I am currently reading this terrific book, and Cannadine argues that as the old landed classes rapidly lost their economic and political grip from the 1880s, what took its place was the rule of the middle class through bureaucracy. This seems to me highly relevant to now... ...because what we have seen over the past 40 odd years is the return of this. Between the 1880s and 1930s, the Labour movement was not strong enough to exert its power politically in any concentrated way, so the country was run first by Liberal professionals and then by the...

I feel that something in Britain has broken in the following sense. Almost all institutions have reached a tipping point where the pure rule of rigid proceduralism and/or atomised impersonality now dominates, overriding any sense of individuals using judgement & moral agency. Both the rule of the market & of standardised bureaucracy - often hand in glove, sometimes in different proportions according to the institution - enervate individual moral choices & skilled judgement. No-one feels responsible for anything or anyone. It's ethically disastrous

Few things depress me more than the way that elements of contemporary academia see their role as trashing scholarship & learning. Great example: there are an increasing number of classicists who hate their own subject and don't think students should have to learn Greek or Latin They make an academic career out of saying that classics is the evil epitome of all that is racist, oppressive, etc about western civilization and that it's elitist to even make classics students learn the actual languages it is based on. Talk about kicking away the ladder

It's fashionable nowadays to use 'Protestant' as an insult. Protestantism is blamed for just about every modern malaise, esp by RC trad types. But I tell you one thing it gave us: widespread literacy & print culture, a legacy now in danger. And boy will you miss it when it's gone I say this as someone who would describe himself as a reformed Catholic Anglican on the high end: I am no fire-breathing evangelical. But Protestant belief in the power of the written word has been so much the air we breathe in Anglo countries that we've forgotten its importance

One of the things that is screwing up Britain is our mad habit of trying to promote everything via every policy. So the core purpose of any policy gets lost. Everything takes 4 times longer and costs twice as much as it would otherwise and never fulfils its main purpose anyway You want to build a bridge? Is the main objective 'how can we build a good sturdy bridge at the best cost'? Lol, that's barely in the top 10 criteria. How can the bridge a) save the planet, b) achieve gender justice etc, c) tackle all racism ever etc etc are all higher priorities

In this country, we've gone from the mentality of 'everything is permitted unless explicitly outlawed' to 'everything is outlawed unless explicitly permitted' and one net result of that is a deeply engrained culture of caution and disdain for showing initiative. It's depressing If you look at younger people, their education, the culture they grew up in, has made them scared of ever doing or thinking anything outside the narrow tramlines of whatever is permitted in the stifling institutional contexts they are used to. A nation of cautious proceduralists

Church leaders should think v carefully here. Many worried about immigration are not 'far right'. They are in fact like the despised outcasts Christ supped with, making our bishops at risk of being the Pharisees who asked 'Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?'

https://twitter.com/ChurchTimes/status/1971094613298417915

No doubt there are genuine racists/far right agitators. But working and lower middle class people from the provinces are the big losers out of the last 40 years and are obviously looked on as 'low status' by urban liberals & establishment figures. Christianity is for them too

We're currently in a disastrous political doom-loop. A large % of western populations are very discontented, their grievances a mixture of the understandable & less so. The elite's major answer to this is not to address the reasonable grievances, but to censor (mis)information... But the elite constantly conflates genuine misinformation with opinions they dislike. So the very act of advocating more censorship turbocharges existing mistrust of the state & media & makes people, some of whose discontents are v real, more susceptible to actual misinformation

It's extraordinary to manage to be forced to u-turn by your own backbenchers on a major policy when you have a majority of 170 odd, and you had iron control of parliamentary selections so most MPs are pretty pliant. Although it's partly aloof management & poor leadership, it's... ...also a sign of a government with no real driving strategy. Many MPs clearly have no faith that Starmer & Reeves have any credible underlying idea of what they're trying to do. The government is a quivering jelly of reactive fiddling and Treasury-brained policy-by-default

As we tear down moral guardrail after moral guardrail, we are sleep-walking into a dystopian society where there will be no ethical limits on anything that gratifies the desires of the amoral & rich. Eugenics, commercial surrogacy, overt post-natal infanticide The modish liberal orthodoxy that has come to stand in for morality provides no basis for objecting to these things, manmade horrors beyond comprehension. It's only the precarious hold of a few social conventions and stubborn taboos that prevents these things happening, for now

The thing about Christianity, inconvenient and in many ways tricky as it has proved for me, is that it is actually true. There is no other explanation for the empty tomb and aftermath that isn't madly convoluted and/or that doesn't ring totally psychologically false All of the 'we must return to Christianity to save civilization!' arguments, tho they may have elements of truth to them, are almost comically irrelevant. If Christ is risen, the fortunes of nations and interests of states seem like something of a secondary consideration

Here's a story (I won't name the person who told me this) that illustrates where we are in modern Britain. Someone who was a Labour Party agent in a town in Britain with a sizeable Muslim population was asked to meet a 'community leader' to discuss the next election. He went... ...and sat down at a table. The person threatened to withhold the votes of the hundreds of postal votes he controlled because the Labour candidate had not satisfied him on a particular issue. To illustrate that this was not an idle threat, he brought in shoeboxes full of....

Some of us have long said that welfare states are only sustainable with the social trust that tends to only exist within a stable & culturally homogeneous population. So don't be surprised at outrage if you cut disability & winter fuel benefits while mass immigration continues Mass immigration combined with a social democratic welfare state will and cannot work. Highly diverse societies are low trust societies and low trust societies can't sustain a social contract of the sort that underpins the welfare state. Trying to defy this = political suicide

The calls to cancel Trump's state visit are amusing. A client state with a military dependent on US co-operation doesn't have the luxury of doing the right thing. When the puppet king tries to stand up to Caesar to curry favour with his home tribes, it doesn't usually end well I'm all for an Anglo-Gaullist drive for national independence. I've been saying so for years. We need food security, a robust industrial policy, cheap energy. But the political establishment now sabre-rattling, both Lab & Tory, has spent years making us vassals. Reaping & sowing

Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. Since the US used Britain's weakness at the end of WWII to crush us as a great power, we've been puppet vassals, expected to periodically travel to Rome to pay fealty to Caesar. Some US presidents are more tactful at hiding the fact but that's it

https://twitter.com/AllisonPearson/status/1895399216287207574

I don't know what it will take to get into people's heads the reality that the US does not and has never seen us as some valued ally of equal standing. We went from being pantomime villain European imperialists to being their client state with a brief period in the middle

The left, such as it is - from the Labour Party through media luvvies through university lecturers etc - don't get how much a large majority of the working classes absolutely fucking loathe and despise them. Viscerally. They hate the way you patronise and talk over them... They hate the stupid nonsense jargon you spout, full of bullshit about 'sustainable communities', 'strategic frameworks' and 'mission statements'. They hate the fact that you're all careerist hacks from London who have never done a meaningful day's work in your lives.

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