THIS has been something of a ‘home truths’ week. Allister Heath in the Telegraph (playing catch-up again – but better late than never) exclaimed over the rapidity of Britain’s decline over the last 25 years. It’s the first time in his life, he wrote, that he’s begun to feel Britain is finished: ‘Almost everything is getting worse, and almost nothing is getting better.’ Indeed. But it’s far from the first time this truth has hit us at TCW – it’s a trajectory we’ve been reporting on since we started out in 2014.
Earlier in the week on the same topic Campbell Campbell-Jack came to the same conclusion that ‘it’s over’, but from the different and more profound angle of our faith. This was, for me, the seminal article. Allister might read it. Campbell wrote:
‘The thing which should truly worry us is not the future of the Western liberal democracy we are so used to. Political victories and the promotion of policies of which we approve are as nothing without foundational cultural change. The major concern of the Christian should be the future of the faith. Without the faith there will be no hope of recovery and rebuilding that which we have lost.’
I would argue that the collapse of faith is the product of a relentless top-down cultural revolution of the last 40 years at least, driven primarily, but not solely, by the new left to the benefit of the new techno, global elite. For the ‘anywheres’ as opposed to the ‘somewheres’. The so-called pandemic provided the perfect opportunity for adding the finishing touches to this brutal post-modern serfdom project. It could not have happened without these prior decades of assault on society’s basic bonds, beliefs and moral boundaries, atomising society, breaking up families, creating dependency, disrespecting faith, encouraging first ‘me, me’ and next woke victim identity culture and engineered distrust and resentment. Our political leaders, including so-called Conservatives, have been at the helm throughout.
This week provided yet another set of metaphors of this descent into contemporary hell. First on my radar came Channel Four’s proposed new show Virgin Island in which, as reported by the Sun, ‘producers hope the virginal participants will pop each other’s cherries’. Quite what sort of woman is Victoria Newton, the paper’s editor, I wondered? What and where are her values? She was happy for her paper to explain that if the young contestants fail in this quest on their own, there will be sex workers on hand to help them out. Is this not institutionalised grooming and rape? Remember feminists fussing about the red tops’ harmless Page Three girls? When it comes to sex grooming courtesy of tax-paid-for TV channels, they are nowhere to be seen.
Orthodoxy is imposed only where it seeds destruction. There was more of that this week too. The news that the New Woke British Army is proposing to reduce security requirements to speed up their DIE recruitment had Paddy Benham-Crosswell weeping, he said, when I asked him to comment on this latest descent into madness. Read his report on this folly here.
We can only hope that Grant Shapps and the top brass read it and take note because it’s not just the Army that’s at sea, the Royal Navy is too. Not content with green paint and LGBTQ flags, I read it’s now considering making courses on climate change compulsory for all personnel. Laugh or cry? I decided on the former and asked John Ellwood to ‘investigate’. His article is very clever. Do read! Many a true word is spoken in jest, and I have no doubt that Mr Putin is still laughing.
For no one knows better than he the result of the sustained assault on our foundational Judaeo-Christian beliefs and values by our home-grown subversive and fully infiltrated ‘Common Purpose’ elites: a very weakened West.
In short, that’s the answer to the question put by the Epoch Times‘s Jan Jeleikek to the historian and commentator, Victor Davis Hanson: ‘Why are so many things going wrong at exactly the same time?’
It’s a thought-provoking interview to watch even if you don’t agree with everything Hanson says. He homes in on the West’s cultural malaise: they can’t control their borders – they don’t know how to exclude people who are not citizens or illegal residents – they don’t know how to pay off their debts ($33trillion in the case of the US) and so on.
Or, as much as ‘they don’t know how to’, is it that the political class don’t want or intend to do any of this?
The left have had their grand vision and it has turned into a nightmare, Hanson says: ‘The great progressive experiment blew up in their faces.’ But the question is: has it? Or has it just blown up in our faces? Indeed the diversity paradigm has destroyed each institution, as he says, but isn’t this what the revolutionaries want, Jeleikek asks? Isn’t the strategy exactly this – the forcing of political change leading to societal collapse through orchestrated crises?
Is it any surprise then that Putin is endorsing Biden and not Trump, the man who temporarily put the US’s decline into reverse and who would strengthen the West again? Why wouldn’t Putin prefer a weaker US? Bring it on, he must be thinking. What after all emboldened him to start his campaign in Ukraine in 2022 but Biden’s ruinous foreign policy as explained in our pages this week in an article well worth reading, in case you missed it.
Is there sufficient fight back left in the West? Will its citizens get behind the farmers before it is too late? Will Trump be allowed back in to stop the rot – or reverse it? The jury is out. What is for sure is that we dissidents can no longer afford a risk-averse mindset any more. Reformation must start regardless, as Campbell says, at the grass roots. If we are not to be fatalistic we must re-find and trust in God.