera that makes our bored and wayward souls horny.
Could the Church have helped to prevent this? My worry is that the current Anglican iteration is so panicked about appealing to wokism that Harry probably wouldn’t have been able to distinguish it from his wife’s current expensive appetite for tree hugging West Coast workshops. “Commandments? Oh, don’t concern yourself too much, they are merely ‘suggestions’ Your Highness for lifestyle enhancements. ” Here is a man displaying a profound lack of Christian catechesis. He thinks he can have God on his own terms.
Maybe as Anglicans we should take the blame, as a religion we have failed him? Biblical fluency would have slammed the brakes on this kind of misadventure years ago. Regular and proper prayer would have constructed a spiritual fortress with a moat and a high vantage point that laughs off the psychological hobgoblins and foul fiends. In Spare Harry talks of an RE teacher at Eton walloping him with a heavy Bible. Clearly not hard enough.
Harry is typical of a lost generation of men starved of meaning and direction. He and those on the other end of the spectrum who drool over the ridiculous Andrew Tate, are like pelicans wandering a neon wilderness tapping at leftovers and carcasses. Whereas Harry has an army of sycophants and celebs to tell him what he wants to hear, these men and boys scuttle around the cyberspace of Tik-Tok, Instagram and Youtube to collect morsels of ready made prejudices. Some of the more intellectually inquiring find solace in New Atheism, but increasingly the gleeful nihilism of Dawkins adds up to little succor these days.
Most youngish men dropping into their Anglican parish church will soon realise that they are misfits in a club that struggles to connect with their concerns or knows what to do with them. Politically correct sermons are also a big turn off. The average vicar it seems has yet to learn from the Jordan Peterson rockstar phenomenon which points to younger generations (men and women) lining up in their thousands for a psychologically full-on wrestling of a demanding meaning to life. This is why he packs auditoriums whereas many of us have half empty churches. Key to this is inverting the victimhood narrative and saying instead “Get your house in order and be a positive force in the world, by the grace of God, you can do it.”
Tragically the Anglican existential need to cosy up to the culture zeitgeist can put it on the wrong side of history, repeatedly. Just over a hundred years ago vicars and bishops casually deployed eye watering jingoistic rhetoric from their pulpits to rally this same constituency of young men to the trenches. The most infamous being the manipulative monster that was Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the bishop of London. He gleefully toured the country and packed churches where he signed up sixteen year olds to the Front. His crazed sermons including rants of “Kill the Hun!” Thank God we can’t imagine Sarah Mullaly or Justin Welby doing this. But, it does at least highlight there was a period in history where young men and princes like Harry Windsor were seen as the saviours of our civilisation even if the salvific work they were asked to shoulder was in reality a big con, an industrial scale slaughterhouse.
Having dipped my toe in the media world I now find myself at the receiving end of a mailbag of letters and emails mostly from Millennials, men (but not exclusively) around Harry’s age and lower who have found Christianity afresh. For various reasons lockdown prompted a considerable number to reevaluate the old faith. Typically they are rebels and misfits who find that the best way to dissent from the woke globalist revolution is to grasp Christianity. The gospel is for them the new anti-globalist movement. I see in them a hunger for demanding gospel which is both generous and orthodox, intellectual and spiritual stretching. They do not want to be fobbed off with social justice platitudes and are prepared to suffer well for their faith, even job loss is necessary. This is an energized constituency that for some reason the Church is apathetic to. Please, please bishops wake up!
So, what urgent spiritual advice could be given to the Duke of Sussex? Clergy, if the prince happens to trip into your confessional let’s not pander with the gushing words of “there, there!” He requires a direct approach. This is because he is like the earnest rich young man in the gospels who is strangulated by his possessions, privilege, and status and ends up walking away from Christ? Doesn’t he see that raking in millions and millions while surrounding himself with the Hollywood luvvies is the proverbial camel that he will never never never squeeze through the eye of the needle? No amount of Elizabeth Arden cream can help either. He needs to give it all up for a radically simpler quieter life.
Is any of this feasible for a royal like Harry let alone all those lost men the churches fail to inspire? Harry doesn’t need to go back to Edward the Confessor to find a role model. He could look no further than his quirky yet saintly great grandmother, the forthright Princess Alice of Battenberg, the Duke of Edinburgh’s mother. She had her troubles with mental health and ended up in and out of sanitariums. Opinion was divided over whether she was a mystic or a nut. Yet, unlike all the made up woke gongs that Harry and Meghan have received, Alice had a real award for her work in saving Jews from Nazis. Israel recognises and honours her as a righteous gentile. She also sold everything and became an Orthodox nun. As a no nonsense woman, she would be the last person on the planet to ever describe herself as a “victim”. She rolled up her sleeves and got on with life doing endless good without fanfare or neediness. I suspect history will ‘spare’ her a bigger and more godly footnote than Harry Windsor unless he seriously and radically changes his ways. And for bishops and archbishops maybe the lesson is that a church that preached and presented an Alice Battenberg Christianity, might not only reach out to guys like Harry but also find a remedy for its own seemingly terminal decline.
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Time To Stop Being Conservatives
‘Conservative’, big and small ‘c’, is blah. Blah party, policies, politicians, polls, prospects, and that’s just the ‘p’ words.
Let’s deal with ‘party’ first. Perhaps you’ve already stopped being a Conservative. There’s plenty of debate among the duckies about leaving, destroying, destroying and rebuilding, long marching through, etc. the Conservative Party. Whatever, sure, broadly, one way or another, there should be a proper political force which reflects ducky views. More on this later.
The real question is this: should you even be a conservative, let alone a Conservative, any more? What is the virtue of being a ‘conservative’? It’s a small tactical mistake, with large consequences, but easily tweaked and fixed. The Conservative Party may present itself as conservative and full of people who are not. How has that worked out?
Policies. What on a practical political level has ‘being a (C/c)onservative’ got you for the last decade, or more? What is it getting you now? What does it look like it’s going to get you in the next decade…or more?
Politicians. Ultimately, it’s these guys to blame for the blah policies. It shouldn’t be any surprise that the Conservative Party has blah policies though. Just look at its politicians. I’ve written at length (see the May 2022 magazine) about how, basically, the Conservative Party doesn’t select for competence, it selects for loyalty, and how changing its composition is unrealistic. You’re just going to have to be stuck with a ministerial cadre which belly flops, marries pensioners, plays hide and seek, and gobbles knobs for public entertainment. Is it even accurate to say that these people present as ‘conservative’ while failing to govern as conservatives? In any case, why are you surprised that they’re failures, and why would you care to keep associating with them? It’s time to stop being conservatives.
Polls. When the presentation of ‘conservative’ is so beyond saving, all that’s left is the reverse. Be conservative, act conservative, but don’t care to present as a conservative. Keep all the principles, attract the people who have them, those who like to pretend they don’t because it’s not fashionable, and those who are merely superficially put off. It costs you nothing but, what, comfiness, pride, what? To ditch a label which gets you nothing practically or aesthetically?
Jake Scott is right. Conservatives aren’t cool. Isn’t it incredibly telling that I’m by far the coolest person he knows and I’m not a conservative? It’s why I’m telling you not to be too. It’s not just the young fogeys, Thatcher throbbers, port & policy chortlers, MP-selfie-profile-pictures – does that cover it? – it’s the concept itself.
Prospects. Alright, this is a bit flimsy, and I’m done with this ‘p’ gimmick. ‘Conservative’ keep you trapped in a progressive paradigm, limiting your prospects. You are conservative relative to their progress. Sure, they’re progressive relative to what you want to conserve, but is that really how it’s taken in the zeitgeist? It doesn’t work the other way around. ‘Conservative’ doesn’t sound like you want to keep what’s what. It sounds like there’s one of two broad choices you can be, left/right, Conservative/Labour. What is it to present as the ones who just want to stick where you are and do nothing? “But there’s plenty I want to build and fix and do to make the UK excellent”, you say. Good! I hear you. In fact, a line from The Mallard’s own Wednesday Addams in her review of Peter Hitchens’ new book stood out to me. “He mourns not for a pristine past, but a future that never was”. Does the word, name, presentation, etc. of ‘(C/c)onservative’ ever connote that idea too? Would anyone associate the word or concept of the future with ‘(C/c)onservatives’ on Family Fortune? Whatever, this is a small tweak too.
Don’t just mourn, don’t be one of those people who seem to enjoy self-pity, wallowing in the ‘man among the ruins’ thing. Even if it’s not so negative, don’t just be twee, oh the green and pleasant land, God save the King, blah. Find and keep what’s valuable, think about how to conserve it, but also how to bring it into the future. While you’re at it, adjust your attitude toward the future. Hitchens is an old man, so whatever, maybe it’s forgivable that all he can do is mourn for a future that never was. But you can act for a future that will be. It will. And you have to totally unironically, unreservedly believe that. Make it a matter of truth!
Jake Scott is right again. Stop pretending as if you are living in a liberal pluralist society in which different ideologies are just different options in a marketplace. I’m not sure this is quite what he meant, but it’s my take: some ways of doing things are better than others. Whether that’s economic, educational, social, whatever. There are better and worse ways of running a country. The progressives are objectively shit.
Truth. You are not a conservative, you are not right wing, even, you just believe in the truth. Twitter has been in the news, let’s use that as an example. The now dismal, disgraced, and now discarded Vijaya Gadde, could not even begin to conceive that Twitter had biased rules against conservatives on defining ‘misgendering’. It’s because her opinion wasn’t just an opinion. It was the truth. Of course, she was wrong. You are the ones with the truth. This is going to get tiresome referring to the same Jake Scott video, but he is right again. If anything he isn’t radical enough. On some things there just is no battle of ideas. There is no debate on insanity. Not in the real world, at least, maybe stuffed away in university philosophy departments where the debate can keep going for 3,000 years without resolution and not interfere with anything that matters.
Anyway, the truth is also that broadly conservative ideas about a whole range of topics are held by most of the country. Brexit was the big one, already proven. Next could be anything from immigration to British values, house building, tax, or all of them if only there was a proper political force prepared to go for it. More on that right at the end. In the meantime, what you believe is true and it will come to be, because you are going to make it happen.
This article hasn’t come out of nowhere, exactly. There does seem to be some buzz around the idea of ‘sensible centrists’. Is that the right branding? Not sure about it, but the concept is onto something which is good politics.
TL;DW, examples from the linked video: 1) it’s extreme to import hundreds of thousands of people to the country, the sensible position is to set immigration by what the country needs, 2) it’s extreme to let crime go rampant and obsess over the relatively small problem of one or two racist police, the sensible position is to be tough on crime, or 3) it’s extreme to hire thousands of people to obsess over a small number of people getting offended, to the tune of billions, rather than just not cater to that hysterical timewasting minority.
It’s not an entirely new idea, but popularising it in ‘right-wing’ circles is valuable, and so is the formula, which is new. The proof that it’s good is that it has been done before. How far back do you want to go? Curtis Yarvin presents Caesar as an imperially purple (red/blue/Republican/Democrat) end to chaotic fighting between extremes – a sensible centre. More recently Vote Leave presented the ‘leave’ option as a sensible left and right-backed, cross-party, non-UKIP, sensible centre which was merely taking back control from an extreme EU, where actually remaining would be the less certain, more dangerous, crazy option.
Does the UK feel stable, well-governed, on the right and true path, today? Is the UK sensible or extreme? See the appendix below if you need any help. Everything is totally fucking awful. It doesn’t even have to be! It could just be well governed instead. You’re not a conservative, you just want a good government.
Today, it is governed by Conservatives. It has been backed by conservatives or otherwise simply just not replaced by conservatives, and in any case conservatives have been totally contaminated by the idea of Conservatives. On top of all of this, when you have the truth on your side, what is there even to be gained by being (C/c)onservatives? Again, see the appendix below for some sense of the scale of the problem.
I’m not sure what exactly is next. Rallying around any sort of name or group or identity, especially if it isn’t totally solid and ready, presents a target. For now it’s enough to simply reject the idea that you are a conservative, or right-wing, especially when asked or characterised as such.
