Some weeks ago my Daily Friend colleague Steven Boykey Sidley wrote an intriguing analysis (The strange sounds of UK’s bewildering politics) of the state of the UK occasioned by a visiting friend. One curious theme emerged: a sense of “I don’t know”-ness. This is ubiquitous. Most of the few remaining sensible politicians don’t appear to know how things have gotten so bad, the civil service can’t tell you, neither can the media nor the academic classes (something you could possibly excuse on the near certainty that both groups consist of unwell people).
I can’t tell you either, but I’m back for a visit. On Saturday night I was driving to my new favourite beach bar on the Pacific Coast Highway in southern California; on Tuesday, I walked through the groaning bowels of Heathrow accompanied by a Bangladeshi lady who tried to urge upon me a sunflower lanyard (“because some disabilities cannot be seen” – they tried to pull the same thing on a late friend of mine but he wasn’t having any of it – and he had MS). Midway into this curious journey toward customs I stopped to look at her instruction sheet and discovered that she was supposed to be attending a different person, disembarking a different flight in a different part of arrivals. I was then detained briefly, which was nice because it’s only the fifth time it’s happened, something I possibly worsened by showing them my phone upon which I had asked Google Translate to express in Urdu that the airport should review its policy of randomly awarding people special needs status (“براہ کرم بے ترتیب لوگوں کو خصوصی ضروریات دینے کی اپنی پالیسی کا جائزہ لیں۔.“) A mutter of border officials eventually waived me the benefit of doubt.
Sidley’s authenticity has stayed with me, raising questions I encountered nowhere else during the two months I spent in Cape Town in summer.
Failing legacy media in South Africa is bad on most things, but especially on the UK; not a single South African legacy journalist on the international brief has studied the breathtaking claims made by fellow South African journalist, Paul Holden, relating to chronic corruption with the Labour Party, most of which have come to pass (plus Holden is a genuinely left-wing guy). Perhaps Adriaan Basson likes Keir Starmer – why wouldn’t he?
The easiest thing about divorcing yourself from the UK is geography. The rest – what Sidley calls “cultural DNA” – is painful, because it involves music you grew up on, literature that moved you and the figures from across public life who were genuinely inspiring without setting out to be. When “trigger warnings” are positioned atop the Charles Dickens section in the municipal library, discerning humanity – irrespective of jurisdiction or bloodlines but conscious that inheritance is always hard fought – has every right to be enraged.
Pedo charliefoxtrot
One of the strangest sounds in the UK’s decline is the establishment squirming of yet another pedo charliefoxtrot. Just as I landed another – ANOTHER – tier 1 BBC man earning hundreds of thousands of sterling has been fired allegedly for a relationship with a male teenager. This has happened within the same three months that the leader of the opposition in Parliament, Kemi Badenoch, described the government as “pedophile supporters”, emphasizing Peter Mandelson’s appointment as UK Ambassador to the US despite a documented relationship with the pedo financier Jeffrey Epstein (which he lied about). Keir Starmer also made a peer of a former advisor who had, erm, “stood by” a pedo – even campaigned for him – while knowing he was a pedo.
Supporters of the ascendant Green Party, be they London’s metropolitan elite or white, Atlantic seaboard-residing Capetonian data monkeys, get cross when you express concern or refuse to “stand by” BBC pedos, but even they can’t deny the speed of the changing ratio: what used to be an annual pedo explosion at the BBC is now bi-annual. Next it could be months, then weeks, at which point a Green government might just normalise the whole thing with protected characteristics, followed by legislation. So, pedos, pedos, everywhere and not a drop to drink.
Our “cultural DNA” is being subjected to an obstacle course – and we cannot be certain where it will end. A spiky nativism is emerging, particularly within younger, white men – the inevitable reflex of excluding groups on the basis of complexion, despite racism being a criminal offence. There’s a grisly post-mortem of Tony Blair era – or the “Blairite consensus” – where the current and agonizingly contrived commitment to “diversity” was supposedly conceived. If this isn’t tricky enough, then things get absurdly Takeshi’s Castle when you review the events of Saturday in Trafalgar Square.
Real enemies
It was another of these “Defeat the far right” protest things – an expression of the state’s conviction that the country’s real enemies lie within. Dr Daniel Allington, a Senior Associate Fellow at the Counter Extremism Group – someone with skin in the game – considers the threat from the “far right” deliberately over-hyped, so let’s change the title to: “Defeat the seven or eight white football hooligans sitting in an internet cafe”.
The day ended with Zack Polanski, leader of the Greens, taking to the stage and dancing with a man wearing suspenders (leather). Having run a campaign in February in which material showing the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was posted through the doors of Muslim voters living in Manchester, Polanski was itching for some energetic public petting, but unfortunately his new constituents didn’t like it that much. “No, man,” a pro-Gaza, trouble-making Pakistani lawyer living in Birmingham called Akhmed Yakoob complained, “there were children there, that stuff isn’t good.”
But our bewilderment is cosmetic. Behind any apparent erosion of culture or fraying of social cohesion, the rubber hits the road in the unsustainable size of the welfare state, uncontrollable government spending, flatlining growth, spiking unemployment and over-judicialised public life.
September will mark the 50th anniversary of the UK going bust (1976). The Wall Street Journal declared: “Goodbye, Great Britain”. But it wasn’t. The resolve of men who’d fought in wars provided cool re-assurance around dinner tables – the UK survived, rose, then prospered all because of collective responsibilities, discipline, priorities and living below one’s means.
In war reporter Sebastian Junger’s 2016 Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, he emphasizes the importance of “levelling” – the state at which conditions have the same appeal to everyone, prompting similar responses. But the effort of using the same tools to overcome the same obstacles in pursuit of the same objectives feels more applicable to South Africans once legislated out of the jobs market than it is to the present UK. If there are answers, they are concealed in layers upon layers of beef.
Limited parameters
For whatever reasons, be it guilt, or ideas contained in Sir John Grubb’s The Fate of Empires, the UK has been forced to renegotiate its place in the world. Given the limited parameters imposed upon itself, it’s reasonable to assume it will surrender some of what it gifted us.
Here, unlike the English, we have the fortune of being able to divide and snatch. Take the good, defenestrate the bad – and just hope that parties influenced by the UK in South Africa or the United States are watching and listening as the country’s plates shift.
[Image: Detail from Rocco Dipoppa on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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