FROM multi-culture to mono-culture and back in four days. Four days of liberation from TCW (left in the safe hands of Steve Doughty) and a break in beautiful Budapest. A city that more than lived up to all those glorious images of Buda and Pest facing each other across the Danube. A trip that proved an education – as all travel was meant to be from the Grand Tour onwards – not just an indulgence.
So what did I learn? First, that the British gentleman still exists. On both legs of the journey I heard a ‘let me carry that bag for you’ before I’d even put my first foot on the airline step. Second, confirmation of Labour driving our best businesses and businessmen out of Britain. One of my gallant bag-carriers was on his way to his new company headquarters in Budapest having just closed his offices in London, a year after relocating his UK factories to China. It was a no-brainer, he said.
With a flat corporation tax rate of 9 per cent, compared with UK rates which span from 19 per cent to 25 per cent depending on profit, it is indeed. A country where a young family with three children pay no tax at all, he told me, and where the working mother has three years off.
The young people replying to his company recruitment drive were presenting with no less than four languages, Mandarin as well as impeccable English, he also told me. If they were anything like the various Hungarian young people I went on to meet, the contrast with the UK was totally in their favour. All well-presented, alert and courteous. And Hungarian. Which brings me to my third lesson: that Hungary values its citizens and its culture. You can see and feel it everywhere. All thanks to Viktor Orbán, the massively and unfairly maligned former Prime Minister of Hungary. Not least for his determined and principled refusal to accept immigrants or implement the European Union’s compulsory relocation quotas. The punitive EU financial penalties he thought were worth paying to preserve Hungarian cultural identity, national security and a level of safety on the streets unknown elsewhere. Certainly not to be found in any other European capital, as getting lost after a wonderful classical evening concert at St Matthew’s Basilica, and long dark walk alone back to the hotel, proved to me. Not for one moment did I feel unsafe. Hungary does rely on some migrant labour in manufacture and service sectors under a highly restrictive policy of temporary guest worker permits. But you don’t see them on the building sites nor in the hospitality sector anywhere. Front or back of house. Polite, alert Hungarians everywhere, from chambermaids to front desk staff. In every restaurant and café, Orbán has preserved his country’s demographic make-up and his people’s dignity. Unlike his EU counterparts, he has never wavered on his country’s right to decide who enters its territory. He has never kidded himself about the illusion of multiculturalism or that mixing Christian and Muslim societies (without assimilation) creates parallel, fractured communities. This is not a country that turns its back on genuine asylum seekers, evidenced by the ticket collector on one of our tours who turned out to be an educated Iranian dissident. A man who marched against the Iranian regime every weekend, always feeling safe. Neither anti-Trump (far from it) nor negative about Iran’s ultimate liberation. A man flabbergasted by the Western media’s gullibility about the failing Iranian regime’s propaganda.
I learnt more on my first evening spent with Gavin Duncan, TCW’s man in Budapest and long-term resident there, and his wife Eva, who was Orbán’s speech translator until a few weeks ago. Their worry is that young people naively voted for change for change’s sake, not knowing how lucky they are. They are worried about new PM Peter Magyar’s immediate (un) constitutional amendment that permanently bars Orbán from returning to power, and the downhill slide that will follow as Magyar pays his dues to his EU masters. The two young people on the two tours I took – one around the Jewish Quarter and the other in the breathtakingly magnificent opera house – were testament to Hungary’s first-class education system. Articulate, fluent in English, confident and courteous. Both passionately attached to their history. Not denying the worst of it. Yet oikophobia free.
The young Jewish guide did not spare us as we heard of the horror of a ghetto that crammed roughly 70,000 to 80,000 Jews into a 0.1-square-mile zone; the starvation, disease and mass slaughter; the 20,000 taken by the fascist Arrow Cross squads to the banks of the Danube, to be shot and dumped in the icy waters after being ordered to remove their shoes. Sixty pairs are replicated in rusty iron as a memorial.
Standing by them nearly brought me to tears.
So too did the memorial to the courageous souls who risked all to save their fellow men. Not cancelled, or explained away as a conspiracy theory or psy-op by modern Hungarians, but respected. Standing at the foot of a plaque in memory of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, I remembered Gustavo Jalife’s account of this ‘hero without a grave’ for TCW:
‘Working under the auspices of the Swedish legation, he distributed protective passes, rented buildings and declared them Swedish territory, bluffed SS officers and bribed Hungarian officials. His tools were audacity, paperwork and nerve. He did not seek to interpret or defeat Nazism; he sought to obstruct it. There was no doctrine behind his actions, no universal claim, only the practical conviction that lives could still be saved if someone acted quickly and shamelessly enough.’ This was a man whose own ending was stolen, whose arrest by the Red Army left him to a fate that ‘dissolved into the grey anonymity of the Soviet incarceration system – the Gulag. No explanation, no closure – only silence’. Insert photo 2 – Raoul Wallenberg’s plaque No grave, but an enduring memory in this plaque. Standing there I realised how memory is as much a key to our Western culture heritage as the magnificently beautiful architecture dominating both banks of the Danube. Buildings designed and built by Hungarian architects and craftsmen through the centuries, and today restored by them and spoken about with pride. I couldn’t help but compare their beautiful golden palace (at night-time from the river) of a Parliament with its inspiration, our own Palace of Westminster which no politician or philanthropist in Britain has cared enough about to stop from slipping into gross disrepair – a rat-infested shambles – risking its very future.
A disregard and de-civilisation that perfectly symbolises Britain today, so diametrically opposed to the civility that shapes Hungary. Yes, in the taxi to London from the airport, checking my emails and social media confirmed it. In four days I had gone from stabbings to safety and back, from cultural prejudice to cultural pride and back, from barbarity to civility and back. Back to a people who are being as brutally severed from their cultural past and identity as the ‘intercision’ process Philip Pullman described in his Dark Materials trilogy that cut people from their souls. Back to the traumatic, lingering death of a nation.
