Month: May 2025

…but Nigel Farage may.

Following a Reform landslide in local elections and also its overturning an almost 17,000 Labour majority to gain the Runcorn seat in Parliament, everyone is mulling the possibility of a Reform government.

I doubt it’ll ever happen. Third parties tend not to carry the day in our first-past-the-post system, which on balance is a good thing. Proportional representation often makes countries ungovernable, and it tends to empower marginal parties too much.

People are saying that our essentially two-party system is broken, but it isn’t. What’s broken is the two parties, Labour and Tories. They seem to have set out to prove that it’s unnecessary to have to choose between subversive and incompetent. Britain can have both.

Labour and Tories are in broad agreement on everything guaranteed to turn Britain into a full-fledged Third World country. They only disagree on how quickly and comprehensively that worthy goal should be achieved.

Fanatical commitment to beggaring Britain with net zero, ideological reluctance to stem the influx of alien migration, unquenchable thirst for extorting people’s money in one form or another, totemistic worship of the NHS, wokery, enthusiastic endorsement of every perversion described in medical literature and some that aren’t, marshmallow softness on crime, eagerness to foment class war, wholehearted attempts to disarm Britain, clear preference for public over private sector, systematic replacement of education with indoctrination – it takes a magnifying glass, nay an electronic microscope, to detect the wafer-thin demarcation between the two parties.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch makes some conservative-sounding noises, but she gives no indication how she plans to translate them into policy and, if ever elected, policy into action. Boris Johnson credits her with “the most original political mind” among the party leaders, but he is being too chivalrous, a failing he seldom displayed before.

Kemi doesn’t have an original political mind because one manifestation of such cerebral excellence is coming up with original political ideas. Yet I’ve never heard her enunciate any idea whose provenance can’t be traced back to some old and venerable source.

Partly this isn’t her fault: after 5,000 years of recorded history, there aren’t many political tricks that haven’t been either considered or tried. Even Margaret Thatcher, who was 100 times the politician Kemi Badenoch will ever be, didn’t have any original ideas.

She had the resolve and the guts to go back to some solid ideas of the past, such as returning some power to the private sector and reminding the people that sometimes they had to fend for themselves. Look up the books by Whig politicians, from Burke onwards, some of their contemporary economists, such as Smith, some Anglo-American conservative thinkers of the 20^th century, and there you’ll have Thatcherism, chapter and verse.

Boris Johnson, writing with his characteristic facile fluency, says the Reform landslide proves that underneath it all the English are naturally conservative. I don’t think it proves anything of the sort. It’s just that the people finally realised that, when they look for the lesser evil in one of the two parties, they end up choosing both evils.

This time they are angry, and their ire became so febrile that they were prepared to vote for any other than Labour and Tory candidates. Had a chap advocating the murder of every first-born boy been on the ballot, he could have won too.

Neither Badenoch nor her likely successor, Robert Jenrick, that walking advertisement for a crash diet regimen, is much of a political thinker, certainly not an original one. But they should have enough nous to realise that their way back to power is to reinvent the Tory Party. Following Chesterton’s advice, they must boldly discover what has been discovered before.

They must do their job, which, for politicians, means winning elections. They ought to realise that the people don’t want conservatism. They want something, anything, new, and if that happens to be conservatism, they’ll take it. The danger is that, should it prove to be fascism or communism, they might be equally receptive.

Yet at the moment their Pavlovian reaction to conservative noises seems to be sharp. Looking at Farage’s manifesto, Kemi-Robert-Boris must sense how those noises should be pitched.

In medical care, Reform advocates a version of the French system, with both private and public sectors chipping in. This will involve tax breaks for private treatment and insurance, tax exemption for front-line workers and so forth. That’s a good idea.

However, since the NHS has been elevated to a secular cult, every effort must be made to sell our gullible public the idea that it’s the same sainted NHS, except it’s no longer wholly funded by the state. Observing how avidly the electorate swallows any canard on offer, this may require a bit of legerdemain, but it can be done.

In the economy, Reform stands for reducing taxes across the board, which includes raising the income tax threshold to £20,000, thereby exempting six million people from paying income tax – so much for Reform only wanting to lower taxes for the rich. Inheritance levies, corporate taxes, stamp duty will also be reduced significantly: for example, abolishing inheritance tax for all estates under two million, as opposed to under £250,000 at present, would be a tremendous boost to families.

On environment, Reform stands for abandoning net zero, going nuclear again, resuming exploration in the North Sea and scrapping green energy subsidies. All good.

Unfortunately, the manifesto also includes the promise to nationalise utility companies, which has led some commentators to bemoan Farage’s shift to the Left. In fact, he hasn’t shifted in that direction, not indeed one inch from his visceral populism.

Britons are paying some of the highest energy bills in the world, and the promise to “stop consumers being ripped off” resonates with them. If a charismatic figure like Farage says that nationalising water and ‘lectric serves that purpose, they’ll believe him. At this point, they’d believe him even if he insisted that eviscerating Ed Miliband would lower their bills.

And so on, all the way down the list. In fact, Reform’s manifesto overlaps with Trump’s pronouncements so much that one could believe they are a cooperative effort. That wouldn’t be the first time in history: some of the same people took part in inspiring and even drafting Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, Hitler’s Four-Year version and Roosevelt’s New Deal.

With his finger never far from the public pulse, Farage has sensed that Trump is hardly the flavour of the month in Britain. Hence he has made some astute moves to distance himself from Mar-a-Lago, but the underlining kinship is unmistakable.

Both Trump and Farage are populist mavericks trying to outflank the two main parties. There is a crucial difference though: Trump has succeeded in getting to the top, and Farage so far hasn’t. Nor will he, unless he learns one crucial manoeuvre from Trump.

Unlike Farage, Trump didn’t try to blow up the two-party system by standing as an independent candidate. Instead he infiltrated the Republican Party and gradually turned it into his own bailiwick. Say what you will about the Donald, but he is a smart political operator.

Farage should be as smart to realise that third parties may at times make a splash in British politics, but ultimately they never win. His route to 10 Downing Street should start at 18 Smith Square, the Conservative Campaign Headquarters.

As the most charismatic and populist leader on the Right, Farage could easily do a Trump on the Tory Party which is ripe for the plucking. The Tories have an abysmal recent record, they are bereft of ideas and public support, and they certainly have no individuals with Farage’s astuteness, charisma and proven, if limited, record.

Several commentators have suggested the idea of a Tory-Reform merger, and the idea is sound: provided that the brand name comes from the Tories but the product from Farage. The popular idea of the Tories adopting Farage’s policies but without Farage will never work.

If they try to do that, “original thinkers” like Badenoch or Jenrick will inaugurate another generation of Labour government, making the demise of Britain irreversible. But, as leader of the (‘new’, ‘real’, ‘genuine’, ‘modern’ – take your pick) Conservative Party, Farage could push some of the Reform ideas through. As leader of Reform, he’ll for ever nibble at the outer edges of the political pie.

The bigger the Reform Party gets, the more amateur politicians are drawn into its ranks, the greater the subterranean pressures will be, the sooner the party will be blown apart by tectonic shifts. The only hope Britain has comes from the Tory Party – but purged of its non-Tory ideas and non-Tory personnel.

P.S. But Farage should take care not to get too close to Trump. He should remember what happened in Canada and Australia, where Left-wing candidates came from behind to defeat their Trumpist opponents.

If there existed a support group called Tattoophobes Anonymous, I’d have to join it. “I’m Alex, and I am a tattoophobe. While I respect tattooed people as human beings, I’m constitutionally incapable of looking at them.”

That creates a problem when I have to talk to tattooed sale assistants, which almost all of them are. They think I suffer from strabismus and look at me with compassion. Later they must tell their co-workers, “There was that old cross-eyed geezer again. Poor sod. He can’t even look you straight in the eye.”

The lower down the social scale you go, the greater the Tattoo Quotient (TQ) becomes. For example, if you arrange different sports in descending social order, you’ll probably find no tattooed polo-playing toffs. Middle-class tennis will probably have a TQ of about 10 per cent, up to 20 among the pros. And almost all professional football players are tattooed, footie being a working class sport.

My little phobia shouldn’t be misconstrued as contempt for the lower social orders. It’s nothing of the sort. Here’s an ironclad rule to which there are no known exceptions: people who despise the working classes are themselves despicable.

By and large, they come from the Islington-dwelling, Guardian-reading, Prosecco-quaffing, LibDem-voting classes who claim to speak French, but fail to pronounce the ‘s’ sound in coup de grâce and fleur-de-lis.

In plainer words, they are pretentious, snobbish twats, not to mention atheists whose milk of human kindness has gone rancid. No believer can possibly despise the lower classes, and neither can a genuinely educated person.

After all, education isn’t just accumulating information but what happens as a result, “what remains after you forget all you knew”, as Einstein put it. And what should remain is wisdom, kindness, style – and love. After all, the Christian spirit permeates Western culture so comprehensively that even educated non-Christians absorb that ethos.

This means that anyone professing contempt for the lower classes is never really educated. Even if he knows how to pronounce coup de grâce and fleur-de-lis properly, he is an ignoramus.

Having said that, while despising proles is indefensible, despising their tastes isn’t only permissible but indeed essential. Even that would be wrong if prole tastes weren’t imposed on the whole society. But they are, so it isn’t.

About 200 years ago some Frenchman coined the phrase nostalgie de la boue, literally ‘nostalgia for mud,’ meaning the attraction of low-life culture and experience. When that condition results from individual longing, it’s bad enough. But when it’s imposed on an indoctrinated society for ideological and commercial reasons, it’s calamitous.

The ideology involved is an echo of Marxism, with its hatred of anyone who doesn’t belong to the proletariat. Alas, even when people reject Marxist economics and Marxist savagery, they still can be sweet-talked into accepting that only the lower classes have virtue.

Many people who grew up in perfectly bourgeois families and went to decent schools feel latent shame and hence the need to fit in with those of a more fortunate, proletarian, nativity. Thus speaking estuarian English becomes ‘cool’, which has to be one of the most revolting words in the language.

The same goes for tattoos: the fashion started because intellectually challenged individuals wanted to attract attention, something they felt they could only do by emulating New Guinean natives. Now that so many people sport tattoos, they are no longer attention-grabbing. They are much worse: cool.

As for ‘music’, which unqualified term even conservative broadsheets apply to prole cacophony, with toff affectation demanding the modifier ‘classical’, the story is more involved. Unlike pop, real music demands a lifelong effort from the listener. One derives gratification, but it isn’t instant.

With a few minor exceptions, even people born with musical aptitude aren’t born with musical taste, meaning the ability not just to like music but to appreciate it. This has to be cultivated over many years, and it takes motivation to embark on such an arduous journey.

When I was little, most parents in our circle, even those who, like mine, had themselves never attended a concert in their lives, knew that music was important – because culture was. Not being able to appreciate (as distinct from merely to like) a Bach fugue or Beethoven sonata was seen as cultural illiteracy, not something they wanted for their offspring.

By and large, that motivation no longer exists, quite the opposite. As Allan Bloom wrote perceptively in The Closing of the American Mind, peer pressure and the whole cultural atmosphere push young people towards prole gyrations. In fact, he wrote, most of his students identified themselves by the pop group they not so much liked as idolised.

The soil thus primed, commercialism moves in. Since most people these days define music as electronic din, record companies drop recordings of real music.

And even conservative broadsheets sense they’ll sell more copies by covering the cultural heights scaled by groups with names like The Urinals, Devil’s Spawn or Evil Incarnate. (These names are imaginary. But, if by some chance the first one isn’t, and you happen to find yourself at their concert, make sure not to sit in the first two rows.)

Tattoos fall in the same category: they are badges of ideologised and commercialised proledom, savagery in traditional Western terms. Just as Prof. Bloom’s students identified themselves by their pop groups, so do today’s lot cover themselves head to toe with ink to make a cultural statement.

The statement is: we are proles and proud of it – even if we pull down a six-figure salary and have to cover our tattoos with suit and tie when going to work. Proledom isn’t about money or lack thereof. It’s about belonging to the ruling party, that of pagan, deracinated, dumbed-down modernity.

These melancholy thoughts have been inspired by most of our papers highlighting the news of the day: David Beckham’s 50^th birthday.

Everyone expected this ex-ball-kicker to be knighted on this momentous anniversary, but so far that accolade has escaped him. Not for long, I’m sure – another few years of Labour government, and Beckham will get at least a life peerage, if perhaps not the crown.

Now David is a nice enough man – or would be if he hadn’t covered every square inch of his body with disgusting tattoos. When he used to put in those right-footed crosses for Man Utd and England, I didn’t mind watching him in long TV shots. Now he tends to appear in close-ups, charming his British and American audiences with his tongue-tied platitudes.

They don’t mind the platitudes and they don’t mind the body ‘art’. This means I mind them.

How many places of interest does Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, have? Not many, would be my guess – three generations of Kims are certain to have replaced any worthwhile architecture with typical communist monstrosities.

However, the current leader, Kim Jong Un, has just ordered the construction of an interesting monument that should have created a worldwide outcry – but hasn’t. The planned obelisk will commemorate North Korean soldiers fighting for Putin against the Ukraine.

This is the first official acknowledgement that regular troops of a foreign country are deployed in the Ukraine. Until recently, Korean soldiers espied in the battlefield were described as Buryats, Yakuts or other Mongolic Siberians, on the assumption that no one would know the difference.

Then, after several Koreans had either deserted to the Ukrainians or been taken prisoner, outright denials began to ring hollow. However, both Putin and Kim refused either to confirm such information or dismiss it outright.  

Such subterfuge is no longer deemed necessary. The other day, the military committee of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) issued solemn praise of Korean soldiers who, “following the Leader’s orders, displayed mass heroism” killing Ukrainians.

North Korean troops were moved to Russia following last year’s agreement on a far-reaching strategic partnership. This is seen as a lucrative posting: those 10,000-12,000 soldiers are paid about $2,000 a month each, a king’s ransom by the standards of their starving country.

The agreement was worked out last autumn, when Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov met the North Korean foreign minister, while the Russian defence minister Belousov had a lengthy conference with his North Korean counterpart.

As a result, the Koreans promised to support their “Russian comrades”. Communism is dead, long live communism. And there I was, thinking that the Russians are no longer comrades but ladies and gentlemen.

These criminal comrades fighting side by side signify a new stage in the escalating aid from Kim to Putin. Until the deployment of an actual military contingent, North Korea had been bolstering Russian aggression with artillery shells, small-arms ammunition, self-propelled howitzers and missile systems. But eventually boots on the ground became necessary as well.

The North Korean troops include the ‘assault corps’, North Korean special forces. Though no better than average even by the modest standards of the Russian army, they’ve distinguished themselves by iron discipline and unquestioning obedience. I’m not surprised: they’ve been trained well. Any deficit of such qualities in North Korea constitutes a shortcut to a nameless grave.

The South Korean government is aghast about this “flagrant violation of international law, including the UN Charter. By acknowledging publicly the deployment, they mock the international community yet again.” The government of South Korea then demanded that Russia and North Korea stop their illicit military alliance that undermines “peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond, including Europe.”

Kim dismissed such protests as a perfidious yet feeble attempt to undermine “the sacred mission of strengthening the traditional friendship and unity between Korea and Russia.”

One has to assume that this cherished tradition goes back to 1937, when the Soviets perpetrated the genocide of Koreans living in Russia. Over 172,000 of them were transported 4,000 miles from Siberia to Central Asia under the pretext of “stemming the infiltration of Japanese spies into the Far East”. (Apparently, the Soviets regarded Koreans and Japanese as identical twins.)

As a result of that mass deportation, over 50,000 Koreans died of starvation and neglect, in the spirit of “traditional friendship and unity”. Moreover, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes in 1956, he didn’t list this genocide of Koreans among them. That little peccadillo was just par for the course, not even worth mentioning.

But hey, let bygones be bygones, shall we? Or, as the more robust Russian version of that proverb goes, “He who recalls the past, let his eye be poked out”. If Comrade Kim says the friendship and unity are sacred and traditional, so they are – and if you deny it… well, you know what will happen then.

The two evil regimes are joining forces to snuff out the light of freedom and civilisation that began to flicker in the Ukraine. These birds of a feather are red in beak and talon, and they are both aware of their profound kinship that goes beyond mutual strategic interests.

Just as the original Kim built his regime on the Stalin model, so is Putin steadily pushing Russia closer typologically to the totalitarian house that Kim Il-sung built. Yet what concerns me here isn’t this statement of the obvious, but the West’s reaction to the presence of foreign troops on Ukrainian battlefields.

When a Western leader, such as Macron, moots the remote possibility of sending a few NATO soldiers to the Ukraine, all hell breaks loose. No, Manny hastens to reassure the agitated world, not to kill Russians, God forbid. Just to act as a peace-keeping force, a sort of buffer keeping Russian dogs at bay – and still other presidents and prime ministers throw up their arms in horror.

We can’t do that! That would be provoking Putin and we all know he provokes easily, the sensitive soul that he is. When echoes of such shrieks reach Moscow, Putin or one of his henchmen helpfully remind the West that Russia has nuclear weapons. Push one button, and puff go the British Isles.

The erection of that obscene monument in Pyongyang is a perfect time to remind the Russians of another proverb: what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If those lovely allies Russia has can deploy troops on the battlefield, then the Ukraine’s allies are within their rights to do the same.

Except that there is a crucial difference. Russia’s totalitarian allies aren’t scared of helping her openly, while the Ukraine’s democratic allies are paralysed with fear whenever Putin looks at them askance. A trickle of weaponry, enough for the Ukraine to fight but not to win, is just about acceptable – and even that seems excessive to Vlad’s friend in DC. But sending troops over, now that would be an egregious provocation.

And it goes without saying that nothing Russia does can possibly provoke the West into a decisive response. We are thick-skinned that way. As a modern Russian classic wrote, “You can stand a foot in front of us and keep spitting into our snout for ten minutes, and we still won’t budge.”

For the same reason, our papers aren’t screaming in 50-point headlines about North Korean troops lending a helping hand to their fascist comrades. I bet they’d even stay silent if China sent, say, 100,000 troops to launch another assault on Kiev. We wouldn’t want to provoke either Putin or Xi.

What a sorry lot we are.