Labour has always had its effete middle class idiots with no feel for our history or traditions, and a fringe of outright two-bit Bolsheviks who hate Britain. But it used to have a large bulk of voters and MPs who were basically patriots and didn't hate Britain. No longer As the party has lost any real organic or meaningful connection with the bulk of the working class, and the 'Old Right' tradition of people like Ernie Bevin (and even romantic leftists like Michael Foot) has withered, it has basically become an anti-national, unpatriotic party

I am grimly fascinated by David Lammy being made (and so far remaining) Foreign Secretary. Did Starmer agree to do it for a bet? Is it an elaborate live social psychology experiment? A lurid bit of humiliation-based performance art? He makes Boris Johnson look like Palmerston I jest, but it's not actually funny having a man who has the perpetual air of a prefect being bullied by the cleverer boys in the lower 4th and thinks the Schleswig-Holstein Question was a brand of German craft beer as foreign secretary. It is a national humiliation

How stupid would you have to be to think that one - and for some reason only one - nation in the world has no distinctive national culture/identity, and that's the country that produced common law, half the world's popular sports, a national literature admired the world over... ...a wildly disproportionate amount of the popular music widely enjoyed across the world, a set of national myths & folklore to rank with any (from Beowulf to Robin Hood etc), well known foods, ranging from our many local cheeses through to our fine tradition of beer brewing...

Politicians and environmentalists have got to face up to some hard realities. If you seriously want to decarbonise the economy and abandon the use of fossil fuels now or very soon, then - unless you lean very hard into nuclear - living standards are going to have to collapse You cannot entertain the delusion that we can have anything like the levels of prosperity and living standards we enjoy in the west without either fossil fuels or nuclear. Prosperity depends on securing a cheap reliable baseload of plentiful energy

I don't understand why there is so much surprised outrage about the French Last Supper thing from actual practising Christians. From cultural Christians yes, but the faithful should expect to be mocked & scoffed at by the world. Father forgive them, for they know not what they do Also, the French have been doing this sort of tiresome sacrilegious shock stuff for nearly 250 years. It is rather old hat by now 🥱

We face an extraordinary 5 months in politics: the collapse of the Tories, Trump very possibly winning, a Le Pen surge in French elections. Such drama would have been unlikely if the incumbents had done one simple thing: made reasonable steps to keep immigration down Mainstream incumbents will do *literally anything* to try to win except the blindingly obvious thing staring them in the face that a large majority of the voters want. How hard is it to understand? It's truly jaw-dropping

I think that therapy culture, the medicalisation of everything and seeing all distress in terms of mental illness is a product of the fact that secular liberal modernity cannot process or deal with the fundamental, ineliminable fact of human suffering Yes, human suffering can be reduced, but it can never be eliminated. It's an inherent part of human existence. Older worldviews like Christianity found meaning in it. Liberal modernity cannot compute suffering: it has no meaning, it is just bad, they think it must be soluble

On 10th February 1355 in Oxford, a student complained about the poor quality of wine served in the Swindlestock Tavern. This escalated into a punch up, then a riot. Nearly 100 people were killed. The incident became known as the St Scholastica’s Day Riots (h/t @BijanOmrani) @BijanOmrani 'The violence started by the bar brawl continued over three days, with armed gangs coming in from the countryside to assist the townspeople. University halls and students' accommodation were raided and the inhabitants murdered; there were some reports of clerics being scalped.'

Progressive middle class people tend to be so unthinkingly pro immigration because the only immigrants they ever meet are either fellow members of the global laptop class who are indistinguishable from themselves, or low paid domestic workers who are basically their servants The former are so like them - well educated cosmopolitans - that they barely see them as immigrants, and they only meet the latter in a context of an employer-employee relationship (more or less) marked by deference or near invisibility

It seems to me that there are a lot of liberals/'centrists' who would rather see civilization fall, terrorism win and probably be murdered in their beds than even be suspected of being in alliance with low-status people with the 'wrong' opinions. And I'm talking about people who can, in their hearts of hearts, see that e.g. widespread anti-Israel sentiment on the left, or transgenderism, etc, are bad things. Their snobbery & terror of being lumped in with the 'gammon' and shunned by their peers outweigh their own reason

Most 'progressive' politics is simply an an anti-poor class war.

Mass immigration - to keep wages down
Climate change policies - will hit the poorest hardest by driving up energy prices
'Anti-racism' crusade - manipulated to demonise the provincial white working class An ever more byzantine set of 'u/non-u' progressive social and linguistic codes on gender, race: marks out the high status 'Enlightened' upper middle class from the 'deplorable' proles

Wanted to prevent Brexit: to show who rules & that working class voters can be safely ignored

Something which I increasingly think about is: how do you (re-)evangelise a formerly Christian, now secularised, country, where most are indifferent and many think that anybody religious is bonkers? In that context, how do we go about preaching the gospel to all? I think that standing about on street corners and shouting or putting up billboards with Bible verses is likely to be counterproductive. And I find the approach often taken by those of an evangelical disposition to be frankly babyish, making us sound like simpletons

The insanity of the progressive cultural revolution does my head in & does need to be tackled. BUT a whole mini-industry has sprung up in response which consists purely of angry, dull & in a way self-satisfied clickbait designed to fuel anti-woke outrage and it's not constructive It makes for very negative, angry and bitter people who are in a symbiotic relationship with the 'woke' provocateurs. They enjoy railing against it: they NEED their opponents and wouldn't have anything constructive or interesting to say if their opponents disappeared tomorrow

Bit tired of people saying 'there are no votes in social conservatism or having Christian values inform your politics'. Not sure that that is necessarily true, but even if it is, I don't care. If the truth put me in a minority of one, the truth would be no less the truth Establishment social libs of left and right sneer at any expression of soc con sentiment: 'I thought this was settled years ago', 'these people are so backwards'. They cannot even conceive of principled rejection of the cultural and social air that they breathe. Let them sneer

This seat in Cambridge has for many years been so safe for Labour that you weigh the vote. So big is the hatred for Labour's congestion charge plans that, despite huge national anti-Tory swing, the Tories got a 20% swing and nearly won

https://twitter.com/PhilRodgers/status/1654465829998583808

The incumbent cllr - Bob Dryden - is one of the few salt-of-the-earth working class Lab cllrs left, and he opposes the congestion charge. Middle class cycle-shagging 'Labour' liberals almost lost him his seat. He's been a Lab cllr continuously since 1995

As we prepare to hear the King promise to 'maintain the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law' in his Coronation Oath on Saturday, today we remember the heroes of the Reformation who were burned for their trouble. Martyrs such as Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley 'Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.'

Since Britain didn't exist as a unified political entity until 1707, it would be pretty odd if it were otherwise. England, on the other hand, is a nation with such a continuous history and identity

https://twitter.com/AaronBastani/status/1653884122467819520

All of the clever-clever 'invention of tradition'/'imagined community' 'it was all a 19th century fabrication' gotchas just don't work with England. England has been a continuous nation state with a distinctive language, legal system, culture etc since about Athelstan at least

Today we commemorate the blessed martyr Charles I, who on 30th January 1649 laid down his life for the sake of the apostolic integrity of the Church of England. He forgave his murderers on the scaffold having lived a life of unimpeachable Christian virtue.

Remember A defender of the poor and weak against the enclosing landlords; an uxorious husband; a loving father; a pious upholder of the Church, he presided over 11 years of peace and prosperity until the fanatical self-interested Puritans fomented bloody rebellion and war

I've had a wave of bitter tweets going on and on about how appalling Britain is and how nothing can get better and we'd all better leave. Yes we have major problems, but this is hysterical rubbish, tbh. As many hysterical Britain-haters on the right as the left... In fact, the virulence against Britain almost seems more bitter among some on the right. A country isn't just some contractual arrangement which you abandon when you feel the terms aren't being kept: it's a covenant, a mutual bond of obligations over time that you can't just quit

Today the Church of England commemorates Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford in the early 20th century, a great theologian and Christian apologist who did much to help Anglicanism respond with integrity and faith to the scientific and critical challenges of the 19th century In this great book Gore responded with great subtlety to the secular headwinds of his day, making mincemeat of much of the liberal Protestant Biblical criticism of the 19th century. His work did much to steady the ship of faith among thinking Anglicans in unpropitious times

It strikes me as remarkable how little mark on the public consciousness the historic division between the Church of England & Dissent has left, given that it was one of the central cultural and political divides in English history from the 17th century even into the early 20th How many now even understand what 'Dissent' or 'Nonconformity' meant? Not helped, of course, by the fact that the historic Dissenting churches have declined into almost total oblivion - URC (incorporating the once mighty Presbyterians and Congregationalists) especially