The Comandante in two very different moods - with Japanese sword, and reading

As Europe visibly crumbles, as the invaders pour in over our unguarded borders, and women and children are attacked every day, it seems the natural response for most people is the urge to flee. They resort to mental flight—simply pretend it’s not happening, the preferred strategy of the chattering classes—or retire to their Georgian rectories in the shires, or flee further, to Brittany, or Tuscany, or even northern Portugal, where I live. I am not saying they are wrong. Like Michel de Montaigne, I am using this essai, which means ‘attempt,’ to explore the options, to think in public. I haven’t made a final decision on this one. But it’s clear to anyone half-awake that we are in a crisis as grave as that of the Roman Empire in the third century, that (like them) we are faced with barbarian invasions, the threat of civil war, war with a superior foreign power (just as Rome was, with the Sassanid Empire), the threat of uncontrolled inflation, and a spiritual crisis, along with corrupt and incompetent leadership across the continent. Faced with all these existential threats, the only possible responses are flight or fight. I want to consider which choices are more practical and likely to succeed, but also which might be morally right.

In each case, you have a passive or an active option. For flight, you bury your head and hope the problem will go away—but unfortunately it won’t—or you retreat from it, as far as necessary, which may work, at least temporarily. All over Europe people are trying to go ‘off-grid’, to become self-sufficient on smallholdings, or simply buy a farmhouse in some unspoilt bucolic spot and spend their lives pottering about in open-air markets, playing golf, meeting other expats, and so on. That’s all very well, perhaps, for now, but the city is ever closer. Portugal, which used to have almost no violent crime, has had shootings almost every day in the past week in Lisbon. We may not have drug gangs in the small towns yet, but already we have large numbers of sub-Saharan men wandering about, so probably it’s a matter of time. Women and girls who could walk home alone at night in perfect safety twenty years ago no longer can in many towns, even small ones, for fear of being harrassed, or worse. If you are elderly, and only seeking a refuge for the remainder of your life, the flight option might work for you. If you are much younger, and have children, it probably won’t.

While most people I know have resorted to flight, or are planning to, in some cases to remote destinations like the Azores, for some reason, my inclination is the alternative: to stay and fight. I’m not sure why. I have never been physically aggressive, and will walk away from a brawl, unless I’m forced to defend myself. Perhaps it’s just native British stubbornness, the bloody-mindedness that kept my forefathers fighting even when the odds were heavily against us, as they were at Agincourt, and again against the Armada in 1588, or during the Napoleonic wars, or against Germany in the First World War, particularly following Russia’s withdrawal from the Eastern Front, or in the Second for the first two years when we stood alone. I just don’t see why foreigners should take the lands our ancestors built, and impose their own laws—which will be very oppressive ones—upon us. Nor do I see why our own governing classes should get away with betraying the people they claim to be representing, while systematicaly ignoring their wishes. If you are one of my followers, you probably agree with me thus far. But is any kind of resistance possible? As Hamlet said, the question is:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them.

(Not for nothing was my old band called Slings and Arrows!) But if we oppose them, alone, of course they will eliminate us. However, as with flight, there may be more than one way to fight. First, there’s the ‘passive’ way, by which I mean the peaceful way, avoiding physical conflict. You write, as I do, you protest, you vote, you try to persuade. You aim to effect change from within, by political means, and arguably by spiritual ones. It might work. The British populace, particularly the indigenous working-class, which doesn’t have the means to move to Hobbiton or Arezzo, is furious, and although it has called a temporary truce on Labour, the party that has abandoned it and despises it, I predict that after this initial honeymoon period with Burnham, the Peter Pan of politics, they will see that the colonisation of the country continues unchecked, and will turn against the globalists of all stripes who are determined to make the country into a borderless state where nearly everyone is on minimum wage or benefits. It’s the same story in France, where Le Pen looks set to win the next presidential elections, and Germany, where AfD are the spearhead of a conservative and traditional resurgence, and are almost certain to take Saxony-Anhalt in the upcoming state election, and could well take over all of the old GDR quite soon.

The problem with hoping that populist movements will bring about transformative change is that a large proportion of the electorate doesn’t vote, and is so poorly informed that they don’t even realise the extent of the catastrophe that has befallen us—most people vastly underestimate the number of foreign-born people in their country—and besides, the ruling elite may be able to prevent any democratic uprising, simply by banning so-called ‘fascist’ parties from running, as they did in Romania, and are threatening to do in Germany, France, and Britain. The revival of Rome in the fourth century was not the result of democratic change, but of change imposed by autocratic emperors such as Diocletian and Constantine, admittedly influenced by popular pressure. It’s worth noting that as the empire was on the brink of collapse, Constantine’s adoption of Christianity gave the citizens a renewed sense of unity and purpose, and without some such sense of spiritual renewal, it’s hard to see the possibility of long-term success against the double onslaught of socialism and Islam.

Of course the other possibility is armed struggle, the civil war that now seems inevitable, particularly in the more heavily-colonised countries, such as France, Germany, and England. (In my estimation, Sweden and Belgium are lost already.) Rioters will be severely punished—at least white, working-class ones will be, as Starmer made clear when he was PM. The police force in Britain may be weak, indoctrinated, and openly biased against the native population, as the Henry Nowak case revealed, but it still has a near-monopoly of weapons, a very pervasive and effective surveillance system, and appears to be loyal to the treacherous regime. I suspect that is much less true of the armed forces, particularly the army, and most particularly the special forces. If they were to side with the populace aginst the police, it would be a different matter. I would expect citizen militias to form, as they did in Lebanon in the civil war of the eighties, who would band together for the protection of communities from the predations of criminals, the police, and insurgent Muslim groups—for those will certainly exist, and given the cohesion of Muslim communities, we can expect them to be well-organised, well-supplied, and tough, too. Certainly every man needs to be physically fit and prepared to fight, if only to defend his home, and particularly women and children. According to the Quran, the latter are the legitimate spoils of war. We know what will happen to them—what does happen to them—if they are left unprotected. And we know that the police and the government have failed in their duty to protect the population from violent criminals, which is their primary duty, along with defending the borders, where they have also failed. We’re almost certainly going to see a Lebanonisation of Britain, and for that matter France and Germany, where ethnic and religious groups are pitted against each other. Initially, ingenuous leftist natives will support the Muslim militias and the police; later, as the severity of Sharia law becomes apparent, they will either defect to the loyalist side or simply become wholly passive. The latter is more likely, because the men are soyboys anyway. Unless we are able to produce our own Diocletian or Constantine—and much as I like Rupert Lowe, I don’t see him as having that much vision, charisma, or military expertise—I can’t see the peaceful restoration happening.

The other great question is the spiritual and ethical one. Many on the so-called ‘right’ are still clinging to the belief that we can somehow recreate a liberal (in the old sense of the word) world order, based on Enlightenment values, rationality, philosophical materialism, capitalism, free trade and free speech. The more moderate nationalist leaders like Nigel Farage of Reform take this approach. Unfortunately, that epoch is over. Western civilization is collapsing because it no longer believes in itself, because there is no longer a unifying set of values—and that’s why we are so weak compared to Islam, which, whatever you think of it, has a remarkable coherence and cohesion. We are not going to be able to unite against common enemies, which could include Russia (if our idiot leaders continue to provoke that country), other BRICS countries, Muslim militias, and the spiritually destitute but still powerful elites who are determined to keep us in subjection and serfdom. The late Roman emperors understood this. Diocletian and Julian both tried, and failed, to resurrect the pagan gods. The problem was that they were already dead, and attempts to create syncretic religions, ‘inclusive’ religions, whether they are New Age and shamanistic, or a mixture of Roman and Mithraic and other Middle Eastern sects, or well-meaning but incoherent attempts to marry Humanism, Wokeism and Islam, are all doomed to failure, because they’re utterly incoherent. King Charles may want his subjects to see the spiritual beauty in Islam—he has said so, and we should believe him—but Islam doesn’t want us to accept it as one religion among many. It doesn’t ask for tolerance, but total domination. Anyone who has lived in the Middle East for long periods, as I have, and is honest, knows this. I am not saying that there are no good Muslims. I have known many fine Arabs, and Muslims of other ethnicities, good, kind, hospitable people, who yearn for peace and prosperity and understanding. But the religion itself is a militant one, there’s no separation between secular and religious power, and its explicit aim is world domination. That’s not an opinion. If you don’t believe me, just read the Quran. Does it tolerate rivals? Not really. It accepts their submission, and taxes Christians and Jews accordingly. Others, pagans, may simply be put to death.

Against this ever-more powerful politico-religious cult, this totalitarian cult, and the equally intolerant cult of Marxism, we must have a belief system that unites us, gives us purpose, and for which we are willing to sacrifice ourselves. That has to be Christianity. It was Constantine’s genius to see this in the early fourth century, and his adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the empire allowed it to flourish for another 150 years—and arguably, over a thousand, in the Byzantine empire, founded on his capital of Constantinople, which only fell in 1453. I think the Christians who advocate turning the other cheek fail to understand the Gospel, and Pope Leo, who seems to be advocating open borders and the unlimited immigration of Africans and Muslims, utterly fails to understand that he is signing the death warrant not merely of Europe, but of Christendom, if that comes about. On the contrary, we must be prepared to fight for our homelands, our families, and our faith, or they will perish. As I have said before, the Crusaders were not barbaric colonialists, but heroes who saved Christendom from the Caliphate. We must be worthy of our ancestors.

Of course this is easy to say from the comfort and relative safety of your study. I am an old man, seventy-one years old, so hardly likely to be in the front line now, even if I choose to stay and fight. At the moment I can still run, and am still strong, but will I still be in five or ten years’ time, when the cataclysm breaks out? I don’t know, honestly. Nor do I know where I shall be. Perhaps my sons will persuade me to retire to an idyllic island in the middle of the Atlantic, and I shall watch the wars from a safe distance. At eighty, that might not be shameful. For now, though, if some brave pope were to issue a call for Christian knights from Clermont-Ferrand, or some emperor were to do the same from Constantinople, or the true king of Britain were to raise Arthur’s sword and rally his good subjects around, I would be girding on my armour.

Vigil for the late Jason Arday, Trafalgar Square, London, Monday 17 August.

A brief personal anecdote: this week, after posting my recent Jason Arday pieces on social media, someone commented that I had hounded the ex-professor to his death, that I was responsible, and he hoped that I would find it hard to sleep at night from now on. You might think that was an isolated nutjob, atypical of progressives and liberals—whom many people still see as ‘well-meaning’—but Monday’s vigil for the late liar, cheat, fraud, and fantastist suggests otherwise. People who tell the truth, and anyone who recognises reality, indeed anyone who disagrees with their delusional view of human life, is not merely to be ostracised and excluded, but criminalised, and punished. In some respects, the vigil of 30,000 people had a religious character: Jason Arday is to be canonised, like George Floyd, or even deified, elevated to a godlike, messianic status. More of that later. But beneath this naive, infantile (and in some senses, genuine) spiritual impulse—because these lost souls are truly searching for meaning, albeit in the wrong places—there was a far more sinister, chilling undercurrent: the desire of the fanatic not just to excommunicate the heretic, but to torture and kill him. Watching the videos of the event, I felt that I was witnessing the birth of a new Inquisition, and have no doubt that if these people gain power, they will use it equally pitilessly. There will be autos da fe. Maybe those of us who refuse to acknowledge Jason Arday as a supernatural being will not actually be burned to death, but we will certainly be silenced, charged with thought-crimes, and incarcerated. If that sounds like a wild prediction, just consider some of the things said at the vigil.

Lord Woolley, the Principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, and former director of Operation Black Vote, said that Jason had been ‘hounded’—again, the emotive language, designed to evoke images of hounds chasing slaves—and other speakers went so far as to mention the ‘lynching’ of Jason, and call for a reckoning. They spoke of ‘racist witch-hunts.’ Zack Polanski, the gay leader of the Green Party, demanded state control of the media—Soviet-style censorship, in other words. The novelist Will Self, who was not (as far as I know) at the vigil, said that the computers of all journalists who criticised Arday should be seized by the police. Cambridge University’s Chancellor, Lord Chris Smith, said that a ‘racist feeding frenzy’ had characterised the coverage of the case. The people who addressed the crowd, mostly famous race grifters like Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy, both members of parliament, also used highly charged emotional language, praising Arday’s sanctity and vilifying his opponents. None of them actually denied the charges of plagiarism, or that Arday lied about his athletic achievements. The truth was, and is, irrelevant to them, not merely as pragmatic inconvenience, but also on a philosophical level. We have to remember that for progressives, who either explicitly or implicitly accept the tenets of French post-structuralism, there is no such things as objective truth. There is only subjective truth, ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth’, and thus, they might argue, Arday did no more than express ‘his truth’, which was as valid as anyone’s—and doubtless, more valid, because he was black and putatively neurologically divergent. It’s a fair guess that not a single person at that vigil cared that Arday pretended to be something that he wasn’t—a genuine scholar—and defrauded his students, most of whom incurred student debt to pay for their studies. None cared, surely, that Cambridge University, an institution until recently regarded as one of the best, if not the best in the world, had employed a man whose doctoral thesis is littered with grammatical errors, as well as plagiarism, and that when Arday spoke, he did no more than utter derivative platitudes about race, and jargonistic gobbledegook. (As indeed you can verify by listening to videos featuring him on Youtube.) None of this mattes to them. All that matters is that one of their heroes, a man who had become a hero not by virtue of his talents, but because he happened to be born black and was a persuasive liar, had been found out and removed from his position of privilege.

‘Rest in Power’, many of the placards at the vigil said. This is an obvious parody of the Christian ‘Rest in Peace’, and, as Gavin Ashenden has pointed out, a very telling one. Of course the woke believers do not wish Jason’s soul to rest in peace, because they don’t believe people have souls or eternal life. What they do believe in, as good, left-brained materialists, is power—again, like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and the rest. Jason Arday was exemplary for them because he rose to power and prestige: and if he did so by blagging his way to it, for them that doesn’t detract from his achievement at all. Why hold a black man to the outmoded standards of the tyrannical white patriarchy? And the injunction to ‘Rest in Power’ is a kind of symbolical attempt to resurrect him, to grant him eternal life. They want to confer what anthropolgists call ‘mana’, a kind of numinous aura, upon him. They aren’t literally calling him a god, because they are atheists, but in fact they are groping in their inchoate, incoherent, childish way towards a quasi-divinisation, an apotheosis, an ascension. They want the spirit of Jason Arday (that fantasizing, mendacious spirit!) to keep vigil over us all from on high, to inspire the faithful to ever greater acts of self-sacrifice, and of course to persecute the evil heretics who will insist on telling the truth, and recognising reality. Even Andy Burnham, the Prime Minister, spoke this week of the ‘tragedy’ of Jason’s death, though as a Cambridge graduate himself, he should have a better knowledge of what the word actually means, in Aristotelian terms. If indeed it was a tragedy, it was one brought on by Arday’s own hubris, by the dishonesty and self-serving indifference to the public good of the professors who appointed him. But according to Aristotle, the protagonist of a tragedy has to have a heroic status, and no one could claim that Arday qualifies as a hero. He was at best a sports teacher. An ordinary man, elevated far beyond his abilities. And besides, again according to Aristotle, there has to be catharisis—through sympathy with the hero’s downfall, the public has to go undergo purification and transformation. Unfortunately, the Left have shown no signs of that at all. On the contrary, they are doubling down on the delusional behaviour and rhetoric that led to this disaster. They refuse to learn: the very definition of low intelligence. And that goes for professors like Hilary Cremin too, the Chair of the Sociology Dept., who treated Arday (as you may see on video) not as a subordinate, or a colleague, but as a Christlike figure whom she venerates.

Perhaps some of you will think that three posts on Jason Arday is excessive, and it should be. One ought to have been sufficient to dispose of the incredible story of this conman who inveigled his way into a position of prestige and privilege. But recent events are showing just how sinister the Left are. Not only are they unconcerned with the truth, with reality, but they have made it clear that they will actively pursue and persecute anyone who dares to believe that there is such a thing as objective truth, and who is bold enough to say so. Their authoritarian instincts are ever more evident, as are their inclinations for violence. Godless as they are, and obsessed by power and victimhood, they are bent on destroying the truth in all its forms, on destroying the Christian faith, and indeed on destroying Western civilization. They aren’t even hiding it any more. We must believe them before it’s too late. These are not well-meaning hippies who believe in peace and love. They are cultists, hell-bent on cruelty and the collapse of the West. The neo-liberal conservatives will not protect us from them, because they only care about profits. We need a new order of moral men and women who will stand up for tradition, for the truth, and for Christianity.

Jason Arday, the serial fantasist, and one of the most successful conmen in history, is dead. By his own hand, to all appearances. I was not a fan of Mr Arday—I refuse to grant him the doctoral title that he didn’t earn, but stole—and yet the news of his death saddened me. Why? First, because he was a human being, still quite a young man at 41, and might have done something genuine with his life. The fact that he committed suicide suggests that he was ashamed of his endless lies, plagiarism, and cheating, and if he had a conscience, I suppose he was capable of redemption. The other possibility is that he had Borderline Personality Disorder—his mental illness has not been diagnosed, as far as I know, but clearly he had one—and had so constructed his fragile identity on the chimera of fame, brilliance, and glory that he had created for himself that when it was whisked away, he no longer felt that he had a self. It’s possible that he believed the myth he had invented, with the collusion of innumerable distinguished academics and journalists, and that he couldn’t face existence as an ordinary man, which was what he was. It’s a waste of a life, as all suicides are, and I would have liked to see him fight like a man after this defeat. He might well have led a useful life—as a teacher of physical education, for instance, which he was actually qualified to do.

Of course the progressives are howling with rage at ‘the Right’, whom they blame. Arday was only investigated because he was black, only hounded by racists and bigots, and so on and so forth. Let’s address that accusation first. It’s true that other academics have been found guilty of plagiarism, and in some instances have managed to retain their jobs, particularly if the investigation found that the plagiarism was the result of carelessness or oversight, rather than deliberate theft of another academic’s work. Incidentally, I don’t condone that kind of generosity: the scholar has a duty to be thorough, to acknowledge his sources, and to know exactly which ideas and words are his own, and which belong to someone else. But anyone’s who’s looked into the Arday case can see that this was not a matter of oversight: that he lifted hundreds of passages verbatim from another student’s PhD thesis, without mentioning it, without quotes, simply passing off the work as his own. Obviously it was deliberate. The fact that his very resignation letter was composed by AI suggests that he knew only too well that he was incapable of writing even simple prose, let alone scholarly prose of the highest standard. Besides, his innumerable other lies, for instance that he was a world-leading ultra-marathon runner, that he raised millions for charity, that he was sub-verbal until he was 11, compounded his guilt, even though they were not in themselves grounds for dismissal. What’s more, he was a full professor, indeed the youngest black one ever appointed at Cambridge, an achievement that the university exploited to the maximum, in order to proclaim its own championing of ‘diversity’. Again, Arday can’t be blamed for that—but for eight hundred years Cambridge has been one of the foremost universities in the world, and expect the highest standards of the institution. That they failed so dismally even to examine his academic work with any rigour is an indictment of the university as much as of Arday himself. All this is to say that the investigations, instigated by the philosopher Nathan Cofnas, I believe, were absolutely legitimate, that the allegations made against Arday have been substantiated and proven beyond all doubt, and no amount of hysterical abuse from the soi-disant ‘progressive’ or woke elite can tarnish those who exposed Arday.

I want to make the contary case, that the guilt for Arday’s death lies precisely with his enablers—that is, by those people who are howling the loudest about racism now. Arday was indeed a victim, just not the victim of the evil white patriarchy that he liked to pretend he was in his derivative papers on Critical Race Theory. In fact he was the victim of a non-meritocratic system, of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) which insists that leadership roles should be held by people of all ethnicities, irrespective of their qualifications and merits, and that equality of outcome—not opportunity—is the goal. It’s because of this that a not very bright young man who was either a gifted conman, or else delusional, was again and again rewarded and promoted well above his natural abilities. He was accepted into a degree course when he held only two non-academic GCSEs. (For people outside the UK, this is paltry: at 16, most gifted children would have at least eight or nine, and then go on to do three A levels at 18 as a requirement for university entrance, which Jason did not do.) Having gained a degree in Physical Education, and a Master’s in the same, he somehow did a doctorate at Liverpool John Moores University, which seems not to have been properly examined, as it’s littered not only with copied passages, but also spelling, grammatical, and usage mistakes. (I have been a thesis supervisor myself, and I never passed any thesis that didn’t correct these.) From there he got visiting professorships at various universities—though not all the universities he claimed to have taught at—culminating in a full professorship at the age of thirty-eight, and accolades from his Chair in the Department of Education, Hilary Cremin, who described his work as ‘the best in the world’, although it was in fact substandard, derivative, often anecdotal, and poorly expressed, according to former philosophy professor Kathleen Stock. It’s the collusion of people like Cremin, who supported his lies—knowingly or naively, we can’t be sure which—that helped Arday create the myth of the genius academic who had overcome his putative disability (for which there’s little evidence), his socio-economic status and ethnic background, despite all odds. And although many Cambridge scholars, and others like Kehinde Andrews, the former professor of ‘Black Studies’ (which means anti-white studies) continued to support him after he was denounced and the scandal broke, it seems that Arday’s conscience got the better of him. For over twenty years they had given him nothing but accolades, praise, prizes, publication contracts, position, prestige, and power—and now he understood that he had only been a puppet, the token black, the tin god.

In last week’s essay I gave my opinion that DEI does not in fact help ethnic minorities. If you are given positions beyond your competence, of course you suffer from impostor syndrome. Arday’s entire academic life must have been bedevilled by feelings of inadequacy, incompetence, and ignorance. This we can surmise because of complaints from former students: he gave seminars lasting an hour rather than three or four hours; he failed to read or critique student papers properly. When an undergraduate complained, he told her sharply that she was speaking from ‘white privilege’—which is unanswerable, in the current climate, just as having ‘bourgeois values’ was unanswerable during Stalinist or Maoist pogroms. He was world-famous, had secured a publishing contract for a memoir from Simon and Schuster—which incredibly has not been pulled—and yet, deep down, he probably knew that he was at best a gym teacher. It’s really an insult to black people, and other minorities, to assume that they are not good enough to compete with white people and Asians on equal terms. As long as these absurd policies remain in place, the so-called progressives are not dismantling racing but on the contrary stoking it, fuelling resentment against the unjustly rewarded, and often incompetent. The Left killed Jason Arday, as are they are destroying the lives of hosts of minority students and professionals, and depriving plenty of deserving people, simply because they were not born in the right position in the currently approved racial hierarchy (which has blacks at the top, followed by Middle Easterners, particularly Muslims, then Latinos; at the bottom of the inverted pyramid are Asians of the Far East, whites, and Jews.)

Unless this sad affair leads to a radical review of Cambridge’s hiring policies and admissions policies—in fact, unless DEI is overhauled comprehensively in all our universities and institutions—Jason Arday will have died in vain, and there will be many more victims of progressive malice and stupidity in the future. Institutions can be reformed—consider the Catholic Church in the Reformation, and if you are sceptical of that, at least you will concede that Protestantism was an attempt to overcome the corruption of the medieval church. Our institutions are rotten to the core. They are not helping black people by letting them play without rules: they are ruining their chances of leading dignified lives and integrating into society.

Jason Arday in doctoral robes at Liverpool John Moores University and Cambridge

This post is painful for me to write, because it’s personal: I am a graduate of Cambridge University, where I did my first degree, and until about ten years ago was proud of it. Now, like thousands of other Cantabrians, I am not only disappointed in my alma mater, but ashamed of the depths to which it has sunk. The plagiarist, liar, cheat, fraud, and fabulist Jason Arday has been so much in the news in the past week that you have doubtless by now heard his story, which I will try not to labour. But it’s worth reflecting on, not only for its entertainment value—by comparison Arday’s claims make Baron von Munchausen’s seem modest—but also because it reveals how utterly corrupted academia has become, and how rotten and delusional the institutions that govern us and force us to pay for them.

For anyone unfamiliar with the biography, I’ll give the outline in this paragraph, which you may skip if you’re already aware of. Arday is the son of Ghanaian parents, grew up in London, and claims he was sub-verbal until the age of 11 and illiterate until he was 18, because he was autistic and dyslexic. And yet somehow he managed to become a student at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, where he completed a BA in Physical Education, and stayed on to do an MA. He then did a PhD at Liverpool John Moores University, where his thesis title, An Exploration of Peer-Mentoring among Student Teachers' [sic] to Inform Reflective Practice within the Context of Action Research, actually contains a grammatical error: the superfluous apostrophe after the plural—not a slip, but a repeated error in the thesis, as Richard Dawkins has pointed out, which begs the question whether anyone at the university actually bothered to read it. And in fact, much of the thesis appears to have been plagiarised from work by a student at Brunel University. Plagiarism is not hard to detect with AI tools, and was not even in 2015, which again suggests that the thesis was not properly examined. What’s more, academics who have read his work, which relies heavily on Critical Race Theory (the officially approved racist theory that consists of hatred of white people and vilification of everything western society has achieved), have agreed that it is sub-standard, obscurantist, derivative, and littered with spelling and grammatical mistakes. So how is it possible that this man, an early-career academic with a doctorate from a third tier university, was appointed as Professor of the Sociology of Education at Cambridge? The answer is that Cambridge were desperate to get him to improve their diversity credentials. Anyone who’s seen the video of Hilary Cremin, head of Cambridge’s Department of Education, fawning over him, calling him ‘the best in the world in terms of the research you do’ will probably cringe with embarrassment. Lauded by the Guardian as a ‘superstar academic’ and described by The Atlantic as ‘the world’s most famous living sociologist’, and with various universities rushing to confer honorary doctorates upon him, he could do no wrong. Even his most extravagant claims, such as that he had run 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine of them with a cracked fibia, or that he ran 600 miles in 6 miles, and raised over 5 million pounds for charity, went unchallenged. Incredibly, Arday is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. It would be tedious to describe all of his claims, which are unsubstantiated, and appear to be pure fabrications. Amusingly enough, according to the Times newspaper, even his resignation letter seems to have been written using AI. It seems he is literally incapable even of composing a letter.

The picture that emerges is of a gifted conman, who understood that the contemporary progressive elite would reward him with the highest honours for his cock-and-bull stories, which he was only too happy to regale them with, complete with his simpleton smile. The more troubling question is how is it that Cambridge University, which is supposed to be among the best in the world, could possibly fall for his fabrications? How is it that they failed to investigate him during the hiring process? He actually claimed to have published a book that had not been published, which could easily have been checked. And it’s not just Cambridge University. Simon and Schuster, one of the ‘Big Five’ publishing houses, still plans to publish his memoir this year, even though, presumably, it’s fiction. And the British police instructed both a journalist and an academic who were investigating Arday for plagiarism to desist. So this is clearly not just a problem in academia, but one that’s corrupted the whole of the Establishment. You might think that it’s not that important: Arday, you might say, was merely a clever conman who had a good run and has now been unmasked. But in fact it shows that for DEI candidates, standards are not upheld, and as I’ve suggested in my title, Arday is the tip of the iceberg. Throughout academia, and anywhere that the progressive elites are in control and imposing their discriminatory ideology, substandard people are being appointed, either because they have the right ethnic background, the right gender or sexual background, or spout the politically correct ideologically nonsense, or all of these, while much better candidates are excluded because they don’t fit the progressive profile. This makes modern universities, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, laughable, as it does the publishing industry, the nonprofit sector, the media, journalism, the civil service, and even institutions like the armed forces and police. And that can cost lives, as we know from cases like that of Henry Nowak. You also have to wonder how many Jason Ardays are piloting jet planes or carrying out surgery in our hospitals. Ultimately, these policies don’t help ethnic minorities, because they cast suspicion on all of them, including the ones who achieved their positions by merit.

The fact that so many leftist commentators have defended Arday, sometimes even claiming that the allegations against him are baseless (in which case, why did he resign?) shows, as ever, that progressives are unable to admit that they can ever make a mistake. Their immediate reaction is to shift the blame to the racist ‘far-right’. The leftist position is in that telling the truth, and upholding strict academic standards, is a standard from which people like Jason Arday are exempt. In other words, they are perfectly willing to suffer the consequences of having ignorant and dishonest professors at our top universities, as a form of redress for centuries of ‘colonialism and oppression’. Similarly, they are willing to suffer the Islamisation of Europe by allowing uncontrolled immigration from North Africa and the Middle East, as we saw last week with the invasion of Ceuta, and will continue to see. They are Nietzsche’s Last Men. They are eager to be replaced, to commit civilisational suicide, in order to atone for the imagined sins our forefathers. It is not just just the confidence tricksters like Jason Arday that need to be rooted out, but all the stupid white people who bend over backwards to promote them, like the Cambridge professors who appointed him and defended him, the police who took his side, and his publishers. We need a reckoning on a scale not seen since Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth.

60,000 invaders in Ceuta, 31 July, 2026. Mostly Moroccans, but also Sub-Saharans.

The invasion of the Spanish territory of Ceuta (pronounced ‘thay-OO-ta’, incidentally) by a sizeable army of fighting-age men, with reliable estimates ranging from 49,000 to 60,000, in a single day, is doubtless a harbinger of the catastrophe to come if we allow traitors like the Spanish PM, Sanchez, to pursue their Great Replacement policies. For anyone who’s forgotten, earlier this year Sanchez granted amnesty to illegal immigrants in Spain, offering them a path to residency and citizenship—not only of Spain, of course, but the whole of the European Union, as there is free movement between the Schengen states. The estimated number of foreign criminals was 500,000, but so far the number who have applied for permament residency tops 1.3 million—not surprisingly, the Marxist Spanish government either grossly underestimated the real numbers, or more likely, simply lied to the public. The result is apparent for all to see: it amounts to an open invitation to all of Africa and the Middle East. The borders are essentially open. In a single day the invaders or colonists poured in, mainly by swimming in, some by simply walking in after climbing a fence. No force was employed to deter them. The autonomous municipality of Ceuta asked the Spanish government to declare a national emergency, but Sanchez refused to do so. But what does this mean for Ceuta and Melilla (pronounced Mel-EEL-ya, the other Spanish territory in North Africa)? What does it mean for Spain, and Europe as a whole?

Let’s consider Ceuta first. Conquered by the Portuguese from the Muslims in 1415, it became a Spanish territory in 1580, when the King of Portugal, Dom Sebastian, was killed fighting (in present-day Morocco) and died without an heir, so the throne passed to Spain for 60 years. Although the Portuguese got their country back in 1640, they never recovered many of their colonies. Now Ceuta has a population of about 83,000. Consider the maths: half of those are women, so only about 10,000 are fighting age men. In other words, the young, active Spanish males are vastly outnumbered by the hordes who poured in, by five or six to one. Predictably, there was rioting, and shops and private homes were broken into. Doubtless we will discover worse. We know from recent Moroccan riots in London, Paris, and Amsterdam during the World Cup that these are hardly believers in universal love and brotherhood. They like to intimidate, to jump on cars and set fire to them, to steal and loot. In other words, the local population cannot protect itself. If massive armed help is not forthcoming from the national government, they are defenceless. There is an interesting irony here. Spain has retained its North African colonies, so it claims, in order to control the Straits of Gibraltar—and it also claims the Rock of Gibraltar, although its own colonies on the North African mainland are apparently sacrosanct.

And yet, if the invaders are given leave to remain, they are then free to travel at once to mainland Spain, and thence to any country in the EU they please (arguably with the exception of France, Italy, and Portugal, who have all temporarily suspended the open frontiers with Spain.) In effect, then, the continent could soon by swamped by hundreds of thousands or even millions of young men, with unknown records, who are unable to support themselves, and must be fed, clothed, and housed by European taxpayers. Obviously it’s untenable. In a short time, if the pillage and plunder continue, Europe will become unrecognizable, and the economic burden so great that eventually it won’t even be a magnet for the piratical and predatory types flooding in now. Make no mistake: this is the tip of the iceberg. If we allow this invading force to remain, far more will follow. So what can we do? What options are there?

The first possibility is the leftist/progressive/woke one: do nothing. You have probably seen the video of the dopey Spanish girl in a miniskirt who waves at jubilant running half-naked Moroccans while filming them. This is someone afflicted with what Gad Saad calls ‘suicidal empathy’. She herself will not be safe. We can, in effect, welcome them, and hope that they will eventually work, pay taxes, and assimilate. Unfortunately, so far this has not happened with Third World immigration. They are disproportionately on benefits—so that in EU countries where ethnic data is recorded, most immigrants end up costing the state around a million euros in their lifetime, a colossal net deficit—and they make up far more than a representational share of the prison population. (Depending on nationality, with Afghans, Somalis and Sudanese up to ten times as likely to be in prison.) They commit the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks in Europe. And most European countries have seen an exponential rise in rape attacks since mass immigration began, e.g. from about 8,000 reported cases in Britain in 2003 to over 64,000 in 2023, and this is mirrored in France and Germany. The only European country that has seen a big decline in rapes in the last twenty years is Poland, the country that has been most successful in keeping the invaders out. So obviously passivity would be a very bad option indeed.

The second possibility might be for to Spain to abandon its ownership of Ceuta and Melilla and cede them to Morocco. That would be humiliating, although whether the soyboy government of Sanchez is even capable of registering humilation, I don’t know. They seem almost proud of their cowardice and treachery. It would also mean that control of the Straits of Gibraltar would be lost to NATO, unless an international treaty could establish that that strategically vital passage now came under the jurisdiction of Great Britain. I would favour that, except that our navy, which is now laughably tiny and inoperational, could not honestly pretend that it could cope with the task, and besides, we have our own soyboy or gay-adjacent PM now, Burnham, whom I cannot imagine getting tough on anything, unless it’s an insistence on the importance of LGBT rights. Besides, even though it would plug the dyke, temporarily, as the child in the Dutch story did, with a finger, inevitably at some point the flood will overwhelm the defences elsewhere: Malta, Sicily, or Greece. So no good either.

The third option is the only realistic one: the exercise of force. I am not advocating mass slaughter, or indeed any slaughter if it can be avoided, but our borders need to be patrolled by the armed forces, as Poland’s and Hungary’s are, and tolerate absolutely no incursions. If marauders get in through Poland’s fences, they are immediately arrested, none too gently—you can find the videos on Youtube—and at once deported. If the numbers are too great for detention and arrest, as in this case, then the police and army must respond more robustly: at first with tear-gas, rubber bullets and batons, i.e. non-lethal force, but if that proves insufficient, lethal force has to be permissible for us to protect ourselves. I don’t want young men from Morocco or Sub-Saharan Africa shot, but it’s a price we must be willing to pay. The alternative, as I’ve pointed out, is simply surrender. That is the coward’s way out, the resort of the leftist ‘girly-man’, to use Arnold Schwarzenegger’s immortal phrase, the solution of the blue-haired harpy feminist and far-left thugs who applaud each time one of their number assassinates a conservative figure like Charlie Kirk or Ann Widdecombe. If we fail to protect our women and children from this onslaught, we are not men at all.

That brings me to the historical precedent: the Reconquista. The Iberian Peninsula was overrun by Muslim hordes, made up of Arabs and Berbers, collectively called ‘Moors,’ under the Umayyad Dynasty, in the early eighth century. They destroyed the Christian Visigoth kingdoms and got as far as Poitiers in France, where they were repelled by the heroic Charles Martel, king of the Franks, in 732. However, it took over 700 years to expel the Moors from the peninsula entirely; the reconquest or Reconquista was only completed with the liberation of Granada in 1492. I won’t go into the medieval history here, but Al-Andalus, as the caliphate of southern Spain was known, was far from the globalist, tolerant paradise that progressives paint it as. It was conquered by force, and Christians and Jews subjected to jizya, a special tax levied on infidels—i.e. non-Muslims—and although they were allowed to practise their religion, they were not allowed to proselytise. Besides, the Muslim dominions were all slave states. The Arabs and Moors and Turks captured black slaves from heathen parts of Africa, and white ones, mainly for use in sex traffic, from places as far afield as Iceland and Britain, and they enslaved in far greater numbers than the Europeans did centuries later, and with far greater brutality and barbarity. (For example, white male slaves were routinely castrated, although castration caused the death of most—and then they were usually used by pederasts.) Anyone who doubts this should read The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise by Dario Fernandez Morera, or indeed the works of Raymond Ibrahim. Muslim rule was absolute and maintained by force. We can expect the same if we allow the steady colonisation of the continent.

Just as the men of the Middle Ages in the countries that are now called Spain and Portugal fought back, for centuries, against overwhelming odds, but eventually triumphed, we need to find the spirit of those crusaders—they were recognised as such by the Papacy—and begin the second Reconquista. All illegal immigration must stop immediately. All Sharia courts, of which there are between a hundred and two hundred in Britain alone, must be closed. Halal slaughter cannot be permitted. Burqas and niqabs should not be permitted. If mosques are tolerated, the amplified call to prayer shouldn’t be, and nor should public prayer in our cities streets and squares, particularly as it is not permitted for Christians in most places. Anyone criticising Christianity or the West, or advocating violence against us, as many imams do, quite openly, should be deported at once. And future invasions, like this one, which appears to have been organised and co-ordinated by the Moroccan government, must be stopped and reversed by our military forces. This is the way to save Europe. Deus vult!

Tolethorpe Hall, home of Stamford Shakespeare Company. Photo: the Comandante

Last night I took my mother to a Tudor manor house, Tolethorpe Hall, to see a production of Twelfth Night. In many ways it was well done: the acting was good, the costumes superb, and the staging imaginative. For me it was marred mainly by one thing: the music. The director chose not to have the play’s songs sung to Renaissance tunes, or even folk tunes, but instead took songs from the sixties and seventies, including one by the Jackson Five, Paint it Black, Whiter Shade of Pale, and a couple by Abba—the performance culminated with the cast singing and jigging to Give Me a Man After Midnight—and mostly with the twentieth century lyrics, though in one or two cases Shakespeare’s ditties were set to pop music. The audience loved it, perhaps predictably, as most of them were my age, and presumably their taste had not changed much in the last fifty years or so. But I found it jarring, as I did when Sir Toby Belch made asides in modern colloquial English. Again, the audience laughed, but I wondered if it’s possible to improve on Shakespeare, or for that matter Homer. Clearly many people think so. One of the current trends in the arts is not merely to preach and lecture, which is tedious enough, but to modernize, to make ‘relevant’ and ‘contemporary’. Christopher Nolan does this by having a rapper play his ‘bard’ (Homer, presumably), by making the dialogue slangy, informal, and in an American accent, by his casting choices, and by basing his script on Emily Wilson’s translation, which The New York Times has just described as ‘modernizing’ Homer. But do we need or want Homer modernized? Or Shakespeare? Isn’t the whole point of the classics that they are timeless?

I’m aware of the counter-argument: that there’s danger that the classics will disappear altogether, that hardly anyone actually reads them any more (unsurprisingly, since they are hardly taught these days), and that anything that gets modern audiences interested must be a good thing. There’s something in this. Art should not be so elitist that it’s inaccessible to ordinary people. Certainly it wasn’t in Ancient Greece, nor in Elizabethan London. Although ‘Homer’, or the anyonymous group of bards we call such, and ‘Shakespeare’, who might have been someone else altogether, were highly sophisticated artists, they also knew how to tell a rattling good story, and in Will’s case to make ordinary people split their sides laughing too; both the ordinary folk and the intellectuals could appreciate them for different reasons. But the trouble with the modernization of these texts is that if you don’t do it with consummate skill, you break the suspension of belief of the audience, and it all becomes very ‘meta’, so instead of watching a film of the Odyssey, you feel you’re watching a post-modern commentary on it, and instead of watching an admittedly rather silly play like Twelfth Night, you’re watching an ironic allusion to it, of the kind we’ve seen so often before, for instance in The Knight’s Tale, where, as Heath Ledger enters the lists on a horse to joust, the audience start clapping the rhythm to Queen’s We Will Rock You, and a medieval dance turns into Bowie’s Golden Years. It may be momentarily amusing, but it turfs you out of the extended dream which any great piece of narrative art is, so instead of being moved, the pleasure you get is a kind of self-congratulatory one on your cleverness and refinement. It’s very much a postmodern pleasure, and I dislike it.

The subtitle of this essay is ‘The Boomers’ Race to the Bottom’, because I believe popular art is increasingly targeting the Boomers and Generation X, and the old fogeys are not serving art well. There’s a frequent appeal to the lowest common denominator, and to nostalgia. At Tolethorpe Hall, the Boomers get Abba, the Jackson Five (those sublime geniuses!), and somewhat more acceptably, the Stones and Procul Harum. The subtext may well be that if you can’t follow Elizabethan English, at least you can rock out to the hits of your youth, which are equally timeless and equally important, as any French poststructuralist will tell you. The Progressives who flock to Nolan’s Odyssey are assured that their feminist values are the correct ones: Odysseus is not the endlessly resourceful, incredibly clever, witty hero of Homer, but a man broken by the trauma of war, miserable, curmudgeonly, and in need of the true wisdom of the women and immortal female figures he encounters, because, as Lupita Nyongo has said ‘Homer didn’t get much screen time to women’. (Which is actually nonsense, as anyone who’s read the Odyssey knows.) The film is not an attempt to dramatically reproduce the epic poem, but an attempt to improve it by reinterpreting it, largely without the agency of the gods. The problem is that Nolan, for all his gifts, is not an artist of the calibre of Homer. Nor are the modernizers of Shakespeare, those producing his plays with all-female casts, or trans casts, the equals of Richard Burbage and the men who produced Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe and the Swan. The modernizers are arrogant, conceited, and ignorant. And it shows.

I love drama, or perhaps I should say that I used to love it. Increasingly you can’t go to the theatre, or the cinema, without being proselytized, preached to, condescended to, and flattered with childish anachronisms like pop songs and American diction. I want to be enthralled, the way the theatregoers were enthralled at Athens and Epidaurus, in London and Elizabeth’s court. Treat me like an adult, not a teenager who’s failed to grow up. Give me a draught of the true vintage, not diluted slop. I’m afraid my generation is determined to wear their tie-dye tee shirts to the very end, and to face eternity singing adolescent lyrics rather than reciting eternal poetry. More’s the pity.

Top row, post Enlightenment philosophers: Nietzsche, Iain McGilchrist, Schopenhauer. Bottom row, Enlightenment philosophers: Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume

I shall tread some dangerous ground this week, by encroaching on philosophical territory. But after all, the blog is called Write Dangerously, is it not? And it is a double risk. First of all, I am not a philosopher, even a second-rate one, and also, I risk boring my readers, who mostly prefer the political posts, if I am not mistaken. But this week I read an interesting post by my good friend Luis Serpa, the Portuguese mariner and writer, on which I could not remain silent, for although I agreed with much of what he said—he is very intelligent, and I always respect his opinions—I thought he had oversimplified an issue of critical importance to understanding this point in history. This is what he said, roughly—this is my translation of his Portuguese:

The criminalization of wealth and profit began with Christianity. ´It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle…´ etc.

Modernity is the inevitable evolution of Christianity.

That said, Man has a biological need, or more properly, a neurological need, for faith, for mythology. In a word: religion. Christianity has been replaced by a series of micro-religions—some of them not so micro—that make up for its dissolution. To hope that it reappears is simply to prefer the lesser of two evils.

Addenda:

Note to self - cf. Catholicism during Enlightenment (originally in English)

Rather than bewailing the ´end´ (quotation marks because it’s hyperbole), we should be lamenting the end of the Enlightenment.

I’ll be as succinct as I can in my reply. It’s true that Jesus was critical of the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself, though this particular epigram has often been taken out of context, and used by socialists and progressives to suggest that it’s sinful to be rich, which is arguably not the case. I believe he was talking more about the greed, the concupiscence of the wealthy man, rather than his actual possession of wealth. However, it’s certainly the case that Christianity, compared with the worldview of the Greeks and Romans, de-emphasized worldly glory, and taught that the true riches were spiritual ones. In my view Jesus was not a proto-socialist, but he did value and teach compassion for the less fortunate—surely a good thing?

I also agree—indeed it’s almost inarguable—that Man, and Woman, has an innate need for faith, myth, and religion. The evidence is that every single society that we know of has had supernatural beliefs. Recent attempts to suppress that natural instinct to create meaning, as in Communist countries, have failed: both because the banned religions (e.g. Orthodoxy in Russia) went underground but survived, and also because the ´rational´ ideologies set up to replace them quickly became pseudo-religions themselves, with a pantheon of unquestionable authorities (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc) and many secular saints, as well as doctrines which could not be questioned on pain on imprisonment or even death, and a series of moral precepts held to be quite as objective as the commandments of any religion. In our time, wokeism or progressivism is clearly a religion in all but name, believed in fanatically, and with absolute orthodoxy by its believers, who are willing to ostracise anyone guilty of criticising the creed, and even to punish them with death. (Viz. the extremely common jubilation when a political assassination is carried out by a left-winger, as in the cases of the murders of Charlie Kirk and Ann Widdecombe.) Indeed, I have satirised the insanity of post-Christian woke religious belief in my novel, Our Parent Who Art in Heaven (Flame Books, 2022). Anyone who thinks I exaggerate should consider that this week the female Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, said that Israel was a ´racist, colonialist enterprise.´ So as Luis Serpa suggests, the choice is not really between religion and pure rationalism of the kind foreseen by eighteenth century philosophers like Voltaire and Hume, the latter of whom said that all books which did not contain scientific or other useful knowledge should be burned. It’s between, in our case—I mean the Western world—Christianity, which has a coherent metaphysics and morality, and the global progressive woke cult, which has neither. So far I’m with him. But then he goes on to say that Christianity is the lesser of the two evils, and that what we should really lament is the loss of the Enlightenment. I´d like to suggest some clarification of those points, and also complicate his statement that Modernity is the inevitable consequence of Christianity. It´s true, or partly true, but we should not forget that Modernity is also the inevitable consequence of the Enlightenment itself. This is why I point out that over-rationalization is not always a good thing. (And Luis objects that over-rationalization is an oxymoron, in other words, you can´t have too much of it. In the rest of this essay I´ll try to show why that´s not so).

This really requires a book, and a long one, and if anyone is interested, it has been written, by Dr Iain McGilchrist. Twice. The first one is called The Master and His Emissary and the second, The Matter of Things. I can´t do justice to his argument in a few lines, but the gist is this. The two halves of our brains, and indeed all animal brains, have evolved for different purposes. Broadly, and over-simplifying, the left hemisphere has evolved to manipulate the world, to grab things, whether food, a mate, power, etc. On the other hand, you also want to avoid being eaten yourself while you are seeking food, mating opportunities, etc., and this requires a much broader (less focussed) attention from the right hemisphere, which needs to be aware of context, relationships, and so on. If you´re a young male baboon, you might want to mate with a female, but that might be a bad idea if the alpha male is around. The left hemisphere has developed, particularly in humans, laser-like focus, therefore, which is vital for success, but not sufficient. Without the much broader attention of the right hemisphere, it´s likely to get in danger and disregard consequences. In fact, according to McGilchrist, the history of the past couple of centuries, since the Enlightenment, has largely been one of increasing dominance of the left hemisphere. Through reason, and science and technology, we´ve become very good indeed at exploiting the world, and each other. But we´re ignoring the wider consequences, to the planet, society, communities, and to our own deeply spiritual selves. The Emissary, the left hemisphere, which should be the servant of the right one, the wise one, has now taken over. Anyone who thinks the Enlightenment was an unqualified success need only look at history, especially in the twentieth century. And even in the nineteenth century philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche pointed out that in fact we were incapable of living purely rationally, because we have Will, which is not rational. I could go on: modern art, e.g. abstract art, which literally means art taken out of reality, abstracted from it, is the result of the over-rational brain. It plays with concepts, but feels nothing. We are dying of the meaninglessness, in spite of our material success.

I´d like to emphasize: it´s not that science and reason are bad. They are absolutely necessary. We need them to build bridges and aeroplanes. But they aren´t enough. When we come to believe that the universe is purely material, and we are just random collections of atoms, life becomes meaningless, and it becomes easy to mistreat and even exterminate others. This is why the very people who claim that they love everyone, believe in inclusion, equality, and diversity, are so often very cruel and heartless. If you don´t want to take a leftist example, consider the Nazis. They were also materialist rationalists, and very efficiently created extermination camps.

I also know that churches are imperfect. But that doesn´t mean that Christianity itself is evil. Look at Jesus, not Sarah Mullally or the woke Pope. Christianity not only offers our lives meaning, but also an objective—and highly rational—basis for morality. In Christianity, every life deserves dignity; everyone is equally loved by God. Isn´t that a good basis for building a society? Perhaps it´s too late, but I´m still hoping for a late Christian revival. Otherwise I fear we are heading for a new totalitarianism, under technocrats, AI gurus, billionaires, bureaucrats—and they will all speak the language of kindness, compassion, of safety and justice and equality, while systematically destroying our freedom of speech and movement, and taking our away our possessions. That would be the worst of two evils, for sure.

Ann Widdecombe on Dartmoor (from her website); right, her official portrait, 2019

Yet another distinguished conservative figure has been butchered: Ann Widdecombe, ex-Conservative MP and Cabinet Minister, ex-Brexit Party Member of the European Parliament, and since 2023, Reform Party spokeswoman. After the initial arrest and release of a 26 year old ‘white British national’, according to the police, another man, aged 28, and also a ‘white British national’ has been detained in Yorkshire. Since a police investigation is underway, we cannot speculate on the motives for this heinous crime—Ann was 78 years old, and whether you agreed with her socially conservative views or not, clearly a good, kind, charming person—but we can certainly react to the way the crime has so far been handled by the police, and to the response from leftists.

The first thing that leaps to our attention is that the police immediately disclosed the colour and ethnicity of the suspect, in both cases, which is not their custom when the suspect is foreign. We all remember Axel Rudakubana, the child of Rwandan immigrants who stabbed to death three girls at a dance class in Southport in 2024, and gravely injured ten more: the police and media described him—this is not a joke—as a ‘Welsh choirboy.’ He had in fact been born in Wales, and had sung in a choir, so it was not strictly untrue. Nevertheless, the intention of the description was clearly to deceive and manipulate; no one could accuse the British authorities of ingenuousness. And this ‘colour-blindness’ which operates only when non-whites are the perpetrators, is now general in Europe. In Portugal yesterday, for example, an airport employee was attacked at Lisbon airport by an ‘Irishman’ according to CNN. He turns out to be an African with an Irish passport. But the moment a white man commits a crime, the public is informed at once. I am not against this: but it should go for all suspects, not just those of the one race who are the scapegoats for everything.

Second, just as after the murder of Charlie Kirk, there was an immediate flurry of celebration across the internet from leftists like Peter Tatchell, the LGBT activist and former Labour and Green parliamentary candidate, who called her ‘a bigot’ (because she was against gay marriage and having the same age of consent for homosexuals, owing to her Catholic faith), or the Marxist newspaper The Socialist Worker, who carried a jubilant article by some unfeeling jackal. And there was worse: trans activist influencer and Aberdeen University employee Heather Herbert (who appears to be a man), said ‘I hope it was an extremely painful death. I hope she was handcuffed to the bed as she screamed in agony.’ This creature, by the way, has stood for parliament for both the Labour Party and the Greens in Scotland, fortunately unsuccessfully. By now it should be obvious that Progressives’ constant protestations that they believe in diversity, tolerance, and compassion, are nonsense. Obviously there are exceptions, but a huge proportion of them are motivated by hatred, by violent and sadistic impulses. These are not good, well-meaning people fighting for social justice. They are evil, perverted people who want to eliminate and even torture anyone who disagrees with them. You might say that there are equally intolerant people on the Right. Of course there are, but certainly not in such huge numbers. If a prominent left-wing figure were killed—such as the leader of the Green Party in Britain, or the Democrats in the States—it’s inconceivable that conservative public figures would openly celebrate the fact. The Left is increasingly and openly unhinged, deranged. For a long time now they have been portraying anyone who disagrees with them—anyone with reasonable views, in fact—as ‘far right’, even such a mild and loveable figure as Ann Widdecombe. It’s time we returned the gesture and started calling them ‘far left’ or ‘extreme left’, which of course they are. Along with the jihadists, the far left are the greatest threat to national security, in Britain and the States.

Ann Widdecombe, in fact, who was born in the 1940s, was not a fascist or far-right, but simply a social conservative, like most people of her generation. She was also a devout Catholic, so it’s no surprise that she was against abortion on demand, and the Assisted Dying bill. It’s a measure of the extreme intolerance of the modern Left, and its evident eagerness to resort to violence as a political expedient, that moderate figures like her—and by the way, she was no longer even in parliament—are now in danger of their lives. Britain is coming apart at the seams. And yet, to date, the response of the Establishment has been to blame everything on ‘populism’ and the ‘far-right’—that is, on democracy and patriotism, on ordinary people who believe they have the right to fly a flag of St. George or the Union, especially when their towns are festooned with Gay Pride flags and Palestine flags. Of course I can’t say whether Ann Widdecombe’s murderer was a terrorist. It’s possible that he was just a particularly brutal burglar, I suppose. We shall see. It seems unlikely, frankly. But if the police and the government don’t start to apply justice equally, so that every man is equal before the law—a principle that has been constant since Magna Carta in 1215—then the last remnants of their authority will be forfeit, and it will be obvious to all that their power is tyrannical and illegitimate, exercised for the benefit of their own ruling class and their client groups, the ‘minorities’ that still vote for them. With every week, we are one step closer to civil war. It could still be averted, but only if those in power start listening to the voices of the British people. God knows, they are loud enough.

Top row: lunch for one, in my garden; woodland path, North Wales; the Comandante on Cader Idris, 2025. Middle row: Roman bust (Julius Caesar?) Mérida, Spain; the Comandante in Santiago Cathedral, 2023; gravestone near Stamford, Lincs. Bottom row: the Comandante in Ponte de Lima; the tomb of a nobleman and his wife, Chichester Cathedral; the Comandante and cousin Kevin Powell, Porto.

Yesterday was my birthday, like America’s, and although I am not 250, I have reached an advanced age: 71. Rather terrifying, not because I’m afraid of the oak overcoat, but because of how much of my life I have wasted. I spent the day cloistered in my cave-like house, with all shutters closed against the ferocious heat, which reached 39 celsius, over 100 fahrenheit, as it will again today. (Remind me: why do I live in Portugal?) So perhaps inevitably I found myself remembering past birthdays. For instance, my 18th: I had a party at home, which my parents allowed on condition that they remained in the house—my own condition being that they stayed strictly in their bedroom. Unfortunately my mother didn’t comply, and marched into the living-room, against my protests, but recoiled at once, on seeing a girl with her skirt around her hips and her knickers around her ankles. (Alas, I was not the lucky boy responsible.) Or my 21st, spent on Sardinia with my bank-clerk girlfriend, who was not terribly bright but looked like a Burne-Jones nymph. As I recall it (or is this nostalgia re-imagining the past in the best possible light?) we spent almost the entire holiday naked. We had a vast beach which was almost our private one: just one other couple shared it, usually, and they kept off about a mile away. (And also invariably naked.) Not altogether unpleasant, you might say, even if those two weeks were devoted purely to sensuous pleasures, and involved negligible cultural, intellectual, or spiritual enrichment. No, I don’t regret that one. And of course at that age you assume that this kind of mindless bliss will last forever—which alas, it doesn’t, or didn’t in my case. I don’t want to get maudlin. I’ve known some pleasures and joys, and doubtless the defeats and disappointments are not worth crying over. They are the norm, of course. At twenty-one, you are convinced that your own life will be exceptional, that you won’t make the same mistakes as all the other fools. How wrong you are, generally.

We’ll come back to me later. Because I share a birthday with the United States of America, a country I lived in for sixteen years, and became a citizen of in 2015, I always spare some thought for the progress—or otherwise—of the nation that adopted me too. I noticed yesterday that Time magazine’s cover had a sentimental and very ‘progressive’ collage of heroes. MLK, naturally, and I’ll concede he deserves to be on it, but plenty of other leftist icons too—unfortunately I don’t recall them all—and a bizarre re-imagining of the Statue of Liberty, not as the noble Greek goddess envisioned by the French who made it, but a modern girl, surprisingly Caucasian, with somewhat untidy hair: the kind of surly girl you’d expect to see at Free Palestine march, or a BLM march, or a MeToo march, in fact. I did wonder if the model was Taylor Swift. Time probably thinks she’s a great woman, after all. As far as the country’s liberal elite is concerned, freedom simply means open borders, whatever the consequences. We know this because this very week the Supreme Court ruled that birthright citizenship shall continue, despite President Trump’s attempt to overturn the Fourteenth Amendment by executive order. So the children of illegal immigrants, and of women who came to the States on vacation for the express purpose of having a baby there, will continue to be citizens. The liberal elite claims that it’s color-blind, and just doesn’t care whether the white population becomes a minority or not. In fact, that’s disingenuous: they welcome the end of the white majority. But if whites become a minority, can America remain American? I think not, at least if by that we mean remaining the bastion of western civilization. As in Britain, the Left actively wants the Great Replacement: that’s why white women are instructed to study, to become girlbosses, and not to have children, while open borders are seen as a panacea for all our problems. Unless there’s a muscular response, which probably can’t take place this year in Congress, in the form of another constitutional amendment, given that the midterms are not likely to be a resounding success for the Republicans, the USA is on a downward trajectory. Perhaps JD Vance will be able to reverse it in 2028. I hope so.

In the meantime, I’d like to offer a somewhat random list of my own American heroes. It’s not exhaustive, obviously, just a personal one. Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, of course. Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt, the president I’d most like to have known. Poe, Melville, Emerson, William James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Mark Helprin. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, John Fogerty, Joe Pass. TS Eliot—or does he count as English? Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, T-Bone Walker. Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood. I know, mostly blokes. Quite a few are black, though. Maybe I’m not as bigoted and far-right as my detractors claim.

All right, back to me, since I’m taking stock. If the US is at a critical juncture, as Britain obviously is—I think both have to take the right direction, i.e. a traditionalist one, in the next ten years, or else face extinction—what about the old Comandante? I certainly face extinction, if not in the next ten years, almost certainly the next twenty. So time is running out. And looking back, notwithstanding a few notable successes—getting into Cambridge, a handful of notable amorous conquests, becoming a professor and publishing a couple of works of fiction—you’d have to say that on the whole it hasn’t been a triumph. Three failed marriages! My academic career ended by cancellation! My two books (already a paltry number) ignored by the media, unread by the public. Donald Trump wouldn’t hesitate to call me a loser. However, I haven’t given up yet. Whether I’ve inherited the Dunkirk spirit, or I’m just bloody-minded, I don’t know, but perhaps I can make something of this last decade or so that I might have left. I’m learning to ride a motorcycle again, something I haven’t done for over half a century. Still hoping to publish a couple of books, my historical novel about Gabriele d’Annunzio, and a weird Welsh novel which interweaves Owen Glyndowr’s rebellion with medieval and apocalyptic tales. I’d like to find a very old farmhouse to live in. As for love… it would be delightful, though I can’t see any pre-Raphaelite nymph wanting to spend a couple of weeks with me naked, these days, sad to say.

This one has been more personal than is my wont; forgive the lapse. But I do hope that Britain and America, who are beset by internal enemies, can overcome them and find themselves again, just as I hope that I can defeat my own greatest enemy, the one who also lurks within, and you can, too. It’s not death we should fear, but death-in-life.

The cancelled actor Armie Hammer stars in Uwe Boll’s film, Citizen Vigilante

Last night, thanks to the munificence of Mr Elon Musk, I watched Uwe Boll’s new film on X. It’s been effectively banned from theatrical release in both Germany and Britain. The fact that the European Establishment doesn’t want us to see it is itself a recommendation for me. Many on the Left are squawking about it: another plus. In fact, it’s not a brilliant film, and I strongly disagree with some aspects of its message. Nevertheless, I believe it’s important because it’s causing controversy, and obliging our maleficient rulers to engage with its argument. In this essay I want to give a brief review of the film, partly as a work of art, but more importantly, as a cultural artefact that is not merely reflecting current realities, but changing them.

For those who don’t know, it’s about an American, played convincingly by Hammer, who carries out vigilante justice on various people, many of them immigrants, but by no means exclusively, who have committed crimes yet escaped justice because of the leniency of activist judges and politicians. It takes place in ‘Europe’—we variously see police officers with ‘Policja’ on their uniforms, but also ‘Police’, and although the newsreader has a British accent, no one else does. (In fact the film was shot in Zagreb, because the city resembled larger conurbations like Berlin and Paris.) Spoiler alert for anyone who’s intending to watch the film and doesn’t want to know what happens: skip the rest of this paragraph. It opens with a horrific scene: a young woman, out shopping with her young son, is stabbed in the neck randomly by an African wielding a machete. We follow the protagonist, a businessman and ex-US Army soldier called Sanders, through broadly escalating situations. He tries to teach three youngsters who have refused to pay their fare on a bus that they should, by paying it for them and talking to them. (And for those who declare that the film is racist, only one of the three is black.) In a nightclub, he sees two young men putting drugs into the drinks of two girls who have gone to the bathroom, and manages to persuade them to leave momentarily, then switches the drinks, so it’s the men who become stupefied, and he can warn the girls. But his main focus is on a 14 year old girl who was gang-r*ped—and her assailants all set free because the judge declared they were victims of injustice as much as she was. He administers justice to that judge (also a white man) and at least two other judges, but the climax of the film is when he visits the home of one of the teenage attackers, an Arab boy, and obliges him to call his friends and tell them to come to his flat at once. You can doubtless guess what happens.

For several reasons, although the acting was mostly good, I don’t think the film is great, as art. I dislike graphic violence, and even though it was clearly not wholly gratuitous in this case, it was at times cartoonish, even comical—particularly in the scene where Sanders exterminates an entire SWAT team come to arrest him—and, I couldn’t help feeling, designed to appeal to the viewer’s basest instincts. But the worst thing about it was the constant explicit messaging. Not only does Sanders himself justify his actions, talking to the camera—he frequently says that he is only doing what he does until ‘you’ (the public) can do it for yourselves—but even the newsreader justifies them, saying again and again that women particularly are in danger, that they are not being protected by the police, and that violent criminals are going unpunished. I don’t like this kind of preaching. If a story is told well, the intelligent viewer or reader should be able to form his own opinions on it. But worse is the implication that citizens should appoint themselves as judges and executioners, and become vigilantes themselves. In that sense, the film’s critics are correct that it is explicitly a far-right viewpoint. Although I agree with the premise that Europeans, particularly women and children, are no longer safe, and that mass immigration from Third World countries has been a major cause of the rise in violent crime—which is verifiable in every country that keeps statistics on crime and ethnicity—I don’t think violence is the answer, least of all violence meted out to individuals who have not had a fair trial.

But in that case, why do I think the film is so important? Firstly, because it’s challenging the official narrative, that diversity is our strength, that immigration is a net benefit to our societies, and that when outrages are committed, we should explain them as the acts of disturbed individuals, who were probably traumatised in their home countries, and, in the now familiar words of British politicians (and indeed the families of victims, who receive official coaching on what to say in their statements), we shouldn’t ‘look back in anger.’ In other words, we should remain passive, trust the security forces and the judiciary who have constantly failed us, and simply submit to these attacks in future. In Britain alone there are several such outrageous attacks every day. As I write, yesterday alone a Somali ploughed the car he was driving into pedestrians, hitting five of them, and another African migrant (labelled ‘French’ by the mainstream media, because he has a French passport) was charged with r*ping and murdering a two-year old girl in Britain. No one can deny any longer that these constant atrocities are taking place, or pretend that people still feel safe, particularly women and children. Nor can they affirm that when apprehended the criminals receive the full justice of the law, when their sentences are frequently more lenient than those of white British people whose tweets the State doesn’t like, or who have committed the heinous crime of praying silently outside an abortion clinic. In other words, the film’s diagnosis is correct, and the fact that the authorities are banning it or trying to ban it shows that they are afraid of the discussion it will provoke. And more and more people are now daring to speak openly about the collapse of our national security and of our judicial system. And when I say ‘our’, I don’t just mean Britain’s, but those of most western European countries, whose deep states are favouring immigrants, even criminal immigrants, quite overtly, over natives.

I also think that the film, in spite of its lack of realism—Sanders could easily have been caught in reality—is prophetic in a way, or at least gives us a warning. I don’t think incredibly brave or reckless individuals are likely to start redressing the crimes being committed. However, groups of vigilantes will. Militias will form. We recently learned, via the murder of Henry Nowak, that although British nationals are not allowed to carry weapons, Sikhs are exempt from this law, for ‘religious’ reasons. I myself have seen black men on the Tube in London carrying katanas, Japanese swords—and I am certain that if I were to carry mine on public transport, I would be reported and arrested. The criminals are armed. It can only be a matter of time before the natives arm themselves too. At that point, as I have warned before, civil unrest becomes civil war. Again, I am not recommending that, I’m merely saying that it’s the inevitable consequence of the State utterly failing in its duty to protect citizens.

One of the bleakest things about Citizen Vigilante is that it seems to lionize an utterly materialist man who sets himself up above all authorities. Although he is shocked by the crimes he witnesses, he is not himself a particularly moral man: we see him having sex with a prostitute, for example, not brutally, to be sure, but without any emotion either. In other words, he is no spiritual paragon. And the real reason for the collapse of our civilization is our atheism and absence of any coherent moral framework. If you believe that there is no such thing as Truth, then of course it makes sense that each community, or even each individual, comes up with their own. But then who is to say which prevails? It comes down to who is in Power. King Charles has just announced that he is no longer the Defender of the Faith—that is, of Christianity—which incidentally he made an oath to defend, at his coronation—but will defend all the faiths of the multi-faith community that is modern Britain. And yet Islam does not accept the equal validity of all faiths: it quite explicitly declares that it must be supreme. And the Muslim community is making use of the king, the government, the judges and civil service to show them tolerance and even favour—just until they are in the majority, when Shariah law will be declared. I believe that a spiritual rebirth is necessary if we are to save the West; simply killing malefactors will not solve our problems. However, we do need to stop the Great Replacement, which means remigration, which could and should be mostly voluntary. Viable political solutions could indeed pave the way for a Christian revival: that would be preferable to the anarchy of lone vigilantes, or militias, responding to ravages of barbaric invaders.

The Starmersaurus and his imminent replacement, Andy Burnham, MP (Makerfield)

I was going to write about the Crusades this week—a much misunderstood and maligned period in history, which we should be proud of, on the whole—but the resounding win in the Makerfield by-election by Andy Burnham this week will have such colossal consequences for Britain that I want to say a few words about it.

For those Overmen and Overwomen outside the UK, and perhaps some inside it, Makerfield is a district of Greater Manchester. The by-election was called because the Labour incumbent, Josh Simons, resigned—specifically so that Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Manchester, and Labour’s king-in-waiting, could be given a safe seat in parliament, and thence be able to challenge the Starmertron for the leadership. It’s a relatively new electoral district, but it has voted Labour since 1906, whichever constituency it belonged to, so it’s been a legacy Labour seat since the party’s inception. All the same, the population is 95% white, and mainly working-class, and in the 2016 referendum 65% of those who cast a vote voted for Brexit. In other words, like most white, working-class British people, they are socially conservative. The vote for Brexit was a categorical vote to end the uncontrolled immigration that has been swamping the country. In case you think that’s a subjective opinion, in the recent local elections most of the council seats were won by Reform, the ostensibly anti-immigration party (which in my opinion is only pretending.) So there was a real chance that a rightwing party, Reform or Restore, might break Labour’s deathgrip hold on the seat. However, Burnham won a resounding victory: 25,000 votes to Reform’s 16,000. In third place were Restore, who got 3,000 votes, or 7% of the vote—not bad for a party that’s only existed for four months, and well ahead of the Conservative, Liberal Democrats, and Greens, but of course still paltry.

The two big questions the Makerfield by-election raises are these: why did a constituency of predominantly white, working-class voters continue to support a party that has blatantly abandoned them, and disregards their wishes; and secondly, what will this mean for the leadership of the party and the future of the country.

First, why did these northerners, who are doubtless mostly decent and patriotic people, vote for Burnham? The man is well-liked in Greater Manchester, because he’s a local lad, speaks with the right accent, loves Oasis, and is capable of smiling, unlike the robotic Starmer. In other words, he’s personable enough. In terms of policy, he’s proven as slippery as Starmer, and like Starmer, was against investigation of the rape gangs, despite his claims to the contrary. If anything, the indications are that he’ll be even further to the Left of Starmer; the party membership believe that the Greens, who are the lunatic left fringe, are stealing votes from them (correctly), and that they need to lurch even further leftwards to scotch the advance of Polanski and his ilk. However, the Makerfield voters are not Marxists, as they’ve shown in the last decade. Their vote was an anti-Starmer vote: they despise the man, as almost everyone does in Britain, even on the Left, and essentially it was a protest vote, if an ill-conceived one. That they chose to remain loyal to Labour, doubtless simply from a sense of familiarity and heritage, is disturbing. The result will be to give a fillip to Labour nationwide, which can only have disastrous results for white working-class people.

Next, let’s consider how the next weeks and months will play out. Burnham will announce his leadership bid very soon, within a couple of weeks. Two thirds of the membership support him. Doubtless the knives are already out for Starmer in the Cabinet. Reportedly Shabana Mahmood will keep the Home Office if she supports Burnham. Wes Streeting, another possible leadership contender—and arguably the only other one with a respectable IQ—has probably been bought off too, perhaps with an offer of the Foreign Office. Lammy, Rayner and Reeves are such obvious clowns that they will be forced to stand aside. If there are more Cabinet resignations, which is likely, and a vote of no-confidence in the House, which is also very likely, then Starmer can either resign, or conceivably call a General Election as a national referendum on his leadership. If he does the latter, Labour will suffer a devastating defeat. The winners would probably be Reform, but perhaps without an overall majority, which might mean a coalition centre-right government led by Reform in alliance with the Conservative Party and/or the Liberal Democrats. This might suit Nigel Farage, who is actually a wet Liberal himself, not the fascist he’s been painted as by mainstream media. But I don’t think this outcome is likely—or desirable.

More likely, Starmer will resign—he’s little more than a machine for processing information, but even he, midwit that he is, must see the writing on the wall—and Burnham will be Prime Minister very soon. He can then either continue to misgovern the country in exactly the same mould as Starmer, or else, as I suspect he will want to take the country much further left than the election manifesto suggested, call a General Election to establish a mandate. If he were to win that—by no means impossible, because he’s quite charismatic, and as I said, his victory has made him popular, and that surge would continue for a while after he became Labour leader, and before the disastrous results of his polices were apparent—then we would have Labour in power in 2031. That seems even worse that what we expected, that they’d be in power until 2029. But is it? Who would win in 2031?

Not Labour, I’m sure. They will continue allowing the waves of immigrants into the country, and squandering vast amounts of national treasure on them, on welfare, while the armed forces remain not merely underfunded, but almost totally defunded. (Britain is currently defenceless). They will continue to support Ukraine and harrass Russia, which is likely to lead to war with the Russia, a war we cannot possibly win. Two-tier justice will continue. The universities and schools will not only continue to be indoctrination centres, but that may be ramped up. Citizens will carry on being arrested and imprisoned for posting on social media. Taxes will rise for working people, and almost everyone will be impoverished. The media will remain a source of disinformation, and NGOs promoting cultural Marxism will be funded by the taxpayer. Crime rates, particularly for violent crime, will continue to rise, and women and children will disproportionately be the victims. And we will rejoin the EU, despite the clear vote against that in the referendum. In other words, unmitigated disaster.

A more likely possibility is the Reform-Conservative-Lib-Dem alliance I forecast before. That sounds better, but is it? The Tories simply continued Blair’s policies when they were in power, and Reform has accepted failed Tories into their ranks, including Jenrick and Braverman, who were respectively ministers of Immigration and the Home Office—the very people responsible for the Boris wave of millions. I doubt they will make any serious attempt to stop the rot.

We must hope that by 2029 or 2031 Restore can mount a viable alternative. Unfortunately at Makerfield their candidate was not up to the task: she couldn’t speak on camera or in public convincingly. They have to find 600 articulate, intelligent, truly committed, courageous people who are ready to stand and will work tirelessly to be elected. Their popularity has grown very fast since their inception. It’s not impossible. And in my opinion, they are Britain’s last hope for a peaceful, democratic solution to its problems. The country isn’t merely in crisis: it’s on the verge of collapse. Restore could avert that, by putting the interests of the British people unashamedly in the forefront again. That needn’t involve inhumanity. Millions must go, yes—but immigrants loyal to Britain, and productive tax-payers, would of course stay. But if the British people don’t understand this—and the Makerfield election is a depressing reminder that most people are voting on hunches and emotions rather than as a result of rational thought—the thirties will be a decade of Weimar-like chaos, and bloodshed will be inevitable. This was a critical election. Let’s hope Burnham is a temporary ill.

Court sketch of Hadi Alodid, immigrant accused of attempted beheading in Belfast

I don’t like to be reactive, but most of the coverage of this week’s events in Britain, from the protests in Southampton over police responsibility for the death of Henry Nowak, to the protests in Belfast over the attempted beheading of a man with autism and learning difficulties by a Sudanese ‘refugee’, allegedly—have failed to see the deeper significance. These are not riots ‘whipped up’, as the government keeps claiming, by ‘far-right’ agitators like Tommy Robinson or the Reform Party: they are spontaneous outbreaks of outrage and desperation, a last resort for a population whose safety is obviously not a priority for the government or the ruling elite class generally. It may well portend the start of the civil war that Professor David Betts and others have been forecasting for some time now. I am not condoning violence, least of all against innocent people who just happen to be foreign, but our blind and deaf elites need to understand that if the legitimate concerns of the public are not addressed, and they haven’t been, then lawlessness will be the result. And while security forces may be capable of containing violence in one city at a time, even on the scale we’ve seen this week in Belfast, should it break out in dozens of cities and towns simulataneously, they will lose their grip and we’ll enter a state of anarchy or civil war.

For anyone outside the UK, a quick recap of what we know. Bear in mind that for legal reasons I cannot say anything that could prejudice the fair trial of Hadi Alodid, who has been charged with attempted murder, even though the attempt is on video and has had multiple witnesses. We know that Alodid is Sudanese, served briefly in the national police force in Khartoum, and entered the country illegally. He had the money to pay smugglers in Libya to take him to France, and from Paris travelled to Dublin, where he took a bus, in 2023, to Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. He claimed asylum at once, and within months was granted leave to remain in the country until 2028 under the new fast-track rules devised by the then-Tory government, under Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary at the time, and Robert Jenrick, the Immigration Minister. The government brought in rules to fast-track visas for asylum seekers from Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen—precisely the countries you’d think any sensible government would not want to encourage immigration from, given their lawlessness and high rates of terrorism. (And incidentally, the ministers responsible for that policy, Braverman and Jenrick, are now MPs for Reform, who claim they will be tough on immigration.) And apparently Adolid has two brothers who followed him to the country, one in England and the other in N. Ireland. Our political masters are generous to ‘refugees’. We can probably assume that Adolid is Muslim, as he was a member of the police force in Muslim and Arab majority north Sudan, but for some reason the Belfast police have ruled out terrorism as a motive. Whether or not the man who attacked Stephen Ogilvie on Monday night was motivated by terrorism or is simply psychotic, we know that he stabbed the Ulsterman in the face repeatedly, blinding him in one eye and severely damaging the other, and started to decapitate him; he was prevented from completing this by male members of the public, one of whom hit him with a hurling stick. When the police arrived, he told them, ‘I’ve killed someone, I don’t know if they are dead’. We also know that when taken to hospital, as he had an injured wrist, he threatened to kill the radiographer, and has been charged with that too.

The salient question is this: why are we allowing illegal immigrants into the country, and instead of deporting them at once, not just permitting them to remain, but spending vast amounts on welfare for them? (For anyone who doubts this, both the Minister of Defence and the Minister for the Armed Forces have resigned from the Labour Cabinet this week, because our armed forces are not adequately funded, and the reason for that, Al Carny, the Minister for Armed Forces, has alleged, is that Starmer is intent on diverting all our resources to welfare.) Why is it that the wishes of the people of the United Kingdom, which they have made clear over and over again in elections, have been ignored? Why is it that when white men commit offences—such as throwing plastic rubbish bins at the police—they get prison sentences of two to three years, while Muslim offenders who threw bricks at the police at protests were only given warnings and suspended sentences? We know the answer: the government is racist, either by conviction (there are plenty of non-British MPs in parliament, including one recent Green Party MP who is on a student visa, incredibly enough) or else for pragmatic reasons: they believe that the immigrants on whom they have lavished so much generosity will vote for them, and always vote for them, and so they will remain in power, even though the white working-class now sees through them. It would be hard to argue against this Machiavellianism. The hypocrisy of the government has been predictable—but even so, flagrant. Prominent members of the Labour Party, including the current Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, knelt for George Floyd, the American career criminal and drug addict, when he died after a police arrest; no one knelt for Henry Nowak, who was handcuffed by the police as he bled to death, while his murderer was never handcuffed, and was offered a choice of snacks at arrival at the police station. And the Prime Minister has done his best to make political hay out of the protests, even though that’s exactly what he accuses the ‘far-right’ of doing. Quite simply, they hate us.

Let’s turn to the protests. Masked men, apparently both Catholics and Protestants, have torched cars, a bus, and some houses in which immigrants were living—after telling the residents to leave. (As far as I know, no immigrants have been seriously hurt, although some Belfast foreign nationals have claimed they were chased, interrogated, and beaten.) I am absolutely not condoning any violence against innocent immigrants, some of whom, doubtless, are productive, and none of whom took part in this barbaric crime. Nor do I approve of attacks on the police—not even throwing plastic bins, though I must say that prison sentences of two and three years for that, given the understandable anger of the local people, seems unduly harsh. If there were any chance of a peaceful way to resolve the crisis, I would support it. And yet this very week the government announced that it would give five thousand pounds to companies for each foreign worker they employed—while there is a youth unemployment crisis: foreign workers are getting all the low-wage jobs, at the expense of British youth. The political and media class are so far showing no signs whatever that they care what ordinary British people think. They are intent on pursuing their no-borders, everyone-is-welcome strategy. They still tell us that diversity is our strength. They tell us that immigrants enrich our culture. This year at an Iftar dinner in Westminster Hall, Starmer said that Muslims were ‘the face of modern Britain’, and emphasized their contribution to every field of British life. Diversity is to be imposed on Britain, in other words, despite our wishes.

As long as the ruling class remains indifferent to the will of the indigenous population, and does nothing to ensure the safety of its citizens—indeed, as we have seen, the police increasingly act as a hostile force to white Britons—then we can expect inchoate explosions of rage such as we’ve seen this week in Belfast. So far they have been uncoordinated, and leaderless. The violence against the property of immigrants is unjustified, but it’s the only way that a voiceless community has found to express its profound anger at the uncontrolled flood of Third World immigrants—not refugees, for they are almost all men, of fighting age—many of whom turn out to be savages. They commit violent crimes at far greater rates than the native population, including truly barbaric ones, against little girls, for instance, as at Southport and the Manchester Arena. The regime has not yet understood that no one wants its globalist Liberal utopia, apart from its own well-educated, well-heeled, privileged members. It believes that it can remain in power by oppression and repression. That’s a mistake. Britain is very close to revolution now, to conflagration in every major city. If steps are not taken to limit immigration severely—ideally, we need net negative immigration, with more people leaving than entering, and no illegal immigration at all—then the consequences will be dire: civil war or perhaps a true far-right backlash, and I don’t mean a Reform government. They are just failed Tories.

It’s hard to find grounds for optimism in Britain. Restore give me hope, but I fear that the Establishment will find a way to proscribe them, as they are doing to populist right-wing parties in France, Holland, Austria, Germany, and Romania. What’s certain is that Blair’s Britain is over. This week is a clear indication to anyone who’s paying attention of what is to come if they keep to the same suicidal policies.

Keir Starmer (image: Times newspapers); Vickrum Digwa, the murderer; police handcuffing the dying Henry Nowak, as he tells them ‘I can’t breathe.’

When I was a boy, my parents and teachers impressed upon me that the police (then called ‘bobbies’, who wore quaint tall black helmets, rather than baseball caps) were my friends. I never doubted that they would come to my aid if I were in trouble. What white British person could still cherish that belief, after the video has surfaced of the police handcuffing stabbing victim Henry Nowak, aged 18, as he lay dying, after telling them that he had been stabbed and saying he couldn’t breathe? Doubtless you know the story by now—even the US State Department has criticised the British government for its two-tier policing this week—so I won’t dwell on the details. My aim is to contemplate what the nation can do now we have proof that the state treats British natives at best as second-class citizens, but often, in fact, as the a priori enemy.

A brief summary, for anyone who’s unfamiliar with the story. On December 3, 2025, Henry Nowak, an 18 year old student at Southampton University, was walking home when he encountered Vickrum Digwa, a 23 year old Sikh, who was carrying not only the kirpan, the knife adult Sikh men are permitted to carry in Britain, but also another 8-inch ceremonial knife. It appears that Nowak teased Digwa, while filming him. Digwa responded by stabbing him five times, including several blows as Nowak attempted to flee. Digwa’s brother called the police, falsely claiming that Nowak had racially abused and punched the Sikh. In the meantime, Digwa’s parents arrived on the scene; his mother took the murder weapon from her son and hid it at their home, where it was later discovered by police. His father tried to keep Nowak alive by keeping him upright, as he noticed that his mouth kept filling with blood. And yet when the police arrived, and Nowak said ‘I’ve been stabbed’, an officer replied ‘I don’t think you have, mate’ and proceeded to handcuff him, forcing him onto the ground, despite protests from Digwa’s father, who told them that the victim’s mouth was filling with blood. One of the four police officers said ‘we’d better check’ and did a cursory search, but found no stab wounds, and the ambulance only arrived soon after, by which time, despite attempts by the police at CPR, Nowak was dead.

The astonishing thing about the whole incident is that the police decided to handcuff and arrest the victim rather than the attacker. In today’s multicultural Britain, alleged racial abuse—which in fact never happened—is a far worse crime than stabbing someone. This may seem an extreme claim, but anyone who wishes to can read the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary’s policy on ‘anti-racism’, which they admit was directly inspired by the death of George Floyd. Here are a few key extracts:

Our commitments

• Zero tolerance of racism and ensuring Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary (HIOWC) is anti-racist in all it does.

• Understanding and reducing our disproportionality using a reform or explain approach.

• Understanding the impact, trauma and history of policing ethnic minority communities.

• Improving outcomes and support for ethnic minority victims of crime.

• Increasing our contact with and involving ethnic minority communities in our policing and decisions that concern them.

• Recruiting, retaining and progressing a representative workforce.

• Mandating and developing a culture that supports and values all of its workforce.

Notice that it’s no longer about applying the law equally to all. Their policy is explicitly ‘anti-racist’ in all it does. For anyone unfamiliar with the jargon, anti-racist may sound harmless—surely it just means ‘not racist’, doesn’t it? But in fact, the term derives from Critical Theory, cultural Marxism, which assumes that all white people are racist, even if they don’t know it, and that in any interaction between white people and ‘minorities’, the white person is the oppressor, again whether consciously so or not. So in fact the policy is the exact opposite of what it purports to be: it is racist. It assumes that all white people are guilty, all the time. It regards ‘whiteness’ as ‘problematic’. The fact that a nation founded by white people, which still has a white majority (just about) should be adopting such policies across its institutions is astonishing, if you think about it. Many countries have policies that discriminate against foreigners, but how many discriminate against their own citizens?

When I lived in the UAE for eight years, I knew there was two-tier justice and that I had to avoid altercations, and especially any kind of legal action, involving locals, because locals almost always won such cases in the courts, regardless of who was at fault. And in the case of locals of ‘good family’, i.e. the families of sheikhs, there was no chance whatever of an expat being found innocent. This was just something we had to accept. Their country, their rules. I can tell you without fear of contradiction that no Emirati would have believed that Britain had a similar but inverted system, in which its own citizens were assumed to guilty a priori if any immigrant were involved.

Some further facts to consider: Digwa has been convicted of murder, and sentenced to just 21 years imprisonment. Why so lenient? He will be free at the age of 44. The majority of Britons would agree with me that capital punishment is deserved in this case. Second, his mother, Kiran Kaur, has been found guilty of assisting the murderer by hiding the murder weapon. I haven’t been able to find out what her sentence is, if any. She is an Indian citizen: so she should be deported after serving her sentence. (And why hasn’t Digwa’s brother, who lied to the police and advised him to plead self-defence, been charged?) Third, Keir Starmer, the amphibian British Prime Minister, who ‘took the knee’ within a fortnight of the death of the foreign criminal and drug addict George Floyd, remained silent on this case for a long time, and although he says the bodycam footage is ‘disturbing’, has claimed that the ‘far-right’ are attempting to weaponise the case for political ends, and has called this ‘unforgivable.’ I would answer that anyone who thinks that the rage of the British populace is unforgivable must be inhuman. Any normal sentient person feels rage over this. Only a psychopathic toad like Starmer could remain unmoved by it. What is unforgivable is the adoption by every major institution in Britain, including the police and the government, of policies specifically designed to protect ethnic minorities at the expense of the native population. Not long ago Starmer said that the police would act ‘without fear or favour’. This case has made it absolutely clear that that is not happening. There were four police officers at the scene of the crime, one of them at least a woman with ludicrous nail extensions on her fingers, as can be seen in the footage, and not one of them dared even to investigate whether Nowak was innocent. He was presumed guilty—the exact opposite of what true justice should presume.

In the title to this essay I alluded to the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, ‘Ohio’, written after the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State University by National Guardsmen. Young sings ‘Tin soldiers and Nixon’s army, we’re finally on our own.’ It’s become obvious that the tyrannical British regime is using the police, the courts, and doubtless would use the armed forces, against the native population. We are on our own. And to all those people who have told me, as one Irish friend did a couple of years ago, ‘Dont’ worry, wokeness is well-meaning, we just want justice’—no, we have the proof now. It’s not well-meaning. (Of course there are well-meaning simpletons who subscribe to it, but its leaders have always manipulated the language to make it sound noble, while their aim has to been seize power.) It’s racist, and murderous. The intention is to cow and subjugate the native population and replace them with submissive, subservient Third World serfs and slaves. Woke is not misguided; it’s evil.

So where do we go from here? What do you do when you have clear evidence that the state has become the enemy of the people? What do you think?

I’m going to be in trouble for this one. ‘Imagine’ is one of the most beloved songs of our era, the anthem par excellence for Progressives, wokesters, and all those deluded souls who pride themselves on being ‘dreamers’. And because John Lennon is a secular saint, an icon superior even to St. Greta or St. Barack—and to be fair, he did write some good songs—many people accept everything he did uncritically. If the unlettered genius of Liverpool composed it, it must be a masterpiece. Besides, most people my age will remember the first time they heard the song, and may associate it with the fond (if false) memories of their youth. I bought the album myself when it came out, and thought it ‘brilliant’, despite misgivings over the syrupy over-production by Lennon’s psychopathic producer, Phil Spector, and notwithstanding embarrasingly bad songs like ‘Oh Yoko’, or the childishly spiteful ‘How Do You Sleep?’ So I won’t be surprised if people unsubscribe, in a high dudgeon equal only to that of their resentful and petty hero. So be it. I have mentioned the song before, with some scorn, but I want to consider it in more depth today, partly to highlight why it’s weak musically, but mainly to point out how it has wreaked unimaginable damage—pun intended—on Western civilization. Was that the intention of this rich ‘working-class hero’? Clearly he loathed nearly everything about the society that rewarded him so handsomely. But I shall argue that while the song had the desired effect, in the sense of undermining the fundamental values of the West, it failed to rebuild the culture in any positive way, and in fact created division, dissension, and hate.

Let’s consider the song from an aesthetic point of view first. Harmonically, it’s cliched and uninteresting: the verse consists of major chords, the tonic (C), the subdominant (F) and dominant (G) with the relative minors of the tonic and dominant (Am and Dm) briefly touched upon on the way up to dominant. Of course many good songs use this simple structure: I’m just making the point that it’s nothing exceptional. The chorus has the same courses with the unusual E chord, the major third, at the end of each line. The tune is quite catchy, especially in the chorus. So far, nothing very original or noteworthy, though also nothing particularly bad. The rhythm is the pop standard 4/4, played at quite literally a plodding, pedestrian pace: andante, which literally means ‘walking’. Again, nothing necessarily wrong with that. What sticks in the mind, of course, is the lyrics of the song. It is their proselytising tone, and their anthemic simplicity and repetitiveness, that have turned the song into a hymn of a generation. And only last week my oldest friend shocked me by saying that the words were ‘true’. I believe he is mistaken to think that—indeed, I’d go further and say that you could only think that if you have been psyopped—and I’m going to show what’s fundamentally false about the lyrics of this ditty, and how the lies espoused in them have poisoned our minds.

The first stanza asks us to imagine there’s no heaven, and no hell—in other words, that there is no God, no transcendental meaning, and therefore we can all imagine ourselves blissfully ‘living for today.’ This is the crassest form of materialism, and the result, inevitably, is to live for pleasure and gain, as indeed Lennon did himself. This has become the dominant metaphysics (or rather lack thereof) of our civilization, particularly among Regressives, with the results we can all see: spiralling mental illness, alienation, anomie, selfishness and loneliness. Not to mention the absence of any moral compass. I don’t have time here to discuss whether you need a concept of divinity to have any kind of objective morality: I need to do a separate essay on that one. But it’s apparent from the pronouncements of post-structuralist philosophers (those lofty figures who have legislated for BLM, MeToo, the DEI industry and every other cranky neo-Marxist group) that their assumption that there is no such thing as objective reality has led to a fracturing not only of a consensus of values, but even of basic behaviour, not just ethics, but even common courtesy. It’s a very bad beginning.

But it’s about to get worse. The next stanza instructs us to imagine there’s no countries—easy enough for Lennon, who was rich enough to be welcome wherever he wished to go, but less so for the rest of us. He tells us that there would then be ‘nothing to kill or die for’, but the history of the world proves the contrary. In fact warfare has been endemic in all societies, including tribal ones, such as the Yanomamo of the Amazon basin, or the highlanders of New Guinea, who are among the most xenophobic and violent people in the world, hating anyone from another tribe, even inhabitants of the next valley, whom they kill without hesitation. (See Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee for an account written by a scientist who admits that he liked the cannibals.) Even in Paleolithic times, men made war. The truth is, human beings don’t love everyone equally. They prefer their families, then their clans, tribes, and larger groupings such as nations. That’s reality, a concept foreign to Lennon and all utopians. The merit of the nation is that it’s a far larger grouping, and if culturally and ethnically homogeneous, is likely to be a high-trust, well-ordered society: at least this has been the case in the West until recently, so most of Europe was extremely safe before the invasion of the immigrants. In some countries the erasure of the border has been nothing short of catastrophic: for instance Sweden, which only two or three decades ago was the safest country on the continent, is now the most dangerous. So Lennon is objectively wrong. You might think you have nothing to kill or die for, if you are ashamed to be patriotic, but many invaders do not: they are happy to kill, plunder, and rape for their own gain. In the same stanza Lennon again tells us to imagine there’s no religion, which he already did in the first stanza. Boring! He ends the verse with ‘Imagine all the people living life in peace.’ Well, you can imagine it, perhaps, but it ain’t happening. The catastrophic rise in crime, especially violent crime, in every single country that has adoped open borders, proves this inarguably.

The final verse is perhaps the most egregiously foolish and deluded, but conforms to the vague neo-Marxism of the others. Lennon wants us to imagine ‘no possessions’—even while he retained his vast fortune, lived in the greatest luxury in the Dakota Building in New York, where his neighbours were movie stars and magnates, and even though he squandered more money on keeping a second apartment refrigerated, as a home for his wife’s fur coats, then most people earn all year. Despite this hypocrisy, he tells us there’s ‘no need for greed or hunger’ and enjoins us to imagine ‘sharing all the world’. But he never made any moves to do that. Nor, I notice, did Fidel Castro, or Stalin, or Nicolas Maduro, or any Marxist leader you can think of. Were they just ‘all too human’, i.e. cowards, or in fact simply liars and manipulators? I think the latter. Consider the life of Bonaparte, who appears to have begun his career as an earnest revolutionary (as indeed did most of them) but who quickly turned into a bloodthirsty, ruthless tyrant, and who had no aim whatever but to extend his power, at any cost.

Lastly, we have the famous, oft-quoted chorus: ‘You may say that I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only one/I hope some day you’ll join us/And the world will live as one.’ This is supposed to be noble, elevated, inspiring. Notice exactly what he’s saying and also what he implies. He is a dreamer, that is one who does not accept reality, but prefers to live in delusion. He also flatters the listener: you too can be a rare and noble genius like me, if you just do as I say. And the other implied meaning is authoritarianism, indeed dictatorship. Because if the world is to live as one, if borders are to be eliminated, against the wishes of the vast majority of people, and if their possessions are to be taken from them, also against their will (as the WEF says, You will have nothing and you will be happy!), and if religion is to be abolished, then all this can be done only by force, because no free people will consent to it. This was the logic of Bonaparte, of Lenin and Stalin, of Castro, Pol Pot, Mao, Chavez and Maduro—the whole pyschopathic gang of tyrants that have pushed for this utopia of ‘equality’. It always means repression, secret police, political imprisonments and executions.

The revolution always creates dissent. Whether Lennon intended this or not, we don’t know. What we are sure of is that his New Agey feel-good, virtue-signalling community building helped create nations within nations that hated everyone who disagreed with them, despised them, and wanted to silence them. As Zack Polanski, the leader of the British Green Party, recently admitted: he sees no place for people who disagree with him in society. And the only way you can enforce a vision is by a police state. This is what underlies every line of ‘Imagine’: the threat of the gulag.

So next time you see someone growing sentimental about the song, or hear one of those heart-warming performances of it on Youtube, in which musicians of every colour and creed take part, all singing along with expressions of piety, remember that these people are not merely ingenuous and deluded, although they certainly are that, if they are at all sincere. But many of them, usually the more intelligent and psychopathic, are mouthing the Lennon platitudes only as a strategem. The real motive is manipulation. They want fame, money, power. They want to impose their vision of the world upon you. And most of all, they want to strip you of your possessions, give them to others, and deprive you of free speech and thought.

That is what ‘Imagine’ means. It’s not just silly, it’s far worse: immoral, evil. We could find far better anthems than this dreadful dirge.

Top row: Cecil Rhodes; Zendaya as Athena in Nolan’s Odyssey; carving from a Portuguese colony in Braganza Castle (photo: the Comandante). Middle Row: Emily Wilson, Chair of Classics at U. Pennsylvania; one of the Riace bronze warriors; a 1950s ad depicting a man spanking his wife for making poor coffee; Bottom row: ad showing an automatic so simple a woman can drive it; Zack Polanski, leader of Britain’s Green Party, and boyfriend; Sarah Mullally, Archheretic of Canterbury

As a professor at an American university from 2004 to 2017—and this was a university in Arkansas, right in the Bible Belt—I was often shocked to find my colleagues ranting, for all the world like religious fanatics, and with just as much imperviousness to reason, although their faith was not Christianity, but a new cult, which, I soon realised, you could only criticise at the risk of total excommunication, ostracism, and cancellation. It’s not an accident, or tangential, that my 2022 satirical novel, Our Parent Who Art in Heaven, has a title that alludes to the Lord’s Prayer, but distorts it, for that’s essentially what the progressive or woke religion is: an attempt to remake Christianity, but without a God, or any metaphysics, or any objective basis for its morality. Essentially it’s a travesty of Christianity, just as Nolan’s Odyssey is a travesty of Homer. Both the pseudo-religion and all its cultural products are uncreative, merely copying older, nobler forms, in increasingly incoherent and distorted ways.

One set of myths that shaped Western civilization was that of the Greeks. Let’s briefly recap what those myths took for granted and what they taught. The underlying metaphysics assume that there is a transcendent purpose to existence, and that gods interfere in human affairs, and punish hubris and blasphemy. Each of the Olympian gods is a personification of a force of nature, or of human life, or of several such. Life is hard, and the successful man (or woman, but usually a man) is a hero, one who fights against impossible odds, fearlessly and relentlessly. As Nietzsche pointed out, their ideal is aristocratic. The Greek city states were sometimes governed by tyrants, sometimes by oligarchies, and sometimes by democracies—not representative ones, but direct ones—but even the latter were aristocratic in nature, as neither helots (foreigners), nor slaves, could vote. (Nor women.) And they were warrior aristocracies. Citizens were soldiers. And wars were not like tribal wars, where a few token casualties are often sufficient to end a conflict. In the constant Greek wars, defeat often meant the extermination of all the grown men and the enslavement of all the women and children. In order to survive, a polis or city state had to produce warriors of incredible bravery and skill. That they did so is proven by their success at repelling the greatest empire of the ancient world, the Persians, at Marathon in 480 BC.

The other great myth—I use the term not in its pejorative sense, meaning ‘fantasy’, but to mean a story that embodies a metaphysical truth and shapes a society—has been Christianity. This also holds that life is inherently meaningful, and directed by divine purpose, but it leads to a different morality. Christ taught that we are all sinners, but can be saved by the grace of God, and that we owe compassion and love to our fellow human beings. It’s not essentially aristocratic (which means ‘the rule of the best’) in ethos. On the contrary, according to Christianity we are all equally beloved of God, and deserving of his love, so all human beings should be treated with dignity.

You know all of this, of course. I’m just recapping here to make the point that whether you believe, as Tom Holland sets out in Dominion, that it’s essentially Christianity that has shaped the West, or as Professor David Starkey does, that paganism is more or equally important, our civilization has been the product of societies who believed in a divine will, who never questioned that there was such a thing as objective reality, and who derived a morality from their understanding of religion and that reality.

Now, however, most of that has gone. Since the Enlightenment, and with ever stronger force, we have become rationalistic, atheistic, and materialistic. Classical Marxism is no longer the rallying cry of the Left, since even they have discerned that wherever it has been tried, it has failed miserably, both to provide social justice and prosperity, and also to maintain any kind of freedom for the individual. And since it’s become obvious that the working classes of Europe and America are by nature socially conservative, and will not foment revolution against the capitalists, a new class of the oppressed had to be created, and a new set of heroes. I’m oversimplifying a bit, perhaps, but the generalisation is useful. Enter the post-Marxists, the Frankfurt School, Marcuse, Gramsci, and Dutschke, who advocated ‘the long march through the institutions’ as an alternative to revolution, which has so successfully been implemented by the Left throughout most of Europe and in America—even in the red states, as I hinted earlier. Post-structuralist French philosophers like Foucault and Derrida have also contributed to the formation of what is now essentially a dogma, a religion, which may not be challenged. They argue that there is no God, nor any objective reality, and thus no way of knowing the truth. This may strike ordinary people as absurd—like Samuel Johnson, who demonstrated the existence of reality by kicking a chair, they might say ‘Go and jump off a cliff then, if you don’t think there’s such a thing as gravity’—but in the universities, it’s now the predominant view among most professors in the humanities and social sciences. Does this matter? Yes, because they are educating the leaders of society, the people who become your children’s teachers, the politicians, the journalists, the creators of culture. They argue that there is no objective truth, only ‘your truth’ or ‘my truth’. So Nolan can interpret the Odyssey just as he wants: that’s ‘his truth’. And all opinions are in principle equally valid. This accounts for the grade inflation you see everywhere in academia. In Cambridge now, for instance, almost everyone gets a 2:1, which was not the case when I was a student there. And if there is no objective truth, there are only narratives or stories that are wielded by different groups in order to increase their power. (Obviously there’s a grain of truth in all this, which is why it’s been so successful).

Certainly some of the assertions of the Left are not unfounded. The sexist ads in my gallery, for instance, demonstrate that misogyny did exist quite openly not long ago, and figures like Cecil Rhodes really were imperialists and ready to exploit natives. Slavery really was cruel and unjust. The problem is that they tend to cherry pick their history to prove their points, and leave out anything that doesn’t suit their narrative—for instance, that Europeans did not invent slavery, and that the British, far from being the worst culprits, were the first empire to put an end to it, at great cost and sacrifice. The other massive problem with the post-modern mindset is that although it asserts that there is no objective truth, that is itself a truth statement, and can’t be possibly be true: if there is no objective truth, it can’t be possible to say anything about the truth at all. And although the Left now asserts that all morality is imposed by a powerful group for its own ends, and that morality can’t be independently determined, they do in fact make confident moral assertions: for example, that racism is wrong, that societies should be open and multicultural, that the ‘male patriarchy’ has been tyrannical and cruel, and so on. And the great Original Sin was slavery and colonialism, for which white Europeans were responsible. Thus, even now, anthropologists, historians, psychologists and sociologists—and even professors of literature and Creative Writing—will insist that the curriculum must be ‘decolonised.’ And in this new religion or cult, the elect are not those who believe in Christ, but those who have been oppressed: women, ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ people. The irony is that although they criticise the unjust hierarchies of the past, they advocate a new one. The best people are black, Muslim, women (especially from ethnic minorities) and gays and trans people. The worst are white men, especially heterosexual white men, who are the worst of all. And although they talk constantly of ‘inclusion’ they show by their cancel culture that they are only too happy to exclude anyone they don’t like or who disagrees with them.

What we are living with now is what amounts to a religion without a God, or even any sense of transcendent meaning (such as Buddhism has). There is a strict moral code, but no way of determining what that code is, except to trust the pronouncements of the Progressive experts, even when they’re full of contradictions. Life is meaningless, according to them, and we are nothing more than random groupings of atoms. Life is therefore entirely materialistic. Thus the enjoyment of its fruits becomes the only rational goal for a human being. Nations and tribes are inherently evil, at least if they are Western—Muslim values must be respected, though, and for instance in Britain, Sikhs are allowed to carry the kirpan or ceremonial dagger, although native Britons are not allowed to carry any weapon—and we should all strive for complete globalism, so that it makes no difference where anyone lives. And feminism, which some people still think of as a movement to advocate for equal rights for women, has been transformed into a belief system that treats men as moral and intellectual inferiors, and aims at societal domination, which it has largely achieved. Look at the BBC.

Most of these beliefs, it’s curious to observe, are derived from Christianity, but distortions of it. Whereas Christ commanded love and compassion for the poor and the unfortunate, Progressivism elevates the ‘oppressed’ to a kind of saintly victim status, and denigrates anyone more fortunate. It’s a religion of envy and resentment. And whereas Christianity advocated dignity for women, the ability to determine their own future, and so on, progressivism elevates them not to equality with men, but to superior status. As I’ve said before, the likely dystopia of the future is not Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but in fact a brutal and ruthless matriarchy, the rule of the den mothers. Throughout Europe in fact, it’s materialising already. Empathy becomes suicidal, and so borders become obsolete. Anyone can come and live here, and need not even work. The moment they arrive, even if they have done so illegally, they are entitled to free housing, food, and an allowance. The result will be Europe undone.

Is there any alternative? Unfortunately those conservatives who long for a return to what they see as the halcyon days of Reagan and Thatcher are deluded. A purely secular, materialistic, rationalistic culture will not defeat the combined onslaught of Islamism, which, whatever you think of it, is a coherent monomyth, nor of Wokeism, which is less coherent, as I hope I’ve shown, but equally authoritarian. People desperately need meaning and purpose in their lives. Capitalistic striving, hedonism and materialism will not do—particularly now that the young no longer prosper under the system. An alternative metaphysical system must be provided if the West is to survive at all. Many neo-pagans hope that paganism, usually in some kind of Nordic variety, will be the basis for the new civilization. I don’t think that’s feasible or desirable. Surely only a Christian revival can save us? These are Christian nations. We must return to the faith that made Europe, or in my view we will perish, and soon.

Tales of the Greeks and Trojans, Roger Lancelyn Green, illustrated by Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone (London: Purnell, 1963); Lupita Nyong’o, Helen in Nolan’s film

On July 4th, 1963, my eighth birthday, my grandmother took me to Smith’s bookshop in Aylesbury High Street and let me choose any book for my present from her. I chose Greeks and Trojans by Roger Lancelyn Green, a retelling of the Iliad and Odyssey for children. I hadn’t heard of Homer, but the stories gripped me and gave me a lifelong fascination for mythology, the Ancient Greeks, and history. To this day I love the superb illustrations by Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone, whom I assume were sisters. And not only did Homer’s stories mould me—they also moulded my sons. I remember one of my best friends being stunned when James, my eldest (who was eight at the time, I think), asking him not which football team he supported, but whether he was on the side of the Greeks or Trojans. All this is a roundabout way of saying that Homer’s work, which was probably composed in the eight or early seventh century BC, is literally one of the foundations of the European imagination, and for me has been as important as my native mythology, of King Arthur and Robin Hood. So I must add my voice to the chorus condemning Nolan’s Odyssey. Many critics have discussed the historical inaccuracies—for example that the Laestrygons wear iron plate armour, which would not be invented for more than 2,000 years after the events of the Trojan war—but rather than focussing on Nolan’s incompetence, I want to suggest that he or his masters (and mistresses!) are motivated essentially by malice: the film is an exercise in destroying the fabric of our civilization, which the elite regime now hates and is ashamed of. And race-swapping is only a part of it.

Let’s briefly address the more egregious casting choices. Lupita Nyong’o, the Kenyan actress, is cast as both Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, and also as her sister, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s queen. Does this matter? Or is Tom Hanks, who says that if you object to this you are a racist Trump supporter, right? Some say that since the story is a ‘fantasy’, it makes no difference who plays the parts. But this is nonsense. The Odyssey is not a fantasy, but a fiction that takes place in a recognisable Mediterranean world. Supernatural figures, such as gods and ogres and nymphs, appear, but always within the context of Greek mythology. None of them have been invented by the author. And in the Iliad, Helen is described as ‘fair’ and ‘white-armed’, which no one could argue Nyong’o is, whether you find her beautiful or not. So why was a black woman cast in the role? The only conceivable reason is that for Hollywood in 2026, no white woman, however lovely, can portray the most beautiful woman in the world: of course she must be black. The Hispanic actor John Leguizamo, who has repeatedly affirmed that only Latinos can play Latinos, is also in the cast as Eumaeus, Odysseus’s loyal Greek swineherd—so apparently his scruples only go one way. In addition we have Zendaya as the goddess Athene—less problematical, for the gods need not look Greek, although the Greeks did typically portray them in their sculpture as having Greek features—and, incredibly, the black rapper Travis Scott as ‘the bard’, Homer himself, presumably. Nolan claims that his idea here was to connect the oral tradition of Greek poetry from the Archaic Age with that other tradition of contemporary oral poetry, rap. Hmm, yes, we can see that Scott is a universal genius, equal to Homer, if not superior! And let’s not even discuss the ludicrous Eliot Page, who is reputed to be Achilles, as that isn’t yet confirmed…

Is this ‘colour-blind’ casting? Clearly not. If it were, we might have a Japanese actor playing Odysseus, an Indonesian woman playing Penelope, a Thai playing Homer and an Afghan playing Helen. Equally, we might have Matt Damon playing Shaka Zulu, or Tom Hanks playing Barack Obama. Imagine the outrage if that were the case! In fact, white people are to lose their heroes, and they are to be replaced, primarily, by black people, who in the woke pseudo-religion are morally superior to all others. If Page, a tiny, frail, weak transgender woman, can play Achilles—and even if she doesn’t, the fact that people are defending that casting is proof that they hate us—the message is clear: all your stories, even the foundational myth of Western civilization, are no more than childish and misogynistic fables created by toxic men to perpetuate their own power, and we, the woke, can and will deconstruct them and remake them as we wish.

I don’t have space here to properly discuss the classicist Emily Wilson, whose translation apparently Nolan relied on. She is a feminist who has declared that Odysseus’ ‘heternormative’ marriage with Penelope made her ‘uncomfortable’, and who seeks to reinterpret the myths through the lens of her own prejudices. (If you watch a video of this heavily tattooed woman reciting her translation, histrionically, clutching her hair like some mad Medea, her voice quavering with lisped hysteria, you will probably understand why she was not the best translator to follow.)

So what is going on? Is Nolan a total imbecile, or merely a coward taking orders from the Hollywood hierarchy? We can’t be sure. It appears that he’s a thoroughgoing materialist—not the best vantage point for someone directing an epic based on myth—and indeed the trailer admonishes us to ‘Defy the gods’—which Odysseus does not do, and which is not by any means the message of Homer or of Greek literature generally. But of course it is in accord with the current political orthodoxy. God doesn’t exist, so humans can choose their destiny, and indeed define themselves: their ‘gender’ (a nonsensical category), their race, their destiny. The film still hasn’t been released so we can’t know how bad it is, but we have already seen enough from the trailers to confirm that it’s intended as an assault on our civilization, and on the very concept of myth as a way of approaching metaphysical truth. The cultural elite no longer believes in any of that. For them, the old stories are all about misogyny, racism, and toxic masculinity and stupidity. The real heroes are women and black people. Nolan’s Odyssey is yet another measure to disinherit us. Only lackeys will pay to see it.

Meanwhile, in Britain, where Nolan and Wilson hail from, although they are both ‘anywheres’ with allegiance to globalist liberalism, this weekend saw the Unite the Kingdom march, led by Tommy Robinson, the ‘far-right’ figure. I just want to mention it because Starmer threatened the marchers, whom he called ‘unpatriotic’ (!) with ‘the full force of the law’, even though he never threatens pro-Palestine marchers, who are also marching for national interests, and who often chant openly anti-western and anti-Semitic slogans. Besides, he banned fifteen ‘foreign agitators’ from speaking at the event, and threatened them with instant arrest if they arrived at any British airport. These ‘agitators’ included Dominik Tarczinski, a member of the European Parliament, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek, the Dutch commentator, who is certainly conservative, but not by any means ‘far-right’, unless that term now means anyone who dares dissent from the woke liberal worldview, in which case I would be included. So free speech is not allowed at a major public event in Britain, the country that pioneered free public speech. This is a national disgrace. It may seem unrelated to the Nolan film, but it’s a symptom of the same epidemic: the assault by the globalist Left on western tradition, heritage, history, political freedom and culture. These people don’t just have different views, nor are they merely ignorant and incompetent. This is a concerted attempt to destroy what’s left of our civilization and replace it with a borderless one, in which compliant subjects addicted to their phones and media will submit to the authority of the matriarchs and the billionaires who control the matriarchs. That is the future unless we resist. Where are our heroes, our men of the stamp of Achilles, Ajax, Diomedes and Odysseus? And where is our great bard, our Homer? We used to produce men like Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, and Milton.

In their stead we have Travis Scott, Christopher Nolan and Sally Rooney? Zeus forbid!

First picture: Rembrandt? Next, the Comandante on Pont Mynwy (Monnow Bridge), Monmouth; the Comandante before Glyndwr’s parliament at Machnylleth; the final picture is in Chichester: I took the photograph but can’t remember the artist’s name.

The elections of May 7 indicate a sea-change in British politics. In the parliamentary elections in Wales and Scotland, Labour have been crushed—a particularly bitter blow for them in Wales, where they have been unchallenged for close to a century—and in the local elections in England, where voter turnout was far higher than usual (about 49%, compared to the usual 29-30%), both Labour and the Conservatives have been thrashed. If this is a harbinger of the next General Election, it’s clear that the duopoly is over. Considering how utterly both the major parties have failed the nation in the past decades, consistently ignoring the interests of the native population, particularly the working-class, and indeed flouting the political will of the people who voted for them, again and again, especially on immigration, that must be a good thing. The question is, which parties will benefit, and how will the emergence of a truly multi-party polity change the nation? On this, there are grounds for optimism, but only very cautious optimism. It could all go disastrously wrong; indeed we may be heading for authoritarianism of one kind or another—or even of both kinds. I’ll explain!

First, the obvious beneficiary of Labour’s abandonment of the British working class is Reform, in both England and Wales. And for the time being at least, Reform are looking like the de facto opposition of Labour, and Farage could become the next Prime Minister, if current trends continue. That scenario doesn’t fill me with hope, because Farage, despite occasionally expressing ‘based’ views, has proven again and again that he is a turncoat with no genuine principles, a pragmatist who will do anything to gain power. Not only has he welcomed Tory defectors into the parliamentary party—most of them not very intelligent, with the exception of Danny Kruger—but he has also fielded dozens, possibly hundreds, of immigrant candidates, some of whom even campaigned in their own languages. Although his current stance on immigration is ostensibly tough—it has to be, given Restore’s meteoric rise—he has previously said that mass deportations would be politically impossible. Besides, as an ex-City man and avowed Thatcherite, in office he would almost certainly be neo-liberal and globalist. In other words, more of the same. Many on the right, for example Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Tory cabinet minister, are urging that the Right should unite, and I think an alliance between Reform and the Conservative Party before the next election is very likely. It wouldn’t change anything essential.

The other big winner in the elections in England was the Green Party, a far-left amalgam of neo-Marxism and Islamism, two very strange bedfellows who share almost no values, except for a hatred of England, of Christianity, and our entire heritage. It may seem too lunatic to take seriously, but that would be unwise: remember that the Nazis were elected with only 12% of the popular vote in 1933. And the Muslims, like the British working-class, have comprehensively abandoned the Labour Party. In 2019, 86% of Muslim voters cast their votes for Labour; in this election it was down to 33%. Not all of the deserters voted for the Greens, of course: many turned to ‘independent’ Muslim candidates who run openly on support for Gaza. We can be sure that in the next General Election there will either be an openly Islamist Party, or else Muslims as a community will be supporting the Greens, as they understand that the Greens are too ingenuous to perceive that they are being used as a Trojan horse. The Green vote is growing, largely because of Muslim defection from Labour, and the defection of ‘educated’ women, especially young women, from Labour, who have been so brainwashed that they are not capable of critical thought.

I doubt if the Greens could garner an overall majority, but in alliance with Labour and the LibDems (who did quite well in the elections, at the expense of Labour and the Tories), could conceivably command a majority. That would almost certainly mean an overtly authoritarian government, as both the Islamists and the neo-Marxists have authoritarian goals. Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens, has actually stated that there would be no place for ‘people with toxic views’ in his Britain. He didn’t spell out how he would remove them, but the options are obvious: prison, banishment, or execution. And we know that the Islamists favour forced compliance. The blasphemy laws they have pushed for, and which seem certain to be enacted by a now shaken Labour government which will do all it can to appease them, will effectively destroy free speech in Britain and make Islam the only protected religion in the country—in effect, the state religion. The Green wokeists claim to oppose authoritarianism, but their willingness to cancel and exclude anyone who disagrees with them is proof of their insincerity. In fact Equity, or equality of outcome, can only be enforced by a removal of freedom. People will not stand for it voluntarily.

Furthermore, we are a step closer to the end of the Union. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party was again the biggest party in the parliamentary elections, for the fifth time running, although it still lacks an overall majority. (Two of the SNP MPs elected are transgender immigrants, one on them actually on a student visa! You couldn’t make this up, could you?) In Wales the nationalist party Plaid Cymru is the biggest party in the Senedd, though here too it lacks an overall majority. The problem with both parties is that they are neo-Marxist, and if they do achieve independence, will govern at the expense of their native populations, not in their interests. (In the gallery, I put a couple of pictures of myself in my beloved Wales, looking suitably concerned!)

Apart from the destruction of the traditional parties, there is one more great ray of hope: Restore. Because it’s a very new party, and could not yet field candidates nationally, its results may appear insignificant. However, in Great Yarmouth, where Rupert Lowe, its leader, is MP, they stood for, and won, every single seat on the city council. (Farage had predicted that they wouldn’t even get 1% of the vote!) Although the mainstream media is still calling them ‘far-right’, they are not: they are simply a patriotic party reflecting the will of ordinary British people. And I believe they have a very real chance of winning the next General Election, particularly if it is held in 2029. This is why I am not in favour of an immediate General Election, despite Starmer’s and Labour’s obvious unfitness to govern. If it were held in the next couple of months, it seems certain that Reform would win, perhaps needing the support of the Conservatives to form a majority. We have to hope that the enormously popular Restore will win the next election, with an overall majority. If that happens, we would see the end of illegal immigration immediately, the drastic reduction of legal migration, the deportation of all foreign criminals, Britain leaving the ECHR, and the end of the power of the Blob, the quangos and civil servants who are throttling the country, largely in order to increase their own wealth and power. Britain could still be saved—though I suspect that Scotland will be independent in the next couple of decades, and Northern Ireland will join Eire. I’m not sure about Wales.

One of the problems is that the first-past-the-post system is designed for the duopoly. That doesn’t mean that proportional representation would be better: we’ve seen how that works in most European countries. You get coalitions of parties that can’t agree on anything and end up governing ineffectively, succumbing to the influence of their unelected civil servants, who serve the globalist world order. If that happens, Britain will remain mired in open borders immigration, with an ever-growing Muslim population that will come to dominate politics, and a compliant London-based globalist elite who will appease them. Britain as we know it will cease to exist.

Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain really are the country’s last realistic hope. The one thing both Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski agree on is that Labour and the Tories are dead. I agree with them on that. But let’s hope they are both wrong that they are the future of the country: either of them would be disastrous. As Britons, we must remember who we are, and make ourselves heard, while we are still the majority.

We must take the country back before it’s lost forever.

Clockwise, from top left: Banksy’s new sculpture in London; Michelangelo’s Pieta; Rodin’s Cathedral; and one of the Bronze warriors found at Riace, Sicily, C5th BC.

This week, on Wednesday, in Waterloo Place, central London, Banksy installed a new statue, which by now you have almost certainly seen. It depicts a man in a suit (of course it’s a man) striding off the plinth on which he stands, because his face is covered by the flag he’s carrying. How daring, how edgy! You will have seen and heard the ecstasies, also, online, and perhaps among your acquaintances. Wherever I looked, I saw people saying that it was ‘brilliant’, and claiming that they loved it—untruthfully, I think, though that depends, obviously, on what we mean by ‘love.’ I’ll come to that. And somewhat incredibly (or not?) for a piece of art that’s been installed in a public place without permission, Westminster City Council has issued a statement saying that they are delighted, and are taking steps to protect it. The mainstream media agrees. So anti-Establishment rebel artist Banksy is applauded by the Establishment. How ironic, and how paradigmatic of the postmodern age, in which most people, especially the educated, no longer have any idea what art is.

I am not a fine artist, but I am a writer, and a musician, and I’ve spent my whole life making art and thinking about what it is and what it’s for. Let’s keep this simple. We don’t need to get too abstract, intellectual, or pretentious about this. Ever since the first human artists daubed the cave walls of Lascaux and Altamira, art has had a number of characteristics that have been pretty universal. For a start, it’s beautiful. It needn’t depict anything edifying or joyful—indeed, it often depicts scenes of horror—but it’s skillfully executed, and aesthetically pleasing, often astonishingly so, regardless of its subject matter. Secondly, it’s moving. When you behold real art, you feel something. Note that word: I don’t mean that it causes you to have a certain thought. (I’m not saying that art shouldn’t be thought-provoking, it goes without saying: I’m saying that that is not its essential function.) When you look at Michelangelo’s Pieta, if you are at all sensitive, you feel compassion for the Mother of God in her grief as she holds the broken corpse of her son in her arms. When you see Rodin’s Cathedral, you are struck with wonder, not merely by the beauty of the hands, but by the way they reach simultaneously towards each other, and upwards, to heaven, like the Gothic arches of a cathedral, creating a feeling of awe and transcendence. When you see the naked warrior of Riace, struck in the mid fifth century BC in Sicily, you admire the strength and beauty of the warrior’s body, but also his poise, his confidence, his inner power; it’s inspiring. In all of these cases, the artist is showing us something about the world which we may not have noticed, at least in this particular aspect. He is showing us how beautiful life is—even in the case of the Pieta, where we contemplate a man who has been tortured and murdered—and in every case we are being led towards a more moral, meaningful life. In fact, the virtues of beauty, truth, and goodness shine forth from all real art. Even Picasso’s Guernica. Lastly, art has a metaphysical dimension. It asks us to contemplate the transcendent, the eternal, and our relation to it—not in some crude, preachy way, but with the sense of innocent wonder that a child contemplates a rabbit, a flower, or the sea. It is always spiritual.

If we consider Banksy’s sculpture in these terms, how does it fare? Technically, it’s well-executed. The man looks realistic and natural, and his stride is full of purpose and energy. We can almost feel the wind blowing the flag across his face, and his rather stiff limbs indicate the rigidity of his character. So, like most Establishment-approved art these days, it’s competent, certainly. But beautiful? And moving? Does anyone feel wonder or joy or any other noble emotion while looking at this? And as for transcendence—fairly obviously not. The statue is not even attempting to exalt our hearts or spirits in that way. What is its purpose then?

Let’s begin with the obvious. It’s a satire, on the blindness of patriotism. It’s no coincidence that the statue has been erected in a part of London noted for figures from the heyday of the British Empire. The purpose of the statue is not to make you feel more deeply, to reconsider your position in the universe, or to fill you with awe—it’s to reinforce a belief that all good people, that is, all Guardian-reading, BBC-watching, Labour or Green-voting people, would share: Patriotism is bad! Flags are bad! Imperialism bad! Colonialism bad! Men in suits bad! Far from being a rebel, Banksy is actually the darling of the Establishment, and is celebrated by the chattering classes everywhere, from Islington to Hampstead, from Brighton to Hebden Bridge, and no doubt from Brooklyn to Boston and from San Diego to San Francisco too. The content of the work is purely intellectual, and its sole purpose is to make you feel virtuous as you look at it, because you are intelligent enough, and enlightened enough, not to be taken in by this primitive patriotism. The woke midwits who applaud this as art have lost sight of what art is. They think that it’s anything that confirms their beliefs and prejudices. That’s why we have almost no good art now, at least that’s successful, whether in the fine arts, music, or literature. ‘Artists’, like Banksy, or Tracey Emin, are essentially grifters, who never make anything surprising, let alone anything that elevates your spirit. Banksy, the so-called anti-capitalist Progressive and rebel, has made millions by flattering the conformists who believe everything they read and hear in the mainstream media. What a farce!

I realise I have not given a full definition or description of art here—that was not my goal, and anyway it’s impossible, because true art will always be indefinable, ineffable, and Protean. But I hope that I have encouraged some people who may have been bamboozled into thinking that Banksy is a great artist to think again: he’s actually a mediocre one, at best. And if we can begin to recognise what art is not, perhaps we can again begin to learn what art is. The Greeks knew it very well, two and a half thousand years ago. Let’s not celebrate this ‘Phart’ or phoney art, as Fyfe Robertson called it. Life is far too short. Let’s return to beauty, truth, and goodness.

Mérida, Spain (Augusta Emerita, founded 25 B.C.) Photos by the Comandante.

Not long ago, I underwent massage therapy, for a back problem, and noticed that in every room in the ‘facility’, there was a Buddha statue. I asked my therapist, whom I knew was a practising Catholic, what she thought of this. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘my bosses choose the decor. It’s just fashionable.’ And in Portugal, where a few decades ago you saw crucifixes, images of the Virgin Mary, and so on, wherever you went, in private homes, hotels, and public buildings, now the Buddha is nearly ubiquitous. If you visit almost any house for sale, particularly if it’s owned by an expat, or an upper-middle class Portuguese person, inevitably there will be pictures or statues of the Buddha. And I had to give up yoga practice because my yoga teacher (who was in other respects very good) insisted on us chanting Sanskrit mantras, which none of us understood, for almost half the lesson. Is a wholesale conversion to Buddhism and the Vedanta underway in Portugal? No. Not at all. And yet the trappings of Eastern religion are now de rigueur here, in polite and progressive society. In Pilates class, for instance, my instructor greets us with ‘Namaste’. What is going on? It’s all part of the systematic undermining of Western culture, particularly Christianity, and its replacement with a kind of superficial, but pervasive, and invasive, barbarism. This is not to imply that Buddhism, for instance, is barbaric per se; I used to consider myself a Buddhist, and know westerners who are Buddhists for genuine spiritual reasons. But when a half-understood exotic liturgy is adopted, and indeed imposed, and when respect for that is enforced, while the native culture can be denigrated and even prohibited, that is sheer barbarism. A kind of forced conversion is going on.

You probably know the CP Cavafy poem, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’: it depicts an emperor in all his finery awaiting the expected arrival of the barbarians, who are ‘due here today.’ The senate isn’t functioning, because ‘What’s the point of senators making laws now? / Once they barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.’ The emperor even has a scroll to give to their leader, and the consuls and praetors are bejewelled, and carry gold canes, ‘Because… things like that dazzle the barbarians.’ However, the poem ends in anti-climax: the barbarians don’t arrive, and men on the border even say that there are no barbarians any longer. The conclusion is a kind of Aesopian moral that is dear to the misnamed ‘Liberals’ and Progressives: ‘Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution.’

This of course is the chief argument of the Left against the patriotic Right: that they (the conservatives) only use the threat of barbarian invasion to distract from their own incompetence and corruption. It’s a partial truth—that can indeed be a motive for xenophobia, on both sides of the Atlantic—and other truths in the poem, for instance that the ruling class is ready to welcome the barbarians without resistance, and that the senators are bored by their own rhetoric and no longer see any point in governing, may persuade us that Cavafy is right. However, the poem was neither historically accurate—the Roman Empire was indeed overwhelmed by barbarians, who did exist and did arrive—nor prescient. Because there are indeed barbarians, and we aren’t waiting for them to arrive. They are within our borders, and they are destroying western civilization, with the active connivance of an effete, bejewelled governing class. The mandarins are making alliances with the barbarians, like the British Green Party (and Labour, and even the Tories and Reform) in the hope of capturing the Muslim vote and thus securing power. The hypocrisy and treachery are not the exclusive preserve of the neo-Marxist Left: there are plenty on the Right, too, who use the rhetoric of outside threat to justify their own predations, wars, and greed.

When an empire collapses, it’s seldom solely the result of barbarian incursions. Usually, the society has lost faith in itself, has become weak, spoiled, (in Britain 25% of the population is registered as ‘disabled’ and 51%—a majority—receive state benefits) and sybaritic, and fascinated by the exotic Other. Its leaders play an active part in undermining the culture, by rewriting the history, or erasing it altogether, as has happened systematically in the West, and encouraging an exaggerated respect for other cultures, which are supposed to be nobler, purer, and more spiritual. (Notice the absurd and historically inaccurate reverence for Native American and African cultures for example.) And of course nowhere is Buddhism a real threat. Only in Poland is it the second religion. In all other European countries, apart from the few and tiny Muslim ones, Islam is now second, and while the elites are not yet advocating conversion to it, nor converting to it themselves, they are devising ways to give that religion a specially protected status, particularly in the UK: the thin end of the wedge.

At seventy, I am an old man now, although I don’t feel like one, and I struggle to reconcile myself to the future. Not for my sake, obviously: I won’t be here. But for the sakes of my children, and their children if they ever have any—the elites would prefer them not to, because a serf class of immigrants is more manipulable, or so they believe. And also for the sake of my ancestors. Like Edmund Burke, I believe in the depths of my soul that we bear a responsibility to our forefathers, the people who built our countries and our civilization. And these were Europeans. Christians. As this civilization declines and falls, which no one can doubt is happening, it’s possible that something different but greater may take its place. There are many rumblings about a new Renaissance on the internet. But I see no signs of that as yet. Out of the turmoil of the High Middle Ages came the painting of Piero della Francesca, Giotto, Botticelli, Raphael and the rest; the epics of Dante and Mallory, and Shakespeare; and polyphonic music. What do we have to compare? Nothing apparent. Of course it’s possible that great art is being produced but suppressed by the Deep State. Every artist knows from bitter experience that the merit of the work is no longer the chief criterion, or even a criterion at all, for praise and publication. And yet somehow those Italian warlords, those late medieval Mafiosos, the Borgias, the Medicis, and the rest, these bloodthirsty, murderous dukes also managed to be generous and tasteful patrons of the arts. On the other hand, our own grey-suited billionaires, the technocrats of Brussels and Silicon Valley, the owners of media empires—these people have no interest in the arts, nor culture, nor spirituality. And that’s as true of Donald Trump, Elon Musk or Nigel Farage as it is of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Emanuel Macron. These are all Philistines, people who don’t read books at all, or if they do, like Obama, read Oprah’s Book Club picks. The elite is middlebrow, at best.

Unfortunately most people, including the highly educated and supposed highbrows, don’t understand what is at stake and what our choices are. Most people on the Left are concerned, perhaps correctly, about the rise of far-right populist movements, and the possibility of fascist dictatorships. Most people on the Right are concerned, absolutely correctly, about the rise of Islamism, and a possible future of authoritarian Muslim regimes. What nearly all fail to see is that a return to a kind of atheistic, humanistic society built on social democracy, such as most of the West enjoyed a few decades ago, is no longer possible. The reason is that it lacks a satisfying metaphysics. The mild statist social democracy and globalism of the post-war world has turned into a highly divisive creed, a pseudo-religion based on the Christian virtues of humility, compassion, and love, but lacking any coherent basis for its morality (because if all morality is subjective, as post-modernist philosophy claims, how can we even agree on what a moral society looks like?) and also openly sexist (against men) and racist (against white people.) So the woke ersatz religion is doomed and is already dying.

I can see only one alternative, the historic one that has sustained us since the reign of Constantine the Great: Christianity. It is the only belief system that offers dignity and freedom to all, and which has a basis not on subjective judgements, but on divine and eternal truth. Whatever you think of Buddhism or the Vedanta, it’s obvious that they are not going to become the dominant belief system of Europe or America, at least unless demographic trends change drastically. The wars in the Middle East and the chaos of Muslim Africa—not just the Maghreb, but many of the sub-Saharan states too—do pose a real threat from Islamist invaders, of a kind we probably haven’t faced since the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks in the seventeenth century. A mild, marijuana-fuelled socialistic love for all humanity, as trumpeted by the Greens, will not stem that tide of marauders, who are bent on world domination. Only a renewed faith in the force that built the West, Christianity, can give us the strength we need.

Thursday was St. George’s Day. Like him, we must have the courage to face, and slay, the dragon. And the task begins with slaying the dragon within ourselves. The true Christian knight was not a savage, but like Chaucer’s character ‘a gentil, parfit knight’. He protected women and children, and was generous to the poor. He was chivalrous, honourable. He only fought when necessary. But that time is upon us.

Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir, two pseudo-philosophers

In this week’s New Statesman, an article called ‘Angry Young Women’ reported on a poll by Merlin Strategy, carried out for them—and bear in mind that this a left-wing, ‘progressive’ magazine, that has long championed feminism—that demonstrates clearly that feminism has failed to make women happier, even though it has succeeded in many of its initial material aims, such as equality of opportunity, equal salaries and so on. The British women aged 18-30 polled are more likely to have degrees than their male counterparts, earn £2,200 a year more, and are twice as likely to own their own homes. And yet most of them are not happy, or optimistic about their future.

Incredibly, 35% of them have a negative view of men, and another third are neutral—only about a third of British women have a positive view of men. 40% think men don’t understand sexual consent. 20% don’t want to have children. In other words, it’s clear that the decades-long campaign of radical feminist brainwashing, which taught women that men were the root of all evil, has succeeded. Despite the evidence of their own lives, they still seem to believe that patriarchal power structures must be swept away before social justice can be achieved. In this essay I want to consider some of the causes of this catastrophe, which can be boiled down to Marxist and neo-Marxist ‘thought’ (it’s actually much closer to prejudice), and some of the consequences, particularly with regard to demographic collapse, and the colonisation of the West.

The New Statesman notes that young women are more ‘progressive’—though that term is a misnomer—than young men, and much more politically radicalised. 60% of them—a clear majority—say they could not have a relationship with a man who had different views from them on Palestine, or Donald Trump. Think about that. Nearly two-thirds of British women think that it’s impossible to talk to someone who doesn’t hold identical views to themselves on political issues pertaining to countries thousands of miles away. As I’ve said before, this is because to the so-called ‘progressive’ mindset—really a deeply tribal, conformist one—believes that if you disagree, you are not merely mistaken, but evil personified. (To give an example: a female member of my own family this week told me that she would be happy if the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel were assassinated.) Many of them say that they are disappointed because men don’t seem interested in these topics, although their main topic of conversation with their female friends is politics. In other words, the aim of the radical feminists, which was always to liberate women from child-bearing and rearing families, has been achieved. But at what cost?

When I was young, most men supported equal opportunities for women, and implicitly supported feminism, because we thought that women just wanted equality. And of course, some of them did. But increasingly, and particularly since about 2010, the educational system has come under the sway of radical intersectional feminism, which has had a poisonous influence on almost every academic discipline, from literary criticism to history, from philosophy to political science, sociology, and psychology. And it goes without saying that this extreme ideology completely dominates all those spurious ‘disciplines’ which have the word ‘Studies’ in them: Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, African-American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and so on. All of these pseudo-subjects are premised on the idea that the white patriarchy has oppressed various minorities for centuries and must be smashed. There is no discussion of this central belief, no debate, no attempt to discover and test theories: all research is merely evidence to back up conclusions already accepted by everyone in the field. Even Creative Writing, another ludicrous university subject (which I myself taught) is not quite so futile or antithetical to what academic study should be.

As Camille Paglia has said, feminism treats women like defective men. In this strange cult, which is divorced from reality, men and women are not complementary, do not have a shared destiny, and are not helpmeets for each other, but on the contrary they are in competition with each other. And as feminism identified men as the culprits for everything wrong with the world—racism, colonialism, war, greed, sexism, homophobia—it decided that women would make much better rulers, and men should be taught to be more like women. Our entire educational system is premised on this idea: boys are forced to study like women, and the high grades and prizes go to students who follow the feminine virtues of diligence, discipline, and obedience and conformity. (I’m not saying that only women do well in this system: a certain kind of feminised man can succeed too, particularly if he is self-effacing and apologetic.) So we now have a world in which most young people are unmarried and lonely, compared to the 1960s when 97% of people were married. The birth rate is well under replacement level in every European country, which means immigration is necessary (or so the argument goes) for economic growth. But it’s also the case that women’s maternal instincts, which by nature should have gone on caring for their children, are going towards compassion for, and deep emotional attachment to, immigrants, whom they see as ‘refugees’, although almost all are economic (and often predatory) migrants. Men are less sympathetic. So as the family collapses, and as sex is increasingly not associated with childbirth, but has become fundamentally a form of entertainment, undertaken purely for pleasure, with no consequences (because of contraception and drugs to treat STDs), most people are lonely, the fundamental unit of society is disintegrating (except in the Muslim communities), and everyone is demoralised.

Another interesting statistic from the Merlin poll is that 53% of British white women think Britain is racist—although the majority of ethnic minority women do not. If the society were really racist and ‘far-right,’ one would expect the minorities to feel that most acutely, but in fact it’s precisely the white women, and especially white professional and managerial women, who are convinced that it is so. Obviously, this is because they have been radicalised, indeed brainwashed. But by whom, and why?

Who really benefits from the radical feminisation of society? For a start, as I’ve mentioned before, the propagators of the ideology are older, highly educated, successful women of the Judith Butler/Simone de Beauvoir type. They are past child-bearing age, and so they preach a philosophy of ‘reproductive rights’, of women devoting their lives to careers and self-development rather than families. Why? Could it be jealousy? I am not suggesting they consciously want to propagate their own genes at the expense of young women, or that they necessarily consciously enjoy the wielding of power—though I have met powerful women who clearly did—but subconsciously there can be little doubt that they are exerting their control over the reproductive resources of the tribe or nation this way. The particular kind of miscegenation they favour, namely white women with black men, which is so ubiquitous in advertising, is another typical feature. If young women are to be impregnated by anyone, it should be by black men. White men, the evil dictators who ruled the world for far too long, must be deprived even of the right to mate. I have said before that Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale is close to the opposite of the dystopia we can expect if current trends continue: a matriarchy will be in control, and the dictators and tyrants will be older women, and the slaves will be young men.

We must avoid this—indeed, prevent it. I am not suggesting that the past was perfect, nor do I advocate a return to Victorian values. Last week, one of my readers said that I seemed to be presenting a misogynist position, but that’s far from the truth. I believe that women are just as important as men, and deserve lives of equal dignity and freedom, as well as equal opportunities. I just don’t think that they are morally superior. And I know, as a student of history, that in every successful civilisation, men and women see each other as partners, each contributing something essential, and each dedicated to the raising of healthy, happy families, which are the fundamental components of any community or society. Men don’t have to dominate; they do have to be given respect, and allowed to do what they do best. And the neo-Marxist monoculture that feminism wants, and which for example the British Greens openly advocate, in the most authoritarian terms possible—Zack Polanski admits that he would get rid of people who were not on board with his policies, presumably by imprisonment or perhaps execution—must be challenged. For the past few decades, only one view of human nature and philosophy has been taught in western universities, and often students have been compelled to take courses in feminism, intersectionality, and so on. I don’t want to ban such courses: as a believer in free speech, I think students should be able to study them if they wish. But alternatives must be provided. If they are not, all state funding should be cut to those institutions. (In this, at least, the Trump administration has been absolutely correct.) We used to have a genuinely plural society, in which a range of political opinions was not just possible, but encouraged. Debate existed between the proponents of various views. If the right wing comes into power in the next few years, as it must, one of the first things it must do is break the monopoly of the feminist-Marxist-Islamist death cult on the universities, the media, and the civil service, and the armed services.

And for heaven’s sake let’s start believing in love again! We are not just bodies that demand pleasure. We have hearts, minds, and souls. We have to learn to trust each other again, to love each other again, to raise families, and feel proud of ourselves.

That is not only possible, but essential, if we are to survive as a civilisation.