Contender for the Conservative Party leadership and Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has declared that he would widen the scope of our PREVENT programme to include those with “anti-British” attitudes. He didn’t bother to define those attitudes but no doubt they include equality, diversity and inclusion to the extent that I will be sent to the Sensitivity Hub in the Leveled Up North for saying I don’t think young girls should cut their breasts off and that a wider cuisine base is the price worth paying for a million immigrant.
British values have had to be invented in the 21st century because they never existed. I’m sorry, but it’s true – otherwise David Cameron wouldn’t have had to try so hard to either define them or legislate for their respect. I still remember that cringe Google advert from circa 2014 that asked “what are British values” and delighted in showing us a picture of two men wearing kilts getting married. But culture, like air, is only felt in its absence. What’s worse, the definitions that have been foisted upon us of “British values” are only British in the sense that they can be found in Britain, but they are not uniquely British. Is it wrong to say that most of Europe respects the values of “equality, diversity and inclusion”?
Diversity built Britain, claims a fifty pence piece with a smug Rishi Sunak behind it. This is only true if you buy the Blairite lie that Britain was born in 1997 and actively chose to depart from its millennium-long history thereafter. Yet, these invented values are clearly not powerful enough to inspire the one thing that keeps a country together – loyalty. The chairman of this publication asked the question “what is a nation if it cannot inspire loyalty?” but neglected to interrogate the cultural dimension of that question, focusing on the legal questions of identity. This is like describing a human in terms of their body only, and making no distinction between living or dead bodies; a body needs a soul to be a person. If you don’t believe me, try and sit in the presence of the corpse of someone you know.
It does not have to be this way; and, when you climb out of the political rabbit hole built for us, you realise it actually is not this way. “Britain” is stamped across everything and pushed into your face at every opportunity – and I’ll tell you what Britishness is shortly. Instead, there is a richer dust beneath that impoverished earth that can be found, if only you look for it: Englishness.
The left fears Englishness because it is real. It does not fear Englishness because it does what the left wants to do, and better – it does not offer “an inclusive and diverse” society – but they fear it because it inspires so much loyalty and with so much ease. And as with oxygen, you only find it when you’ve been denied it for so long; but this actually makes finding it easier since we are so starved of it already. You can find it in a country pub, at a church fête, at a garden party, at a Christmas church service, in the architecture of Buckingham palace, in the music of Herder and Elgar, in the tailors of Saville Row – in short, in all the places you would not find anywhere else in the world. You don’t find it in a cup of tea, or in a queue, or the other twee nonsense that is so important to the 21st century project of multiculturalism.
You have to find these things, though. They are hidden, and consciously so – otherwise they threaten the damp, empty and meaningless focus of loyalty you’re supposed to feel, “British”. And Englishness threatens Britishness because it’s so much more powerful. I don’t blame the SNP or Plaid Cymru or Sinn Fein for being so successful. I blame our gutless, cowardly elites.
It wasn’t always like this. Britain and “Britishness” was only ever a legal identity supported by an English hegemony. There’s a reason that, for so long, writers would use the words interchangeably – it’s because they were. Englishness was unique and different to Scottishness (Welshness doesn’t exist), and quite clearly the animating spirit, the soul of Britishness. Scottish and Irish people might complain today that their culture was “erased” by the British state under an English hegemony, but to the victor, the spoils. England and Scotland had the same population sizes for centuries, and went to war so very often, it’s hardly surprising that one of them would eventually triumph.
English people were aware of this. It’s no surprise that Enoch Powell spoke about this – typically eloquently and with deeper understanding than any living politician – and urged that “Britain” concede its diminished place in the world, surrendering the Empire (and its step-child, the Commonwealth), instead accepting that England is the only real entity worth loyalty. Powell thought that clinging on to a vaguely defined “Britain” at a time when her seapower was basically gone, the massive waves of immigration were becoming the norm, and the European Economic Community was expanding, meant the hegemonic English identity would be turned in on itself, swallowed up, and hollowed out by the desire to make “Britain” as palatable as possible. As with everything else, on this issue Time has proved to be Enoch’s greatest ally, to the extent that David Lammy – who has no cultural or ethnic connection to Englishness – can call himself English. The only reason he can, is because Englishness and Britishness are still mistaken for one another. We have made the mistake of letting an English hegemony be captured by those who hate England.
But this hegemony is almost dead: whilst the last bits of “Englishness” that have dominated “Britishness” are swallowed up, it became the project of the Left in the post-Thatcher years to become even more aggressive in simultaneously undoing that hegemony whilst also turning it in on itself. That first part, of undoing this hegemony, was fuelled by Leftist desires for “equality” between Scotland and Wales, and England, and the farcical idea of Britain as a “nation of nations”, culminating in the devolution programmes that created the fake nation of Wales (still a principality of England, really) and threw the rabid dog of Scotland a steak as if that would satisfy its hunger. You don’t feed the strays.
Peter Hitchens’ Abolition of Britain catalogues that second arm of the Leftists strategy, of taking the ‘kind and gentle’ civilisation of Britain and weaponising it against the England upon which it was built. Another article published by the Mallard, written by Eino Rantanen, put this point well – “British friendliness has created not only complacency, but rather powerlessness in the face of people and ideologies that have no qualms asserting themselves, often violently”.
One violent ideology of this kind is the hated enemy of Blairism. Blairism was the final legal victory of the Leftist assault on English hegemony: again, the Blairite elements of the British state have been rightly identified before, but I will list them for the sake of explaining my point: the Supreme Court (which is a nonsense name, the Monarch in Parliament is still supreme); devolution, as I say above; the eradication of our educational heritage by devaluing university; and so on.
But, this publication has made it its job to be more optimistic, or so I’m told. The situation may look bleak, and I doubt I’ve helped, and this next point might make me sound even more blackpilled: the British project is nearly exhausted. The values that had to be invented in the sundering of the English hegemony of Britain were a sort of proto-globalism – that triumvirate of mediocrity, “equality, diversity and inclusion” have proven to be as empty as the French Revolution’s “liberte, egalite et fraternite” – but some kind of pseudo-cultural identity was needed to keep Britain going. In a way, the Left has dug its own grave, because it took away the only real substance that gave Britain an identity, and replaced it with a set of contradictory inventions.
And you can see this new public culture everywhere. Indeed, it is stamped across everything, in such a way that you cannot avoid it: for example, despite the fact that June has (somehow, unquestioningly) become “pride month”, there are still “pride parades” everywhere and all the time, and in such public spaces that you need to actively try to avoid them – an inconvenience that they are counting on, of course. And “pride parades” are not even about being gay anymore, or LGBT, or whatever, they’re just an excuse to get drunk and be promiscuous in the street, and you can take part – provided you wear the dress and make up and face paint necessary to mark you out as “one of us”, whoever the “us” is.
Contrast this, quite literally, with the fact that Eid is celebrated by thousands of Muslims on the streets of London, a religion that is less tolerant of homosexuality than Christianity. And again, you don’t even really need to be Muslim to take part in the celebration of Eid. The fact that these contrasting belief systems are publicly supported and worshipped is the sign of the absence of a communal identity, not its existence; deep and contradictory belief systems cannot be present in the same collective identity. It is just proof that different collectives live in the same space now; and the simultaneous celebration and sublimation of each is the only way their contradiction can be held in check. In the same way that Patrick Deneen wrote in Why Liberalism Failed that the expansion of atomistic individualism required a stronger state, so too does multiculturalism (another invented British “value”).
Then there’s the fact that every advert – every advert – is full of black people (or, if you want to see intersectional London’s one-step-further form of this, spot the Tube advert with an interracial lesbian couple in which both are wearing face masks). To such an extent that British people think the British population is 20% black (it’s 3%, by the way); and never mind the fact that black people are not Britian’s biggest ethnic minority, we now have a “Black history month”, apparently. You would be forgiven for thinking we lived in America – but maybe that’s the point.
Where is the room for Englishness in all of this? That’s just the point: there isn’t any, and by design. The desire to strip the England out of Britain by the Left meant that Englishness has to be sublimated in order to for “Britishness” to be viable. But here is the optimistic point of this article: the twin facts that the British project is fraying, and that English culture has to be suppressed, points to a single, irresistible conclusion. Englishness is both too powerful for the new British “identity” to counter, and that it is ripe for rediscovery.
The final point here is that, the word “rediscovery” is intentional – Englishness has to be found, partly because it is so smothered by that new British pseudo-culture I lay out above, but also because real culture is physical and tangible. You can find English culture hiding in an Anglican church, in a garden party, in the squat village pubs – basically, in all the places that are unique to England and around which a recognisable pattern of behaviour has been built. Englishness can be found once again – you just need to look for it.
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The Right in Academia and Politics
As a student at university, it’s easy to be aware that academia is dominated by the left. After all, it is the voices on the left we hear the most. Added to this, a Conservative Party that does not look very conservative at the moment and almost like they are out of ideas – just take a look at the agendas for the Conservative Party Agendas for 2023 and 2022. But over the summer, two academic conferences of note took place, which should bring a glimmer of hope to conservative students.
The first, held at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge from the 6th to 7th July 2023, on British Intellectual Conservatism: Past and Present. This was organised by ResPublica and the University of Public Service. The second, held in the House of Lords from the 14th to 15th September 2023, on Margaret Thatcher: Her Life, Work, and Legacy. This had been organised by two research centres at the University of Hull. The first research centre was the Centre for Legislative Studies, which is led by Lord Norton of Louth, the second by Dr. Matt Beech who leads the Centre for British Politics.
The conferences, naturally, had different focuses but as a participant at both – and having had time to reflect on them, there are four things I found in common. These conferences were full of enriching academic thought, they were both thought provoking, provided a space to be reflective, and to think ahead to the future. In the current climate when it looks as though the Conservative Party will be unsuccessful at the 2024 General Election, both conferences highlighted the need for a better vision.
The two conferences in their own way provided a means to push back against the narrative we see that the right are out of ideas. Rather, the conference on British Intellectual Conservatism: Past and Present consisted of several panels, from Conservatism Today to addressing Free Speech and Conservatism. There were also two panels dedicated to two of the great leaders of the Conservative and Unionist Party, a panel on the Age of Churchill, another on the Age of Thatcher. All in all, the conference did exactly as the name of the conference said it would. A key focus of the conference was on the works of Roger Scruton and bringing his ideas, which may have been forgotten to the forefront. There is much to be learnt from this conference.
For the conference on Margaret Thatcher, many ideas were shared. The main takeaway raising the issue that politicians today do not have a long-term vision. Many who praise Liz Truss and her allies say “she did what Thatcher did” but what people fail to recognise and remember: Thatcher spent many years developing her ideas with a team before those ideas became policy.
There are lessons to be learnt from the conferences. It is people, no matter their role in politics, whether they work in academia, policy or aspire to be an elected representative, who need to take a step back. There are many great people we can learn from, but the problem with the world today is everyone is looking for the next great thing. The rivers of free-flowing conversation of ideas from conservative academics and politicians needs to be opened up before anything else can happen.
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Why We Won’t Publish the Word ‘Woke’
As of today, the Mallard is no longer publishing articles that include the word ‘woke’, in either print or online.
Too many submissions, not just to the Mallard, but other publications – have become reliant on this word to explain away current trends that people find unappealing, yet cannot articulate why beyond anything other than this word. It is the responsibility of all outlets to contribute to the public discourse, and when a word, concept, idea, or individual, fails to contribute to the discourse – they have to be removed.
When pundits of the right use ‘woke’, they are using a word spawned by the online Left to denote their being ‘awake’ to the ‘injustices’ of the world, which are usually spawned from an ideological conviction rather than an actual understanding of the complex issues of the world. It suggests these people – the ‘woke’ left – are awake to the things that we are not, as if they have some deep insight that surpasses the average person. It is simply the latest expression of ‘real consciousness’ derived from Marxism.
Of course, we all know that the word is used sarcastically – but to use it at all is to make the eternal mistake of the Right, and to fight the Left on their own terms. We have been making this mistake for seventy years, and to reverse this trend, we need to stop appealing to their language, their values, their goals.
But even when the word is used derisively, it adds virtually nothing. Issues around pronouns and bathrooms pale in comparison to the economic, cultural, and demographic changes brought about by the respective trends of globalism, liberalism, and immigration. There is nothing substantively different in the current cultural trends than in the previous cultural trends. What is happening today should not be described with a new word, because what is happening today is not new. That is the reality of where we are now – ‘woke’ is not sufficiently different from what came before it to really merit a separate topic of discussion. It is just an extension of the logic of the sexual revolution, the Civil Rights era, and the great liberalisation of the last sixty years.
One of our assistant editors, William Yarwood, last year recorded a short podcast begging us to stop calling groups like Antifa ‘fascists’ or the Left ‘the real racists’, and recognise that they are just communists. Stop calling the Left ‘woke’ as shorthand for a broad range of things you just ‘don’t like’.
It is useless to say ‘look, I agree with what they stand for, I just don’t like how they’re going about it’. Then your disagreement is technical, it is not fundamental, so really you’re just the ones putting the brakes on their movement. They will come for you eventually, so you might as well recognise that now.
Calling something ‘woke’ is a lazy caricature that lets (what passes for) the right wing commentariat get away with murder; the liberals of yesteryear are allowed to displace conservative voices in media, politics, and culture. They pretend, in their sarcastic overtones, that leftists are weak and hypersensitive, when in reality they want to put children on hormone blockers, let men into womens’ changing rooms, open our borders to people who hate us, and teach the next generation that they have nothing to gain from the civilisation that birthed them.
These individuals are not weak. These people are not hypersensitive. Instead, they pass laws to put people in prison if they so much as joke about them. The notion these people are weak is a reflection of decades of failure of conservatives to actually do anything about them. If these individuals were weak, they would not find it so easy to break down the barriers that protect the most vulnerable in society: women and children.
These are not just simple activists, by the way. They are in our institutions, running our universities, pioneering our civil service, ‘decolonising’ our curricula, all the while entrenching their culture by building parallel careers that have no real world purpose or function. The massive, tumorous growth of the ‘human resources’ machine has seen to it that busy body unemployable humanities graduates have a reason to exist once more, only now it is self-perpetuating cancer that simultaneously cannot abide the existence of leftist heresy whilst relying on it like a parasite.
And as we see continuously, the online right is just as bad. If there are necessary discussions about poverty, living crises, genuine injustices that actually harm peoples’ lives, the right shrieks ‘woke!’ in such a hypersensitive way that the actual discussion disappears behind parody and caricature. TalkRadio’s infamous Mike Graham recently told an Extinction Rebellion member that we can ‘grow concrete’ in an effort to ‘own the lib’ – to which the XR member, who is stupid for different reasons, was left speechless. By consequence, Mike Graham made XR look reasonable – an own-goal, if ever there was one.
When war broke out in Ukraine, it was necessary for the right to attempt to make sense of it. This was done well in some circles – with people drawing attention to the Realist school Regardless of your thoughts on the Realist school, it was undoubtedly an intellectual contribution to the discourse. If you looked at the mainstream discourse however, you would know nothing of this contribution. Instead, it became another flashpoint to discuss this word, those they associate with it, and how these people were ‘weak’, ‘hypersensitive’ and made it so we were incapable of fighting a war against Putin.
It couldn’t possibly be that nuclear war is a possibility, or even – as the neoconservative lobby implicitly recognises but refuses to admit – that we have nothing to gain from getting involved in the war. No, it must be the woke. We end up in some perverse eternal Spy vs Spy scenario, where ‘woke warriors’ seek out racism/sexism/whateverism in any place they can find it, while the ‘common sense rightists’ only try to define what they consider ‘woke’ to make it work, rather than criticise it on its own grounds.
So we are not publishing the word any longer. Here is a list of publications that are likely interested: The Sun; TalkRadio; The Critic; Compact; Breitbart; GB News. I am sure they will find your work fascinating. We won’t.
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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.
