ANOTHER week of doom and gloom for decent hardworking Brits. But I am yet to feel where an effective pushback is coming from. Has Britain turned into a nation of submissives? Incapable of taking on the Left and Islamism? Where’s the alliance of the massed right against Labour’s massive wrongs?
If the young are walking out – as the latest ONS emigration data, which I wrote about yesterday, says – it’s no wonder. You can hardly blame them. For them it’s the choice of hope versus no hope. Of having a family or not. I found this Budget-day interview with 29-year-old Jack Drury heartbreaking. He said: ‘I’m married, and I want children, but I’m not convinced I can afford them. I’m happy to pay my way, but with income tax thresholds frozen during a period of high inflation, all we’re going to see is more people dragged into a world where incentives become completely perverse . . . That’s why I’ve got friends moving to Dubai. A dentist friend of mine moved to Australia – she’s never coming back.’
How badly this country has let them down, allowing the uniparty cultural and economic swing to the Marxist left that is fast destroying us.
So Kemi finally found her mojo this week, I am told (no, I couldn’t face watching this pitiful charade of democracy). But it was too little and far too late for our young, thrown to the State’s wolves. Generation Z – the cotton-woolled but emotionally neglected and mentally fragile, fragmented families, child-care generation, left to the mercy of their peers and the internet. Their choice? Fight, be indoctrinated or quit. I don’t think they’ll be fighting.
Rachel Reeves’s smirk was not wiped off her face for long. She seemed pretty pleased with herself. Never mind crippling the economy or dashing people’s hopes, she’d given the far left enough meat, and (for the first time?) she knew she looked good. My woman’s instinct is finely tuned. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for well-groomed politicians, but not for smug self-centred ones. Not for ones whose expensive makeover – you don’t get that hair, makeup and clothes transformation for nothing – was as insensitive as it was brazen. A two-fingers to millennials as well as Generation X with no hope of buying a house to live in, let alone one to rent out as well.
Is it going to be left to the oldies to fight the battle to save the country, I mused. Then I heard there was one was less of us at the coalface. The sad, sad news of Peter Whittle’s death came up on my screen on Friday just as I was sitting down to write this piece. A true culture wars warrior and defender of freedom. When he set up the New Culture Forum to fight the culture wars in 2006, we were still in ‘peak Labour’, the Tories salivating over Tony Blair and working out how to copy him.
Peter’s was an extraordinary, brave and prescient move. A Forum which grew and evolved into something bigger than him. That is his great legacy. Perhaps more than anyone else, he brought the (woke) disgraced but brilliant David Starkey back centre stage of political debate. He also nurtured a team of young warriors who today stand out from their own generation for their daring.
He was one of the very few well-known people to back me when I put my head above the parapet during lockdown when he offered to film and distribute my open letter to Michael Gove on its dark dangers in November 2020. We have much to be grateful to him for.
Peter Whittle’s death reinforced a growing feeling of trepidation that we are already in a state of civil war in this country – albeit not a violent one. That, in all honesty, is thanks only to the natural restraint of the right. Yet the provocation is huge. Take the arrest of a perfectly peaceful farmer for bringing his tractor into Trafalgar Square last week to protest against the Budget and inheritance tax raid. Why the handcuffs? He wasn’t resisting. That was another image printed on my mind.
This is blatantly politicised and two-tier policing. You can be a rebel, but only if you have an approved cause. Questioning the government – the basis of democracy – is not one. Remember, by contrast, the seven days of eco protests in 2019 which closed off Trafalgar Square for days, blocking ambulances to boot. Yes, arrests were made but the police I saw out in force each day made no attempt to clear the square – only to dance (literally) in attendance.
Forget the uniparty, we are back to a divide between left and right that is unbridgeable. And it is between left (globalists) and right (nation staters). People who don’t see it are in denial. A lecture I attended last Monday at the Global Warming Policy Foundation given by the clever and witty Labour peer Lord Glasman, author of that oxymoron Blue Labour, was a case in point. A hall full of Net Zero sceptics welcomed him to their midst while politely restraining themselves from confronting his idealistic but fundamentally philosophically and politically contradictory ‘keeping warm is good’ speech.
Imagine DeSmog inviting Charles Moore to speak to them on Net Zero and being gracious and not wanting to offend or embarrass him? They wouldn’t – if they got inside a room with him they’d be on non-stop attack.
Daniel Jupp set out the brutal reality out last week in his ‘Manifesto to save the West’. The left have inherent and historical advantages over the right, and to confront them we have to borrow at least some of their tactics, or turn their tactics on them.
The sooner we wake up to this the better, because the left are not finished with us yet. However hard the undoubtedly moral Lord Glasman tries to reform his party from within, it’s structurally locked against it. It will be hard, but people are going to have to decide and declare where their loyalties lie. With their principles or with their tribalism. With blind faith in the State or with those who fear it more by the day. I still hear the tumbrils rumbling, and they should too.
That’s my wake-up call for the week. It’s as important as being ‘awake’ over covid.
As for the good news? That Zelensky is ‘finished’, as Jim Ferguson predicts, I think must be. That we might finally be getting peace in Ukraine, at least an end to the bloodbath and war of attrition. We can only pray – on this the first Sunday of Advent – for that hope.
Finally, thank you from the bottom of my heart to the many people who responded to our appeal for support. Our ambition still is to increase the number of regular monthly donors (I am talking about only £5 a month) to give us the security we need.
