Friday 31 July 2020

Rise And Shine?

You missed Easter? Pull the other one. Sitting in the house doing nothing was exactly how you would have spent that four-day weekend in any other year. It is normally what you like about Easter.

At least half of you would have to look up what it was really about. And if you go so far as to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, then you are vastly more likely to be an attendee at a Black Lives Matter march than to be a self-appointed protector of the statues of people of whom you had never previously heard.

"Blah blah blah values blah blah blah community blah blah blah stability over change blah blah blah." Meaning what, exactly? If that side of the supposedly raging culture war were to win, then what would be the result? What, exactly, would happen? 

In the wildly unlikely event that you did still hold the views that even the great majority of this country's tiny minority of practising Catholics no longer did, then how would you be expressing those views by voting for Boris Johnson, or by supporting Donald Trump?

Those views are, and will always be, the position of the Magisterium. That is the sweetest of consolations to some of us. But they have never been the position of, most obviously, the Church of England. And to hear them preached, or to worship surrounded by people who held them, then, again, you would be far better off in the Black Church. Or a mosque. You would certainly never come across their being taught in any of the Catholic Church's precious schools.

Despite the fashion for calling it "emerging" and what have you, some of us have already spent well over 20 years trying to promote the understanding that to uphold family and community values, then it was necessary to secure economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

That social solidarity was an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility was protected by social solidarity, international solidarity was an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty was protected by international solidarity. That equality and diversity ought to be defined as economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties.

That One Nation politics required an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation, reorganising the British economy under State direction, and developing a fully independent British foreign policy, with no use of military force except in self-defence. And that the leading role in all of this belonged to the people and places whose votes have gone on to decide the outcomes of the 2016 referendum, of the 2017 General Election, and of the 2019 General Election.

The value that decided that referendum and those Elections was the value of labour along the Red Wall. Those who cast the decisive votes for Brexit then voted for Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. They would have done so again if Corbyn and McDonnell had retained in 2019 their 2017 commitment to withdrawal from the Single Market and the Customs Union that had played such an important part in reducing them from wealth to poverty during the unbroken period that had begun with the Budget of December 1976.

Accordingly, and not because of Covid-19, the Government has adopted Modern Monetary Theory for the purpose of heavy reindustrialisation under close central government direction. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It already has plenty going on.

We are not "socially conservative". We want society to change very radically indeed. And we have never not been "cancelled", by exactly the people who now complain about a "cancel culture" of which they can produce nothing more than the most frivolous evidence, usually injuries to their own monumental vanity.

I am forever being asked whether, or when, I intended to read this or that new book from the latest official voice of Postliberalism. But if you can get published at all, if you can get work of any kind, if you have never had an election rigged against you, or if you have not been wrongfully convicted after a three-year campaign that might realistically have cost a million pounds, then you are a dilettante.

And do the Rolling Stones pay to go and see Rolling Stones tribute acts? I accept that people might have arrived independently as the same conclusions as my own. I myself arrived at them independently. But they have not arrived independently at my exact words as published on the Internet.

On one notable occasion, someone who was then a paid adviser to the Prime Minister reproduced an entire paragraph of mine, without the slightest attribution, in what was no doubt a well-compensated contribution to a swanky magazine that had banned me from its website for having expressed essentially the same views, only with specific policies attached.

So no, I have not read your friend's book. Or yours. Nor will I be doing so. I know what it is going to say. "Blah blah blah values blah blah blah community blah blah blah stability over change blah blah blah." But in fact we need very radical change indeed.

In 18 months' time, and I am being generous, no one will remember your name. If you were any good, then no one would publish or employ you, and the Crown Prosecution Service, the rest of the right-wing Labour machine, the Liberal Establishment in academia and the media, and the closely allied salariat of the Catholic Church, would all be pursuing a vendetta against you for the rest of your life.

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