The Leftists have always been with us, but the current crop is different.
People like MacDonald, Attlee, Bevin, Gaitskell, even Wilson may not make the rather short list of politicians I venerate. But at least they all loved their country and tried to do their best for her.
Today’s lot hate Britain and hence don’t mind hurting her with destructive policies. But what does loving one’s country really mean?
One’s countrymen are one’s neighbours, and both Testaments issue the same commandment: “Love thy neighbour as thyself”. That raises the next question of exactly how much we love ourselves.
Few of us consider ourselves perfect, free of any character blemishes. Few believe they’ve never done anything wrong, and most people I know – including a certain A. Boot – have done shameful things they’ve regretted ever since.
Yet though we may not always like ourselves, on balance we seldom lose self-love. Fair enough: we like for something; we love in spite of everything.
It was the US naval commander Decatur who some 200 years ago applied that principle to patriotism in a spiffy toast: “My country, right or wrong.” Since then that phrase has adorned the rear bumper of many American cars, but the sentiment hasn’t made any inroads into the hearts of Labour ministers.
Ideologically, which is to say emotionally, they loathe Britain, right or wrong. And intellectually, they are too stupid to know right from wrong.
Thus they hate every great cultural and political landmark signposting Britain’s history, along with the giants associated with those landmarks. However, much as I despise the likes of Starmer and Reeves, I admire their honesty.
They don’t try to conceal their feelings for Britain. They hate the country and they don’t care who knows it. That’s why the moment they lied their way into 10 and 11 Downing Street, they immediately removed from those Georgian walls the portraits of the men and women the nation has every right to be proud of.
When Britons argue about naming the country’s greatest monarch, Elizabeth I is always in that conversation. So naturally Starmer found her likeness unworthy of a place in Number 10. The sins of that great monarch weren’t redeemed by her sex – the benefits of womanhood don’t apply to colonialist vermin.
Off the wall Queen Bess went, although to the best of my knowledge her portrait hasn’t yet been tossed onto the pyre. I wouldn’t put that past our Marxists, but I suppose they need to lodge their feet more firmly under the desk before touching a match to the twigs.
Elizabeth’s reign was really the beginning of the British Empire, a political entity our rulers see as evil and in every way inferior to the Soviet Union. Thus, following the Queen into what their role model Trotsky called ‘the dustbin of history’ was Sir Walter Raleigh, who was prominent in colonising North America. Colonising anything makes anyone worse than Hitler and immeasurably worse than Stalin. So no mercy to Sir Walter from Sir Keir.
And who was the greatest cultural figure of Elizabethan England and hence tarred with the same imperial brush? Correct. So William Shakespeare was also deemed unworthy of a place on that wall, and his portrait was yanked off.
The British Empire reached its peak under another Queen unworthy of her sex. Rather than repudiating the Empire as the devil’s spawn, Victoria went a long way towards strengthening it. And William Gladstone was one of the most illustrious prime ministers of that era.
Now Gladstone operated on the left of Victorian politics, but Victorian left wasn’t left enough. Contemporaneous though Gladstone was with Marx, he didn’t exactly heed the latter’s dogma. Still, he might have hung on to a place on that wall had the sins of his father not been visited upon him.
Sir John Gladstone owned 2,508 African slaves, and was paid £105,781 in compensation after slavery in the colonies was abolished in 1833. In Britain proper it was abolished in 1807, and in fact English privateers had been harassing the slave trade for many decades before that. Still, the mark of Cain was attached to William Gladstone and, as far as Starmer is concerned, it’s indelible. Into the bin with that reprobate’s portrait.
Now we all appreciate that every woman in high office strikes a blow for equality. Yet we’ve also had to learn that womanhood is a political, not biological, concept. No one is born a woman – this is an honour that has to be earned by wholehearted commitment to neo-Marxism.
That may be partly why Starmer finds it hard to define a woman. Physiologically, he has already implied that 34,000 British women have penises (one-tenth of one per cent, as he put it). But politically, he’d have to deny their sex to millions of Tory-voting women, which may be a step too far even for him.
However, he could still dump the portrait of that sexless monster Margaret Thatcher and did so with alacrity. The first female prime minister doesn’t belong in the residence of a committed feminist.
Starmer’s neighbour, Rachel Reeves, has the power of her feminist convictions. Moving into 11 Downing Street, she declared that thenceforth a female-only rule would be imposed. All artworks in her new residence must be “of a woman or by a woman”.
In that spirit, she threw out the portrait of former chancellor Nigel Lawson who, in addition to his toxic conservatism, committed the crime of being male. The vacant place was filled with the portrait of Ellen Wilkinson, who in 1920 became a founding member of the British Communist Party.
I don’t know whether Miss Reeves’s grasp of communist history matches her affection for it, but, unless she’s prejudiced against foreigners, I could recommend a few other candidates. Rosa Luxemburg, for example, or… no I get it. Rosa Zemliachka would be even better.
That lovely girl was in charge of massacring 100,000 people in the Crimea during the Russian Civil War. Her Marxist credentials were thus impeccable and, unlike Miss Wilkinson, she succeeded in putting them into practice big time.
Yes, I know she wasn’t British but, on current evidence, I doubt Starmer and Reeves are either, in any other than the ethnic sense. Their spiritual home is where their art is.