ON June 29, a champagne reception was held in the garden of 10 Downing Street to celebrate Pride Month. Under a rainbow-flag-festooned gazebo, our nominally conservative Prime Minister strongly advocated the need to be ‘progressive’ in all matters of sexuality, going on to celebrate the ‘extraordinary contribution of LGBT people to our country’.
Pink News, as ever, was outraged. It brought to attention words written by Boris Johnson before his woke lobotomy, which seemingly took place shortly after the 2019 general election.
Quoting his 2004 novel Seventy-Two Virgins, that esteemed website took umbrage at Johnson’s use of the phrase ‘tank-topped bum boys’ and the description of a female character as ‘a mega-titted six-footer’. Reading such heights of literary achievement, I feel myself warming somewhat to the Boris Johnson of old.
Not that he would say anything so risqué now. Having achieved power, the carefree and libertarian bumbler of yore has been replaced with LGBT eco-warrior/health Kommandant Johnson.
In 2021 Britain this is all par for the course. It may surprise some, however, that not all leaders have been so busily engaged with Pride Month activities.
Compare and contrast with Chairman Xi a couple of days later. Addressing a packed Tiananmen Square on July 1, Xi not once mentioned LGBT rights. There were no rainbow flags to be seen draped over the Forbidden City – surely an organisational oversight.
Instead, during his speech to commemorate the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (this year being the centenary of the formation of the 1st National Congress), Xi gave a distinctly less progressive talk. The good folk of Pink News will surely be up in arms.
In his best Chairman Mao fancy-dress costume and taking some liberties with the truth, Xi told the crowd:
‘We Chinese are a people who uphold justice and are not intimidated by threats of force. As a nation, we have a strong sense of pride and confidence. We have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will. By the same token, we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us. Anyone who would attempt to do so will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel forged by over 1.4billion Chinese people.’
There are a few takeaways from this. Naturally we see the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Western press. Xi is not averse to using threats of violence – bones crushing and the spilling of blood are standard fare for the chap. Not that you’d guess from a pliant Western media, which is able to criticise politicians only if they are a) white and b) ‘Right-wing’. A dictator with aspirations to become ruler of the world talks of cracking heads and spilling blood? Crickets!
Moreover, given China’s famous touchiness – surely it is among the thinnest-skinned of superpowers in history – you can be sure that its definitions of ‘bully’, ‘oppress’ and ‘subjugate’ differ substantially from ours. This, after all, is a state which trots out the clunky phrase ‘[insert country/person/organisation here] has hurt the feelings of the Chinese people‘ whenever something happens it doesn’t like. Therefore, expect that the ‘Great Wall of steel forged by over 1.4billion Chinese people’ is far closer than you might expect.
This is the same China which we spend endless man hours (sorry, people hours) prattling on about without actually doing anything; the same China that has utterly revoked its binding agreements in Hong Kong; the same China whose influence now spreads into private and public institutions across the West; the same China which has been keenly buying up vital infrastructure across the world; the same China that is engaged in its own Scramble for Africa.
Uncomfortably, it is also the same China to which greed-driven western companies and governments handed over our manufacturing base to satisfy shareholder interest while giving the middle finger to the man and woman on the street.
Despite the clear threat that China poses to the West, the debate as to whether we should allow ‘private’ Chinese companies – in fact firms which are either controlled directly by or are answerable to Papa Xi – to acquire British chip manufacturers or build our nuclear power plants continues with a bizarre lack of urgency among our complacent elite who instead are fully committed to our managed decline.
That our government appears to have no qualms as Beijing’s communists hoover up companies in vitally strategic areas of industry is a sign of a government not fit for purpose. Too busy riding a wave of virtual signalling and forever navel-gazing about the civilisation-corroding concepts of identity, our leaders ignore the blatant threat which has been on the horizon for decades. The closer the threat becomes, the more difficult it becomes to solve. Instead of preventing intellectual property being stolen by the Chinese, they commit to the trillion-pound folly of ‘Net Zero’.
If one were to need an example of just how magnificently Western politicians have failed – God knows there are enough to choose from – their response to China just about takes the biscuit. Endless parroting the tiresome shibboleths of the Left, they simultaneously have got into bed with a most deeply authoritarian and anti-Western state which would like nothing more than to reduce us to the status of vassal state.
There are signs of our leaders slowly awaking to the threat. It is, nevertheless, much slower than necessary. Until just a few years ago, our leaders were heralding the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Sino-British relations, with the slimy likes of Cameron and Osborne lining up to abase themselves at the feet of the Chinese cash cow.
Everyone but our politicians saw the menace rapidly closing in. Many of us have known for years that it is time to disengage with Beijing. No hostilities are necessary, just a gradual decoupling to shield ourselves from the economic warfare China so willingly engages in with those who question its hegemonic aspirations.
Our politicians, on the other hand, have been too myopic to notice. They were doing things like – oh, I don’t know – hosting alphabet-soup people events.
When they write the history of the post-Cold War era, they will surely wonder how the West fell willingly into such a marsh of pointless, tiresome nonsense and actively placed itself in such peril. Some of us are already wondering the same thing.
