ALEKSANDR Solzhenitsyn said: ‘To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.’ Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in the Gulag for criticising Stalin and knew a thing or two about ideology, hard labour and anti-Soviet propaganda. Today, in an entirely different time, geography and ideology, our own Prime Minister seems to be waging war on his people with social media users being imprisoned for expressing opinions that challenge the woke dogma. Sir Keir Starmer’s aim in this war might be to sever Britons from their roots. Like so many left-wing ideologues, he aspires to the Rousseau-esque blank slate, the social tabula rasa from which traditions and identity have been eradicated. Then he can fill the void with the ideology du jour – radical wokeism. I reckon this nefarious ideology runs pretty thick through the Prime Minister’s veins: he made his name as a human rights lawyer defending some of the hordes of illegal migrants who invade our shores every day of the year. He chose this career for a reason. He thought he might be able to put right what he wrongly perceived to be the ills of the past.
The war I refer to is the war on straight, white men who face constant discrimination because they do not fulfil the ‘diversity’ criteria, the war on white women who no longer feel safe in their communities and of course the war on the countryside, the farmers and the people whose livelihoods depend on the rural life. The year just ended has seen a vicious attack on those who feed us with plans to tax inherited agricultural assets. Last week’s proposed ban on trail hunting (where dogs follow an artificially placed scent trail) amounts to pure spite and like most bans is driven by ideology. Such unnecessary actions really make it feel like a ‘war’: these changes could have a devastating effect on rural communities, but No 10 won’t care a single iota about that. If you put two and two together, you would have to conclude that Starmer seems to despise the countryside, and the people who live there, because he thinks it is ‘too white’. It fails the diversity criteria which form the cornerstone of his liberal guilt.
Over the last ten years or so, Britons have been told repeatedly by the likes of Sir Sadiq Khan and those who populate the front benches that ‘Briton was built on diversity’. This is of course a lie; a lie saturated in ideological claptrap. This is what Solzhenitsyn would have called ‘a false slogan characteristic of a false era’. Britain was built on the quiet strength of these farmers that Starmer seems to wish to ruin, many of whom now face an existential threat. Sadiq Khan tells us in his Christmas message that ‘Christmas is a time for diversity’. No, it isn’t. Christmas is a time to celebrate the birth of our Saviour. If he doesn’t like that truism, why doesn’t he just leave?
We need leaders who cherish their people and their traditions, not leaders who bear an ideological grudge against them. My hope for 2026 is that those who are being persecuted – the free-speech advocates spending this Christmas in prison, the DEI sceptics, the farmers and the good country people who think our traditions are worth preserving – will hold the line. This will be the year where the most duplicitous government in history will attempt to shoehorn the population into the digital prison through their digital ID scheme. It will be the year where Starmer attempts to continue Blair’s legacy by attempting to fade out field sports. It will also be the year when, sadly, anger spills over into civil unrest.
Solzhenitsyn was expelled and deported from the Soviet Union in 1974. Four years later, he gave an unforgettable address at Harvard University. https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart The audience expected him to share some personal insights of Soviet Union repression, but he turned his guns on his host and place of asylum, the West. He spoke of how the Western world had lost its civil courage, become spiritually impoverished and how its leaders lacked any backbone. He reminded the bemused audience that the decline in courage that he had witnessed in the West is always accompanied by moral mediocrity and over-legalistic structures, and is the beginning of the end for a nation. In this remarkable lecture, Solzhenitsyn told us that the problem with the West is that there are too many human rights and not enough human obligations (to God and society, which have grown dimmer and dimmer). Nobody could have imagined that a dissident who had been sentenced to years of hard labour for voicing an opinion could have made such a statement. Solzhenitsyn was a prescient thinker, and Starmer, the human rights do-gooder lawyer-turned-politician, is the personification of that spineless milksop he had in mind when he delivered the lecture. He would have thought such a political candidate to be ‘demeaning’.
When we listen to the ideological woke drivel pour forth from our leaders, it is clear that we are living in Solzhenitsyn-esque times ‘where the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the State’. Unfeasibly, perhaps, this time around the State is not the Soviet Union but what Russians call the ‘once’ Great Britain. The political communism of Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet Union ended in ideological defeat. It is the duty of Britons to ensure the radical wokeism that Sir Keir Starmer represents enjoys the same fate. Sooner or later, I am confident that this will happen and the long road of restoration can begin. Let’s hope 2026 marks once and for all the decisive turning point where we can bury the unimaginable follies of the recent past.
This article appeared in Country Squire Magazineon December 31, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
