LAST week took me back nearly two decades to a battle, pre-TCW, that preoccupied me then. To a war that no one except Peter Hitchens, David Raynes and myself seemed to be fighting. Against Britain’s psychotically lethal, health-damaging and socially corrupting drug culture, against its powerful legalisation advocates and defenders. The word ‘woke’ hadn’t yet emerged, but that’s what typified their pseudo-social injustice arguments. We did our best to take on the massively Soros-funded Global Commission on Drug Policy, the vehicle for his globalist and global campaign to legalise drugs. It was made up of dodgy former South American heads of state and ‘public figures’ such Richard Branson, Nick Clegg and none other than the very woke former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, all advocating what they called drug law reform.
Just like today’s Net Zero establishment, their claim was that their policy was based on scientific evidence, health, and human rights. It wasn’t. It cared nothing for the relationship between liberalisation, wider drug use, and more addiction. Their arguments ignored science and social science evidence, and denied human dignity and autonomy. There was no room for scepticism of this orthodoxy. We were treated as reactionaries and pariahs by the liberal elite.
Seeing Rowan Williams popping up again, hosted by the Spectator to lecture us and promote his new book on ‘solidarity’, reminded me of all this. There he was laying into ‘America’s demonic political climate’; using his ‘standing’ again, this time to support Pope Leo against the evil Donald Trump and to attack the emergence of Christian nationalism.
Pretty ironic, I thought, considering Trump’s (very mistaken in my view) liberalising drugs moves on virtually the same day. These socially destructive, if not demonic, developments we might have expected to have elicited praise from Williams. Not so. Perhaps neither he nor the Spectator’s Freddy Gray had caught up and so were saved the embarrassment of endorsing Trump’s executive orders. The first of which was to downgrade marijuana to Schedule III, justified as pragmatic reform, which it was not.
I knew it was coming. Nevertheless it was a severe disappointment. The first thing I have criticised Mr Trump for. And I do.
He’s surely been got at (given the added irony of his own sobriety), duped by the very left progressive, deep state globalist lobby that it has been his USP to fight. I blame Robert F Kennedy Jnr too, a man whom I have praised for his vaccine scepticism and his battle against Big Pharma but whose own drugs history perhaps influenced him; likewise Joe Rogan, a man not be trusted given his own open illicit drug use. Both men, I saw, were looming behind the President ensuring he signed a second order. This the White House framed as ‘a groundbreaking Executive Order accelerating research and improving access to psychedelic drugs as promising treatments for serious mental illnesses’. I don’t believe a word of it.
Menacingly, both orders represent something far more troubling: a victory for the globalist progressive left; a politically expedient shortcut that sidesteps (what needs to be) rigorous scientific and regulatory processes to protect public health; a boost to Big Pharma and to the already far too powerful recreational and so-called medicinal drugs industry interests.
Drugs liberalisation will not Make America Great Again, Mr President.
Back to the liberal-thinking Rowan Williams, his assertions about solidarity and his predictable condemnation of resurgent Christian nationalism. The diabolical is everywhere, he said, indifferent to the diabolism that national Christian revivalism is a response to. Blind to the evil of his own pseudo-intellectual, morally relative leftist and oikophobe stance, he would have us stand by strangers even when they want to destroy us. Forget any solidarity with our own besieged and beleaguered populace, defrauded and disparaged by the government, at sea, without an anchor, but seeking one.
How does he reconcile that with his insistence that Christianity requires us to be unconditionally welcoming of migrants? A question forced upon us by mass immigration.
Well, Christianity doesn’t. The answer to that, and to critics last week who questioned my Christianity after the tough stance I took regarding illegal cross-Channel asylum seekers in my interview with Liam Tuffs, deserves to be spelt out.
An essay in First Things, a website I only recently came across, did it brilliantly. It summed up the Rowan Williams position in three words: the ‘counterfeit of charity’.
Vigilance against nationalism (like Williams’s), the author says, ‘is purchased at the price of wilful obtuseness about differences in national character’. Are we to lie down when immigration starts to look like colonisation or conquest? No, he writes, not if the new arrivals hold the native population in contempt, ‘for being too decadent, too passive, too spiritually exhausted to make a claim on their own behalf (and that of their posterity) to the inheritance their ancestors handed down to them’.
To the non-Western mind, he continues, ‘this renunciation is likely to appear not as magnanimity but as simple weakness’; the resulting contempt may be expressed as cultural and racial aggression, as was the case with the rape gangs in the United Kingdom or in the case of Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota. Indeed. ‘Christian love does not require the Christian to abandon partiality for his own, or the corresponding ethic of care for what is close to hand.’
Quite independently, and before I had read the essay, I had put my troubled question to one of TCW’s resident clerics, Peter Mullen. ‘Being a Christian’, he emailed back, ‘doesn’t demand that you become soppy and lose all sense of the right and the just: quite the opposite in fact. By allowing unlimited (and of course illegal) immigrants into this country one would be ensuring more harm to more innocent people, including children, than there would be by floating them back out to sea and letting them fend for themselves.
‘They make illegal voyages not only at their own risk but to lifeboat crews whom they rely on to save them if they get into trouble. It is the illegal immigrants who are behaving immorally. They must take the consequences. Your duty is to your country and your people.’
So there’s the moral and the Christian argument.
The demonic politics that plague the country today are those of the pro-drugs, anti-nation state former Archbishop and our ‘plastic patriot’ critic and veteran-hounding Prime Minister. The one traducing patriotism and the other traducing Christianity. Neither engaging with the real moral argument of the day or concerned with the defence of our society and heritage. To remind them that some wars are just and Christian too, I am going to finish with a message put beautifully by another, very different, Rowan on Anzac Day. Rowan Dean, the Editor in Chief of the Spectator Australia, wrote about the ‘lest we forget’ slogan, reminding us what has been forgotten – that a war can be a moral crusade, that some wars have to be fought simply because they are the right thing to do. As I believe Trump’s war on Iran is.
I am only saddened that he’s got it so wrong on drugs.
