Censorious, over-regulatory, ban-happy, criminalising – that is the nature of Blairism and of our culturally-liberating government as it impacts upon the quiet lives of Middle England.  If you hunt or if your hobby is shooting, if you own a house which you may wish to sell, if you own a horse or both a car and a mobile phone you will be regulated or you will be banned.  If then you fail to comply you will be criminalised and have to pay a swingeing fine … or face jail.

The social customs and interests of all those respectable, responsible folk who abide by the law and intend no man harm are being steadily legislated away.  It might not be programmatic.  A case can be made for each of these new legal instruments and, yes, they arise through different causations, not simply political malignity.  But the unavoidable overall picture is one of a government with extreme and well-targeted regulatory instincts ... a government with absolutely no inclination to maintain for its own sake our long-standing tradition of liberty.

At some point that has to and does connect to a set of profoundly malign political values.

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No doubt the left looks with gloomy ingratitude upon the memory of A.C.Benson, who gave us the words for Land of Hope & Glory.  Likewise, Dr Henry Carey of National Anthem fame will not be admired among those who would prefer Prince William to marry an exotic flower of our, of course, always vibrant minorities.

As for James Thomson, his stirring Rule Britannia probably can’t be sung at all by anyone who has read as far as page 2 of Das Kapital.  Which isn’t all that many, actually.  I know.  I tried.

And, well, Russ Parker and Hughie Charles (There’ll always be an England) should be on Trevor Phillips little list.  Can’t say blacklist, of course, but you know what I mean.  A million marching feet … the Empire too, we can depend on you!  One must have been a fascist, the other a racist.  It’s perfectly obvious.

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These are momentous times in Flanders.  My friend, Johan Van Vlaams, blogs below on the new beginning for pro-Flemish politics.

Meanwhile, I want to look backwards at the Vlaams Blok model.  Does it have a wider applicability?  What if any lessons does it hold for the benighted natives of my own country.  For the avoidance of doubt and in deference to my Scots friends I will restrict my observations in this respect to my own band of raiders south of the border.

The Blok took its character and drew its determination not from anything so nebulous as political ideals - or, God help us, values - but from the Flemish people themselves.  They are children of the North Sea coastal lands of Europe, cut from much the same cloth as the Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans who, with the Celts of the fringe, constitute the indigenous peoples of Great Britain.

But unlike us, the Flemish have, even under the multicultural onslaught and in the maw of the Belgian Establishment, retained sufficient self-knowledge and self-respect to found a liberation movement on national identity.

National identity in a European people, no less than any other, ought always to be contiguous with the nation state.  A discreetly related people is the heart and soul of nationhood.  But that nationhood is not merely diminished by the artificial conjunction of differing peoples with differing interests, it is permanently disfigured by the inevitable contest and still more inevitable one-sided outcome.

But there is an upside to this, too.  Ancient rivalries do speak to public feeling.  A people who suffer injustice are likely to be as mindful of their identity as any single-malt nation.  All too clearly, being gripped in the Belgian maw has served just such a purpose for the Flemish.  The Blok was all about that.

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It was a long time ago.  If I had to rely purely on memory I couldn’t even be sure of the year now.  But, you know, I was young and didn’t worry for the world as I do today.  I didn’t understand the need to hold fast to the remembrance of such dispiriting realities.  I didn’t understand why it would matter if, so many years later, they should slip out of the public mind, and mine.

So it was rather easy to forget.  Perhaps, too, forgetting went with the grain of the wood.  Seventies Britain was a different place with quite different expectations.  Life seemed more providential, and perhaps was.  We raced between the lights.  We were freer and more risk-taking or, perhaps, just more subject to the cheapening, egalitarian law of accident.  Now we are all wrapped up in cotton wool.  Death seems an intolerable affront.  But I don’t know that it was then in quite the same way. 

I should also say that we were also immeasurably more naïve then than now.  For one thing, the foul-minded, shit-hearted non-soldiers of the Provisional IRA had not begun leaving their murderous gifts in mainland pubs.  We saw terrorism on the nightly news.  But it was mostly on the island of Ireland, as the shit-hearts liked to put it.  Or it was even further away and involved Middle Easterners and Israelis.  This type of terrorism came to us through the most basic moral filter.  It was a filter through which only one side of the story ever got told.  We didn’t question it then.  We hadn’t learned to question everything.  But anyway it was a true filter.

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Digby Jones, Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, will tell his members at their annual conference today, “there will not be any work in Britain for unskilled people … within one scholastic generation.”  Outsourcing is the culprit, with the jobs going to India, China and, increasingly, the countries of eastern Europe.

Jones is scathing of the protectionist trends in American and French political life.  One would, of course, expect him to be.  The CBI has been a cheer-leader for goin’ global for years.  Its D-G has “formed the view that if ever there was a country made for globalisation it is Britain. It is in our DNA.”

Well, he might be over-heating somewhat there and probably meant to say that it is in our island culture.  Still, from that one can fairly construe that he is referring to the culture of the indigenous Anglo-Saxon-Celtic peoples of this island.  So, if globalisation will indeed pin our future prosperity to our native capacities, which seems to be the logical extension of Jones’ premise, why are we allowing in 150,000+ legal and illegal immigrants each year with not a moment’s consideration of theirs.

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So despite all rumours au contraire there is hope for France again.  Magnifique.

An article that may interest Majority Rights readers.  The Failure of the American Experiment published at Kuro5hin

I remember a Romanian telling me, just before the downfall of the Ceausescus, that it would take three generations at least to remove the taint of the communist system from the souls of Romanians; it will take at least as long to remove managerialism from the souls of the British, though it has been with us for so comparatively short a period.

— Theodore Dalrymple