‘THERE were people, thin-skinned intellectuals such as Auden and Spender who, when the war with Hitler came, were very cross because it might stop them producing what were supposed to be their masterpieces and because national war was not, so to speak, part of their theory of things.
‘I watched with a certain malicious pleasure these people who had scruples about the war. Certainly, I felt England to be in the right but, as an intellectual matter, I hardly admitted the categories of tight and wrong in politics. All that counted was that England had been there for a very long time and England was my country. The windbags who invented ideals for her to fight for were wasting their time. I preferred the mere animal stubbornness of my unthinking fellow countrymen.’ – Autobiographical Reflections on Politics by C H Sisson.
Like Sisson and Samuel Johnson before him, I am a conservative – though I prefer the four-letter word Tory. Tories do not believe in theories, doctrines and ideals in political affairs. Tories believe in practical realities and in interests. Theories are the preoccupation of ideologues, usually Whigs and socialists: self-satisfied types who would not even notice you were despising them when you referred to them as the intellectual elite. This coterie of supercilious riffraff consider themselves far above the vulgar instincts of mere patriots like Dr Johnson and the Duke of Wellington.
Well, that is quite enough of scene-setting. I mentioned realities and interests, so let me confine the rest of what I want to say to some very particular realities and some and very pressing interests.
Our country is in mortal peril. We have been here before. In 1588 Drake left aside his bowling match to see off the Spanish Armada. Later Nelson, Wellington and the string of Martello towers along the south coast foiled Napoleon. After too much fatuous prevarication we cast out the appeasers, sent for Mr Churchill and so were ready to fight off the Luftwaffe in 1940.
On all those occasions, the enemy was something identifiably alien, but today there is something new and disgraceful. The difference in 2022 is that we ourselves are the enemy. We have rendered ourselves impotent to repulse any external foe by running down our armed forces. Far worse than that, we have made ourselves dependent on our enemies for our very survival by our reliance on foreigners to supply our energy requirements – and at a rate of payment, ever increasing, that we cannot afford.
Worse even than those follies, we have enchanted ourselves with the fantasy of global warming and opted instead to impoverish our people by the lunacy of net zero carbon emissions. Could we have made things worse? Of course! Indeed, we did so by inventing pseudo-problems to replace the tangible physical threats: the sheer clowning involved in our obsessions with racism, sexism, the whole repertoire of equality, sexual diversity and the narcissism of the profitable trans-gendering industry.
Unlike Drake, Nelson, Wellington and Churchill, we have ignored real enemies and instead diverted all our energies to the vanquishing of imaginary ones.
Finally, we have decided to hate ourselves, to despise and ‘cancel’ our history. We turn our censure on the perceived faults of men and women who lived hundreds of years ago instead of those of today who are guilty of far more despicable sins, negligences and ignorances. The unreal woke establishment, by which we are now governed and controlled, spurns our heroes and heaps honours on those – such as Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion – who have vowed to destroy our age-old way of life.
The deranged wokery of the socialists will most damage the poorest – exactly the class of people they declare, with bleeding hearts, they wish to help. And now even those who call themselves Conservatives compete to outdo the socialists in the implementation of the fantasy policies of the green lobby.
We are going to die poor, frozen and insane – but still protesting our politically-correct self-righteousness. It will be painful and we shall deserve every self-inflicted pang.
This is England, RIP.
