Month: July 2024

The warning was issued by Robert Walpole, 1^st Earl of Oxford, the dominant political figure in the first half of the 18^th century. (Does anyone know why he was 1^st Earl of Oxford? After all, the title goes back to the early 12^th century.)

The facts of his life are widely known. Walpole was de facto the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, and the longest-serving one in history. He was also the first PM to move into 10 Downing Street, making this address synonymous with the office.

What’s less known is something I pride myself on discovering. Walpole was a seer who saw the future more clearly than most people see the past. In that capacity, he cast a prospective glance over tomorrow’s elections and passed his verdict.

Labour politicians and their fans are more triumphant the day before the General Election than few parties have ever been the day after. As far as they are concerned, the biggest landslide in history is just around the corner, and Britain is about to become effectively a one-party state. The Tories will be too marginalised to offer any meaningful opposition, and Labour will unerringly steer the ship towards the rocks of socialism.

Walpole himself was no stranger to marginalising the Tories. Under his leadership the Whigs ran practically unopposed for at least 20 years, with the Tories reduced to a handful of seats.

In general, this sort of arrangement is rarely beneficial to the country. But in particular, the country may still do well if the dominant party pursues good policies. Walpole did: he lowered taxes, strengthened exports, promoted tolerance and moderation, established a solid working relationship between Crown and Parliament.

Today’s Labour Party may well achieve the same domination as Walpole’s Whigs, but their policies are exactly the opposite. They will raise taxes with suicidal abandon, stifling Britain’s competitiveness and hence her exports. They will treat the monarchy as a mildewed artefact belonging, next to the House of Lords, in what an earlier socialist called the “rubbish bin of history”. And instead of tolerance and moderation they’ll impose tyrannical rule by woke fiat.

Listening to their jubilant shrieks on the eve of the elections, Walpole is smiling wryly. “They may ring their bells now; before long they will be wringing their hands,” he says, repeating his adage of some 300 years ago.

So they will, but our constitution says that wringing their hands will be about the only thing they’ll be able to do about it. It’s extremely hard to replace a government before its five-year term has run out. The people will have to take to the streets, French-style, but this political stratagem doesn’t come naturally to the British.

Even when the country comes to a standstill, as she did in the 1970s, Labour still completed its term. They were only ousted in the 1979 General Election, leaving Margaret Thatcher with the Augean stables of a country to clean out.

Barring a cataclysmic internecine revolt, a party with any majority in Parliament rarely has problems passing the laws it desires. And if the Labour majority is as vast as predicted, Britain will remain a multi-party state only technically. In essence, Starmer will have almost as much power as Xi has in China, and he won’t even have to rely on the secret police to get his way.

Anyone with a modicum of political nous realises that the policies Labour will be likely to pursue will quickly take Britain to the brink of disaster, and ‘quickly’ is the operative word. Effective opposition will come not from the Tories but from the markets, which don’t like socialism any more than I do.

Once the socialists start implementing their time-disproven policy of high tax, high spend, the markets will push the SOS button. Wealthy people who have to share their wealth around even if they aren’t especially charitable will flee, taking their businesses with them. Global corporations based in Britain will move to sunnier economic climes. The pound will collapse.

Again speaking in generalities, that last development is supposed to make our exports more competitive. But Walpole knew that British producers could only take advantage of that if domestic taxes were low enough to give them some freedom of movement. That won’t be the case under Labour.

Our economy will be further crippled by Labour’s fanatic commitment to net-zero madness. The Tories are feigning the same psychiatric disorder, but upward pressure from their grassroots may force them to be more flexible. No such pressure from the Labour rank-and-file: they are much more doctrinaire than they were even under Wilson and Callaghan.

The economic damage Labour will cause in the first few months (only my natural prudence prevents me from saying ‘weeks’) will be dire. But it’ll be minor compared to what they’ll do to the social fabric of British society. Not to cut too fine a point, they’ll rip it to tatters.

Alien immigrants, both legal and illegal, will flood in, and Labour will do all they can to make sure the mighty stream will flow unabated. During Blair’s tenure, so far the most disastrous in history, Labour politicians learned how to perpetuate their power by importing ready-made Labour voters owing their livelihood to social handouts.

Once those sluice gates are flung open, the stream will be difficult to stop even if the ruling party wants to, which Labour won’t. The Tories would want to, in theory, but in practice they lack the nerve and gumption to introduce the kind of measures that can succeed. Still, half-hearted efforts to stem the flow are better than none – and certainly better than concerted efforts to do the opposite.

Our armed forces will be degraded even more than they are now, and we won’t be forearmed even though we have been forewarned. So far Starmer has promised to start spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence “when conditions allow”. That’s the Labour for never.

Though incapable of waging war on foreign predators, a Labour Britain will be plunged into aggressive class warfare domestically. So far, Starmer has only hinted at the offensive he has in mind, but the hints (such as the plan to impose a 20 per cent VAT on private school fees) are clear enough. What Corbyn extolled, Starmer will do.

Blair taught his socialist brethren how to throw a camouflage net of centrist phraseology over their essentially subversive nature. Starmer learned the lesson well and, having ousted Corbyn, he has assiduously cultivated the image of Walpole-like moderation.

Yet nothing in his political life paints him any colour other than red. When he was Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer never saw a criminal he couldn’t free. What do you suppose his stand on law and order will be when he’s PM with virtually a single-party majority?

Incidentally, extremists of the whole spectrum of hues have learned the same trick. In France, for example, Marine Le Pen has worked tirelessly to change the image – not the essence – of her party, shifting it (the image) away from its original neo-fascist design. And Mélenchon has been doing exactly the same with his Trotskyists.

It doesn’t take much perceptiveness to see what’s lurking underneath the camouflage, but, alas, more than the voting masses possess. That’s why the sage people who lovingly nurtured Britain’s constitution for centuries knew how vital it was to counterbalance the elected power of the Commons with the hereditary power of king and aristocracy.

Walpole, for example, was rather the opposite of a populist. He now listens to the ringing bells in the mournful knowledge that the future points to a lot of wringing hands. Alas, there’s nothing he can do about it now. Neither can we, come to think of it.

When it comes to satanic rituals, the British have a lot to learn from the Dutch and their neighbours.

The best – or rather the worst – we can do is get some S&M babes before a mob of drug-addled retards, turn the amplifiers up full whack and let’em rock to pro-Palestinian, anti-royalist shrieks half-muffled by incoherent electronic cacophony.

Music in any aural sense of the word doesn’t come into it – it’s strictly a visual spectacle staged as a pagan rite. I wrote about the Glastonbury festival the other day, and I really have nothing much to add to it.

But the Dutch, Belgians and Germans do, and what they add is a new concept hitherto unexplored by our progressive modernity. They show how to combine satanic rituals with music, and I do mean real music: classical, acoustic and performed by properly trained musicians.

As I write, I’m looking at a brochure advertising a unique concert to take place on 28 July in Amsterdam. Called Klassiek Fetish, it’ll feature performers and audiences clad in the kind of gear… well, I’d better let the brochure speak for itself:

“Amsterdam will be filled with high notes during the launch of its first classical music event for the Fetish & LHBTIQ+ community in the capital following the example of Fetish concerts in the cities of Berlin and Antwerp.

“Celebrate beauty, freedom and wonder while enjoying classical masterpieces performed by amazing musicians.

 “Dress to impress: Leather-Rubber-Uniform-Superhero-Gala-Sportswear-Drag.”

Lest you may think this is just a gimmick, a regular concert with some kinky kit thrown in to spice up the proceedings, the brochure emphasises the transcendent aspect of the experience:

“Classic 4 Fetish is not just a concert, but a celebration of individuality and artistic expression. It is an opportunity to show yourself as you are, in a setting that is both respectful and inspiring. Put on your best fetish gear and be enchanted by the beautiful sounds and visual beauty. Let yourself be carried away by the timeless melodies and enjoy the beauty of classical music in an environment where freedom and expression are central. Buy your tickets now and experience a day full of musical splendor and visual magic in the enchanting surroundings of the heart of Amsterdam.

“The programme offers a breathtaking selection of music pieces by Tchaikovsky, Bosmans and Fauré, among others, supplemented with many other surprises.” I shudder to think what these might be. Public flagellation? Human sacrifice?

This is worse, much worse than Glastonbury – in the same sense in which a heresy is a greater threat to a religion than that posed by atheism. A fortress may be able to withstand a battering ram, but it will succumb to the vandals inside its walls.

Christianity and music, its closest approximation in the lay world, can best resist perverse vulgarisation by putting up a wall around themselves and letting the outside world get on with its vulgarity. Both Christianity and music may venture on outside forays to convert the heathen, but they must not on pain of death open their doors to unconverted barbarians.

Churches commit this mistake by downplaying the mysteries of their creed and seeking sleazy popularity, the kind provided by raves and services accompanied by pop excretions. Musicians – or, to be more exact, concert organisers – do the same thing by mixing serious music with trashy muzak best suited to shops, lifts and restaurants. (BBC Proms are a good example of this stratagem.)

Yet both religion and music can succeed only on their own terms – or not at all. When they sell their soul for the mess of popularity, they betray their mission and ultimately become irrelevant.

However, what’s going on in Antwerp, Berlin and Amsterdam is even more sinister than all that. It’s an extension of a continuous effort to sexualise real music, thereby lowering it to the sewer of pop. In this case, the sexualisation is of a perverse kind, but that’s merely a development of a long-standing tendency.

Several generations of people have been raised on the crudely erotic content of pop music, conveyed both through the lyrics and, more typically, rhythm. So trained, people seek the same thrills in real music written to appeal to the higher faculties of man rather than to his lower regions.

Much of Wagner’s oeuvre is overtly sensual (one of my many problems with it), but his operas are too long for pop junkies to get their jollies. They want their fix short and sweet, which explains why Ravel’s Bolero is the most popular classical piece among young people.

Its monotonous coital rhythm produces a most enjoyable response that has little to do with its understated musical content. (Ravel himself once said that there was no music in his Bolero.)

All this was hilariously illustrated in the 1979 film 10, where the Bo Derek character always puts on Bolero before making love (she uses a more direct term). And in 1984, the British figure skaters Torvill and Dean won the Olympics with their elegant copulation on ice performed to the unremitting beat of Bolero.

But at least Torvill and Dean did their bit in elegant clothes, and Bo Derek in no clothes at all. They didn’t take that quasi-classical piece into the ‘Leather-Rubber-Uniform-Superhero-Gala-Sportswear-Drag’ territory.

We’ve had to wait 40 years after the British Olympic triumph for this musical development, but, as Galileo and Newton discovered, falling objects accelerate. The same is true of modern life: processes that used to take centuries or decades to develop, these days take years or months.

That’s why I can confidently predict that things will quickly sink even deeper than the bottom-feeding Klassiek Fetish. I’m not sure, alas, that my imagination is vivid enough to imagine what those lower depths could look like.

It’s possible, for example, that the fetish gear that so far is optional will in due course become compulsory at all classical concerts. Or that the audience will be given Ecstasy and fentonil rather than glasses of bubbly at the interval. Or that we’ll be regaled with a performance of, say, St Matthew Passion by nude singers.

The possibilities are endless, and I’ll leave you to explore them on your own. Let’s just say that Klassiek Fetish shows a promising way forward.

P.S. If you wish to attend Klassiek Fetish, I’ll be happy to provide booking information.

Let’s start by stating that Gennady Rakitin has something in common with Homer and Shakespeare. At this point you’re supposed to ask, “Who’s that?” and “What do they have in common?”

Assuming that the first question is about the first name I mentioned and not the other two, Rakitin is a superpatriotic pro-Putin poet cum doggerel writer, whose verses have flooded Russian social media.

The poet has won numerous accolades, and thousands of followers befriended him electronically, including 100 MPs and 30 senators. One of his poems has even won a literary prize.

Impressive though this is, it’s still not enough, you’d think, to mention Rakitin in the same breath as Homer and Shakespeare, the greatest literary geniuses in history. However, Rakitin does have something in common with them and no, it’s not his mastery of versification.

Many unorthodox scholars doubt that Homer ever existed. They ascribe his work to anonymous collaborators, and the same posthumous fate befell Shakespeare. Though Will Shakespeare of Stratford did exist, his plays and sonnets are supposed to have been written by someone else, and the list of candidates is long.

Rakitin shares this enigmatic quality with the two geniuses, but that’s where his path diverges from theirs. For, while doubts about the identity of Homer and Shakespeare still persist in some quarters, those about Rakitin have been dispelled. He doesn’t exist.

Rakitin is a hoax expertly played by anti-Putin Russians on the gung-ho public. And his jingoistic verses are slightly adapted translations of Nazi poems from the 1930s and 1940s.

Thus the poem The Leader, describing Putin as “a gardener who harvests the fruits of his heavy labours …” was originally entitled Der Führer. It was written by Eberhard Möller, who way back then was churning out anti-Semitic verses and film scripts for Dr Goebbels.

Another poem, The Faceless PMC Soldier, glorified a Private Military Company mercenary killed fighting against Ukrainian Nazis. That work’s maiden name was The Faceless Stormtrooper, and its protagonist died fighting for, rather than against, Nazism.

Then there was an elegy entitled Before the Portrait and illustrated with a picture of Putin. The original by the Nazi writer Herybert Menzel was inspired by the portrait of another leader, a typological precursor of Putin.

The Rakitin affair makes yet another addition to the list of notable literary hoaxes. For example, the 18^th century literary world welcomed the discovery of the blind Scottish poet Ossian from the 3^rd century.

The epic poetry produced by ‘the Homer of the North’ thrilled Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson, and it inspired Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and the whole Romantic movement. Alas, Ossian never existed – he was the product of a clever literary hoax.

Neither was this literary genre unknown in Russia. In the 19^th century, A.K. Tolstoy and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers created Koz’ma Prutkov, the 18^th century author of pretentious verse, diaries and aphorisms. Most Russian readers were taken in, and the authors enjoyed a good laugh at the public’s expense.

The Bolshevik takeover, on the other hand, was no laughing matter. However, the need for plagiarised material became acute, what with proletarian poets and composers unable to keep up with the voracious appetites of Russia’s growth industry, propaganda.

During the Civil War, Bolshevik hacks ripped off many march songs of the tsarist and White armies. For example, one of the most popular songs of that period eulogised the Red Army storming a White stronghold in the Far East. In fact, that was the song of the Drozdov regiment in the White Army, and the new version changed only one word, replacing the Red colour of the stronghold with White.

Moving along this timeline, we get to the 1930s, a period most relevant to my today’s theme. As both the Nazis and the Soviets were preparing for war, they formed a sort of alliance based on ideological kinship and similar goals. Both predators were also stepping up their propaganda efforts, with patriotic songs in high demand.

At that time, the Red Air Force acquired its own theme song, which every Soviet child knew by heart well into the 1970s (I still remember all the blasted lyrics). The first line of its refrain went: “Still higher, still higher, still higher…”.

As it turned out later, that song was plagiarised from a Nazi original, whose first line was “Mein Führer, mein Führer, mein Führer…”. Birds of a feather sing together, to paraphrase ever so slightly.

The Rakitin hoax demonstrates the inherently Nazi nature of the Putin regime, for German hand-me-downs wouldn’t fit so snugly if the Russian body politic were fundamentally different. I’m still awaiting the arrival of Russland, Russland Über Alles in Russian, and I hope the wait won’t be too long.

This is all especially telling because officially Russia pounced on the Ukraine to de-Nazify her regime. Even though Gennady Rakitin never existed, he managed to provide a perfect illustration of the boot on the other foot, leaving one in no doubt as to which country needs de-Nazifying.

It’s wrong to ignore the differences among various fascist regimes, but ignoring the similarities is even worse. Because, if we don’t understand where such a regime comes from, we won’t know where it’s going. And when we finally determine that destination, it may be too late to do anything about it.