14/12/2019
Comment on The Nation has spoken, by Charles Moore (£Telegraph), see below
By Christopher Vipond Davies = https://www.facebook.com/pg/ChristopherVipondDavies.WriterEditor - 20191214
What an unpleasant article. With lots of colourful language and imagery and mockery, somewhat reminiscent of Boris, but much nastier. Is this the true face behind the mask of Boris' so-called One Nation? But what nation? The UK, Britain or England?
I was disappointed with the result but warmed to Boris' post-election speeches and someone saying that the real Boris is more Heseltine than Thatcher. But who is the real Boris, does he know himself, beyond still wanting to fulfil his boyhood dream o being king of the world, reminiscent of Jesus' talking of gaining the whole world but losing your soul? A sexual philanderer and perpetual liar, a Tweedledee to Trump's Tweedledum, he was propelled to victory by Dominic Cummings coming up with a brilliantly simple and equally misleading mantra as the Brexit referendum's Take back control, namely, Get Brexit done. Who cares that it will take years and almost certainly make the rich richer and the poor poorer?
I saw some time ago, and now others are talking about it, that Brexit might well lead to the breakup on the United Kingdom, even to the independence of Wales, England's first colony. But it will not be the England of Alfred the Great, but the England of Wiliam the Bastard and his Norman knights and castles. As I understand it, Magna Carta did not limit the power of the barons, merely of the king over the barons.
Anyway, time will tell. I hope Rory Stewart will become Mayor of London and we might see an interesting contrast between the administrations on either side of the Thames, somewhat reminiscent of the days of Thatcher and Livingstone. In the meantime, I am happy to be living in Amsterdam, had I more money I might contemplate trying the invasion of William of Orange (until I came here, I thought he took the throne by invitation, but he brought a large army and oodles of b***y, effectively ending Amsterdam/Holland's GoldenCentury, transferring the Blessing, as in Divine Principle, to England/Britain).
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The Nation has spoken
Charles Moore (£Telegraph) writes........
The logic of democracy in this country is iron, as is our rejection of extremism
Britain will now be free to govern itself, united by a patriotism that crosses the class and ethnic divides
Yesterday morning, parents of children at a school in London received an email which began: “Sometimes, things happen in the wider world, in the country ... that can be difficult to understand.” It went on to explain that while it was good for children to talk to “trusted adults” about “things that worry us”, it was important that “we won’t talk about negative events to other children”. Although the email did not say so, the “negative event” here referred to was the result of Thursday’s general election.
What the teachers wanted to keep from their sensitive charges was the fact that democracy had just fulfilled its logic. That should not be “difficult to understand”. In 2016, in the largest vote for anything in British history, we voted to leave the EU. The campaign which persuaded us to do so was led by Boris Johnson. For the ensuing three and a half years, including the 2017 general election in which the two main parties promised to implement the result, almost all the most powerful people in (and outside) the country strained every sinew to frustrate or nullify it.
In the process, Mr Johnson was betrayed, marginalised and vilified. Theresa May made him foreign secretary and then set out to destroy him. He resigned when he saw Brexit was not happening. When it duly did not happen, he challenged, became party leader and hence Prime Minister. We had a Leave government for the first time. When Parliament still made government impossible, he called this general election to get Brexit done. So he won. So it will happen. The logic of democracy is iron. The victory – with the important exception of Scotland – is complete.
Although its ex*****on was sometimes defective, the Tory campaign was rightly conceived by the almost shockingly clear mind of Dominic Cummings. In 2016, the majority had voted to take back control. Their wish had to be fulfilled. In 2019, it has been.
It could not have happened without Boris. When I was his editor on this paper, he often drove me to distraction with his lateness and unreliability. But I also formed the view that he is one of the very few people I have ever met who can be described as a genius. For all his defects and peccadilloes, Boris is the man.
As a result of Mr Johnson’s leadership, the Tories are the One Nation party at last. Until now, the phrase “One Nation” tended to be a codeword meaning the Left-wing, anti-Thatcherite wing of the Conservative Party. It meant high welfare spending and “caring” patter. Now it means what it says – an independent nation free to govern itself, as Margaret Thatcher herself fought for; and a patriotism which unites the classes.
In workaday Workington, a Tory candidate with a strong northern accent threw out Sue Hayman, one of the many animal-rights fanatics on the Corbyn front bench. In Blyth Valley, a Geordie Jew, Ian Levy, captured the Labour stronghold for the Tories. In his speech he thanked the southern Old Etonian whose popularity had helped him to victory in that previously hostile territory in the politically frozen North. One Nation.
In trying to achieve One Nation, Boris was hindered at every turn by Tories who had that phrase constantly on their lips. It was neighed by old warhorses like Sir John Major, Lord Heseltine, Lord Patten of Barnes and Kenneth Clarke, with answering whinnies from rebels who left the party, such as Dominic Grieve, David Gauke, Anna Soubry and Heidi Allen. On Thursday night, every single one of the rebels lost. They leave a Conservative Party at last united, strong and, south of the border, all but omnipresent.
They also leave a government with a large overall majority in the hands of a single, mainstream, broad-based, ancient political party. That is more, much more, than any other major European country can manage just now. It will make our forthcoming trade negotiations so much easier: we shall be united, the EU divided. Until now, it has been the other way round.
In percentage terms, Tory gains on Thursday were more modest than Labour losses. That is Jeremy Corbyn’s special contribution to this story. He and John McDonnell offered voters by far the biggest bribes with their own money ever crammed into the brown envelopes of politics. They were not much tempted.
Mr Corbyn also invited electors to join his army of culture-warriors dedicated to attacking Britishness, trashing our history, marching through our independent institutions and sucking up to our terrorist enemies, especially Islamist ones. Unbelievably, for the party of anti-racism and anti-fascism, he permitted open season on Jews. The voters rejected all this with disgust.
In the last week of the campaign, Mr Corbyn appeared to be gaining momentum by mobilising that part of the electorate which is green in tooth and claw. But all those Extinction Rebellion fanatics who have it in for the human race got nowhere. There was no youthquake. A septuagenarian friend emailed me after Boris’s victory quoting Wordsworth on the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”. I replied, misquoting the same poem: “But to be old was very heaven.”
Except for one septuagenarian with a beard from Islington. It has been shaming to our country that one of its two great parties has been in thrall these past four years to a dim bigot of the far-Left who has not had a new thought since the sit-ins of the Sixties. Yet in the matter of Brexit itself, the Corbynistas are not the main villains of the piece. Many of them, including their leader, had at least some idea that junking the referendum result would come at a high cost. They had the sense, if not the skill, to try to ride Leave and Remain horses at once.
No such prudence troubled the most extreme people in the Brexit saga – the self-styled moderates. Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, Lord Mandelson, Jo Swinson, Ed Davey, Hilary Benn, Emily Thornberry, Sir Keir Starmer, all those renegade Tories mentioned above, and the faction’s Rumpelstiltskin, John Bercow, stopped at nothing to block the referendum result. Having behaved like that, they now leave Labour, the Lib Dems and their version of moderation with nowhere to go.
And to help their relentless resistance to the democratic process were all the other centre-Left, “woke”, supposedly sane and undoubtedly well-educated and well-informed people in the law, the civil service, the universities, the Bank of England, the House of Lords, the CBI, much of the media and above all the BBC who disdained, misunderstood and attempted to ignore the voters. As recently as Wednesday, the BBC was trying to break Mr Johnson by a squalid media trap over the picture of the little boy on the hospital floor. Such are the unelected people usually trusted with the top jobs to keep this country ticking over while politicians fight.
What an ancien regime they now are. In the 19th century, the Church of England was forced to get rid of the tithes, the special taxes that had made it rich. How much longer, in the 21st century, for the BBC licence fee?
In the age of universal suffrage, three elections – 1945, 1979 and 1997 – changed Britain. Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019 is already doing the same. The “clever” people were wrong, and the “stupid” people were right. That is why we have democracy.
