It was Nietzsche who described the ‘fin de siècle’ era of the 19th Century as one of ‘nihilism’. With the ‘death of God’ and the new industrialised world offering economic highs and lows, along came Weimar and the catastrophes of the 20th Century. Nietzsche, of course, ended up hugging horses in the streets of Geneva and was sent to a mental institution. I hear you.
The new Labour government in Britain is run by a lawyer called Starmer. There’s something about lawyers as leaders… Remember Maximilien Robespierre chopping heads on the guillotine? The Les Misérables of the Labour executive behave like a legal caliphate. For example, the Liverpool City Council were able, within 24 hours of its erection (no pun intended), to send an ‘officer’ to order the removal of a Halloween decoration deemed ‘too frightening’. The decoration in question involved a couple of human-like figures stuffed and left in black bin bags, hanging from a garden tree. This is not as scary as Angela Rayner or Rachel Reeves in what has to be the most ghoulish government executive in British history.
The Labour government would probably brand me as a ‘member of the far-right’. I am still searching for my membership card. Let me check: was it the NSDAP or the SS? A blanket intolerance for ‘the other’ is symptomatic of a state in terminal decline – a nation that incarcerates political rioters and releases thousands of dangerous felons onto the streets … because the prisons are full. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky remarked, you can always judge a country by the state of its prisons. This is a nation that cannot afford two battleships and has a diversity department for the Army. Whilst Britain has been wallowing in Woke world, the standing army constitutes 74,000 soldiers. The Russian army is 1.1 million strong. Sri Lanka has an army of 265,000 and Thailand 650,000.
Having said that, I do have a social conscience. I decided to get involved with ‘reparations’, so I marched down, like Citizen Smith, to my local West Indian restaurant only to find that all the staff were white. It’s the thought that counts. As some of you readers may know, my new book, Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century, did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I wasn’t so much shortlisted, as excommunicated. The winner, and here’s a shock, was a woman from South Korea. The BBC said that her ‘billet doux’, ‘crosses boundaries by exploring a broad span of genres – these include violence, grief, and patriarchy’. I didn’t know there was a ‘patriarchy’ section in Barnes and Noble, but hey, let’s get with it. She won the Booker Prize a few years ago with a novel called The Vegetarian, which I bought thinking it was a Korean cookery book. The BBC assured us it ‘depicts the violent consequences for a woman who refuses to submit to the norms of food intake’.
Meanwhile Starmer, unhappy with the decor at 10 Downing St, has taken down the painting of Elizabeth 1st posing with Sir Walter Raleigh and replaced it with the work of a modern Portuguese artist depicting what Starmer said was the need for ‘a powerful woman’ called Crivelli’s Garden. Labour’s whitewashing (blackwashing?) of history makes the woman who defeated the Spanish Armada a weak woman. History, and anything vaguely intellectual, does not appear of much import to present British political elites. After Liz Truss and her foreign policy humiliations at the hand of Lavrov, there arrives the likes of David Lammy. The UK Foreign Secretary was accused of a diplomatic blunder after he suggested that Azerbaijan had ‘liberated’ the disputed Caucasus territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, despite official UK policy on Armenian rights to the territory. Lammy has a Substack where he plans to write more about world affairs and UK foreign policy. Can we not ban Twitter and Substack? No doubt Lammy’s work will be sitting in pride of place in Barnes and Noble next to Toynbee, Spengler, and Weber. Or perhaps in the ‘Patriarchy for Dummies’ section.
Wearing a rainbow badge at the UN General Assembly, he did not address the audience with a speech about the new multipolar world, civilisational decline, or the Eurasian alliance of Russia, China, and North Korea. No. He spoke about a ‘Global Clean Power Alliance’. Lammy’s success is remarkable. There is only one member of the alliance: the United Kingdom. This in the light of the Kiel Institute’s recent alarming study on the inability of Europe to match Russian levels of rearmament. ‘Germany will not attain 2004 levels of armament for about 100 years.’ The EU has committed to a policy of decarbonisation to be achieved by 2050. This will cripple European economies. At least when the Russians arrive, we will have electric charging facilities for their new T-72 tanks rolling off the production lines.
Meanwhile, the Welsh assembly has produced a ‘blacklist’ of racist buildings. The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) has made a list of racist buildings to avoid. The aim is to make Wales ‘racist free’ by 2030. These buildings can be schools, community centres, or pubs. They are also racist if named after historical figures such as Churchill, Nelson, Columbus, or Cecil Rhodes. Buildings are colour-coded depending on the level of culpability; red, orange, green. My house has been marked with a large red plaque. The Buccaneer Inn should not be frequented for a pub lunch or a pint of Guinness. It was named after ‘pirates’ who ‘sometimes traded slaves’. The village of Nelson (near 5,000 inhabitants) is off-limits. There have been sightings of people leaving the Caerphilly area wearing KKK outfits and brandishing pitchforks. This was not Halloween either.
Even the realms of culture are not immune to the proselytizing. There is a black-only theatre in the heart of the West End, London. Inclusive? We have heard it said that, ‘Britain isn’t English any more…’ I have been saying the same thing ever since the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707. Anyone who utters such a thing is made a ‘persona non grata’ and cancelled from everything. It’s Stalinist and The Engineer of human souls all over again. But at least the factories will be clean… As they won’t exist.
Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well. Alas, poor Albion.
Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany in magazines such as The Spectator, Comment Central, The Times, The American Spectator, Asian Affairs, Deliberatio, L’Indro Quotidiano Indipendente di Geopolitica, The National Interest, GeoPolitical Monitor, Merion West, Voegelin View, The Montreal Review, The European Conservative, Visegrad Insight, The Hungarian Review, The Salisbury Review, New English Review, American Thinker, Indian Strategic Studies, Philosophy News. His new book: Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century is published now by Ethics International Press. He is an adviser to several Think Tanks and Corporates on Geopolitical Issues.