Picture for a moment an early morning, say, next Spring.  It is the middle of the rush hour in a city in the north of England.  But this is not to be just any city or any morning.  This morning will be remembered as long as men draw breath.  This morning local radio has reported that three identical backpacks, each equipped with a tank and motorised aerosol, have been discovered - one at the railway station, two on busy street corners.  The tanks were said to be empty.  How many more there are out there nobody knows.  Shock and rumour spreads.  Al Qaeda.  People are talking about biological weapons, smallpox possibly.  Could it be true?  It doesn’t matter.  Everyone knows what it means if it is true.

By nine the broadcast media are reporting the events and speculating on their cause.  Scheduled programming has been suspended.  A few talking heads – opposition politicians, terrorist experts, ex-military men, an ex-scientist at Porton Down – are wiseacring at short notice in the way they do.  But as yet there is no official statement.

In any case almost as one, people are drawing the obvious conclusion and deciding what they must therefore do.  An exodus of citizens terrified for their children and themselves bursts into being.  Schools just filled are quickly emptied.  Cases are packed, cars loaded and driven out into streets in which no law, no bar to progress is tolerated.

It takes another sixty minutes for central government to act.  There is no great appeal for calm.  Calm, if that is what it is, will be enforced.  Everyone attempting to leave or who has left the city is to return.  Everyone contemplating leaving the city is to remain where they are.  All are to obey a 24-hour curfew to be effected from 6pm.  Ominously, there is no confirmation or denial of the rumours, no attempt to appear other than authoritarian.  Public fear reaches a point of conflagration.

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Joanna Murray-Smith confesses

in a recent Age article,

“I am leading the life the feminists of the ‘70s dreamed of: successful professional and mother - but it’s no dream.”

Why not? Because of the mental anguish she feels at not having time to spend with her children. She asks,

“Where is the play time with our kids? Where are the long hours of unhurried togetherness?”

She admits that “I go to bed at night asking myself over and over again how much our working lives really benefit our children?” and that “increasingly I resent the dishonesty of pretending that our children are not guinea pigs in an experiment that is, in many ways, a failure.”

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With thanks to the cartoonist at Vlaams Belang

On a day when Prince Charles spoke for us all and Charles Clarke spoke for the rest, I was pleased to find that John Ray had got there ahead of them.

He reported this article by English lecturer Joanna Williams.  She has come to the realisation that this government’s great drive for social inclusion is counter-educational.

Inclusion is, of course, code for equality.  But it’s code that we, as nice, decent, high-minded people are not meant to quibble with.  After all, who would protest at something so soft-focus, so clearly well-intentioned and humane as inclusion, whereas an awful lot of us will bitterly contest the harder, politically divisive issue of “equality” – be it of opportunity or outcome.  No, inclusion is a useful word, a real asset for the left.  We need to unpick the meaning of it ruthlessly because the meaning of it is that classic dictatorship of the proletariat: the lowest common denominator.

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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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