When faced with the utter treachery of progressive intellectuals, there are times when one is tempted to go back to the old ways. Show up to their threshold, give them a slap with your glove and then hopefully grant them eternal peace from their nightmarish debility in a duel at the next daybreak. Peace would then return and one would tread home with the gratifying thought of having served mankind. But alas, the time of blood feuds is spent, and the resting lion who could once easily crush the hyenas troubling his sleep is now constrained to articulate his maw into words; explaining to them why it is uncourteous and inappropriate to come to his dwelling and trouble his sleep.
So be it. Let us contend defamation with apology, caricature with truth, and cede the arma to the togae; after all, we have no army at our disposal to cross the Rubicon.
An anglophile, and an admirer of Anglo-Saxon famed freedom of speech and liberalism, I must say I have been rather disappointed by how sententious the analysis of British and American newspapers of Mr Zemmour’s political position has been. After having observed now for two months or so the unceasing manhunt of the candidate by mainstream British media, I thought that one should not let this monochord blabber follow its course without a single objection. For example, let us take a look at this stereotypical leftist hit piece from The Guardian.
Written by what many would call an academic demigod, Didier Fassin, professor in anthropology at the Collège de France, one could have expected this article to be a dense synthesis of a profound analysis of French society and politics. How mighty was my astonishment when I found that the author’s main source regarding Zemmour’s ideas was one pamphlet from the junk information website Slate. I can easily guess that Professor Fassin never thought it worthy of his rank to listen to Mr Zemmour with his ears once in the past decade. Here is the only grounded and meaningful paragraph extractable from Professor Fassin’s article about Mr Zemmour:
“Indeed, he [Mr Zemmour] has said that parents should only be allowed to give their children ‘traditional’ French names, approvingly referred to people comparing Nazism with Islam, propagated the so-called ‘great replacement’ theory and argued that employers have a right to turn down black or Arab candidates. He believes that political power should belong to men and that women’s role should be to have and raise children. He has claimed to be on the side of General Bugeaud, who massacred Muslims during the colonisation of Algeria, has contended that Marshal Petain saved Jews during the second world war, and would like the death penalty to be reinstated. His overarching narrative is reversing France’s supposed national decline, which featured again in the video announcing his candidacy.”
Let us dissect these eight claims, in which the author restitutes eight of Zemmour views that he thinks should be problematic and let us try to display to the reasonable and discerning Anglo-Saxon reader how Zemmour’s real positions are not as grossly fascistic and vulgar as Professor Fassin wishes to make it seem.
1. “He has said that parents should only be allowed to give their children ‘traditional’ French names.”
Zemmour argues that the civility under which French citizens are recognised in the public space should be a French traditional first name. That is either from the calendar of Saints or prior traditions such as Greco-Latin history. Let us be clear, he does not speak of the use of a foreign name in private life. He does say that one’s ID and passport are not of the private but of the public domain, which is true.
Indeed, the elites of the now frighteningly multicultural city of London might be revolted by this proposal. These “enlightened divines”, as Burke would call them, would also be edified to know that this was a French law, passed by Napoleon. It was only repelled in 1993 when it was stated that parents had the right to freely choose their children’s names. Still to this date judges may forbid names that are judged disadvantageous to one’s future, such as: ‘Borat Miller’ or ‘Mr Bean Smith’. Anglo-American progressives are prompt to project their multicultural conceptions on France, but our histories differ.
At any rate, for most great societies until the twentieth century, the adaptation of foreign names or their outright changing, especially between Western nations, was the rule. In particular, virtually all French Jews between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, adopted French names as they were finally integrated into French society after centuries of rejection.
“We must give the Jews everything as individuals, but nothing as a nation” is a quote from the revolutionary nobleman Clermont-Tonnerre, often uttered by Zemmour, for it matches entirely his own family’s choices and trajectory, that of Jewish France. This cultural assimilation was the way of integrating migrants in France for the past 200 years, since the founding of the Republic and before.
2. “[Zemmour] approvingly referred to people comparing Nazism with Islam.”
Muslim people do not share this tradition of adapting names and they never have. After all, Muslims seldom moved to a country outside of the context of invasion and this wasn’t to change until the 20th century when Muslims immigrated to countries for other reasons. Like Judaism, Islam is a religion of law but even more so. Islam requires not only material compliance of its followers but sets a legal and political order of which they are a part. Thus, the historical distinctions of Muslim countries (Caliph, Sultan, Emir, Sheik) are both religious and feudal titles.
Islam also took from Christianity its universal purpose. Islam sought to establish a universal caliphate. But the lector knows of this, as recent history does not cease to recall us that fundamental difference.
In that aspect, Islam is of all religions the closest one to modern totalitarian ideologies, because it seeks to change every detail of private life in a codified manner, and seeks to bring about these changes universally, willingly or by legitimate force. In short, Islam seeks to transform the individual and the world in their totality.
Hitler himself was an admirer of Islamic values, and said, quoted by Albert Speer:
“Theirs [mahomedans] was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to their faith. The Germanic people would have become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.”
The comparison of Islam and Nazism has at least this much relevance but, of course, it does not aim at saying that Muslims are Nazis, nor that Imams are Gestapo officers.
3. “[Zemmour] propagated the so-called ‘Great Replacement’ theory”
Here, there is no need even for discussion, let alone debate, but just for a brief word.
The ‘Great Replacement’ is but the junction of two simple facts. Firstly, contrary to America, which is based upon no ethnicity, France, as most nations or peoples in the Old World, is very much based upon ethnicity, although not limited by it. France emerged as a nation of people who had shared the same land, history, culture and even religion for 2000 years. In terms of ethnology, France is much closer to the Iroquoian confederation than to the USA. As General Charles De Gaulle famously said to an American diplomat telling him “I know France well, I have lived here for 10 years”, De Gaulle answered, “Well, we have for 2000 years!”
Now, the second idea is even more genuine: The fact that several hundred thousand migrants enter France each year, mainly from African and/or Muslim countries, and that the birthrate of women from these countries is on average twice that of white French women, mathematical law implies that there is a demographic landslide, or “Grand Remplacement” of “European” descendants. Whether it is desirable or not, whether it is even worth discussing, is a question begging to be answered.
So there isn’t anything for Mr Zemmour to propagate but a trivial collection of facts. Most of the people who are willing to vote for him would consider this a major issue independently of his candidacy. Someone ignorant of the ethnic change that France is going through was either in hibernation and has only just woken up, or a very biased leftist who would rather point out the risk of alien invasion than the risk of Islamisation.
4. “[He] argued that employers have a right to turn down black or Arab candidates.”
Zemmour indeed argues that it is an employer’s right to refuse or grant someone a position for any reason he should see fit, whether it is competence, character or skin colour. To discriminate is to choose. It is a most rational and simple argument: an employer is not a public service and refusing to give someone a job, lease him a car or a property cannot be earnestly considered as harm done to this person.
Let’s be clear, a crime committed for any reason related to race, sex, sexual orientation, colour, religion or even competence, regardless of the reason, is a crime and should be punished as such. But rejecting an application is not a crime. How could an act that is not a crime in itself, be called a crime once the intention underlying it is known? In the end, this is nothing but an impugnation of motives. Undoubtedly, society should in any way possible facilitate the life of those who suffer from objective physical and mental handicaps. I ask Professor Fassin and his Londoner friends: Is Muslim religion a mental illness? Is dark skin a physical handicap? Is sexual orientation an objective deficiency?
No, will they will inevitably answer, but it is perceived as such, and this law should be in effect until all prejudice has been removed from society. Should law have a curative purpose? Justice is absolute, and so are good and evil. Crime is a crime, regardless of the time and context. The circumstance may affect the gravity of it, but not the nature of the act. Therefore, by mindlessly stuffing everything they find disagreeable into the criminal category, the left yields to the reproach made to it by conservatives for two centuries: the progressive idea of justice a contingent one, they ultimately subscribe to sophism, that is believe in nothing except themselves.
The proof that recruitment discrimination cannot be called a crime or an offence, is that it is in practice undetectable. How do you prove that someone was hired or rejected based on their ethnicity rather than on their competence? In most cases, you cannot. How do you prove an organisation has a hiring bias? You have to organise tests, which is akin to pursuing a fly with a sledgehammer.
5. “He believes that political power should belong to men and that women’s role should be to have and raise children.’’
The French candidate says some qualities are more closely related to one or the other gender. He states that political power belongs by default to manhood. A clear example of this is the traditional virtue of virilitas so cherished by Republican Rome. For biological reasons, the functions of power, war, and political decision making were, for dozens of millennia, by default masculine functions. Those of education, housekeeping, cooking and, even I dare say, finance were by default feminine ones.
He is right. Of all the folks and communities of mankind ever known on this planet, there was never a single matriarchal society. Some societies are more matriarchal than others, but it is only relative and never absolute. Processor Fassin knows this perfectly well, for he is himself an anthropologist, and in order to disagree with Mr Zemmour, he would have to go against the scientific consensus in his own field.
This again should not be an inspiration for fixed laws in a Republic founded upon the principle of equality between individuals regardless of their sex, and it would be absurd for a patriot of the nation of Joan of Arc to try and relegate women to the household. But that it is not in any way part of Zemmour’s agenda, even by extrapolation.
6. “He has claimed to be on the side of General Bugeaud, who massacred Muslims during the colonisation of Algeria.”
None will disagree that the massacre of innocents can be excused or even explained. But then again, this is not what Zemmour did: Zemmour lauded a military man’s uncompromising patriotism. He did not excuse this particular command of Bugeaud to suffocate an entire tribe into the cave where they had taken refuge.
Being coherent with my own words, I believe that statues of General Lee should not be taken down in the US, because despite fighting for an evil cause, he was still a great military leader, a patriot, and even freed slaves that he should have received has inheritance, before the war. Alas, few heroes of American, French or British history were saints, and fewer even by modern standards of sanctity. If Lee is taken down, how long before Nelson, Napoleon, Churchill and De Gaulle receive the same fate?
To remind Anglo-Saxon readers of the historical context, one of the casuum belli of the French conquest of Algeria from 1830 onwards was to put an end to slave raids that had plagued the Mediterranean for a millennium. And this was far from being a pretext, as some historians like to put it. When the French expedition took Algiers it immediately freed several hundreds of French slaves – thousands of European slaves altogether. This excuses nothing but explains how the struggle between the Western and Muslim worlds is not a recent, superficial or arbitrary one, and how the situation cannot be naively diagnosed in all abstraction of history.
7. “[Zemmour] has contended that Marshal Pétain saved Jews.”
Marshal Pétain and the regime of Vichy generally speaking – despite being regimes founded upon the treason of the French nation, forsaking the alliance with Britain, and collaboration with Nazi Germany – spared France from total defeat. Fighting to the end would have meant that the whole of France would have been conquered and placed under direct German governance, like Poland, Czechia or Greece. One knows that in the latter countries, the proportion of Jews who died in the Holocaust reached 90%, in the case of Greece or the Netherlands. In France, it was around 10%. Vichy leaders still instinctively rejected Nazi racist axioms. In France, in Italy, in Spain, Jews undeniably found a better shelter from hatred and deportation than under direct German rule.
This does not mean that Mr Zemmour ignores the existence of the Vel d’Hiv deportation, of the Lois Juives, or of the militia’s massacres, and general servility of Vichy towards Germany. He acknowledged it and maintained his position all the same.
Be that as it may, this historical thesis was not at all invented by him. It was generally accepted in France, even defended by Jewish and Israeli historians, until the publication of Robert Paxton’s book Vichy France which condemned Vichy as altogether evil. Recently, an Israeli historian has published sources that demonstrate the active role of Vichy in attempting to protect French citizens, regardless of their religion, from the Gestapo and the SS.
I think that Pétain was a traitor to France, but history is complex. This matter is still an area of academic debate, and I believe it will forever remain a matter of opinion. Only the party that wants to censor the other one will truly be wrong.
8. “[He] would like the death penalty to be reinstated.”
One can reasonably disagree with Mr Zemmour, and join the liberals who believe, like Victor Hugo, that “Vengeance is human, Justice is divine. The State is in between, its role is to heal, to better the men.”
Nevertheless, support for the re-establishment of capital punishment is widespread among French people. Some months ago, the Rwandese refugee who burned the cathedral of Nantes, that had been left to roam about by the police because “He was not subject to detention under European laws of asylum” said the French interior Minister Darmanin, eventually found the primary target of his arson, the vicar of the cathedral, and stabbed him to death, in the Vendée. Most of the perpetrators of the past ten years were known to be dangerous by the intelligence services but were still left free because of lack of space in prisons or EU legal restrictions.
But there again, Mr Zemmour’s support for the death penalty is anecdotical in the greater picture of his battles and it is certainly not something he would have the leisure and popularity margin to reinstate if he managed to beat Le Pen and Macron.
As a way of conclusion, I will say that it matters greatly for foreign conservatives or reactionaries to understand their French comrades and comprehend the hope we put in Mr Zemmour. For every new decay brought by progressivism in any one of our nations inevitably ends up plaguing the other ones, and we have a common interest in vanquishing deconstructivism in the West as a whole. One could not forget how the French theory (it is a shame in itself that such devilry should be characterised as French) crept from the intellectual boroughs of Paris, insidiously wrecking itself on the shores of New England, and eventually mutated into the notorious, dreadful and destructive cancel culture that scourges our time.
The fact that a member of the Collège de France, pretty much the equivalent of Cambridge Trinity College in England, should write a derogatory article about a French presidential candidate in the British media demonstrates what is wrong with France’s establishment. The establishment of my country lives in an enclosed penthouse, more concerned about what foreign elites think of them than about what their own people think about them. Sound familiar?
Where their fate might be worse than that of Britain’s establishment, is that their minds and their logos are colonised by Anglo-Saxon structures, and they play the role of New-England progressives more readily than that of French scholars. Professor Fassin is probably eminent in his field, but in this particular case, he blatantly used his position and network at The Guardian to cast a stone at My Zemmour, because of political enmity. Even in the case that The Guardian did ask him for his contribution, he could have passed, quite obviously not being an expert in the matter.
I will also indulge in begging The Guardian, or any British media outlet, that if they should wonder about Mr Zemmour’s views they should simply ask him directly and let Professor Fassin return to his studies, by which he is certainly much beguiled so that he has no spare time to come down from Mount St Genevieve and seek quarrel in the political arena.
One last sting: The Guardian seems to gather and spread information about France only through those with whom they are in ideological communion; the same way that the American or Soviets informed themselves about the countries they invaded or ‘freed’, only with the local communists, pro-West or Shia Muslims. I think I am fair to call this a colonial method.
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On Freedom of Navigation
Amidst the present difficulties in transmitting knowledge from one generation of educated people to the next, one principle that seems to have been mislaid is freedom of navigation. This has been laid bare by commentary on the recent Anglo-American operations in the Red Sea against the Houthis. Hence, it is worth offering a short explanation of freedom of navigation: what it is, its history prior to its modern codified universalisation and its defences up to the present.
Before its codification by the United Nations, freedom of navigation was part of customary international law, by its nature quite distinct from how modern international law is established and enforced. It originated in the Dutch Republic’s rule of mare liberum (free seas), coined by influential Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in 1609, which considered neutral ships and their goods inviolable on the high seas. Naturally, this could benefit trading powers like the Dutch, but came into competition with competing Consolato customs. These were named after the Aragonese Consulate of the Sea, both a body to administer maritime law and a collection of maritime ordinances codified since at least 1494. These rules determined neutral ships could be attacked in times of war to seize enemy goods, but even on enemy ships neutral goods could not be taken. By the seventeenth century, Consolato was often paired with the concept of mare clausum (closed sea), coined in 1635 by English jurist John Selden, which held that areas of the sea could be entirely closed off from foreign shipping. Both principles were supported by the major naval powers of the day, including England, France and Spain.
As was the case with a number of pivotal concepts in European history, mare liberum was often fought for over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first by the Dutch alone but later by the nascent American Republic and the Russian Empire as a right of neutral states. The cause of freedom of navigation was greatly assisted during this period by the Dutch victory in the Eighty Years’ War against Spain, as well as the later decline of Spain and Portugal as dominant powers who had attempted to apply mare clausum to the New World’s seas. Another conceptual innovation emerged to resolve some discrepancies between the rival customs in 1702, as Dutch jurist Cornelius van Bynkershoek formulated that maritime dominion corresponded with the distance coastal cannons could effectively protect it; the range of the most advanced cannon at the time was three nautical miles. Beyond the Dutch, naval powers still employed the Consolato principle into the nineteenth century against other countries, especially during major conflicts, but this could be superseded in treaties by freedom of navigation. Ultimately, this became the case for all European powers at the end of the Crimean War in the 1856 Declaration of Paris Respecting Maritime Law, which synthesised the two customs into a rule that enemy goods were covered by a neutral flag whilst neutral goods could not be seized on enemy ships. Arguably, this built upon the Congress of Vienna’s grant of freedom of navigation to key European rivers, which constituted multiple states’ new borders and economic arteries, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The exceptions to the rule outlined by the 1856 declaration were effective blockade and contraband, whereas privateering (in other words, state-sanctioned piracy) was confirmed to be abolished. As Europe proceeded to dominate the world in the nineteenth century, so too did the inviolability of neutral commercial shipping and their freedom to navigate the seas as their juridically innocent business permitted.
Of course, the growth of freedom of navigation did not result in the disappearance of piracy, nor pirate states. For instance, the United States, Sweden and Sicily fought wars against the Barbary corsairs in the early nineteenth century to ensure the freedom of their merchant ships from ransom and enslavement in the Mediterranean, despite only Sicily possessing an obvious interest in the region. In recent weeks, the Houthis have proven themselves to be another such pirate state through their rather indiscriminate attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea. In response, Britain and America (with support from several other countries) have attempted to neutralise this threat to freedom of navigation under Operation Prosperity Guardian. In theory, this should be the least controversial Middle Eastern intervention conducted during this century thus far, since the Houthis are plainly violating the neutrality of benign ships under neutral flags. At the time of writing, there is no hint from the intervening powers of the neoconservative adventurism which defined the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor strong intentions to impose changes on Houthi internal affairs beyond the immediate issue at hand. In practice, the war in Israel has entirely toxified any discourse surrounding events in the Red Sea. Instead of realism, one witnesses what is allegedly another instalment of the clash of civilisations. Whatever the merits of Samuel Huntington’s thesis of contemporary world affairs, such hyperbolic reactions to events in the Red Sea overestimate their significance.
If America did not exist, it would be in India or China’s interest to assert freedom of navigation in the region due to its foundational importance to the global economy. Readers should bear in mind that the principle has only a tangential relationship to a nation’s trade policy. Although freedom of navigation is a precondition of free trade, it does not determine the extent to which a ship’s goods are impeded from accessing markets at port, only that the international movement of goods can occur without undue harassment. Perhaps a handful of countries at most could be expected to subsist today to a reasonable standard without substantial trade, an interesting notion in itself but beyond the scope of this article. Likewise, most, if not all, nations lack the naval strength to forcibly guarantee the security of their commercial shipping worldwide, given the sheer volume and frequency of post-containerisation international trade. This means freedom of navigation ought not only to be remembered by readers, but as a matter of historical preference and present necessity defended into the future.
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Britain could be left holding the bag over Ukraine
The new Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, in his first newspaper interview since taking up the position, called for British weapons manufacturers to set up shop in Ukraine and revealed discussions with Zelensky about the Royal Navy getting more involved in the Black Sea.
The biggest potential escalation was his suggestion that British military instructors be moved into Ukraine.
“I was talking today about eventually getting the training brought closer and actually into Ukraine as well.”
As of yet, the UK and allies have avoided a formal military presence in the conflict due to the risk of direct conflict with Russia, so these were major policy changes being floated.
The same day, former Russian President and now deputy chairman of the country’s influential Security Council, Dmitri Medvedev, posted on Telegram that such moves bring World War Three closer.
‘[This will] turn their instructors into a legal target for our armed forces… understanding perfectly well that they will be ruthlessly destroyed. And not as mercenaries, but namely as British NATO specialists.’
Just over two hours later, the Prime Minister had pushed back at the Defence Secretary’s comments telling reporters on the first day of his party conference there were no immediate plans for this:
“What the defence secretary was saying was that it might well be possible one day in the future for us to do some of that training in Ukraine. But that’s something for the long term, not the here and now. There are no British soldiers that will be sent to fight in the current conflict.”
Leaving aside Mr Shapps’ questionable ministerial record and lack of obvious suitability for his brief, this incident (which was conveniently brushed under the carpet of the Tory conference) raises some serious questions about decision making at the MoD.
Was this interview cleared with No. 10 and if so, are they now backtracking? Or did the Defence Secretary go off script and unsuccessfully try to use his own initiative?
Or was this government floating an idea and testing the waters? If so, they got their answer quick.
The sight of British soldiers returning in body bags in an election year might not be a big vote winner.
Government’s decision to ramp up support for Ukraine and double down on its all-or-nothing position comes as cracks in the alliance grow wider by the day.
As all this was unfolding, Slovakia was electing its next parliament, with an anti-Ukraine party winning the election. The country has already halted military aid to Kiev, joining the Hungarians.
Just two weeks ago, one of Ukraine’s strongest allies, compared it to ‘a drowning man’.
A dispute over grain exports got so bad that the Polish president said:
‘The drowning man is really clinging to anything available and it is somehow what the situation between Poland and Ukraine is like today… it is clinging to anything available. Can we hold grudges against them? Of course, we can. Do we have to act in a way to protect ourselves from being hurt by a drowning one, of course, we have to act in a way to protect ourselves from being harmed by the drowning one, because once the drowning man hurts us, it will not get help from us.’
This was quickly followed by the Polish prime minister announcing: “We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons.”
Next week will see Poland have its own elections, and like Slovakia, an anti-Ukraine party is doing very well in the polls, with hopes to be kingmaker.
The United States is not immune from political division over the conflict, with various presidential candidates from Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy to Robert F Kennedy Jr calling for its end.
Domestic political pressure and war fatigue aren’t the only factors creating friction between Western capitals. After 20 months of being told victory is round the corner, reality is starting to bite.
This week NATO’s most senior military official told the Warsaw Security forum the West is running out of ammunition for Ukraine. Admiral Rob Bauer said: “The bottom of the barrel is now visible.”
UK Defence Minister James Heappey also added that the West’s stockpiles were ‘looking a bit thin’.
This might explain the eagerness to have British weapons manufacturers ramp up production by setting up factories in Ukraine, but it does not explain the stubborn continuation of a failed strategy.
A policy should be judged by its results and as of writing, Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of its young men, millions more have fled, its economy is decimated, and its state is on life-support.
Russia, meanwhile, has weathered the sanction-induced storm which turned out to be a strong breeze rather than the predicted tornado. Its economy has not only held up but is on track to grow.
NATO’s eastern flank, be it Turkey, Hungary, now Slovakia and potentially Poland, is already publicly disagreeing and diverging from the Washington-London line, and this is likely to continue.
And the Washington line, as we have only seen too well over the last decade, is liable to change rapidly depending on the outcome of the next election.
So, can Britain afford to continue its Johnsonian zeal for trying to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian, or is it time to take back control of our foreign policy and start thinking seriously about Europe’s long-term security architecture?
I would hope that the government concerned with ‘long-term decisions for a brighter future’ would be reassessing its policy.
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Little England: Bekonscot, Le Corbusier and the Housing Crisis
The Morris men stand, hankies aloft, in the same pose they’ve held for decades. The little girl tugs at her father’s sleeve.
“Who are they, daddy?”
Her father pauses for a moment, scratches his chin and ventures a guess.
“They’re Irish dancers.” He says, “I think.”
The girl looks confused.
“I mean, I don’t know why they’re wearing lederhosen.”
Puzzled, he contemplates the scene further. I walk on.
BEKONSCOT
In 1927 Roland Callingham’s wife, tiring of her husband’s toy railway, insisted that he take his trains outside. Callingham, a well-to-do city accountant, purchased four acres of land on the outskirts of the Buckinghamshire town of Beaconsfield and, with the assistance of his gardener, W.A. Berry, began work on a model village, complete with a high street, church and railway, each constructed at the scale of one inch to one foot. Callingham dubbed his creation ‘Bekonscot’.
Originally intended as a private diversion, Bekonscot opened to the public in 1929, and soon became a popular tourist attraction, incorporating, in time, seven model villages. Initially, Bekonscot kept pace with the changing architectural styles of the times. However, a reactionary purge in the 1990s saw most modern buildings removed and the villages returned to a thirties aesthetic. Thus, what was originally conceived as a chance to see the everyday world in miniature, is increasingly a museum of a bygone Britain. Notably, the villages’ high streets are devoid of the vape shops and Turkish barbers that lend colour to the contemporary streetscape. Today, concessions to modernity are confined to a handsome Art Deco tube station, a few authentically drab office buildings and some token Arts and Crafts houses.‘THE BEAUTIFUL’
The week before I visited Bekonscot, the government, determined to accelerate the rate of housebuilding across Britain, announced plans to build 300,000 new homes annually. Earlier in the summer, Angela Rayner announced plans to drop a requirement that new houses be ‘beautiful’, dismissing the old rules as ‘ridiculous’. ‘Beautiful’ explained Rayner ‘means nothing, really.’
For our deputy prime minister; her mind addled, like most of her generation, by postmodernism; ‘beautiful’ is a concept too subtle to be reduced to simple language, and as such, is essentially meaningless. For the modern liberal, ‘beauty’ can be filed alongside ‘female’ and ‘nation’ as terms too slippery to contain meaning.
This does not mean that the Angela Rayners of the world fail to recognise beauty (or, for that matter, ugliness) when they see it. It is rather that they have taught themselves to disregard the evidence of their eyes and dismiss all aesthetic judgments as purely subjective. But how smart must one be to understand that the average street in Salisbury, say, or Stratford-upon-Avon, is more beautiful than its equivalent in Salford or South Croydon? This is a truth that I am sure even Angela Rayner would acknowledge, if pushed.FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
Why, among those less sophisticated than the average Labour cabinet minister, is ‘modern’ often a synonym for ‘ugly’? There is no reason why contemporary buildings should not be beautiful. Modern architects can do ‘spectacular’ well – witness London’s ‘objects’ – the statement buildings that litter the City and Docklands. But such edifices, no matter how impressive, do not belong to any regional or national tradition. The Gherkin would not look out of place in Los Angeles, say, or Lagos. Further, every ‘object’ is an experiment, and if it fails to pay off, a city must live in its shadow.
By contrast, tradition makes for attractive architecture. Ugliness is seldom worth repeating and does not endure. In aesthetics, as in politics, however, the liberal distrusts tradition, preferring theory. In our enlightened age, it is not enough for a building or artwork to be beautiful, rather it has to satisfy certain theoretical criteria. One only needs eyes to judge how a building looks. It requires an education to understand what a building means.
Only an architectural theorist of Le Corbusier’s brilliance could have built a city as inhuman as Chandigarh. By contrast, the numberless attractive villages that dot the British countryside were built, in the main, by unlettered craftsmen, men who would have found modern architectural theory incomprehensible. The vernacular architectural styles immortalised in Bekonscot evolved across centuries and were to inform the styles of suburban housing into the immediate post-war era.
The latter half of the twentieth century saw the defeat of tradition and the victory of theory, in politics, in art, and in architecture. Just as, for the political utopian, one solution (the common ownership of the means of production, for example, or the disappearance of the state and the triumph of the market) is sufficient to meet the needs of all human societies, so, for Le Corbusier, the principle of ‘form following function’ was a universal maxim. The great brutalist dreamed of a world remade in concrete and glass. Le Corbusier spoke of architecture when he maintained that ‘[In] Oslo, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Algiers, Port Said, Rio or Buenos Aires, the solution is the same…’ but the sentiment is echoed throughout radical literature.
The Le Corbusiers of the post-war era have left Britain an uglier place. I am confident that, by the time Labour leaves office, many of Britain’s towns will be uglier still.
Britain needs new houses, of course. Would I feel the same sense of trepidation if acres of countryside were to disappear beneath dozens of (full-scale) Bekonscots? No. But, alas, the philistines hold power and are intent on despoiling our countryside with more of the soulless Legolands that litter the outskirts of our towns.
In Bekonscot, of course, it is forever 1933. Were things really better then? Life today is undoubtedly easier, but in many respects, Britain is a less pleasant place in which to live, with the cultural and economic revolutions of the post-war era having eroded social solidarity and trust. This decline finds a strange parallel in the quality of our built environment, as the reins of power passed to those less concerned with ensuring that England looked like England.
Tellingly, overseas visitors to Bekonscot seem to be having a great time. Perhaps Bekonscot looks more like the England they hoped to see than whatever they have found outside.THE LAST DANCE
This is the future we have chosen, or at least, the future that was chosen for us. We could choose another. Conservatives should reject the mistaken idea that the cultural, social (and yes architectural) changes we are living through are inexorable and unalterable.
Which brings me back to the incident with the Morris dancers.
By the late nineteenth century, Morris was all but dead. A small band of Victorian enthusiasts recognised the tradition’s value and fought to ensure it did not die. Folk dance has never been fashionable, much less ‘useful’ (I should imagine that it would be difficult to convince Angela Rayner of its value) but England would be that little bit poorer if it were to disappear.
Likewise, the antique crafts required to build cottages and cathedrals were passed down across generations and are largely lost now. We are poorer for their being lost. But they could be revived. It only requires will.
Bekonscot’s brochure describes a ‘little piece of history that is forever England.’ There is no reason why the full-size England outside of Bekonscot’s walls should not remain forever England also. Traditions are only truly lost if we stop fighting for them
