I read this and thought of Fred.

Janice Turner is the kind of journalist who should never type the word, patriotism.  Or nation, or nationhood.  To state the obvious, she is a lady journalist, you see.  A woman ... a nice, emolient, “why can’t we all just get along?” sort of soft thingy.

In this morning’s Times she simpers, “Help, I think I’m a little Englander.”  But what she really delivered to the doorsteps of the, well yes, nation was a perfectly-honed if unwitting confirmation of my friend Fred Scrooby’s oft-stated view of her sex.

She is unaware that she can’t apprehend race, of course.  Not in its fullness.  For Janice, her homeland and the interests of its people can be only vaguely perceived through the medium of the economy.

This, then, is how she makes the patriotic case:-

... Does it matter that such a cherished British institution [she means Wimbledon 2006 - Ed] has shacked up with a foreign brand?  Lauren’s little polo ponies will trot out of the Wimbledon shop as sure as rain will fall. So he’s worth his £6 million deal.  And anyway, what is British fashion?  Our designers create from Parisian ateliers, their clothes are cut in Milan, sewn in China, shown in New York.  Get with the global economy, grannio, you may think.  Well, perhaps . . . except it just feels so wrong.

Likewise, as I glare at the Saharan patches on my lawn and read about Thames Water, which hiked up my bill on a promise to repair leaks but instead decided to award my hard-earned to its shareholders, my fury is compounded by the knowledge that my water is German-owned.  I keep imagining the executives of RWE — Thames’s parent company — relaxing by glistening swimming pools, amid verdant gardens.

Deep in the Ruhr or Rhine, they won’t get neighbours ear-bashing them about plants shrivelled by the hosepipe ban.  They won’t feel they have failed in their duty to their customers or to this country, because we are faceless, faraway citizens and this is a foreign country.  They don’t feel responsibility, let alone shame.  ... Am I a little Englander, a petty nationalist, an economic dinosaur because I loathe the idea of British utilities and infrastructure being foreign-owned?  In the global free market, the swirling, borderless world of international finance, why should it matter that the Spanish are about to buy Heathrow, Gatwick and five other British airports?  Or that 21 ports, including Hull, Southampton and Tilbury — accounting for a quarter of British seabourne traffic — will soon be controlled by a foreign consortium?  After all, much of our energy is already owned by French or American firms, or at any rate controlled by non-British shareholders.

... And so powerful and cross-party is the belief that liberalised markets mean the best company — regardless of nationality — gets the gig and provides the best value for the customer, it feels heresy to ask two simple questions: is this safe and is it undermining our sense of nationhood? I cannot answer the first. No politician has ever explained what happens if things turn sour with a country that owns our strategic installations: a bunch of power stations, say, or Mersey docks, now property of the people of Dubai. The British Government has already vowed that Russia’s state-owned Gazprom will not be allowed near our gas for fear it will use supplies as a political weapon, as it did in Ukraine. Yet we are expected to believe that all other foreign companies are benign, have only our interests at heart.

Now, at this juncture MR - if not Times - readers will be connecting the dots pretty damned quick.  So what has Janice to say of the surrendering of whole segments of our cities and towns to complete aliens?  Does she rail at the paucity of politicians, by which we must assume she means mainstream politicians, explaining that things will turn very sour racially?  People like us have, of course.  Several times.  But our politicos would rather eat sennapods and gunpowder for a week.

Ms Turner, it turns out, feels the same.  There seems to be a war going on inside her between her feminine emotion and her masculine reason.  Here she is zig-zagging towards an outcome, a synthesis of sorts:-

London is pretty much the epicentre of the global economy.  A bus ride is a mobile Babel: a third of residents come from ethnic minorities.  You can shop your way across the capital, eat in a café or a Conran, go on a bar crawl and not once be served by a British person. ... in London, since there is work enough for all who want it, and unless you are an aggrieved white working-class family who has been shunted down the housing list by more needy incomers, we mostly rub along.  That children of so many different origins cohere and thrive at my sons’ state primary makes my eyes well up at every school assembly.

... Yet as David Goodhart says in his essay on diversity for Prospect magazine, such a society means “more of our lives is spent among strangers”, ie, people who are not like ourselves, than any previous generation.

... Previous generations raised children in times of greater poverty and international uncertainty, yet were confident of their everyday safety because they felt, outside the home, they would be watched over by people like themselves.  Today, for many, only the family feels safe enough: beyond that is an uncaring, unheeding world of disparate individuals.

So what role can a new and modern sense of British nationhood play in alleviating these feelings? We are, of all countries on the planet, the most apologetic about asserting our common values.  And yet there is a deep-felt longing, as the England penants fluttering from countless balconies and cars illustrate, to come together as one.  Patriotism is viewed with suspicion, even revulsion, as akin to racism.

Yet what we need is a patriotism that unites all the races making up our nation. And maybe that begins with the water that falls on our soil being returned to British hands and Wimbledon officials being dressed in the true English tradition, not in Ralph Lauren’s polo-ponied pastiche.

Notice that her concern is not to deal with the real consequences of a global influx, only to alleviate our feelings about it.  Apparently, our feelings about it cannot be alleviated if the “one” for which we have this deep-felt longing is a communion of the English.  Oh horror.  Oh racism.  Oh revulsion.  No, no ... aghast, the lady must conjure up an entirely fantastic and novel alternative, a Turnerist economic jingoism by which to magically unite “all the races making up our nation”.

Quite apart from the staggering irrelevance of business ownership to such a project, how, short of through panmixia, can aliens ever make up a nation with us?  They are, let us never forget, aggressing against us.  They occupy a living space belonging to us without our consent.  The whole Marxist prescription is an abomination brought upon us by a disloyal political class.  We need not preserve it for one second.  It is against jus naturale, against the time-honoured principle that some things are as they are because that is how they are.  Neither are we under any moral obligation to discard or damage our interests for the sake of these aliens ... quite the contrary.  We are under a moral obligation to serve our interests and to reclaim our children’s birthright.

But Janice, Janice ... you are a woman and you recoil from the depths of your spirit against such clarity, even though it tends to the advantage of your own issue.  I might think differently of you, and all your sisters, if it was merely the attractions of liberalism or prosperity that had eaten away at your will.  But I see no will to begin with.

Fred is right.  You can never be persuaded.  If we are ever to pull ourselves out of this mess you, I’m afraid, will probably have to be disenfranchised.

Posted by Guessedworker on Saturday, June 24, 2006 at 05:51 AM in Journalism
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