Doctor Beeching is a pariah, his name darkening over the passage of time, but the settled narrative is simplistic. People are led to believe that Beeching vandalised the railways, just as Margaret Thatcher destroyed the coalmining industry, but the truth is not so straightforward. Arguably, while Beeching drew vociferous opposition to his proposed closures of branch lines, that was the heart overruling the head. The rationale for reducing the network was objectively clear at the time: costly, underused routes where the journey could be made more easily by road.

Beeching was only doing what the political administration asked him to do, but be became a convenient scapegoat. It was his responsibility to produce a report with recommendations, not to wield an axe with his own hands – it was the government that took the decisions and actions. Furthermore, Beeching is unfairly blamed for closing lines that have since reopened in some form, such as part of a metropolitan tramway network. His report should be judged by the context of the 1960s, not by the needs of today.

I understand the lament for lost railway links, but it is harder to criticise Beeching when you understand British transport conditions and prospects 65 years ago. The nationalised corporation of British Railways had already embarked on a radical change to operation, by replacing steam locomotion with diesel and electric trains. This caused mass redundancies of labour and resources. The government and railway board had been reluctant to bite the bullet, knowing that jobs would be lost in the coalmines at a time of austerity. Going into the 1960s, lines still being run on steam traction compounded the perception of rail travel as a relic.

The dawn of private transport promised a bright future of freedom, convenience and accessibility. Millions of new cars left showrooms in the Sixties, as Rootes, BMC, Ford and Vauxhall made cars more affordable while also adapting to the improved conditions. In the Fifties there was no expectation for anyone to drive at over sixty miles per hour: the roads and the cars were not built for speed.

The motorways changed motoring dramatically. The network was built steadily in the Sixties and Seventies. Another important development was the building of wider trunk roads, with bypasses around towns, much of these dual carriageway at national speed limit. Long-distance drivers were relieved of the tedious passage through high streets that they had no need to visit.

A car in the driveway became as ubiquitous as a television aerial on the roof, outward signs of social and material progress (albeit a decade behind the Americans). Speed was prominent in advertising, followed by luxury. A man’s choice of car was a symbol of his status, actual or aspirant. Only in London, where the underground railway brought commuters into the city centre every morning, bucked the trend of driving to work. In most areas, no self-respecting chap would catch the bus or train. Parking spaces were provided at factories and offices. In town centres, parking was mostly free, on a first-come, first-served basis. Councils had not yet learned to treat motorists as a cash cow.

Beeching urged retention of the railways for longer journeys from city to city, and diesel locomotion was setting new standards. Electrification was advancing too. Contrast this model of high-speed train travel with the branch lines that Beeching cut. Many of these took a winding route, passing various towns and villages, and avoiding steep gradients. Few passengers boarded or alighted along the way, because passengers were now going by car instead, taking a shorter and quicker journey. Critics look back today and say that Beeching harmed communities, but the lines may have survived if more people were using them. Every service was losing money for British Railways, detracting from modernisation elsewhere.

Although Beeching was enthused by the new landscape of travel, the idea of the private car as the future was already facing a reality check by the late Sixties. In Britain the baby-boomer generation would be coming of age and creating traffic. Could the country build its way out of antiquated and congested infrastructure? Indeed, that was the positive thinking in councils, as architects were given free rein to design new town centres, prioritising the motorist.

Globally, population was hurtling upwards, with cities such as Calcutta, Delhi, Manila, Tokyo and Mexico City overtaking London, New York and Paris. Global organisations, alarmed by Paul Ehrlich’s alarmist The Population Bomb (1968), warned that humanity was facing disaster.

But in Britain, as in most developed countries of the West, the birth rate was heading downwards and population was stabilising. Thus the transport ideals of the Sixties were realistic: a nation of private motorists going wherever they wanted, with improved roads and vehicles. The future was of everything getting better. Beeching’s contribution to this was to focus railway investment on where train travel was most beneficial, and to eradicate parts of the network that stood in the way of progress.

It is nonsense for Beeching to be blamed for the transport problems of today (as some critics continue to do). He could not have foreseen the mass immigration that has added twenty million to the country’s population. I recall, some years ago, Nigel Farage being , ridiculed by the BBC and Guardian for complaining of being late for a meeting because of traffic caused by immigrants, but of course he was right. Beeching was not responsible for the deliberately destructive Net Zero policies pursued by central and local government, which now seem bent on forcing people off the road.

The golden age of British motoring was the two or three decades after the Beeching Report was commissioned. The restructuring of the rail network was a painful necessity, enabling British Railways to survive rather than drowning in debt from wholly unprofitable routes. Beeching’s detractors should be asked: would you prefer the transport plan of the Sixties, to the reverse gear on individual mobility driven by our rulers today?

Ukraine is running out of manpower, and a recent video showed a press gang dragging a taxi driver from his car, booting the passenger out, and taking the man off to a military camp. Into the meat grinder go women too – apparently on a more voluntary basis, but that may be changing. In the Telegraph, Zoe Strimpel’s weekly opinion piece was titled ‘Ukraine’s fight against Putin shows what women are really capable of’.

Like many media figures promoting the carnage in Ukraine,. Strimpel is Jewish. That’s worth mentioning because of the Zionist agenda, for which such commentators are propagandists and deceivers. There is growing speculation that Israel is quietly taking control of the war-torn land, perhaps to establish a new homeland after most of the white Christian men have been eradicated. And Jewish influence is prominent on the other side too.

While Zelenskyyy has implored his compatriots to ‘fight until the last Ukrainian’ (interesting wording), Putin has tried to mobilise more men to go there ‘to fight till death’. The mode of warfare is that of the First World War, with military commanders sending men over the top as was the British infantry in the mud of the Somme under General Haig. War is an efficient killing machine. But why?

The war in Ukraine is not, as portrayed by Western politicians, a battle of good Europeans versus Russian evil. Basically it is Russian people killing other Russian people, because the Ukrainians are of the same genetic stock and heritage, divided only by the administrative lines of a vast country. Crimea, for example, is as Russian as Pontefract cakes are from Yorkshire. Kiev is the ancient capital of Russia. .

JW Huntsmann, in a recent video on Bitchute, explained: -

‘A real Russian invasion would have lasted a week, but this is dragging on for months, and all that’s happening is that more and more Russian people are dying. This was doesn’t make any sense at all until you find out that Zelenskyy is part of the Jewish cult Chabad Lubavitch’.

Vladimir Putin is associated with Chabad Lubavitch too. Huntsmann asks ‘why would two leaders who are part of the same cult fight against each other?’ His answer is that both Ukraine and Russia are occupied by a foreign entity, and that Zelenskyy and Putin are performing their role in killing as many white Christians as possible.

This genocide, as Huntsmann sees it, got me thinking about an episode in distant history: the Crusades. Were these ultimately futile endeavours by Christian European aristocracy a trap? Was the best fighting stock lured to killing fields in the same way that Russia and Ukraine are sacrificing their young men today?

I often hear fellow sceptics opine that Freemasonry is of Jewish design, as a means of concentrating secretive power and controlling the goyim. I go back further, to speculate on the possible creation of Islam by Jews as a bulwark against the spread of Christianity, three centuries after Roman persecution ended. As we see in Gaza currently, the Jews have no fraternity with Muslims, but use them to undermine Christian faith – as demonstrated by Jewish promotion and facilitation of mass immigration and the ‘melting pot’ ideology of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi.

Let’s do a refresher on the Crusades, as presented in official narrative. Also described as the Wars of the Cross, the Crusades were an attack on Mohammedans by European kings and knights over the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The objective was to ensure safety of pilgrims to the Holy Land, to build Christian rule in Palestine, and later as offensives against Egyptians and Turks.

In the year 1010 the Muslim caliph Hakim broke a lasting treaty for Christian passage to Jerusalem. The sanctuary was destroyed. In 1095 Pope Urban II began the movement that became the Crusades, as described by the Everyman’s Encyclopaedia: -

‘The turbulent feudal knights of Europe received a new outlet for their energies. Instead of being restrained by the Church with peaceful admonitions, as in the institution of the Truce of God, their warlike ardour was encouraged, organised and dedicated to what was proclaimed to be the highest and holiest service.’

In 1096 to 1097 a great army was formed and fought its way from Constantinople through Asia Minor, taking Antioch in 1098 and Jerusalem in 1099. A Christian kingdom was established, but this was increasingly harassed. Saladin, who had captured Damascus in 1174, entered Galilee, defeated the Christians and took Jerusalem in 1187. This provoked European leaders to send more men on their holy mission. Many were slaughtered in a reckless assault on Egypt in 1217, and a crusade led Louise IX of France in 1249 was even more disastrous.

So the Crusades were ultimately lost, although historians state that Europe gained from closer links with the Arab world in trade and knowledge.

What contribution was made by the Jews in the Crusades? They seem to be on the margin in the history books. According to Wikipedia the Jews were constantly persecuted by the Christian marauders. So the Muslims, despite the antipathy of the Koran., were less of a threat than fellow believers in the biblical God.

In my conjecture, which you may dismiss outright, or take as impetus for further reviewing of mythical and manipulate d history, the Jews incited the Crusades. They lured the stoutest of Christian manhood to shed its blood in a cauldron of Muslim fanaticism (also a Jewish creation). The Ukraine war is yet another cull on the long and painful path to global mastery by the ‘chosen people’.

How can you distinguish a so-called type O cassette? Here are some indicators: -

1. Weight: a type O cassette feels flimsy, made of weak plastic

2. The tape label is merely a piece of paper attached with glue, and may be coming off

3. The tape is of pale brown appearance, and very thin

4. The front cover of the inlay card has the logo ‘compact cassette’, which was standard until the end of the Seventies, when major brands disused it

5. The cover design has brash colours, often related to space travel or other advanced technology

6. The cover declares ‘high output, low noise’ (subjective terms that don’t contravene trade description laws)

There is one sure sign of a type O tape, though. Press your finger nail into the gap in the middle of the cassette shell, where there should be a plastic window to show how much of the tape has played on either side. If you meet only soft resistance, there is no plastic barrier and you are pushing directly into the clear slip mat.

Here are some type O tapes: -

Such tapes are a cause of reputational damage to the listening format. Many people remark, when I’m selling cassettes at a local stall, that the tape often unspooled when they used them in the past. This is probably an exaggeration, and was mostly due to overheated tapes kept in cars. But it could happen at home too, particularly if using a type O cassette. Don’t risk using them on your machine.

Just because you haven’t heard of a brand of cassette, doesn’t mean that it’s type O. For example, Yashima has the appearance of a type O with its ‘UFO’ phrasing, but it’s a superior Japanese make. Ampex is a Califonian brand, rarely seen in the UK, with a rich heritage in reel-to-reel machines and later excellent chrome tapes.

Also, retailers WH Smith, Dixons and Boots sold own'-brand cassettes that were actually made by good manufacturers such as Maxell and Agfa. I held a tape party recently and a recording I made on a 1980s WH Smith tape sounded almost as clear as a TDK ferric. Back in the Eighties I found Boots chrome tapes to be as good as BASF.

Recently I acquired a slightly unusual TDK that was labelled as a TDK ‘D’ but with the addition of ‘true mechanism’. The tape dated from the late Seventies and may have been TDK’s response to the supposed improvement by BASF with its ‘security mechanism’. This was overengineering by the German firm, though. The plastic wings to keep the tape spooling correctly inevitably led to loss of data from the tape, and BASF finally abandoned it in the early Eighties. But perhaps TDK felt the need to do something, despite its tapes being of reliable running precision.

The TDK ‘true mechanism’ tape is now thought to be a counterfeit. This belief is reinforced by an American chap who recalls being sent to a warehouse to ensure that a batch of thousands of TDk ‘true mechanism’ tapes were condemned. The supply had come from Cyprus, leading to the suggestion that they were made by the large Turkish pruducer, RAKS. It is unlikely that RAKS would have made counterfeit tapes, but perhaps TDK subcontracted to the Turks to produce a tape for the European market to compete with the BASF design. And then TDK didn’t like the end-product, and wanted to withhold its distribution?

The ‘true mechanism’ TDK tapes are a mystery yet to be fully solved. They are definitely not type O. However, the niche market for vintage cassette collecting is not primarily about quality, but preserving pieces of our musical past. Most type O tapes were discarded decades ago and they have retro appeal as they become scarcer. Delve deeply at car boot sales!

When I moved to London in 1991 it was still a mostly white city. The bars were tended by Australians; the Irish diaspora was prominent, and tourists were mostly European rather than the Chinese and Koreans that dominate today. There were black and Asian areas, for sure, but even in Southall, Brixton and Stepney there was a substantial remnant of the indigenous working-class communities. Now the school rolls are filled with sons and daughters of immigrants, from inner to outer boroughs.

Ever-rising blocks of flats are being built at hubs across the city, from Elephant & Castle to Alperton. And now Sadiq Khan is desecrating Green Belt land, on which 56000 homers will be built. All for immigrants, of course.

The city is dominated politically by Labour, the party that supposedly stands for the disadvantaged masses, and so the ethnic minorities (now the majority) always vote by default for whoever wears the red rosette. Khan has particular appeal, as an outspoken critic of white patriots and their alleged bigotry.

So what is the Conservative Party doing? It still has representatives at City Hall, from affluent areas such as Harrow and Bromley. This week the Tories were making noise about Khan’ preparing to dispossess residents of their local green spaces. Superficially, the message was right and proper: Khan must stop covering London in ‘ugly tower blocks’ and should not send his bulldozers on to what’s left of the Green Belt.

But Andrew Boff, long-standing Conservative member of the London Assembly, exposed the fallacy of Conservative opposition. He wants Khan to keep building. Family homes are needed instead, Boff argues. Where on earth would these be built?

The Tories say nothing about relentless mass immigration and the transformation of London into a two-tier city of extremely rich foreigners lording over hordes of poor foreigners.

Working at City Hall in 2021v I met Shaun Bailey, the black Conservative leader and mayoral candidate. A nice bloke, with a background of working with gangs and social problems in the Afro-Caribbean community. But ineffectual as a political player, and Khan wiped the floor with him at the weekly mayor’s question time (only the former UKIP pair of Peter Whittle and David Kurten took him to task).

The truth is that Khan is the man for the globalist agenda, and the Conservative Party is not really trying to oppose him. Its London Assembly members from current leader Susan Hall to Boff and Bailey are merely pretending to protect citizens from Khan’s destructive policies. In a way, they are more fraudulent than the fake scholarship of Professor Jason Arday.

Khan is pushing white Londoners out of the capital, and the stream has become a flood - that’s why fields are being lost to housing everywhere in the Home Counties and beyond. These displaced townies will help to elect Conservative MPs, as if the blue team will save them.

Read between the lines, and you will find that all mainstream political parties and politicians are smoothening the path to a global technocracy and elite-controlled neofeudalism.

Stars are awarded at school, and as a measure by reviewers of books, music and movies. The Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard celebrates thousands of famous actors and actresses, each with a star (including the White House and WWF actor Donald Trump).

Over four billion of the world’s people are living under stars, as they appear on national flags. From capitalist USA to communist China, the pointed shape is a ubiquitous symbol of nationhood – but what is it its meaning and significance?

‘Hold our star for us’, Remainers plead to their friends in Europe. They are still wishing on the star that represented Britain’s membership of the EU. The celestial circle on the EU flag has grown with expansion of the federalist bloc, but had its first reverse when the UK finally left in 2020, four years after the vote for Brexit.

The British flag, popularly known as the union jack, has the crosses of constituent nations (except the Welsh dragon). The St George cross for England, St Andrew for Scotland and Northern Ireland from the island of St Patrick. We have never had stars as a national symbol.

At the Last Night of the Proms, the BBC gave prominence to EU fanatics in the crowd who politicise this annual patriotic celebration by flying the flag of the Brussels-based superstate. If the EU flag seems alien to our culture, it is also overriding the distinct heritage of our continental neighbours, whose flags are striped rather than astral (Germany, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, France, Austria, etcetera), or have Christo-pagan crosses (Scandinavia).

I’m no vexillogist, but clearly the star is a pervasive symbol in national and supernational insignia. The easiest way for a child to draw a star is by drawing two equilateral triangles, one pointing up wards and the other downwards, partially overlapping each other. Hey presto – a Star of David. This six-pointed shape is not the standard depiction of a star on flags or symbols of merit, though.

With some other exceptions (the cog-wheel star of Malaysia and the seven-pointed Australian display of the Southern Cross constellation), the standard form is the pentagram: as in the EU and numerous African and Middle-Eastern countries. The Stars and Stripes has such a star for each state, supposedly emphasising constitutional autonomy.

In the 1920s Leon Trotsky, a Jew, chose the five-pointed star as the symbol for international communism. He was inspired by the mystical Kabbalah with its iconic pentagram in the middle of a Star of David. The US military establishment in Washington is another five-edged shape: the Pentagon. Is this significant?

As the late Maltese psychologist Edward de Bono, in I am Right – You are Wrong (1990) observed, ‘if, in the scene we are confronting, there is something we recognise, we may ignore the rest and follow only that pattern.’ According to de Bono, symbolic associations are wired into neural circuitry. The star is rooted in the principle of monarchy as spiritually empowered rule, deigning the divine rights of kings. Today, it is impersonalised as the state, but as in the past, it conveys a message of unquestionable authority. Have we been trained to see our country’s rulers as the ultimate source of light, truth and power?

The EU flag is a grand deception, suggesting sovereign states in fraternity. As the united states of Europe is controlled from the centre, there should be a large star in the middle of the flag. Perhaps a more apt presentation would be a black hole, sucking the nation states into an abyss, depriving them of light. Whether their people know it or not, the civic democracies of Europe are being sucked into a void.

Recently many people (myself included) have awakened to the reality of Zionist influence over the world. In the USA, politicians from both major parties in every state from Maine to New Mexico are funded and controlled by Jewish lobby organisations such as AIPAC. Those stars on the American flag, I suggest, have become symbols of oversight. In the EU, whose führer Ursula von der Leyen declared that European values emulate the Talmud, the stars imposed on the continent could be interpreted as the pursuit of Noahide laws for the goyim. The mass immigration that has transformed Western Europe has been facilitated by Jewish money and power.

Of course, not all Jews are involved in a plot to take over the world. And the star icon may be understood at a level beyond worldly affairs. The twenty-two stars on the Paramount Pictures emblem represent the twenty-two angels who came down from Heaven to Mount. Herron. These angels became the watchers, who impregnated the daughters of men and thus the Nephilim were born. Mount Herron is also where in Greek mythology lies a cave known as the Entrance to Hades. Lucifer took a third of the angels with him (33%) and the longitude and latitude for the mountain is 33.33° north and 33.33° east.

The pentagram is associated with Satanism primarily because of its inverted orientation and its adoption into 20th-century occult imagery, specifically the Sign of Baphomet used by the Church of Satan.

When you see, you cannot unsee. Stars are used everywhere, and as an observer of behavioural psychology and propaganda, I am wary whenever the pentagram appears in the imagery of government, military campaigns or globalist technocracy. Or maybe I’m becoming paranoid…

Israel was first admitted to the cosmopolitan party in 1973, achieving fourth place, and since then it has punched well beyond its weight. Each country’s viewing public votes on the performances, but political bias is clearly influential, from the Irish tending to award few points to the British, to the more blatant animosities of an expanding Europe (Turkish musicians must take the blame for their compatriots invading Cyprus, for example). Israel has drawn both sympathy and antipathy in the voting, the former normally outweighing the latter.

The Israeli debut in Paris was at a time of war in the Middle East, and regional conflict was a rationale for letting Israel play in Europe rather than in Asia, in football with the qualifying round of the World Cup and European club competitions. Maccabi Tel Aviv could hardly be expected to play in Damascus.

Arguably, the European media establishment used the Eurovision platform to apologise for the Holocaust. In 1978 Izhar Cohen & the Alphabets topped the poll with ‘A Ba-Ni Bi’, a song in Hebrew that was not particularly melodic or of mass appeal. It won because it was time for Israel. Arab broadcasters, however, ended their showing of the contest when it was inevitable that the Israelis would win.

The Jewish nation, then of merely six million people, won again in the following year in Jerusalem. Milk & Honey performed ‘Hallelujah’, a song that reinforced the biblical bond between Israel and Christian Europe, while expressing the Eurovision values of love for all. Three yews later Germany won for the first time, with Nicole’s ‘A Little Peace’. But the message subtly changed towards the turn of the millennium.

After twice finishing second in the Eighties, Israel won again in 1998. Performing ‘Diva’ in Birmingham, a song supposedly about powerful women, Dana International was the first transgender winner. Born as Sharon Cohen in Tel Aviv in 1972, Dana International became an icon of LGBT identity politics. The path was laid for the bearded Conchita Wurst winning for Austria in 2014.

Eurovision thus became an extravaganza of ‘woke’ dogma, as national entries were chosen for their adherence to the new values of celebrating diversity and gender fluidity. Israel won for the fourth time in 2018 with ‘Toy’ by Netta. Mostly in English lyrics, the song was performed by Netta Barzilai wearing traditional Japanese costume. This was perhaps the most poignant Jewish-Japanese expression of multiculturalism since Count Coudenhove-Kalergi in the 1920s.

After the conflict in Gaza erupted in 2023, Israel lost much of its European guilt-ridden favouritism. As the IDF massacred citizens including children in the Palestinian territory, nations such as Spain and Ireland called for Israel’s ejection from Eurovision. But whereas European youth has a rapidly increasing Muslim element, and middle-class whites are pro-Palestinian, a concerted and authoritarian response by the Zionist-influenced powers-that-be has flooded the media with the message that criticising Israel is anti-Semitic.

The timing of this article, months before or after the annual show, became more apt as I was writing. A new ruling by the organising committee was issued last week, in response to a growing boycott. Belgium was the sixth country to threaten to pull out. Israel came second in 2026, riding on political sentiment, and the danger is that as the winner hosts the tournament in the following year, the show could be held in Tel Aviv while Palestinians are being slaughtered nearby. This would have been unconscionable for the ‘progressive’ audience. And so the committee has ruled that Eurovision cannot be hosted by a country that is at war (Israel was not specifically mentioned, and this could also apply to Ukraine).

As always, ‘antisemitism’ is cried out. But there are good reasons for the viewing millions to vote for anyone but Israel. Like Australia, Israel is not in Europe, and that invalidates its participation. But secondly, while the merits of the songs and performers are generally derisory, Israeli entries have been particularly awful, from the manipulative ‘Hallelujah’ to the Cultural Marxist subversion of recent years.

Israel, nil points from me. Yet it always seem to overcome all the odds.

Most of the heavy industry of South Wales has disappeared, leaving rundown towns with high streets occupied by vape shops, tanning salons, messy takeaways, ‘traditional Turkish’ barbers and general degradation (Swansea, which I visited on my way home, is a depressing dump, where foreign students and migrants seem to outnumber the locals). Images in the books by South Wales Evening Post photographer David Roberts (e.g. Thank You for the Days, 2005) express the adage that the past was a different country.

Two hundred years ago, before South Wales became one of the most prominent industrial heartlands of imperial Great Britain, the town of Cardiff and much of Glamorgan was owned by the second Marquis of Bute. ‘The Monument’ as now known, is a statue of his lordship in Roman robes, erected outside the town hall and later moved to St Mary Street due to road widening. Few people today appreciate his role in the development of Cardiff and its administrative importance in Wales, but looking back at his endeavour, I wonder if our current political leaders would be fit to lick his boots.

In his Discovering Cardiff’s Past (1995), historian Dennis Morgan tells the story of the town’s transformation to a busy and prosperous city under the rule of John Crichton Stuart, who succeeded his grandfather as Marquis of Bute in 1814. He was a good lord, who did not secrete the profits from the subterranean fortune of coal, but ploughed them into the social and economic progress of Cardiff and its environs.

‘He was a man of vision who regarded the proper use of his wealth to be almost a sacred trust and it was this sense of duty that led him to become the most important influence on the development of nineteenth century Cardiff.’

The Marquis suffered from an eye disease but this did not deter his industriousness, and he was revered in his fiefdom.

‘Bute could only spare the time to visit his Welsh estates for a few weeks each year in spring and autumn but his reception at Cardiff was almost like a royal progress. His agent, Edward Priest Richards, prepared for the visit well in advance. Which were the deserving causes the Marquis ought to patronise? Who should be offered leases for the mineral rights on the Bute estates? Which tradesmen ought to be favoured with new contracts? Who deserved one of those eagerly sought invitations to the banquet at the castle?’

The Marquis was socially conscious and he opposed the harsh practices of Merthyr ironmasters, whose dangerous mines had prisons on site to detain disobedient employees. He was the patron of various charitable causes such as Cardiff’s infirmary, seventeen schools and generous personal grants such as an annual £10 ‘to Mrs Roberts for the maintenance of her idiot son’.

However, as Morgan notes, ‘the Marquis had little patience with the idle poor and showed scant sympathy for the Irish immigrants who arrived in Cardiff’. Others of the landowning class might have exploited the flood of incomers from across the Irish Sea for cheap labour, but Bute was concerned for social cohesion.

The Marquis was alert to the transportation need for the rapidly growing mining industry, and his biggest investment was the building of a large dock in 1839, the first in South Wales. This, Morgan notes, ‘gave Cardiff an advantage…just as his Welsh coalfield was about to reveal its treasures to the world’. The coal in the South Wales valleys was not only plentiful but the finest anthracite – a relatively smokeless fuel ideal for heating homes, and a potent energy for firing industrial machinery and driving steamships and locomotives.

With its grand civic architecture, opulent villas for the merchant class, and endless of terraced houses for the workers, Cardiff developed rapidly in population and prosperity.

After he died of a heart attack while attending a civic function in Cardiff in 1848, ‘the ‘father of modern Cardiff’ was carried to the dock he had opened nine years earlier, and taken from there across the Bristol Channel and on to his last resting place in Cambridgeshire. The Merthyr Guardian, a newspaper founded by the Marquis, implored: ‘weep, sons of Cambria, weep at the loss of such a benefactor’.

Now, contrast the genuine reverence of the people for the Marquis of Bute with the widespread disgust for our current rulers, who seem to do everything opposite to what we want and need. How many citizens would flock to the city centre to greet Andy Burnham or Ed Miliband (or, for balance, Kemi Badenough)? These politicians are placemen of a parasitical elite, fleecing the people for every pound in their pocket or purse. The Marquis of Bute, like the Earls De la Warr in my Sussex town, was rich beyond the dreams of lesser mortals – but he made it his duty to make ordinary lives better.

As I argued on Country Squire two years ago, loyalty cards should be treated with caution. The marketing motive is not merely to reward customers with lower shopping cost (thereby reducing profitability). The bigger beneficiaries are the third-party companies with whom supermarkets share your data. Noah Yuval Harari may be right in predicting our future status as ‘useless eaters’, but for now we are useful eaters. There is much to be gained from the comprehensive information gathered on every aspect of our lives. Data have become a valuable commodity, although we may be unaware of how our every move is tracked.

Supermarket loyalty cards are playing an important part in the development of a digital control grid.

The Co-operative Society has given discount to members since the late nineteenth century, although its close association with the Fabian Society (whose sinister motto is a wolf in sheep’s clothing) should be noted. I remember Green Shield stamps in the Seventies. Then in the Nineties some supermarkets introduced electronic bonus cards to customers, loading points at the checkout for customers to save or use as payment.

Nowadays joining any loyalty scheme is done online. Soon the physical cards will be withdrawn, as they are nothing but a legacy of the old physical world. The infamous World Economic Forum video featuring the line ‘you will own nothing, and be happy’ also emphasises that people will have no privacy. The global corporate-state regime will know everything about you. Like digital currency, loyalty cards will be programmable to the level of individual curtailment or enhancement.

Loss of privacy is most blatant in the supermarkets’ installation of AI-assisted facial recognition technology. If you use the so-called ‘self-service’ tills (an oxymoron, as service is something that you receive, not do to yourself), you are agreeing to a level of monitoring that would have made eighteenth-century designer of the ‘Panopticon’ Jeremy Bentham blush.

I refuse to use them, just as I eschew loyalty cards, because I realise that neither of these developments are for customers’ benefit. Safety and price cuts are readily appealing to the unthinking masses who do not see that they are being lured into a trap. .Another motive for me (as a trade union officer) is to protect jobs. Don’t customers care that once the human checkouts are removed, the nice lady at the till will be redundant?

The cameras at the auto-tills are not just to deter shoplifting. An officially-stated purpose is age verification. The Japanese company Fujitsu, which was involved in the Post Office / Horizon computer scandal (leading to unfair prosecution, and some cases of suicide, among stricken postmasters across the country), gained government approval for its facial analysis tool. But this is not merely to stop an under-age youngster from buying a litre or cider. This it total digital surveillance, using your biometric data, which are then passed to other companies without your permission.

The age of AI is upon us, and ethical safeguards are being cast aside. These images, recording your facial features and emotional state, are taken with no informed consent. There is no regard for your dignity, and no watchdog to check that your data are anonymised and only retained for a stipulated time period. .Data protection laws are seemingly breached yet the authorities do nothing to stop this mass data theft, because it is all part of the agenda to create a global technocracy.

In the coming ’15-minute cities’, a policy promoted as the guaranteed provision of vital amenities and services within walking or cycling distance from home, supermarket cameras will be put to more radical use. The loyalty scheme will be the carrot, and the facial recognition the stick. But in practice, these will become integrated. In the near future, customers won’t use a card to get their discount; their entry to the store will have already identified them, and the value of goods purchased will be automatically deducted from their bank account. Customers will be individually limited in what they can buy, with rationing of alcohol, meat and any foodstuffs in short supply, but also shops outside the customer’s 15-minute zone will either charge more or deny access.

What can you do to avoid this dehumanising matrix? As much as possibly, use independent greengrocers, butchers, bakeries, fishmongers, etc. Most of the proprietors willingly take cash. As fellow members of the community they know the true meaning of loyalty, and facial recognition is knowing you as a human being.

The stage show worked well. The story of Spain being suddenly overwhelmed by a migrant surge was reported as though the hordes came to mainland Spain. Some European leaders (following a script) demanded that Spain be ejected from the Schengen area of free movement between EU nations (actually, Ceuta and Melilla do not have full Schengen status). A priest called the migrants ‘invaders’. Local people waving Spanish flags chanted at the Africans and chased them out of the market square.

Ceuta was given constant coverage in the media. Several YouTube videos, falsely labelled as ‘live’, showed scenes on a loop with minimal subtitled explanation. Police officers in riot gear, bearing shields and batons, were shown in a long line on the beach. This was followed by images of migrants in the sea, suggesting that the only way was to swim back to Morocco. Such videos are ideal for propaganda.

Allegedly sixty thousand came, but in no video could I see more than a few hundred. Random charges by police or army seemed to have no obvious purpose other than to show a global audience that the authorities were trying to be tough after initially being overwhelmed.

As most of the migrants have been sent back, Ceuta will soon be overtaken on news broadcasts by other events, but the seed has been sown in the collective psyche.

Meanwhile the Strait of Hormuz is still blocked, if you believe ‘the news’. There was much concern about the escalating oil price and prospect of shortages and rationing, and airlines cancelling flights due to lack of jet fuel. Indeed, the cost of a litre of petrol or diesel rose, and has remained high, but it has stabilised. Oil tankers, therefore, must be getting through. People are not worrying about a £2 litre, or doubling of air fares to the Mediterranean.

All the mainstream media focus was on Donald Trump’s bluster and the evil Iranian regime, but people have got bored of the ‘war’ already. The more alert viewer perceives a contrived conflict. But hardly anyone seems to be aware of the real reason for the reported obstruction of this vital sea passage.

There is another resource on which the global economy and the welfare of humankind depends, which has been seriously thwarted in production and distribution. It’s difficult to know what to believe from the videos of missile strikes on American airbases and Arabian oil refineries, but in the small print of media reports on the impact of (alleged) Iranian attacks on energy facilities is the disruption to plants producing fertiliser used in agriculture worldwide.

Almost a third of the global supply of fertiliser was passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Using natural gas, Qatar and other Persian Gulf states are major exporters of urea, ammonia, sulphuric acid and phosphate fertilisers. Prices have surged, and shortages will be felt not so much this year but in 2027.

Curtailment of fertiliser supply is a sure way of inducing famine, particularly in poorer regions of Africa. An unprecedented wave of migration will be the result of a starving continent. Europe will be the destination, and when it happens, governments will be forced to declare a state of emergency. Military policing of our streets will make the Covid-19 lockdown seem like a picnic in the park.

The official cause of this exodus will not be a fertiliser shortage, but the ‘climate crisis’. White Europeans will be to blame! They should not complain, therefore, and accept purgatory for that their centuries of greed and racism. What kind of Christian would send fellow human beings back after a perilous journey, to starve in a land parched by the ravages of global warming caused by Western fossil-fuel luxury?

That’s the message that will maintain the divide-and-rule strategy in Britain and Europe. The Left will call for mass state housebuilding and safer routes for migration (after inevitable reported deaths in the crossing – a feature also of the Ceuta story). The Right will want to send them back and call for identity checks and ICE-style intervention.

Every major media narrative is a manipulation of the audience. The faceless globalist cabal is preparing us, tentatively, for further upheaval. People will really perish, and civil unrest will really erupt. Such carnage and chaos will justify the giant boot stamping on our faces.

Yet a very different view is taken on the imperial development of India by the British. Younger generations are indoctrinated into regarding the empire as a racist regime. Mention the British Raj and you will hear that the railways were built for troop movements, and modern facilities for the colonists alone.

But only an insufferable leftist bigot would deny that the British had a constructive and civilising impact on the Indian subcontinent. In the compendium The Raj: an Eye-Witness History of the British in India, soldiers and administrators describe the primitive, filthy and barbaric customs, as in these excerpts:-

Fighting elephants

In the early days of the East India Company, King James I sent Sir Thomas Roe as ambassador to Surat. The exclusive entertainment of elephant fights was held for the king, Jehangir, once or twice per week at Agra.

The manner thus, partly as myself saw, and partly by report. First the elephants appointed for the day, which are usually one couple, other times there may be two and sometimes three couple. The King cometh to the jarooca or window, that looketh into the river, upon whose strand, right before the said window, being the place appointed, they are brought; with each a guide sitting on his neck. At the word given they are let go, and so running one against the other with their trunks aloft they meet head to head. There they with their teeth lie thrusting and forcing with all their strength….Sometimes one gets the victory by overbearing the other in strength till he makes him give way, which he follows; and if the other be not too light for him, overtakes and overthrows him sometimes, then lies over him, foining at him with his teeth, trampling and overlying him, for they can neither kick, bite nor scratch.

Forced circumcision and conversion

The British had a small force in India that was sometimes overcome by local armies. William Hickey was sent by the British government to Calcutta. He was imprisoned in 1781 and succumbed to forced circumcision by Muslims.

In the month of September, almost six months after my imprisonment, the Nyar, a Bramin, and the commander of our guards, entered the prison early in the morning, and selected Sergeant Dempster, with fifteen more of the prisoners, among whom were two young boys, drummers of the 73^rd Regiment; struck off their irons, and, without deigning to utter a word, carried them away, for the purpose of circumcising them. They resisted a long while, and bore very cruel treatment before they submitted to this operation, nor did they submit at last until they were stupefied with Majum, which they were forced to swallow.

This incident spread general terror amongst the rest of the prisoners, every one apprehending that he might be the next victim devoted to Mahometism; nor were our fears groundless, for early in January 1782, the same persons re-entered our prison, accompanied by Sergeant Dempster, and made a second selection of fourteen, in which number I had the misfortune to be included. As Dempster was suspected of a share in this horrid business, every one of us were highly exasperated against him, and it was fortunate for him that he was protected by the guards. The treatment the first victims ha undergone served in some way to apprise us of the inutility of resistance. With horror and indignation we swallowed the narcotic poison, and those whom the dose had no effect upon were forcibly seized and pinioned by stout coffres, whilst the operation was performed (having previously shaved us). After the operation our right ears were perforated, and small silver rings with round knobs foiced in them, this being a mark of slavery amongst the Mahometans.

When Hickey and fellow countrymen had recovered from this ritual, they were transferred to the Nyar’s chaylah (slave) battalions.

Execution by elephant

Hyder Ali died in 1782 and was succeeded by his son Tipu Sultan, who made peace with the the British in 1784. James Scurry, a sailor in the Royal Navy, was captured by the French off the Coromandel coast, sent to Hyder Ali and imprisoned, forcibly circumcised and enlisted to a chaylah battalion. He escaped three years later, and he described the brutality of Tipu.

His most common method of punishment was, that of drawing to death by the elephant’s feet. The poor wretches (for several were drawn at one time) first had their arms tied behind them, above the elbows, and then a rope put about the small of their legs, which was fastened to the elephant’s foot. This being done, the criminals stood with their backs towards the elephant’s posterior, waiting sometimes an hour for an order for their execution. The distance they stood from the beast was about six yards, and first step the animal took would throw the poor unfortunates on their faces, thus they would be dragged over rough and smooth ground till dead, and with no faces left.

Scurry noted Tipu’s lust for torture and humiliation. At the public market, two or three hundred noses and ears were exhibited, their many owners disfigured for life. As in Arabia, fingers were removed from adjudged thieves or corrupt clerks.

Ruled by bandits

Gilbert Elliot, Lord Minto, arrived in Calcutta as governor-general in 1807. Local government was weak, while bandits had the real power (hakim) in their district (zillah). According to Lord Minto: -

If a whole village was destroyed, not a man was found to complain. If a family was half-murdered, and half-tortured, the tortured survivors could not be prevailed upon to appeal against the criminals. Men have been found with their limbs and half the flesh of their bodies consumed by slow fire, who persisted in saying they had fallen into their own fire, or otherwise denying all knowledge of the event that could tend to the conviction of detection of the offenders. They knew, if they spoke, they would either themselves or the remaining members of their families be despatched the same evening.

I was not a little shocked, and could not help feeling some shame, when I became fully apprised of the dreadful disorders which afflicted counties under the very eye of Government; and for many months past it has been one of the principal objects to put this monstrous evil down.

Magistrates had typically taken their evidence from corrupt sources, and they were replaced by men of superior qualification and integrity. But illicit power was not easily suppressed. Lord Minto was aware of the risks of intervening in established social structures, however awful their ways, but he felt a moral obligation.

It was for the Government of England to decide whether it was expedient to observe a strict neutrality amidst these scenes of disorder and outrage which were passing under our eyes in the north of Hindostan, or whether we should listen to the calls of suffering humanity, and interfere for the protection of those weak and defenceless states who implore our assistance, to deliver them from the violence and oppression of an ambitious and lawless upstart.

Hindu ways of dying

Mary Martha Sherwood, wife of a captain in the 53d Foot, arrived at Madras in 1805. She was an evangelist who was horrified by the Hindu on her journeys to the River Ganges.

In the evening we reached Dalmow, and saw an old man brought down to the riverside to be smothered. He was not dead, but his relatives had given him over, and when such is the case the poor dying man has no resource but to submit to his fate, and to suffer himself to be carried to the shores of the river. There his sufferings are speedily put an end to by stuffing his mouth, his nose, and his ears with hoy mud. He is then left on his charpore, from which the corpse is soon dragged by the jackals, or birds of prey.

Sherwood was given an account of the burning of widows on the funeral pyre. Hindus believed that this would send the woman to heaven.

A certain number of faggots mixed with straw are piled up. The woman is placed with the corpse of her husband across her knees; she is then surrounded with other faggot s and built with them into the pile. When this is finished she generally receives a brand, and sets fire to the straw, but sometimes one of her young children is compelled to do it. It is always considered a propitious circumstance if she can repeat the name of Sitta Ram several times after the pile is ignited; each time that she cries out the people around shout aloud with apparent joy. The woman of whom the gentleman spoke repeated ‘Sitta Ram’ three times. He remarked that when the fire reached the poor woman’s clothes she attempted to put it out, and seemed uneasy; the Brahmins immediately uttered loud shouts, and threw fat and wet straw on the flames, so that with the hissing of the grease and the thick smoke of the wet grass the unhappy pone would no longer be heard nor seen.

Female infanticide

William Sleeman, in his book Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude 1849-50, described the Indo-Islamic practice of killing baby girls.

They cannot give their daughters in marriage to any Rajpoot families, save the Rhathores and Chouhans. Those who have property have to give all they have with their daughters to these Chouhans and Rhathores, and reduce themselves to nothing; and can take nothing from them in return as it is a great strain to take kuneea dan, or virgin price, from anyone.

Mothers wept and screamed a good deal when their female infants were torn from them; but after two or three times giving birth to female infants, they became quiet and reconciled to the usage; and said ‘Do as you like’. It was for dread of sinking, in substance, from the loss of property, and in grade, from the loss of caste, that alone led to the murder of female infants.

The infant is destroyed in the room where it is born, and there buried. The floor is then plastered over with cow dung; and, on the thirteenth day, the village or family priest must cook and eat his food in that room. He is provided with wood, ghee, barley, rice and tillee. He boils the rice, barley and sesamum in a brass vessel, throws the ghee over them when they are dressed, and eats the whoie. This is considered as a hom, or burnt offering; and, by eating it in that place, the priest is supposed to take the whole hutteea, or sin, upon himself, and to cleanse the family from it.

I am told, that they put the milk of the mudar shrub – Ascelpias gigantea – into the mouth of the infant to destroy it, and cover the mouth with the faeces that first pass from the infant’s bowels. It soon dies; and, after the expiation, the parents again occupy the room, and gossip as usual!

Was India particularly cruel?

Before the civilising impact of the British empire, life for the majority in India was brutal and short. The country developed steadily in colonial times, as civic administration and the rule of law gradually replaced despots and sacrificial rituals. But critics will be champing at the bit to tell me that Great Britain was equally bad, or perhaps merely a century or two ahead in social progress. They had fighting elephants but we had fighting cocks. We had public executions and heads on spikes. We had dreadful diseases, wars and dire poverty. Indeed, but the uniqueness of India was in its rigid caste system and fanaticism of its three main faiths. It’s not whitewashing to state that Christian free will and morality in the West was a brake, to some extent, on the abuses of religion and social structure.

Squeamishness is a feature of civilised society. If you happened to be in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, would you take the opportunity to visit ‘Chop Chop Square’, where weekly beheadings are performed? Most of us would flinch, or be deterred by our moral compass and the sense that watching another person’s suffering for interest is a bad deed.

In modern multiculturalist dogma, all cultures are equal and deserve respect. But this is a luxury belief of ‘woke’ middle class snobs, who should be more rigorously challenged on what they tolerate or endorse. Should humanity accept female infanticide, forced circumcision or severe penalties for blasphemy? Should society be controlled by bandits or so-called ‘community leaders’? Of course, the genteel multiculturalists wouldn’t want any of these customs for themselves, but they will never call out on cruelty (such as the mass rape of white working-class girls at the hands of Pakistani-origin Muslims), because it doesn’t affect them.

If your first reaction to the quotes above is to find fault with British culture, you are immersed in the irrational and dehumanising doctrine of moral equivalence.

Too much emphasis is given today on how slavery built Great Britain, an exaggeration that overlooks the ardour of the working class in mines, mills and as cannon fodder in military pursuits. But when you think of Belgian chocolate – reputedly best in the world – do you ask where the cocoa came from?

Conrad (1857-1924) was born in the borderlands of Poland and Ukraine and as a young man decided to go to sea. He travelled across the Indian Ocean on merchant ships and climbed the ranks. Eventually he took command of a steamer on the River Congo. Heart of Darkness was one of several stories based on his experiences. He became a naturalised British citizen and lived in Kent.

Belgian Congo was a vast country, stretching from Angola and an Atlantic seaboard to Sudan. Much of it is jungle, in Conrad’s time sparsely populated with few roads. Too humid and uncomfortable for white Europeans to settle, Congo was a posting for colonial administrators but few others. Initially the country was named as Congo Free State, as Arab slave traders were ejected, after many a gunfight. Cynically, the Europeans wanted the continent for themselves. In 1908 Congo was annexed by Belgium.

Conrad’s Captain Marlow went fifty miles inland with his steamer. The stretch of river from there to Kinshasa, 340 miles from the sea, was not navigable due to rapids. Conrad had made the gruelling trek to Kinshasa. In his Heart of Darkness was a white man named Kurtz, who was worshipped by the natives. Francis Mosley, in his introduction to the Folio edition, identified Kurtz as Conrad’s depiction of American explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley was enthused by the imperial partition of Africa and leasing of Congo to King Leopold, which produced, according to Conrad, the ‘vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience’.

White Europeans have a fascination with darkest Africa. Henry Livingstone’s exploits in the mid-nineteenth century were compelling reading for Victorian society, and his meeting with Stanley after his four-year disappearance was an epic event. I remember, in the Seventies, a neighbour whose lounge was adorned with carvings of negro figures. ‘Black is beautiful’, she enthused. The BBC series Roots depicted African natives sympathetically, the lead character Kunta Kinte becoming a household name. But to most people in the West, Africa was viewed with little more respect than it had been in previous centuries. The term ‘savage’ was banished, but attitudes changed slowly.

As a childhood reader of Herge’s Tintin series, I later became aware of the Belgian author’s first outing for his young adventurer. You won’t find Tintin au Congo in a bookshop or library, because it is regarded as the epitome of colonial racism. The Congolese have grossly oversized lips and eyes, and act in stereotypical simplicity. In the Eighties, when several football teams had black players, hooligans threw bananas on the field. It’s different today, as Africans dominate football. In the 1974 World Cup, Zaire (the token African qualifier) lost by nine goals to Yugoslavia. In the recent tournament, Congo almost beat England in the second round (European teams are still winning, but only because of their imported players).

Confusingly, there are now two Congos. The Republic of Congo is north of the river, a smaller county of merely six million inhabitants. The Democratic Republic of Congo is the larger state, with over a hundred million. The two capitals, Brazzaville and Kinshasa (Leopoldville in colonial time) are on opposite banks of the River Congo, several miles wide at that juncture.

In 1960 Congo gained independence, as European nations relinquished their colonial assets and refocused on building the federalist project. Brussels would become the seat of European government, rather than running remote lands. The governor-general in Leopoldville had exerted civil and military power on behalf of the king, with a workforce of civil servants, teachers and doctors de la Belgique. The country collapsed into chaos when the Belgians departed, and a United Nations force intervened as civil war erupted.

The greater Congo became Zaire in 1965, remaining under that name until 1997. In 1974 the famous ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman was held in Kinshasa, symbolising black power. Two years later, British singer Johnny Wakelin reached high in the pop chart with his song In Zaire.

Congo, impenetrable to the ordinary Western mind, is a land of coveted minerals, which enriched Belgium: uranium, radium, zinc, iron, copper, diamonds and gold. Reputedly Livingstone, when given some gleaming stones by a fellow white man, threw them into the bush; his mission was to propagate Christianity, not greed. Today Congo provides crucial elements for batteries and digital technology. China is the new governor, and there are few qualms about children working in mines from dawn to dusk. The plunder goes on, through slave labour.

Meanwhile Congo has an extremely high birth rate, and human exports are increasing. Brussels, Paris and other western European cities are home to hundreds of thousands of Congolese. Support within the diaspora is a protective factor against anomie, but many young men turn to a life of drugs and crime. They are victims of the new world order, which plans land clearances while it destroys white Christian society in the West.

The British empire was a marvellous feat to patriots, and a loss to lament. To indoctrinated younger generations it was a racist regime. But imperialism, whether British, Dutch, French,. Portuguese or Belgian, was probably not the national rivalry that we are meant to think. Empire was always financed by the Rothschilds and other international bankers, and Jewish entrepreneurial fingers were soon on any discovered lucre.

Since the eighteenth century, empire has been a global venture, with continents shared between European nations. The n came the century of American imperialism, now in managed decline. China appears to be taking over, but really no nation, no government, no leader is in charge: they are just taking orders.

Was the life of the Congolese native in Conrad’s time really worse than that of the migrant in the Paris banlieue today?

An estimated million people flocked to the city in their rainbow colours, bondage gear, various states of undress and dog masks. Into this Sodom and Gomorrah came a Muslim terrorist in a car. He rammed pedestrians and then attempted a stabbing spree. One person was killed. Hundreds mourned to day at the Brandenburg Gate.

But was it real? Use of a vehicle to attack people is convenient for staging false flags or hoaxes, because nobody takes any notice of what cars are in their vicinity, and a ramming could only involve a few dozen people at the most. The incident with Liverpool fans two years ago was probably staged, happening on a side street, after an earlier advertisement for volunteers for an emergency exercise.

There is a clear motive for a hoax, in my view. Recently I watched a YouTube video of a protest in Blackpool, on the weekend of a Pride festival in the town’s gay district. Although many residents in that area may be homosexual or transsexual, I’m sure that there are hundreds who have lived there for decades, long before the streets were captured for gender politics. What struck me was the fencing around a great swath of streets, with security guards restricting access at every entry point. Not much to celebrate if you live there and aren’t a gay hedonist.

The Berlin terror event will make Pride participants fear for their safety, and they will gladly accept an enclosed sector of the city for future festivals, with access by digital identity. Soon, you won’t be able to go anywhere without your ‘papers’.

Meanwhile the choice of a Muslim perpetrator, rather than a ‘far-right’ activist, serves the divide-and-rule strategy well. Pride supporters tend to be very open not just to sexual liberation but also to national borders. They think that boundaries are morally wrong - unless they are to keep nasty characters out. Several banners were held opposing racism, because Pride and Islam are (bizarrely) regarded as bedfellows.

But when a Muslim (allegedly) attacks a LGBT celebration, more gay people will decide that Islam is a danger to their livelihood. And that’s the authorities’ intent.

The security services are running the show, and the use of ‘Abdul’ is following a tried-and-tested tactic.

Postscript

The largest Pride rally in this country, in Brighton, will now be protected by armed police. Counter-jihadists will think this is right and necessary. Unwittingly, these supposed right-wingers will accept guns on the streets, to ensure no threat to blatant Cultural Marxist subversion.

Meanwhile the majority of society naively regards AI as progress, making lives easier, safer and more informed. ‘Normies’ don’t mind the loss of privacy and seem unperturbed by the overarching digital surveillance grid being built around them. AI simply means a ready source of information on any topic, answering questions in encyclopaedic detail with incredible speed, as well as giving advice, writing essays for cheating students and threatening letters for the litigious.

Ordinary people may have heard of controversial AI output promoting Adolf Hitler or creating images of bikini-clad politicians, but on their near horizon these are teething problems, to be remedied by codes or laws. With wishful thinking their government will remain in control.

The Trump administration, emulating the regulatory fetishes of the EU, has taken an interventionist stance. Chinese AI models have overtaken American competitors, and the Washington ‘deep state’ is worried. Citizens will need a licence to use Chinese AI. This is grossly protectionist, and will leave US developers lagging further and further behind the open AI enterprise of the Far East.

But this apparent geopolitical and commercial folly may be scripted, for the agenda of a multipolar new world order. China is being reinterpreted by Western commentators in mainstream and independent media as a rational and efficient system (UK Column, for example, is frequently promoting the Chinese way). We are told that the people of inwardly communist and outwardly capitalist China are happier, with no less freedom than is afforded by increasingly authoritarian Western states. The minions of Shanghai and Wuhan aren’t being censored or jailed for opposing ‘woke’ ideology.

Propaganda for Chinese AI emphasises the perceived downward spiral of the West, which has lost its lead in every aspect of social and technological progress. AI is transformative, and China is now established as the most advanced innovator and producer.

Technocracy is here already, but there is still a long way to go in relieving Westerners of their time-honoured values of liberty, democracy and civil rights. While malaise spreads throughout Europe and North America through mass immigration, cultural conflict and the twin delusions of ‘green’ and ‘woke’, the Chinese are getting on with their productive lives under total digital surveillance. Who wouldn’t prefer order to chaos?

The chaos in the West, demonstrated by the Black Lives Matter frenzy, subversive gender ideology, encroachment of Islam and ballooning debt, is contrived. The aim is to create a tripartite world of three powers, just as predicted by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell’s telescreen was a foresight of AI. The global government will pretend division, to justify a constant state of emergency and war. Reality will become impossible to know, because everything will be staged by AI.

The idea of major powers developing AI for aggressive purposes will be part of this pretence. There will only be global AI, and this will gain a momentum and motive of its own. But at the stage where AI has escaped from any human control, its hitherto creators will be the first to be eradicated.

For the faithful, AI is the new Tower of Babel, and the outcome will be the same as the first time. God will strike against evil design, having watched mortal beings believe that they are invincible and masters of their destiny. Ultimately, perhaps AI is God’s means of reminding his flock of its humanity: anything else is the work of Satan.

Having acquired remnants of a house clearance, in the form of a large bag of cassettes, I initially put tapes by Last and Wunderlich in my recycling pile (for a charity shop, not the rubbish bin). Then I was struck by the raunchy cover of a Wunderlich album, which seemed at odds with the style of music, as confirmed when I played the tape. Yet after three tunes I was hooked. Like Last, Wunderlich played a mixture of contemporary pop, classical pieces, folk songs and movie theme tunes, and I liked his orchestration.

James Last was born in Bremen in 1929 as Hans, and European fans always knew him as Hansi. He played in the musical corps of the Wehrmacht. After the war he was the big band leader of the James Last Orchestra, playing the double bass. In the Sixties he wrote songs for leading artists such as Elvis Presley, Andy Williams and Petula Clark, but he became most famous for his clever arrangements of popular music.

By the Seventies his series of albums titled Non Stop Dancing and Beach Party were selling fast. British holidaymakers retuned from the Mediterranean with a taste for European food and music, and with kitsch records the likes of Last and Wunderlich fulfilled their desire for something accessibly cosmopolitan. Don’t dismiss it all as a fashion faux-pas. Last’s style was jaunty, with a steady momentum from one track to the next.

Last was prolific, having around 180 recordings published with over 80 million sales. He toured regularly, and hosted a television show. He was still performing live in 2014 at the age of 85, but he retired due to terminal illness, dying nine months later. In the Guardian, Alexis Petridis noted: ‘his detractors complained that James Last made everything sound the same. Showtunes, classical music, Old McDonald, Children of the Revolution – it all came out sounding like snappy tunes and happy music to bring joy to all the world’.

Wunderlich was born two years after Last, at Chemnitz in 1931,too young for military service for the Third Reich. In 1951 he moved from communist East to capitalist West Germany. He started playing a Hammond organ in 1955, and in 1958 he signed a contract with the Telefunken record company. Wunderlich did plenty of touring but after building his studio in Karlsruhe in 1972 he concentrated on producing his recordings of musical medleys.

Almost a hundred albums were produced in that studio, aided by his wife Gisele, a broadcasting sound engineer. Wunderlich progressed from Hammond to Werst organ, and later a Moog synthesiser. He was popular in the UK, not as much as his rival (of English-sounding name), but he filled the Royal Albert Hall in 1978 and the Royal Festival Hall in 1984. After 20 million sales, Wunderlich died of a heart attack in 1997, aged 66.

Last sold more records, did more gigs, was a bigger celebrity and household name, yet I prefer Wunderlich. I am not sufficiently verbose in music writing to explain why, but I find his tapes strangely alluring. He is more interesting in his selections, not so much playing to the masses but creating a warm aural kaleidoscope of individual harmonic interpretations of songs old and new, from ‘When I Take my Sugar to Tea’ to ‘Star Wars’.

Driving lessons and taking the test (perhaps twice or more) add to the debts mounted by a young person on starting adult life. The coveted licence is not like the Monopoly board’s £200 on passing ‘go’ but the very opposite: entry to an extortion racket of parking fees, rising petrol and insurance costs, road charging and fines for the merest infraction. No wonder then, why you hardly see learner-drivers nowadays: the driving instruction business is in terminal decline as the future is realised of driverless cars and smart cities.

Use of motorways will be charged heavily, effectively converting them into ‘Zil lanes’ for the rich. Consequently the general public will be diverted to ordinary roads, where progress is obstructed by roundabouts, traffic lights, narrowing and – soon to be announced – a 20mph speed limit across the whole of England. If you still think ‘surely they wouldn’t do that’, your wishful thinking is delusional: such a blanket restriction has already been imposed in Wales, and in Greater London. Several city and county councils have rolled it out, priming for a national slowdown.

Road safety and air quality are the lies used by the establishment to justify this blatantly regressive policy. Traditionally most cars had manually-operated transmission, and a limit of 20mph would need no more than three gears. Fourth and fifth would be redundant. The most fuel-efficient way of driving is at cruising speed, not at an urban crawl, so pollution will worsen. If the powers-that-be were really concerned about the air that we breathe, they’d stop showering us with metallic fragments from geoengineering. As for road safety fewer people are killed now than in the days of horse and carriage. But any excuse will do for enacting the Great Reset.

The authorities will not be lenient with your speeding. Ten per-cent over the new limit is merely 22mph, and thousands of motorists are being caught and fined. It’s a cash cow, further fleecing the ordinary people as they try to make ends meet.

The truth is that they want you off the road. They are building a grid to force us to stay in our zones, through digitally-monitored roads and cars. You are fooling yourself if you think that this will get any better. The best option is to sell your car now and prepare for new ways of maintaining independence and freedom, in the face of the technocratic onslaught.

‘Dear colleagues

I am writing to you following Lord Mann’s review into antisemitism and other forms of racism in the NHS. Its findings are painful, serious and important for every part of our health service, and I am accepting all the recommendations relating to actions required of NHS organisations, in full, on behalf of our trust.

In the wake of a series of horrific attacks on the Jewish community across the country, including shocking examples of intimidation and abuse, Lord Mann was commissioned by the Government to lead an urgent review into how the NHS and its regulatory system recognises, reports, and tackles antisemitism and other forms of racism.

Lord Mann has heard that Jewish people in the NHS experience “routine ostracism”, with Jewish colleagues being the only religious group in the latest NHS Staff Survey for whom discrimination from colleagues is rising rather than falling. Sadly, the review found that this means that some of our Jewish colleagues are considering leaving the NHS. Some Jewish patients also reported not wishing to present for treatment or putting off receiving important care.

With 16% of Muslim staff and 20% of Black and minority ethnic staff also reporting discrimination nationally in the last year, the reforms will benefit everyone who experiences hatred or abuse in the health service and Lord Mann’s recommendations extend to additional protections and support for colleagues of other faiths for that reason.

The main recommendations that we will now implement include (but are not limited to):

• Myself and the rest of the board will undertake anti-racism training, specifically including antisemitism, within six months.

• We will adopt the seven anti-racism principles of the NHS Race and Health Observatory.

• We will implement the forthcoming national guidance on uniform and NHS-issued equipment to ensure patients can access care with confidence, free from any perception of bias, and on how trusts should respond to racist behaviour from the public.

• Subject to the outcome of a further consultation by the Government, we will include, wherever possible, Jewish and Sikh as ethnicities in data collection.

We already adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of Antisemitism and offer mandatory Equality, Diversity and Human Rights training. In addition to these commitments for us, you can read more about the commitments which NHS England is making nationally as a result of this review, by reading a letter from NHS CEO Sir Jim Mackey.

Why this matters

The NHS is for everyone. East Sussex Healthcare is for everyone. Antisemitism, racism and discrimination undermine everything we are as an organisation and prevent us from doing what we are all here to do: to care for our patients, service users and each other.

There is more work to do, and we must redouble our efforts to work towards truly being an organisation where everyone feels welcomed, included and equal. When we protect colleagues and patients who face hate, abuse or discrimination, we make our trust safer for everyone.

Thank you for everything you do to care for our patients, service users and each other.

Jayne’

Similar missives will be sent to staff throughout the NHS, but each chief executive should be held accountable for their actions. I have been informed by trust workers that senior managers are being instructed to monitor social media posts by staff, and to pursue through disciplinary process any comments that come into the scope of ‘antisemitism’. And that’s a wide net, as I shall explain.

Of course, there are many groups of protected people in society, with prominent political moves to banish ‘Islamophobia’. However, that is similar to ‘homophobia’ , ‘transphobia’ and other forms of ‘hate’ in that the concern of the authorities is not really safety and harmony. Indeed, the objective appears to be the opposite: a society riven by identity politics and resentment. Not that Jayne Black necessarily wants that – she’s just an officer of the regime doing her duty.

Likewise, the focus on antisemitismis is not primarily to support Jewish people (whose British population is very small) or their religious practices. It is to maintain cover for the dystopian oligarchs, many of whom identify as Jews, to portray any criticism as the type of thinking that culminated in the Holocaust. ‘Antisemitism’ is their sword and shield.

As anyone with cerebral functioning knows. the real massacre is happening in Gaza, aided and abetted by the same Western governments that impose multiculturalism, mass immigration and de facto blasphemy laws for Islam. Muslims are fair game for the IDF, but a protected species in the West. Our leaders are unconscionable hypocrites.

Thousands of pro-Palestine protestors have been arrested for expressing their humane outrage. And in the NHS, which has a high proportion of Muslim employees, doctors and nurses have been severely sanctioned by management, in some cases reported to their regulatory body and barred from practising.

Yet accusation of genocide in Palestine is not the main reason for the government’s pledge against anti-Semitism. Too many people have awakened to the evils of Zionism, and are now openly discussing phenomena that the powers-that-be want kept under wraps.

Jayne Black’s emphasis on training, like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, will teach managers to interpret the real ‘antisemitic’ meaning of social media posts mentioning the following: -

· ‘Global’

· ‘New world order’

· ‘Cultural Marxism’

· ‘International banking system’ (remember that mural that got Jeremy Corbyn into trouble)

· ‘George Soros’

· ‘Palantir’

· ‘Zionist’

Let’s consider why these terms are important for the master-class to quash. Anything ‘global’ suggests that the social media post is informed of the Zionist goal of eradicating national sovereignty (while pretending that nations and their democracies are still functioning – as presented by national variations in the Covid-19 lockdown). The person posting may have realised that a world government is already operating, run by Zionist criminals.

‘Cultural Marxism’, unlikely to be mentioned within the generally leftist NHS workforce, is cast as an antisemitic conspiracy theory, as if there wasn’t a Marxist school led by Zionist professors that refocused from Marx’s economics to culture. Again less likely to be identified by NHS practitioners as a problem is George Soros, but the training in anti-Semitism will surely coach managers in the ‘right-wing conspiracy theory’ that this kind philanthropist is funding minority groups to undermine Western society.

Much more in the typical NHS worker’s way of thinking is the ogre of Palantir. This company, based in Israel and led by overtly Satanist Peter Thiel, provides weapons for the slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children. Now it is being given control of confidential NHS data on all patients. But for any employee to suggest that this is wrong, whether due to fascist surveillance or an immoral contract given Palantir’s activities, a disciplinary allegation of antisemitism may be pursued by management.

Finally, ‘Zionist’ must not be accepted by managers in its intended meaning. Instead, it must mean that the person using the phrase means Jews – all Jews. Not just the Israeli government and its brutal military forces, or the dastardly people who control global finance and almost everything else.

Ordinary Jewish people do not seek the destruction of Western nations and their culture. Like everyone else they want peaceful co-existence and to enjoy the benefits of an orderly democratic society. But NHS managers are now expected to go far beyond rightly protecting Jewish patients from discrimination, to impose censorship that serves not the British public or any religious communities but a global totalitarian tyranny that is hell-bent on destroying white Christian culture.

This following of Zionist orders is a threat to the privacy, political rights and freedom of speech of staff. This will be a test for all those Remainers in the NHS: will they stand tall with the protections of the European Convention on Human Rights, or will they meekly comply? EU president Ursula von der Leyen said that Europe is guided by the values of the Talmud, so the liberal progressive Utopia was a fantasy.

NHS clinicians should be compassionate to all in their care. But a good person can neither be ‘globalist’ nor pretend that dark global forces don’t exist.

No, surely not, some readers might exclaim. How can a football match- indeed, several football matches - be managed for a desired outcome?

Agents.

All top footballers have agents. The player does what he’s told, and is richly rewarded. It’s a short career, which could be ended at any time. So make hay while the sun shines.

Agents got players to take the knee for BLM, despite what supporters thought of it.

And agents get players to follow the plan. Wives and girlfriends might be told too much, but they would be foolish to risk a ‘car accident’.

So what is the plan, and who are the planners?

FIFA, of course, is another global organisation under Zionist control.

FIFA allowed the public obstruction of the Iranian team by the US authorities.

FIFA knows that Argentina’s name was on the World Cup before it started.

When England lost to the Argies on Wednesday, the reasonable comment was that the better team won. But why did the English team, after little threat by their opponents prior to the 55th-minute goal, decide to camp in their own penalty area, with not a single player up-field? The inevitable onslaught was encouraged. Argentina had chance after chance and eventually scored. A great comeback, apparently orchestrated by Lionel Messi, was probably stage-directed beforehand.

The English players didn’t look very dejected after the final whistle. Argentinian players celebrated with a banner proclaiming the Malvinas (Falkland Islands) as their territory. Israel, remember, supplied the Argentinian forces with high-tech weaponry in the 1982 war. Nice allies, eh?

Wall-licker Messi is the poster-boy of the Argentinian triumph over European nations, whose adopted African immigrants failed to regain past glory.

Argentina, in the past an option for the Jewish homeland (before Palestine was chosen)., is becoming a Zionist outpost, with vast swaths of land being bought by Israelis. Its president is a best buddy of Bibi Netanyahu. Messi will be loudly cheered in Jerusalem as he holds the World Cup aloft on Sunday.

Football is a circus, but it is also very useful for messages. We thought that the game was genuine sporting competition, as it always had been, but now we see it overrun by VAR, advertisement breaks -and scripted winners and losers. Like Hollywood, it serves Zionist goals.

Postscript

I was wrong about Argentina winning. Perhaps the goal had already been scored. And that half-time display in the final in New Jersey was pure Cultural Marxism: the pretence of universal love by elitists who want us in a global state farm.

Wikipedia was created by Sanger with Jimmy Whales in 2001, after an earlier project named Newpedia. But Sanger saw changes in policy as early as 2006. Corbett concurred with this timing, having worked as a fact-checker in Canada and observing, in 2005, that suddenly Wikipedia entries were given prominence on Google searches.

Sanger is not a conspiracy theorist, but he agreed with Corbett on the potential manipulation, stating: ‘the neat thing about Wikipedia from the point of view of propagandists is that it’s anonymous.’ Corbett regards it as ‘the perfect intelligence laundering device for those types of three-letter organisations that would love to get information out there in third-party form’.

Neutrality was fundamental to Wikipedia. In its early years, the website embraced critical and countercultural thinking, taking care not to take a side in controversies. Nowadays, Wikipedia is a fount of establishment narrative, with no radical perspectives allowed (except to ridicule or dismiss them) on anthropogenic global warming, 9/11, the Holocaust or rigging of the 2020 US presidential election.

Wikipedia, I suggest, is a weapon of the security services against conspiracy theory. We saw as much during the Covid-19 scam, when military units were involved in surveillance of social media posts. Wikipedia seemed to give uncritical support to all the draconian interventions for Covid-19, including lockdown, masks, PCR testing and universal vaccination. No dissent was allowed.

In 2021, while working at the London Assembly, I was asked by assembly member David Kurten to amend a biased Wikipedia page on him. I gave myself a foreign name and made some tentative edits to the existing text. Immediately I was challenged for categorising my amendments as ‘minor’ rather than ‘major’. On making further changes, adding a factual line on Kurten’s role in UKIP, I was scolded and unable to do any more editing. Clearly, political messages are under tight control. But who is pulling the strings?

As Corbett suggests, Wikipedia has not been transformed by an organic political movement. There is a tendency of people of right-wing orientation to blame the Left for commandeering the media and online assets such as Wikipedia and Google. This is believable because leftists are given a free pass while the Right is suppressed. But this is only because the former are ‘useful idiots’ for the globalist, technocratic masterclass that owns the media and operates all the levers of modern society, economics and statecraft.

For many years Wikipedia has been indistinguishable from the BBC or New York Times in its versions of truth. As Sanger explained, conservative media outlets such as the Daily Mail, Fox News and the New York Post are described as unreliable and cannot normally be used as sources. Sanger stated that the only media of any conservative aspect that can be sourced are the Wall Street Journal and Daily Telegraph, as these are establishment-supporting outlets that remain safely within the Overton window. The establishment position – not the rhetoric of Che Guevara or Gramsci – is always reinforced. Wikipedia policy of favouring supposedly reliable channels of information results in establishment-friendly secondary sources being prioritised over primary sources (use of which ids generally discouraged).

It is important to understand that the powers-that-be are not really political, but will use politics and ideological conflict to further their cause. The likes of the Telegraph keep readers eyes shut to the dystopian agenda. Immigration, subversive gender ideology and Net Zero puritanism are blamed on ‘woke’ madness or ‘green’ activists or the Labour Party, rather than being understood as means of destroying white Western society and its Christian values.

Know who controls you by who you are allowed to criticise. Antisemitism, predictably, is emphasised on the website at every opportunity. Now left-wing Palestine sympathisers are being censored too.

This goes beyond any of the criticisms of Wikipedia by Sanger, who still believes that the problems can be resolved. His ‘nine theses’ are as follows: -

· End decision-making by ‘consensus’

· Enable competing articles

· Abolish source blacklists

· Revive the original neutrality policy

· Repeal ‘ignore all rules’

· Reveal who Wikipedia’s leaders are

· Let the public rate articles

· End indefinite blocking

· Adopt a legislative process

What? You think that the controllers will relinquish control now that it’s firmly in their hands? It’s noble but naive. Sanger comes across as a decent chap who hasn’t opened his mind to the reality that we are now in the grip of a dastardly and nameless regime, for which information assets such as Wikipedia are tools of totalitarianism. The online encyclopaedia might as well have been the ongoing revisionist job of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Whereas Wikipedia began with at least an effort to speak truth to power, now it is power speaking to truth. It is the most blatant manifestation of how the internet lured us with its potential for liberalisation of knowledge and has instead imposed collective ‘truth’ (which is often false). We must all think and learn the same ideas, and that is the surest route to serfdom.

The 2View cassette was the same as standard VHS with one significant difference: inside the cartridge was an elaborate mechanism that would allow two plays of the film, and on rewinding after the second time, a magnet was run over the tape to delete the contents. The user then had a blank tape that could be used to make a recording of a television show or whatever.

The customer got a film for a slightly higher price than a rented videotape, but considerably less than the price of a purchased copy of the film on normal VHS or DVD (it’s hard to imagine nowadays, when charity shops offer DVDs for a pound or less, that these products were sold for around £20 when released).

Why didn’t 2View succeed? It was introduced in 2001, at the time that DVD sales were overtaking VHS for the first time, and video rental chains were beginning to see the writing on the wall after rich pickings throughout the Nineties. Within a few years the likes of Blockbuster were disappearing from the shopping parade.

Blank tapes, including those of reputed brands such as JVC, Maxell and Sony, had become so cheap that there was no attraction in the remnant from the watched film, doubtless of poorer quality and not virgin tape.

But the worst flaw, from the perspective of the producers, was that the magnet could be dislodged through deft use of a paperclip, preventing its designed deletion of the film. Hollywood studios did not want their movies so easily obtained at a discount, and so 2View was finished.

The video cassette was an adaption of the audio cassette, which was originally devised in the Sixties for recording business meetings. The eighth-of-an-inch tape of the compact cassette was not the optimal means of listening to music, but it was a clever design that has lasted to this day. Quick question: how many parts are in an audio cassette?

The answer is twenty: two sides of the casing, five screws, a felt pad and metal spring, two rollers, two spools with two removable pieces to clasp the tape, two slip sheets, and of course one roll of magnetic tape. That’s eighteen, but we can add two labels.

‘Boomer tech’ was analogue, and generally it was fixable. You could take things apart and rebuild them, procuring spare parts if needed. Mechanical engineering worked best when it was kept simple: older cassette decks with clunky piano keys from the late Seventies and early Eighties have often outlasted those of the Nineties, which were over-engineered, with soft-touch digital features: more to go wrong.

In the Seventies, German company BASF became a leading manufacturer of audio cassettes. Another quick question: what is the full name of this company?

Answer: Badische Alinin und Sodafabrik, a company founded in Mannheim in 1865. . BASF cassettes had two extra parts, for the proprietary ‘Security Mechanism’. Two plastic fingers kept in contact with the tape on the left and right spool, supposedly ensuring stability and smooth running. Perhaps it saved users from mishaps with tapes unspooling in their machines.

But the SM was an unnecessary addition to the classic design of the compact cassette. The constant contact with the tape was bound to cause some deterioration to the surface of the tape and the recorded signal. Perhaps not surprisingly, SM cassettes had relatively prominent hiss, detracting from the generally high quality of the BASF tape.

Later the SM was withdrawn, and in the Eighties BASF tapes emulated TDK and Maxell in reputation.

And this was one of the features of the analogue era: diversity. Digital is dependable but boring. Nobody can fiddle with a CD or DVD like you could with an audio cassette, or the 2View video restrictor that home-taught engineers learned to bypass.

The journey began in a very different place. Goodwin was of modest social background and the first in his family to go to university. This was thanks to New Labour, Tony Blair’s government having widely expanded access to higher education. The future seemed bright, and on beginning as a lecturer Goodwin fitted in well: -

I was, like the vast majority of people in university, a fully signed-up member of the liberal left. I used to read and write for the Guardian. I voted for the Labour Party. I worked at left-wing think-tanks. I advised left-wing politicians. I walked around campus wearing T-shirts with Che Guevara on them. I routinely changed my Facebook profile picture to signal my concerns about whatever had just upset liberals, and shared their moral outrage over various injustices around the world. I made sure that my tweets included the latest fashionable hashtag. I viewed everything to the right of the centre-left as ‘fascism’ and the ‘far right’. I routinely complained about conservatives and right-wingers, viewing them as inherently racist and problematic. Surrounded by other members of the university class, I thought all this was completely normal.

Goodwin sees a stark contrast in his career of before and after Brexit. As he began to realise, the atmosphere in university changed from liberalism to an intolerant, censorial and puritanical application of the ‘minorities good, majorities bad’ doctrine.

While the followers of this ideology claim to be the most liberal and enlightened of all, they feel so intensely about the need to protect minorities that they become deeply intolerant of people who hold different views – especially on university campuses where a diverse range of views are supposed to flourish.

The book is neatly structured by chapters titled ‘Scholars’, ‘Students’, ‘System’ and ‘Solution’. Goodwin observed, as I also did in my two decades at King’s College London, the decline from academic ideals to an environment that is anti-liberal, anti-science, anti-truth and (dare I say) anti-human. The dystopian meritocracy described by Michael Young sixty years ago has become reality: a self-serving graduate class that thinks of its privileges as earned by intellect and endeavour, but in fact are the reward of credentialism (which serves the ruling class).

The establishment tricks the young and idealistic into believing that they are anti-establishment, but as Goodwin writes about Brexit, and was more blatantly shown by Covid-19, these supporters of left-wing causes are diametrically opposed to the wishes of the ordinary and relatively powerless people. After the EU referendum Goodwin was dismayed at a colleague lecturing in a T-shirt pronouncing ‘Bollocks to Brexit’. How stunning and brave of this Remainer, in a Remain stronghold, but what if he’d worn a message against EU interference in our democracy?

Goodwin was subjected to persistent harassment, reminding him of being bullied at school. As well as the personal impact, it was making his job impossible: -

I found it harder to publish academic papers and secure funding for my research. I became more difficult to talk with colleagues, who had once appeared friendly but now seemed wary I was quietly remove from senior administrative roles in my department, often with no explanation and despite the fact I was a professor in the school and my research papers were among the highest rated. This meant I had little influence over how we organise our teaching and who we appoint to academic jobs. I was lef with an overwhelming sense that I was now a pariah on campus.

A turning point for Goodwin was when he invited David Goodhart to speak to students, in the aftermath of the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump, those twin shocks to the (fake) liberal establishment. Goodhart (another writer of left-wng background) was an ideal choice because his conceptualisation of ‘Somewheres’ and ‘Anywheres’ explained the division in society: -

I believe such debates are critical to countering confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, and building more cohesive societies. But I was not prepared for what followed.

A department staff meeting was hurriedly convened. Lecturers were aghast, as if a Ku Klux Klan leader had been invited. The event was cancelled and Goodwin relieved of his duty in organising the speaking programme. The ‘debate’ was rearranged with nobody to argue or explain the Brexit cause: it was simply a Remain show of snobbery (I witnessed a similar ‘debate’ at King’s College London, with a panel of four devoid of any Leave perspective).

Yet academic colleagues, despite all the evidence of a political witch hunt that would have made Senator McCarthy blush, didn’t see anything wrong. ‘Cancel culture’, to those who had heard of it, was right-wing hysteria or at least an exaggeration. Such denial, which I have also heard uttered by uncritical university careerists, is like the words of the narrator in Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: -

How can you expect a man who is warm to understand a man who is cold?

The assertion that you have free speech but not freedom from consequences is a favoured refrain of the censors. Goodwin quotes gender-critical scholar Helen Joyce, who likened such a stance to the words of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s warning that people ‘had freedom of speech but not after it’.

Progressive language is used to control the debate, as in this quote: -

In 2024 the Economist pointed out how, over the last twenty years, young women have become much more liberal than young men. For example, a plurality of women age twenty-five or younger believe JK Rowling should be dropped by her publisher for rejecting the suggestion that gender identity should super se biological sex.

The word ‘liberal’ is completely fraudulent here. Goodwin raises a significant concern about a particularly authoritarian type of female graduate who rises high in management and imposes censorship and ideological puritanism. Truth, indeed – the raison d’etre of academe, is now associated with white male privilege, as a means of discriminating against women and minorities.

‘Social justice’ trumps truth, which is bad enough for students to believe, but terribly hypocritical for university administrators whose pay has steadily increased in recent decades. Furthermore, the vast sums of money spent on DEI consultants and other ‘woke’ training organisations reduces the budget for teaching. Bureaucrats, not the founts of knowledge, are in control.

Goodwin notes that ‘professors like me are now actively discouraged from exercising our professional judgement’. The same suppression of autonomy is evident in the health professions, which train practitioners in a culture of obedience, maintained by the ‘safeguarding’ regime. The university (though not necessarily its teaching staff) posits in locus parentis, treating students as vulnerable people who need a ‘safe space’. Students are encouraged to regard themselves as delicate, and to report any professor or peer who makes them feel uncomfortable or offended. The emphasis on emotional safety manifests in intolerance and outrage. HR officers and DEI ‘leads’ jump on board with the latest moral crusade with adverse consequences for any dissent.

Meanwhile academic standards have collapsed. I saw this as a lecturer at King’s College London: when I started at the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery in 2010, the former matrons ran a tight ship. Anyone making ‘woke’ demands would be reminded that they were doing nursing, not media studies. But after these ladies retired. I saw attendance and examination standards slip badly. It seemed, particularly when teaching went online in the Covid-19 debacle, that the university was abolishing itself – although its political mission was dramatically revived by the blatantly racist Black Lives Matter campaign.

In the final chapter on solutions, Goodwin rejects any appeal to reason in the system as a futile endeavour.

We should not, as some might suggest, spend the next few years trying to convince the radical progressives, leftists and politically motivated bureaucrats who now dominate the universities that crucial things like free speech and academic freedom are worth protecting and promoting, and that, together, we all need to push back against the growing threats to them on campus.

Such an approach would be ‘naïve and misguided’, Goodwin avers, because the people with the upper hand are ‘too deeply entrenched’ with no motive to change their beliefs or behaviour. Indeed, many high earners depend on alleged institutional racism and other bigotry for their jobs. There is, therefore, no chance of reform from within. The universities must be reformed, without mercy for those who have corrupted these hallowed halls. Legal imposition is necessary, in a proactive rather than passive interventionism that must have teeth to tackle the predictably defiant.

Resistance would be hysterical and ferocious. The tactic of denouncing enemies as ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ would still work, and do not underestimate the potential for physical hectoring, tyre-slashing and worse. I doubt whether most of the would-be reformers have the stomach for the fight. Goodwin is bullish in his proposals, but he doesn’t go far enough. The leftists are the real extremists, and this must be emphasised at every opportunity. Western society defended itself against communism, but it has lain supine to ‘woke’ activists, allowing bullies to take over. Goodwin’s inexperience in bruising politics showed when he lost to the Green Party, the most ‘woke’ of Britain’s major political parties, in a winnable by-election.

The blind spot

Looking back to Blair, I sense that the real purpose of university expansion was to create the divided society of today. Whereas in the past people disagreed in politics and social outlook, they remained compatriots. Now, as Goodhart described, a new class of people has emerged through progressive education that rejects nationhood, borders or any identity and heritage for white Britons. Politics, culture and the institutions are downstream of university, and Blair’s millennials are wrecking traditional society. But why? This is a question that Goodwin fails to answer.

There is no mention of the likes of Herbert Marcuse or Saul Allinsky. Referring to such radical ideologues would have given the book better analytical grounding, instead of making it seem that the politics of the university has evolved organically. Goodwin uses terms such as ‘DEI agenda’, ‘social justice, ‘identity politics’ and ‘the Sixties’ (as if a decade had ideological impetus of its own). Perhaps because he has not studied it properly, or because of its associations with antisemitism, he fails to name the beast of Cultural Marxism.

In his introductory chapter, and elsewhere in the text, Goodwin rages against anti-Israel bias. He has taken hook, line and sinker the story of Hamas terrorists attempting a second Holocaust by attacking Israeli people, raping women and beheading babies, etc. He cannot bring himself to any consideration of the plight of the Palestinians under IDF bombardment. Goodwin refers to other anti-‘woke’ academic dissidents with sympathy for Israel. But they are not clever enough to see that multiculturalism, mass immigration and subversive gender ideology are manifestations of a Zionist plot to destroy Western Christian society (most conservative websites and commentators are under the same delusion). In this deliberate strategy: students and lecturers are ‘useful idiots’ unwittingly working towards their own oppression.

Goodwin writes engagingly, and I recommend any young person thinking of going to university reads Bad Education first – not necessarily to deter them, but to warn of the regime and how it is meant to mould them.

Acknowledgment: thanks to Robin Tilbrook for advice and support