Well, it’s Faversham actually, in the green and watery, ancient county of Kent.  Not some mug-scarce inner-city blessed with that precious New Labour phenomenon, automatic weapons.  Aagh, didn’t mean that to slip out!  No, diversity – that’s what I meant to say.  Obviously, diversity.  And a jolly good thing, too, if you ask me.  And it’s entirely possible that Her Majesty’s new breed of politically correct, people’s policemen will knock on my door and ask me some time very soon (after Griffin you never know).  So we don’t want to be too white, do we?  Not too stuck in a chalky Kentish rut, so to speak, not too un…vibrant.  Decidedly not.  Constable.

So … back to Faversham, twixt the Kentish Swale estuary and the Kentish North Downs.  Beautiful, quiet, hardly troubled middle-England, all apples and beer and old church towers (hiding new and deeply dubious phone masts, but anyway we’ll not let that spoil the image).  Undeniably, though, there are too many cars.  Too few children.  Sufficient Conservatism, however.

But still, it’s not an obvious area, one would have thought, for a population indulging en masse in a quick light up of the old Rastarfarian sacrament.  But why not, I hear you say.  It’s a real religion, isn’t it?  You know, the Ethiopian ...

promised land and ...

the lion of Judah and ...

the pipe of peace and ...

black supremacy, for heaven’s sake.  It’s all serious stuff.

It’s just not very serious in Faversham.

Of course, airhead drug users exist in Faversham as they do everywhere.  In surprising, twenty-first century numbers, no doubt.  It’s a price of liberalism, one of many.  I’ll bet that like users everywhere they remove themselves from reality by whatever means they can.  They don’t need the excuse of a spurious religion.  So, as well as the not-bothered weed they use any and every chemical means they can lay their cash-strapped hands on, however foreign it may be to the European psyche and its non-relative, deterministically-derived culture.

No, Faversham is the kind of quiet English market town that might have its share of druggies in doorways and gypsies, Kurds and Albanians wandering around in surplus 1980’s shell-suits.  But by and large it is solidly, prosperously English middle-class.  Well, it’s damp and cold in Winter, and no one in their right mind would want to live there.  Except the people whose real home it is.

So, how revealing and how heartening that the essential cooperativeness of the English soul - that loving will that unites a real people and renders possible their assent to the cloud-covered heights of civilisation – has manifested itself thus:-

Take no notice of the drug information man quoted in the Telegraph article.  He’s losing out by this, that’s all.  And take no notice of the civil liberties artist, either.  Back in the “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out” era of second-picket line violence and unionised class warfare civil liberties meant the working man’s “right” to be used as an industrial battering ram.  Now all that’s left of that is Lenin’s body odour they come over all pro this and that, anything anomic, anything that advances the cause of kicking over the traces.  They weren’t capable of defending freedom before and they aren’t capable of it now.  Were it not so they might actually own up that a society of drugged-up lost souls, however self-creative they may be, is not the way to freedom.

The parents of Abbey School have done well without them.  They were fearful of modern liberty and determined to draw a line before their own children slouched towards dependency.  They have made a “brave” choice according to the Conservative controlled Kent County Council.  It is a choice for wholeness and a healthy society.  It is a choice for standards in personal life.  It is a conservative choice by a Conservative people.

Now, what chance is there that their example, their will to cooperate for the common good will spread to other Kentish towns and villages?  Rather high, one would think.  But will it ever reach westward and deep into the ganja badlands of South London?  Would a set of distinctly un-conservative and un-Conservative
Lewisham, Lambeth and Southwark  parents cooperate to the same vivifying end?  Or not?  And what does that say about them and us, and about our respective politics and priorities?