Mutiny on the Britannia
Now that the most anodyne Queen’s Speech in history is behind us, it’s time to take an eclectic look at what lies ahead. I don’t mean individual bits of legislation that will be savaged by the Opposition, but rather the plans of those who care little for Britain’s best interests.
To explain further, I mean the best interests of ordinary UK citizens, not the geopolitical fantasies of the incompetent élite in London and elsewhere. There are several groups who (in the disturbing syntax of 1791 and 1935) represent real, cast-iron Enemies of the People.
The first group to shine the arc-light on is Whitehall – that antediluvian Set where arrogant amateurism mixes with unelected power, misplaced Sovereign ambition and rampant greed to act against the interests of most of us….but especially the ethical, the disadvantaged, the old, and the very young. For the feather-bedded folk in our senior civil service are sure they know better than us what our future should be – even though their past is strewn with examples that suggest the diametric opposite is true.
In summary, Whitehall is anti-Brexit, anti-reform, anti-mutualist, anti-foreign policy independence, anti-devolution and anti-nationalist. It wants to stay with the politically correct multicultural federalism of the EU and the NATO alliance. And it wants to cling on to its control over centralised power, be that centre Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt or Washington. Finally, it most certainly is not interested in lots of radical idealists, ideologues and anti-neolib oiks determined to give more power back to the People….through requests for everything from less surveillance and more localism to proportional representation, and a return to older social, educational and public standards.
When the national Government is weak, the bureaucrat is strong: the beleaguered politician looks to Whitehall for off-piste help in order to survive. And remember: while in theory the security services report to the legislature, in practice they are steeped in the sort of Defence of the Realm mania that demands secrecy, cover-up and the suspension of the Rule of Law as and when such things suit the Whitehall/Downing Street Executive Set.
Then there are the soi-disant Progressives who are always right. Those who – when the People express a view, dissatisfaction or demand for action – invent a hundred rationales as to why such expressions of will are naive, ignorant, bigoted and wrong. So close is their view of life to the autodidacts of the EU, they will do anything to ensure its survival – and turn a blind eye to everything that suggests Brussels has lost the plot on economics, State sovereignty, citizen rights, uncontrolled migration and blatant intolerance.
They are never going to accept the following: the loss of the EU referendum, Brexit as a clean-break, quitting the Special Relationship, Islamic guilt, the obvious flaws in globalism, doubts about global warming causality, and the urgent need to rebalance the UK economy if we are to make export drives more successful.
Significantly, they dominate those mainstream media with influence in Britain.
That second group are suckers for the apologiae of Islam. Their cognitive dissonance in doing so – Love not Hate, Peace not War, Feminism not Femininity – is so obviously denialist, objective observers of it are as one in seeing it as the “changing correctness” of Orwell’s 1984 coming to life. It is akin to the Nazis in 1941 declaring the Japanese to be “honorary Aryans”.
Islam is not the religion of peace, it is the political result of a latter-day decision by Mohammed to adopt violent coercion in place of persuasion when recruiting new converts to Islam. Islam is not a tolerant religion, it is the religion that demands the death penalty for those who change to another form of worship, and those who refuse to convert to Islam. It is not democratic, it is not libertarian and it is anti-matter to the West’s belief (realised or not) in equality. Last but in many ways first, specifically on equality it is misogynist to a barbarian degree, pushing as it does the idea of a woman as half a man, as a gender that must not enjoy sex, and must never stray from the marital bed….yet again, on pain of death.
A common excuse served up by both Muslim ‘leaders’ and liberal sympathisers is the claptrap about Islamics being peacefully unlike Islamists. The split terminology didn’t even exist until after 9/11 – suggestive of tactical spin coming into play. But it isn’t true either way: many peaceful Muslims share the same aims as Jihadists, and indeed fellow-travel with such people – often bankrolling their insane acts of wanton human destruction. The 2013 Pew study “Muslims” found the following among law-abiding Muslims aspiring to migrate into Europe, the US and Australia:
- 75% of Pakistanis, 43% of Bangladeshis and 41% of Iraqis supporting death as the penalty for leaving Islam
- Each of the above in turn (85%, 65%, 69%) say Sharia Law is “the revealed word of God” and supercedes any civil law anywhere
- Those seeing ‘Honour killings’ as justified if the offender is a woman represented 55%, 66% and 78% respectively.
And be clear about it: they self-select on seeing themselves as “law-abiding”.
Equally clichéd is the “it’s only a tiny minority” claim. There is no such thing as “tiny” when it comes to Islam: 24% of the world’s population (1.8 billion) are Muslims – and even where the diaspora is only slight (for example, in the US) there are still 180,000 US based Islamics who in research openly support suicide bombing. 31% of UK Muslims aged under 35 told YouGov in 2005 they “approved” of the Tube bombings that had just a few weeks earlier killed 56 people. It took British Muslim Council leader Iqbal Sacranie three weeks to finally (grudgingly) condemn the same act.
Twelve years later, the Home Office itself estimates the number of active Jihadists in the UK to be 25,000. A few weeks back, just three and then two of them were able to bring central London to a standstill.
The snail’s pace at which Britain’s Westminster, liberal and police élites are waking up to the threat has to be seen to be believed at times. The “revenge” attack last weekend was so obviously going to come sooner rather than later, I wonder whether such élites are the equivalent of Bourbon aristocrats lying face down under Madame la Guillotine……still hoping that the blade might get stuck halfway down the shaft.
That’s why I number those élites among, not necessarily our enemies, but certainly as Fifth Columnists or useful idiots. Talk to the minority of Muslims who grasp (and want to reform) the politico-religious aggression of Islam, and they will tell you in no uncertain terms that Western liberals are deluding themselves.
But Britain’s greatest foe is still the divisive fixation with secular ideology – in short, the old, tired and largely irrelevant ‘models’ of socio-economic policy: neoliberal v socialist.
The new socialist Messiah remains Jeremy Corbyn, but his formula isn’t a new one. It plays well among the dispossessed because it consists entirely of more welfare, minimum wage levels, soft Brexit and social justice. The last of those is what all decent people want, but Corbyn is only giving us at most half the picture: we have heard nothing from him about post-Brexit export strategy, the UK’s cost of borrowing under a Labour Government, or how the economy is to be rebalanced.
Labour’s recovery during the General Election consisted of fleet-footed tactics, daily increased promises, and vowing to “stop” everything from blazing tower blocks to Islamic violence. In Theresa May, Mr Corbyn was fortunate in his enemy. In events, he was fortunate enough to play police, health and Brexit cards. But what got forgotten were first, the people around him (often ideologues of doubtful competence) and second, his own baggage.
The media underestimated his shrewdness as a politician. But not all shrewdness in a politician is a good thing.
On the other side of the aisle sit ruthless but now weakened neoliberal zealots….still with over 50 seats more than Labour. They will have banking, globalists, the media and NATO behind them; but they will also be distracted by plots to rid themselves of Big Sister.
Britannia is struggling to make sail with a corrupted administrative class, Islamic Lenins, Progressive Kerenskys and squabbling ideologues on board. This crew of myriad saboteurs, fantasists and cowards could easily exhaust Britannia on their own.
With developing econo-financial storms, a committee of EC pirates and NATO expansionists just below the horizon, the ship is going to be tossed about, fired upon and undermined.
All it would take is one or two Golden Goose bankers in the hold to start playing with gunpowder, and we’ll all be on a one-way descent to Davy Jones’s Locker.
With those exquisitely mixed naval metaphors in mind, sending Theresa May along the one-way plank would be an enjoyable but empty gesture. Britain needs a new ship and a new crew, but lacks the Admiralty systems and will to provide them.
The fifty-year Thatcher Expedition is coming to an end. It’s every man for himself.
The Slog 