Seasoned MR readers might remember that we’ve featured a couple of posts about the English accoustic folk duo, Show of Hands.  I was much taken by the simple trust for and faith in their own English people that Steve Knightley and Phil Beer display.  But I’m posting the video of their number The Flood from the 2001 album Cold Frontier for a different reason.

A Lewes resident during the floods of 2000, I recognised straight away Steve Knightley’s descriptive account of “the Southern Chalk downland ... soaked after weeks of hard rain” and “streams that were dry since the war, they’re flowing again”.  But it was what followed that surprised me.  Here is Knightley linking the flood we saw with climate change and desertification, African boat people, the Sangatte crisis of 1999-2002 and most remarkably and presciently, the debt crisis of today.  The central theme to all of this is the “cost of the flood” that “everyone round here is counting”.

Naturally, this conjunction of folk music and protest of social issues would have moved Knightley and Beer - men of my age - in their youth.  But how refreshing to encounter it today allied to an overarching concern for the real people of this country.  The more I hear of these two guys, the more I find to agree with and admire.

How has the current Western political class come into being?

That’s the question posed to readers of that tribune of the libertines, Samizdata.net.  It’s a good question, but not a perfect one.  It could, I think, be improved by the addition of the following:-

And how has this Western political class been sustained in power?

That allows us to talk about the democratic process, its subversion by special interests and it hollowness in electoral terms.

Now, there is a certain congruency between Samizdata and MR readers.  Both are individualistic - the Samizdatista archly so, the MRer inadvertently.  Both, of course, disdain the political class as a body of men and women rigidly antipathetic to their respective primary interest.  The liberty junkies, therefore, wail as the creeping sands of the state envelop the liberties they cherish.  We, being human, spit on the soil and look to the horizon, thinking about our children and our land.

You can see what kind of fist the Samizdatistas made of answering their question here.  “Education” is a favourite resort.  Of course, none of the answers make any sense from the standpoint of a European people losing their land and their life in a politically ordered and defended genocide.  The Samizdatistas are historical dilletantes and mewling liberals who have conniptions at the slightest whisper of the word “race”, and a full-blown seizure at “Jew”.

Still, let’s see what we can put together by way of an answer to that question: how did our political class come to this estate, and what keeps them like it?

I’m sorry if this succession of posts on the Manichean struggle between the Establishment and the BNP is becoming a little tiresome.  But it is not as repetitive as it seems.  There is a movement to it that is both fascinating to observe and hopeful for those of us looking for cracks in the edifice.

To be precise, that movement is towards a failure of command in the Establishment, and an increasing rebelliousness among the indigenous Brits.  The impressively uniform and multi-layered attempt by the political class and their clients in the media and cultural heirarchies to fence off the BNP is plainly having an unexpected effect in some quarters.  It may not have much impact on next Thursday’s vote.  But the dye is cast.  The Establishment has only one song in its repertoire, and the singing of it over and over again - not just in this election campaign but in the years ahead - is only going to drive more voters to the very “far right” they are meant to fear and loathe.

I can quite see, five or ten years from now, vexed Establishment figures still repeating their magic slogans while the more bloody-minded and laconic members of the public shrug and walk away.  And all the time the less rebellious are tempted to follow.

The 106th (and soon former) Bishop of Rochester, the Pakistani-born Michael Nazir-Ali, has taken to the Telegraph to proffer his electoral advice to the nation.  Let me save you the bother of reading it.  The headline is “Jesus wouldn’t have voted BNP, and neither should any Christian”.

Well, I know that priests and politicians alike have a mission to guide mere sinners and tax-payers towards the promised land.  That’s their business, obviously.  But the direction of the British public to vote for Establishment-friendly parties is so vast now, one is bound to see in it an arrogance of equal scale.  Where did these people get the impression that this is OK?  Do they expect none of us to see what they are doing, judge it, find it high-handed, self-serving and unacceptable?  I think they do.  So confident in their power and inviolability have they grown, they think they can filch from our wallets while they rule over us, and entrench their rule simply by uttering nonsense like this:-

So when we ask “What would Jesus actually do?”, the answer is clear. He would include all in the embrace of his Father’s love, and so change them that they begin to live for others, to meet the needs of strangers and to work for a just and compassionate society.

Nope sorry, that’s politics.  The Gospels don’t mention “a just and compassionate society”.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Telegraph commentariat.  Here’s what they think so far, as of four hours after the Bishop’s article was posted:-

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First, please listen to a ten-minute sound-file on Simon Darby’s blog.  His post is titled Sunday Times Donates £5,000 to Solidarity Trade Union.

This details the BNP’s judicious handling of a dodgy £5,000 donation back in January.  It was made out to Griffin personally and was claimed to come from an elderly female party member.  Griffin recognised it immediately as a set-up and donated the money to Solidarity Trade Union. 

Now look at what the fearless and upstanding investigative journalists Fiona Hamilton and Sam Coates of The Times have made of it:

Mystery of the BNP’s general election war chest

The British National Party is facing an inquiry into its funding after its leader, Nick Griffin, paid a £5,000 political donation into his personal bank account without declaring it.

The party’s finances came under scrutiny yesterday after it declared donations with the Electoral Commission of £21,132 for the first quarter of this year. No donations were declared between March and December last year. It has pledged to spend £500,000 campaigning for next week’s European and local elections alone.

Under Electoral Commission rules, donations in excess of £5,000 to political parties and in excess of £1,000 given to party members to be used for political activity must be declared ...

Fiona Hamilton has anti-BNP form.  Coates appears to focus quite a bit on party funding in general.  Yellow journalists both.  The story involves setting up a fictitious BNP member and a chequing account.  It must have taken least five to six months in the planning, which gives you some idea how much premeditation has gone into the wider media onslaught.

Meanwhile, the beat goes on.  David Cameron has come out all guns blazing at the BNP - no doubt just a consequence of his present embarrassments.

UPDATE

From the BNP website, an article revealing:-

Angered at being exposed in this way, The Times and The Daily Mail have retaliated by making the absurd claim that the Electoral Commission is now investigating the matter after their Communist Party sources claimed to have reported it.

The BNP [Lee Barnes, actually - Ed] has been in direct contact with the Electoral Commission this morning. That body has confirmed that there is no investigation into the BNP, and that they have no intention of launching any such investigation.

The role of the Electoral Commission is to investigate donations made to political parties. They have no interest in ‘investigating’ donations given to private individuals which are then passed on to non-political parties.

The latest anti-BNP smear from the Daily Mail:

Family of Winston Churchill slams BNP over far-right party’s attempt to hijack wartime leader’s legacy

Relatives of Sir Winston Churchill have denounced as ‘monstrous’ an attempt by BNP leader Nick Griffin to cloak himself in the mantle of Britain’s greatest wartime leader.

The far-right British National Party’s election broadcast, which is screened nationwide this evening, features Mr Griffin quoting from one of Churchill’s most famous speeches.

The BNP chief uses the broadcast to argue that modern Britain, with its record of welcoming immigrants, has betrayed the ‘the blood, sweat, toil and tears’ of those who fought for freedom in the Second World War.

... They have no right to use Churchill’s face in this way. It causes tremendous offence to people of the wartime generation.

‘They were a generous generation. They weren’t a mean-spirited generation. It is deeply offensive to his family and if the law were different we would take steps to stop it. To suggest that he would have supported something as wicked as the BNP is beyond the pale.’

I love the way these elitist crooks inform us that we have a “record of welcoming immigrants”.  I’ve never welcomed any immigrants.

The smear-piece goes on to quote from “The Rune”, an august publication in which Mr Griffin once waxed lyrical about the courage of the Waffen SS.  I really don’t see this working for them, do you?

Here’s a more subtle one from The Times titled, “Englishness needs more than a corny festival”.

If the thought of the left-wing intelligentsia gathering to wave St George’s crosses, watch terrier racing and applaud welly-boot throwing makes you smile, you’re not alone. But the IPPR has understood finally that the BNP has its tank on the long-neglected lawn of Englishness and is capitalising on grievance- fuelled politics. It urges mainstream parties to “combat the insinuation that Englishness is forbidden in our cultural and political life”.

The research paper, by Michael Kenny and Guy Lodge, acknowledges “a growing sense that Englishness is disapproved of by the politicial elite and most public authorities”. Dislike of English symbolism and the public celebration of English traditions, they add, has become prominent in recent years.

Kenny adds: “It is imperative that we do not let Englishness be tainted by the BNP and other opportunistic far-right parties. A sense of pride in being English and a growing wish to celebrate our English heritage and culture are positive developments that should be… encouraged by the main political parties.”

Meanwhile the BNP’s “legal department”, Lee John Barnes, has provided a little more information about the alleged perpetrators of the cyber-attack on the BNP website:

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This is the film produced for the BNP’s solitary ppb.  Heavy on old-fashioned patriotism, no horse-frightening on repatriation.

by The Narrator

The following text was written by Thomas Jefferson two centuries ago. The subject: blacks. His observations and conclusions look surprisingly fresh and modern in both the good and bad sense.

For example the first president of the Banana Republic of North America comes to mind when Jefferson states:

They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory….But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration….He is often happy in the turn of his compliments, and his style is easy and familiar, except when he affects a Shandean fabrication of words. But his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a process of sober reasoning: yet we find him always substituting sentiment for demonstration.

The existence of rap and hip-hop seems quite natural, as centuries ago it is observed that blacks:

In music…are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.

Indeed the verdict is still out.

His most profound observation on them, though, is at the heart of why any kind of social/political/religious agreement or mutual understanding with them is impossible. He writes of them:

They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.

Most interesting of all though is Jefferson’s seeming moments of slipping into sentimental leftism that seems a habit of some Whites. For example, of black crime he writes (the very modern looking apologetic):

That disposition to theft with which they have been branded, must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any depravity of the moral sense.

Of course, as their situation has changed much over the past two hundred years while their proclivity towards crime remained unabated, we can see the faulty conclusion of Jefferson’s appraisal. It’s his motivation for writing such that is of interest, though.

In his concluding sentence we can see the all too familiar appeal to religion and a murky notion of “social justice” as Jefferson writes:

The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.

Naturally that can also be read as a warning. Still it’s interesting to see Jefferson do what so many in our own time do in coming to a natural conclusion on the obvious differences in the races, yet flirting with the idea that he wishes it were not so and that it will one day, miraculously, go away.

Like so many Whites of modern North America, Thomas Jefferson makes reasonable deductions based on an abundance of study and observations on the undeniable and profound fact of the multitude of differences in the races, yet still wishes to imagine that it will all resolve itself in some egalitarian utopia at some unspecified future date under some mysterious bit of magical circumstance.

The text is interesting not in so much as it represents a mirror image of our thoughts as modern White Americans, but as more of an old home movie of how those thoughts used to look.

Here it is in full.

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”Revolutions do not happen in this country, but every now and then the public gives a great heave of boredom and impatience, and something is done with forever.”

These words of the American literary critic Edmund Wilson, writing of Britain in April 1940, contain the explanation to a modern media mystery: why did the Telegraph play Pandora, and launch its ruthless two-week offensive against the political class?

”Radical reform of discredited Commons system” and ”many MPs will be suspended from Labour over expenses” scream the headlines.  This is a political earthquake.  Why would the Telegraph, a party to every level of the Establishment, unleash it?

One is left pondering what might have been said to tip the editorial balance in those chic, glass-walled offices overlooking the Telegraph’s newsroom.  I can think of three factors that might have done that.  There is only one commending caution.

The “go” factors are:-

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