Unenlightening Europe

Quelle surprise!  As we noted in September, France was an easy target for terror.  So, ten days on from the Paris attacks, how’s the reaction unfolding?

Canadian blogger Vlad Tepes sums up the polarisation:

“The most important thing you can do when people you don’t know are murdered by Muslims in an act designed to promote the primacy of Islam, is show your moral superiority to people who would like to take meaningful action by demonstrating grief…  People tripping over themselves in self-sacrifice, trying to tell the people who want them dead or enslaved how there will be no ‘backlash’ instead of at the very very least going en masse to the mosques and screaming: ‘stop the hate’.”

Eloi turning on the Morlocks then?  But would that help or not?

And when the candles and the flowers and the teddy bears have been cleared away, what will remain?

There’s little serious anger that carries through.  From a position of strength, that would be good news.  From a position of weakness, it only underlines that weakness.  The silence is nervous.  It’s well-known that the ISIS strategy is to destabilise Europe, to make normal life unpredictable, to create the conditions in which submission to the gangsters’ will seems the safest option.  Part of that strategy is placing Europe’s leaders apart from the led.  They won’t be targeted.  They’re too useful as they are: mostly perceived as bumbling, incompetent, and lacking any will to defend their people.  Get rid of them and you only invite the more determined to replace them.

François Hollande ramps up the rhetoric but results will be another matter.  Pending anything better, la gloire is back.  France is bombing Raqqa, because France is now at war.  France was bombing Raqqa anyway, because that was just fooling around?  The tricolour has been much in evidence across the globe.  It’s forgotten, for now, that its history is no more glorious than the swastika’s.  Remember the Vendée, the génocide franco-français.  France’s politicians, gathering last week at Versailles, belted out their national anthem, as we’re all now encouraged to do.  ‘Do you hear, in the countryside, the roar of those ferocious soldiers?  Let's march, let's march!  Let an impure blood water our furrows!’  Yes, they still get away with that, but it’s not our Europe: it’s a gory theatre of the absurd, founded upon a lie (that France in 1792 was not the aggressor).

Hollande insists that he will defend the Republic.  Not so much France.  Not so much the French.  La République, a hate cult of hypocrisy, historic enemy of European regionalism, the proto-fascist State over which Hollande presides, one that despite his best efforts still cannot bring itself to legalise any indigenous language on its territory besides French.  (To quote Musa Anter, a Kurdish writer assassinated in 1992, "If my mother tongue is shaking the foundations of your state, it probably means that you built your state on my land.")  Republican values are the new Falklands factor – the art of war turned to domestic political advantage.  A false flag operation?  We’ve no evidence, but the motive is clear enough.

France likes to think it has a special relationship with the Mahometan world, one strangely informed by a millennium of conflict with it, real or imagined.  Charles Martel at Tours.  Roland at Roncevaux.  St Louis on Crusade.  Napoleon in Egypt.  Charles X seizing Algiers.  Charles de Gaulle letting it go.  It’s not actually the most promising basis for peaceful co-existence.

Nor is Britain’s record.  A century ago the UK made promises to the Arabs and the Jews.  It would be simplistic to say that the promises to the Jews were kept and those to the Arabs were not.  Neither got everything they expected.  But the Arabs, and the Kurds, got a lot more than they bargained for.  Promises of self-government if the Ottoman yoke were thrown off became the reality of a new colonial yoke.

In 1920 an insurgency broke out in Iraq against the British occupation.  RAF bombing of the area continued throughout the decade.  The Air Ministry considered it useful practice for other territories where “armed forces are required to give effect to British policy and uphold British prestige”.  Not least because it was so much cheaper than deploying ground troops.  Squadron Leader Arthur Harris reported after several such punitive raids that: "The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage.  Within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape."  At the time of the Arab revolt in Palestine in the late 1930s, Air Commodore Harris, as he then was, declared that "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied".  Ancient history this may now be, but the lands cursed with oil have a particular way of keeping the past in mind as they navigate the present.  The wonder is not that Europe suffers from terrorist atrocities.  It’s that patience proved so long-lasting.

What strikes westerners as not-quite-cricket is the worldwide extra-territorial jurisdiction that religious regimes claim, in defiance of international norms.  Killing cartoonists is the ever sharper expression of an idea that began in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and which the civilised world failed to challenge effectively.  In the UK we may tend to remember the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.  In France it’s more likely to be the murder in Paris of Shapour Bakhtiar, a remarkable man who was secular Iran’s last hope.  But all such incursions into European sovereignty pale into insignificance set against the western assumption that eastern regimes exist to be changed at will, whatever the locals think.  However tempting it is to bomb Syria without UN authority, the result will be more anti-western feeling, coupled with more European guilt for the collateral damage (damage that’s only terrorism by another name).  Or if nothing is done, an equal and opposite guilt for inaction.  If Europeans are to defend themselves, they must first question on what terms they think it proper to decide the fate of others.

Europe’s defence is bound to become more inward-looking because Europe is forming a smaller and smaller proportion of the world’s population.  (Its share is expected to halve between now and 2050.)  The ultimate triumph of universal human rights is no longer assured, because the expanding populations of the world may have no use for them.  They may view them with indifference, or with hostility.  Either way, Europeans need to be more watchful of what happens to their own rights and make that task their first priority, because it may be that no-one else will.  Europe is busy renouncing its enlightenment heritage because others find it offensive.  Since only those with something to hide are offended by the truth, it would be better not to retreat from the enlightenment but to shine the torch deeper, into our own society and into others’.  But that’s not what will happen.  On the contrary, we’ll continue to allow victims to be created by allowing others to use the value system of the victims’ own society against them.  Nice work for lawyers.

As terror attacks escalate, so the paradigm by which Europe’s rulers rule crumbles.  It survives only so long as it offers satisfying explanations of why the world is as it is.  European unity has been shaken by the migrant crisis, with one of its most unambiguous achievements – the borderless Schengen area – now in tatters.  Counter-terrorism demands closer co-operation across borders, better sharing of intelligence, perhaps a Europe where unity is enjoyed by the rulers even as it ceases to exist for the ruled.  It’s not a Europe that necessarily requires the EU, democratic or otherwise, which may be one reason why the EU is under political challenge.

Predictions of Mahometan conquest are far-fetched but only because they’re wrongly framed in military terms: a formal State structure can survive long after the internal reality of which active minority wields power in society has been utterly transformed.  One only has to look at Tower Hamlets under Mayor Lutfur Rahman to see how easily the corruption of Bangladesh can be reproduced wholesale in a London borough if standards are not upheld.  Given the London party consensus that elected mayors are better than open government, we can only expect to see more of this.  But even Europe, tolerant, self-loathing Europe, ever apologetic, ever happy to accept that two wrongs make a right, has a tipping point, a point of calling to account.

Expect far Right, anti-EU parties to fill at least part of the vacuum left by the collapsing paradigm of the politically correct.  Expect xenophobia to make no distinction between guilty and innocent: a presumption of innocence is essential for justice, but not for security.  It’s not impossible to imagine some countries taking things as far as mass expulsion of religious minorities deemed too troublesome to remain, especially once those countries are outside the EU.  It’s what happened in Spain in the 17th century, a move obviously considered worth it despite the economic damage it wrought.  Many of Spain’s moriscos ended up in north Africa, swelling the ranks of the Barbary pirates who took their revenge on Europe’s coastal communities, including those in Wessex.  Terrorism is nothing new and neither is the suite of possible responses.  About the only ‘self-evident truth’ is that the less Mahometanism there is in Europe, and in the world, the less terrorism there can be.  That calculation, that suspicion of the murky middle ground, that condemnation even of the fiercest fighters against the likes of ISIS, is the real tragedy.  Europeans aware of their history and confronted once again by an ideology that demands the death penalty for thought-crime may rather be safe than sorry.  It doesn’t lessen the tragedy.

If far Right parties fill part of the vacuum it’s also true that they can’t fill it all.  There are equal opportunities for other visions of Europe: most vitally a Europe of small nations and historic regions, decentralised, democratic, inclusive (of those willing to be included), yet passionately protective of traditional rights and committed to international justice rather than to the addictions of repression and war.  It’s a strong possibility in the longer term, but getting there could be a close-run thing.

Wrapped in Golden Chains

“There's been a lot of pressure to highlight human rights abuses but the Chinese haven't mentioned the DWP once.”

Tory Comedians on Facebook

Questioned in London this week on his country’s human rights record, Xi Jinping responded with the kind of explanation that would have appealed to Deng Xiaoping back in the 80s.  Something along the lines of ‘human rights, with Chinese characteristics’.  Universal, but to be applied only as it suits us.

WR Council member Douglas Stuckey was in London too, joining others in drawing attention to China’s chronic oppression of Tibet and reporting that:

“I was with the Tibetans to view the arrival of the Chinese dictator.  The Chinese showed scant courtesy in dumping boxes of kit all over – baseball caps, red flags, etc – and ordering students and others to line the route.  We should oppose Hinkley Point on grounds of security, technology, finance and humanity.  After all, we should be first to say: ‘once you pay the Danegeld’.”

Earlier this year the Dalai Lama, perhaps the greatest regionalist of all, was another visitor to Britain, and specifically to Wessex.  He was invited on-stage at the Glastonbury Festival (despite the usual foot-stamping warnings from the Chinese) before addressing a rally at Aldershot Town FC that Douglas also attended.  Tibet matters absolutely.  The involuntary loss beyond redemption of an insightful culture that took centuries to form is no less a crime against the world than the mass extinction of species demanded as the price of economic growth.  Tibet also matters relatively.  The media silence is deafening.  Just why destructive events in east Asia matter less than those in west Asia is one of the sad mysteries of the British media malaise.  Are the Tibetans not setting off enough bombs to be interesting?

Until 2008, the UK maintained its long-standing view that China’s relationship to Tibet was one of suzerainty, not sovereignty.  Gordon Brown was the first PM to kowtow on that point.  And clearly not the last.  China’s detailed interest in Tibet arguably began as a defensive move, to keep the British out.  Today, that’s as meaningless an argument as a Union Jack in Dublin now that France and Spain are our allies.  Chinese attitudes to Tibetan nationalism are ones not simply of arrogant opposition – Beijing knows best – but of old-fashioned outrage that self-evident truths are being challenged.  For Chinese diplomats, the right of nations to self-determination applies to existing states only, and if it does apply to aspiring nations then it is one that must not be exercised.  The State defines the People.  The People do not define the State.

How different things are in Europe!  Well, watch carefully.  The facts are that democratic change here would be ‘destabilising’ too and we just can’t have it.  It might spook the markets.

The Catalans, denied by Madrid the right to hold a referendum on independence, voted for it anyway through elections to the regional parliament.  Alex Salmond, interviewed for Catalan television recently, observed that Scotland had the process without the result, while Catalonia had the result without the process.  Madrid, not content with prosecuting the Catalan leadership for being over-democratic, is now hinting that Catalonia’s existing autonomy might be revoked.  Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution allows it to do this, in defence of the national interest.  The last person who revoked Catalonia’s autonomy was General Franco: that’s how bad things are.  West along the Pyrenees, in the region of Navarre, NATO is preparing its biggest troop exercise since the Cold War.  Wonder why?

Further north, the French Parliament struggles to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.  Not because to do so would make French any less important, but only because it would deny French a monopoly in those historic territories where French is a foreign language.  The Chinese, the Spanish and the French all have the same world view: THEIR rights to self-importance must be protected against any interference in their internal affairs, but the internal affairs of those they occupy are there to be trampled upon.  It makes you feel so good to be British.  At least we allow an independence referendum to be held, albeit with every institution of the status quo briefing against.  But no, there’s no cause for self-congratulation here either.  Consider ‘guided localism’ and all the other sinister phrases the Coalition inspired and the majority Tory government doesn’t even need to repeat.  All these regimes regard autonomy as something they wind out on a string; not one sees it as a reflection of power rising from below, the only direction compatible with a vital democracy.

These are interesting times for Europe because Europe is losing the plot, demographically, economically and politically.  The price is one to be paid in freedom.  We don’t criticise the Arabs over sharia law and the funding of terrorism: we need their oil.  We don’t criticise the Chinese over Tibet or human rights generally: we need their investment.  Even if it’s a desperately bad deal for us, pursued for ideological reasons.  And even if it means handing over the keys to our infrastructure, against sound military advice.

It can only get worse.  The UK is becoming a Cornwall writ large, a place whose heavy industry has been destroyed by changing global markets, leaving only speculation and tourism to fill the gap.  Cameron swims beside Xi like a minnow beside a whale.  It's the pretence of mattering, in a world where even a united Europe looks lightweight and confused.  Who benefits more from the UK becoming China’s new best friend, as the USA’s star sets in the west?  The Chinese have views on trade unions and the work ethic that will fit nicely in Cameron’s Britain, but revenge for the Opium Wars will be sweeter.

The Left, wracked with post-colonial guilt, find it hard to offer an alternative.  China’s economic success is a good news story to them, but if China now has surplus cash to invest abroad then China’s success has clearly been overdone.  As for giving our power and wealth away to those elsewhere in the world who do not share our values, it’s a fair question whether this won’t increasingly lead to the undermining of those values at home.  It’s a debate to which the Left have nothing constructive to contribute.  They’re much too busy attacking free speech, and sawing off the branch that sustains them.

A fundamental aim of the Wessex Regionalists is to contribute to the creation of a sustainable and equitable global economy in which the health, security and liberty of all is paramount, regardless of race or creed.  There’s no better place and time to start building that world than right here, right now.  Do we still have the self-respect as Europeans to do that?  We face a bleak future if we don’t.  So far, all the signs point towards Thatcher’s poisonous legacy that everything has its price and that any exceptions to the rule must therefore be more cosmetic than real.

That Sinking Feeling

In the late 1940s, large numbers of people were forced out of the lands where they and their ancestors had lived for generations, since at least the time of the Crusades.  Their ancestral homes were handed over to immigrants from other parts of the world, who brought their own history with them.  The displaced lived in refugee camps in neighbouring territory, where they were made welcome by those who spoke their language and shared their culture.  Eventually, a concrete wall was built to separate them from friends and family left behind.

Despite all this, they never lobbed missiles into Czechoslovakia or blew themselves up on public transport in Gdansk.  These are not the Palestinians.  They’re the Germans, expelled from East and West Prussia, eastern Pomerania, eastern Brandenburg, Silesia and the Sudetenland.  Many of them were resettled in Lower Saxony.  The total number comes to over 12 million people, equal to 16% of Germany’s 1938 population.  When Chancellor Merkel offers sanctuary to 800,000 Syrians, a 1% addition to the population, we can only assume that the Germans still have the means to organise these things better than most.

Has Angela set an example for the rest of Europe to follow?  Or acted irresponsibly, energising a magnet that draws thousands uninvited across the sovereign territories of others who now have to play along?  To be a euro-cynic one only has to see things from a Brussels perspective, that the Syrians can be the first true European citizens, spread around every Member State, a constant reminder of a common European problem with a common European solution.  Too important a transformational prize ever to be allowed to return to their homeland or encouraged to dislodge those destroying it.  On account of a huge range of internal political anxieties, this is one area of policy where EU unanimity is unlikely to be achievable.

Germany has waived the limits on its legal responsibility to Syrians under the Dublin Convention, but what is Europe’s moral responsibility overall?  How many refugees should it take?  The answer could well be far fewer than it is taking.  Europeans played a relatively minor role in causing the refugee crisis.  One view is that it’s all the fault of an inhumane US foreign policy: a bunch of kids with sticks poking the beehive.  In which case, how many Syrian refugees have the Americans taken in?  About 1,500.

Alternatively, it’s attributable to the rise of Salafism in its most militant form, promoted and funded from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.  Have they opened their doors to the refugees?  They have not.  Yet Makkah and Madinah both host gigantic mosques that could be converted into refugee camps for Syrian Christians.  Why not?  The Saudis would, of course, have to completely re-write their law code so that immigrants feel under no pressure to assimilate.  The ban on church-building would have to go for a start.  Do the Saudis have none of the basic human compassion expected to flow so freely from the ever-malleable Europeans?  How many refugees have the Saudis taken?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is nil.  The Saudis aren’t signatories to the UN refugee convention, though there are plenty of Syrians present in the country without being recognised as refugees.  The Saudi relationship with ISIS is complicated, because officially the two sides are sworn enemies, so the Saudis are wary of who they let in.  Not forgetting the pro-Assad fighters in disguise either.  In any case, the Saudis are too busy bombing the Yemenis and guess who sold them the weaponry with which to do that.  The flag over ‘our’ Parliament was lowered to half-mast when the bloodthirsty brother and predecessor of the present king died in January.  ‘Our’ Prime Minister almost immediately dashed off to Riyadh to kiss the hand of the new ruler, just in time for the first beheadings of the new reign.  Defence of the regime is considered a vital British interest.  Right.

Labour’s Yvette Cooper argued this week for a clear distinction at all times between refugees and economic migrants.  In the interests of population stability this surely has to involve something along the lines of ‘one in, one out’, which would mean identifying and deporting all those illegally living and working in the UK, below the radar.  In short, zero tolerance of those to whom Labour turned a blind eye not so long ago, so don’t expect it to become that party’s policy.  Cooper’s words are hollow because no-one believes that the distinction she makes will be respected and enforced.  The legacy of past policies has made the suffering of genuine refugees far worse than it could have been.

Cooper’s other repetitive soundbite is the Kindertransport of 1938 to 1940.  It’s a false and distracting analogy for four reasons.  One is that even had the UK embraced the whole of European Jewry, that was a figure ascertainable and not overwhelming for a country that still had a global empire.  Today, according to the International Organization for Migration, there are at least 50 million irregular migrants in the world, over one-fifth of all international migrants.  If migration to Europe occurs on that sort of scale, then Europe will notice the difference.

The second reason is that the flow of refugees is contaminated with economic migrants.  ‘Contaminated’ is a term used here not for effect but for accuracy, because blurring the truly desperate and those just trying their luck will provoke an ugly outbreak of empathy fatigue.  Libya’s boat people include Gambians, Senegalese, Malians, Ivorians, Nigerians, Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis.  Afghans and Pakistanis as well as Syrians were camped out in Budapest.  No doubt people-traffickers tell their customers that Europeans are a pushover.  If the people-traffickers are proved right, the flood will have no end.

The third reason is that refugees coming to Europe through already safe countries are not in danger, and so not entitled to come (not even small boys drowning off Turkey).  Escaping from danger doesn’t open up an unrestricted choice of where to live next that isn’t available to others who play fair.  Arguments that ‘this is about human beings’ aren’t designed to save life but to subvert lawful authority.  Hungary’s Viktor Orbán may be seen as applying the political equivalent of ‘work-to-rule’ but this is about more than being a stickler for the regulations.  The regulations are there for a purpose.  If you don’t like the purpose, change the regulations.  Meanwhile, they are there to be enforced.

The fourth reason is that Jews aren’t in open war against European values.  Whatever one may think of their cultural and economic influence, they aren’t waging violent jihad against Europe, as a rather dangerous number of Mahometans clearly are.  The fact that many migrants are apparently fleeing from this violence doesn’t of itself dispel mistrust.  What are the implications of so many being young men of military age, apparently more interested in coming to Europe than in staying behind to defend their beloved homeland against somewhat harder targets than the Hungarian police?  Do they perhaps, so the argument runs, care less about their homeland than about stamping the will of Allah upon the world?  Chants of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ outside Keleti station certainly aren’t the way to win friends and influence people.  When Orbán tells the world that he doesn’t want to see Europe’s cultural and religious character transformed beyond recognition he knows what can happen in such circumstances.  For over 150 years, almost the entire Carpathian Basin suffered a brutal occupation by the Ottoman Empire before the tide began to turn at the gates of Vienna on 11th September, 1683.  The attitude of ‘Old Europe’ to co-existence with Mahometanism is one based on hope.  The attitude of ‘New Europe’ is one based on experience, optimism being too great a risk to take.

Can Europe be the same with different people in it?  It’s the question posed recently by Christopher Caldwell.  In one sense it’s a misunderstanding, because the people who make up Europe are forever changing as births and deaths occur.  Demographic trends do matter though.  If Europe’s deaths continue to exceed births, as in many countries they currently do, then the future will be formed by substitution, not inheritance.  For the far Right, Europe’s woes are caused by the traitors who let the immigrants in.  On deeper analysis, they’re the result not so much of what immigrants or anyone else has done as of what natives have not done.  ‘They’re taking our jobs!’  (So why aren’t you taking them?)  ‘They’re taking our homes!’  (So why aren’t you taking them?)  ‘They’re replacing our whole population!’  (So why aren’t you replacing it?)  The solution to the demographic winter isn’t a European armed resistance; it’s ‘make love, not war’.

And so the questions continue.  Was it the fault of the Left?  Of feminism, encouraging women to have careers instead of babies?  Of environmentalism, encouraging Europeans to sacrifice themselves for the planet while others multiply like there’s no tomorrow?  Of anarchism, desiring society’s downfall in favour of something a bit more edgy, and potentially much, much worse?  Was it the fault of the Right?  Of consumerism, valuing stuff and experiences over children?  Of individualism, believing that personal choices do not have social, selective, evolutionary consequences for others?  Of economic liberalism, treating humanity as one enormous labour pool that does not come with other, sometimes very illiberal values attached?

In 1973, the French writer Jean Raspail published a controversial apocalyptic novel apparently set in the early 21st century.  Since translated into English as The Camp of the Saints, it records the arrival in the Mediterranean of a vast fleet carrying Third World migrants (hostile or desperate, according to viewpoint), a crisis which finds Europe lacking any concerted idea of how to respond.  The book explores the quandary: What will a liberal society do, or not do, to protect its way of life when confronted with the consequences of its ideals?  Will it allow itself meekly to be infiltrated, overwhelmed and ultimately trampled underfoot because of hyper-liberal trust in the good intentions of others?  In the south of France, an old professor finds his historic home invaded by a hippy, who expounds his hopes that the migrants will trash the place and go on to end European civilisation.  Won’t this mean, asks the professor, that you lose your own identity?  That’s exactly what I want, replies the hippy, before the professor, bored with the conversation and preferring to spend his remaining hours more pleasingly, reaches for a shotgun and kills him.

Europe has plenty of hippies, for whom boundaries do not define home and responsibility, for whom boundaries are no more than the foul scars of history.  Migration is ‘inevitable’, because it’s always happened.  True, it has, but so too has racism.  We have laws to manage migration’s impacts, just as we have hate speech laws and anti-discrimination laws to manage the strife sometimes emerging in response to migration that isn’t welcome.  If the first set of laws are no longer respected, the second set will be the next to go in reaction.  ‘Inevitability’ is a powder keg, more an attempt to frame political debate than a serious objective commentary.

Weston-super-Mare’s derelict lido, once Europe’s largest open-air pool, is currently home to ‘Dismaland’, an exhibition of contemporary art curated by Banksy.  In one of the more overtly political of the themed areas is an image of a butterfly, captioned ‘Migration is Beautiful’.

Is it beautiful to flee for your life, your male relatives beheaded, your female relatives enslaved, your people’s contribution to world culture burnt or blown to dust?  Europe’s jesters perennially miss the point: migration, external or internal, is always a means to an end.  Safety.  Prosperity.  Education.  Retirement.  Re-joining family.  Leaving family, to marry.  The sense of power your followers give you as you ride at the head of a conquering army.  Viewed from the other side there are other ends.  Filling rubbish jobs.  Filling skilled jobs for which we can’t be bothered to train.  Assuaging post-imperial guilt.  Self-loathing.  Getting more interesting sports players, clothes, music and restaurants.  Who is it we really care about?

Folk have indeed moved throughout history, but reasons vary enormously.  To say that you’re for or against migration, regardless of origin and motive, regardless of receiving capacity, regardless of the potential for things to develop badly, is to lump all those reasons together.  That single reason can mean either swamping the boat of your own society or ignoring the genuine plight of those whose own countries have become uninhabitable for them.  So let’s do something really unfashionable.  Let’s not be afraid to draw distinctions, and ensure they’re firmly upheld.  (If we say we’re full, then we do have the right to defend ourselves against those who disagree, otherwise defence has no point.)  Let’s also ask if we can do more as a world to make migration an informed choice, with respect on both sides, and not a terrifying necessity that neither side would wish was happening.

Being Sub-Human

The Pyrenees are a formidable geographical barrier, the terror of would-be conquering armies approaching from north or south.  What they are not is a formidable cultural barrier.  Basque culture in the far west and Catalan culture in the far east transcend them and have done, peaceably, for millennia.

The national frontier of today results from the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, when a line was drawn through the mountains by the imperial states based in Paris and Madrid.  To tidy things up.  No need to consult the locals. 

The provinces to the north-west are now within France’s département of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, with its capital at Pau.  Those to the north-east form Pyrénées-Orientales, with its capital at Perpignan (Perpinyà in Catalan).

Basque nationalists have long claimed their lost lands as part of a free Euzkadi: an idea expressed in the formula 4+3=1 (4 Spanish provinces, 3 French provinces, 1 nation).  And the Catalans are no more content with the status quo than the Basques.

France is having none of it.  The European Free Alliance reported this week that a French court has banned the area’s political movement, the ‘Committee for the self-determination of Northern Catalonia’, on the grounds that it represents a threat to the territorial integrity of the French State.  That’s how France survives, not by consent but through injustice.  It’s a paranoid, police state, and always has been.  The Revolution changed nothing of any substance.  The real revolution is still awaited.

French regionalists are still smarting from a territorial reorganisation law that rejects the rights – indeed the very existence – of Alsatians, Basques, Bretons, Catalans, Flemings, Occitans and Savoisians.  An inclination towards separatism would be a reasonable response.  France’s swift reaction against the Catalans is a warning that freedom of association in pursuit of democratic aspirations will not be tolerated.  French democracy, such as it is, is State property and not to be trespassed upon.  It does not, and cannot, belong to the people.  You can say ‘Je suis Charlie’ as much as you like, but you can forget about ‘Je suis Catalan’.

If Europe is such a beacon of democratic light, as it keeps informing the Russians, just how does France get away with it?  It’s certainly a pariah state by European standards; only Bulgaria and Greece are as obstinate and repressive in denying the objective existence of national minorities on their territory.  But Europe’s laws are crafted by an imperialist cabal: we have explained before that the European Convention on Human Rights offers no protection against those determined to enforce long-redundant state boundaries.  Separatists do not have human rights as others do.  What does that say about how they are viewed in law?

Jeux Sans Frontières

Events in Paris this week have exposed Europe’s anxieties to the full.  Let’s consider some of the possible reactions.

On the far Right, and among the not-for-prophet movement generally, this is I-told-you-so time.  Even those who disagree with the politics must find recent analysis strikingly prescient.  And at least it’s an opportunity to highlight some double standards.

Then again, cui bono?  Who benefits?  Will Le Pen prove mightier than the sword, deepening the backlash?  About the only certainty is that there will now be further restrictions on civil liberty in order to intensify the ‘war on terror’.  Threats to national security will be enumerated, movements for autonomy doubtless among them.  Those who like the theory of a false-flag operation – a few fanatics supplied with guns and training by the security services and then shown the direction to go – will point to other conspiracy theories that turned out to be at least partially true.  The humanitarian catastrophes that have resulted from intervention across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia are too systematic and repetitive to be put down to incompetence.  Those in charge know what they’re about.  The challenge for anyone else is to say what that is, though for starters what do the letters O.I.L. spell?

That sense that there isn’t a trustworthy narrative is bound to be destabilising.  Its consequence is fear and more fear, coupled with appeasement as a means to restore breathing space.  Freedom of expression will not be defended (if anything, the pressure will be to remove freedom of non-expression in the hunt for the non-conforming).  Liberals and anyone to the left of them will certainly not defend it, because it’s a fixed principle and liberal power depends on being able to manipulate a debate and steer its unfolding, contradictory development.  Power, for them, depends on the ability to set, and to arbitrate on the setting of, social and cultural boundaries.  An uncompromising defence of free expression is a nuance-free zone in which born control-freaks can make neither mischief nor money.  There can be no political correctness where nothing’s incorrect.

Migrants, and perceptions of migrants, play a relatively small part in what’s essentially a struggle for hegemony between the elites of Left and Right.  That being so, we cannot expect measured but steadfast leadership from either side.

The closing of the European mind is a mark of Europe’s lost place in the world.  You don’t annoy the oil sheikhs.  You rant against the terrorists, not their funders in the Gulf, whose wealth you court.  Does the Royal Navy’s new base in Bahrain serve any credible military purpose, or is it a taxpayer-funded shop window for the UK arms trade?  The BBC’s Robert Peston last month suggested that the dramatic slide in the oil price has been deliberately engineered to put high-cost oil extraction – fracking, deep sea, etc. – out of business.  And after that, the price will again rise.  It’s all a game, mes amis, c’est tout un jeu.

The Spirit of ‘15

Last year’s commemorations of the First World War were a good excuse to re-open old wounds and close our eyes to modern Europe.  Now consider that 2015 marks the 200th anniversary of Waterloo and the 600th anniversary of Agincourt.  In 2014 the French were our glorious allies against the Hun.  This year, it will be their turn to feel the cold shoulder, if not exactly the cold steel.  Better still, we shall be marking the 750th anniversary of Simon de Montfort’s first Parliament and the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.  That will be a splendid opportunity to overlook historical niceties.  Like the European context in which the first English Parliament arose.  Or the inconvenient fact that while the English (in 1215) and the Irish (in 1216) each had a Magna Carta to defend their threatened liberties the Scots never did (they still manage well enough without one).

London’s Lefties will be all frothing uncontrollably about the need for the modern UK to have a written constitution.  There will be conferences and seminars, websites and book launches.  No-one will ask whether ‘modern UK’ isn’t a bit of an oxymoron, or why for 800 years we’ve obsessed over keeping our rulers in check instead of challenging their assumed right to rule.

This time in 2013 we predicted that that would be the Year of the Wyvern.  We were a year out.  In 2014, the Wyvern made its mark, with local councils endorsing the flag, flying it proudly for St Ealdhelm’s Day, and our Secretary-General unfurling it for the BBC as part of their debate on devolution.  So what of 2015?

If last year remembered the start of the First World War, this will recall the end of the Second (as well as the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain and the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death).  It sounds like an opportunity for Labour to put Blairism behind it and rediscover the spirit of ’45.  Last month saw the death of John Freeman, the last man alive to serve as a minister in Attlee’s government.  That was the death not just of a man but of the memory of an idea.  There is no way that Labour can rediscover its past, because its front bench is corrupted beyond redemption by the Blair and Brown years.  Labour in 1945 offered a different world.  Labour in 2015 will struggle even to cobble together a markedly different vision.  When it’s seriously suggested that they might prefer a coalition with the Tories to working with nationalists you know the game’s well and truly up for them.

Common Wealth, the wartime socialist party to which we owe much of our thinking, was sceptical even at the time that Labour would deliver.  John Freeman resigned as a minister in 1951 over the introduction of NHS prescription charges.  Under Blair and Brown, Labour went on to set the NHS up for privatisation.  When David Cameron promised that ‘the NHS will be safe in my hands’, it was a claim he needed to make, even if he didn’t believe it and few believed him.  But is the NHS safe in Ed Miliband’s hands?  In Labour’s case it might be thought that past actions speak louder than present words.  Voters in at least one Wessex constituency this May can expect to have an alternative they can rely on.

Silenced in Court

The Torygraph yesterday reminded us that the Conservatives may be in coalition with the Liberal Democrats but they are far from being liberal.  (Democracy isn’t often their strong point either.)

Theresa May’s proposal for ‘Extremism Disruption Orders’ could see courts banning speech that’s judged to be a bit too free.  George Osborne has described this new tool as a means to deal with those who don’t break any laws.  Yes, he did.  We can’t have folk running around doing stuff that’s legal.

You could of course join Labour.  Where you’ll find Jack Straw arguing that Scotland’s ‘No’ vote justifies a declaration that separatism is now unconstitutional.  He hasn’t explicitly said he’d like to ban the SNP but that’s the direction of thought.  Fortunately, it’s not the direction of Scottish politics.

Won’t the European Convention on Human Rights come to our defence?  No.  Article 10 (freedom of expression) is “subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.”  There’s not a lot left once you’ve deducted all that.  Note that ‘the interests of territorial integrity’ are more important than freedom of expression.  Jack Straw couldn’t have put it better.

As Joseph Stalin did put it, ideas are more powerful than guns; we would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?  In Wessex, we’re used to seeing things being banned and we’ll be ready.

The Eastern Question

“‘Fighting’ was one of the most honourable words in the vocabulary, ‘the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man’, as Thomas Hughes put it…  Of course, the fight had to be for a good cause.  But one of the effects of imperialism had been to imbue very large numbers of people with a religious belief in Britain as the great force for good in the world…  That England could be in the wrong was almost inconceivable.”

Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (1981)

One of the key arguments in the debate on Scottish independence is that a splintering UK would lose the ability to throw its weight around in the world.  Is that an argument against independence, or one of many strong moral arguments in favour, one of the instances where Scotland’s gain is also a gain for others, here and abroad?

When David Cameron writes, as he did in the Sunday Telegraph last week, about Britain’s ‘military prowess’, he hopes the lack of connection with other issues won’t show through.  He heads the government of a country that is supposedly bankrupt (though, as we’ve noted, in no hurry to pay down its debts).  Local services are being more than decimated, while food banks proliferate.  Never mind ‘charity begins at home’.  What about ‘competence begins at home’?

The incompetence of the London regime explains why our energy security has been outsourced.  It’s why the next nuclear power station in Wessex will be built by two rogue states if ever there were, the French and the Chinese.  The French, whose position on minorities is 200 years out-of-date.  So much so that if France applied to join the EU today it would risk a refusal on human rights grounds.  And the Chinese?  China is an economic giant and emerging superpower but arguably has the worst human rights record of all.  Just 25 years ago in June, troops of the People’s ‘Liberation’ Army mowed down students demanding reforms before the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing.  Justice is still awaited.  France and China share an image of themselves as modern, enlightened states that in fact carries forward the contemptuous centralism of absolute monarchy at its worst.

In 1969, following the crushing of the Prague Spring, two young Czech students burned themselves to death in Wenceslas Square.  Their example has been widely repeated, notably by autonomists in India and by victims of the European sovereign-debt crisis.  But nowhere do the figures equal those in Tibet, where 35 cases were reported in 2011/12.

Do we hear about these deaths?  No, we do not.  Gaza, yes, Lhasa, no.  Whole editions of Newsnight are devoted to every little flare-up in the Middle East.  China might as well be another planet.  That can’t just be because there are fewer Tibetan Buddhists at the BBC than Jews, Arabs and Maoists.  Acute oppression makes news headlines; chronic oppression does not.  Those who have rockets to lob at their neighbours are, from a relative perspective, the lucky ones.  The unlucky are those whose oppression is so total, whose fear of reprisals is so great, that their voices are never heard.

The United Nations should be standing up for the oppressed everywhere, without favouritism.  It faces huge difficulties in doing so.  It is composed of the winners, the states that exist and not the unrepresented peoples who are still in the queue.  The least that British diplomacy can do is nudge it in the right direction.  Can British diplomacy do that?  Or is the shadow of empire cast too long?  Are we too busy doing our own thing, exercising our military prowess?  Bombing other countries, then sanctimoniously patching-up the injured and welcoming (or not) the refugees whose homelands our actions have disrupted.

Most of the time, over 95% of the world is at peace.  It shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man, acting collectively, to treat violence and the causes of violence, problems no more inevitable than smallpox or polio.  Unilateral action may be swift but it’s rarely decisive and it effectively absolves the rest of the world of its responsibility for collective security.  We need to confront the fear that if we aren’t acting as the world’s deputy sheriff, someone else will fill the vacuum.  The UN’s job is to prevent the vacuum emerging.  The sad fact is that our own efforts seem to have created far more vacuums than we’ve filled.

Look around the world for hotspots and you’ll see the Union Jack disappearing over the horizon, its mischief-making done.  Kashmir.  Palestine.  Iraq.  The Libya operation cost around £1 billion and only succeeded in replacing a crazy but competent dictator with a bunch of bandits.  While spreading conflict across the central Saharan states in its wake.  Leaving well alone was always a sensible alternative.  Now, when last week’s evil enemies are proposed as this week’s necessary allies, it makes even more sense.

The best intentions can go awry.  The 1916 Sykes-Picot accord is now viewed as a shameless example of European colonialists carving up territory that was none of their business.  Yet Mark Sykes, the British half of the deal, was a Yorkshire squire who fell in love with the Middle East.  He had his doubts about imperialism, thinking that "the White Man’s burden is a bag of gold".  He hated cities and their inhabitants (he was, after all, MP for central Hull) and greatly admired the nomadic life of the desert.  It was his deepest wish to protect the area’s ancient civilisation from corruption, "the smearing of the east" with the "slime of the west".  He hoped Sykes-Picot would provide the focus for emergent Arab nationalism.  Which in a much less predictable sense it now has.

In a globalised economy, actions have unexpected consequences.  The idea that Islamist fundamentalism was deliberately promoted by the British Empire in order to weaken Ottoman rule – and strengthen London’s influence in its place – is about as believable as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  The Brits backed fighters, not theologians.  But successful fundamentalism never lacks funding.  Oil is oil and if the Islamic State is financed by the oil wealth it now controls and by donations from others whose wealth also comes from oil, then we may indirectly be funding terrorism every time we top up the tank.

Muscular humanitarianism has been the subject of debate ever since Disraeli and Gladstone locked horns over the Eastern Question of their day.  But whatever its achievements, crusader-style chivalry starts to look insincere once we consider how cramped its priorities are by realpolitik.  In the 21st century, 19th century multi-national empires like the UK are not the best means of doing good and they only get in the way of other institutions better placed to deliver.  At the 2005 G8 Summit in Scotland, Tony Blair told the world’s press that “we are trying to do good”.  Might it not be far, far better for states like ours to stop trying to do good and simply be good?

Wise Men (and Women) From The East?

January’s issue of BBC History Magazine includes an interview with Professor Linda Colley, described by Wikipedia as “a historian of Britain, empire and nationalism”.  It’s a very revealing article, to the extent that Colley articulates what are the common, unconscious prejudices of the metropolitan chattering classes – the MCCs – towards the past, present and future of these islands.  In 1999, when she held a post at the London School of Economics, Colley was one of several speakers invited by the Blairs to deliver a Millennium Lecture at 10 Downing Street.  This talk, Britishness in the 21st Century, was subsequently widely referenced by the British Council and other mouthpieces of the regime.

If we believe her latest piece, “London has been influential in lots of different ways, some of which have been benign: it does continue to pump a lot of money into the economy, for instance”.  It’s astonishing that someone as ignorant of the facts as Colley can achieve the influential position she holds.  London is habitually presented as the UK’s cornucopia, through comparing its contribution to tax revenues against a highly selective reckoning of money spent there specifically for its benefit.  Money spent there that is deemed, however questionably, to be for the benefit of the whole UK is excluded from the calculation. 

A historian of empire ought, one would think, to be more inquiring about how London’s wealth is amassed and at whose expense, since it mostly doesn’t come from growing or making things locally.  In double-entry terms, most of the money pumped into the economy is made up to correspond to an equivalent amount of misery inflicted, here or elsewhere.  The systematic eradication of the City of London would undoubtedly be the greatest advance in human freedom since the abolition of the slave trade.

While Colley refuses to be drawn on the outcome of next year’s Scottish referendum, her contribution does outline some ways in which Britishness might mount a recovery.  The three-headed hydra we shall need to slay comprises federalism, a written constitution, and a charter of UK rights.  Expect to hear all three argued to death by the MCCs over the coming years as a means of keeping real change well off the agenda.

We have explained before why federalism cannot work to turn an unequal union into an equal one.  There’s no point in labouring the numbers.  The word has a deceptively gentle ring to it, an air of fairness drawn from other contexts where federalism does work because the facts of geography are favourable to it.  It can’t make a silk purse out of the pig’s ear that the UK has always been.

How about a written constitution?  For England, it might work, as might a federal union of English regions (though better still a confederal one).  So it might too for the other nations of these islands, individually, as sovereign states.  What good could it do the UK?  To demand a written constitution in advance of sorting out the territorial power relationships is profoundly reactionary.

An unwritten constitution is fluid, allowing devolution to be expanded relatively easily as compared to getting a constitutional amendment passed.  The purpose of a written constitution – in the UK context – is to make constitutional change more difficult, especially through requiring the consent of the whole UK to any change.  So Scotland wants devo-max?  Fine, but only if the UK’s English majority agrees.  A written constitution, just like federalism, is more likely to fan the fires of separatism than leaving well alone.  It will make what could be an amicable dissolution into a bitter and even violent break-up if one part of the UK seeks to thwart the ambitions of another for self-government.  Those who advocate it have learnt nothing from Irish Home Rule save how to repeat the process in as horrible a manner as possible.

A charter of UK rights?  Yawn.  Just like a written constitution, this is a device to kick the debate into the long grass.  Who, honestly, is going to spend years sifting through all the citizens’ tweets of what they’d like included?  We can be sure that community rights to self-government won’t be allowed through.  The London regime is obsessed with individual rights and nothing else because it is local communities, united in indignation, that pose a threat to its dominance.  Individuals are no threat at all.  They can be repeatedly assured of how valued they are, even as everything they value around them is torn apart for profit.  (And, in law, private corporations, remember, are people too, with the same inhuman rights as everyone else but with bigger legal teams to enforce them.)  Eliminating every intermediate identity between the State and the individual is the essence of the still-dominant Jacobin worldview.  But there is more to the project even than that.  It isn’t just a device to avoid discussing the realities of property and power in a London-dominated island, and maybe entrench them further.  It’s also a device to avoid questioning what’s so special about the UK that it has to be the fundamental focus of that project.

The Coalition has wasted considerable resources on setting up a commission to look into a UK Bill of Rights and has received some interesting rebuffs.  One is to ask why the devolved areas can’t have their own.  Scotland has its own legal system, one very different from English common law.  Wales has its language issue.  Northern Ireland lives with sectarian nuances that may suggest different requirements from a charter that will succeed in keeping the peace there.  And if the UK is too big to be meaningful as the maker of rights, might it also be too small?  If we must have rights above the level of the basic nation, why not have rights that are European or universal?  What is it that the UK dimension adds?  What is it that we are supposed to all have in common that separates us from the rest of humanity?  What is the tradition appealed to in defining a ‘UK right’, ‘British values’, or whatever other piece of chauvinistic nonsense happens to be doing the rounds?

One such tradition could be that stodgy constitutionalism that is forever looking around for ways to make the ruling class do what is theoretically their job instead of ways to abolish them.  England, in particular, is awash with wannabe Wat Tylers waving Magna Carta and demanding the redress of grievances instead of questioning the basis of central authority itself.  Constitutional rights are the enemy of democratic choice.  In placing certain things beyond normal debate they fossilise into a dictatorship of the dead.  Though all dressed up as ‘de-politicising’ the issue, it’s actually all about de-democratising it.  Labour seem particularly keen on this as a means of retaining power even when out of power.  We don’t need ‘rights’, by definition limited.  We need freedom, bounded only by the freedom of others.  Should we respect the accumulated mess that is the constitutional status quo and further sanctify it, simply because we are assured that where we are is broadly speaking a good place to be?  Do we not know that starting from where we are assured that we are (even when we are not) is the surest way of being persuaded essentially to stay put?

Professor Colley offers no immediate answers to any of these questions.  Nor can anyone among the MCCs.  For all their accumulated qualifications, they simply cannot see that the London-based system of decision-making is not benign, never has been and cannot be made to be.  Their belief in the self-evident goodness of the UK, of the micro-management of Wessex towns and villages from London, is so entrenched that they will do everything in their power to suffocate any other way of debating the issues.  Instead, we must discuss how to make everyone British again, deferential to London, respectful of the wisdom and thankful for the gifts coming to Wessex from the mighty east.  Sorry to spoil your dinner party, chaps and chapettes, but that record is well and truly broken.