Dominion Day, 1964

[H/T: British & Commonwealth Forces | Facebook]

Wealthless Nations?

The above is from one of those boring but important/scary articles that give one some idea of quite how badly things are really going. England will prevail, of course. But before that happens we may well have to learn the hard way (once again!) that the only way to wealth, health and happiness is through earning and saving, whereas spending leads only to poverty and misery.

Benjamin Franklin of all people put it well:

The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality: that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do, and with them everything.

Kipling, of course, put it better:

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four– 

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

Melbourne Grammar School

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From Bad to Worst?

Somewhat depressingly, my order for the least worst Prime Ministers of the 21st century goes

1. Blair
2. Brown
3. The other brown one
4. Lord Cameron of Diddly Squat Farm
5. Boris
6. Mrs O'Leary
7. Sir Keir
8. Lady May

I suspect Mr Burnham will slip neatly into place either just before or just after the current No 7*.

In reality, they have of course all been fairly terrible. What is interesting though is that there's a discernible sense in which they generally get worse as time goes by, and not just because of "events, dear boy, events!". Indeed, even general entropy and decline, not to mention political evolution (not to mention "devolution"), the ever expanding and less efficient "civil" service, and quite simply "modern difficulties" (ageing and increasingly "diverse" populations, "secularism", etc.) don't quite account for the distinctly palpable sense that each new PM will in all probability be more politically incompetent than his or her predecessor(s). But then maybe I'm being optimistic.

The cretinous Sir Keir Starmer - in reality an over-promoted government bureaucrat rather than a politician as the term is normally understood - must surely be a case in point. How does one account for the little creep's sheer awfulness? Despite having survived in No 10 for barely a couple of years, the man's "war record" is prodigiously impressive. Just to list out his achievements, since he took office he has declared war on:

• landlords;
• political protesters;
• schools;
• churches;
• farmers;
• war veterans - Ireland and Iraq;
• employers;
• unborn children:
• teenagers;
• trail hunters;
• what remains of the British Empire; and, of course, 
• our country's most important international ally.

In fact it was of course the last of these that finally did for him. The desperate need to replace our man (or person!) in Washington, who is normally a career bureaucrat, with a twice-failed career politician (i.e. the opposite of what had been done in 10 Downing Street!) was because of the Labour Party's bizarrely ill-advised decision to intervene in American politics by sending its goons to campaign for the Democrats at the last Presidential Election. Sir John Major, after all, might have warned them about the perils of that sort of thing - not to mention Lord Cameron, whose equally disastrous decision to get his black pal Barack Obama to intervene in British politics on the side of the Remain campaign was similarly poorly judged.

In reality, I think it has to be confessed that the problem is liberalism itself - or, in its developed forms, Marxism and nationalism. People don't become politicians anymore because they don't like politicians, and they don't like politicians because the whole concept of state authority has to a large extent broken down. Why should someone who's just like me get the authority to tell me what to do? Well, unless you genuinely think it's OK for a majority to use its sheer weight of numbers arbitrarily to bully a minority into doing what it was - including giving up its property and income for the sake of the supposedly greater good - it's quite hard to explain why being "democratically elected" means anyone should be able to tell you what to do. And in our heart of hearts we all know that it doesn't. And thus liberal democracy is to a certain extent self-discrediting. Ordinary decent people prefer to give it a wide berth because they know it's fundamentally unfair and quite frankly just not right.

And so the sort of people who end up getting elected (or, in the case of the creature that's about to start inhabiting No 10, not even elected) just go from bad to worse to worst.

*The sheer unbridled catatonic pointlessness of the last must never be repeated.

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The Nostalgia of Time Travel and the End of Politics... as We Knew It!

Reports of the death of Doctor Who are of course amongst those things that historically have indeed been greatly and repeatedly exaggerated. And in all probability the terminally online buffoons of Restore Britain will this week help to save the Labour Party once again from its long overdue and much deserved electoral annihilation. But it cannot be denied that both of these great icons of the British Left are currently nearer than ever to their respective ultimate demises.

Auntie has announced there won't be a Doctor Who Christmas special this year. They've also - and not before time - sacked the revolting Russell T Davies and decided to put the show's production "out to tender". In other words, to all extents and purposes the TARDIS is grounded for the foreseeable future. The angry Scots leftist, the dreary baby-killing northern woman and the icky gay black man have together driven the viewers away, and for the time being they're not coming back.

Doctor Who's relationship with politics in the "real" world has of course been rather ropey. When the show started in the early 1960s, England was still officially a conservative country, but the coming of Harold Wilson and all his works was already very much on the cards. The Doctor himself was brought down to earth - and joined the Army! - at about the same time as the country's bluff was called (to use Christopher Booker's memorable phrase) when the "Tories" returned to power in the 1970s - only for them to do everything a genuinely conservative government would never have done, including banjaxing the economy and taking Britain into the EEC.

The results of this were of course inevitable: Labour were returned to power, and the Doctor returned to his travels in time and space - only for the show then to become a sort of national comfort blanket during the chaotic years of the Labour-Liberal lunacy in the late 1970s. The coming of Mrs T and the 1980s then did for Tom, and whereas the show struggled on, trying to be a modern, exciting "Global Britain"-type brand, the BBC had decided that they hated it - partly because it was science-fiction (too whacky, too futuristic!) and partly because it was too old-fashioned (too much like Dixon and All Creatures!).

In fact for all that the script editor at the time (before the days of the "show-runner"!) had vowed to use the show to bring down Maggie, there's an eerie sense in which the Beeb's hysterical and contradictory attitudes to Doctor Who (stupid kids' show, and too violent!) mirrored their schizophrenia about Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Party (bunch of rich toffs making everyone poor - and also everyone's too rich, and they're vulgar!). But hey, the 1980s were a goofy time! Fittingly perhaps, first time round the Doctor went out supporting Stalinism and hunt saboteurs, and the Iron Lady was herself finally toppled shortly afterwards. The Mutually Assured Destruction of Left and Right did in practice have a certain poetry to it. The Berlin Wall was down: Nelson Mandela was out of gaol. Socialism and conservatism were both dead. Tomorrow belonged to the liberal internationalists.

Only in practice it wasn't to be. By 2005, the Blajorite "End of History" experiment was already in trouble. The improbability of the trans-Atlantic friendship between Tony and Dubya had rather twitched the curtain on the uncomfortable realities of global power: political alliances are fragile indeed, even if we like to imagine they're "apolitical". And thus when the world came tumbling down again in 2008 the Doctor was ready for it, becoming once again a sort of comforting TV dad (or at least eccentric TV uncle/insufferable TV older/younger brother, etc.) at a time when socio-economic "uncertainties" were unskilfully swapped out for the banal platitudes of (once again!) coalition government... and yet more liberalism!

In truth it was of course the Brexit vote of 2016 the pushed the entire British Establishment over the edge, and the people in charge of Doctor Who as much as everyone else. When the series came back in 2017 for Capaldi's final season, the writing had fallen off a cliff and the show was a bitter, angry, mean-spirited shade of its former self. Everything from the British Empire to the Catholic Church was a scapegoat in plain sight for the woes of an upper middle class "elite" who had lost control of the country. Doctor Who itself had now become officially unwatchable.

And in practice that was that. From then on, the show-runners' only even vaguely defined agenda was to make the viewers suffer: woman Doctor, black Doctor, black woman Doctor, and so on! David and Catherine came back, along with Rusty D himself, but don't relax - because they were all just as angry as everyone else in the BBC, not to mention Fleet Street, academia, Whitehall, the Church of England, the "health" service, and every single political party apart from Ukip (or the Brexit Party, or Reform UK, or whatever they're calling themselves this week).

So, does the "death" of Doctor Who mean that it's all over - at least for the time being? Personally, I wouldn't bet on it. My prediction is that if Reform win the next election the "Old Who" will make a comeback not so much as a organ of state propaganda as as a nostalgia-themed bargaining chip in the BBC's own political battle just to say alive itself.

Whether anyone will actually feel nostalgic about it though - after its systematic desecration and degradation by Chibnall, and then by RTD himself - is another matter.

Jamaica is approaching 60 years of independence. Jamaican newspaper Gleaner commissioned a poll in 2017, it found:

"49% believe the country would be better off today if it had remained a colony of Britain, 27% disagreeing."

62% the economy would be stronger while 13% disagreed.

— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) June 12, 2021