There has been a gradual creeping up of copyright terms, with a 120-year term in force in some cases in the US. It seems logical that there should be some copyright provision, but by the same token copyright laws seem out of kilter with any kind of reasonable approach. It seems amazing that in the case of printed works, copyright extends beyond the death of the author—and not just for a short while beyond his death, but for 70 years. The works of someone who died in 1942, some of which could have been written in the late nineteenth century, will still be covered by copyright. Of course this provides an income for his estate, but in no other walk of life is a profession expected to provide for relatives and heirs for 70 years after the person’s death. This provision is not currently extended to audio recording artists—although it is applied to composers and the writers of song lyrics—but an eventual extension of recording copyright to 70 years beyond the artist’s death has to be on the cards, given the general legislative drift in this area.

Copyright exerts a dead hand on culture. While writers need to make money and pharmaceutical companies need to be sure that expensive development of drugs will result in a profit, at some point writers’ works join the common heritage of culture, which belongs to us all, and drugs and industrial technology become part of the common pot of human innovation and invention that can rightly be drawn upon by all human beings. To argue for no copyright at all would seem to be misguided, but to argue for copyright of anything beyond 20 years restricts innovation, economic growth and the enjoyment and development of culture. This is because, in the first place, one person’s innovation forms the starting point for further innovation by others, and there must be a mechanism to move innovations into common use within a reasonable timeframe.

For famous cultural works, it is even clearer that they rapidly become part of society’s heritage and do not exclusively belong to the author/artist, but to all fans, readers and listeners, beyond a certain point. There is an irony in all this, of course, because the great works of Western European culture—works by Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy, the Brontës, and compositions by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann and Tchaikovsky—are generally out of copyright, although in the case of classical music, recordings are themselves subject to copyright provisions separate to those applying to the original compositions. Much of what passes for culture today—including Cliff Richard’s Living Doll—is meretricious pap for the masses. One could facetiously assert the rule that where anything was in copyright, it was by definition not worth reading or listening to. But regardless of whether the cultural production is itself of poor quality, the development of culture requires that works quickly exit copyright provision. Technological advancement also requires the sharing of inventions and scientific achievements.

In England, copyright dates back to the 1709 Act for the Encouragement of Learning that came into force in April 1710. That Act provided for a copyright term of 14 years for new works, and 21 years for books already in print. By 1731, when many works fell out of copyright, the issue came before the courts, resulting in decades of lawsuits, before the 1774 Donaldson v. Beckett case established that copyright was purely a creation of statute law; there was no common law right of copyright that publishers could fall back on. This is important for conservatives who see wisdom in our ancient common law: while modern economic realities require a development of the law, copyright law as currently in force has taken us a long way from the 14-year term originally enacted.

Copyright terms should be substantially reduced. As stated above, I would like to see a maximum 20-year term, and the immediate cessation of copyright with the death of the author/artist even where a 20-year term has not elapsed. Another issue of concern to me is the copyrighting of computer programmes. Many older computer programmes are no longer supported by developers, and computer programmes, unlike books and audio recordings, require support. It is still illegal to copy older versions of Microsoft programmes, and I would like to see 20-year maximum copyright term supplemented by an additional provision that computer programmes no longer supported by the developers fall automatically out of copyright.

An additional quirk of copyright is that many works are in copyright, although the books concerned are no longer in print. This bizarre and irrational circumstance means that those works are no longer available, despite the fact that the publisher had judged that there is no money to be made in republishing those works. If the publisher of George Orwell’s 1984 decided to stop publishing the work, it would be unavailable until 2020—70 years after George Orwell’s death—despite the fact that this is an important work in English culture, and that the publisher’s decision to stop publication had the effect of deleting a work from the canon of English literature. Publishers, writers and artists who had allowed works to fall out of circulation for more than 5 years should be deemed to have surrendered copyright to them. In the era of micropublishing and electronic publishing, it is simple for an author to maintain his works in circulation for the 20-year term I am advocating.

Crown copyright is another interesting area of law. The British Crown apparently retains copyright over the Authorised Version (King James Version) of the Bible, The Book of Common Prayer, Acts of Parliament and other works. Amazingly, the Crown copyright over the Authorised Version of the Bible, produced in 1611, is perpetual, although this is not respected by Anglicans abroad, and so the full text of that version of the Bible is available online. Perpetual Crown copyright of anything seems a nonsense, and even more so for a work produced in 1611 that is a core part of English culture. It seems logical to make clear by Act of Parliament that the Queen’s Coronation Oath implies a duty to defend the Authorised Version and The Book of Common Prayer, but that that is not any form of copyright. Consequently, the claim by Cambridge University Press that it has sole right to reproduce the Authorised Version in the UK after taking over Eyre and Spottiswoode, the descendant of the original office of the Queen’s Printer, in 1990 ought to be rejected. Acts of Parliament are by their nature to be widely available in order that the provisions of statutes enacted become widely known. Once again, the claim that there is “copyright” in an Act of Parliament is a nonsense. Acts of Parliament are available on a government website—yet Her Majesty’s Stationery Office has stated that it does not accept material on such websites to be freely reproducible.

I would like it to be made clear legally that no Crown copyright subsists in anything produced using public funds. While few people would be seeking to reproduce Acts of Parliament, a more interesting question arises regarding BBC output. The BBC is a quango, paid for from public funds (as the TV licence is just a hypothecated tax). Yet the corporation runs a profitable commercial operation based on the “copyright” in its programming. Some BBC programmes are available online via the iPlayer service, but many are not, with a notice claiming that copyright laws prevent redistribution of some programmes via iPlayer. As far as I am concerned, no copyright subsists in any of the BBC’s output. I would like all sporting events televised by the BBC to become freely available too.

Copyright on the Internet is an interesting question. While I would not like someone to assemble my articles into a book and make money from them, the nature of electronic publishing is that it is easy for the texts to be copied and distributed. Online copying and redistribution of something that primarily exists online (thus excluding MP3 files of audio recordings that have a prior existence as physical CDs, which ought to be covered by 20-year copyright), where not for commercial gain, should be deemed by law to be the logical consequence of one’s decision to publish anything online. The forwarding of an email is also the logical consequence of one’s decision to send an email to someone, and should not breach any copyright terms.

Furthermore, the creative use of “copyright” to cover personal letters is absurd. We were told that when Princess Diana’s letters to Captain James Hewitt were about to be published that Captain Hewitt owned the paper and ink the letters were written on, but Princess Diana’s estate owned the text and the copyright thereto. This is a nonsense. The owner of the letter owns the copyright to the text in the letter—and one should be careful not to send risqué letters to indiscrete people. I see no reason why Captain Hewitt should not make money from the publication of Princess Diana’s letters. A private letter is different from a published work, in that the text is privately owned and copyright should exist as long as the owner keeps the letter private—it is, after all, difficult to copy a letter the owner will not make available—whereas most copyright law refers to copyright over previously published material.

Finally, our economy needs to be based on real production (of industrial and cultural works) and not just on revenue collection from old works. We need innovation, sales and profits, not just the purely parasitical function of copyright revenue. The older advanced economies are ill-advised to depend on their technological lead and rest on their laurels by creaming off the profits from the adoption of their “intellectual property” in the developing world. If we do not produce anything of value now we will be overtaken. A revision, and scaling back, of copyright laws would be opposed internationally, where there are international agreements in place on the issue, but we need to assert the primacy of our own laws and establish the UK as a global centre for new, creative innovation once again.

I don’t have any interest in drawings of children being raped, but I know of no legitimate law where people could be imprisoned for drawing such a scene. However, this is apparently illegal in the UK today, and the first prosecution was brought recently under this law. See this article in the Daily Mail.

I have no objection to throwing the book at real paedophiles—people who sexually attack children—and would consider penalties much, much stiffer than any contemplated by our leading political parties—including the death penalty in many cases. Ironically, the police and the judicial establishment involved in the prosecution for drawings of sex with children are the very same criminal establishment who are opposed to the death penalty in the UK. In my book, the judges abet paedophilia by the judgments they hand down to serious paedophiles. A future conservative state could well retrospectively punish those judges involved.

Look at how strangely we are governed! We read a while back of how a young adult who raped a 6 year old was not given a detentionary sentence, because the “Christian” parents “forgave” him (but real forgiveness relates to forgiving something done to yourself: it was simply evil—Pharisaical sanctimony—for the parents to forgive him “vicariously” on behalf of their child), only for him to then rape a 7 year old. I would argue those parents, by their opposition to proper punishment for the rape of their child, are complicit in the rape of the 7 year old, and, if members of the Church of England, should be denied the sacrament until they have done penance for that. Nearly everything done in the name of Christianity today is contrary to the 2000 year old teachings of the church: those parents could indeed raise their child to try to forgive the perpetrator and leave punishment to the state and to God (as Romans 13 makes clear that the Christian church does see a God-given role in public punishment for crime), but to go out of their way to ensure such a paedophile remained on the streets is something else entirely. So it seems real cases of paedophilia don’t necessarily get condign punishment, whereas on the other hand, these drawings, which do not include any violent act on any child, are subject to punishment. Does anyone understand this?

The definition of paedophilia has become wider and wider. We have seen:

1. viewing pictures on the Internet equated with actual child rape (in a free society the police would have to have a good reason to believe you had actually engaged in sex with a minor before viewing anything on your computer anyway, and the possession of an easily copiable computer image should not be actionable at all, no matter how repugnant it makes the person downloading it);

2. the judicial insistence that all child nudity, including nudity where there is no sexual component, is pornographic, including pictures of children wearing no clothes at the seaside, whereas, no matter what the motivation of the adult taking the photographs (e.g., a paedophile could be using a camera on the beach), the image is simply not pornographic—it could only be held to be so where the judge himself were a paedophile… (actually…. I could believe that);

3. female teachers in their early twenties engaged in sexual relationships with pupils only five or six years younger than themselves are now held to be predatory paedophiles (they don’t exactly fit the profile for paedophiles jumping out of bushes to kidnap, rape and murder 5 year old children…); and

4. the drawing of imaginary pictures depicting paedophile scenes is now equated with physically raping a child.

It is worth asking (I don’t know from the Daily Mail article) the presumed age of the children in the drawings: there are “children” above the age of sexual maturity simply because the law says they are children (e.g., the age of consent varies from country to country), and then there is the real hardcore paedophilia of people who target those who are actually children.

I’m not suggesting, for example, that 15 year olds should be subject to predatory behaviour, but that there is a difference between the rape of a 7 year old (too young to know what is happening) and apparently consensual sex with someone a week before his/her 16th birthday, who is biologically mature, old enough to know what is happening, and only a “child” because we choose to keep young people in education until they are 16. Now, if I had a 15 year old child, I would be livid if some 45 year old were behaving lasciviously towards him or her—in social terms, 15 year oldd are not fully street-wise, and, owing to not having their own money yet, could be easily lured by a much older person. But physically, biologically, there is nothing strange about sexual attraction to a 15 year old. I defy ANYONE to show me that someone attracted to someone 16 years and 1 day old would not be attracted to someone 15 years and 364 days old. You could argue there must be a cut-off point (and the same argument would apply whatever the cut-off point), but 16 years of age is simply well above the age of sexual maturity.

In fact, I will go further: the policemen who, according to the very Act of Parliament we are discussing, are entitled to possess “pornographic images” for the purpose of cracking down on vice, are probably turned on by them. Tell me what heterosexual policeman working in the anti-paedo unit is not going to appreciate pictures of 15 year old girls he comes into contact with at work? And if there are any homosexual policemen in those units coming into contact with pictures of 15 year old boys, I think the number who will not enjoy the pictures (if the pictures are of attractive people) is going to be zero. So according to their own theory—the policemen themselves in those anti-paedo units are paedophiles themselves! In fact, I would say that every single policeman working in the anti-paedo unit is a paedophile, according to their own definition.

Now, I think taking advantage of a 15 year old should be some kind of offence, but it is not paedophilia as such. And it is not at all the same thing as the people who kidnap and force themselves on 7 year olds. My guess is that the number of people who are interested in actual children (pre-pubescent children) is extremely low—they are severely disturbed (lthough I would still argue for the death penalty for any of those who acted on their desire for pre-pubescent children), and there are probably no more than 100 of these (maybe much less) in the country as a whole, all very well known to the police and monitored in some way. Now, as for arrests for paedophilia—my guess is that in nearly all cases, we are dealing with people attracted to 15 year olds, or maybe 14 year olds (as, after all, these are also post-pubescent). Real paedophilia is very very rare indeed.

I could understand paedomania if we were not trying to sexualise children at a younger and younger age—but to go out of our way in the media, the education system and the wider culture to sexualise even pre-pubescent children (as well as sexualising post-pubescent 14 and 15 year olds, who would in the 1950s have still been pretty innocent even if biologically mature) and then suddenly claim that paedophilia is rife is a contradiction in terms. Let us not forget that the sexualisation of school pupils from the ages of 6 to 16 is the official policy of the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour Parties in the UK. Where teachers teach sex education to 14 and 15 year olds, I cannot believe there is no sexual tension in the class. Any red-blooded male who taught sex education to a class of people many of whom he objectively must be attracted to is going to be getting off on the whole experience.

I looked up this 2009 law on “drawings” (the Coroners and Justice Act 2009), and funnily enough it did say that the drawing was illegal even if some features appeared not to be of a child, i.e., where “the predominant impression conveyed is that the person shown is a child despite the fact that some of the physical characteristics shown are not those of a child.” You could even see the humour in this—what they are talking about is a drawing of a child with an outsized penis! Even though the penis would be bigger than that expected of a child, if the overall image appeared to be of a child, it would be illegal. In fact,that law states that the relevant age for illegal drawings is not 16 but 18. Where do I start on this? It is legal to have sex with a 16 year old, but not to draw that same person nude? Young people aged 16 are serving in the army, but are children for the purposes of photographs and drawings? So it is not paedophilia if you just want to have sex with a 16 year old, but the moment you get your camera out, you are a paedophile? And the police claim to be able to distinguish a drawing of a 17 year old from a drawing of an 18 year old—what nonsense is this?

It is easy to go down the kneejerk route and say that people who are sexually interested in those under the age of 16 (or 18, in the case of images) should have no rights—but we should think of how close the state is moving into all our lives. When the state can monitor your drawings, there is really no private sphere left. You will notice that the case in that Daily Mail article is described as a “landmark” case—in other words, a case making new case law that will begin to be more widely applied. While it is true that the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 does say “references to an image of a child include references to an image of an imaginary child”—so this is not one of the many cases where new laws are being made by judges—statute laws that are an abuse of power are also of great concern to me. Moreover, while there is a statute law promoting the paedophile panic, we need to bear in mind that judicial interpretation still plays the key role. (It will largely be a matter of interpretation where a judge decides that a drawing is  of a 17 year old and not of an 18 year old). We are a grossly overgoverned country, not least because we allow ourselves to be taken in by these moral panics.

The abuse whereby Chinese workplace bosses would refuse to allow their employees to marry—they were required to sign the documents—unless the bride first gave her virginity to the boss has been stymied by a change in the law, which does not now require workplace approval for the match, but sexual abuse in the workplace is not only rife, but standard, in China. The parents who lost their children in the Sichuan earthquake of 2009 were arrested for protesting over the schoolhouses that collapsed like jelly as the money for school construction had been siphoned off by corrupt officials. Of the 80-odd earthquake orphans who were disabled as a result of the earthquake, not one—not a single one, according to the Chinese press—found a family in the world’s most populous nation willing to adopt him. As far as most moral issues are concerned, the Chinese do not really seem to “care”.

We care. It is what we do as Westerners. We are the nations intent on building up geo-political rivals by subsidies and technological transfer. Hillary Clinton cares about the rioting Egyptians (although apparently much less about the displaced Palestinians in much worse circumstances). From racism to sexism to homophobia to destruction of the environment, Western political views are directly informed by a sort of cod-altruism. We are worried about the plight of slaves in Mauritania and about child labour in Pakistan. And such supposed “altruism” feeds directly into the politics of guilt: it is “unfair” that other nations are poorer than we; we were the ones who engaged in the triangular slave trade; we are not doing enough to help the homosexuals of Iran; the underclass in Britain cannot be expected to control their own fertility, even in the age of the “morning-after pill”, and so it would be “unfair” not to subside their unproductive lifestyles; and the death penalty for cold-blooded killers would be cruel, as social disadvantage is deemed to play a key role in such individuals’ personalities.

Clearly we are different from the other civilisations of the earth. And it is not just the Chinese who fail to measure up to our moral standards. While the Islamic civilisation includes a large and unbending moral component, one of the key things that stands out is the cruel use of state power to enforce their moral code. For some reason, Islam never set out to create individuals who were morally upright; it did not set out to build individuals who did not need cruel punishments to stay in line. Hilaire Belloc’s wonderful tale, The Mercy of Allah, sets out an understanding of Muslim society that is every bit as selfish and greedy as Chinese society. To rob others, unbeknown to them until you are far off, is shown in that book as viewed as “the mercy of Allah”, who facilitates the crime. Christian concern for others, even those you do not know, does not seem to be present in those societies. In Britain itself, the paedophilia and sexually predatory behaviour of young Muslim men, long suppressed as an item of news, has recently hit the headlines. What surprises you is that such behaviour is not rare or a fringe activity, but one participated in by large numbers of Muslim youths working together. Crime statistics are apparently “top secret” in the UK, but statistics from a range of Western countries confirm the prevalence of crime among the non-European part of the population. In Sweden, for example, the still demographically small first- and second-generation immigrant population is responsible for a large majority of rapes and sexual assaults.

True, violent crime is less common in China, where it is the overwhelming social norm for men to frequent brothels, and the lower level of violence can also be explained by higher average IQ levels in East Asia, which produce a fairly stable population, who prefer to use their intelligence to rip others off financially than to use their fists or force themselves on lone women. Indian and Pakistani doctors in the UK are known for “feeling up” their female patients—presumably in their culture they would get away with this behaviour, and “anti-racism” ensures they often do in Britain too. Real hard violence, as a social norm, is, however, rather found in the African-descended part of the population, who lack the IQs of the Chinese and the economic prospects of everyone else. Many geneticists believe that not only IQs but also the tendency towards aggression is coded for in human genes, and further solid information on this subject is eagerly awaited by conservatives.

So it seems clear that there is a real difference between the West and the other civilisations. This is not to deny that bad behaviour has not become much more prevalent among the Western underclass, possibly as a side function of state sponsorship of sexual incontinence and unmarried motherhood. The “wigger” phenomenon suggests that British youths are modelling themselves on their Afro-Caribbean counterparts, with negative social consequences. However, these phenomena are the result of the distorted morality or guilt of the Western middle classes, who have allowed bad behaviour to take root rather than being “judgmental”. This produces the curious circumstance that, whereas other civilisations, such as Islam, are unofficially immoral, in contrast to the full Islamic law, which would be unbendingly moral, we now officially support immoral lifestyles. Islamic revulsion at Western society has been frequently described in the press: it seems that calls for social integration fall on deaf ears, when that society smiles at images of young women drunk and half-naked lying on the pavement. At least officially, in their own communities, the Muslim leaders are not afraid to denounce immorality. It seems we are both more “caring” and less strict on the moral front than they are, or at least claim to be; there is a good deal of evidence that private moral behaviour is much worse in the Muslim community than it would be in mainstream Britain.

This produces a complicated picture. How can we be more moral if we are morally lax? The solution seems to lie in the cod-altruism mentioned earlier. Western society, and particularly Anglo-Saxon society, is noted for its sanctimonious and self-righteous tone. Western society functions as a competition for moral status, a game of moral “one-upmanship”. I think this explains the pretence of altruism: by displaying your concern for others, you prove your superiority to others, in this game at least. Free Tibet! I’d rather pay a bit more in tax! Save the whale! One of my best friends is black! We mustn’t be judgmental! All these are particular manifestations of the game of moral status.

Actually, the self-righteous do not actually give a damn about any one of their causes. I have tried to winkle out the bottom line of their altruism: when the self-righteous witter on about their concern for the 3,000 desaparecidos of Chile, I ask them if they are as concerned about the 30,000 members of the Matabele tribe slaughtered by the anti-imperialist, Robert Mugabe, in Zimbabwe. That generally leads to a tense conversation: their eyes glaze over, they refuse to listen to any more facts and get angry. Yet, if they really were altruistic, they would care about deaths at the hands of anti-imperialists too. It was shown at one point in the Somali famine that the agricultural situation had recovered in that country, but the fact that Western food donations kept rolling in made farmers reluctant to cultivate their fields. Why would it make any difference to the self-righteous if they were actually harming the Somalis by their vaunted “kindness”? Does it make any difference to them that the welfare benefits system has led to a large rise in the numbers of children brought up by single mothers? And that that situation is linked, in one of the strongest statistical links in the social sciences, with crime, delinquency, drug abuse, and the physical and sexual abuse of the children, often by their mothers’ string of “partners”?

If we are “moral”, we are moral in a way that is largely intended to flatter ourselves. That is why the objects of our concern are so curiously selective. In the 1990s, we were oh-so-concerned about the driving of the Bosnian Muslims out of their “safe havens”, which we viewed as part of a wonderful attempt to create a multi-ethnic society (ahem! among people killing each other), and yet the driving of the Croatian Serbs out of their “protected areas” failed to provoke a similar reaction. It was ordinary people who bore the brunt in both cases. It could be said that Western people are idealistic, and that they pick out the cases to show concern over with a careful eye on what would make themselves look good morally.

That is not to say that self-righteousness is not connected in some way with real morality. The fact that in most of these cases people are being treated in ways that would call for compassion—especially if you were a member of that society, and rather less credibly if you are just enjoying the sensation of concern via the television screen—is what the claim to altruism rests upon. To that extent, it seems that “youthful idealism” is used by a more cynical class of free riders to stake out their own claim to moral superiority, while not really giving a damn. I am a long way from condemning genuine altruism, although it would be very rare, and I do not think I have come across it in British society. Anyone who is really concerned about the starving millions in Africa would sell his house and give the money to the starving. I would not discourage anyone from doing so, as long as no-one else (for example, wife and children) were affected, in which case imposing suffering on them would not be genuinely altruistic. Quite simply, I myself do not care about the starving in Ethiopia—it is a very abstract concept to me, and charity is better directed to one’s own immediate community—but then neither do the self-righteous; the difference is, I do not feel the need to indulge in gesture politics on the issue.

Self-righteousness has become the moral stance of the British elite, many of whom are making large sums out of their concern for others. I am sure senior civil servants, bureaucrats in the health service, headmasters on six-figure salaries in failing schools, “quango queens” and charity directors all tell themselves that they are handsomely rewarded for their superior morality. They are all trying to do good, or so they tell themselves, and if they are actually imposing a financial burden on the low-paid, siphoning money off from front-line healthcare, teaching trendy subjects they know will damage the life chances of their pupils, wasting money on fatuous and politically motivated campaigns, and even directing money collected as “charitable donations” into their final-salary pension funds, they are able to rationalise it in some way to themselves. How lucrative “caring” has become! Quite often these people are prepared to siphon off large sums of money into overseas projects (collecting their salaries on the way). I would argue that the Chinese-style naked pursuit of self-interest at least has the advantage of allowing the Chinese to support their own society. They do not have to pretend to care about the Sudan, and so they can keep all their money in China. And they do not need to feign concern about the human rights of murderers, and so are free to support the death penalty and keep China a stable, low-crime society. And the Muslim society of wealthy Saudi Arabia sees no need to fund unmarried motherhood, so helping to ensure that most children in that society are brought up by both of their real parents. Amazing, is it not, how self-interest often fosters a healthy society?

How did Western society become so self-righteous? Is this merely a phenomenon of the twentieth century as our Christian culture receded? I would argue that the sanctimoniousness of the elite, and their middle-class hangers-on, has huge material advantages for the elite, in that it has vastly expanded the size of the state, but there are other advantages too for the elite of this form of self-righteousness. Whereas traditional morality required them to set a social example themselves, the new form of cod-morality requires nothing of them personally. You can be a serial divorcer and abandoner of children, and as long as you are passionate anti-racist and concerned about global warming, you are still a good person today. The cod-morality requires nothing more than occasional lip-service, whereas traditional morality was a tight life-long straitjacket of behaviour. We have reached the point where morality is what you say and not what you do. A pleasant person who never does anything to harm others, but voices his opposition to immigration—I would put myself in this category—is deemed in self-righteous circles to be a “nasty individual”, based entirely on his views. Someone who has ruined the lives of his wife and children has only to mouth platitudes to become accepted in the best company.

Clearly, though, self-righteousness is connected to our erstwhile morality. Even in the old days, those who were determined to be seen to be behaving in line with the church’s moral precepts were seen as self-righteous. They cultivated their moral images every bit as much as the new elite cultivate theirs. From one point of view, the change in society has been nothing more than a shift in the focus of morality, from sexual to racial matters. Incidents such as the persecution of the witches of Salem in early America show that the same tendency to self-righteousness, together with a taste for persecuting others that is very much alive in the new political correctness, has been there all along. Yet the difference is that the old self-righteousness of the family and the church fostered a good society: it held the fabric of the family and nation together. The new self-righteousness is destructive of the fabric society because it opposes the family and the nation, and it is for that reason, and not its mere sanctimonious tone (unbearable though that is), that I oppose it.

Finally, the church itself warned of self-righteousness and judgmentalism. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were probably not engaging in any form of immorality, but it was their self-righteousness that offended Jesus, who condemned them as “whited sepulchres”. A nation steeped in the Bible was on the look-out for self-righteousness, and this at least meant that a genuine difference between real morality and the cultivation of a fake moral image was clear to all members of society back then. Could it be that, as we have in the main abandoned Christianity, we no longer see the distinction between righteousness and self-righteousness? That having been weaned off the Bible, we take claims of morality at face value?

It was always a problem for the Christian church that it called for righteousness and condemned unrighteousness while claiming to oppose self-righteousness too. Is it not self-righteous to tell others to be righteous? I can only square that circle myself with the concept of a nation that is Christian, rather than individuals who are Christian. At one stage, Englishmen were told they were “building Jerusalem”, that England must become the kingdom of God on earth. It was not a messianic vision of the Second Coming of Christ, but was rather a messianic vision of a good society, right here in England. Once the values that were once seen as moral and right are assimilated by the majority of society, it becomes harder for one individual to stake a greater claim to morality by adhering to them. They were once the norm in society. True, there were individuals hamming up their devotion to God, but there was nothing unusual back then about loving your wife “till death do us part” and bringing up your children to behave themselves. This moral tone was what was great about England—we were individuals with integrity, not individuals who it took the strictures of a cruel and barbaric shari’ah law to keep in line. The goal of the Church of England was never merely to create moral individuals, but to create a society where moral behaviour was the accepted social norm. Whether the theology of the Bible was true or not, it is a fact of history that the “new personality” spoke of by St Paul was put on by many—the majority?—of Englishmen, and that a society that worked on its precepts brought the religion of Christianity alive regardless of the facts of science and history.

So it seems to me that our traditional morality has metamorphosised into the self-righteousness, the cod-morality, of our new elite. Having been profoundly influenced by the Gospels, our nation was ripe for the emergence of anti-racism and various forms of synthetic outrage to replace the old certainties. Is this some kind of original cultural flaw in the Western societies? Does our oft-proclaimed moral superiority conceal a tendency towards self-deception and gesture politics? The irony is, when the Western civilisation was at its height, it was better than the rest of them put together!

While I do believe that, ideally, all children should be brought up by parents who are committed to each other and to their children, I don’t see that the state can mandate the traditional family as the sole household arrangement. However, by the same token, it should not be funding the breakdown of the family either. It is simply anti-social for the state to allow single mothers to apply for and get social housing. The result has been an upsurge in the numbers of women who see single parenthood as a career choice.

I should add that I do not agree there should be any social housing available at all. Social housing distorts the property market, and allows large numbers of people to live essentially parasitical lifestyles. The recently leaked US embassy cable referring to the fact that 28% of Muslims present in the UK live in social housing also highlights the fact that social housing is being used to promote the government’s anti-British demographic objectives.

I would like to see all social housing privatised and all levels of government withdraw from housing policy. As a libertarian society would scale down (and ultimately eliminate) social security, one feasible way of withdrawing from social housing and slashing social welfare payments would be to give all present social housing to their present occupants, giving them a safety net in life, but being accompanied by a large cut in social welfare payments too. I would strongly support this in the case where social housing is inhabited by people of British or Irish descent; in other cases, social housing could be sold in job lots to private landlords, thus allowing the state to withdraw from the sector.

This would mean there was no social housing for single mothers—which is how it should be. No single mother should be able to casually assume that the broad mass of the population wished to fund her parasitical lifestyle. But the other aspect of this moral/social question I wish to comment on is relations between the sexes, and in particular the impact on the fathers of the children being brought up by mothers outside wedlock of the mothers’ decisions to proceed with the pregnancies.

While I do not necessarily approve of abortion—and serial abortion as a means of contraception is even more repugnant to me—there is an interesting social question regarding who makes the decision to proceed with an unplanned pregnancy. At present, the decision is 100% the woman’s to make—not unreasonably considering the fact that an operation on her own body would be required to accomplish an abortion—and yet the man is left in the situation where he will be called upon financially for 16 years thereafter if the woman decides to proceed, regardless of whether he wants the child or not.

This is manifestly unjust. The Child Support Agency is also a manifestly unjust organisation that doesn’t even ensure that the monies it garners from the fathers are given to the mothers/families involved. Quite simply, if a man has not entered into a legal agreement to support a woman and any children she bears—and this is the definition of “wedlock”—it is unjust for him to be required to financially support the upbringing of children who do not live with him and whose birth he did not agree to. A thirty-minute liaison after a drunken night out does not create an agreement of lifelong commitment to the woman—or to her future children. While people will say that a man has to honour his responsibilities, he is not involved in the decision whether to proceed with the pregnancy or not. He therefore has no responsibilities in the matter.

Why would any man want to pay for children who don’t live with him and with whose mother he has never entered into any agreement of commitment? A glance at The Jeremy Kyle Show on ITV shows that most working-class men who are interested in their children want the mother and the children as a package—and where he wishes to have a relationship with the woman, but she doesn’t reciprocate, he rarely wants to fund the lifestyles of either the mother or the children. Most of the DNA testing done on that show relates to the idea that a man has a responsibility to fund the upbringing of children who are genetically his, but who he may not even know, or with whom he is allowed only brief and supervised contact, and who are often the results of only a thirty-minute relationship with the mother.

The Child Support Agency should be closed down. Where children are born out of wedlock, and bearing in mind that the mother’s decision to proceed with the pregnancy is final, there should be no legally enforceable obligations on the father. In such circumstances, and given that I support the withdrawal of all benefits to unmarried mothers, the woman could only proceed with the pregnancy had she a private income or where her parents were happy to help to finance the child’s upbringing. The father might be prepared to help out, but given that he was under no moral or legal commitment (i.e., “no bond of wedlock”), it would be his free choice whether to do so or not.

Of course, a decision to proceed with a pregnancy is irrevocable once the child is born. It should be possible for parents who are not married to agree that the pregnancy go ahead, with the man signing a legal contract agreeing to take on the obligation of supporting a child born to a mother to whom he is not married. Such a legal agreement would give a cast-iron guarantee to the mother that she could proceed with the pregnancy and would be able to sue the father for maintenance were he to go back on the agreement. In the absence of such an agreement, she would not be able to look to the father or to the state for help. (Were it later shown via DNA testing that the child was not his, this could create a legal justification for his backing out of the agreement; ultimately, a mother does know if she has been having sex with numerous men and she has to take responsibility for herself too.)

This policy would lead to a large reduction in unmarried motherhood, with positive implications for crime, delinquency, child abuse and the quality of child rearing. It would create a situation of genuine equality between the sexes, which is after all what the rhetoric surrounding women’s rights is all about.

It is quite false to believe that Britain is a capitalist or bourgeois society. This is the most important theoretical point that needs to be grasped. Without an understanding of this, all other comment on British society will be superfluous. James Burnham, the former Trotskyist who became a conservative, and whose writings underpinned the views of the US conservative (now sadly deceased), Sam Francis, believed that bourgeois society had been replaced by “managerialism”. The more vulgar forms of Marxism had posited a linear progression, whereby slavery gave way to feudalism, feudalism to capitalism, and thus ultimately to socialism and communism. What else could there be after capitalism?

We have seen a greater expansion of the managerial state than in Burnham’s times and are therefore in a position to agree with his thesis that after the bourgeoisie comes the managerial class. Note that I do not assert any linear progression: the managerial class has replaced the bourgeoisie, but it didn’t have to happen this way. However that may be, there are few genuine “bourgeois” running large businesses today. The nineteenth-century style owner-manager system, whereby a rich individual owned his cotton factory and everything in it, does not exist today. Most businesses are joint-stock corporations. The owners are actually pension funds and private investors, and the operations of the company itself are controlled by a class of managers.

Now, it would be possible to argue that the greater complexity of big business today, the larger size of the enterprises and their greater number of employees mean that an owner, a single bourgeois, could never hope to manage his company singlehandedly. Surely he would need chief financial officers, accountants, personnel managers and so forth. From that point of view, economic growth has led to a technocratic future, with the various managerial functions occupying various technical roles in business that cannot easily be dispensed with.

I am not one of those libertarians who would like to attack big business and replace it by smaller business units. But there is a certain amount of merit to the view that the greater complexity of business today has led to a proliferation of technical-professional roles within businesses, and in particularly large businesses. Without a bureaucratisation of the polity, however, such a managerial stratum would never have emerged as the ruling elite of society as a whole.

It was pointed out by Sam Francis that the same types of people–in fact a managerial elite–were running everything, both in the private and public sector, today. The technocratic style of the managerial roles allows managers to move seemlessly between the sectors. There is no reason why a personnel manager of, say, a drinks company, should not move over to the Church of England to perform the same role, and then into the civil service and then back into the private sector. The role–the technical function–is the same. Similarly, an accountant with an oil firm can get a job in the Salvation Army, and then the Ministry of Defence, and then maybe a EU institution. Whereas once all these organisations would have employed different types of people, the managers are an identikit class. The ascendancy of a technical-professional class means that our society functions as a technocracy, with a technocratic elite dominates all large institutions.

This is partly a function of the education system, which is highly influenced by political priorities. Much of the university syllabus in many subjects is taken up with various forms of promotion of egalitarianism, producing a uniformity of view among the would-be managers. However, this in turn is also a function of the politicisation of culture. The larger state has been created, ostensibly in response to demands for greater government intervention to even up socioeconomic outcomes. However, the university-educated are well-placed to take advantage of such greater government spending, and more likely to speak the politically correct jargon of the managerial class.

Take, for example, multi-culturalism. This political obsession, once confined to “loony left” councils, is now preached in the universities and promoted by all state bodies and all private-sector companies. It seems extraordinary that private companies should take part in political campaigns, but all companies are required to have “equal opportunities” policies–which frequently do not amount to a promotion of “equal opportunities” at all–and have therefore staff members occupied with the administration of and promotion of this agenda. A cursory glance at well-paid job vacancies today shows that many of these are connected with the open promotion of this political agenda, creating a relatively large class of people who are doing the bidding of the political elite as a matter of course in their day-to-day work. It is important to realise that this agenda blurs the distinction between the public and private sectors, creating a class of people who move between both, using this political agenda as a vehicle for their career aims.

Multi-culturalism bring in its wake a slew of jobs in the police force, the prison service, the courts, insurance (because of higher crime), counter-terrorism, border controls and even translation services, all of which are either parasitical on the political agenda of multi-culturalism or justified as an attempt to address the social dislocations caused by having non-integrated ethnic communities in our country. While multi-culturalism is in many ways the most prominent of the elite’s obsessions, and important because the promotion of mass immigration threatens to dispossess the British of their homeland, it is, from the point of view of the elite, but one of many “causes” that justify public spending, well-heeled jobs in the public sector and equivalent jobs in the private sector.

First of all, there are other forms of egalitarianism, including feminism and the “gay rights” agenda. There are organisations public and private (and many of the private ones are funded or partly funded by the state) promoting this agenda, and jobs to be had in both public and private sector in connection with it. Often the egalitarian agenda is wrapped up in one department, with “human resource” staff charged with complying with legislation on racial, sexual and sexual orientation equality, as well as a number of other issues (such as disability) that are spawning public- and private-sector technocratic employment. However, feminism and “gay rights” produce their own spin-offs too. They justify intrusive government intervention in the form of family courts, social workers, employment tribunals–and even adoption agencies are reported in the press as being involved in an attempt to promote the “gay rights” agenda. Solicitors benefit financially from family break-up, and then there is the so-called Child Support Agency bureaucracy, with its own technocratic and financial interest in the breakdown of family values and the promotion of state intervention in the area.

So called environmentalism is another bureaucratic growth area. A large number of public-sector jobs result directly from claims that economic growth is fuelling “global warming”. Jobs in academia and the Metereological Office, both paid for from the public purse, are dependent on political interest in this area, and local councils are employing large phalanxes of “carbon change co-ordinators”. A number of charities, quangos and EU bodies are parasitical on the environmental agenda.

Health and safety has metamorphosised from an area characterised by common sense to one where common sense is not allowed to intervene, as it would threaten public-sector and private-sector jobs. The Health and Safety Executive is a gross example of technocratic employment in this area, but a large number of private-sector jobs are in this area, which also requires wasteful and fatuous business expenditure on “training” in this area, including trivial and absurd examples, such as “training” in the movement of a chair.

Public health is a growth area too. Despite the financial crisis, £4bn has been announced in spending to influence health prevention behaviour in the areas of obesity and smoking. There is little evidence that bureaucracies trying to influence personal health prevention behaviour work, but the jobs are well-paid, and the ideology behind them provides the sense of self-righteousness that motivates the people working for the state in this area. Jobs in academia also leech from the public purse in this area, invariably revolving around research showing a “link” between various types of behaviour and health outcomes, often of questionable logic. Publicly funded media, such as the BBC, also devote great space to these issues. Dyslexia, dyscalcula, hyperactivity and other obsessions are also essentially parasitic on the public purse and depend on publicly funded media and academic willingness to promote the various panics or concerns that lead to the opening of the public purse-strings. The number of people involved in the “AIDS establishment”, the number of people publicly funded to treat HIV/AIDS or promote a panic over the issue, exceeds the number of people with AIDS in the UK.

It is important to note that these areas of public concern have a large ideological component. Any ruling elite depends, not on physical force, but on cultural hegemony to support its rule. With great media, political and academic resources at their disposal to promote their points of view, which have a common thread by invariably requiring government expenditure and bureaucratic positions to address alleged evils and often requiring private-sector participation in the campaigns, the managerial elite is in a position to influence a broader range of the population. People who are not conceivably part of the managerial elite espouse the managerial ideologies. One can cite, for example, schoolteachers who think it is appropriate to lock a primary schoolchild alone in a classroom while police are summoned to deal with a “racist” incident of the most utterly trivial kind or the local council staff who cite the health and safety ideology to justify an inability to remove household waste that cannot be pulled with two fingers alone. In addition to the elite or managerial-level jobs that are involved in promoting bureaucratic intervention of many kinds, there are numerous (millions?) of lower-level hangers-on, people who abuse their positions in schools, hospitals, companies or government offices, and justify their behaviour by reference to one or more of the managerial ideologies.

However, even this would not be enough to explain the dominance of the technocratic point of view in society. Why do so many business leaders spout these ideologies? It seems clear that a crisis of elite belief in the nation-state and British culture has led to a search for a new, more sustainable ideology in a globalised world. Democracy itself appears less meaningful once the national culture has been debunked and the population, once united by a common culture, reduced to a meaningless collection of people with little connection between themselves by means of multi-culturalism and immigration. The various managerial ideologies provide a way of looking at the world that is a replacement for Christianity, patriotism and the nation-state. The business class has therefore been ideologically captured by the new managerial elite, at least to the extent that they are prepared to mouth the managerial rhetoric. It makes no difference that many business leaders will not privately be sincere about anti-racism, egalitarianism, helping Third World development, environmentalism and all the rest; their sincerity need be no greater than their previous support a century ago for Britain’s traditional Christian culture.

As a consequence, the business and state-sector sections of the elite are able to unite behind an agenda in a way that few businesses can speak out against things like climate change levies and carbon taxes. The business leaders themselves are not personally majority owners of their companies, although they may own some shares. They are not the family-firm bourgeois of previous centuries, but in fact people who have risen up the managerial ranks, spouting the various managerial ideologies on their way up.

In addition to the various “causes”, huge government expenditure on health, education, housing and social security provides massive technocratic job opportunities, as well as giving political power to public-sector unions. Firstly, the large state is supported by many businesses, who are able to privatise profits and nationalise costs. One can cite big business support for cheap labour immigration, which involves huge costs for the taxpayer in the form of crime, social welfare spending, the wasteful promotion of multi-culturalism and social and cultural anomie. Many businesses are directly dependent on state spending, as with solicitors (dependent on crime and family break-up), accountants (dependent on a state that levies high taxes), companies working in the health area, and any private-sector body or company getting any kind of grant from the local or British governments, or the EU. High fees charged by nursing homes or residential homes for the elderly, which frequently exceed the cost of staying in five-star hotels, depend directly on the government’s intervention in the area of “social protection”, and the willingness of the taxpayer to pay exorbitant fees. Lower down the food chain, landlords are able to charge absurd rents in poor areas owing to the housing benefit, adding a further layer of individuals who support the state technocracy and the levying of high taxes to support it.

The charities were once voluntary organisations, but are now mainly semi-quangoised and receive a good deal of their money from the state. The state funds them firstly by not levying tax on them; this is equivalent to a direct grant. But in addition to that, most of the large charities receive explicit state funding, and have halted much of their non-political work. Charities like Barnardo’s and the NSPCC have closed down most of their children’s homes and are spending most of their money on campaigns against Borstals for young offenders and campaigns in support of social workers and other forms of state intervention in the family. They do not campaign for policies to promote the traditional family, although this would achieve nearly all of their stated aims, as such a campaign would offend the political elite. The proliferation of quangos is another area where political campaigns are used to leech off the public purse. Quangos promoting health or environmentalism or egalitarianism abound, In although such quangos are not limited to politically motivated campaigns, as any excuse is seized to rifle the public purse. In any case, the quangos are staffed by individuals who support the entire gamut of the managerial ideology. Interestingl, the recent “cuts” by the Cameron government have shown that the Conservative Party will only close down the smallest quangos with the smallest budgets, rather than touch the employment opportunities of the technocratic elite.

Despite the fact, therefore, that we are told we operate a free market, it is clear that the state is spending nearly half of GDP (the figures are distorted by tax credits and the tax-exempt status of charities; were the beneficiaries of those schemes deemed first to have paid all their taxes and then received a grant, it would be seen the state is larger than official figures show), and that much of the private sector is also dependent on public policy, state spending or the managerial ideologies in various ways. And the private-sector part of the economy is not run by owner-managers, but by people who have worked their way up in the managerial elite. Consequently, it is not surprising that all the political parties are remarkably unanimous in their support for managerial ideologies, and that the UK is signed up to membership of a number of international bureaucracies that provide job opportunities for technocrats and aim to lay down public policy on an international basis. Our laws are mainly issued by a technocracy based in Brussels over which we have no proper control. The principle of technocratic rule–government by regulations drawn up by bureaucrats–is accepted by all sides of the political elite.

It is clear therefore that we are not in the same circumstance as nineteenth-century Britain, where the state spent 7% of GDP, most companies were controlled by the families or entrepreneurs that founded them, and there was little in the way of public-sector employment, whether domestic or international, and no pressure on private-sector companies to promote political agendas. If the laisser faire free market is at one end of the spectrum, where more than 90% of economic activity is private and not subject to much in the way of taxation or regulation, then communism lies at the other end of the spectrum, where more than 90% of economic activity is directed by the state. We clearly lie in the middle, with a “mixed” economy, but the nature of the mix is the primacy of public expenditure, and the united nature of the senior echelons of the elite who move between the public and private bodies with ease, speaking their politically correct jargon fluently, and noting that they mix with people of the same type as themselves, whether in the private sector or the public sector or in multilateral institutions, such as the EU.

It would be as wrong to characterise the UK as capitalist–”bourgeois”–as it would be to characterise it as “communist”. This is why the ruling class is not essentially based on the relatively small number of private-sector enterpreneurs as if this were still the nineteenth century, but on the managerial elite of people who support massive state intervention and speak a language of government control. It is important to note that the economy as a whole is run in the interests of these people. The “cuts” going ahead now have in the main been directed away from the managerial elite. Few quangos are affected. The core civil service is hardly touched. And wasteful state expenditure in the area of managerial ideologies remains untouched. While propaganda by the BBC and others alleges that the point of the large state is to help the vulnerable, it seems clear that the real scroungers are the managerial elite themselves. They are not all working in the public sector, but it is reasonable to believe that a collapse of public-sector spending and an end to state intervention would lead to a reduction in job opportunities in the private sector too for such people. After all, race and diversity personnel are only needed because the state requires it.

It is interesting to see the argument that the government has to pay the market rate for its senior managers. Of course, the market for senior managers is greatly distorted by the availability of so many positions in the public sector for such people. Just think, if Whitehall no longer paid salaries over £40K, how many of the highly paid state officials could find highly paid jobs in the private sector? Some could, but not all, as there is not the demand for so many of them in the private sector. For this reason, it is not private-sector salaries that are dragging up public-sector ones, but the other way round. Without so many high-salary public-sector posts available, it is likely that private-sector salaries for senior managers would be lower than they are now too. In other words, the “egalitarians” have managed to create a socioeconomic setup that works to their financial advantage, and in fact fosters social inequality. If social inequality has risen over the decades, it is because of the size of the state sector, which is committed to providing salaries equal to those in the private sector, but which has effectively doubled market demand for highly qualified personnel (or for utterly non-qualified personnel who speak managerial ideologies fluently), and thus driven up salaries throughout the upper echelons of the public and private sector.

It seems clear that in terms of “who? whom?”, our society is run for the benefit of the managerial elite. State spending is justified on the basis of helping the vulnerable, but the greatest beneficiaries are state employees themselves, as well as highly paid individuals throughout the economy who benefit from the general effect state spending has of promoting wage inequality. I am not arguing that we should intervene to prevent wage inequality: I am arguing that our very intervention to prevent inequality is what underpins wage inequality, and that we should stop such intervention.

The “who? whom?” approach is important because it helps us identify who British society is run for. By contrast, we are constantly told we live in a democracy. But democracy is not a form of society in itself. If slave-owners were the beneficiaries or ruling class of slave societies, as the lords were in feudalism, and the bourgeoisie in capitalism, are we to believe that the ruling class of “democratic societies” are the broad mass of the people themselves? That the unemployed lout collecting his dole cheque is in fact part of the ruling stratum of society? Clearly, democracy is not, and cannot be, a form of organisation of society. There may be an electoral mechanism, but there are still class faultlines in society, and those who are in the driving seat socially are usually able to manipulate public opinion and democracy to their ends. Democracy is therefore just another form of oligarchy. The technocratic trappings bolted onto democracy–the regulatory bodies and EU bodies that pass down regulations–are an attempt to ensure that the electoral mechanism cannot produce results that frustrate the aims of the ruling oligarchy.

I am not denying that there must be a ruling elite, and so therefore democracy in its true sense is impossible. But we have becomes serfs to the managerial elite where we could be free people. A great deal of freedoms were allowed us under the former bourgeois elite, and British culture gave a structure of belonging to all those in society. Under the managerialists, we have lost our liberties and our social identity and ended up supporting a vast superstructure of state hangers-on with our taxes. We would be better off without them.

The need for a rethink has been underlined by Barack Obama’s reflexive contempt for Great Britain. We have seen him refusing to meet a British prime minister, despite our support for US adventurism abroad and the supporting role of our troops in Afghanistan defusing landmines by hand—by hand, no less!—as part of the supposed, but largely fictional “special relationship” between the two countries. Barack Obama apparently supports Argentina’s claims to the Falkland Islands, and has enthusiastically sought to destroy BP for an accidental oil spill. The US has strong-armed the UK into an amazingly one-sided extradition treaty. Many minor slights could be enumerated, including the gift of trashy DVDs to a British prime minister and Michelle Obama’s disrespectful behaviour towards the Queen.

There is no special relationship. We must breach the psychological barrier that tells us that there is. On a people-to-people basis, there is much in common between the British and American peoples, and I would argue that this survives despite tensions at the governmental level, but if we cannot cash that in for support by the US government geopolitically, it is not as meaningful as it at first appears. Furthermore, US immigration policy is designed to shift the country away from its roots. The US of the future is not going to look like us, and we could be left looking foolish trying to insist to a multicultural America that Great Britain is its natural number one ally. We need other options.

I would like to see the UK as a neutral country, as the European option is too invasive of our country’s sovereignty. Furthermore, there is a whole world outside Europe, and while we might look back longingly to the reassuring world of the past, where European supremacy was taken for granted, that will not be a realistic view of the world in the future.

An interesting question is what attitude the UK will take towards India and China. I have outlined before some reservations over the rise of China, none of which is incompatible with UK geopolitical neutrality. But reservations over the rise of China should not be equivalent to support for the rise of India, supposedly because the country is “English-speaking” (after a very poor fashion) and “democratic” (after a very poor fashion too). More than anything else, I do not think the presence of a large (and unwanted) South Asian community in the UK should be the determinant of our foreign policy. We should not be trying to appease ethnic minorities. We need to think about things more rationally than that.

China is a determined competitor, and one with a casual attitude towards human rights, but that cannot be our main concern. In many ways, China is a more admirable country than India. It has a rational government and a largely non-violent population, and is not beset by the linguistic, religious and racial divisions of India. Unlike India, China is not a ramshackle and disorganised country. Furthermore, China is already further ahead on the path to modernisation than India. We should avoid giving any impression that we are going to back the loser (India) in a future global struggle for power. Another consideration is that, as India begins to become more powerful, the temptation for that country to interfere in the UK’s domestic politics where the Indian minority is concerned will grow—India is already exhibiting that tendency in relations with Australia. True, China plays the same game too—but the Chinese minority in the UK is much smaller than the Indian minority. A future relationship with both countries needs to be based on our right to handle immigration and issues related to cultural conflict as we see fit.

It is time to pull out of Afghanistan and NATO too, and become a neutral country. The US lease on the British Indian Ocean Territory (Diego Garcia) should be allowed to expire, and US military bases in the UK closed down. While maintaining strong civilian contacts with the US, we need to recognise that the US is determined no longer to be a WASP country. Barack Obama is not the exception to the rule, but the future rule itself. Relations with Canada, Australia and New Zealand may change dramatically too as those countries take determined steps to expropriate their Anglo-Saxon majorities. We need to make clear to China that we are not going to be rivals of their growing power. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan, or anywhere else in Asia, would be neither here nor there to the UK.

We should consider selling as many arms as possible to both China, and Taiwan if possible (although that option may be excluded by an agreement with China). We should also sell as many weapons as possible to India and Pakistan. China and India are both nuclear powers, and it is too late to bar them from the nuclear weapons club. China has bought weapons from Russia, and we should explore the option of defying the EU and the US and dropping all controls on arms exports to China. Ideally, we would aim for long-term supply contracts, to make as much money as possible out of China—although we should definitely avoid any commitments not to supply India with the most advanced technology too.

We should get out of the whole democracy export business, and cease the publication of official reports on the progress of Hong Kong’s transition to Chinese rule. We should also see if the City of London could garner a slice of the future offshore renminbi business that is likely to be monopolised by Hong Kong. All immigration —from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau—as well as from the whole of the Indian subcontinent—should cease, including that of refugees and family members.

We need to halt the opposition to Russia and Belarus that has been the policy of the EU and the US for some time. Those countries are democracies, although not necessary as liberal as the Western countries, and we should stop pushing those countries into the arms of the Chinese. Ideally, any agreement with Russia should guarantee the UK’s supplies of oil and gas quite independently of the EU. More generally, we need to consider our foreign policy, and not just continue with existing policies out of inertia.

I am afraid that the age of pre-critical belief has gone. It is appropriate therefore for me from the outset to tell the stark truth about our religion without any pretence of the real faith that our ancestors would once have exhibited. I feel curiously disloyal in saying so, but the Christian religion itself rests on a tissue of falsehoods. The Bible is not an inspired unerring book. I would be outraged if a clergyman said so from the pulpit, but, between you and me, Jesus was not the son of God, and certainly did not rise from the dead on the third day. I first realised this as a child when leafing through the very first chapter of the New Testament, Matthew 1, which claims that Jesus’ ancestry can be split into three sections of 14 generations apiece. But any child can ascertain that 40, not 42, generations are enumerated. Similarly, Matthew 2 quotes an Old Testament prophecy to the effect that Bethlehem is “not the least among the princes of Juda”, whereas the actual prophecy, in Micah 5, describes the town in diametrically opposite terms as “little among the thousands of Judah”. No one can claim today to have the uncritical belief of our ancestors, and yet to take part in theological disputes within the Church of England, one has to pose as a “believer”. One example is the false debate around homosexuality, where liberals have devised novel interpretations of Bible passages that contradict their political views. It would be more honest for them to state that they do not believe in the Christian religion than to try to read their modern political views into the ancient texts.

The 19th century elaboration of scientific theories disproving the creationist claims of the book of Genesis pulled the rug from under the feet of religious belief. A. N. Wilson’s book, God’s Funeral, gives a highly readable account of the 19th century debate around religion; I sympathise most with John Ruskin, who hoped that the sentiment of religion could be preserved without its real kernel of faith. The funny thing is that, long after Darwinian theories had become universal knowledge, religiosity remained a feature of English culture. Right up until 1960, the majority of English children went to Sunday school. The more recent abandonment of the Christian church reflects no great movement within society from the bottom up, rejecting our traditional culture. It is the ecclesiastical establishment itself that found itself cringing in embarrassment at traditional belief. Classical Anglicanism, rooted in the history of this country, lost its legitimacy in the eyes of our haughty bishops, who have cast round for sources of legitimacy less tied to our national history and culture. The King James Bible—our church’s greatest contribution to the English-speaking world—has had to go. Apparently, recently discovered manuscripts in the Sinai desert have shown a series of minor discrepancies with the Textus Receptus that the Authorised Version was based on: why this is relevant, when none of us believes in the inspiration of the Bible, escapes me. Our Book of Common Prayer has had to be updated, with church services moving towards the informality said to be common in the primitive church, the new source of “authenticity”.

Why does it matter if the church hierarchy wants to reform the worship and doctrine of the Church of England? Surely, if it is admitted that religion is based on false factual premises, it matters not a whit if things are updated? However, the Christian religion is a fundamental part of our culture. But just as Bagehot warned in the case of the monarchy, not to let daylight in on magic, so the health of our spiritual culture depends on our preserving the spell woven by the liturgy, the music, the architecture, the dress and the style of worship that was passed down to us by our ancestors. From the time of the Deists of the early 1700s doubts were expressed about the veracity of the Bible story, but, as John Ruskin showed above, our ecclesiastical heritage continued to be valued. Ordinary people were aware of the scientific arguments that surrounded the creation story, but continued nonetheless to draw comfort from their church, until the reformers destroyed the church that they knew. So fully has daylight been allowed in on the former magic of the church, that would-be worshippers are more likely to find in their church a female “priest” promoting homosexuality, justifying criminality and calling for more tolerance of Islamic extremism, than an opportunity for solemn worship that could call the nation to morality and repentance.

Religion contains a series of cultural images or motifs that have moved the nation down through the centuries and have moulded our cultural values. To this extent it is irrelevant whether the facts of the Bible are true or not. Pondering the message of the Bible, we have been made into Englishmen. The motifs of the Bible story form part of our culture: the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the parables, the attitude of Christ to children, to the poor, to sinners, all form part of our culture. These motifs do not only form part of our culture; they are the root of our culture. Muscular Christian virtues were inculcated in the British elite through the public education system by educationalists such as Thomas Arnold, and we were once able to boast of high public standards among civil servants and imperial administrators; this has all gone by-the-by in the post-Christian period that has now produced a highly politicised civil service and judiciary. However, even today, Englishmen, particularly in small town and countryside areas, are noted for kindly and considerate behaviour to neighbours and others. Our inherited values have stood us in good stead for many centuries, and to read the Gospels, to sing our wonderful hymns and to contemplate our ecclesiastical architecture can only be upbuilding. Finally, no appreciation of Western Civilisation over 2000 years is possible without an understanding of Christianity. Milton’s Paradise Lost becomes an odd work, only comprehensible as the creation of a 17th century poet mired in superstition, as the images he paints leave us cold today. We might enjoy listening to some of the settings of the Mass by classical composers, but without any connection to our past, the question will always be on our lips, “why did all these composers choose to compose music for this particular text?”

“Why take ye thought for raiment?”, Christ asked. But, you will never hear this in the Church of England today. “Why are you anxious about clothing?” is the dumbed-down version preferred by the T-shirt-wearing social workers who pose as members of the clergy. The hymns of Charles Wesley, expressing complex theological concepts to the accompaniment of a church organ, have been replaced by pop songs and the strumming of a guitar. As for the Cathedrals that are our heritage, we can view them only after payment of a tourist fee, impertinently demanded by the moneychangers that occupy the Temple today. Worse than all these enormities, is the current passion of the Anglican church leaders for the Islamicisation of Great Britain, a cause that seems likely to render superfluous the church itself. Our traditional interpretation of Christianity—it is irrelevant to me whether it conflicts with the Christianity of the primitive church or not—was a martial, warlike one, symbolised by St George, and best represented by Richard the Lionheart and his participation in the Crusades. Now it is constantly inferred that somehow the Crusades were ill-conceived, or even downright evil, whereas the Islamic conquest and conversion of the Middle East and North Africa by the sword are given Canterbury’s silent seal of approval. And yet the irony is that the very crusading zeal of multiculturalism and our attempts to remake countries overseas in our image reflect, however distorted, the martial interpretation of Christianity we inherited from our forbears.

The enthusiastic adoption of heretical causes by the Church of England has robbed English men and women of the sanctuary they have the right to expect of their local church. Whatever happened to this nation, the Church should always be there, providing comfort to the people of this nation—“feed my lambs”, as Christ said to St Peter. If we were conquered by an invading force, all would not be lost, as we would be right to expect our Church to be there, providing consolation. If our nation were stricken by a famine, as in days of old, it would be the duty of the Church to declare days of penitence and beseech God for his mercy, and to organise relief through the parishes. No calamity could be too severe to nullify the role of the Church in our society, ministering to the powerful and the powerless alike.

Yet, we have lived to see the Church withdraw its support from our nation. Multiculturalism and mass immigration are now championed by the Church, which cares not a jot about the impact of these developments on its own flock. Those who are victims of growing lawlessness cannot look to the Church for love and support; the Church leaders are too busy condemning any attempt to bring ethnic criminals to book to give a damn about the victims. The sacred words, the sacred hymns, are now gone, bread replaced by a stone. And yet in every mosque, every Hindu temple, up and down the land, the ethnic minorities can attend their services, safe in the knowledge that their own religious leaders will not try to palm off on them politically inspired innovations in place of their religious traditions. No Muslim imam will preach homosexuality and abortion in the mosque; no mosque will attempt to update the traditional Arabic prayers; no Hindu temple will fail to support the Indian community, through thick and thin. These newcomers are cocooned in communities whose leaders value their cultures and traditions. The contrast provided by our Church, which has turned its back on our people, could not be greater.

In these circumstances, I do not believe the Church of England can reform itself from within. The physical and financial resources of our Church are being abused by people who have wormed their way into an organisation whose traditional values they have never espoused. The reformation of the Church, therefore, must become a political issue. The General Synod must be closed down; the heretical bishops, the openly immoral priests and the female “priests” must be defrocked; the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, together with an authorised collection of solemn and patriotic hymns, must be reimposed on the church. The loss of so many heretical clergymen would leave many a parish without a minister, but any male member of the congregation can lead a service of Choral Matins, a traditional service that has regrettably faded away in the modern Church. The pretence of a religious faith to oppose these changes should be greeted with contempt. We may not believe in the literal truth of the Bible, but English patriots do believe in the holiness of the culture that Christianity created in this country; we need to restore that and start providing succour to our people in every parish once again.

I have some detailed policy prescriptions. I would close down all the LEAs tomorrow and enter the names of all their employees on a Bureaucratic Parasites’ Register (BPR)- and cancel their pensions for lack of interest. People on the BPR would be subject to a lifetime ban on working in the public sector. The BPR wouldn’t be a quango, but simply an Internet list of all those so banned. There would be no secret register to pay to search: the information would be permanently in the public domain on a website.

The whole education system should be privatised or handed over to existing management and the state should get out of the sector. Basically, vouchers should replace school funding, but the vouchers should be set at a level that requires every parent to pay something. Clearly the poorest would get a voucher covering 90% of the cost, but they ought to pay at least something in order to take interest in what goes on in the school. Teachers’ salaries are determined on a school-by-school basis. Schools that underperform simply have no choose other than to cut salaries.

Beyond that, every school would be selective, and there should be no national curriculum, and school inspectorates should be closed down (and their employees entered on the BPR). The state should confine itself to monitoring exam syllabuses and marking schedules. As long as the exams are tough, presumably the schools have to raise their game. By ensuring that real content is on the exam papers, ideally set to be similar to those of the 1950s, schools simply have to teach better in order to have their little charges pass the exams.

I would introduce a baccalaureate of 1000 points. Maximum 10 subjects of 100 points each. Pupils only entered for 5 subjects can only get 500 points and so are missing out on 50% of the marks to start with. This is so that those bright students who can do 10 exams get a higher overall mark. No one scoring under 700 goes on to A level and university. The Bacc would be as follows:

1. Latin 100 marks (to include Caesar, Vergilius etc)
2. Modern language 100 marks (to include an oral)
3. English language 100 (to include tough requirements on grammar). Children who can’t spell or use the subjunctive score very badly here.
4. English literature 100 (purely consisting of Shakespeare and the Greats – basically the syllabus would require knowledge of so many Classic works, there would be no time to teach PC works.)
5. RE – knowledge of the Prayerbook and one of the Gospels of the Authorised Version of the Bible required. No Islamic or alternative option available.
6.History or Geography – knowledge of facts required to pass. Geography is about geography and not about social exclusion. History requires much more than knowledge of slavery and the Holocaust. Exam questions like “imagine you are a slave; write down your feelings” are simply deleted from exam papers: the study of slavery has a place, but this sort of “exam question” is a nonsense.
7.At least one science. There is no such thing as “double science”. Biology, physics and chemistry are separate options.
8.Mathematics – at least as rigorous as the 1950s O level.
9 and 10 – a choice of additional languages, humanities and sciences, music etc.

Schools that did not teach Latin would see their children unable to score more than 900. Schools that didn’t teach any language, Latin or modern, would see their children unable to score more than 800. Schools that taught PC books would see their children fail the English literature component. Schools that taught Islam in the RE component would see their children fail on knowledge of the Christian tradition.

But it makes no sense to monitor what happens in each class. Set the exam syllabuses and marking schedules so hard that the only way of passing is to teach a traditional curriculum – but let the schools do what they like. The Baccalaureate league table would lead to parental pressure. Parents would have the legal right to sue the schools if they felt they were not teaching the good stuff. The idea would be to make it very hard for anyone not in the top 2% of pupils to score more than 900 under this baccalaureate. A criminal investigation of the exam boards would ensue whenever more than 2% of pupils scored more than 900. As I said, no one scoring under 700 goes on to A levels. The wheat is sorted from the chaff.

Let me add that the number of people with qualifications is too high in the UK. The certificates they have are often meaningless. We have seen graduates required for jobs that previously were done by those with A levels and now for jobs previously done by those with O levels. We saw recently how a girl with GCSEs and A levels committed suicide because she was unable to find a job. It is simply wrong to create a system where degrees are required for jobs that technically do not demand anything other than good English and arithmetic. Why is a degree required to work in a travel agents’ office? Indeed, why are A levels required? The job technically does not require any qualifications at all.

We need to substantially reduce the numbers with A levels and degrees, not in order to take opportunity away from people, but in order to restore it. Most of these degrees are nothing more than a detailed grilling in left-wing propaganda anyway. The teacher training colleges should be closed down (and their employees entered on the BPR) and schools required to conduct their own training.

* Compulsory education abolished. Home schooling and no schooling become fully acceptable—and no supervision of home-schooled children is carried out.
* All coursework for exams abolished. Everything is on the final exam with no appeal allowed. Pupils can sit the entire year again and then take the exams the following year – no public funding for repeating a year would be available; parents would have to pay the full tuition fee.
* Corporal punishment – 6 of the best – introduced in all schools. Parents are not permitted to object.
* Schools required to keep order and prevent bullying – the headmaster subject to criminal charges (abetting violence among pupils in his care) if he doesn’t. Parents can also sue the schools if the headmaster fails to keep order in the school.
* School league tables remain in existence: schools are judged on the exam results of all children in their care, including those entered for no exams, so the current bureaucratic fraud of labelling children dyslexic, attention-deficit and dyscalculic, comes to an end
* Hectoring the children on multiculturalism becomes a criminal offence. The Crown Prosecution Service plays no role in such prosecutions. Parents initiate prosecutions themselves on a “no win, no fee” basis.
* Hectoring the children on support for “gay” sexuality becomes a criminal offence (=Section 28 restored).
* Sex education criminalised.
* The child measurement programme is cancelled – measuring children’s weight at schools is defined as a human rights abuse.
* Normal food reintroduced in school canteens.
* Christian assemblies required in all schools, required of demographic composition.
* School uniform standards enforced. Parents of schools where girls are no longer required to wear skirts can sue the schools.
* The Criminal Records Bureau checks are ended. Schools are required to be open to the general public. Padlocking children behind locked doors out of a misplaced security panic is defined as false imprisonment—a criminal offence.

Firstly, the UK in particular does well out of large companies. BP would have been a good example a while ago, but appears likely to fall foul of the US administration’s interpretation of US laws in such a way that BP, a limited liability company, is unable to pay what had appeared to be the maximum of US$75m in liability for oil companies beset by an oil spill. The City of London and large pharmaceutical, financial services and defence companies form the mainstay of British Big Business–to a large extent, we are still living off our former imperial glory (sadly one with Nineveh and Tyre these days), and the advent of an era of cottage industry small businesses would be profoundly negative for the medium-term outlook of the UK economy. Second, I would react with alarm to the idea that I should be held personally responsible for losses of a company I held shares in–another related point that Dr Gabb has encouraged discussion on. The joint-stock company format has allowed millions of small private investors to piggyback on the growth of the larger companies and make provision for their futures, and I think libertarians should see that as positive. The alternative is dependence on state pensions financed out of taxation.

Part of what Sean Gabb seems to be getting at is that the joint-stock corporation means that bourgeois capitalism is no longer with us. This fact complicates a lot of arguments that libertarians make: for example, where libertarians support freedom of association and therefore the right of a business to refuse the custom of anyone, for any reason (including race, sexual orientation, etc), what if the managers of the business do not personally own the business? What right is it of them to pursue these kinds of agenda when they do not even own the business concerned? If we supported freedom of association only where a business was owner-managed, as with a corner shop or a bed-and-breakfast guesthouse, we could end up supporting freedom only in certain circumstances, only at the margins of society.

I was impressed by the arguments of the late Sam Francis in the US, that a new managerial elite had effectively replaced the former bourgeoisie. In a development not anticipated by Karl Marx, the progression from feudalism to capitalism has been succeeded, not by a progression from capitalism to communism, but from capitalism to managerialism, obviating much of the Marxian doctrines. As corporations grew larger, owner management became rarer, and in fact impossible. Even where a business remains in the hands of the original family founders, they require personnel directors and many other similar managers to run the business for them. The joint-stock company further diluted the control of the original entrepreneurs, who in most cases sold up, to the extent that individual entrepreneurs no longer control significant parts of the economy today. There are no capitalists left.

With ownership so diffuse, managers control the economy today. This answers the essential question that Lenin asked of political economy, “Who, Whom?” The key point of political analysis is to work out who the elite is and who the governed are. The capitalist-style analyses of the socialist left are simply wrong, in that they give the wrong answer to “Who, Whom?” as there are no capitalists. What there are are managers in a technocratic economy-state. Sam Francis pointed out that all institutions are run by the same people today. A civil servant can leave for the private sector and take up a managerial job, and then move on to a managerial job in the church, and then move on to a similar job in the defence industry, and then into politics. The public sector, the private sector, the churches, the charities–these are run by a mobile elite flitting between them. Church finance directors are not deeply religious people who do the job out of faith, but rather finance directors who have had a number of posts elsewhere and demand six-figure salaries for running the finances of a church. Personnel directors of charities are not people who are seeking to work with the disadvantaged, but personnel directors who have worked elsewhere and demand large salaries and pensions, to be paid directly from sums raised ostensibly for charitable deeds. The same type of people are doing everything.

The bureaucratisation of the economy is aided by causes such as “anti-racism”, “multi-culturalism”, “health and safety” and “the environment”. These causes are the justification for the employment of technocrats. Even private companies have to employ large phalanxes of people whose jobs are essentially political. (In fact, abolishing limited liability would simply diminish risk-taking, and lead to the development of more technocratic jobs in the area of risk management. Whole departments of functionaries handling risk would be born in every private enterprise.) It seems that a large proportion of the private sector is directly dependent on government policy (not just companies that benefit from government contracts, but the semi-quangoized charities that depend on public handouts, and many other niche technocratic roles–think of the people who produce the Energy Performance Certificates for houses being sold or the people whose jobs depend on the exorbitant fees charged to check the criminal records of teachers and nursery nurses: their roles have been invented as an act of public policy, although to no useful purpose).

It is worth asking what we can do about the managerial elite. Opposing limited liability seems to position libertarians as anti-capitalists, without addressing the argument that a new public-private managerial elite has replaced those capitalists. There are big businesses around today, but the problem is not that they are big, or even particularly predatory in behaviour, but that they have been captured by functionaries, technocrats who staff layers of middle and upper management that are strictly unnecessary. Big business needs to survive, because otherwise we would not be able to invest in these companies, and the average person would remain dependent on the state to provide for his long-term future. We need instead to think of anti-technocratic policies to cut down on the bureaucratic behaviour of functionaries in both public and private sectors.

I would like to severely cut down on the numbers going to university, as the universities have largely been remade as factories producing pro-managerial wannabe technocrats. The promotion of cultural agendas such as anti-racism and multi-culturalism should be criminalised–in the private sector as well as the public sector. It should simply be a criminal offence for companies to spend any money on political propaganda on cultural issues to their workers. There should be no public financial support for charities. There should be a clear distinction between the public and private sectors: I would argue that anyone whose livelihood depends on the public purse should not have the right to vote or stand for Parliament. This would severely cut down the pro-managerial electorate, and clarify that people who work in the public sector are our servants, and not the other way round. All consultancy work for the public sector should be banned, as should advertising by public-sector bodies. All public-sector workers should be limited to maximum salary of £50K. While consultants in the NHS and others should earn more–this should be facilitated by the privatisation of the health sector. If headteachers of failing schools hope to earn six-figure salaries, they should do so in the private sector, where they would have to work to attract pupils. We could reintroduce annual parliaments (the norm in the Middle Ages) and ban political parties from funding candidates’ election campaigns. All policies should be designed with an eye on preventing control by the managerial elite.

The easy part is cutting down the public sector. The difficulty comes with the private sector: once the owner-managers of the bourgeois era have gone, are we condemned to technocratic management for ever? I would argue that many of the technocratic posts in the private sector have been created by government regulation, and by eliminating the regulation and reducing the availability of graduates, we could reverse the quangoization of the private sector. Countries like Japan and China have big businesses and limited liability, but have not seen the cultural trends of the Western countries, such as multi-culturalism, simply because there has been no attempt to delegitimize national identity in those countries–and if we economically disarm ourselves by opposing big business, we will find that the Far Eastern countries end up becoming our new masters. However, given that we have the cultural problem of self-righteousness among the middle class, and the Far Eastern countries do not, something has to be done to try to counteract it. Could we introduce compulsory John Lewis-style workers’ democracy into joint-stock companies, seeing as their managers do not actually own the companies? Maybe managers adopting a technocratic style could be “recalled” by their staff members? Ultimately, a society’s culture is not just a function of the size of its businesses or something like limited liability, but a product of political discussion, the broadcast media, the schools and the churches. It is these that are driving trends in the private business sector today and not the other way round, and so the restoration of our culture can only begin by sorting out the political parties, the media, schools and churches.