Browsing through an autobiography of authoress P.D. James, I was surprised to discover she is something of an Anglican traditionalist. She writes,

“The Church of England in my childhood was the national church in a very special sense, the visible symbol of the country’s moral and religious aspirations, a country which, despite great differences of class, wealth and privilege, was unified by generally accepted values and by a common tradition, history and culture, just as the Church was unified by Cranmer’s magnificent liturgy.”

As you might expect, she does not approve of recent developments within the C of E. She declares,

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I have long regarded the political correctness movement as a threat to all independent thought, and I am deeply concerned about the level of self-censorship in academia. To counteract this tendency, I have left no political taboo untouched in my teaching. I believed that America was still free enough for this to be possible, and I assumed that my relative prominence offered me some extra protection.

If I made one mistake, it was that I was too cooperative and waited too long to go on the offensive.

The closing words of a statement by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, following his victory over a UNLV “commissar”.

Hoppe had been persecuted through the disciplinary machinery of the university for an entire year by this individual.  His sin was having twice failed, while lecturing, to take account of the feelings of a homosexual student.

The academic world - or that part of it that cares more for academic freedom than political correctness - rode to Hoppe’s defence.  UNLV was presented with a public relations disaster and, with some reluctance it seems, was finally forced to back down.

There’s been another survey showing a disintegration of Dutch national feeling. The survey found that 32% of the Dutch wish to emigrate and that only 51% feel proud of their country.

Why such negativity? According to the researchers, people complained about “political developments, multiculturalism, over-population, criminality and socially distant people.”

What makes this situation especially interesting is that The Netherlands has always been held up as a showpiece of liberalism. It is what we are all meant to be heading toward. And yet multiculturalism has already been so destructive of a sense of Dutch national community that a third of the population wants to leave.

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... what “no-go area” generally means is that you can vote for Tweedle-left or Tweedle-right but all the great questions have been settled by transnational elites sufficiently insulated from your tedious parochial griping.

Mark Steyn, writing in today’s Telegraph.

Steyn is an interesting case.  He earns what must, in journalist’s terms be a substantial crust by extending both ends of the political commentator’s art.  On the one hand, he skits across the stolid affairs of nations and the works of powerful men with a delicious irreverence and lightness of touch.  Where serious political analysis should be are the acid truths and improper musings of a one-time student rag writer grown more skilled but also more comfortable and rounder of girth with age.  Thus:-

I’ve no reason to disbelieve the crop of polls showing Labour and Conservatives neck and neck, but, unlike American polling, where distinctions between “registered” and “likely” voters are carefully studied, none of us has any clear idea which unloved party will do the least effective job at further depressing the turnout of whatever unenthusiastic faction of its dwindling base is most unresistant to being cajoled to the polls.

On the other hand, as a beneficiary perhaps of the double detachment of being a foreign national and a Jew, he eschews the familiar petty battles of British political life in favour, amazingly, of the things that actually interest us.  So we get transnationalism over the cornflakes - the rude but oft neglected reminder that our votes don’t mean a damned thing.  If we did not know before, we are plainly told now:-

The Guardian complained yesterday about Michael Howard’s assertion that “for too many years immigration has been a no-go area for public debate”, and I sort of agree with them. It’s not that it’s a “no-go area for public debate”, but that you can debate it all you want and in the end nothing happens.

And:-

... the so-called public “indifference” to the royal wedding is part of a deeper fatalism toward British institutions and the British state. The Windsors have been wily adaptors to the evolving mood of their kingdom, but with the kingdom evolving itself clear out of business, who needs a king?

In the free and scandalously irresponsible cyber-world of blogging this sort of hard truth-speak is meat and drink.  We don’t get nearly enough of it in a mainstream that assesses the cares of the public no higher than a morbid fascination with bed-blocking in the NHS.  Where can one find a few more Mark Steyns?

I’m sometimes bemused when I hear people talk of Australia as being a possible last holdout for Europeans. It’s true, as John Ray likes to point out, that we have a stricter control over illegal immigration than America or even Britain.

But this is only to ensure that the massive legal migration programme continues undisturbed.

Look, for instance, at what we poor Melbournians had to wake up to this morning. Our Labor Party Premier, Steve Bracks, wants to make immigration the “centre of government policy” (the centre of state government policy, when the state government is not even responsible for migration).

He wants to use immigration to add an extra 700,000 residents to Melbourne to overtake Sydney’s size, and an extra 1,300,000 over the next 20 years to take the state’s population to 6,000,000.

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On April 9th 1942 some 76,000 Allied forces, Philipino and American, surrendered to General Masahura Homma on the Bataan Peninsula.  The following day they were force-marched from Mariveles, on the southern end of the Peninsula, about 100 kilometres north.  Their destination was Camp O’Donnell, a prison camp in Nueva Ecija in the Philippine region of Central Luzon.  They were denied food and water, bound, beaten or killed with impunity by the Japanese soldiers.  Some were bayoneted when they fell from exhaustion.  Others were made to dig their own graves and buried alive.  Only 56,000 prisoners reached the camp.  Of these, thousands died later from malnutrition and disease.

Now, it happens that last night, April 9th, I received an e-mail with a link to the website of the, of course, anti-semitic, fascistic, Hitlerian yada, yada historian, David Irving.  The linked page was an old post reproducing a Haaretz article by Schlomo Shamir from April 24th, 2004.  I have not, incidentally, been able to get the Haaretz search engine to dig up the original article.  But I don’t doubt that Mr Irving, a man with first-hand experience of libel litigation, is citing it correctly.  He quotes Mr Shamir thus:-

A table in an appendix to the Gribetz report states that compensation and benefits paid to individuals and institutions since 1953, comes to a total of $53,871 billion, of which 44 per cent went to individuals and institutions in Israel, 28 per cent to others in the U.S., and 28 per cent to survivors in the rest of the world.

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Suleymann Kufr, London
Guardian staff reporter

Michael Howard today resigned as leader of the Conservative Party, after leading the Tories to a third successive defeat.

Speaking outside Conservative Central Office in London, Mr Howard said, “It is vital for the party to reflect fully on the decision of the electorate and on the direction the Conservative Party must now take.  That direction should be the responsibility of a new leader who can build on the very substantial progress we, as a party, have made in the past eighteen months.”

It is eighteen months to the day since Mr Howard replaced Mr Ian Duncan Smith as Tory leader in what was a one horse race.

Mr Howard claimed that his party was “back in business” but he also spoke of the electoral mountain which it still has to climb.

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Tory leader Michael Howard recently proclaimed “We are all British, we are one nation.” Which, unfortunately, isn’t true anymore, as left-wing Guardian journalist Peter Preston was quick to point out. Preston used the example of the Old Kent Road, a place now so multicultural that Preston happily labels it “omnicultural”.

Of course, as a left-wing journo Preston sings the praises of the “naturally polyglot” Old Kent Road, writing that it represents “A Britain future, not Britain past.”

The best response I’ve seen to Preston is over at Faute de Mieux. The article there seems to suggest voting Tory might improve things - something which I am deeply sceptical about - but I like the concluding paragraph:

“Should Preston get his way, we shall have just as little love for our transient neighbourhoods, cities, regions and countries as his immigrants have for the Old Kent Road. With this crucial difference: his immigrants will always have a place called home.”

Reading about the fate of the Old Kent Road makes me feel fortunate that I live in a very Anglo suburb of Melbourne which still does feel like home for me. But I’ve observed enough about the transformation of much of Melbourne to know exactly what the writer at Faute de Mieux is talking about. We can’t assume that we’ll always find such places where we are something more than just outside observers.