The Lost Tories

No, obviously it's not "left-wing" judges. Nor is it even the "left-wing" Establishment.

I mean, obviously both the judiciary and the Establishment more broadly are horrifically left-wing. And of course, more to the point, they're so left-wing they don't realise how left-wing they are. Once you've lost sight of the shore, after all, you can't possibly realise quite how far you've drifted from the land.

But the simple problem is that our entire society has by now drifted so far to the left, and that's because there's been nothing anchoring it to the real world of Church, country and family. The link to the Church was cut in the 16th century, the link between King and country was cut in the late 17th century, and the destruction of the family, which began in the 19th century (with the Marriage Act 1836), was eventually brought to a conclusion in the 21st century (with the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 making the ideological case, and the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020 administering the coup de grâce).

And that's because at every stage the resistance that should have been there should have been the Tory Party - and since 1834 the Tory Party simply (and quite literally!) has not existed. In its place has been an organisation that has always called itself "the Conservative Party" and yet has in fact never stood for or believed in actual conservatism at any time ever.* The hereditary principle meant little to them. Friendship with the soil meant nothing at all. Divine right was utterly beyond their comprehension. 

If the party that wants to be its successor is serious (yeah, right!), it will have to do slightly better than the fogeys, fascists and faggots who have made up "the Right" of the so-called Conservative Party. But in practice I feel they will (at least for a while) surf the same tide of nationalism that is sweeping larping national socialists to power in the Celtic fringe and literal national socialists into political office in "Muslim" areas of England.

Because who cares about hyper-inflation, baby-killing, or World War III breaking out in eastern Europe? So long as the man in charge looks like "one of us"!

*Even icky Alan Bickley over at the Libertarian Alliance gets the point of the Torygraph's pearl-clutching:

Conservative journalism has specialised in this sort of thing since the 1950s. You identify some development that threatens national ruin. You describe it with gloating horror. Then you stop—never the final step, never the remedy. The function, of course, is not remedy but sedation. It instructs the faithful that resistance is futile, that they are simply “on the wrong side of history.” Whether this paralysis comes from stupidity or cowardice no longer matters. The effect is the same: make every complaint a call to despair.

Well, quite!

(The rest of his article unfortunately is unreadable rambling drivel.)

How important is Britain really?

How important is Britain really? In the Real World, that is? On what used to be called "the world stage"  - although to be fair even that doesn't sound like quite such an important place as it did?

That surely is the question one has to ask when one sees our creepy little twerp of a Prime Minister desperately trying to insert himself into the Donald's shot as the great man is announcing Peace In Our Time in the Middle East. And if something's so cringe that even Jeremy Kyle thinks it's cringe, you know - or at least you ought to know - that you've crossed a line.

On the one hand, of course, you've got UK education secretary Bridget Phillipson insisting without a jot of evidence that our great country indeed 'played a key role behind the scenes' in shaping Trump's peace deal between Israel and Hamas over Gaza. On the other hand, you've got, er, the US ambassador to Israel saying quite clearly 'I assure you she's delusional."

And then of course you have the uncomfortable reality: peace could have been achieved a good deal earlier, if only Britain and America had worked together, with the latter keeping a close eye on Netanyahu whilst the former put in the diplomatic legwork to get the Arab states to condemn and isolate Hamas.

Of course, the isolation and surrender of Hamas did eventually. The Israelis bombed Iran. Then Britain and America helped them bomb Iran. Then the Israelis bombed Qatar. Then the Qataris decided that supporting Hamas wasn't quite such a good idea. Then Hamas surrendered.*

But in the meantime Britain, along with Canada and of course France, had done the exact opposite of what was wanted by deciding to "recognise" a "Palestinian state". And apart from because it pandered to their increasingly substantial domestic national socialist Moslem minorities, it wasn't at all clear why.

It is of course possible that it depends whom you ask. Anyone in the Real World, such as poor dear Marco Rubio, will tell you that the Moslem Occupied Governments' decision to reward Hamas by giving their cause diplomatic support did no good whatsoever. But from the point of view of reliably loopy Blairites such as Jonathan Powell it was all part of a cunning plan that couldn't fail.

The plan is, of course, a "peace plan". It's modelled on Powell's other great success, which was of course his plan for "peace" in Ireland. (How's that working out? Oh, yes!) And unfortunately the likes of Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff are clearly sold on the idea of having a sovereign state governed by Hamas. (How would that work out? Oh, yes!)

The fact that Powell and his cronies (and Blair himself is hovering stage left, if reports are to be believed) wouldn't recognise an enemy of western civilisation - whether it be Arab nationalism or Chinese communism - if it were goosestepping up Whitehall is not unimportant. And yet because he has a serious face and a posh accent the Yanks have yet again fallen for the British shtick. "Don't worry, my dear fellow. We know how to handle these people."

The "British", bear in mind, are the supposed colonial experts who almost lost Iraq, just as by now we've all but lost the Chagos Islands, just as we lost most of the rest of the Empire in the 1960s, just as back in the day we lost a handful of colonies on the east coast of North America.

So why exactly Trump & Co are currently seeking and accepting our advice over "peace" in the Middle East raises some very nasty possibilities indeed.

*And pace Douglas Murray, that is essentially what they've done.

From The Daily Telegraph recently:

Zelensky hailed the King as a ‘true inspiration’ Credit: Getty

Sovereign

There was a time when [His Majesty King] Charles [III] was spoken of as a “caretaker” King – a phrase his allies have always bristled at. He would fill the gap, it was thought, between the beloved and long-serving Queen Elizabeth II and a younger, vigorous King William V and his glamorous wife.

It is now clear he is doing a great deal more than that.

As Tina Brown, the former Vanity Fair editor and biographer of Diana, Princess of Wales, wrote recently: “As the British public waits for Prince William to walk through destiny’s door, the most that was expected from the transitional reign of his septuagenarian father was, in Churchill’s phrase, to just ‘keep buggering on’. And yet, Charles’s first few years as monarch have been something of a quiet triumph.”

The successes are easy to list.

The King has charmed post-Brexit Europe by addressing parliaments there in their native language, rehearsing diligently to get his French, German and Italian accents up to speed.

In May he jetted to Canada for less than 24 hours (he is, lest we forget, the King of Canada) to attend the State Opening of Parliament. It sent a message to America, in not so many words, that Canada was a sovereign nation they should stop threatening to invade.

Trump has been “very quiet” about it since, notes one British diplomat.

Charles has burnished his own diplomatic credentials with support for Ukraine, hosting President Zelenskyy for tea at Sandringham in March, shortly after Zelenskyy’s bruising encounter at the White House. 

The war was a “priority” for the King to discuss with President Trump during their private meetings during the state visit, a palace insider confirms. A week later, Trump made what appeared to be a public U-turn to say that Kyiv can “win all of Ukraine back in its original form” and is said to be growing impatient with Putin’s Russia. 

“It is interesting timing, isn’t it,” notes the source. Some Ukrainians, meanwhile, have credited the King outright.

His quest for building bridges between the faiths is ticking along without the need for speeches: he will visit the Vatican this month, and recently made a striking show of attending the first royal Catholic funeral in modern history – of Katharine, the Duchess of Kent, with the Royal standard flying above Westminster Cathedral.

The King’s speech at Auschwitz for the 80th anniversary of liberation was warmly received, making him the first monarch to visit the site of the concentration camp. His work with the Windrush generation, commissioning their portraits for the Royal Collection, helped celebrate their contribution to British life in the middle of the culture wars.

Having been so outspoken in the past can work to the King’s advantage, aides believe: the public knows what he thinks, so now he can say less and “convene” – that favourite royal word – more.

The National Socialists: A Warning for Historians

As with anything about "the Nazis", this is annoying, albeit with a surprising number of insights. It ought to go without saying, of course, that the National Socialists did indeed start building "camps" as soon as they got into power. Their desire to make Germany great again moreover was perfectly just, and it was shared by both the Right and the mainstream Left in Germany at the time. But they were not anti-immigration, nor did they "defund the arts", nor did they "demonize educators". (Nor, pace a bit of prat orthodoxy on the modern American "Right", did they ban guns!) More to the point though, the English-speaking Left and Right now tell themselves quite different versions of the why the Second World War happened, and they have quite different reasons for believing that it was a Good Thing that we won - whether or not they really believe it was a Good Thing, or indeed (viz. Peter Hitchens et al.) whether we really did win after all.

For the mainstream British Right, nothing much has changed. The Second World War happened for essentially the same reasons as the First World War. It was simply a continuation of the same conflict after a hiatus of twenty years. Indeed, many of the very men in charge of the fighting in 1939 had cut their teeth in the '14-18. The Left, on the other hand, have created their own mythology about "World War II" that goes back to the failure of the communist revolution in Bavaria after the fall of the monarchy in 1918. For them, the War was not a recommencement of hostilities between Austria-Germany on the one side and France-England-Russia on the other, but some sort of crusade against "fascism". For them, it was started by "the Nazis", who were themselves started by Hitler, who himself was a right-wing politician from Bavaria. And of course he was allowed to start the war by certain right-wing Tories, who secretly (or not so secretly!) admired him because he hated gays and racial minorities.

The question of course is Why? Why come up with such an obviously ludicrous version of recent history - both overly complicated and with precious little purchase in reality? Because National Socialism did not begin with Hitler in Bavaria after the Great War, but with Ferdinand Buschofsky in Bohemia in 1903. It was not some species of "fascism", and in fact it predated actual fascism by over a decade. Its real roots were in fact in German nationalism (often of a peculiarly esoteric rather than particularly "scientific" or "racialist "variety) and, of course, in anti-Semitism. Hitler himself though was no more anti-Semitic than Kaiser Bill had been. And his vision of Lebensraum in the East, although coloured by the stories of Karl May that he had read as a boy, and by the history of the ethnic cleansing of the Red Indians by the American cavalry in the nineteenth century, was substantially the same as that of the Prussian Junkers going back centuries.

The obvious answer of course is because the Left need to iron out a particular kink in their own mythology, which long ago wrote off the Great War as a pointless, disastrous slaughter caused by late capitalist western imperialism, but nevertheless has to preserve the War as the Left's own Great Crusade Against Fascism. And so not only must the two wars be thought of as being quite separate, but they also have to have had quite different causes. And thus we have not just a distortion of modern history but a distortion of reality that has had a crippling effect on modern politics.*

So, let us follow the logic...

The Great War was in reality caused by the French. (Christopher Clark is far too gentlemanly to say it, but he makes the case all the more powerfully despite himself.) French revanchism after the War of 1870 led them to form an alliance with Russia that meant that they would be able to go to war with Germany (indeed would automatically go to war with Germany) on the pretext of almost any sort of war breaking out a thousand miles away in the East. (I use the term "Germany" to cover not just the Kaisereich but the rump Hapsburg empire as well: I accept James Hawes's thesis that under Bismarck's deal the German-speaking Catholic and protestant powers had carved up Heilige Deutschland between them.) The rest, as they say... except of course that the British Empire, being more scared of the French than of the Germans, sided with the former, and so plunged Europe into a nightmare of blood and steel from which she would not re-emerge until over thirty years later.

For the mainstream British Right even to this day (not to mention the post-1960s German Left), it was all the fault of the Germans, who probably shouldn't have been allowed to have their own country anyway.  (There's a batshit crazy complicated version of history that basically says the Germans are uniquely evil and so basically need to be permanently divided and conquered. Whatever!) For the Left, the Allies and the Central Powers were as bad as each other. But whichever side one chooses to support or blame, implicitly the problem is one of sheer physical geography: within the borders of their own continent (or, if you like, their continental peninsular), the inevitability of the Atlantic Ocean means that the western European powers can only expand eastwards - and inevitably they will tend to do just that in furtherance of their national interests. The more nationalistic they get, the more they will tend to go to war against their eastern European and Asiatic neighbours. The only solution to this problem - if international peace is indeed a state of international tranquillity that comes from international order - must therefore be some sort of supranational authority with the capacity to maintain a monopoly on international violence. And it makes comparatively little difference whether said authority comes in the shape of Empire (Roman, Holy Roman, British, or otherwise) or superpower, or super-duper power! The point is that it's needed.

What's particularly frightening about the modern Left and their banal and irrelevant parables about "fascism" then is that reality, as ever, has its own agenda. In the last ten years, "anti-fascism" has done nothing to stop Afghanistan, eastern Europe or the Middle East from descending further and further and further into chaos and bloodshed. And at the same time both Europe and America have descended ever further not into "fascism" but into statism, isolationism, anti-Semitism, and of course nationalism. (Sound familiar?) As yet, England herself has remained comparatively immune to the last of these - as indeed have Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. But even in the few remaining "civilised" parts of the English-speaking world, that may not last much longer.

*The Teutonophile Right meanwhile has its own slightly spicy version of this sort of thing, only the other way around: Kaiser Bill's war was a just war (because he was forced into war against his will, and then Hindenburg and Ludendorff effectively sidelined him anyway), but Hitler's wasn't (because Hitler and the Nazis were evil... and of course he was just a ruddy little ignoramus Austrian corporal, donchaknow!). And of course the neo-nationalist "Right" will happily go one better (or worse) by effectively trying to rehabilitate nationalism by scapegoating "Nazism". Tangled webs, indeed!