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If There is Hope, It Lies in the NIMBYs

By Bukes — 1 year ago

~ To my good friend Chris, who – despite the best available treatment – continues to suffer with YIMBY brainrot. ~

If there was hope, it must lie in the NIMBYs, because only there in those nonconforming disregarded boomers, ~22 per cent of the population of Britannia, could the force to destroy the regime ever be generated. The regime could not be overthrown from within a newbuild. It is them and them alone who are capable of preventing further mass migration into these isles. Collective animosity to the transformation of our country over the last seventy years can only be galvanised through the emergence of direct and inescapable negative externalities of the immigrant population being here.

The NIMBY’s dug-in heels expose the costs of the unnatural population boom that has been imposed on us, through hospital appointment delays, waiting lists, the lack of available school placements, etc. and through these problems the British are made incapable of following the path of least resistance and fleeing their local ship and scurrying to cheaper houses elsewhere. NIMBYism will push us all against the wall and ensure we confront the real and existential threat facing our people.

Let us suppose we disregard the NIMBYs, fall to the knees of our enemies, and beg them to build more houses regardless of the protestations of white Lib Dem voters: for whom would they really be for? Such housing would only be accessible to the middle class and subsidised immigrants.

Around 80% of the population increase since 2001 has been due to immigration. Many settlements across the country such as Sunderland have seen a population decrease since 2001, yet have had vast newbuild suburbs tacked on around the area, so it has to be stressed that these houses being built are not for those already here.

The goal of house building is instead an attempt to maintain a semblance of stability as our occupation government intends to push immigration each year into the millions. The price of housing can never be brought down under this arrangement. All we can currently control locally in our own communities is how much space is opened up for displacement populations to be moved in. For a country that has had a negative birth-rate for decades, you would think that there would be no seething cries for concreting over the remaining pleasant lands unless there were some unnatural force being pulled forth from abroad artificially ballooning the demand for housing.

Quell your trivial lamentations, for if we are unable to own homes and the rent becomes too high we can always live with our families and they (the potential repopulators) can continue living elsewhere. The gap between rental supply and demand is like a Thermopylaen dam, holding back the forces of change and securing what remains of the villages and towns that we grew up in.

It is worth looking at the impulse towards YIMBYism before continuing on with the defence of NIMBYism. YIMBYs are, basically, a self-interested cohort of deracinated individuals incapable of feeling any sincere communitarian connection to the country they purport to care about. No one who ascribes to YIMBYism in the present could ever truly be right wing, and they are certainly not nationalists by any real definition.

The motivation for YIMBYs is the desire for personal material gain irrespective of the consequences to the wider nation as a whole. You would have to be deeply, spiritually indolent to be aware of the racial dimension to the present struggle yet continue to spend your time focused on pushing for as many things to be constructed as possible (lest the Roman goddess Maia smite you down from her Olympian high-rise building).

This can all be contrasted with NIMBYs, where, on the surface it seems to be primarily a cause wrought from self-interest, yet there is an implicit racialism, or at least communal collectivism, that animates them into spending so much of their time trying to stop the construction of anything near their homes.

There is a subconscious understanding granted to NIMBYs, by their blood and bones, that any and all development is wedded to the immigration issue, even if they do not articulate their reasoning as such. Even if they are outwardly liberal and vote for the uniparty, in one garish form or another, they have still been compelled to try and halt the stampede of construction; compelled by grander tribal considerations beyond their conscious control and far beyond the petty desires of their local area.

NIMBYs, God bless them, sit atop the large ball and chain shackled to the YIMBY bug man that is desperately trying to claw the nation towards total multiracial capitalist dystopia, under the guise of it being ‘based’ someday.

The NIMBYs, by their actions, are making it as difficult as possible for those in power to bring about their desired thousand-year panopticonic hell of global technocratic control. They exclaim with righteous fury ‘the character of the area will change’ and, with this implicitly reactionary rallying cry, they proclaim a stand is being taken in defence of what our ancestors left for us; in defence of what is ours, in defence of what we must dutifully preserve for those that will come after us. If you oppose these sentiments and side with the YIMBY cause of pro-building you are anti-white.

Who else is deserving of praise when these issues are discussed in our circles but the late great Richard Beeching, without whose cuts to our rail infrastructure we would be deprived of rural Britain in its frozen primordial state. This is the power of Levelling Down, the inadvertent preservation of what really matters, of what we conjure in our mind’s eyes when we hear the word ‘England’.

What would the demography and texture of life of rural areas look like had those arterial transport lines not been severed by the British Railways Board at that moment in time? Those geniuses of bureaucracy looked only at immediate cost-saving measures yet ensured much of Britain would progress far slower than the urban warts in the fore, much like how Eastern Bloc states were shielded from decades of societal and cultural degeneration occurring in the west.

This has already played itself out before in our past. In Victorian Britain, Peterborough and Swindon were enlarged and urbanised due to their status as railway towns, and in contrast, towns such as Frome and Kendal remained intact due to being bypassed by the main lines. What could be argued to have been unfortunate then has been insulating for rural areas affected in the same way now.

It is far harder to displace local economies and people when there is simply no infrastructure to enable newcomers moving in, and those in power know this. Even in official government reports, our overlords lament how the rural areas of our country continue to be white spaces (in contrast to our grey polyglot citadels to nowhere), which has only been possible because of our inefficient and underdeveloped infrastructure.

Even setting aside the more esoteric takes on NIMBYism, NIMBYs have plenty of legitimate reasons to be opposed to construction in the areas they live in. Villages and towns throughout the country are under threat of being subsumed into a mass of soulless commuter zones around the nearest city. Everything is set to be absorbed into a blob of suburban prison cells without community or belonging, all to line the pockets of parasitic housing companies and give ascent to the ethnic machinations of our destructors.

People who live in these places know that expansion means that everything outside of their front door will look and feel more like London and they correctly reject it. People instinctively recoil at the efficiency with which 5G towers were pockmarked across our landscape during the Covid ‘Lockdowns’ and people are right to be repelled by all of the slick technological wonders of ‘smart homes’ sold to us by our masters. None of these things are congruent with how anyone deep-down wants Britain to be.

YIMBYism is deceptive in its overall presentation as being the sensible or reasonable option, in contrast to the supposed extreme positions of many NIMBYs (which is a self-own in its own right), but YIMBYs do not actually care about real development of this country. Most, if not all, of the real solutions that would give us good-quality, affordable housing would be contrary to a policy of deregulating the economy and doing whatever international finance asks of us to be done to our land and people.

Such solutions would likely be decried as socialism or communism and with it the YIMBY would expose himself as but a pawn of the oligarchs, no longer a Briton in character or spirit. These points though are a distraction away from what really matters and such policy debates can only be relevant in a post-regime world without the albatross of near-imminent demographic erasure around our neck. The elephant in the room is quickly forgotten about if you even momentarily entertain the notion of house prices mattering beyond any other silly partisan issue discussed in Parliament.

But it is not just housing that is in contention. All forms of expansion and growth are, in the long-term, detrimental to our people whilst we are occupied. Everything done freely in our liberal, capitalist country in the last 50 or so years has been to the detriment of the people our economy is meant to be built around. Every power plant built or maintained allows Amazon warehouses to keep their lights on. Every railway built or maintained ensures employers can reasonably expect you to submit to the Norman Tebbit mindset for how we are to live and work. Every new motorway has facilitated increased population mobility and with it the new motley generation of white collar serfs defend their creators, scuttling across Britain’s surface unable to understand why the older, whiter parts of the country might have deep-rooted connections to the places they live.

This new generation, marketed as the ‘Young Voters’ or ‘Young People’, do not really exist in the same way that Boomers and Gen Xers do. Trying to appeal to or identify with this spectral universal generation of youths is to view these issues through an inherently post-racial lens, and by extension, to misunderstand the driving motivations of NIMBYism. The older generations, which are the bulk of those that sympathise with NIMBYism, are the only ones that matter politically and economically and counter-signalling them is implicitly a form of anti-white hatred.

The temporarily-embarrassed plutocrats in our midst are becoming more and more apoplectic when confronted with the reality that the vast majority of the British people want nothing to do with Singapore-style excess capitalism, no matter how desperately they attempt to sell to them the potential material gains and goodies.

We should aspire to be more like Iran, a Tehran-on-Thames, a country that actively restrains the degree to which businesses can expand so that everything stays small and localised. People yearn for flourishing high streets and dignified work local to where they were born, something Iran has succeeded at maintaining with its constitution and system of dominant cooperatives and Bonyads. This is tangential to the NIMBY/YIMBY divide but integral for understanding what is going on.

The British people want the things that they care about protected and secured and valued above the interests of capital or the growth of the economy. Our people have simply had enough of growth, progress and rapid change that they did not vote for, and their views on construction and economics are shaped by that impetus. Brexit Bonyads are inevitable.

If anything is to be conceded to the YIMBYs, it is that their urge to make things more efficient is understandable (natural really for any European man) and a good impulse to have. However, this impulse is being exploited against us, a form of suicide via naivety, where we continue pursuing these instincts in spite of the fruits of said efficiency. My position on nuclear power plants would probably be different if we were the ones in power, or perhaps the small percent chance of something going wrong and having all of Britain’s wildlife poisoned would prevent me from ever endorsing them.

Let us suppose we put pressure on our current regime, a regime similar to the Soviet Union except without any of its upsides, to build a nuclear power plant: can we trust that the diversity hires, rotten civil service and corner-cutting private contractors will not bring about a disaster worse than what occurred at Chernobyl?

Point being, many things which are bad for us now are not bad for us in principle (and vice versa), something atom cultist YIMBYs are incapable of understanding. YIMBYs are equally incapable of understanding why one might be averse to scientific innovations that amount to playing God and making Faustian economic bargains. Money spent on scientific research is better spent on just paying people to leave.

There is an alternative lens to look at everything through though. For those that do not just want to talk all day about nuclear power plants with people that wear polyester suits, for those that have higher values beyond ‘Jee-Dee-Pee’, for those that are capable of having principles they would put before their immediate personal comfort, there is the true way forward.

It is our duty to be revolutionaries, in the vein of Hereward the Wake, villainous rebels resisting the occupation government perched above us. NIMBYism is a successful strategy for a time, this time, in which we have no realistic chance at having power. Frustrating outcomes and disrupting their long march onwards is all we have in our illusory democracy.

Inefficiency is a good thing. We must crave blackouts like houseplants crave sunlight. Our only hope for liberation and true prosperity lies with our regime being as broken as possible. Our people must be pulled from their comfortable position in the warm, crimson-coloured bathwater and alerted to the fragility of their collective mortality. The international clique and their caustic bulldozer of modern progress now have a sputtering engine; it is all grinding to a halt and there lies the hope for our future.

Do not fret! Do not return like a battered housewife to those that wish to destroy us the moment things become inconvenient. Imagine pre-1989 Poles wanting to hold the Soviet Presidium to account, putting pressure on the government to be more efficient, the same government that is occupying their people – that is how ridiculous YIMBYs look to authentic British nationalists and patriots.

Our whole lens must be different if we are to meet the almost-insurmountable forces that tower above us, wishing for our end. As the Book of Job attests, the righteous suffer so as to test their faith in God, to make them more like Him, and to bring Him glory. So too must we be prepared to tolerate personal discomfort if we are to survive as a people, and it is absolutely a question of survival.

Existential threats require recalcitrant attitudes and policy positions and being unable to own a house or having to pay higher rent is a small price to pay to escape the present railroad we have been stuck travelling along since 1948. We all have a collective skin in the game. If the actual issue is not solved (the solution being our regime destroyed and immigration ended) then Britain, as it has existed for more than a millennia, is permanently erased off the map.

The inability to ‘live it up’ as a young voter in the supposed Gerontocracy is not something deserving of any hand-wringing, much less wall-to-wall tweets discussing housing and pensions every day. Some things, most things, matter more than housing being unaffordable and energy bills being costly.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel and until they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. Every wrench in the system creates another ripple, another scenario where the masses have their eyes opened to what has happened to their country and what is intended to be done with it in the future.

What lies before us is a task seldom asked even of our ancestors, it is a task of securing our existence before the brink, of pulling everything out from the abyss before it is brought to a state of total oblivion. There are no mechanical little fixes to any of this, civilisation does not work like that and all of the Poundburys and HS2s in the world will not improve our lot in this current epoch. The finest of McTrad housing estates will never be more beautiful than God’s raw, untouched nature.

NIMBYs instinctively know they are in a death battle and understand what really matters in this world. YIMBYs, on the other hand, think this is all algebra that requires university-brained midwits to solve. Damn the YIMBYs. Go forth thy NIMBY warriors, heroes of the fields and hedgerows, paragons of Arthurian legend; lead Britain back to its pre-modern, Arcadian state!

To conclude, a simplistic allegory will be provided: we are farm animals, farm animals on a big gay tax farm. If more barns and cottages are built things will not improve for the animals. More generators will just allow the farmer to expand the slaughterhouse. The solution is not more generators or more buildings on the farm. The solution is to shoot the farmer.

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In Defence of Political Conflict

By Sam Bidwell — 1 year ago

It’s often said that contemporary philosophy is stuck in an intellectual rut. While our forefathers pushed the boundaries of human knowledge, modern philosophers concern themselves with impenetrable esoterica, or gesture vaguely in the direction of social justice.

Yet venture to Whitehall, and you’ll find that once popular ideas have been refuted thoroughly by new schools of thought.

Take the Hegelian dialectic, once a staple of philosophical education. According to Hegel, the presentation of a new idea, a thesis, will generate a competing idea or counterargument, an antithesis. The thesis and the antithesis, opposed as they are, will inevitably come into conflict with one another.

However, this conflict is a productive one. With the merits of both the thesis and the antithesis considered, the reasoned philosopher will be able to produce an improved version of the thesis, a synthesis.

In very basic terms, this is the Hegelian dialectic, a means of philosophical reason which, if applied correctly, should result in a refinement and improvement of ideas over time. Compelling, at its face.

However, this idea is now an outmoded one. Civil servants and their allies in the media and the judiciary have, in their infinite wisdom, developed a better way.

Instead of bothering with the cumbersome work of developing a thesis or responding to it with an antithesis, why don’t we just skip to the synthesis? After all, we already know What Works through observation of Tony Blair’s sensible, moderate time in No 10 – why don’t we just do that? That way, we can avoid all of that nasty sparring and clock off early for drinks.

This is the grim reality of modern British politics. The cadre of institutional elites who came to dominate our political system at the turn of the millennium have decided that their brand of milquetoast liberalism is the be-all and end-all of political thought. The great gods of this new pantheon – Moderation, Compromise, International Standing, Rule of Law – should be consulted repeatedly until nascent ideas are sufficiently tempered.

The Hegelian dialectic has been replaced by the Sedwillian dialectic; synthesis begets synthesis begets synthesis.

In turn, politicians have become more restricted in their thinking, preferring to choose from a bureaucratically approved list of half-measures. Conservatives, with their aesthetic attachment to moderate, measured Edwardian sensibilities, are particularly susceptible to this school of thought. We no longer have the time or space for big ideas or sweeping reforms. Those who state their views with conviction are tarred as swivel-eyed extremists, regardless of the popularity of their views. Despite overwhelming public dissatisfaction with our porous borders, politicians who openly criticise legal immigration will quickly find calls to moderate. If you’re unhappy with the 1.5 million visas granted by the Home Office last year, perhaps you’d be happy with a mere million?

The result has been decades of grim decline. As our social fabric unravels and our economy stagnates, we are still told that compromise, moderation, and sound, sensible management are the solutions. This is no accident. Britain’s precipitous decline and its fraying social fabric has raised the stakes of open political conflict. Nakedly pitting ideas against each other risks exposing our society’s underlying decisions and shattering the myth of peaceful pluralism on which the Blairite consensus rests. After all, if we never have any conflict, it’s impossible for the Wrong Sorts to come out on top.

The handwringing and pearl-clutching about Brexit was, in part, a product of this conflict aversion. The political establishment was ill-equipped to deal with the bellicose and antagonistic Leave campaign, and the stubbornness of the Brexit Spartans. Eurosceptics recognised that their position was an absolute one – Britain must leave the European Union, and anything short of a full divorce would fall short of their vision.

It was not compromise that broke the Brexit gridlock, but conflict. The suspension of 21 rebel Conservative MPs was followed by December’s general election victory. From the beginning of Boris Johnson’s premiership to the end, he gave no quarter to the idea of finding a middle ground.

Those who are interested in ending our national decline must embrace a love of generative adversity. Competing views, often radical views, must be allowed to clash. We should revel in those clashes and celebrate the products as progress. Conservatives in particular must learn to use the tools of the state to advance their interests, knowing that their opponents would do the same if they took power.

There are risks, of course – open conflict often produces collateral damage – but it would be far riskier to continue on our current path of seemingly inexorable deterioration. We must not let the mediocre be the enemy of the good for any longer.

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The Chinese Revolution – Good Thing, Bad Thing?

By Jimbo Flappr — 1 year ago

This is an extract from the transcript of The Chinese Revolution – Good Thing, Bad Thing? (1949 – Present). Do. The. Reading. and subscribe to Flappr’s YouTube channel!

“Tradition is like a chain that both constrains us and guides us. Of course, we may, especially in our younger years, strain and struggle against this chain. We may perceive faults or flaws, and believe ourselves or our generation to be uniquely perspicacious enough to radically improve upon what our ancestors have made – perhaps even to break the chain entirely and start afresh.

Yet every link in our chain of tradition was once a radical idea too. Everything that today’s conservatives vigorously defend was once argued passionately by reformers of past ages. What is tradition anyway if not a compilation of the best and most proven radical ideas of the past? The unexpectedly beneficial precipitate or residue retrieved after thousands upon thousands of mostly useless and wasteful progressive experimentation.

To be a conservative, therefore, to stick to tradition, is to be almost always right about everything almost all the time – but not quite all the time, and that is the tricky part. How can we improve society, how can we devise better governments, better customs, better habits, better beliefs without breaking the good we have inherited? How can we identify and replace the weaker links in our chain of tradition without totally severing our connection to the past?

I believe we must begin from a place of gratitude. We must hold in our minds a recognition that life can be, and has been, far worse. We must realize there are hard limits to the world, as revealed by science, and unchangeable aspects of human nature, as revealed by history, religion, philosophy, and literature. And these two facts in combination create permanent unsolvable problems for mankind, which we can only evade or mitigate through those traditions we once found so constraining.

To paraphrase the great G.K. Chesterton: “Before you tear down a fence, understand why it was put up in the first place.” I cannot fault a single person for wishing to make a better world for themselves and their children, but I can admonish some persons for being so ungrateful and ignorant, they mistake tradition itself as the cause of every evil under the sun. Small wonder then that their hairbrained alternatives routinely overlook those aspects of society without which it cannot function or perpetuate itself into the future.

And there are other things tied up in tradition besides moral guidance or the management of collective affairs. Tradition also involves how we delve into the mysteries of the universe; how we elevate the basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing into artforms unto themselves; how we represent truth and beauty and locate ourselves within the vast swirling cosmos beyond our all too brief and narrow experience.

It is miraculous that we have come as far as we have. And at any given time, we can throw that all away, through profound ingratitude and foolish innovations. A healthy respect for tradition opens the door to true wisdom. A lack of respect leads only to novelty worship and malign sophistry.

Now, not every tradition is equal, and not everything in a given tradition is worth preserving, but like the Chinese who show such great deference to the wisdom of their ancestors, I wish more in the West would admire or even learn about their own.

Like the Chinese, we are the legatees of a glorious tradition – a tradition that encompasses the poetry of Homer, the curiosity of Eratosthenes, the integrity of Cato, the courage of Saint Boniface, the vision of Michelangelo, the mirth of Mozart, the insights of Descartes, Hume, and Kant, the wit of Voltaire, the ingenuity of Watt, the moral urgency of Lincoln and Douglas.

These and many more are responsible for the unique tradition into which we have been born. And it is this tradition, and no other, which has produced those foundational ideas we all too often take for granted, or assume are the defaults around the world. I am speaking here of the freedom of expression, of inquiry, of conscience. I am speaking of the rule of law, and equality under the law. I am speaking of inalienable rights, of trial by jury, of respect for women, of constitutional order and democratic procedure. I am speaking of evidence based reasoning and religious tolerance.

Now those are all things I wouldn’t give up for all the tea in China. You can have Karl Marx. We’ll give you him. But these are ours. They are the precious gems of our magnificent Western tradition, and if we do nothing else worthwhile in our lives, we can at least safeguard these things from contamination, or annihilation, by those who would thoughtlessly squander their inheritance.”

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Technology Is Synonymous With Civilisation

By Adam Limb — 1 year ago

I am declaring a fatwa on anti-tech and anti-civilisational attitudes. In truth, there is no real distinction between the two positions: technology is synonymous with civilisation.

What made the Romans an empire and the Gauls a disorganised mass of tribals, united only by their reactionary fear of the march of civilisation at their doorstep, was technology. Where the Romans had minted currency, aqueducts, and concrete so effective we marvel on how to recreate it, the Gauls fought amongst one another about land they never developed beyond basic tribal living. They stayed small, separated, and never innovated, even with a whole world of innovation at their doorstep to copy.

There is always a temptation to look towards smaller-scale living, see its virtues, and argue that we can recreate the smaller-scale living within the larger scale societies we inhabit. This is as naïve as believing that one could retain all the heartfelt personalisation of a hand-written letter, and have it delivered as fast as a text message. The scale is the advantage. The speed is the advantage. The efficiency of new modes of organisation is the advantage.

Smaller scale living in the era of technology necessarily must go the way of the hand-written letter in the era of text messaging: something reserved for special occasions, and made all the more meaningful for it.

However, no-one would take seriously someone who tries to argue that written correspondence is a valid alternative to digital communication. Equally, there is no reason to take seriously someone who considers smaller-scale settlements a viable alternative to big cities.

Inevitably, there will be those who mistake this as going along with the modern trend of GDP maximalism, but the situation in modern Britain could not be closer to the opposite. There is only one place generating wealth currently: the South-East. Everywhere else in the country is a net negative to Britain’s economic prosperity. Devolution, levelling up, and ‘empowering local communities’ has been akin to Rome handing power over to the tribals to decide how to run the Republic: it has empowered tribal thinking over civilisational thinking.

The consequence of this has not been to return to smaller-scale ways of life, but instead to rest on the laurels of Britain’s last civilisational thinkers: the Victorians.

Go and visit Hammersmith, and see the bridge built by Joseph Bazalgette. It has been boarded up for four years, and the local council spends its time bickering with the central government over whose responsibility it is to fix the bridge for cars to cross it. This is, of course, not a pressing issue in London’s affairs, as the Vercingetorix of the tribals, Sadiq Khan, is hard at work making sure cars can’t go anywhere in London, let alone across a bridge.

Bazalgette, in contrast to Khan, is one of the few people keeping London running today. Alongside Hammersmith Bridge, Bazalgette designed the sewage system of London. Much of the brickward is marked with his initials, and he produced thousands of papers going over each junction, and pipe.

Bazalgette reportedly doubled the pipes diameters remarking “we are only going to do this once, and there is always the possibility of the unforeseen”. This decision prevented the sewers from overflowing in 1960.

Bazalgette’s genius saved countless lives from cholera, disease, and the general third-world condition of living among open excrement. There is no hope today of a Bazalgette. His plans to change the very structure of the Thames would be Illegal and Unworkable to those with power, and the headlines proposing such a feat (that ancient civilisations achieved) would be met with one million image macros declaring it a “manmade horror beyond their comprehension.”

This fundamentally is the issue: growth, positive development, and a future worth living in is simply outside the scope of their narrow comprehension.

This train of thought, having gone unopposed for too long, has even found its way into the minds of people who typically have thorough, coherent, and well-thought-out views. In speaking to one friend, they referred to the current ruling classes of this country as “tech-obsessed”.

Where is the tech-obsession in this country? Is it found in the current government buying 3000 GPUs for AI, which is less than some hedge funds have to calculate their potential stocks? Or is it found in the opposition, who believe we don’t need people learning to code because “AI will do it”?

The whole political establishment is anti-tech, whether crushing independent forums and communities via the Online Harms Bill, to our supposed commitment to be a ‘world leader in AI regulation’ – effectively declaring ourselves to be the worlds schoolmarm, nagging away as the US, China, and the rest of the world get to play with the good toys.

Cummings relays multiple horror stories about the tech in No. 10. Listening to COVID figures down the phone, getting more figures on scraps of paper, using the calculator on his iPhone and writing them on a Whiteboard. Fretting over provincial procurement rules over a paltry 500k to get real-time data on a developing pandemic. He may well have been the only person in recent years serious about technology.

The Brexit campaign was won by bringing in scientists, physicists, and mathematicians, and leveraging their numeracy (listen to this to get an idea of what went on) with the latest technology to campaign to people in a way that had not been done before. Technology, science, and innovation gave us Brexit because it allowed people to be organised on a scale and in ways they never were before. It was only through a novel use of statistics, mathematical models, and Facebook advertising that the campaign reached so many people. The establishment lost on Brexit because they did not embrace new modes of thinking and new technologies. They settled for basic polling of 1-10 thousand people and rudimentary mathematics.

Meanwhile the Brexit campaign reached thousands upon thousands, and applied complex Bayesian statistics to get accurate insights into the electorate. It is those who innovate, evolve, and grow that shape the future. There is no going back to small-scale living. Scale is the advantage. Speed is the advantage. And once it exists, it devours the smaller modes of organisation around it, even smaller modes of organisation have the whole political establishment behind it.

When Cummings got what he wanted injected into the political establishment – a data science team in No. 10 – they were excised like a virus from the body the moment a new PM was installed. Tech has no friends in the political establishment, the speed, scale, and efficiency of the thing is anathema to a system which relies on slow-moving processes to keep a narrow group of incompetents in power for as long as possible. The fierce competition inherent to technology is the complete opposite of the ‘Rolls-Royce civil service’ which simply recycles bad staff around so they don’t bother too many people for too long.

By contrast, in tech, second best is close to last. When you run the most popular service, you get the data from running that service. This allows you to make a better service, outcompete others, which gets you more users, which gets you more data, and it all snowballs from there. Google holds 93.12% of the search engine market share. Amazon owns 48% of eCommerce sales. The iPhone is the most popular email client, at 47.13%. Twitch makes up 66% of all hours of video content watched. Google Chrome makes up 70% of web traffic. There next nearest competitor, Firefox (a measly 8.42%,) is only alive because Google gave them 0.5b to stick around. Each one of these companies is 2-40 times bigger than its next nearest competitor. Just as with civilisation, there is no half-arseing technology. It is build or die.

Nevertheless, there have been many attempts to half-ass technology and civilisation. When cities began to develop, and it became clear they were going to be the future powerhouses of modern economies, theorists attempted to create a ‘city of towns’ model.

Attempting to retain the virtues of small town and community living in a mass-scale settlement, they argued for a model of cities that could be made up of a collection of small towns. Inevitably, this failed.

The simple reason is that the utility of cities is scale. It is the access to the large labour pools that attracts businesses. If cities were to become collections of towns, there would be no functional difference in setting up a business in a city or a town, except perhaps the increased ground rent. The scale is the advantage.

This has been borne out mathematically. When things reach a certain scale, when they become networks of networks (the very thing you’re using, the internet, is one such example) they tend towards a winner-takes-all distribution.

Bowing out of the technological race to engage in some Luddite conquest of modernity, or to exact some grudge against the Enlightenment, is signalling to the world we have no interest in carving out our stake in the future. Any nation serious about competing in the modern world needs to understand the unique problems and advantages of scale, and address them.

Nowhere is this more strongly seen than in Amazon, arguably a company that deals with scale like no other. The sheer scale of co-ordination at a company like Amazon requires novel solutions which make Amazon competitive in a way other companies are not.

For example, Amazon currently owns the market on cloud services (one of the few places where a competitor is near the top, Amazon: 32%, Azure: 23%). Amazon provides data storage services in the cloud with its S3 service. Typically, data storage services have to handle peak times, when the majority of the users are online, or when a particularly onerous service dumps its data. However, Amazon services so many people – its peak demand is broadly flat. This allows Amazon to design its service around balancing a reasonably consistent load, and not handling peaks/troughs. The scale is the advantage.

Amazon warehouses do not have designated storage space, nor do they even have designated boxes for items. Everything is delivered and everything is distributed into boxes broadly at random, and tagged by machines so the machines know where to find it.

One would think this is a terrible way to organise a warehouse. You only know where things are when you go to look for them, how could this possibly be advantageous? The advantage is in the scale, size, and randomness of the whole affair. If things are stored on designated shelves, when those shelves are empty the space is wasted. If someone wants something from one designated shelf on one side of the warehouse, and something from another side of the factory, you waste time going from one side to the other. With randomness, you are more likely to have a desired item close by, as long as you know where that is, and with technology you do. Again, the scale is the advantage.

The chaos and incoherence of modern life, is not a bug but a feature. Just as the death of feudalism called humans to think beyond their glebe, Lord, and locality, the death of legacy media and old forms of communication call humans to think beyond the 9-5, elected representative, and favourite Marvel movie.

In 1999, one year after Amazon began selling music and videos, and two years after going public – Barron’s, a reputable financial magazine created by Dow Jones & Company posted the following cover:

Remember, Barron’s is published by Dow Jones, the same people who run stock indices. If anyone is open to new markets, it’s them. Even they were outmanoeuvred by new technologies because they failed to understand what technophobes always do: scale is the advantage. People will not want to buy from 5 different retailers because they want to buy everything all at once.

Whereas Barron’s could be forgiven for not understanding a new, emerging market such as eCommerce, there should be no sympathy for those who spend most of their lives online decrying growth. Especially as they occupy a place on the largest public square to ever occur in human existence.

Despite claiming they want a small-scale existence, their revealed preference is the same as ours: scale, growth, and the convenience it provides. When faced with a choice between civilisation in the form of technology, and leaving Twitter a lifestyle closer to that of the past, even technology’s biggest enemies choose civilisation.

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Between Tradition and Modernity: A Review of “British Conservatism: 2024 to 2044”, by Richard Cruston

By Ben Sixsmith — 1 year ago

This lively volume follows the development of right-wing thought in Britain between the beginning of the premiership of Labour’s Keir Starmer and the end of the presidency of Mark Hall of the United Party.

Richard Cruston, Professor of Political Theory at Trinity College, Cambridge, is a learned scholar who has written biographies of Edmund Burke, Roger Scruton and Jacob Rees Mogg. His deep knowledge of ideas and personalities were clearly essential in developing this book.

His story begins with the astonishing electoral failure of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 2024 — ending almost fourteen years of more or less unrivalled Conservative success. In exile, the Conservatives found themselves fragmented, both politically, with the Johnson loyalists in a fiery campaign to make the unenthusiastic former Mayor of London and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Leader of the Conservative Party, and ideologically, with “post-liberals”, “national conservatives” and “classical liberals” vying for influence.

If conservative ideas mattered at all, it was in their influence on the Labour government. Professor Cruston is an authority on the development of post-liberalism — a communitarian trend which earned support in the wake of the 2028 London riots — which spread from the capital across provincial England — as its emphasis on order and localism chimed with the state’s management of societal division. Cruston suggests that there might have been the faint whiff of opportunism in the combination of communitarian rhetoric and neo-authoritarian security measures — with more of an emphasis on “community hubs” and “peace enforcement” than on family and faith — but it was politically successful.

The 2030 blackouts were considered the beginning of the end for the Labour government. Prime Minister Meera Devi won the 2032 elections on a platform that some commentators called “neo-Thatcherite” — promising economic liberalisation, energy reform and closer links with what became known as “the younger powers”. Professor Cruston disapproves of what he describes “the fetishisation of the market” — though he doesn’t say where the power was meant to come from.

Devi’s government placed significant emphasis on character and individual responsibility. “Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important,” she was fond of saying, quoting Britain’s first female prime minister, “Is the high road to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction.” Regrettably, her time in power was dogged by scandal, with ministers being accused of cocaine addiction, using prostitutes, doing cocaine with prostitutes and being addicted to doing cocaine off prostitutes.

Ashley Jones’ Labour premiership offered conservatives a chance to regroup. Had they forgotten the ends of politics as well as the means? Were they too focused on economics and not culture? Cruston is informative on the subject of the traditionalist “Lofftism” which flourished in the late 2030s, only being interrupted by the “Summer of Crises” which finally led to the United Party taking power in March 2039.

Conservative thought flourished in the early years of the 2040s, with generous funding being invested in private schools, universities, think tanks and private clubs. Here — if you were fortunate enough to be invited — you could hear about great right-wing minds from Hayek to Oakeshott, and from Kruger to Hannan. It was a time of intellectual combat but also intellectual collegiality. Millian liberals could debate Burkean conservative and yet remain friends. You could say anything, some intellectuals joked, as long as you didn’t influence policy.

With the unexpected departure of President Hall on the “New Horizons” flight the future of British conservatism looks mysterious. Professor Cruston counsels that we return to Burke — a voice that spoke in a time of similarly great upheaval. Perhaps we should heed his words.

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In Conversation with Curtis Yarvin (The Return of Don Quixote and Anglo-Meiji Restoration)

By The Mallard — 1 year ago

Curtis Yarvin, known by his pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’, is one of the most prominent social critics and reactionary writers of the contemporary era. Yarvin’s blogs, ‘Gray Mirror’ and ‘Imperial Melodies’, can be found on Substack.

Yarvin’s words are in light.

There’s a little-known Chesterton work called The Return of Don Quixote. Don’t know it at all?

I don’t. I mean, I’m familiar with the original Don Quixote by Cervantes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, The Return of Don Quixote, and it’s about the victory of a joyous reactionary movement, written as an Edwardian novel, set in the future. It’s very interesting and it sort of catches the sort of joyousness right, which is an absolutely essential part of, like, any kind of restoration of this type.

And yet, you know, kind of Russian Hide And Seek, which is of course a much later work, is more…black-pilled, you might say, and perhaps a little more convincing. And I would say, sort of read them both. You’ll get kind of some of both of these ideas, but just breaking out of this incredible, I mean, it’s like, when you look in the rear-view mirror at Brexit. It’s like 0.1% of a British Meiji, right? And it’s a completely failed venture, and a completely failed thing, you know, I was reading Richard North’s blog EU Referendum, back in the earlier ‘00s, you know, I think he was associated to some extent with, like, early UKIP, and, um you know, the idea of having a referendum on Britain leaving the EU in 2005, let alone that referendum winning, it seemed like such, what we call here, a stretch goal.

It seemed so unimaginable and it happens. This incredible revolution happens and of course it happens and it doesn’t amount to shit. It just has no momentum. As soon as it wins it begins to lose. And, actually, the main effect of Brexit was to destroy the Brexit movement.

Pretty much.

You can’t help but feel that when you do something and people put that much effort and that much hope into something, and in retrospect you can look at it and just say “Well duh, obviously that was gonna…there was no way that could have worked in any way, shape, or form and done anything useful or relevant, or whatever,” and, the, you know…the definition of insanity is making the same mistake twice, and, right, and here, is just the form of government that has been how England rose to greatness and has been governed for pretty much all of the last two millennia, you know, before the invitation to William, right? You know, I guess, you know, William, it’s hard to know to what extent William of Orange was really interested in British domestic affairs. I don’t know how great it was.

Queen Anne was certainly pretty feeble and um, you did know that the um, the king has the right to veto legislation in parliament, right?

Yes.

And do you know who the last person, the last king, who actually used that power was?

It’s not going to be James I is it? Someone distant. Charles I?

Here’s a hint. It wasn’t a king at all.

Really? OK, so was it Queen Anne then? Was it in fact Queen Anne?

It was in fact Queen Anne. Uh, she did it once, and I forget over what. Probably some completely symbolic bullshit.

I see. They went “No, no, this is no good, we’ll get this Dutch fellow”.

Yeah, yeah, it was sort of their ‘lordships die in the dark’ moment. I think, like you know, the People’s Budget of 1911 or whatever. Yeah, Queen Anne was like the legitimate daughter of James II, right? And there was some hope that – and she was basically a Jacobite heir – it’s sort of like this woman Georgia Meloni who gets elected in Italy spouting all this rhetoric and then she’s like “We must fight for the Ukraine, the cause of Ukraine is the cause of all of us”, right?

You know, when I was in Portugal, I was in a small town in this summer and, you know, all of the…you would swear the whole population of Setúbal, Portugal, had come out and, like, popular enthusiasm for the cause of the Ukraine was everywhere, spontaneous graffiti, right, you know, and it’s like, these expressions of popular enthusiasm, like ‘workers of the world, unite’ in Czechoslovakia in 1976. You know, the greengrocer does not really care about workers of the world and I’m pretty sure that if you’re a bus driver in Setúbal, Portugal, your interest in the Dnieper isn’t really – excuse me, Dnipro – is fairly limited, and the uh, just, I mean, it’s increasingly comical, and so, the idea of just like, this whole structure collapsing in one boom is so much more realistic than the idea of Brexit. It’s so much more realistic. People think it’s unrealistic, no, it may be unrealistic, but it is vastly more realistic than Brexit.

I read your piece about a Meiji Restoration. I was sat in the middle of a bunch of naval officers and I was thinking “You know what? Rishi Sunak’s not very popular, neither is Keir Starmer, nobody likes parliament, what would actually happen right now if King Charles did in fact just go ‘guys’…”

Martial law.

Yeah exactly. What would actually happen? And you know, there’s been this sort of endless slew of headline after headline after headline of “Oh, this thing isn’t working, we’ll get the army in to drive trucks” and “Oh, this isn’t working, we’ll get the navy in to sort out this hospital”, and you just sort of look at this thing and think “Why is it that the last sort of functional bit of our government is essentially military?” And “Why is it that…” what would actually happen if…would anyone stop it? Would anyone in the military?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was in Dartmouth. I was at BRNC when the Queen died.

Oh wow.

It’s full of these young, early twenties cadets, who are going through…you know, I was there the day…so I think I was one of the last people to officially join the Queen’s navy and one of the first to join the King’s, and you know, everybody, the whole, the whole college just stopped. I went out onto the Parade Ground at about 5pm in the early evening and every church bell in Dartmouth was ringing across the valley. And yes, there’s a huge amount of symbolic nothingness to it –

But that symbolism can be converted back into reality.

Right!

And everyone would be stunned at how easy it was, and how obvious it was.

I don’t think anyone would say no.

Well, would Sir Arthur Scargill bring the unions into the street? Would like, you know, would the SpADs like set up barricades outside of Nelson’s Column? What?

Right, right. I don’t see it.

I don’t see it. And so you can have your New Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. You just have to realise that the chains that are bonding you are made of paper.

But that’s the question. The new Prince of Wales hands out copies of the Big Issue –

[*Laughs*]

And I just don’t see the king going along with this, so what do we do? Do we have some kind of new Cromwellian parliamentary lie where oh no, no, the king is held captive by these malignants and bad ideas, what is it? What on Earth are we doing?

Yeah, yeah, well, you know, um, maybe we, you know, uh, I don’t know, if Prince William did enough acid, maybe?

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Birth of the Cosmoproletariat (Magazine Excerpt)

By Brian Budd — 1 year ago

When you hear talk of globalisation, the winners and losers have become fairly set categories: the “winners” are the hyper-mobile, global class that are capable of picking up and putting down almost anywhere, whether that is London or LA, Tokyo or Berlin, Moscow or – well, maybe not Moscow, at least not at the moment.

These winners are the beneficiaries of the most dynamic economy that has ever existed in history before, in such a way that – even if we cannot put a hard date on it – I think it is pretty clear that the modern global economy defines the contemporary era of mankind more than anything else. We are living in the “global age” and there will inevitably be those for whom that age is good.

And then there are those for whom that age is bad. These are the majority of people whose lives are usually spent in one place, from school to work and, if they’re lucky, a few years of retirement. They might be more mobile than their ancestors, for whom life was inevitably spent in the same village, whilst they travel around their county or district but, broadly speaking, never stray too far.

These are the losers, we are told. They have suffered the effects of globalisation – declining industry, evaporating investment, creaking and groaning infrastructure – but are powerless to do anything about it, as they get caught in a cycle in which power follows money and money flows away.

So why not go where the money is? Why not travel abroad, where the work is? Part of the reason is that the last thing the “losers” have left is each other. The day before the In/Out Brexit Referendum, news vox-pops of people on the street saying they would vote to Leave, when asked why, gestured and said “look around. What do I have left to lose?” The backdrop of shuttered shops and boarded windows was the answer, and it wasn’t a very compelling one.

But the answer off-screen was one that the Remain camp had tried to buy into – they had their families, their households, their communities. When David Cameron claimed Brexit would “put a bomb” under the British economy, and George Osborne’s treasury pumped out statistics on the damage it would do to the average household, they were trying to speak to the rational brain that fears material loss. It made sense – it was the same brain they had been speaking to for six years with messages of necessary spending cuts, tax breaks, and increasing job opportunities.

Except this did not work because that audience was not there. The average person did not have the material loss to be threatened, and at a time when fatherlessness was rising, families were breaking down, and over three million households were single-parent; even that small amount to lose was felt to be lost already.

The one thing that the losers had left was their community – and by and large, these were communities that had been decimated by the austerity years. So, they stayed, because their families might be thin and disappearing but their community remained fairly strong.

When Karl Marx decided that the slow transfer of people from the countryside to the cities meant that the “proletariat” would emerge, he was attempting a scientific analysis of what was already happening. As people moved from field to factory, leaving behind their old places in the world and attempting to take up new ones, they forged bonds of solidarity to replace the ones they lost. Human beings are deeply sociable, both from an inherent reality, and an existential need; we can only come into this world as a result of others, but we need to be seen and recognised while we’re here.

So, Britain especially saw the rise of industrial communities – and not just the political conscious-raising efforts of Trade Unions, for politics is tiresome and boring, really. There were also football clubs, local churches, free schools, civic action groups, and so on – in Bristol, there were 400 alone. I’m sure Marx’s miserable mind was able to only imagine the political, but in truth the personal is so much more interesting and enriching than the political. Don’t be fooled that they are the same thing.

This is an excerpt from “Nuclear”.

To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.

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British Conservatism is Ignorant of History and has Forgotten its Past (Magazine Excerpt)

By Henry George — 2 years ago

This dictatorship of the present has been enabled by around thirty years of material abundance and relative peace following the conclusion to the Cold War. As John Keegan, the military historian put it, Britain and American can afford our universalist idealism and our fantasies of a benevolent world united and ameliorated through commerce, given our good geographical fortune of being separated from continents by bodies of water. We can forget that the tides of history have pulled whole cultures under in violence and war, instead indulging in an imagined progressive history, moving ever upwards towards ever greater enlightenment and prosperity.

Our leaders, if they deserve the name, have forgotten the lessons of history, because they do not know history. They do not know the fate of nations and peoples. They are ignorant of the importance of the landscape of the world and the moral landscape of the heart, and how the interplay between the two shapes the destinies of civilisation. It is not to engage in nostalgia for a vanished age that never existed to reckon with the fact that those who governed us in the past were well aware of life’s tragic nature, of the reality of necessity and the ultimate goal of the avoidance of anarchy, its own form of tyranny. Our leaders in the 19^th and up to the mid-20^th centuries had been baptised in the fires of historical experience and therefore knew that the maintenance of right order, in accordance with the good, true, and beautiful, was the precondition for any liberty. Utopian, romantic ideas of universal rights, spreading democracy and natural freedom were dangerous in their unbounded idealism, leading nations and government astray in the quest for moral perfection.

History never ended, in the sense Francis Fukuyama meant it. Hegel, and his disciple Alexander Kojeve, were both wrong in discerning a direction to human History that would see the creation of the perfect liberal democratic regime and state of being in our world. History is the story of the deeds men and women do and accomplishments achieved together as clans, tribes, cities, empires, and nations. It is a story that will only end at the end of all things. Awareness of the living past reminds us that our lives are part of the weave of time, stretching back across the years, our own lives and the actions we take adding the threads that continue into the future.

This is an excerpt from “Mayday! Mayday!”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.

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A Factory for Mediocre Leadership

By Oliver Peter Smith — 2 years ago

“Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally, among mankind.” – Thomas Carlyle, ‘On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History’, 1841.

I often read history through the lens of ‘Great Men’*. The term ‘Great Men’ refers to ‘Great Man Theory’. Originating from Thomas Carlyle’s lectures on heroism in 1840, later being published as ‘On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History’ in 1841, the theory alleges that history is dictated by those men who possess a remarkable ability to inspire, lead, operate, and execute. These men often find themselves climbing the ladders of power with haste, winning decisive battles or reinvigorating policy and therefore dictating the future of their people for generations to come. Furthermore, these men are rare to come by.

Most notably, Great Men most often rise to power after periods of struggle and disdain. This is no coincidence, of course, as it is during these times when those seeking power find the cracks to reach it. Napoleon Bonaparte, Julius Caesar, and Caesar Augustus all rose to power sometime after periods of national crisis, and afterwards pursued a relentless set of reforms. It makes one wonder, as the United Kingdom struggles and toddles along with little direction, how long it will be before another Great Man makes our nation his own. I am not going to write yet another list of everything that is wrong in the United Kingdom in 2023, as this has become rather cliché, but it is worth saying that in such bleak and despairing times, people will seek a Great Man to worship.

Yet, if history is so full of Great Men, then where are the Great Men of today? Some present the argument that history is written and read through the lens of nostalgia, and that perhaps these Great Men of the past were not vastly different to the leaders we have today. While nostalgia will always tilt perceptions of history to some degree, it would be unfair to discredit the Great Men of history due to it. Or perhaps, the leaders of today simply do not have as much opportunity to prove their ‘greatness’. While Bonaparte, Caesar, and Augustus could ride into battle on horseback, wielding swords and witnessing stunning victories before their own eyes, the leaders of today can only really prove their greatness via oratory and data. However, this isn’t to say that a leader cannot be ‘great’ post 19^th century. Winston Churchill may not have rode into battle on horseback, but he can be considered a Great Man nonetheless.

However, the greater point here is that modern democracy simply isn’t built to elect Great Men. It is impossible for the electorate to understand the character of candidates to any considerable degree if information is only presented to them via snappy slogans, 60-minute debates on Channel 4, and vague five-point policy plans. Not only do we rarely understand what it is the candidate wants to do, but we know nearly nothing about the candidates themselves. A 30-minute interview with Andrew Neil, however great of an interviewer he may be, will not accurately inform us of the deeper character of the interviewee. If one wishes to elect Great Men, you must know them personally, or at least be aware of their faults and goods to some deeper level. The modern electorate simply cannot elect Great Men, and not for a fault of their own. You could call it a factory for mediocrity.

Compare this to older processes of election, and the story is different. Richard D Brown talks of the system of election soon after the United States was birthed in his article titled ‘Where Have All the Great Men Gone?’, and says:

“The key process of nominating candidates was dominated by layers of local, state, and national elites. Candidates were selected by their peers, people who had witnessed them in action for years and who knew first-hand their strengths and weaknesses. Whatever the office in question, relatively homogeneous groups of incumbents and their associates selected candidates from among their own number. While the system was open to new men, and choices required approval at the polls, it had a distinctly oligarchic flavor. High esteem among the peer group was a prerequisite for major elective offices.”

The likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were elected because the electorate knew them. The electorate trusted them. They assumed the presidency because those voting for them could trust that they had the guts, the character, and the bottle to lead this newly born nation. Furthermore, as Brown later says, these men were elected on the basis of “private, personal virtue as a prerequisite to public virtue”, and on the basis of possessing “superior wisdom, energy, initiative, and moral stature”. One could say that this system intended to elect Great Men. Moreover, this certainly is not an advocacy for the implementation of the electoral system of the early years of the United States. Instead, it tells us that our current electoral system is flawed, and that we should seek to implement electoral systems with the potential to fight off mediocrity. Electoral systems featuring some form of meritocracy and aristocracy appear to do this best.

Moreover, it was said earlier that a modern leader cannot ride into battle on horseback. Therefore, how do we identify Great Men in the modern world? Such a man should not be judged by the endless quest for progress, nor should they be wholly judged by however much of a percent our GDP rises by each quarter. If we are to identify Great Men, we need to search for the correct metrics to find them. This requires hefty research, and it wouldn’t be proper of me to claim to know how to identify Great Men in the modern world in this short article. Yet, having the capability to identify Great Men is central to moving past mediocrity.

However, as a final point, it is worth noting that the Great Men of history often have common personality traits. We have already talked of energy and charisma, but initiative, principle, and confidence are personality traits often found, and these traits should be a starting point when attempting to identify a Great Man in the modern world. Moreover, these personality traits remain massively important. While a Great Man of today may not have access to swords, bayonets, and rifles, reform and reinvigoration remains as important as it ever has. Only a master statesman is capable of successfully reforming and reinvigorating a nation. The likes of Bonaparte, Caesar and Augustus all had the vigour to do just that, and all three understood that politics is about winning.

*Today, ‘Great Men’ are sometimes referred to as ‘Big Beasts’, and the purpose behind this is to include great female leaders under the term. While I rarely like to modernise language (and haven’t done so in the article above), I do believe it is worth writing this note here, for there have been many great female leaders of whom possessed many of the same traits as Great Men.

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The National Scandal That Never Was

By Edward Howard — 2 years ago

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.

Photo Credit.

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