Among the biggest political issues today is this: the economic, social & cultural hollowing out of hundreds of towns and small cities in Britain. Many places that used to have their own significant civic and economic existence are now either just commuter towns or on life support I will take the example I know best: my hometown, Chelmsford. Chelmsford remains relatively prosperous, but only as a dormitory of London. Over the past 40 years or so, it has lost most of the employers that gave it its own economic existence and pride. Little of that is left now

What increasingly strikes me is the lifelessness of contemporary liberalism, its total lack of vim or ultimate purpose. Ensuring that the right procedures are in place so we can all fairly participate in...nothing worth bothering with anyway. Equal opportunities nihilism Any human institution or practice is meant to orientate us to some ultimate end worth having. Communion with God and holiness. Honour. Beauty. Love. The act of creating something worthwhile in itself in a faint imitation of God. Grace and glory. The beatific vision.

There is something faintly comic about Britain wandering round trying to find international courts to surrender to just at the moment that the liberal order is clearly collapsing. It's real 'last Japanese soldier in the Jungle' stuff. We need to get real or the shit will get real This government is like someone trying to roleplay the 90s at its most unrealistic and hubristic. Think 'cosmopolitan democracy', 'global governance', all that guff. Hard to think of a less propitious time to be resurrecting this bullshit

As a society, we increasingly make an idol out of procedures. Many people would rather follow the designated procedure knowing that the outcome will be bad than they would defy the procedure and produce a good outcome. We've forgotten that procedures aren't an end in themselves Many think we can produce a good society by stripping everyone of the ability to exercise their judgement and instead erecting the rule of depersonalised rules and procedures. This encourages us to think that cultivating character & moral judgement in individuals is unnecessary

The end of St Augustine's life - watching his life's work as a bishop, and indeed much of North African Catholic Christianity collapsing around his ears, all as he lies dying in Hippo during the Vandal advance, reciting the penitential psalms - is very moving. He spends those last days, in the shadow of the Vandal siege, editing his works & making arrangement for his library to be preserved. Among the rapine and chaos of the eventual Vandal capture of Hippo, his work survived. Something is preserved despite the world's violence & chaos

Nothing will shake my view that English history since 1642 is best understood as the slow, inglorious victory of Whiggish gradgrind oligarchs who have sold England by the pound & squeezed all romance out of the nation in service of their self-serving & soulless utilitarianism The natural alliance is between the landed classes and the working classes against that toxic mixture of secularising disenchantment and selfish profiteering that characterises the money-men, the small souled-bourgeois financiers, the heirs of the Puritans and Whigs

The interesting thing about the disaster zone that is modern British Higher Education is that it has artfully combined the worst of the modern right - an obsession with marketising everything - with the worst of the modern left - the sham egalitarianism of dumbing everything down Also it has managed to combine the most toxic parts of private and public sectors. Bullshit commercialism and a failed attempt to impose consumerism on education AND 99 shades of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Plus the DEI/HR nonsense you find in both sectors, for good measure

The British elite - e.g. the 'sensibles' who run the main parties, civil service, legacy media etc - are an insular self-protecting club. The worst crime in their eyes is when 1 of their own goes rogue & breaks omerta, or when outsiders penetrate the citadel & don't play the game The point for them is to accumulate jobs, status and money in the cliquey merry go round of state and corporate greasy pole climbing. Anything beyond mild technocratic disagreement within the club is 'just not on'. To demand actual accountability for failure is unforgivable

My son is sometimes noisy in church. He is 3. I & my wife spend every service doing all we can to keep him quiet: we do sticker books with him, take him to the side chapel to play, shush him etc. Told by our curate today that we are 'utterly selfish' because he isn't silent He 'nearly had to stop his sermon' - because my son was a bit noisy as I rushed him to have a wee. Members of the congregation and choir 'have had enough'. You know how many children turn up most weeks? 3, 2 of them mine. Sometimes 4.

The assisted suicide debate has been instructive in terms of sorting out the quality of our MPs. Those in favour almost all demonstrate poor reasoning, poor grasp of the bill, & poor grasp of parliamentary procedure. Often a poor grasp of the difference between truth and lies too Those against vary - some are in favour of assisted suicide in principle, some against - but all can work out when a bill is full of holes, when the detail is unacceptable or poorly thought trough, and all deplore the lack of proper consideration & time for debate on a key issue

The incredibly thin and ethically moronic basis of modern liberalism, based on a paper thin and one-dimensional view of human nature that has no time for context, human solidarity or moral restraints. The ethic of the capitalist sweatshop owner

https://twitter.com/kimleadbeater/status/1860429144363872612

On this basis, we shouldn't try to help drunks and drug addicts drinking themselves to death, or anorexics getting treatment, or problem gamblers putting the mortgage money on the 2.30 at Chepstow. 'I choose my choice' neoliberalism.

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