WITH Ben Stokes’s curiously timed and curiously effected retirement from international cricket, Brits lost one King of the North. The valiant warrior with patriotic flair and heavy impact will return to his digs in Durham and ponder his future.
Just as Britain ponders its national future, in what the Lotus Eaters called a ‘liminal moment’ – or to the less etymologically endowed, a fork in the road.
Britain has lost another ‘leader’, less loved than Ben and far less deserving of any association with leadership. The Starmergeddon finally arrived. And the other King of the North has descended upon London, to take his place. Douglas Murray asks, ‘Does Burnham even know why he wants to be PM?’
Opinions will vary as to whether anyone else knows why they want him to be PM. If they do.
The revolving door at Number Ten has delivered a conga line of disasters since Maggie left the building. Major. Blair. Brown. Cameron. May. Johnson. Truss. Sunak. Starmer. Just to list them is to run up the white flag.
And we Aussies think we have had prime ministerial problems . . .
Mostly, Andy Burnham – even the name is cool – looks like a character out of Miami Vice, what with the tees and jackets. The Don Johnson of Manchester. With all the funky political words and moves but seemingly without, as Francis Urquhart used to say, ‘bottom’. His world view? No one has really discovered that. The old/new joke about the Blairite, the Brownite and the Corbynite who walk into a pub is telling. The barman says: ‘Hello, Andy’.
So much for the political theatre. Far bigger things are in play.
In 2016 the late Sir Roger Scruton wrote a great book with an underwhelming title, Where We Are: The State of Britain Now. It is one of the best books on globalisation and its discontents that you will read. Scruton is across Goodhart’s somewheres and anywheres, and he recognises the dangers of the shifting sands. He saw the writing on the wall, even before the covid tyranny, the lockdowns, the Boriswave, the Starmer disaster, the cancel culture, the online fascism, the revisited ID, the refugee boats, the street violence and the full grooming gangs story. Before the rise of Katie and Tommy. Before Southport, Henry Nowak, Belfast and Downpatrick.
Let alone before the credible predictions of civil war made by scholars without dogs in the fight, such as the much-podcasted David Betz.
Scruton thought it was disastrous before all this. England as elegy, indeed. And the numpties at the New Statesman thought that Roger was far-right. Defining yourself as the ‘centre’ when you are far-left certainly helps.
Sir Roger was an early adopter in the sub-genre of lamentations over the trajectory of his sinking homeland. This wasn’t his first intervention. His 2000 work, England: An Elegy, provided the backstory of a nation he perhaps feared, even then, was heading for exit stage left.
But Scruton wasn’t the first of his kind. Of his predecessors, Enoch Powell was the most prescient, and the most specifically prescient in view of the current ‘troubles’. Further back, both Orwell and Huxley provided visions of a dystopian future. Little did each know that bits of their forebodings would add up to what we have now. A boot on the throat AND endless addictive distractions.
But further back was the prescient pessimist par excellence, W B Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats was writing (1919) in the shadow of the bloodiest war ever to come upon the earth. He didn’t know the half of it.
Britain faces an electoral future that bespeaks chaos. Where the ‘centre’ cannot now even be properly defined. By 2029, or whenever the next election comes, it is likely that there will be four or even five parties with about a fifth of the popular vote. The Labour rump. The Tory rump. The Greens. Reform UK. Maybe Restore Britain as well. What in God’s name will a coalition government look like? How will it manage the by then mass popular unrest on the streets?
And this is what both the Islamic invaders and the Davos elites want: disrupt national governance, then march in.
AI claims that 41 per cent of Londoners were born overseas. The obvious retort: That few?
Beyond electoral dysfunction, there are bigger problems facing the home of democracy, the land of Magna Carta. One is obvious. It is demographic replacement. By about 2060, or earlier. That is a familiar story in the alt-media.
John of Gaunt would be spinning in his grave.
But the other problem, first identified by Goodhart and repeated by Scruton and many others, is the somewheres and anywheres matter.
The emerging generations (Y and Z) are ideologically in the anywheres camp. Confused, indoctrinated, deprived by the education system of their critical faculties, depressed at the supposed climate catastrophe, wedded to social media, lonely and sexless, they are geographically unmoored, identitarian but believing that their ‘identity’ is anything but family, church, local town or (especially) nation. They wouldn’t fight for the homeland. They wouldn’t know what ‘homeland’ meant, or means now. They are the distracted and drugged Brave New World generation.
It is the wicked combination of the demographic shift, the self-inflicted, guilt-ridden, post-colonial invasion, and the new, embedded globalism that will kill off the British nation. The two trends working as one.
In such a world, there is no way that the falcon will remotely be able to hear the falconer. It is a Yeats moment.
There are many Aussies, perhaps more than our own elites recognise, who love our mother country and who shake our heads in disbelief at what you Brits have allowed to happen to your nation.
A bit like the Blackcaps (the NZ cricket team) at Trent Bridge who were shaking their heads at the suicidal English cricket tactics that simply gave up and went down, not fighting, but partying. A test and a series lost. And a once proud nation, too.
