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.

But that does not mean that an anti-history, a version of history where everything Britain did was wrong, should be accepted either. The rights and wrongs of the Ulster Plantation are a 17th century question: such things would not be attempted nowadays, not in the West at least, and to analyse them from the perspective of radically altered political realities centuries later would simply be ridiculous.

What should be accepted on all sides is that the Unionist community exists and that they have their rights as human beings and as a community the same as any other human group. They are not going anywhere. Just as the rights and wrongs of the creation of the State of Israel can be endlessly debated, but the Israelis are there now, and must be accepted, so the realities of Northern Ireland include the existence of the Unionist community.

Britain should seek a good relationship with the Irish Republic and with the Gaelic population of Ireland, but should do so without chucking the Unionist people over board. The Partition of Ireland was forced on the country by the IRA, and was accepted by the Catholic Church and other reasonable forces in the South, which opposed the anti-Treaty forces. Partition represented an attempt to recognise the reality that, not only were there two countries here (Britain and Ireland), but that there were two communities here (the Nationalists and the Unionists).

It cannot be right for the IRA to have sought to oppose this settlement by violence. The maximum that could be said is that whole counties with a Roman Catholic majority ought to have the right to choose to join the Republic. I believe Tyrone and Fermanagh have large Catholic majorities and that Londonderry and Armagh have more finely balanced demographic configurations. However, political views cannot be immediately extrapolated from religious affiliations, and opinion polls show that a large percentage of Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland favour the existence of the Union too.

To seek by violence to force the majority in Northern Ireland into a reunification with the South that they didn’t want was simply wrong. On “Bloody Sunday” in 1972, the IRA used violence to try to provoke the British Armed Forces into a violent reponse. The IRA used machine gun fire against the soldiers in what cannot be described as anything resembling a peaceful demonstration. British intelligence prior to the event showed that they were aware the IRA was going to try to provoke civilian deaths in order to blame the British; it is unfortunate that, forewarned, the result was still as the IRA had planned: civilian deaths.

As General Sir Michael Rose has said, ” it was known through intelligence sources that the IRA intended to create a bloodbath by drawing the security forces into a firefight with their gunmen in the middle of the civil rights march”. The soldiers had been ordered not to enter the Bogside, but did so as orders changed when they were subjected to stones and nail bombs from the crowd. People in the Rossville flats were opening carrying rifles and shooting at the soldiers. Indeed, some of the civilian deaths could well have been caused by the Republicans shooting from the flats.

That the people apparently killed by the troops (or in the crossfire, by the Republicans and the troops) were unarmed does not necessarily mean the troops committed any offence. In a calm and clear atmosphere, unarmed people would not have been killed. But in the confusion of a riot with machine gun fire coming from IRA members in the Nationalist suburbs, it is understandable that the soldiers returned fire–and the IRA would be responsible for any deaths that ensued. With Martin McGuinness spotted with a machine gun on Bloody Sunday–he has failed to clarify what he was doing with it–it is more than possible that he himself bears the blame for the whole incident. An intimated witness to the Saville Inquiry has said that Martin McGuinness fired the first shot.

It is a thing of utter repugnance to me that the terrorists are all free, but that they are now seeking to have the soldiers charged. Had there been a peaceful demonstration, nothing would have happened.

It seems clear the Saville Inquiry is as politically motivated as the decision to clear Winston Silcott of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock.

The entire peace process in Northern Ireland is utterly unjust. It forms part of a strategy to pull out of Northern Ireland eventually. And if the province were exclusively inhabited by Nationalists, that would be the correct course of action. But what about the Unionists? They have their rights too. First of all, there should be no undemocratic powersharing. The majority should rule, as it does in the Republic of Ireland. Second, there should be no Fair Employment Agency. In a free society, companies should be free to hire at will. Third, even if a Nationalist majority emerged in Northern Ireland, the counties loyal to Britain should not be handed over. Antrim and Down, strongly Unionist, together have 1.1m people, and if small dependencies such as the Isle of Man survive and flourish, there is no reason why Antrim and Down should not become a Crown dependency even if the other four counties chose to accede to the Republic. Indeed, on a county-by-county basis, there is no reason to suppose Britain would ever have to fully pull out of Ireland.

Take the article about a “German doctor” who contributed to a patient’s death. The doctor’s name is Daniel Ubani–and he most certainly is not German. His gross negligence would be highly unusual in a real German. Actually, he is Nigerian, not German, and shouldn’t be in the EU at all–or would not be, had it not been for the treasonable policies followed by the German and UK governments.

Look at this man’s photograph, and tell me how German he looks:

The insistence that people who are not members of the nations whose passports they carry are in fact bona fide nationals of those countries is part of an attempt to render national identity meaningless.

Take the online magazine Spiked Online. Josie Appleton asks “when so few European women wear the full veil, why are governments falling over themselves to ban it?” Clearly she is trying to insinuate that Asian colonists in Europe are “European women”. But what does the term “European” mean if even non-Europeans are thereby encompassed?

In Ireland, Rotimi Adebari, a Nigerian, was elected mayor of Portlaoise only seven years after arriving in the country. We should be clear he was not elected mayor in a popular vote–it was an internal vote of the council that decided it. Handy, isn’t it? Democracy is so much more palatable to our rulers when the people themselves are not actually involved!

In the UK, Diane Abbott, an Afro-Caribbean, wants to run for the position of leaderette of the Labour Party–she hasn’t bothered to explain why she should be running for office in our country.

These people are not Europeans, and it is time we ended free entry to our country by holders of debauched passports. If Germans, Canadians, French, Irish, Americans, Italians, Australians want to come here – they should either apply for visas first or sort out their own citizenship rolls, which have been heavily compromised over the past few decades.

Their basic wage is Rmb900, or £90, a month, but they get to do an average of 4 hours’ overtime a day. These are long hours – but not longer than was performed by workers during England’s Industrial Revolution, and the money is worth it to Chinese peasants. They get free meals, free accommodation, free transport within the huge facility, free laundry, free swimming pools, free tennis courts, and chess, calligraphy, mountain climbing and fishing are also organized by the company. They did not get all that in the original Industrial Revolution in England.

The trouble with China is that they want the West to just hand everything to them on a plate, without working for it. In fact, I am scandalized. Why is Foxconn wasting money on tennis courts for these ingrates?

China’s tale of humiliation between 1840 (the Opium War) and 1949 (the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China) is dubious on various accounts. Firstly, a moral objection to Western colonialism ignores the question of why the Western powers were able to briefly humble the Chinese Empire in the first place. Compared with the landmass of China, Great Britain is but a small dot in the north of the Atlantic Ocean that would comfortably fit several times within some of China’s provinces. Moral considerations projected backwards over more than a century into the past to a time when all the great powers engaged in territorial rivalry—including the loser in this Great Game, China—are just an irrelevance. The real question that needs to be asked is why it was the Western powers and not China that made the modern world. In cultural terms, China was clearly not as great and accomplished as it still holds itself to be. The recognition of that fact has come very hard to China in modern times.

Secondly, if anything the Western powers have done to China really does amount to a century of humiliation, it pales into insignificance compared with China’s own actions in much more recent times. China’s occupation of non-Han territories such as Tibet and East Turkestan has been accompanied by a much more systematic attempt to extirpate the local culture, and even demographically dispossess the local peoples, than anything any nation could ever have attempted by the West in the case of China. The Chinese continue to bring up the Nanking Massacre when up to a quarter of million Chinese were killed by the Japanese—the numbers are disputed, and I do not doubt the willingness of the Chinese to overstate the numbers, just as the Japanese might be inclined to understate them—and like to highlight the use of a history textbook in Japan that glosses over the massacre. But the large numbers of Tibetan and other minority peoples killed, tortured and imprisoned in the modern period are not mentioned in China’s textbooks, and in any case nothing imperialists have done could compare with the 30m deaths in China’s self-inflicted Great Leap Forward.

Thirdly, China, so far from finding its ambitions constrained by the Western powers in the modern world, is permitted to occupy a uniquely privileged position in the global political system. Why does the People’s Republic of China wield a veto in the UN Security Council? Why is China permitted to insist on the diplomatic isolation of Taiwan? Which of the other developing countries has seen a global financial centre (Hong Kong) just land in its lap? The rise of China as the next global power seems to have been accepted by the West, which has invested frenetically to make this scenario come true. Chinese leaders are frequently told by their Western counterparts that this is going to be “China’s Century”, and so why should the Chinese themselves not believe it? There seems to be no substantive reason why China should be an aggrieved power in the modern day. On the contrary, there would be many reasons for China to feel satisfied and relaxed on account of its treatment at the hand of the Western powers today.

China’s essential problem is not that any foreign powers have held back China’s development at any point in history, or even that foreign powers are seeking to constrain China’s rise. Rather, China is resentful of the success of the Western countries. A century of humiliation remains a factor in China’s thinking precisely because China still erroneously believes itself to deserve the top slot in the global pecking order as of right. China’s tragedy is not that pesky Western barbarians harried its coasts a century ago and occupied some ports—China’s economic development would be less rapid today if Britain had not occupied Hong Kong and Japan had not occupied Taiwan—but that so little of China came under Western rule and was transformed by Western rule. China’s cultural assumptions remain intact because it alone of the developing powers was—contrary to the domestic propaganda retailed by the Communist Party—hardly touched by the hand of colonialism. China’s problems are entirely of its own making, from the Great Leap Forward through the Cultural Revolution to the corrupt and exploitative social structure of the modern day. No country has a “rightful” place in the world, and China’s own failure to innovate for centuries in succession means that its current position in the world as a poor, developing power is the one it deserves.

China’s current economic development is not simply the product of the ruling party’s farsightedness in embarking on economic reforms. China has benefited from a decision made by the Western powers to co-operate with China’s reforms, largely as a function of the West’s Cold War with the Soviet Union. In retrospect, the Cold War was an unnecessary foreign policy development that led to a series of decisions that have weakened the geopolitical position of the West today. China was brought in from the cold, given a position on the UN Security Council, and subsequently found that the Western willingness to invest, coupled with the role played by the Hong Kong and Taiwan economies, put it in pole position for a rapid rise as a great power. The experience of decades of fast economic growth has created a euphoric rush of blood to the head in China. China has emerged as an important global player, only confirming China’s deep convictions of its rightful place in the global order. In the late 19th century, China started to doubt itself, as witnessed by the top-level debate on the relative roles that Chinese learning and Western learning should play in national development. By contrast, all of China’s cultural assumptions of superiority are currently being confirmed and underlined in its contacts with the West.

China has managed to join the world on its own terms. it has gained leverage over the US through its purchases of US Treasuries—although one could argue the resulting interdependence will prevent China from exercising such leverage. China’s policies towards Taiwan were enforced during the Taiwanese presidency of Chen Shui-bian largely through putting pressure on the US to ensure that Mr Chen did not overstep any of China’s red lines with respect to Taiwanese independence. The US military commitment to Taiwan has therefore meant that the US government has emerged as a key enforcer of China’s geopolitical ambitions. China is a recipient of large inflows of concessional aid from the World Bank and other sources—but also maintains its own aid programme. Sums in excess of US$1bn have been extended by China to clients such as Cambodia and Angola. Sinologists in the West have largely “gone native”: multiculturalism has meant that Chinese language departments in Western universities are staffed with patsies for the rise of China. Many of these claim to be “experts” on Chinese culture, intoning that it is always better to show concern for China’s face in dealings with China, as confrontation is said to be counterproductive in Chinese culture. China is exporting people as fast as it can, and the recent reaction of the Chinese community in the US and elsewhere to international protests against China’s policies in Tibet shows that these communities are largely loyal to China—not their host countries. China refuses to take back its illegal immigrants to Western countries, on the grounds that if they have destroyed their identity papers their nationalities are unknown. Countries with relatively small populations such as Australia and New Zealand could conceivably end up with majority Chinese populations by the end of the 21st century, and politicians in those countries are scrambling to improve relations with China.

Let us take up the point that “it never works to put pressure on the Chinese”. It is undoubtedly true that the Chinese prefer to save face, and prefer to be flattered on the international stage. This is really all that the views of “experts” on China amount to. China puts a high premium on its “face”, and this can lead to infantile reactions by the Beijing government. When German chancellor, Angela Merkel, met the Dalai Lama, China responded by blocking German access to economic deals and contracts for months. Similarly, the conferring of the Congressional Gold Medal on the Dalai Lama was followed by China’s decision to turn away the US ship, the USS Kitty Hawk, from the port of Hong Kong, where it hoped to dock in time for Thanksgiving. Dealing with nations that hold issues of “face” in high priority can often seem like dealing with five-year-old children, and Western nations often choose to “rise above” such issues and ignore them. But it is worth asking whether the Western countries should always deal with China in the way it prefers to be treated. The theory that international relations can be fostered by nurturing soft power and maintaining extensive contacts with counterparts ignores the fact that these interactions are always underpinned by hard power considerations. While there is no reason to go out of our way to court poor relations with China, Western governments need to maintain their independence of action with relation to China (for example, by not becoming overindebted to a strategic competitor), and should treat China, not in a way that suits its cultural assumptions, but in a manner that is befitting to a developing country with a standard of living hardly one-tenth of that of the West.

It seems incontrovertible that Western policy towards China has been allowed to drift, possibly as a result of the focus on unnecessary side-issues such as the Iraq War, but the security situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and other failed states and Islamic militancy more generally do not represent the challenge to Western dominance of the globe that China does. A further problem is that whereas China is a united country, the European nations including North America and Australasia, are not, giving China the ability to play off the EU against the US, and play off individual EU powers against one another in the granting of favours. The EU itself is problematic in that, although it claims to unite European countries for the purpose of international negotiations, it also explicitly aims to confront US geopolitical power, and so necessarily divides the European-descended nations on the global stage. I would argue that, in the unlikely circumstance that European-populated nations could show a common front to the outside world with the aim of seeking to perpetuate European geopolitical power for as long as possible, key policies towards China would need to include the following.

• Diplomatic and other relations with Taiwan should be restored by all Western nations immediately. As a matter of principle, it is unacceptable that any nation require all its diplomatic partners to shun a state the whole of which it claims as part of its territory. While claiming to oppose intervention in a country’s internal politics, China is in this way forcing every nation on earth to intervene on its side on the Taiwan issue. This does not mean that Chinese reunification should be opposed. Military and other guarantees by the US to Taiwan should be dropped. Ultimately, if China did launch military action against Taiwan, there would be little to gain for the West by intervening.
• Western nations should leave the UN. As a permanent member of the Security Council, China wields a veto and a growing crowd of sycophantic Third World supporters, and the organization could well become a vehicle for Chinese geopolitical influence.
• The reality that China holds Tibet and East Turkestan cannot be affected by Western grandstanding. We should withdraw from the game of pronouncing whether a territorial holding is “de jure” or “de facto”, and simply maintain relations with any regimes that hold their territory and appear likely to continue to do so. This way, China could not claim that Western nations had “agreed” that Tibet was part of China: we would simply not comment on the legitimacy of such things any more. Western leaders should not be afraid of inviting Tibetan and other such leaders to the West should they wish to do so, but should avoid giving encouragement to such groups, simply because the reality is that we have no interest in supporting their causes and they cannot therefore rely on us.
• Chinese departments in Western universities should not be permitted to act as support groups for China’s emergence as a great power. There are a number of Chinese academics in the West who use their positions to argue points such as “Tibet has always been part of China” and “the West is seeking to limit China’s rise”. They should simply be required to adhere to tough academic standards instead of engaging in politics from their academic strongholds.
• The human rights dialogue with China should be cancelled. While sympathising on an individual basis with victims of abuses, there is nothing we can do about them, and nothing that we should do about them, given that our foreign policy should be geared to our national interests.
• China should be deleted from the list of countries eligible to receive concessional loans from the IMF, the World Bank or any bilateral or multilateral institutions.
• We need to work out what level of investment in the economies of rival civilizations is appropriate. Natural resources investment needs to take place where the resources are. Arguably, we benefit from cheap imports of low-level manufactures (T-shirts and toys), but ought to draw the line as China’s exports move up the value chain. Higher-value manufactures should always be sourced from within the West.
• Each Western nation should avoid becoming too dependent on imports from any one non-Western nation. Free trade and the World Trade Organization should be rethought.
• Immigration from China and applications for naturalization from Chinese should be rejected as a matter of course, as China is a potential enemy power.
• Chinese students should be ineligible for study grants or postgraduate study of any kind in Western universities. We are currently building up a rival power, and, to the extent that these individuals enter academe, traducing our own academic institutions.
• While we can, and maybe should, do little to make China a democracy, it is worth considering what level of international interactions is appropriate with such a country. China should never have been given the 2008 Olympic Games.
• The current Western hostility towards Russia, which is pushing Russia and China together, should be reversed. Russia is a European nation, and in any possible future conflict ought to be on our side.
• We should avoid fatuous geopolitical games, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, that merely enable China to win brownie points for failing to cast vetoes at the UN. Co-operation with China in anti-terrorism, likely a cover for a crackdown on separatists in the West of China, should be halted. Confrontation with Iran and North Korea ultimately is not in the Western interest, and China should receive no credit for any diplomatic efforts it makes with those regimes.

What the accusation of racism means is that people who make conservative arguments are not nice people. It has nothing to do with the truth or otherwise of our arguments. This was pointed out in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. Professor Bloom argued that cultural relativism was not a point of view arrived at after extensive research of the cultures of the world, but amounted to a saccharine moral that “we should all get along”. We should be “nice people”—and that means refraining from expressing negative attitudes towards other cultures, whether well-founded or not. A liberal will often stop a conservative from explaining his point of view in mid-sentence, not in fact because he fears our understanding and greater reasoning ability, but in order to prove his moral superiority. Quite simply our ideas are deemed to be nasty—supposedly, only nasty people want to retain their national culture or remain in a majority in their own societies. It is simple to point out that the same liberals value the attempt of minorities to keep their own cultures, and so their views contain double standards and logical errors, but to approach the question in this way just becomes a “rant”.

In order to understand why liberals like to grandstand morally, we need to understand the role that morality plays in society and how it underpins the rule of the social elite. This issue is key to the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a Marxist who noted the relative stability of “bourgeois society”, and drew the conclusion that this was because the ruling class enjoyed “cultural hegemony”. A ruling class cannot survive based on force alone; its power is buttressed by cultural support—buttressed by a moral image—that usually renders its monopoly of force redundant. Such a view can be described as conservative in that it is essentially contradictory to the “materialist” assumptions of Marxism, reflecting Gramsci’s disillusionment with the failure of the revolutionary movement in Italy. Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony was set out in his work The Modern Prince, which drew on the thought of Niccolò Macchiavelli, who argued that the Prince should promote whatever cultural and religious customs would unite society, regardless of whether they were true or not. As long as the population believed in those cultural and religious traditions, support for them would render the Prince’s rule morally acceptable. So it was that the leading figures in English society as late as the 1930s were required to appear to support the Christian church, the monarchy, and our customs and way of life more generally. The working class for their part were attracted in greater numbers to Methodism than to Marxism.

However, since the Enlightenment, Western culture has become more amenable to rational deconstruction, unlike its rivals in the Islamic and East Asian civilizations. While our traditions could have continued to buttress the rule of our elite, cultural hegemony is not entirely cynically accessed. An elite that no longer really believes in its mission begins to search for alternative value-systems—other systems of morality that can justify its rule. In the 18th and 19th centuries the British elite was required to support British culture as the price of its rule, but there was little reason why they should not want to do so. But once the culture had been subjected to ruthless Marxist and Freudian deconstruction, and following the traumatic experience of the two world wars, which intellectually discredited Western civilization, the search was on for a more workable morality, leading in the post-war period to the assertion that anti-racism and support for cultural diversity represent the acme of good morals. The discovery of the theory of evolution and modern Bible criticism had undermined belief in our traditional culture somewhat earlier. The Russian Revolution and the pointless barbarity of the First World War also knocked the West’s confidence in itself, but, as Gramsci noted, civil society, morality and patriotism allowed the system to trundle on, only to culminate once again in fascism, genocide and the 55m dead of the Second World War. Many soldiers returned from the war to find that their wives had been unfaithful (this prompted the formation of the Marriage Guidance Council in England). Patriotism was smeared by a (false) association with fascism. There was no energy or belief in imperialism left, and the British Empire was quickly disposed of.

The real arguments for morality and patriotism that conservatives are still trying to win were lost in the 1950s, and a gradual search for a different set of values to underpin the Establishment’s cultural hegemony was set in motion. The process was partly obscured by the Cold War—while our rulers were shifting their ground and putting in place the foundation for a new type of society, conservatives were mainly chasing down the dead end of anti-communism. Freedom was declared to be the defining point of Western society in the 40 years before the fall of communism, while policies were adopted that would dissolve the real fabric of society, in turn laying the foundation for a retreat from liberty more recently. We have traditions of liberty, but no society can be mainly about liberty alone; we are learning now that liberty becomes licence and diversity, which eventually corrodes any real social bonds. Put differently, real liberty depends on a society that still has the glue of a common culture.

No longer convinced that the nation-state represents an adequate moral project to justify its rule, the Western elite is anxious to portray itself in more universalist terms, and that requires a recreation of society demographically. The key point about immigration is not that business interests support immigration in order to get cheap labour—this somewhat reductionist analysis may be the easiest one to advance in a five-minute conversation—but that the issue is seen as a moral one by our new rulers. Business leaders who do want cheap labour are able to grandstand morally as if their self-interest were some kind of altruism. But the search for cheap labour is not really what drives the agenda of cultural diversity. It follows therefore that the cheap labour argument falls flat for us, because we are thereby not taking on the moral agenda of our new elite, one that inspires it with a sense of self-righteousness despite the negative effects of such an agenda on society as a whole. It is important to recognize that cultural hegemony has two aspects: justifying an elite’s rule to society at large, and justifying its own rule to itself. As long as the ruling class in society is cohered by a sense of values and purpose, it will bring enough middle class people along with it to remain in power. So, the second moment, that of justifying its rule to itself, is actually primary. Just as the Soviet Union fell because the Soviet nomenklatura no longer believed in itself, our rulers cannot be undermined without undermining their self-belief first.

True, there is the difficulty for the new Establishment that, unlike the old morality of family, church and nation, the morality of supporting diverse lifestyles and of encouraging cultural diversity cannot really unite society. True morality and patriotism hold a society together—social leaders were once forced to uphold these values as a price of their positions, but the quid pro quo for us was that a decent society was created. Diversity, by contrast, divides society into competing groups, and cannot realistically become an ideology that fully unites society. But by dissolving the national spirit and culture, English people (and the same process is at work in all other European and European-descended nations) lose their connection with one another. As real communities cease to exist, the population becomes individuated. Even the family is no longer the unit that it was, as most marriages end in divorce and children do not necessarily maintain contact with their parents. As civil society becomes weaker, state intervention is extended to more areas of life.

Society never really feels good about itself anymore, but the more problems there are, the more middle-class people become involved in attempts to manage social conflict. School teachers get a rush of moral superiority as they punish pupils—even infants, according to the newspaper reports in the UK—for politically incorrect language. Every company employs a phalanx of workers dedicated to the promotion of anti-harassment codes and equal opportunities. The diversity agenda continually wears society down with the negativity of social discussion, but anybody who is anybody embraces the new moral agenda. Traditional views become largely confined to the working class, or people nowhere near the trough. Those who are at the trough justify their position by their moral superiority over those who do not accept the new moral agenda. The middle classes have always sought respectability, but the current values that enable them to claim moral respectability just happen to be socially divisive. However, as long as they believe that their values are socially divisive only because nasty people—“racists”—are standing in the way of a more successful embracing of their values, these social values will remain an avenue for social respectability.

“Respectable” individuals enjoy to an extent the feeling of disgust they feel when confronted with someone who refuses to accept the anti-social values being promoted by the elite today. At the very least, it enables them to get a “fix” of moral superiority. These are the people who wrung their hands over Chile under Pinochet while studiously ignoring a much greater death toll during the same time period in Zimbabwe (where around 30,000 members of the Matabele tribe were slaughtered). This synthetic morality seems curiously selective. The eyes of the politically correct glaze over if you point out such details—they are not really interested in any of their causes as such—they do not really give a damn about the desaparecidos of Pinochet’s Chile any more than the Matabele—so much as the chance to prove their own moral superiority to themselves. Even people who disagree on the science behind claims of global warming can be seen as immoral, as utterly trivial issues such as the use of a supermarket plastic bag become touchstones of people’s moral characters.

We need to paint the current elite and its middle-class hangers-on in their true light, as immoral collectively and individually. This is a challenge, as these “respectable” people go to great lengths to demonstrate their niceness. They are not imperialists, or “racists”, or “sexists” or “homophobes”. They love everyone and everything. They fret—or claim to fret—about women’s rights in Mauritania and the plight of homosexuals in Iran. They are delighted to let you know they vote for parties that would enable people like themselves to pay a bit more in tax, because they are concerned about the poor. They are the very definition of the Pharisaical “whited sepulchres” that the Gospels speak of. Unless we can demonstrate that these seemingly nice people are actually self-serving and uncaring we do not stand a chance of undermining their rule. There are various arguments we could adduce. Liberals undermine the socioeconomic position of the most vulnerable in their societies by fostering immigration. Their enthusiasm for state intervention and welfare has led to the growth of single-parent families—it is “nasty” to criticize them, but what about the children? Such children are statistically highly likely to end up in crime, delinquency, welfare and prison. Support for divorce, abortion and homosexuality has in fact led to tens of millions of unhappy lives. We need to hammer home that these self-righteous people are spreading misery in their own societies. People who support the EU on the grounds that it represents international co-operation are actually closing off Europe from trade in agricultural commodities with the poorest of nations. Supporters of state spending are actually fostering the growth of a large group of public-sector workers, whose salaries and pensions are in many cases financed from the taxes of people who face greater challenges in struggling to make ends meet.

As far as immigration is concerned, we are robbing developing nations of their most mobile populations—whatever you think of immigrants, both legal and illegal, they are undoubtedly resourceful in managing to better themselves at our expense. As far as liberal concern for other nations and the human race as a whole is concerned, maybe we could point out the reality that, short of recolonizing the entire developing world, we must respect those nations’ right to sovereignty, as how can we be responsible for the plight of people over whose affairs we have no say? Real morality begins with creating a good society—and if other countries have less successful societies that is a problem for them to address. The self-righteousness of internationalist concern for failed societies beyond the seas leads directly to wars in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, which the liberals, of course, claim to oppose. Self-righteousness in our own countries leads directly to a rise in crime and social anomie, complemented by the growth of an underclass. A desire for a national culture is not bigotry at all, but a quest for a social discourse that provides meaning and a place in society even for the economically disadvantaged. The smugness of liberals who oppose a national culture has written the most vulnerable out of society. Liberalism must be exposed as exploitative, nasty, cynical, hypocritical and self-serving. True, pointing out that business leaders want cheap labour paints them as self-serving in a financial sense. But liberals more generally exploit their moral grandstanding to paint themselves as wonderfully compassionate figures, despite the colossal negative impact of the policies they support. I am sure better conservatives than I can think of many ways in which the claims of “liberalism” to the moral high ground can be refuted. Until we get to the point where many of our rulers privately start to wonder whether multiculturalism, diversity, the large state and so on are actually deeply immoral projects, we will continue to lose all significant ideological battles.