THE LAST DITCH An Englishman returned after twenty years abroad blogs about liberty in Britain

Remember 7.10

IMG_6506When I returned to Britain after twenty years abroad, I found myself widowed and living alone in a London very different from the place I was working when I went abroad in 1992. I would ride the 94 bus to town, only hearing the English language on the recorded announcements. Buses and tube trains, which I remembered as being quiet enough to work on, were a clamour of every language but my own. Where, I wondered, were the English?

I had been home for a year before I realised that a good number of people on the bus were as monastically silent as me. Looking around at them I realised we were here. We’re just still quiet. Too nice to say “shush” to the first noisy incomer to ignore our cultural practices, we were now doomed to be inaudible in our own capital. When I had an Indian girlfriend (later, briefly, my wife) I mentioned it to her. The next day she reported that she’d discussed it with all the other foreign students on her masters course and that they’d had an “aha” moment. So that’s where the natives are, they’d said!

IMG_6501
I remembered this at the rally in Hyde Park today. On the 94 bus there, I’d googled it and found no sign it was happening. The Met had asked the organisers not to publish the location so that the pro-Hamas “protesters” they so assiduously protect didn’t threaten our (or more likely their officers’) safety. I wondered - denied all modern means of publicity - if anyone would be there. 

I needn’t have worried. There was a large, multi-generational, polite and well behaved crowd to listen to the Israeli ambassador and other speakers remember the pogrom of a year ago tomorrow.

The UK I grew up in is still here, though you’d never guess it from the clamour of the MSM, our terrorist—sympathising government or social media. We’d talked to each other, exchanged private messages and kept the whole thing — amazingly — off the internet. We’d been sure enough we could do it that families had showed up with their grannies and their infants without fear of the swastika-waving “we love Hezbollah” fascistic barbarians who had owned London’s streets yesterday. 

I am not able to stand very long these days and after a short time I needed the loo. I hate being old. Having found relief, I sat in light rain on the nearest free bench to the event and watched Londoners of middle-Eastern appearance and Muslim garb walk by, horrified, at the sight of a sea of Israeli flags in Hyde Park. They’d clearly had no idea it was going to happen.

Part of me hates that secrecy was needed. Londoners should be able to show their support for civilisation as loudly and proudly as our barbarian cohorts show theirs for its enemies.  I just loved the fact that we’d been able to organise in the face of such obstacles — and that so many of us showed up to stand in the rain, remember the victims of a pogrom and — so differently from the pogroms of old — show support for an army of Jews equipped to fight back and defeat their enemies.

I am not Jewish as many of the attendees were but I felt  happy to be among my people. My people in the sense of civilised Londoners, free of hatred and political extremism, doing the right thing for no better reason than that it was the right thing. 

Remember 7.10. Stand with Israel. Because it’s right and because — if she falls — she won’t fall alone. 

PS. It seems I did stay to the end. I listened to the speeches at a distance from my rainy bench and the event is now ending with the national anthem. You won’t hear God Save the King at a pro-Palestine rally, that’s for sure. Israel still exists and so — for now — does Britain. 


Legalising assisted suicide: Theory and Practice

Legalising assisted suicide would be a profound moral error - spiked.

One of the fundamental ideas of libertarianism is self-ownership. If you have legal capacity to decide (i.e. you are adult and sane) then you can do what you like with yourself and your body. If you want to mutilate or kill yourself, that's your choice and no-one else's. So assisted suicide should present me, as a libertarian, with no moral problem. Yet it does. In theory, it's fine but in practice there are serious issues.
 
There have been moments when the only reason I didn't commit suicide was because of the effect on the people I love. The first time was during a long-ago marital crisis. The dark web didn't then exist then but it was easy to find out how. The government helpfully provided the information by restricting the sale of certain over-the-counter pharmaceuticals to safe amounts. All I had to do was tour pharmacies and buy ten times those amounts. I returned home and poured myself water to wash down the pills. As I held the glass, I imagined my toddler daughters hearing I was dead. I couldn't do that to them so decided to live - for many months in profound misery. 
 
Many tales like mine end differently in the United States. One of the reasons gun control advocates always talk about gun deaths rather than homicides is that so many gun deaths are suicides. A suicidal American with a gun has the means to act. Suicide rates are higher among doctors and dentists for the same reason. They always have the means at hand.
 
That said, I'd rather have freedom than safety. In a free society, I'd favour assisted suicide so that frailer people could pay for help to act on their free choices. Private doctors would be governed in their conduct by their professional bodies and – more importantly – by their liability insurers. They'd have to ensure their patient was legally competent and suggest alternatives so they didn't get sued. Friends or family asked to help someone die would have similar legal concerns – at least about the would-be suicide's mental health. There would be many unfortunate outcomes because life isn't perfect, but those are protections enough. It's better we make some wrong decisions than that all decisions are taken away from us.
 
I can't support it in Britain however because of the NHS. When it was created, our ancestors thought they were nationalising the provision of medical services. In truth, as Labour's current rhetoric about saving it money by focussing on prevention shows, we nationalised our bodies. If we make the wrong health choices, the cost falls on the state so – inevitably – the state wants to make the choices.
 
This is nonsense of course. The state doesn't have the means to meet any costs other than by robbing us or borrowing against our credit. Our wrong choices (drugs, smoking, obesity, etc) tend to mean we're not around for the really big hit on the NHS - old age. Many old people access medical services constantly. That's when most get the benefit of the money they paid in to the system during their productive lives. But if the government can off the elderly, they will have more tax money available for things they really care about, In Labour's case, they also know the elderly generally don't vote for them. Killing them improves their re-election prospects, just as giving the vote to sixteen year olds will. 
 
It is frankly sinister that Labour is suddenly raising this issue now in the context of (a) the black hole rhetoric used to justify cancelling the winter fuel allowances, and (b) its review of the NHS. I have no doubt that their rationale is to get rid of as many of its most costly patients as possible. If they don't die of hypothermia at home, they can be guilted into not being a burden on the hallowed NHS.
 
The linked article cites examples of horror stories emerging from the Netherlands, where old people now desperately resist going into hospital because they know they'll be encouraged to die, and Canada. Canada is a perfect example because it's the only other country that still has a Soviet health system like ours. Canada's MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) programme is now the country's fifth leading cause of death. When Christine Gauthier, a Paralympian and veteran asked the authorities if she could have a stairlift installed in her home, she received a letter asking if she had considered euthanasia.
 
From the point of view of apparatchiks managing a state health service, every patient will present a choice. Provide treatment that may costs hundreds of thousands of pounds or offer a cheap death. If you're an old lady like my mum; unable to take care of yourself, sad and lonely in widowhood, guilty about the strain you're putting on your care-giving daughter, etc., how likely are you to say yes? For that matter, if you're a single, unemployed, young man suffering from depression why wouldn't you? It's happening, big-time, in the Netherlands.

There, physically healthy young people are being euthanised to ‘cure’ conditions like depression and anxiety.

It's the old people I mainly worry about though. They'll be pressured to check out early not just to save the NHS money (and its staff trouble) but to accelerate the inheritance of an indebted generation waiting for them to die. Most families are loving and caring, no doubt, but there are plenty of Dickensian rascals waiting at bedsides – metaphorical and otherwise.

The Left are skilful and relentless about normalising whatever they've decided is necessary for the advancement of their cause. They are masters of both euphemism and agitprop. They demonise their opponents and sanctify their supporters. Once they have their foot in this door, they will keep pushing it open and many will die. Thanks to the NHS, one in five deaths in Britain are already avoidable. Now Labour wants us to stop even trying to avoid death. It won't end well.


The Future

Miss Paine the Elder and her life partner have chosen the name of my granddaughter - due to join us on December 9th - but will not share it with anyone until she is actually born. So for now she is codenamed "Boudicca" – Miss Paine the Younger's jocular suggestion when told they wanted a "traditional English name, not too commonly used." I have been thinking of her as Boudicca now for so long (and, trust me, I think about her a lot) that I may keep calling her that.

Regular readers will recall my unalloyed joy at the news of her impending arrival. She's not even born yet and she's making me a better man. For the first time in years, I'm thinking about the future. It will be her world now and I want it to be great. I also want to live long enough for her to remember me and am constantly planning ways to be as memorable and beloved a grandfather as my dad was to my girls.

That's the good news. The bad news is that our civilisation is still in jeopardy. Our enemies mass at the gates. Our leadership is execrable. It's so stupid it can't understand the importance of the freedoms that made the West. It lacks morals. Its public policy ideas would shame a sixth-form debating society - even one formed (as my admissions tutor – looking at the crap comprehensive I was "educated" in – rightly guessed) just to look good on an application to a law faculty. 

I had resigned myself to the fact that a great civilisation was coming to an end (as all must) and that it was my destiny to live in its final years. Statistically Boudicca is likely to live more than a century however, so my concerns now reach beyond that feared end. I'd always assumed my American-educated daughters could flee there if Britain and Europe fall into a new Dark Ages. Now I have to pay attention to trends in American politics that make it seem doubtful as a refuge.

Arguably the most optimistic thing I ever did – a decade and a half ago in Moscow – was to start this blog. I uttered the optimist's favourite cliché: that it was better to light a candle than curse the darkness and set out quietly to try to change minds. I remembered how one pamphlet – Tom Paine's "Common Sense" – had shaped a new world and took his as a pen-name in the hope of pamphleteering digitally to similar effect.

How many minds have I actually reached? A few thousand at best. A few hundred regulars. Remember how the internet was going to allow us all to escape the wicked grasp of press barons and those whose spittle they lick? Well it kind of happened – consider the reach of Guido Fawkes or Ian Dale these days, let alone Elon Musk on X – but it wasn't to be for most of us. My candle is still a candle and the ideas it was supposed to illuminate – Enlightenment notions that were uncontroversial for centuries – are more in the dark than ever.

I would love it if you, gentle readers, could help me back from the negative mindset to which, in such circumstances,  I have descended. I don't hope to recover the arrogance or optimism of my youth. I quite accept that the wisdom of age largely consists of realising how little you really know and how stupid you used to sound. There's nothing wrong with a bit of humility or perspective, for sure. I just need to recover some hope that, for the sake of my Boudicca and yours, good ideas can prevail.

The only hopeful straws I see in the current winds are Elon Musk, a friend's son's explanation to his dad of all the "bullshit you have to pretend to believe at school to get marks" and the fact that – last July – the utter collapse of the Conservative vote in Britain didn't increase the numbers voting Labour. In fact, in the only part of this realm with a Labour administration (my native Wales) their vote went down. Only in Scotland did Labour gain – from the laughably incompetent (and left-wing) SNP. 

Also, while critical thinking has been hounded out of the Establishment and the dreaming spires of academe by the clerisy of a new religion rivalling Scientology for weirdness and stupidity, it lives on among the laity. The ordinary people of the West lack leadership however. The more thoughtful among us live in fear that they may acquire some of a nefarious kind. The more the Leftist Establishment cries wolf about the "far right" the more likely a real wolf is to spy an opportunity. All non-leftists have now been called Nazis so often that it's lost the shock it should command. I hate to end on a negative note, but that seems almost as dangerous as the religious and ideological threats calling such demons forth.

So, gentles, if you have seen other straws in the wind that might give me hope, please let me know in the comments. 

 


A crisis of Britishness

Margaret Thatcher famously quoted Kipling's Norman and Saxon to President Mitterand of France in an EU meeting;

The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow – with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, 'This isn't fair dealing,' my son, leave the Saxon alone.

She was trying, perhaps not as delicately as her diplomats would have wished, to explain how the apparently calm British will react – eventually – to being wronged. 

I spent twenty years in three other countries and worked closely in business with people from many more. I have often smiled to myself since returning when I hear British people speak of our unique sense of fair play. It's not unique at all. Everyone has it. We do not own fairness. We do not own tolerance.

We do, however, traditionally pride ourselves on both and the way we see ourselves has shaped our reactions over the last twenty-five years as we welcomed more immigrants than in the previous two millennia. A few years ago I listened quietly to a Bangladeshi friend – a would-be human rights lawyer – talk about racism in our country. I asked her where in the world was a better place to live as a member of an ethnic minority. On reflection, she agreed with me that there is nowhere.

I am not saying we couldn't treat each other better. Of course we could and should try. But let's take a moment, as our streets burn and our elites condemn us as far-right racists, to be proud of how we've behaved in general towards so many new arrivals in such a short time.

Britain, like Europe's other social democracies, was, when this process began, not producing enough children to maintain our population. That wasn't intrinsically a problem. Depopulation would mean cheaper land and housing, more room for nature and a cleaner environment for example. It was however a major problem for our political elites because of what Nye Bevan called "the big dirty secret about the National Insurance Fund." Which is, there is no f***ing fund.

The "from the cradle to the grave" welfare state was a mis-sold insurance product. We and our employers paid something called National Insurance on our salaries, which was supposed to fund benefits when we were sick, unemployed or too old to work. However, none of that money was ever actually set aside and invested. Politicians spent it in ways they thought would win votes. They counted – like the founders of a Ponzi scheme – on future contributors. When they realised those contributors weren't coming in sufficient numbers, they knew their scheme would collapse. The demographic crisis was theirs.

One day history may reveal which politician in the capital of an old European empire realised there was a ready supply of workers in the former colonies. People who spoke our languages and were familiar with our systems of government – because both had been forced on their ancestors. It was a perilous idea that may yet prove to be the end of European civilisation but he must have looked like a genius to his peers.

The doors were opened and cheap labour flooded in. From the lofty heights where the elites survey us, it looked like a perfect solution. On the ground, not always so much. Mostly we've been welcoming, accepting and tolerant. We've sometimes even gone beyond tolerance and flattered our new arrivals that they've enhanced our magnificent old culture with their jerk chicken and curries. 

Yet already when I was a youngster practising criminal law problems had begun to emerge. A custody sergeant with whom I used to chat when waiting to see clients in the cells told me suicide rates among Muslim girls in our Midlands city were disturbingly high. Asked why that was, he said they were not suicides, but honour killings – the first time I'd heard that phrase. No-one, he said, commits suicide by pouring paraffin over themselves and setting themselves alight. It's just too painful.  Muslim men were killing their daughters and sisters. Asked why there were no prosecutions, he said senior police officers made it clear to their subordinates that it was "racist" to suggest the dead girls' families' stories of suicide were untrue.

Fresh out of my university law faculty, I sneered that his bosses were right and he was a racist. I will never forget the last words he said to me;

Young man, then you're part of the problem.

And I was. In that moment, I'd turned away from murdered women to preserve my smug world view. Just as, decades later, council staff and police officers in cities all over Britain turned away from young girls groomed and raped by Muslim men, for fear of being called bad names.

Decades later, our elites are still sneering. Yes, skin colour is irrelevant to moral worth. Yes, other religions can and should be tolerated. Yes, immigration can be a good thing – if managed properly. Our island story is peppered with immigrants who made this a better place. But flooding the country with people who don't even aspire to share our values and doing so at a speed that gives no chance – even if we were trying – to assimilate them into our society, was always crazy.

We've long been cowed into submission. We watched as our present PM "took the knee" in solidarity with one black American thug who sadly died an unlawful death, when he'd said not a word about myriad British victims of grooming gangs or honour killings. We watched swastika-bearing pro-Hamas protestors be protected by police from "obviously Jewish" passers-by who might upset them. We watched police run meekly from violent ethnic minority protests against children being taken into care and heard our elites make excuses. We watched our authorities cave into that violence and hand those children back.

Then, when three innocent girls were recently murdered by a second-generation immigrant, we watched the ferocity of the police response to protests. We thought they'd gone soft. We thought they didn't know how to respond to illegal violence. We were wrong. They know how to do it but only to those who challenge the state's political narrative.

It's been called "two tier policing." That is a mild term indeed for open, shameless injustice. Call it what you like, to come back to Kipling, it isn't fair dealing. That's why anger – simmering quietly for so long – is boiling over now. Terrible things may be done, which I will not support or excuse. I am not going to stoop to our elites' disgusting level by excusing wickedness on identarian grounds. I will just say the British State created this dangerous situation.

Our country didn't become the best place to be in an ethnic minority because we are bad people. Calling us bad names and unleashing the state's thugs on us for crimes so readily excused in others is unjust. The government never shuts up about equality, but the most important equality of all is equality before the law. When that fails, as it is failing, there is good reason to ask once again what it really means to be British – and this time get the answer right. 


It depends on which immigrants, really.

Politics latest news: People want immigration controls, Tony Blair warns Keir Starmer.

One of the joys of growing up working class (middle class in the American sense) and becoming middle class (in the British sense) is that – from your weird bubble where neither the people you grew up with, nor the people you now live with, quite accept you as fully belonging – you get to see just how little our people know of each other's lives.
 
Take the example of immigration. In the linked article, Tony Blair (who seems somehow to have been re-elected last week, though he appeared on no ballot papers) says immigration is a good thing with the following example;
I think there is a centre ground that can hold which is where people understand there are enormous benefits to immigration, and by the way a lot of what we are talking about, these great AI innovations, look at the people leading them, many of them are immigrants into this country. 
I am more than ready to believe that the immigrants Blair encounters in his high-powered, wealthy life are driving innovations in AI. It's far more plausible than that Blair understands what AI is, for example. The immigrants of his acquaintance are like the immigrant I married. The ex-Mrs P II has a masters degree and pays not only her taxes but all the visa fees and NHS contributions required of legal immigrants pending acquisition of citizenship or legal right to remain. She's responsible, law-abiding and less likely to trouble the Metropolitan Police than the average native-born Londoner. 
 
I suppose that immigrants of that quality might still present a threat to our culture if there were enough of them, but let's face it there just aren't. Even if there were millions whose arrival would instantly raise our GDP, improve our social order and raise educational standards in our schools such people are thoughtful and polite enough to take note of local culture and make an effort to integrate. 
 
Blair and his metropolitan mates however need to understand that if you're a working class person in Luton or Leicester, those aren't the immigrants you meet. You're far more likely to encounter not just un-educated but viciously mal-educated people with attitudes more suited to England's Middle Ages than its 21st century. Mr Blair, there's nothing racist about them noticing that.
 
Here's a link to an account of a pogrom in England. I take no pride in that dark history, but I am delighted it's so far in our past. There have been no pogroms in our country in modern times – yet. The kind of immigrants who cause voters concern are those who are more than likely – I personally fear that it's inevitable – to shatter that proud record of peace and tolerance and sully our history with a modern pogrom.
 
There is a middle ground. Rigorous enforcement of immigration laws, with rapid deportation of illegal immigrants, coupled with a reduction in both the costs of legal immigration and of bureaucratic obstacles to qualified migrants. Making it easier for useful, respectable people to come here, regardless of colour or creed, would confirm (as has long been the case) that Britain is the best place on Earth to be a member of an ethnic minority.
 
We should be proud of being the least racist country in the world. Excluding and if necessary deporting those who demonstrate – by breaking our laws on the very day of their arrival, by upholding doctrines incompatible with our values or by themselves being racist (anti-semitism counts) – would not in any way contradict that. Unless, as would never be the case under our laws, legal distinctions were made based on race.
 
Though it's hilarious he can't see how rarified his example is, Blair is right that there are benefits to controlled immigration. Bringing in people of the quality he describes is a good thing. There are however no benefits to importing ignorant, backward enemies of Western civilisation, whatever colour their skin is.

An election that's hard to bear

IMG_6278As I walked home from casting my vote, I felt sad. I live in a solid Labour seat so had no hope of my vote counting. I am used to that. In my life as a voter, I have rarely – under Britain's first-past-the-post system – been on the winning side. The only big win of my democratic life was the vote to leave the EU.

I watched people passing on their way to the polling station and wondered what they were thinking. This is leafy West London. By any logic familiar to the minority of us who live here who were born in this country, my neighbours are not voting Labour from self-interest. Perhaps I should be ashamed to know them so poorly as to have no idea what drives their choice. I am certainly not ashamed not to know the hundreds of them who celebrated on our local streets last October 7th.

The result in my own constituency
credit: Evening Standard | click to enlarge

It looks like Labour will command a majority of about 160 seats in the House of Commons on the basis of a national vote in England & Wales that is down on last time. They've won no votes from the Conservatives - only from the SNP in Scotland.

They have achieved their majority without disclosing what they actually intend to do with it. The Conservative Party has lost the support of its voters so comprehensively that all Labour had to do was sit quietly and wait.

As an experienced older voter, that's not really a problem to me. I know what Labour will do from a lifetime of bitter experience. Their ideology is envy and their policy is armed robbery. They'll waste money, they'll attack and impede the productive, they'll raise taxes, they'll diminish liberty and they'll subsidise (and therefore encourage) failure.

Labour always leaves both society and the economy worse than it finds them so I know the final decade of my life will be poorer and less pleasant than it would have been. I won't be alone in that. Life will be poorer and less pleasant for Labour voters too, unless they are on the state's payroll.

Labour did not deserve to win this election, but the Conservatives richly deserved to lose it. Labour is the accidental beneficiary of the Tories' national vote losses to Reform UK. The Conservatives comprehensively betrayed their principles over the last fourteen years and have been duly punished by the voters they arrogantly thought of as their own. The one thing they did that "their" people wanted was done with obvious reluctance and under pressure from Reform under its former name of the Brexit Party. They should feel profoundly ashamed for delivering us into the hands of scoundrels. They're to blame for what will follow as Britain lurches left just as the rest of the free world turns right.

Are there any signs of hope in today's results? Perhaps. The Overton Window has moved so far left in my lifetime that the entire national discourse now fits within the policies of the Labour Party when I was young. The Reform Party's vote share suggests this is unjustified. Most people in Britain are some kind of small-c conservative. Most of the time they're not just disregarded by the Establishment, they're sneered at and denounced. That's not going to change anytime soon as the political wing of the public sector unions takes office, but Reform has the chance to give them a voice in Parliament for the first time in decades. Farage is a principled conservative and a skilled orator and I confidently predict he will make some of the most listened-to speeches in the coming Parliament.

I don't yet see any sign yet of the Conservatives understanding what's happened. There must be hope that in the weeks and months ahead, they will work out that Labour only won votes in Scotland from the hopelessly incompetent SNP. In England their vote is unchanged. In Wales, where people have a Labour government, it went down. If the Conservative Party is to survive it needs to win votes back from the right. There are none to be had from the left. 

As I type this, I'm listening to Ed Miliband promising to prove to a disillusioned electorate that Government can do good. That's Labour finally making a concrete promise and it's one it can't possibly deliver. Government is a necessary evil, even when confined to reasonable bounds. Our government burst those bounds decades ago and Labour is not the Party to change that. The evils of government can therefore be expected to grow and there'll be no-one but Labour to blame.

Young voters who don't know Labour are about to learn some very painful lessons that will contradict the propaganda they heard in the course of their education. I place my hope in our young people. They've had a bad deal economically and they're about to get a worse one. If they are shaped by their experiences, rather than by their education, there's always hope.


Why the French are so pessimistic | The Spectator

Why the French are so pessimistic | The Spectator.

The most striking thing is the skilled and marvellous way France maintains the public realm. From pavements to lighting, to high streets and motorways and serious infrastructure, France gleams. Frankly, given the choice, I’d rather live in a French roundabout than the average redbrick Barratt Home new-build, with its three-inch-wide windows. The former, the French roundabout, is likely to be prettier, and better designed, and it’s guaranteed to have superior stonework.

Just as I noted here during my recent road trip!

French taxes are as high as ours, but more of them get spent on things French people need. Their elections are showing however, that good infrastructure, housing and lifestyle are not enough. The French are not becoming politically more extreme in search of a better material life. They are doing it to ditch a treacherous establishment that does not respect them. The Énarques have strutted and preened long enough, while filling France's cities with enemies who openly despise her in order to prop up their state-sponsored Ponzi scheme.

We all care (pause here for leftists to call us racist) about our culture and our way of life and want to see it preserved. In the final analysis we will all – even the relatively pampered French - rise up and fight for it. The French people are saying "non!" at the moment and I wish them luck. Vive la France!

As I recently watched Tucker Carlson tell an Australian journalist,

Happy people have children and a functioning economy allows them to do that.

Rather than import new citizens to prop up the numbers, perhaps our governments should try to make it so young people can both afford to have children and believe enough in the future to want to? If, for example, housing costs and high taxes mean it mostly takes two incomes for young people to afford a home, it's hard to sacrifice some or all of an income to have a child. Importing low-income households while restricting housing supply with planning laws, will never make that easier. So maybe let's not, eh?

Sadly the betrayal of everything they should hold dear by the so-called "Conservative" Party is about to give Labour a five to ten year untrammelled chance to build a massive demonstration – a sort of Leftist theme park – of every vice and folly that has been dragging down the West for decades. I am afraid we're going to be late to your party, mes amis. Do your best without us for now.

When our time comes, however, watch out! By the time Labour has further impoverished us while robbing us blind, denigrating our way of life, rubbishing our values, castrating and mastectomising our healthy children and rewriting our history to make us the world's monsters, we'll be ready.

This is not what I personally want, of course. I'd love a thoughtful national review of the scale and role of the state followed by a slow, gentle move towards liberty. My whole ethic is based on the non-aggression principle, and I despise social division and violence. However it's clear our Deep State parasites will no more remove their blood-sucking proboscises than will France's without weaponising some version of Le Pen against them. The Left's culture wars also dangerously shift focus from rational issues to defending our way of life. Resisting that is more obviously a task for a Le Pen or (God help us) worse than an economics professor like Javier Milei in Argentina.

The Leftist shit-show and inevitable economic car crash we're facing without even an adequate Opposition to resist, makes it sadly more likely that when our Le Pen materialises, she is likely to make cuddly old Nigel Farage seem milquetoast.


Pride comes before a fall

As the chairman of my university Conservatives in England, I led my members on a march to legalise homosexuality in Scotland and Northern Ireland. That dates me. The law was not changed for Scotland until 1980, or for Northern Ireland until 1982. It was of course already legal in England & Wales where the law changed in 1967. I’m old but not that old.

We marched neither for self interest nor self promotion. There was no social benefit for us — indeed we were made most unwelcome by leftists on the march, because we didn’t fit their narrative. Already in the 1970s, among student politicians, no one gave a damn about the “content of your character” or even the correctness of your policies if you were not of the Left. 

We were small state, low tax Conservatives. The national party would shortly thereafter close down the Federation of Conservative Students to which we belonged for advocating the legalisation of drugs, for example. We wanted Liberty to reign and people to make their own choices wherever possible — and express them mostly through the economic democracy of markets.

So my rationale for leading my members that day was not to win homosexual votes,  nor to feel cool for being an ally. Their sexual urges were as icky to me as mine were, I assumed, to them but they were of just as little concern as they were of interest.

My objective that long-ago day was to reduce the number of unnecessary laws. What consenting adults did to each other in bed was (like all other aspects of our private lives) none of the state’s damn business. If, as they liked to sing back then, homosexuals were “glad to be gay”, we were glad for them. The “crime” was victimless so should never have been a crime at all.

The legal reform we sought was an excellent one, not least because it was (unlike much legislation since, which actively and anti-democratically seeks to shape thought) driven by changing attitudes. Few people cared if their neighbour was gay as long as he or she didn’t “do it in the street and frighten the horses”. The law opened gays to abuse and blackmail. It did much harm and no good. It was clearly better to restore some Liberty and let people be. 

Since then my only involvement with the gay rights movement has been to be delayed in traffic by a “Pride” march on a visit to New York City once. If I’ve thought about it at all, it’s been to worry that rights specific to particular groups are dangerously divisive insofar as they undermine the key concept of equality before the law. I’ve advised gay people professionally, worked alongside them and employed a fair few of them without ever thinking about their sexuality. Why would I?

So why am I thinking about them now? Firstly because they are insisting upon it. I’m no more proud to be straight than I am to be tall or white. It’s just one fact among many. Yet activist gays insist that not only are they proud to be what they are, but that I should be proud for them too. That’s frankly nuts.

The Pride march in NYC that once prevented me getting to lunch as quickly as I would have liked has become a global festival that lasts a bloody month. Gays literally want us to celebrate them more than we celebrate our great inventors, poets or the warriors who died for our freedoms. How can that be a good look in PR terms? Frankly, if you think your sexuality is thirty times more worthy of celebration than Shakespeare’s genius, you are off your tastelessly-painted trolley.

Secondly, they're using their bully pulpit unwisely. LGB, a standard TLA (three letter acronym) is getting perilously close to consuming the entire alphabet. The minute a plus sign was added, I wondered why they don’t just settle for G+ and save some trees. 

By adding more and more letters to that alphabet soup and insisting not on a general human right to be harmlessly different, but on category-specific rights for ever smaller and wackier groups, the movement has weakened the consensus that drove legalisation all those years ago. We were with you (or at least benignly indifferent to you) until you embraced people waving their dicks in our faces while insisting they’re women. Or until you advocated life-changing surgeries for confused minors (more than most of whom were on track to be happily gay).

What were you thinking?

The sloppy “born that way” arguments deployed to support that excellent reform back in the day are being stolen and abused. You ignored the risk of reductio ad absurdam until it morphed into reductio ad fastidium

Are you looking for trouble? Did you learn nothing from the damaging attempts of the Paedophile Information Exchange (supported by Harriet Harman in her stupid youth) to ride on the coattails of gay rights back in the day?

To try to answer my own question I attended an online Pride Month seminar yesterday. It was not pretty. The three presenters were variously queer. One was — of course — transgender. I knew more history of the gay rights movement than they did. They spoke of decades as if they were aeons and words as if they were cannons. They were wedded (in complete ignorance of the struggles of their pre-legalisation brothers and sisters) to a sense of oppression. They saw no logical conflict between despising heteronormativity and bemoaning how much unhappier and more suicidal they were because they were outside that norm.  

Rather than being glad to be gay and celebrating the world of opportunity opened to them by their oppressed predecessors, they made it clear they could never be happy until everyone else approved of them. They wanted us all to learn the minutiae of their kinks and waste great chunks of our lives proving the depth of our useless knowledge. They want us to respond to them in total sensitivity to a sense of self that one of them said varied from day to day according to his/her/its “vibe”.

These are luxury beliefs no society is rich enough to afford.

If you want to be happy, accept yourself. Most people don’t know or care about you anyway. If you try to force them to look at you and then tell them you can only be happy if they approve of you, you are “cruising for a bruising”.  

It is a recipe for lifelong misery. Pack it in. 


Juneteenth and reflections on slavery

This (republished from four years ago) article from The Cato Institute set me thinking. I was happy to be introduced to a word in ancient Sumerian — ama-gi.

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This is the way the concept of freedom was first expressed in writing. Interestingly it connoted (amongst other things) release from slavery, which shows how deep rooted that concept is — despite charlatans attempting to characterise it as the vice of a particular modern race. 

Every step away from Liberty is a step towards slavery. Working most of each year to pay taxes for example, is a kind of time share slavery.  The slave masters here are not just the government enforcers but all those who say, as Lincoln the great Liberator put it

You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it.

To work for government or otherwise live on its stolen bounty is — morally — to enslave your fellows. It should be as repugnant as working for a gangster. Anyone attracted to it as a means to make a living will be at best naive and at worst a moral degenerate.

Even if you don’t live on money taken by force from fellow citizens you need to consider the morality of your choices if — every time the conduct of your fellow humans offends you — you call on the state to constrain them.

A good friend of mine has a habit of leaping from a valid moral position to seeking its enforcement by “society”. That can of course be a thing. The most complicated technology we use every day — our language — was developed freely by society without any enforcement mechanism. It’s one of the best examples of spontaneous order. 

But that’s not what he (or other would-be society enhancers) means. In practice, he means enforcement by government. The very idea that the crooked timber of mankind can be shaped into something beautiful by the worst of us; people attracted to living as parasites on us while bossing us about is naive, given all the history on the subject. It would be funny if it were not so lethally wrong.

I am happy that Americans celebrate Juneteenth. Slavery is the absence of Liberty and therefore wrong. I just wish we could learn to celebrate — and trust — Liberty itself. 


Home again. Travel Mode OFF

IMG_6248My journey got off to a bad start when a group of us were given the wrong directions to our section of the car deck on our ship. Speranza was right at the front of deck 4 and my late arrival held people up. How embarrassing,

The drive from Plymouth to London  can be summed up by this screenshot of Speranza's trip computer. Over five hours to cover less than 250 miles is a disgrace. My average speed was 40 by the time I made it to the M4, after encountering endless delays. It was stop/start driving all the time on the A roads from Plymouth and the M5. I managed to improve my average on the M4, despite a fair amount of stop/start and many miles of average speed monitored road works (with not a single worker visible at any point). 

The final run back home on UK soil is often the worst part of my continental jaunts, because our roads are so depressingly bad and overloaded by comparison with those of our continental neighbours. We used to have the excuse that we paid less tax than them. That's simply no longer true. Is it because their engineering skills or industriousness are superior? Perhaps so in Germany, but their roads aren't as good as France's. In my view it's entirely because of the ideological capture of our public services.

Whereas we pay public servants to be just that – servants – they decline these days to serve us. Rather than do a good job of public infrastructure works and their maintenance – a sort of blue collar, essential job in the national enterprise – they prefer to be our HR Department. They cajole, they threaten and above all they try to shape our thoughts and behaviours into conformity with their own.

They're neither rewarded for pleasing us nor fired for failing us. Their employment arrangements are Soviet in that sense. Unfortunately if you want the Soviet apparatchiks' opportunities for idleness, irresponsibility and superior benefits to the productive proles, you also need the Soviet discipline of the gulag and the firing squad – and ours don't have that. 

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That said,  Speranza is back in her parking spot having brought me safely home. I thoroughly enjoyed my little adventure – even some of the unforeseen parts. I learned a lot about myself and at least one of my friends and I will certainly always remember where I was when I learned I am going to be a granddad! My final Track My Tour map (from which the above is a screen shot) is here. 

Without the late Mrs P. to edit me, I worry that I may over-share. If so, I am sorry, I hope that, despite that, you enjoyed riding along in imagination. Thank you.