31st January 2020

I went down to London last night to mark Britain’s exit from the European Union. I no longer see it as a vitally important thing — I neither voted in nor blogged about the referendum — but for many years, through the nineties and the oughts, leaving the EU was at the centre of my political position. That includes the early stages of blogging, with posts like this and this and this, and by joining in the celebrations I was, in a way, acknowledging my younger self.

I also wanted to be able to say I was there, to stand on Parliament Square and cheer and sing songs and generally larp at being part of a movement for a couple of hours. It was cheaper than going to a Luton Town game.

Also, while my opinion is that the exit doesn’t change anything fundamentally, it’s worth noting that I have claimed first that the referendum is a bad thing because the establishment media will so dominate that Remain is bound to win and they’ll just use it to shut up debate for another generation, and then that even though Leave won, they wouldn’t actually leave, they’d just hold it up and eventually drop it. With this track record of being consistently wrong, I have a slight lack of confidence in my current pessimistic projections.

My explanation for being wrong is that I have been overestimating the competence and power of the establishment. The atomisation of society is now degrading the strength of the political parties themselves, being media-driven and bioleninist is reducing the competence of establishment leaders, new media is making democracy more real and less fake in a very damaging way.

The central event of last night’s celebration, after the terrible singing and before the countdown to 23:00 GMT, was of course the appearance of Nigel Farage. People were calling his name from the time the lights went on, and every warm-up speaker remarked that none of this could have happened without him.

That is surely true. And that says something very interesting about the way democratic politics works. Because Farage does not really seem to be a “Great Man” of the kind who are supposed by some theories to be able to shift history by themselves. He can speak on television OK, but he is no great orator or demagogue, or even an entertainer like Boris or Trump. He is intelligent and competent but he is no master strategist, or prophet, or technical genius. Anyone who could successfully run a corporate department with thirty employees could have done what he did. But without him there could have been no sustained UKIP. UKIP caused the referendum by costing the Conservative Party seats. The referendum led to Brexit.

Why say UKIP could not have sustained itself without Farage? Because every time it tried, it failed. Other than him, all the leadership of the party after the Alan Sked pressure-group era were insane, stupid, or lazy. Farage was competent enough to run the party, worked very hard on it, and caused it to continue existing.

It is truly remarkable that there were over four million people1 willing to vote for UKIP, but there was only one capable person willing to run it.

Farage devoted most of his adult life to the cause, out of idealism. Many of the other four million would have been as capable as he was, but they had better things to do with their lives. None of the other few dozen people who were in the leadership of the party were of the two or three percent of people who have the abilities needed to do it successfully.

Many politicians are idealistic, but it is easier to be idealistic where there is a career path. There is no career path to being a fringe anti-establishment politician. Farage got an MEP’s salary for thirty years, but that was by no means guaranteed. Victorious, he will pick up some media bucks, but he will never be treated as an elder statesman. Nobody else with the “corporate department head” level of ability showed up to discard their career and do the work.

There are strong echoes here of the situation with academia. For every competent right-wing intellectual working full time with donor funding or their own money, there are hundreds of left-wing intellectuals with a stable academic career. Tens of thousands of people shouting Nigel Farage’s name on Parliament Square give a hint of how important that fact is.

  1. 4,376,635 votes in 2014 Euro Elections

2 thoughts on “31st January 2020”

  1. I was the opposite to you, taking little heed of the celebrations but enthusiastically campaigning and voting for Brexit. I cautioned that Brexit was no magic bullet but only the tiniest of baby steps—but a baby step is still a step. The baby might still collapse and be crushed beneath the press of SJWs and the aliens they so eagerly import; but the step might also be just enough to take him briefly out of their path, give him some breathing space to take another step, then another, increasing in confidence…

    I noticed some Remain-fanatics—now labelling themselves ‘Rejoiners’—wittering on about how stupidy-stupid Brexiteers are, some being unaware that the ECHR is a separate body from the EU. What do they think those people unhappy with the ECHR and who thought that by voting for Brexit they were escaping it, will do when they realise we’re still subject to it? ‘Damn, foiled again. We’ll have to rejoin the EU.’ Obviously, they will demand to leave the ECHR too. And when they find out other noisome regulations stem from WTO, or UN, or NATO, they will likely want HMG to tell those organisations to ‘do one’ as well. So there is hope we will gradually not only regain our full sovereignty as a people but our self-confidence too (see rather good column by historian Andrew Roberts: Britain has become an adult once again, taking ultimate responsibility for our own choices and actions).

    But the biggest benefit by far of Brexit is its shakeup of British politics, exposing those Fifth Columnists with no loyalty or respect for the British nation and people. It has revealed the true divide in Britain—as elsewhere across the West—is not between Left and Right but between David Goodhart’s ‘Somewheres’ and ‘Anywheres’(The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, 2017): those with roots in somewhere versus those with no roots anywhere; those valuing community, ancestors, tradition and nation, regarding Society as ‘a contract … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’ (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790) versus those who calculate only in short-term political or financial gains, caring little for either heritage or legacy; globalists versus nationalists (the latter not to be confused with the petty-nationalisms of Scottish, English, Welsh, Cornish, etc. separatists).

    Here is another little idea that I wish enjoyed greater interest in reactionary circles: CANZUK. Before dismissing it, consider: to get the EU to work, they’ve had to virtually bury history—can’t remind the Brits of all the times we stood up to one continental tyrant after another; can’t remind the rest of the continent how often their grandparents and older ancestors were massacring each other. To get CANZUK to work, all four nations’ politicians are pretty much obliged to do the opposite: to remember our history—our shared, glorious history and Anglo-Saxon heritage. It might snowball. It might, just might, lead to an Anglo-Saxon revival.
    (btw, imo, military co-operation holds out more tantalising possibilities than free movement—bearing in mind that *all* our militaries are now SJW-run slow-motion trainwrecks).

    Yes, all our nations are SJW s***shows—we can all point our fingers at each other and decide we don’t want anything with that country’s SJW lunacy. (‘Oh,’ says Australia, ‘We don’t want to be flooded with your Pajeets.’ ‘What’s that?’ replies Britain, ‘I don’t understand Mandarin.’) The SJWs are flushing our countries away irrespective of CANZUK.
    But… pushing CANZUK opens up the possibility of uniting a CANZUK Right—a harder, patriotic Right. An advantage the Left enjoys is combining across international boundaries: sharing vacuous slogans, language barriers affect them less, and hating their own countries means less friction. In contrast, the Right in Europe faces problems from the start: patriots prefer communicating in their own language, ensuring many forums are effectively closed to non-nationals; and anyone referring positively to one of their heroes risks alienating non-nationals due to that hero defeating their ancestors. This does not affect the Right within CANZUK: apart from the Quebecois, no language barriers, and no serious friction from past heroes and battles—what Brit will refuse to toast or be inspired by, say, Canadian Billy Bishop, Aussie Clive Caldwell, or NZer Evan Mackie?

    Neither Brexit nor CANZUK will usher in the reactionary utopia that some of us wish; but they are baby steps, and might at least take us a little closer to the road back to sanity.

  2. Your information on the 60s and 70s does not tally with anything that I remember from that era. In fact the notorious Schoolkids’ Oz of 1970 showed a cartoon of a headmaster, sexually aroused by his wielding of a cane (so offensive to the establishment was this that I cannot even find it on google). The message is clearly that adults in authority should not be allowed bodily contact with children or adolescents.

    One might imagine that this drawing was a reference to Chenevix-Trench, the Eton headmaster exposed by Paul Foot in Private Eye (the other anti-establishment magazine of the day), but as none of the Oz Schoolkids were Etonians, it would seem that this phenomenon was wider than just this school and that others were affected by something similar.

    So we have Oz campaigning against adult abuse of children, and Private Eye as well: if there was a third counter-culture magazine in which children demanded sex with adults and increased flagellation or vice versa, I didn’t hear of it.

    So what was the agenda of these alleged pro-paedophile campaigners? As I see it, adolescents, or anyone with an empathy with such people, would not be campaigning for an increase in the number of men in dirty mackintoshes with packets of sweets hanging round school playgrounds, or better access for Jimmy Saville, Cyril Smith and the Bishop of Medway to schools and orphanages. The scenario I imagine was that a fourteen year old boy might want his girlfriend to come and spend the weekend with him, in the same bed, without provoking a police raid. (I believe this sort of thing does happen in Holland, the parents giving them stern lectures about contraception). There was a film at the time called Blue Lagoon (well, in 1980), which depicted this idealised view of sexual innocence and awakening taking place on a desert island.

    I had a disagreement with a person who believed in home-schooling. I said there should be inspectors, he said who will inspect the inspectors? Technically, if parents can do anything, they might choose to educate their offspring by playing them tapes of bovine flatulence for 11 years. However, we just have to rely on the probability that they wouldn’t want to do this.

    The current law that 16 year old girls have total sexual freedom means that it is completely legal for them to indulge in coprophagic interchanges with 92 year olds. We just have accept that in all likelihood they would not want to and would be able to resist attempts to make them do so.

    So the movement to grant sexual freedom to 12 year olds was primarily intended to allow them to have sexual relations with 12, 13 and 14 year olds. That it would have the effect of legalising the activities of Jimmy Saville and Cyril Smith is unfortunate but true. But JS and CS were able to carry on as they did even with the law against them, so where is the advantage?

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