Posted on by Liam Guilar · 1 Comment

Chapter 4 – Vortigern and Hengist

This is Part 4 of LIAM GUILAR’s almost completed epic of Britain. Chapter One was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and Chapters Two and Three in The Brazen Head

The story so far: 449 AD in the Roman province of Britannia. The Legions have long gone and raiders and civil war are becoming endemic as central authority breaks down. The Vicarius, de facto ruler of the province, is dying and about to appoint his successor. There are only two candidates. Adolf of Gloucester has been sent North (See chapter three); Vortigern has been sent south to hire three shiploads of Germanic warriors who have arrived off the coast.

You can read more about Vortigern, Hengist and The Legendary History1 at www.liamguilar.com.

1. Old Friends?

What Vortigern wrote in his report

There are three ships,

60 fighting men,

all experienced.

They have a British Latimer  ((In Laȝamon’s time a latimer was a translator, the term is anachronistic here))

called Keredic.

I have made the standard deal.

What happened

From London, along Watling Street towards Canterbury

in easy stages for his infantry. Crossing the Medway,

he had left his officers billeting the troops

ridden the short distance to this estate

for the comfort of time

spent with someone he could almost trust.

Aurelianus was old-school.

An imperial patrician of

impressive pedigree.

Perhaps more honest than the rest,

but generations of his family

had enforced the rules

they were happy to ignore

then wondered why no one

respected their authority.

They had dissolved the distinction

between ‘legitimate behaviour’

and ‘corrupt self-interest’.

If he were appointed Vicarius,

that line was his to draw

and to enforce. But for now, imagine,

two old friends in an autumn evening

as the light softens and the air begins to bite.

In a tidy garden by the water feature,

sipping imported wine and reminiscing.

The abrupt shifts, unfinished statements,

allusions no one else would understand.

Aurelianus could talk the hind legs off a donkey

but retirement has made him garrulous.

‘I heard you freed the slaves on your estate.’

Vortigern waits for the verdict.

Aurelianus sips his wine

settles in his chair, brushing at the midges.

He was a very junior officer on this man’s staff.

First post, a favor owed to somebody,

a debt paid in another lifetime.

The neat patterns of tidy fields

fall to a distant line of trees,

sprinklings of huts, lazy,

innocent smoke from cooking fires.

Voices rising towards them.

Some of the huts are rectangular.

‘They’re calling you their new Stilicho.

Hardly a compliment.

Why are you heading south?

Adolf’s Comes Litotes2 etc. etc.’

‘Did you ever fathom the Vicarius?’

‘No one has. I knew hard men

who stood their ground, outnumbered,

facing Attacotti …

                          …You’d think he was a bad dream

and then meet someone who was there and know that he was real.

No one’s threatened him since Locrin was in nappies.’

‘Constantine?’

‘A minor irritation. Swatted,

with your co-operation,

if rumors are to be believed. 

‘I didn’t kill him.’

‘The difference between you and Gloucester?

He wants the title; you want the job.’

‘Gloucester’s good.‘

Aurelianus pours more wine and waits.

‘I’ll say it if you won’t. He’s competent.

He’d make a fine quartermaster.

But well-meaning, hard-working, ordinary’s not enough.

Men who thought that power and influence

were theirs by right of birth or wealth,

who went to the right schools and joined the right clubs,

could rule the province when it ran itself

and competence was irrelevant. But now

they’re learning how inadequate they are

and talent, skill and application, regardless

of the family’s history, are what’s required.

Extra ordinary times highlight just

how ordinary our leaders are.

There was a time a clumsy oaf like Constantine

could rule the creaking province

and you and I, young Gorlois, Adolf, the Vicarius,

we’d sweat and bleed to make it work.

I saw a bridge collapsing once.

Dust first, then random bricks,

then a pillar, then the whole thing went.

The bricks are loose. It’s only time

before it all comes tumbling down.

The Vicarius will name you his successor.

The question is, will you accept?’

‘Only fools pick fights that they can’t win?’

‘Someone has to hold the pass.’

You have Germans on your estate?’

‘Hard working men.

I hear you’ve learnt their language.’

‘Slaves?’

‘No. I followed your example.

I give them land for service.

So many days a year to work my fields,

a pig from the litter, honey from the hive.’

‘And if the land you offer them

happens to be on the wrong side of that tree line?’

‘My estates spread. If my neighbors object…’

‘Your Saxons fight well.

No magistrate to hear complaints?’

‘Magistrates, yes. Magistrates with clout, no.’

‘There is no longer Greek nor Jew, slave or free?’3

‘All that bollix about Britain for the Britons.

Any man who rolls the dice, leaves his home,

and braves the crossing, recommends himself.

As for the women, they’re a race apart.

If I were younger, I’d have me a Saxon wife.

The sons we’d breed. How are your boys?’

            ‘Vigilant, on the coast, with troops,

watching the new arrivals.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

‘They’re bringing them to Canterbury.’

‘You’ll stay the night? No? Of course not. 

You’ll be there when the first man stumbles out to piss.

Which is as it should be.’

Torchlight, patient horses, patient grooms.

‘I’ll lend you a guide if you’ll send him home.

What’s left of the army will follow you

unless you put it on a ship to France.

You are the best man for the job.

There’s a rumor in the fields.

South of here they’ve called the county out.

An armed mob moves on Thanet.

You’ll meet them on the road.

You cannot reason with a man

who thinks ten thousand Saxons landed.

Ask him how many ships that would require

show him three keels pulled up on the sand

he’ll still call you a liar and claim

you hid the rest by sleight of hand.

Don’t bet on their obedience. 

Deference has been replaced with calculation.

We’ve lived to see the end of institutional authority.’

2. The job not the title

Said the man expanding his estates.

And if that were the last time that they met?

He thought of things he didn’t say,

wondering if they needed to be said.

Some debts lack their vocabulary.

And if that were the last time that they met?

Or if they met again as enemies?

Take the title, become the title.

The obligations of the office

before friendship or desire?

Overhearing the soldiers in the column

as they crunched their way south-east

in perfected order of march.

Yes Ma’am, he tells her memory4

I did take notes. I studied hard,

and learnt from men who knew their trade.

His officers about their business,

until the scouts returned and put an end to banter.

A mob in the road.

Britons, with farm implements,

rusty swords and hunting spears.

No match for a German warband.

A pot-bellied old man shouting at him in a reedy bellow:

‘A thousand Saxons pillage Thanet.

The county’s out and armed

we go to slaughter pagans.

Ride with us!’

‘There are three ships: sixty men.

They have come in peace.’

Spears and pitch forks twitching,

like reeds in the wind

as they ebbed towards the riders

then recoiled from the levelled spears.

The wide boys at the back began to chant

the usual obscenities and physical impossibilities.

Your father was a traitor too!

He never met his father!

His mother outdid Messalina.

She never knew which bean made her fart.

The mob seethes,

growing coherent in its shoaling.

stones starting to rattle and ping

as the men behind him tightened their ranks.

A spear wobbled towards him from the back.

Softly, for the form of it,

knowing nobody could hear.

‘This is your last warning:

obey the law, go home.’

The mob surged forward.

He shouted the necessary words.

 

3. Foederati

Bugger meeting on a beach and pandering to pagans.

Vortigern and his staff arranged the reception as a set of signs: 

nothing ornate, redundant, nothing ramshackle or improvised.

Everything tidy, trim, bright, like a well-honed killing edge.

Turned out in battle order. We are fighting men,

we strike a deal; wealthy enough to pay,

strong enough to crush you without effort.

Vortimer, his eldest son,

riding beside the walking Saxons.

They stack their spears.

He notes their care,

the bright, honed points,

their polished shields,

abundant swords.

The knives that name them

are to be left outside.

And God,

these were not the shabby discards time had spat up on a beach.

These were fighting men who didn’t need to strut.

With an army of these men he can hold the Northern Border

and use The Wall for landfill.

‘Who are you?

You are not the usual dregs

washed up on these shores.

Unless my eyes deceive me,

these are front-fighters

battle scarred and tested. These men

have stood their ground.’

Keredic translates.

‘I am Hengist, son of Wictgils,

son of Witta, son of Wecta, son of Woden.

This is my brother Horsa son of Wictgils,

son of Witta, son of Wecta, son of Woden.’

Vortimer, interrupting:

‘Who does he worship?

We are Christians here.’

‘I don’t care who he worships

if his god has a special hell

for men who break their oaths.

Where are you from?’

‘We have no home. We seek a lord

who will reward our service.’

‘Without a lord or land

a man is nothing to your people.

If you are exiles, speak now

and do not hide your crimes.’

The translator hesitates.

‘Exactly what I said,

and nothing more.’

Like little knife cuts.

This Hengist does not flinch.

‘Fierce, unrelenting tribal warfare

interrupted by long, bitter winters.

The sea rises, pushing us towards the Franks.

The Franks push us towards the rising sea.

So we drew lots and those who lost stayed home.

You will be our Lord.

We will astonish you.

And we will see our families again.

I have my name and sword.

I will keep both bright

and earn your gratitude.’

As if that were sufficient.

Later Vortigern thinks

one culture’s arrogance

is another’s confidence. 

He’s met this type before:

one more tribesman on the make

one more thug who kills,

and lets the paymaster decide who dies.

Who wants whatever the Empire has to offer.

But this man, this Hengist, is impressive.

There’s something godlike in his certainty.

If his self-confidence is tinged with madness

it’s the kind that founds dynasties and crumples empires.

 

4. Vortigern the King

The past begets us,

then grows old as any parent must.

Comes a time it cannot offer shelter.

Cannot satisfy our restless need

for whatever tomorrow calls to us.

It becomes the parent standing at the door

watching us set out on our own.

A private audience.

The map is still rolled out across the table.

Mad as a cut snake

and twice as vicious,

the Vicarius is folded into a high backed chair;

a skull balanced on a bundle of fine cloth.

Word is, he’s got less than weeks to live.

‘You took the oath to serve:

For the ashes of my fathers,

and the temples of their gods.

You gave your word,

under the watchful gaze of your ancestors

as custodian of their tarnished honour.

You stand by it?’

The Vicarius almost smiles.

Perhaps he winces,

old age raging his joints,

and twisting his mouth.

‘Of course you do.’

The old man starts to cough,

doubles and shakes,

a man beaten by time.

((See Chapter Three, ‘Adolf of Gloucester goes to the Wall’, The Brazen Head – https://brazen-head.org/2021/06/09/adolf-of-gloucester-goes-to-the-wall/))

‘He’d have wasted his time 

playing with the Empire’s carcass

rebuilding towns we can’t live in

maintaining roads that lead

nowhere we need to go.

What will you do?’

Poisoned as any half-expected chalice.

But there’s no time to say,

take this cup away from me.

‘The Saxons and Picts don’t worry me.

They’re a military problem.

The legions were victorious while they held their line.

Now that line is broken,

so many little princelings who’d rather claim a dung heap

than work their corner of a mighty empire.

Who don’t care if their kingdom falls tomorrow

as long they‘ve been ruler for a day.’

‘Talking won’t save you.

You can lay out all the reasons

for co-operation. Explain

why they always win if they’re united.

And still they will refuse.

Splintered, word will spread,

is spreading even now.

This is no longer Ynys y Kedeirn5

The land is good, the Britons weak. Soon

three hundred ships, not three will land.’

‘Even now the Picts are gathering.’

‘Gloucester didn’t mention this.’

His voice has the dirty edge of a blade

the executioner doesn’t clean.

‘He saw empty villages

met with no resistance,

assumed they were afraid of him.

The women and children

head to the heather

while the men are gone.

They know what we know.

Once they cross The Wall

there’s nothing to oppose them.

The princelings have to choose:

join in or be destroyed.

This is their moment.

If they succeed,

they’ll swarm over the midlands.

Death and misery on a scale

no Briton’s seen since Boudicca trashed London.‘

But Vortigern isn’t looking at the map.

The wind behind him mutes the stench

of so many unwashed bodies

but doesn’t dim the shaking

cacophony of their howling voices

as they race towards his waiting ranks.

Discipline beats numbers every time.

His voice, calm, saying, ‘Hold your lines.

Hold your lines and you can’t lose.’

The Saxons proud of his centre to break the first assault.

Afterwards, his horsemen in pursuit.

The horrors of a routed army,

hunted down ‘til the beasts of battle,

so glutted on their favourite food,

lie down and refuse to move.

Then the work of devastation

until there comes a day when no dog barks

between the stone wall and the turf.

‘We have a month before they move.

an inauspicious moon demands

their priests’ attention.

We’ve summoned the leaders of the North.

The messengers will bring them,

or their replies, to Lincoln.

I’ll meet Adolf and his soldiers there.’

‘Those who don’t respond?’

‘Once the Picts are defeated

these tyrants are no match for us.

Not one can field an army worth the name.

Most of them have twenty, fifty men at most.’

‘After you defeat the Picts,

take this Hengist and his men,

find the kinglet furthest north

who refused your call,

slaughter his people,

devastate his ‘kingdom’.

Become a terror to your enemies

and your friends’.

‘They make a wasteland and call it peace?

((Vortigern is quoting Tacitus ‘quoting’ Calgacus, an enemy of Rome))

‘Fear, the rack and a well-stocked gallows

guarantee obedience.‘

‘A frightened man is never loyal.

If he thinks you’re weak, or threatened,

he’ll run or rip your heart out.

The mess we’re in proves that.’

‘Unreason frightens you. It always has.

A man who’s wrong and disregards the facts,

short sighted, blinded by self-interest,

acts knowing that his actions are disastrous.

You might as well talk philosophy to your horse.

Don’t be misled by eloquent historians

who make the past seem rational.

Don’t think that your intelligence

will solve the problems you encounter.

You have to deal with people as they are.’

‘Better a dead friend than a live enemy?’

‘Yes. [Cough] Emphatically, yes.

Always.’

‘There has to be a better way.

When Gwendoline ruled this island,

a woman, with a baby at her breast,

or a man, with the red gold in his bag,

could walk the length of Britain unmolested6

 ‘…That old fairy tale.

Kill Gloucester before he murders you.

Then purge the council and the senate.

Survive or perish. That’s your only choice.

If you decide to rule, power has its logic.

You can no more change this system

than you can push the cart you’re sitting in.’

5. What may mon do but fonde7

In the early morning light,

on the inland wall,

now looking north,

London at his back.

His position ratified

by a wary council.

The old man’s pyre

still smouldering.

Could he have had the clarity

to understand his world was gone?

The ideology that held the empire; gone.

Comfort and sophistication; gone

and none of it was coming back.

For the next five centuries,

tiny kingdoms and their tyrant kings,

scrapping each other with armies

that would have made a Caesar laugh:

‘Surely they’re not serious?’

His map torn up to make a jigsaw,

the tiny pieces ‘kingdoms’

with their ragged edges 

lines of rivers, ridges, roads.

Glued together, then re-torn

as violent men compete,

for the right to strut a short day

as King of the Breadcrumbs.

In their draughty barns,

with their mead and alliteration

their imperial fantasies

their beautiful books and demented priesthood

whose love of learning and their God,

will give them strength to lecture

killers about a God of Peace.

He watches his soldiers prepare to march,

and Hengist’s men accumulate untidily.

The road leads straight to Lincoln

to the mustering of his army. 

There will be more than he expected

and less than he wanted.

But they will come to his name

not to some ornate Latin title

that would once have activated

a well-drilled, dutiful response.

What’s left is personalities,

rivalries, irrational animosity.

In place of public servants,

working for the public good

self-serving functionaries

asking ‘what’s in it for me?’

With greed its own event horizon,

and a life defined by its fulfilment

or frustration. Loyalty and obedience,

replaced with automatic calculation:

weighing effort against cost.

The empire was expert in legalised brutality;

whips regulation length, tortures itemised.

Four hundred years and not one independence movement?

After it stacked the corpses of its enemies

possessed their lands, erased their way of life

it offered their descendants the benefits of Empire.

From Persia to The Wall the grandchildren

of those it killed queued up to out-Rome Rome.

Beyond greed and fear, there are better reasons for obedience.

Britannia stood or fell on their discovery.

In retrospect, and there’s 1500 years of it,

it’s obvious he must lose

but he stands on the inland wall,

that faded coin in his hand8

planning to save his province.

  1. ‘The Legendary History’ is shorthand for the history of Britain that was being told in the 12th century. These chapters began life as an attempt to understand the version told in Laȝamon’s Brut. The Legendary History cannot be reconciled with modern understandings of the history of this period. Improbabilities, anachronisms and contradictions abound. I have not tried to tidy them up [↩]
  2. Count of the Saxon Shore. The Saxon Shore would include the area Vortigern is heading towards, while Gloucester has been sent North [↩]
  3. Vortigern is misquoting St Pauls’ letter to the Galatians [↩]
  4. See Chapter Two, ‘A Man of heart?”, The Brazen Head – ((https://brazen-head.org/2021/02/28/britannia-in-peril-an-extract-from-an-epic-of-britain/ [↩]
  5. ‘The Island of the Mighty’ [↩]
  6. Gwendoline’s story is told in A Presentment of Englishry, Shearsman, 2018 [↩]
  7. What can a man do but try? From Gawain and the Green Knight. Gawain too sets out on an impossible quest and holds himself to an impossible standard [↩]
  8. An imperial coin worn smooth which he found in Chapter Two [↩]
Posted on by Ken Bell

Diary of a Somebody

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Diaries 1918-1938

Henry Channon, edited by Simon Heffer, Penguin, London, hb, 1,002 pages, £35

KEN BELL dives into an interwar atmosphere of complacency and privilege

The complete diaries of Sir Henry “Chips” Channon are now being published and the first volume will be required reading for anyone interested in the interwar period.

Channon was a handsome, wealthy American with an easy charm, who lived on the income provided by his shipping magnate father. He spent most of the 1920s assiduously courting the British upper class, and by the end of the 1920s he had become such a part of English high society that he married a Guinness heiress, and became a British national and a Tory MP. Given that he was born in 1897, it is amusing to realise that the first thing he ever had that approached work was when he became an MP at the age of 38. That was for a seat, by the way, that was in the gift of his wife’s family, as both her parents had represented it. Eventually, Paul Channon, Chip’s only son, would sit for that division as well – proof, I suppose, that the age of the rotten borough is not yet over.

His bisexualism probably also helped his rise, as it looks as if he tended more towards men than women. If my reading of his character is correct, then women would find him safe in taxis, so there was a charming, handsome, wealthy man who wasn’t going to jump on every woman he met, but might not be averse to an evening with one of their husbands, so long as it was all handled very discreetly. Indeed, his sex life is handled discreetly even in the diary. Prince Paul of Yugoslavia seems to have been the great love of Channon’s life, but we are never given any details about how they got it on. He seems to have mooned over the Prince, and it is quite possible that it remained unconsummated.

In the 1920s, he also became entranced by Viscount (George) Gage, and it is possible that his visits to a young prostitute called Josephine may have been partly due to the fact that she also counted Gage as one of her clients. One imagines that as part of the bedroom chitchat, he got her to prattle about what Gage was up to. He did have sex with Josephine, in spite of the fact that he found her Newcastle accent distasteful, but we are not treated to full accounts of their couplings. In fact, that is the way it is throughout the diary as when he visited three very expensive Parisian brothels he took the trouble to tell us their addresses, but not how he had pleasured himself. It may be that he kept his clothes on and only went there to be seen.

On the other hand, he did have a fling with Tallulah Bankhead, and was fairly open in his diary about that, including the hilarious account of playing a stripping card game with her and another girl. The other girl left the room at some point, leaving the naked Chips and Tallulah to enjoy each other, but the most entertaining section comes at the end when she returned and both girls got to watch as Chips slowly got dressed. He was convinced that his body was so perfect that the two girls would enjoy that spectacle, so much so that he dedicated more wordage to the act of getting dressed than to describing his bout with Miss Bankhead.

Before the mid-1930s, Channon seemed to have no interest at all in politics or the major events of the day and his diary is full of the parties he attended, along with quite tedious lists of the very important people who were also in attendance. His catty remarks about some of their personalities will bring a smile to the reader, and it is amusing to read that one woman “has a face like a well-rounded bottom,” or another was so weighed down with jewels that she “looks like a ferret that has got loose in Cartier’s,” but it does wear after a while.

The diary comes alive after 1935, with Channon in the House of Commons and war looming in Europe. His account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics is interesting for his admiration of Hitler and what he was doing in Germany. One suspects that he may also have been quite taken with all the tall, blond, Aryan gods in their tailored black uniforms that he saw, but by that time, Channon, who had been long terrified of the workers, then saw the USSR as the greatest threat to his position, with Hitler as a staunch bulwark against upheaval.

Two years later, his account of the Munich Crisis is desultory in the extreme, as he clearly just wished that the tiresome Czechs would give in to Germany’s demands. When they did, his admiration for Neville Chamberlain knew no bounds, along with his contempt for Churchill and the other doomsayers. Channon was probably in the majority at that time, but it is still interesting that he devoted more space to the 1936 Olympics than to Munich. Then again, Herman Goring had hosted a fine bash at which Channon had been a guest in 1936, and Munich did rather put a downer on the London season that year.

Channon was at his best, as well as his worst, with the abdication crisis of late 1936. As a friend of the future King Edward VIII he was not only aware of Mrs Simpson, but on good terms with her – yet he hardly mentioned her until the story began to break in November 1936. It is as if Channon did not realise the full implications of a foreign, divorced woman marrying a future King and becoming Queen-Consort. Indeed, his failure to even grasp the fact that as head of the Church of England, the King was caught up in a theological battle of his own making is quite incredible. For his part, Channon just saw it all as Stanley Baldwin pandering to the Dominions and the reactionary parts of middle-class Britain. Channon may have been afraid of the working-class, but his distaste for the middle class runs through the diary.

Chips Channon was also at his best as a diarist, politician and friend to the King once it all exploded in November and December that year. He tried to get the King to announce that he had no intention of marrying Wallis Simpson, and hold to that story until after his coronation. He wanted the King to lie, in other words, to buy time until he had been safely crowned; then he could have married Wallis and presented the government with a fait accompli. The King refused the entreaty so Wallis scuttled off to France and Chips came up with a Plan B. She would lie and tell the world that she had no intention of marrying the King, but that failed when Channon realised that the King would have gone to France had she made such an announcement. The thought of the King-Emperor abandoning the country for such a reason is what brought Channon to a realisation that an abdication was the likeliest outcome, but he continued to argue the King’s case right up until the final moment. “We can only combine to save the sovereign and can we?” he wrote in early December 1936, before doing what he was good at which was working the ‘phones, networking long into the evening, and trying his very best to keep the King on his throne.  Let us give credit where credit is due: Channon was quite magnificent in the defence of his friend during those weeks.

In the aftermath, Channon wrote two memoranda that aimed to make sense of the crisis and a diary entry which assessed the personalities of the King and Mrs Simpson. His view was that Edward “suffers from sexual repression of another nature”. He “surrounded himself with extremely attractive men… and even these he dropped as they aged”.  So, Channon, writing as a closet homosexual, saw King Edward VIII as a repressed one.

Chips was not a complete cad, as he also loved his son dearly. That comes through various entries when he will end something unrelated to his family with a sweet comment about his then baby son. Other pleasant aspects are also to be found. On one occasion his wife discovered a half-starved stray dog, which Channon took in and fed. He then looked at the mutt’s collar and found an address, and was able to track down the owner who was on holiday in a converted railway carriage on the coast. Channon, his wife and the dog then climbed into his car, and the dog was restored to his master, who broke down in tears at the sight of his companion. The Channons were invited in for tea and everyone sat around chatting amiably. Channon’s account of all this is respectful to the family and lacks all the malice he used when dismissing the middle-class and their mores.

The Channon diary, unexpurgated though it may be, represses far too much of the author’s private life, so it is not on a par with that of Alan Clark. Yet, he was a wonderful writer who captured the spirit of the twenties and thirties very well – at least, that part of it that involved his wealthy social circle.

However, his repeated failure to spot a looming crisis when it was right in front of his nose marks down his utility for most of the major events of the period, except, of course, for the abdication. His fear of the working class was such that it clouded his admittedly limited political judgement, so in his penultimate entry of this volume he wrote that if war was to come then “I am indifferent to precautions, for if there is a major war, nothing matters. I don’t care to survive in a Moscow world.” The following day, his final entry lauded the “gentlemen’s peace” that was the Munich Agreement. He went on: “The whole world rejoices whilst a few malcontents jeer.”

He got that wrong, but so did most of Britain at the time. It will be interesting to see in the next volume – due out later in 2021 – how he managed to get out of that particular fix when the war finally broke out a year later.

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

England’s musical Shakespeare

Henry Purcell
STUART MILLSON gives a glimpse into the life of Henry Purcell

Henry Purcell (1659-95) is forever associated with the birth of opera (or masques) in England – works such as King Arthur and The Fairy Queen – the creation of semi-operatic scenic cantatas, like his music for The Tempest, and with expansive works for church and state, especially his odes for William and Mary and their ‘Glorious Revolution’ – and, later, funeral music of intense mourning for Queen Mary. Not all artists or musicians are celebrated in their lifetime, but Purcell was recognised as a great composer, ascending to the heights of achievement for his time – a reputation which enhanced the career of his younger brother, Daniel – also a composer. But it is in our own world that Purcell has truly come into his own: an unending stream of recordings, often in period-instrument form, from some of the greatest interpreters of baroque music, such as Sir John Eliot Gardiner and William Christie. For Denis Arnold, the renowned General Editor of The New Oxford Companion to Music, Purcell warranted not just a few paragraphs and a portrait, but three pages of musical description and discussion – another impressive measure of the man.

Jan van Kessel, ‘Personification of Music’

Purcell was the second of four brothers and followed an early career as a young chorister in the Chapel Royal of Charles II, enjoying the early Restoration flowering of art and music. By 1673, his angelic voice was no more, but his musical talents had made such an impression that he was appointed as the custodian of the King’s collection of instruments. He also became a composer-in-residence at Westminster Abbey, going on to succeed the great John Blow as organist.

Composers such as William Lawes wrote very much for the delight or diversion of the Stuart court; just half-a-century later, ‘serious’ music had emerged as a force to be reckoned with, especially in the theatre – as a form of art increasingly enjoyed by the wider society, with provocative political allegory never far from the surface. A perfect example is King Arthur (1691), with its libretto by John Dryden, which goes far beyond the boundaries of any conventional theatrical format – the story of the mythical warrior-king of the Britons, but with overtones of the contemporary struggle between the cause of James II (the rightful heir – but a Catholic) and the triumph of the Protestant succession, in the form of William of Orange. With its famous, ethereal patriotic air, ‘Fairest Isle’ – a slow, contemplative song sometimes extracted from the score and performed as a piece in its own right – Purcell emerges as a ‘composer-laureate’, long before the era of the national-composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with their oratorios of ‘Blood and State’ (Parry) or ‘Banners of St. George’ (Elgar).

Purcell’s English mysticism is something we tend to associate with musicians of an epoch much closer to our own, such as Vaughan Williams with his Flos Campi or Five Mystical Songs, and Holst’s unchanging, unforgiving Wessex landscape of Egdon Heath. Purcell brings us into a markedly supernatural country, of charms and prophecies, and the extraordinary presence of a ghostly character, the ‘Cold Genius’ – a singing spirit of frost, ice and wasteland, brought to stuttering life by a shivering bass singer, accompanied in a curious pre-echo of 20th-century music by the icy, scratchy, toneless, guttural bowing of string instruments. Purcell was ahead of his time in other ways too –with the rumble of wind and thunder machines in The Tempest, and waves of scurrying strings suggesting a rushing tide about to break across the land – a scene straight from Benjamin Britten’s 1945 Suffolk opera, Peter Grimes (credited as the first great English opera since Purcell).

As a concertgoer or buyer of recordings, it is worth remembering your first experience of a particular work – and often more fun to replay that memory (or vinyl disc) and compare it to the many other versions which have proliferated in the intervening years. I first encountered Purcell’s Chaconne on a record-buying expedition in 1981, the work appearing on a Decca LP collection entitled ‘English Music for Strings’ – a 1968 recording made at Snape Maltings, with Benjamin Britten conducting the English Chamber Orchestra.

The Chaconne, or ‘Chacony’ as it is sometimes written, is an old dance-form, made up of variations (in Purcell’s piece, 18 in number) which flow effortlessly into one another, and founded upon what musicians know as a ground-bass theme (the deeper, more sonorous theme or tune that seems to underpin or “anchor” the whole work). Britten, a great admirer of Purcell, and of older English music generally, was immediately attracted to the gently-noble, faintly melancholic melody of the Chaconne, which had been preserved in a collection of Purcell manuscripts, stored in the British Museum.

Even with Britten’s modern string instrumentation and the rich reverberation it creates, we are transported in the first moments of the work to an England of 300 years ago – of lute- and viol-playing ‘people of quality’ at courts and country houses, of misty deer parks and an adjoining countryside of ancient steadings – and yet, despite the clear antiquity of the style, there is a universal essence to this music (very much like Bach) which somehow defies time. Readers may also enjoy the more authentic version of the Chaconne, performed by Canada’s Aradia Baroque Ensemble, which appears on the Naxos label, an interpretation that brings us the delicate, glassy, crystal feel of authentic baroque-era strings. The CD catalogues and Youtube brim with Purcell recordings.

This remarkable man, in charge of England’s musical formalities, was also fond of the occasional joke: listen, for example, to his Ode for the Birthday of Queen Mary – Come Ye Sons of Art – to the section entitled, ‘Sound the trumpet’ and the line, “… the listening shores…” Something to do with all England listening for the word of its monarch, perhaps? Or a joke at the expense of trumpet-players, with the surname Shore – who had nothing to do in that particular section!

Pier Francesco Cittadini, ‘Vanitas – Stillleben’

Timelessness seems the very essence of Purcell, that shaper of national myth in music, a ghost who still comes back to life as the cold genius of our isle. It was the cold which brought about the composer’s untimely death in 1695: returning home late at night during a bitterly-cold November, so the story goes, it seems that he found himself locked out of his Marsham Street home by his wife of 14 years. And curiously, from then on, his country began to forget about him. The musicians and choristers of the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey honoured his passing in a great service of remembrance ; yet the decades and centuries that followed saw the virtual disappearance of his name. Perhaps it was only Britten’s rediscovery in the 1940s and ‘60s that brought Purcell back to life – a crusade assisted and added to by composer-conductor, Malcolm Arnold, conducting full-blown arrangements of the 17th-century composer’s works at a Proms concert in the late 1960s.1

What we can say with certainty is that the jibe made during the mid-19th century (principally by Germans), that England was “the land without music” was only partially true. We had simply forgotten about our own geniuses.

  1. Malcolm Arnold’s conducting of Purcell’s suite from Abdelazar is available via: https://www.amazon.com/Elgar-Concerto-Vaughan-Williams-Orchestra/dp/B000000TKX [↩]
Posted on by Mark Gullick

Medical notes from underground

“Theodore Dalrymple”, anatomist of modernity (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
MARK GULLICK profiles the cultural commentator THEODORE DALRYMPLE

The English writer Theodore Dalrymple, whose real name is Dr. Anthony Daniels, spent much of his professional career as a hospital and prison psychiatrist. He has also written many books on a variety of subjects, and travelled the world extensively.

But, even given the breadth of Dr. Daniels’s voracious reading and the length of his journeying, his most memorable books report back from a place far bleaker than the many and often pitiful countries he has visited. These are the books and essays which deal with his experiences among Britain’s ‘underclass’, and his ruminations as to why these unfortunates are kept in their place by a society which is, by global standards, extremely wealthy. These are the writings I will concentrate on here.

To read Dalrymple’s accounts of the inhabitants of the prisons, hospitals and sink estates where he ministered to them is to enter a type of hell, but what is most frightening is not any inscription above the gate reading ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’, but the simple four numerals at the end of many of the most appalling essays. For example, ‘1995’ and earlier. Does anyone believe things have improved in the quarter century since the good doctor painted his Bosch-like visions of Britain?

One of the most apparent aspects of Dalrymple’s talent is his ability to take the pulse of his own culture, and he is never more accurate in his many observations than when writing about his fellow Britons:

Gradually, but overwhelmingly, the culture and character of British restraint have changed into the exact opposite. Extravagance of gesture, vehemence of expression, vainglorious boastfulness, self-exposure, and absence of inhibition are what we tend to admire now – and the old modesty is scorned

Anything Goes

Although it is Dr. Daniels’s literary avatar Theodore Dalrymple (a pen-name which puts me in mind of some Dickensian notary public) who publishes these diagnoses of country, people, political regime, or seismic cultural shift, it is the doctor who really does know best. He is a hyper-realist and draws on professional experience, not on social theories that happen to be de rigueur, and he has the ability to bring analytical forensic skills as much to a society, culture or woeful institution as he would be to the body or mind of a patient.

The National Health Service (NHS) in particular presents unfavourable symptoms. There are many hustlers and grifters who have exploited Britain’s much-lauded health service for their own advancement and comfort, and at whom Dalrymple often takes aim:

Britain now has more educational bureaucrats than teachers, as well as more health-service administrators than hospital beds

Not with a Bang but with a Whimper

This in itself is a scandal and, having worked for the NHS in four different capacities myself, I can vouch for Dalrymple’s depiction of “a British bureaucratic zombie, for whom work is a painful interruption of entertainment” (If Symptoms Persist).

Dr. Daniels clearly sports the livery of old-fashioned Conservatism, which naturally earns him sneers and smears from the bien pensant class, displaying as they must their ‘woke’ insignia with misplaced pride. Dr. Daniels is everything ‘woke’ is not. He clearly feels for the British ‘underclass’, but is able both to state plainly that “I delighted in what my patients said” (Not with a Bang but with a Whimper), and to render them in miniature with merciless accuracy:

More flagrant injustices by far, worse physical conditions, greater exposure to violence, were of course to be encountered elsewhere: But for sheer apathy, for spiritual, emotional, educational and cultural nihilism and vacuity, you must go to an English slum

If Symptoms Persist

Anthony Malcolm Daniels was born in 1949 in London’s fashionable Kensington. Thus, he began his life in a recently bombed city in a district of which, the last time I visited it five years ago, seemed still to be a building site in perpetuity, but for more modern reasons of appreciating the value of property rather than rebuilding one of civilisation’s great conurbations.

His father, we are informed in an essay on the poverty of English post-war architecture, was a communist (and Dalrymple will have much to say on the subject of communism) and despised Victorian art and architecture, to the extent of destroying some quite valuable paintings from that era which he felt were taking up loft space. This may or may not be a Freudian moment which directed the course of Daniels Junior’s future beliefs. We will never know; Daniels is scathingly dismissive of Freud.

In 1980, Daniels, writing as ‘Theodore Dalrymple’, so impressed the editor of The Spectator, Charles Moore, that he began a regular column in that magazine on the strength of unsolicited submissions, a breaking of precedent by Mr. Moore. There followed a string of books – as well as regular writings in various periodicals online and off – which were mostly received with discreet critical approval without the usual attendant razzmatazz of press and television appearances. Dalrymple has always swum against the stream of what is now called the ‘narrative’, a sort of media-instituted and pre-fabricated substitute for the truth, and his profile in the mainstream media is concomitantly rather sparse.

For the British, at least, one of the most staggering allegations Dalrymple makes is that social services have absolutely no intention of helping those under their care. The NHS – at least at the level of management – are not overly interested in sick and injured people or their recovery, teachers are actively opposed to well-tried educational methods on ideological grounds, and the police would look askance at anyone suggesting they went out preventing crime by their presence as they used to do.

An example – from many candidates – concerns the British police. The ‘TICs’ mentioned here are ‘Taken into Considerations’, or crimes the defendant admits to in order to lessen the likely sentence for his present misdemeanour. A defence counsel will use these playing cards blatantly and the police will be all the more grateful for that, and for the following reason;

TICs are the means, roughly speaking, by which known criminals admit to offences they didn’t do, in order for the police to clear up crimes they can’t solve

Life at the Bottom

Criminals in one area tend to know each other, and these TICs serve as a kind of barter system. Added to this, the criminal serves less time for his act, and possibly none at all, while the police delight their masters by delivering improved statistics. Everyone, as they used to say at British fairgrounds, is a winner.

This wholly twisted version of policing is typical of Dalrymple’s dealings with the public sector in Britain, although many of his interactions provoke laughter as much as despair. Dalrymple is a comic writer in that he presents a lacklustre reality and invites the reader to find it grimly funny – Alan Bennett does something similar – while always gently reminding us that if we do find ourselves sniggering at this shabby round-dance of foolishness and ignorance, our laughter is very much in the dark, and we, like him, are whistling past the graveyard.

Although Dalrymple is an intellectual by definition, and one who indeed finds much compensatory delight in his studies of literature, we are fully aware of his ingrained attitude toward the intellectual class, “whose livelihood depends on ceaseless carping”. We recall Thomas Sowell, among others, when Dalrymple writes that:

[M]ost of the social pathology exhibited by the underclass has its origin in ideas that have filtered down from the intelligentsia

Life at the Bottom

It is no longer government that threatens social cohesion and culture, he writes, but “the universities and the intellectuals, or semi-intellectuals, that they turn out” (ibid).

Dalrymple is less an intellectual than a professional with both the life experience and the depth of reading to make him a perfectly capable philosopher. Indeed, he gives one of the finest mission statements for philosophy (my own subject) that I have come across:

The philosopher is an archaeologist of knowledge, rather than a builder of it: he strips away the misconceptions that have accreted since birth

In Praise of Prejudice

This definition is in bold contradistinction to the destructive, moth-like work of the intellectual, and bad ideas, when their time comes, can only lead to what modern sociologists term ‘bad outcomes’. One more than others.

Outside of the mainstream media, the dread realisation is taking place that the West is undergoing what I call ‘Sovietisation’ (although I am sure I am not the first to coin the phrase). It can scarcely be said that Britain, as one of the most egregious examples, is moving away from rather than towards the type of societal control around which the communist apparatus was constructed.

Writing from experience, Dalrymple has made many points concerning communism, but they have as their centre of gravity the same essential statement; the point of lying to the people, a practice inherent in the communist system, is not to persuade the populace of the truth of what is being said, but to humiliate them in the realisation that they must believe or, in many cases, die. This summation comes from The Wilder Shores of Marx:

Apart from the massacres, deaths and famines for which communism was responsible, the worst thing about the system was the official lying: that is to say the lying in which everyone was forced to take part, by repetition, assent or failure to contradict

Dalrymple still writes for several online magazines, and the closest he has to a mantra follows him there:

In my study of Communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate…

Interview with FrontPage Magazine

And, along the same lines: “[T]he purpose of political correctness is not to enunciate truth but to exercise power” (‘Rigid Diversity’, Taki’s Magazine).

A modern refusenik, then, but if Dalrymple is a contrarian, that should be placed in context. The British media has a rather cunning way of appearing to be in touch by occasionally feinting a blow at the clumsily named cultural phenomenon known as ‘political correctness’ (a chrysalis whose emerging creature is ‘woke’). But this is mere nose-thumbing for effect, and there is another aspect of modern cultural dysfunction that is sacred for the media – victimhood.

It is axiomatic for the British media class that, in a dreary revival of Marx’s misplaced dictum in The Communist Manifesto, everything must be viewed through the (distorting) lens of class conflict, and that battle to be further parsed into the constant war of oppressor and oppressed. This now has its new identity as racial/social justice. This is succinctly summed up by Dalrymple in his collection Farewell Fear. The author is describing the appeal of conversion to Islam to a woman named Lauren Booth, half-sister-in-law to ex-British Prime minister Tony Blair. Ms. Booth displayed, writes Dalrymple,

…the very characteristic thirst of modern people who have lived privileged lives for the safe psychological haven of victim status

Just as Dr. Johnson was of the opinion that patriotism (or the pretense of patriotism) was the last refuge of the scoundrel, now another doctor indicates that victimhood is the first refuge of scoundrels we must now call ‘woke’.

Here we are at the heart of cultural darkness, the blind spot that seems to affect Western governments. If whole generations of the ‘underclass’, along with ethnic minorities, and those of one non-heterosexual persuasion or another, are constantly told that they are neither culpable for their actions or, perhaps, in need of psychological care, and also that they are and have been somehow repressed by a supposedly dominant ethnic group, they will gladly accept the nomination.

And as victimhood is offered freely and for free, courtesy of the state in Britain, so too its status seems to absolve the victims of responsibility. Dalrymple makes a comparison between African countries (specifically Tanzania and Nigeria) and Great Britain:

Yet nothing I saw [in Africa] – neither the poverty nor the overt oppression – ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live that I see daily in England

Life at the Bottom

You will emerge from the writings of Theodore Dalrymple enlightened and entertained, but also disgusted and with a stain on your soul, which admittedly doesn’t sound like an endorsement. It is a stain no soap could ever wash away – disgust with the weakness of people who could be helped by even a small show of strength on their part, disgust with the frankly wicked waste of money spent in the callow belief that it is a god who will answer the petition of prayer and provide for the meek and lowly, and disgust for the level to which British culture has been allowed, and even intentionally manipulated – to sink. Above all, you will feel a searing disgust with those ‘in charge’, those in well-remunerated positions of power who believe they are doing good when what they are in fact doing is misusing money to salve their negligible consciences and inflated egos, as well as adhere to political dogma which would disgrace a poor African nation, what Dalrymple calls “the baleful influence of mistaken ideas”.

The collected works of Theodore Dalrymple, advised as he is by his éminence grise, Dr. Anthony Daniels, should be read by every social worker and politician, every police officer and NHS manager, every journalist and every teacher in Great Britain, but of course they will not. Quite the opposite. They will be cast into the fire so that those people – many of whom Dalrymple describes as performing “makework” jobs – can return to the state-funded, well-sucked thumb of Critical Race Theory, or whatever name it has this month. As the good doctor himself quotes more than once from T S Eliot, “mankind cannot bear very much reality”.

Dr. Daniels was kind enough to answer a few brief questions for The Brazen Head…

BH: Is there any hope for the British public sector?

AD:  There are three main problems, it seems to me. First is centralisation. Second is the size and the number of the tasks it is expected to perform. The third is its corruption – moral, intellectual and increasingly financial. They are interconnected. In most cases, people have little idea what the purpose of their organisation is, and goals have been obscured by ideology and political entrepreneurs. As far as financial corruption, I am afraid it was Mrs. Thatcher who started the ball rolling. It is much worse than the offering of money under the table. Financial corruption has been legalised. 

BH: Do you see in the response of Western governments to the COVID pandemic reason and measure, or have they used it for a more sinister accumulation of power?

AD: I have some sympathy with governments that clearly had to do something. It is rarely, however, that governments relinquish powers willingly that they have taken in emergencies. Therefore, the return to the status quo ante will be difficult – and it wasn’t so very splendid to begin with.

BH: Do you see what I have called a ‘Sovietisation’ of the UK?

AD: I definitely see a Sovietisation of Britain – but not only of Britain. People are now afraid not only to voice opinions in public but (what is worse) not to subscribe publicly to opinions that they do not hold. They thereby lose their probity and therefore their locus standi to oppose the grossest absurdity and violation of common sense. As for Soviet-style langue de bois, it is everywhere: you can hear it uttered even in private. 

BH: I gather that you spend most if not all of your time in France. Do you ever feel a prophet without honour in your own land?

AD: I do not feel a prophet without honour because I do not feel a prophet. I often wonder whether I’m exaggerating things, whether I am too gloomy because of my personal experience, because gloom is easier to write about, at least interestingly, than success. I often ask myself how seriously people should take me, and I have no definitive answer, and certainly no tablets of stone to bring down from any mountain.

Posted on by Liam Guilar · 2 Comments

Adolf of Gloucester goes to the Wall

This is Part 3 of LIAM GUILAR’s still-being-written epic of Britain. Chapter 1 was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and you can read Chapter 2 in the previous issue of The Brazen Head.

The story so far: 449 AD. The Roman province of Britannia is tottering. The Legions have long gone and raiders and civil war are becoming endemic as central authority breaks down. The Ruling Council has sent Adolf of Gloucester1 on a mission to establish contact with the new war lords in the North and call them to a meeting. After that he is to continue further north to investigate the rumor of a lost legion. The Council intend to use such an army to protect the province. Adolf has other plans. Adolf’s main rival is called Vortigern. You can find out more about Vortigern and the Legendary History at www.liamguilar.com

Chapter Three: Playing Dress up in the Ruins.

Gloucester goes north

Ghosts on the great north road

moth-eaten capes, tarnished brass:

pretend Romans on a fading track

its edges blurred, the landscape

creeping back, erasing the affront.

The old Cursus Publicus.

No one waited with a change of horses

to speed them on their errand.

No patient slaves were waiting

to lead them to a bath house.

Stunned groups struggling south,

unable to say where they were going.

Some with belongings. Some

begging for food, or running

at the first sight of armed men.

The worst were those too tired to run

who simply stood or sat and waited.

All day darkness, and the sky fouled with smoke,

as though the north itself were burning.

They were grateful for the rain.

An abandoned temple gave them shelter.

Gloucester imagines ordered lines

stepping towards the incoherent mob.

Discipline against barbarian chaos

the grateful blood stained victors

chanting their general’s name.

A legion at his back? Why not?

It worked for Constantine.

His men are camped outside.

More scared of ghosts than rain.

But in this world of broken shadows

even the ghosts are now afraid.

You’ve met these two before:

History’s statistics.

They are there to prove how great the victory

how terrible the defeat. Until recently

nobody bothered with their stories.

They’ve been around since wars began.

They’ll grumble on until there are no wars.

Two faces in the firelight, sharing food.

Veterans of the service, though the service

in their eyes, is looking very shabby.

‘All punishment and no discipline.

Innocent or guilty, capable or clumsy

makes little difference to this Adolf.’ 

‘When that rider came…’

…’The gibberer?’ ‘Him.’

‘What did he say?

A raiding party running for The Wall?’

‘Burdened with loot and captives.’

‘Wagons loaded down with loot he said.’

‘Pushing wagons loaded down with loot.

But Gloucester says They’re heading east.

Our orders take us west.’ ‘That’s true though isn’t it?’

‘Yes, indeed it is, but consider this.

Can you imagine Vortigern letting them escape?

Or being insulted at that hill fort

and turning tail? He’d have burnt it round their ears.’

Two days earlier….

The hill fort had been recently reoccupied.

The path rose, cutting a labyrinth of bank and ditch

until they were confronted by a well-made wall.

Everything was squared, trim, and even.

They waited in the shadow of the gate house

Then a voice, like the north wind coming off a glacier,

speaking British in defiance of their uniforms and banners.

‘Is Vortigern the Thin amongst you?’2

‘I am the Magister Militum,

Count of the Saxon Shore.’

‘Pretty titles for these ugly times.’

‘The Council summons you to London.’

‘Whatever your titles meant

when you left home,

here you are unwelcome.

There is no legion at your back,

nothing to ratify your idle names.

We can slaughter you and no one

no one, will come to bury you

let alone avenge your deaths.

Turn back, we will not follow.

Go home, we know the place

to break a column of toy soldiers

but we have better things to do.

…

‘We should have burnt it down around their ears.

They have sent a boy out on a man’s errand.’

The Risen Christ

Gloucester continued north.

Torch light and candle light

lamplight and firelight

and never enough light

to stop the darkness

infecting everything

so the edges blurred.

A marching camp, smoke rising,

the usual signs of occupation.

The bank is sagging underneath the wooden wall.

The platform like a discarded party streamer. 

No man could hold his ground on such a footing.

From a gate tower creaking in the breeze,

the watchman said, ‘No more than four.’

Gloucester and the Proconsul

are escorted to a timber building

with not one right angle in the joints.

In the middle, facing the smouldering fire,

whoever calls himself king of this rank and smoky space. 

A cloak of raven’s feathers, bright rings, armbands, native paint.

The protocols of embassy and messenger are swept aside.

He insists they kneel. When they refuse, he rises:

‘I am the risen Christ and you will worship me!’

Only the years of discipline stop Gloucester’s laughter.

This silly little man in this squalid little barn:

Christ how the world has shrunk

if fools expect such folly to be taken seriously.

The women are attractive, desirable but hesitant.

Eager to please their messiah. The apostles

are playground bullies in patchwork armour.

The proconsul is a bald, grey bearded man

who in his youth…etc. etc.

But now has the power…etc, etc.

It’s all implied and understood.

‘We’re all familiar with the law.’

‘This is the law,’ said the kinglet,

his fist smashing the bewildered face.

He asks the sprawling body:

‘Who will enforce your law?’

He knifes the writhing man.

‘I will’, he says, in the bloody silence

that is so profound, you can hear it

hold its breath and bleed.

Until

Gloucester grabs a log from the woodpile

and swings it hard against the Saviour’s head.

Blowing the hunting horn around his neck,

his men break through the flimsy wall.

The risen Christ and his disciples

soon lie scattered on the dirty floor.

The Wall

Impressive but redundant marker,

of a boundary the land ignored.

Camped at a central fort,

Gloucester waited for his scouting parties.

Men sent out along the roads

or following The Wall in both directions.

Stopping in the little villages.

Abandoned huts,

cooking fires still smouldering.

Rarely a furtive native,

perhaps an ancient man or woman

left behind when all the others

had taken to the heather.

Gloucester, in the rain,

supervising his fort’s repair

imagines ranks stepping into incoherent mobs.

The disciplined advance into barbarian chaos.

The grateful victors chanting their general’s name.

His command is leaking men.

Even here, snuggled into winter quarters,

riders don’t return, and patrols sent to find patrols

find nothing. No one. The land is empty. 

Did you dream about the other

who would solve your problems?

The pay rise you deserved

to cancel out your debts.

Did you clasp the lotto ticket

dreaming of your new life

if they called your numbers?

Did you throw it in the bin

and swear you’d never bet again?

Or did you keep on betting

long after common sense had called a halt,

and there was nothing in the bank

to fuel the fantasy but a bruising desperation.

Another party rides towards the turf wall further north,

along a broken road no one has bothered to repair.

The surface fractured by the travellers’ wheels

is best avoided. On the hills, blocked culverts,

force the streams to flood and wash away the terrace

and the road it balanced. Beyond all that

right on to the end of marching

past the broken watch towers and abandoned forts

to ditch and bank and sometimes rubble

where squatters huddle in the outline of a camp,

sheep graze and the indifferent, stupid cattle

trip on the remnants of a barracks floor

that once held 30,000 men

and housed the Emperor himself.

Standing on The Wall,

waiting for patrols,

he scans the bleak upland.

It doesn’t roll, it heaves.

The burnt look of moorland

the gullies and abrupt valleys

too untidy for his taste.

No straight lines except the roads

confidently heading south.

Here, at its northern limit,

the whole ruined empire echoing behind him.

Over there the chaos that slighted Rome,

source of the tidal surge threatening to drown them all.

News from the South.

Vortigern this. Vortigern that.

His fifty Germans had erased a raiding party

then seized their ships.

He’d want a Triumph next.

What were fifty tribesmen to his Legion,

forcing the channel crossing,

following their choice of Caesar.

It worked before.

The Western Empire could be saved.

The sun crawls over the horizon,

then slides, embarrassed, to the west.

Winter, immobility and failure,

creep towards him, deaf to threat or reason.

Days when the demented wind

battered them, assaulting roof and wall

while the horizontal rain trashed

anyone who dared to stand outside.

The world was dissolving in rivers of slime.

His soldiers slithered and flopped

as if some magic had removed their bones.

Soon winter would invest the fort,

forcing them indoors to brood beside their fires

and analyse his failures. 

Vortigern this. Vortigern that.

Questions. Disappointment.

The patrols encounter roads

that fade into the heather,

ruins in the glens, tracery of walls,

fear and incomprehension

and neither had an answer.

No violent opposition.

Until one shepherd, caught on the run,

shaking with fear, stammered:

there was a fort in the north west:

it had been repaired.

‘In Wood or stone?’

So much hung upon the answer.

He didn’t know. It was a story he’d been told

by a drover he’d been drinking with.

He wouldn’t even swear that it was true.

Far from any road, overlooking a river

that drained hills to the north.

Playing dress up in the ruins

They watched, while rain was turning into sleet,

the great gate shaking in the wind.

There were guards on the wall.

So they retreated to the ruined vicus                                                                                          

where traders and camp followers had sold their wares

unwrapped their eagle, donned their fathers’ uniforms

and moved in line towards the gate.

It opened, men in armour moving out

a legion on the march. Adolf saw the future:

the roads busy, the towns thriving,

but no legion ever staggered,

ragged arsed into a line that bent.

He rode closer playing Roman.

There was nothing Roman or Imperial on view:

patchworks of rust and improvisation.

Someone whose faded plume suggested rank

stepped forward. Braided hair leaked

from the badly polished helmet.

Only the little gimlets of his twinkling eyes

broke the bearded, tattooed face.

He spoke a mix of Pict and Legion

Gloucester struggled to translate.

Inside the fort, the walls contained a rubbish tip.

Once neatly ordered barrack blocks were patterns in the mud.

Dirty children squabbled in the wreck of the Principia.

Dirty women moved amongst the dirty huts.

Removing bits of armour with relief,

the garrison was every other native they had met.

‘They said that you would come for us,

the oldies.

They said: “The bastards sailed without us.

They’ll return.’’

We buried the last of them so long ago.

My father’s father. Take us back to Rome.

Take us to the bath house and the forum.

The oldies said that Caesar would reward our loyalty.’

They celebrated in the wooden barn

that once had housed the grain.

Perhaps they thought it was a feast.

Perhaps, they thought that this was how

the legions honoured their important guests.

So Gloucester lied about his errand. Pretended

Rome was still unscathed, the Empire

sound but still in need of loyal troops.

Would they drill for him tomorrow?

Those who weren’t too drunk turned out.

He counted less than fifty,

some too old to stand up straight.

Echoes of empire in mangled Latin.

Their drill was comically inept,

like little boys playing dress up

in a misremembered game.

They were no use to anyone.

He couldn’t take them with him.

But they wouldn’t let him leave.

So Gloucester gave instructions.

They rode away.

The wooden buildings smoking in the rain.

The bodies piled into a heap.

The glory that was Rome

left for the raven and the wolf.

  1. Adolf is one of Laȝamon’s oddities. Although he is a British hero, he has a very German name [↩]
  2. He is ‘Vortigern the Thin’ in Welsh tradition [↩]
Posted on by Guy Walker

Of course a man can imagine what it’s like to be a woman!

GUY WALKER says we must be allowed to imagine opposites

Fitzwilliam Darcy, Mr. Knightley, Dr. Lydgate, Edward Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, and Daniel Deronda are excellent examples of well-rounded and believable male literary inventions, with a variety of qualities of character.

Portia, Beatrice, Miranda, and Viola are excellent examples of brave, intelligent, and virtuous women, while Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril are equally good examples of wicked women with the added factor, in the case of Lady Macbeth, that she is even regarded with a degree of human sympathy in her wickedness. Shakespeare also wrote a poem treating the story of the rape of Lucretia, the wife of a Roman aristocrat, by the King’s son. Rembrandt, an artist famous for his paintings of marital intimacy, especially with his own wives, produced two paintings of the victim. Seldom (especially in the second version, painted in 1666) have the anguish and shame of a rape victim been more tenderly evoked or better understood.

The remarkable thing about these very well-known creations is that they were all created by writers, a playwright, and an artist of the opposite sex. To take it further, Deronda and Shylock are created by writers who were not Jewish, and Othello is created by a writer who was neither black nor a convert to Christianity from Islam.

Modern orthodoxies might, however, insist that they shouldn’t exist. In Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I Am No Longer Talking to White People About Race, the thesis is that it is futile to speak to white people about what it is like to be black in Western democracies because the simple fact of not being black disqualifies one from the possibility of understanding black experience and, therefore, from having a worthwhile opinion. A similar logic is often applied to the proposition of men being able to understand or hold opinions about female experience.

This being the case, how did Rembrandt, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and William Shakespeare, along with a host of other successful writers, manage to pull off the trick of evoking or inventing such believable characters, thus giving the lie to such thinking? Surely it is a combination of two things.

The first thing is the intense familiarity with the opposite sex that being social and sexual animals affords us. For example, most women have one or many of the following – a father, a brother, a male sexual partner, a son, a male friend. Secondly, we have the human aptitude for imagination afforded by the unique quality of self-awareness. This means that, although not all humans do it, it is relatively easy for us to think ourselves into the skins of those with a different skin colour, religion, status, or sex. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but space travel is hugely advanced and regular shuttles have been running for a long time. It is impossible to conceive (pun intended) us without our being constantly in each other’s orbit and being the very opposite to estranged aliens or alienated strangers.

I’m all in favour of the celebratory French dictum “Vive la différence!” For the heterosexual majority, the ever-renewed joy of sexual relation resides in the mystery of the otherness of their partners and mates and the fact that the two sexes complement each other to make the complete human wholeness.

However, this can be taken too far. Men and women are from the same sexually reproducing species, and therefore, in sexual relations with each other biological imperatives often encourage lifelong pair-bonds. As a result, sexual relation is the extant bedrock of most of our society. All of this, in fact, leads to an astonishing intimacy. Our other-gendered partners could not be less alien to us as, in a sense, they are us, being part of our wholeness. One can play here with the various meanings of the verb to know. If a couple know each other in the supremely intimate biblical sense, it is pretty likely that they will also know what makes each other tick. That being the case, how could we not have a very close acquaintance with each other? By definition of what sex is, what in the world do we study, whether we like it or not, more than our sexual partners? We may say different things but, for the most part, we speak the same human languages.

Given such intense and inevitable familiarity, a small effort of imaginative sympathy is bound to give intelligent and sensitive people a very good understanding of what motivates the opposite sex. To return to race or religion, that same imaginative sympathy can be applied in exactly the same way. Before we are black or white we are human – hopefully a statement that is the very opposite of racist. When Shakespeare created Othello or wrote Shylock’s “If you prick us do we not bleed” speech, he accessed a black man’s and a Jew’s consciousness by means of a humanity he held in common with them and perfectly understood their plight. Imagination triumphed and our human sameness, rather than demographic characteristics and differences, was insisted and focused on.

You could argue that such imaginative versatility is one of the very sophisticated qualities that distinguish our civilization, one of the jewels in its crown that lead to our ability to embrace considerable diversity within its aegis. So why is it that that very excellent quality is so under attack? What is to be gained from insisting so vehemently and so angrily that there are impassable obstacles in the way at the borders leading to the foreign lands of the other sex or of other races and religions, or that common humanity is trumped by demographic differences?

Who profits and what is driving those who prefer to propagate the myths of antagonism and alienation over the obvious truths of familiarity and commonality? The attempt to drive a wedge between the sexes, on whose happy relations we literally depend for our lives, might seem like an assassination attempt on the human race.

There is a clue in the very particular way chosen to describe human history here:

The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs 

That, of course, is from the Communist Manifesto. Some people, then and now, profit from sowing discord and division (then it was class; now it is class, gender, race, and religion) because such false accounts of reality, configured entirely in terms of antagonism, exploitation, grievance, and alienation, afford opportunities and excuses to live out angry dramas and gain power based on the unjustified assumption that they are true. So habituated are we now to preferring to see things in terms of such antagonisms that we are almost dependent on the hits of outrage endorphins they give us and find it difficult to imagine weaning ourselves off them and seeing things in any other way. To see if this is true you have only to watch news programmes where virtually every item is routinely and unthinkingly configured in terms of who has been aggrieved by whom and who owes apology and compensation to whom. Division triumphs, and this is why we are no longer allowed to know each other and be friends.

Posted on by Derek Turner

A road by any other name…

Shutterstock
DEREK TURNER takes a Brum road-trip

What’s in a name? A great deal – so Birmingham City Council hopes. In December, as part of a £500m redevelopment of the city’s blighted Perry Barr district, it revealed the names of six new roads to “reflect community and Commonwealth sport values”. Diversity Grove, Equality Road, Destiny Road, Inspire Avenue, Respect Way and Humanity Close will shortly be adorning the Birmingham A-Z, and by 2023 residents will be giving their addresses embarrassedly to Deliveroo drivers.

Potential names were submitted by “the public”, and selected by a panel led by local politicians. According to one member of the panel, there was

…an impressive submission of entries that epitomised not just the core values and culture of Perry Barr but encompassed what the area is all about.

Puzzled Brummies immediately took to social media to wonder why none of these had been chosen.

According to the competition criteria,

Street names should ideally have a local connection, which is historically, geographically or culturally relevant.

Yet these names do not obviously have a particular Birmingham connection, and arguably not much “relevance” anywhere. These are not place-names for posterity, but sermons by street-furniture. Another Birmingham thoroughfare comes irresistibly to mind – Needless Alley – and a Lincolnshire road I noticed recently, Labour-in-Vain Drove.

Insofar as Diversity, Equality, Destiny, Inspire, Respect or Humanity do have real-world application, it may not be one all Brummies can embrace unreservedly. Elevated language frequently has less elevated applications; as Tacitus, quoting a subjugated Briton, noted of his own people, “they make a desert and call it peace”.

But then the Handsworth heroine who ‘thought’ of these names is a forward-thinking missionary, and above such earthly considerations. Social media sleuthing unearths wholly expected attitudes, a humdrum hashtaggery – BLM, Corbyn, DecoloniseBrum (and Yorkshire, while she’s on the subject, which is probably quite often), Israeli “apartheid”, race quotas, Tories hating the poor. She nurses an impressive dislike of James Watts’ business partner Matthew Boulton, judging from the many photos of Boulton-related Birmingham place-names onto which some monomaniac has Blu-Tacked typed ‘recontextualisations’. This is a lady who trends. The comical bathos of her toponymy exposes a hole in the heart of 21st century Brum, and Britain. In the land of the bland, the cliché is king. David Brent’s song Equality Street was a cynical ploy, and a good joke; Equality Road is less desirable.

Names have always been surrounded with superstition. As it says in 1 Samuel, “As his name is, so is he”.  Puritans aimed for Elect-ion by giving children hortatory names – Charity, Faith, Goody, Hope, Praise-God. Their Godless heirs try to be ‘Goodies’ in their turn by naming places after equally insubstantial ideals, chasing contemporary chimeræ with the same guilty enjoyment Ranters devoted to Revelations.

The coiner and adopters of these names clearly hope that, in the words of the 1791 ballad, Song on Obtaining the Birmingham and Worcester Canal Bill, “Twill prejudice stifle, and malice strike dumb”. A Conservative councillor who chortled at the new names as “Woke Way” was chided by the panel’s chair –

It is disappointing that Cllr Morrall does not appear to share these values or respect the views of the selection panel.

Behind these primly freezing words stretches a bleakly unwelcoming England, where human nature is to remade every morning, long-standing landmarks are to be levelled, and taken-for-granted things are to be taken. It is the same world, but a different planet – an alien environment with an atmosphere of noxious gases, and governed by platitudinous correctness. This may not be The Road to Serfdom, but it does resemble a Road to Nowhere. To turn around that property market cliche, “No location, no location, no location”.

Street-naming has historically been a form of culture-cleansing, warfare by other means, as incoming regimes impose their moral and social preferences on the losers. Names like Revolution Road, or 5th October Avenue, have frequently been inflicted on harmless highways, although sometimes only temporarily. Russia has reverted to many pre-1917 names – but the Cold War’s ‘winner’ has been convulsing its cultural cartography in response to radical social shifts, frenziedly naming roads after Martin Luther King, and recently even George Floyd. Is this ‘respect’, as is claimed – or is some less edifying emotion? Perhaps even fear? Renamers often seem not quite to know what they are doing, or why.

Romans Latinised England’s infra dig Iron Age trackways, and Normans Frenchified Saxon nomenclature. Socially-uncertain Georgian and Victorian town councillors sanitised suddenly shocking streets, exemplified by the “Grape Lanes” still seen in British cities – a gloss on “Gropecuntlane”, alluding to the ancient presence of prostitutes. They also sought to sweep away what they saw as irrelevant remembrances of the past – thus the 19th century rash of Gas Streets and Station Road (plus some more pious thoroughfares, often echoing religious revivals, like Fortitude Street or Temperance Road). They delivered a shiny new modernity, lavishly bestowing the names of engineers, explorers, generals, industrialists, missionaries, monarchs and planters on newly set-out streets, valorising the villas of the newly-rich and crowning even workmen’s terraces with classical and imperial motifs. Today’s craze for naming streets after Nelson Mandela, Windrush passengers, or Guru Nanak is a case of the Empire striking back.

Birmingham has always been busily Promethean, and has attracted the worst as well as the best kinds of change. Emma’s Mrs Elton expressed a common prejudice – “One has no great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound”. Two centuries or so on, the pleasant local accent ranks at the bottom of those unofficial but oddly powerful ‘trustworthiness’ surveys that appear spasmodically in the media, which are subliminally influential on those deciding where to site call centres and other industries. This is to ignore utterly the city’s shining other side – geniuses like Joseph Priestley, the kindness of the Cadburys, the civic pride of Joseph Chamberlain, the excellence of the CBSO, the many thousands of hardworking and respectable people.

The municipality has at times been badly served by its agenda-setters and political leaders, and modern Birmingham still bears the scars of the overlong incumbency (1935-1963) of Herbert Manzoni as City Engineer and Surveyor. Manzoni bequeathed Brummies a brutalist, traffic-blasted landscape at colossal cost, and his Bull Ring and Inner Ring Road are now being superseded at even greater expense. Manzoni’s views on Brum’s old buildings betray an absolute absence of imagination –

I have never been very certain as to the value of tangible links with the past… As for future generations, I think they will be better occupied in applying their thoughts and energies to forging ahead, rather than looking backward.

His epic incomprehension is echoed in the ostentatiously ‘socially concerned’ but secretly ruthless language of ‘decolonisation’ and ‘diversification’. These six roads in question may be new roads, but they are built on the thrown-down past. They are really different kinds of demolition, and their impossibly tangled rationales are the ideological equivalents of Perry Barr’s unsavoury neighbour, Spaghetti Junction. The Brave New Birmingham Manzoni and others brought was obsolete even before it was finished – and their “forging ahead” is now our inconvenient and shameful past, for which we must all undergo a painful and undignified procedure of deconstruction, and decolonic irrigation.

As Perry Barr booms and clangs with the din of earth-movers and pile-drivers, so the British imagination is being constantly razed and rebuilt, our inner and outer landscapes a permanent building site. Perhaps one day even the proud Handsworth heroine’s streets will become embarrassments, banal vestiges of a patronising political tradition and a worn-out West no longer ‘relevant’ to the Brum of 50 years hence.  

Posted on by Ken Bell

Brexit blindness

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

Fintan O’Toole, Head of Zeus, 2019

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles

Fintan O’Toole, Head of Zeus, 2020

KEN BELL says a prominent Remainer still doesn’t comprehend Brexit

I have just finished reading Heroic Failure and Three Years In Hell, both by Fintan O’Toole, which is good for you as it means you don’t have to. I was attracted to these volumes by the fact that O’Toole as an Irishman might bring something new to the pro-EU debate, but unfortunately all he does is regurgitate lines British writers have already done to death.

Three Years In Hell is the lesser volume, and the easiest to dismiss, since it is essentially a diary covering dates in the years 2016 to 2019. Most of the entries became moot once Boris Johnson took over, so the entries that deal with Theresa May are little more than space fillers. Much is made in both books of the supposed fact that Brexit was an ‘English revolution’ – an engagingly off-the-wall line the Guardian emits regularly.

In the first place, the Brexit plebiscite was specifically set up as an all-UK vote. That is why Nicola Sturgeon could scamper off to campaign for ‘Remain’ in southern England. Now, you cannot have an all-UK vote and then dismiss its results because you come from an area that ended up on the losing side. Well, you can, if you are Nicola Sturgeon, but that does not mean that the rest of us have to take your whining seriously. That applies to writers as well as politicians, by the way.

Secondly, and this is where the much longer Heroic Failure takes over, to dismiss the Brexit vote as being a purely English victory when proportionally as many Welsh voters supported Brexit is to dismiss the people of Wales with an airy wave of the hand, which is what O’Toole does repeatedly. Not just Wales, either – pretty much anyone who is not part of the Guardian-reading metropolitan bubble is only referred to in passing. Thus, when discussing the makeup of the Brexit vote, he makes great play of the English middle class component and tries to slight the much larger working class element by saying that a majority of them were working class Conservative voters already! That may be the case, but it only leads us to a question of why did people who had historically voted Labour decide to switch parties, something which started to happen in 1997? It may be that Labour has changed and they haven’t. O’Toole does not even raise that theme in his books, being content to dismiss working class Brexiteers as people engaged in an act of self-harm.

A whole chapter of Heroic Failure is devoted to Boris Johnson’s journalistic pieces devoted to mocking the EU, with O’Toole then pointing out the errors and, by implication, the stupidity of the plebs who believed those tales.  This theme is not original to O’Toole, but it is what his readers believe, just as Boris’s believed his lines about prawn-flavoured crisps. Actually, Boris was on fairly solid ground with his EU reports, because even if he got some details wrong, there was a greater truth that he got right. When we joined the European Economic Community we were told that it was a big trading bloc and nothing that it did would ever affect us in any way. It was all about trade, nothing more.

Then we noticed that local council jobsworths were giving grief to market traders who wanted to sell their produce in pounds and ounces. We noticed that our children were coming home from school and talking about heat in Celsius and distance in metres. We battled to keep beer and milk in pints and road markings in miles, but in our hearts we knew that all we had bought was time, and that the jobsworths were just licking their lips at the thought of earning a tasty butty as they forced us to think the European way.

This brings me close to the end, with O’Toole convinced that the Brexit vote was due in no small measure to a desire to recreate the British Empire. It wasn’t, of course. It was a desire by millions of people, many of whom had never voted before and probably haven’t since, to be allowed to live their lives as they wanted under the jurisdiction of politicians who may be dubious characters – but they are our dubious characters and we can get rid of them every four or five years if we are bored with their faces. The EU may not really have instructed its provincial legislatures to enact laws against prawn-flavoured crisps, but the story illustrated a great truth that Brussels did order Westminster around on many issues, and Westminster did duly enact the legislation as instructed.

One day a pro-Brussels writer will investigate the mindset of the British people who voted freedom’s way, and a light will come on in his mind. He can then pass this information on to his readers, and his side will finally start to come to terms with the reasons for their defeat. Alas, Fintan O’Toole is not that writer.

Posted on by Mark Gullick

American piety: meet the new Boss

SHUTTERSTOCK
MARK GULLICK sees wrinkles on the Free World’s senior stuffed-shirt

“I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress”1          

President Biden is already being granted the status of a deity. Roman Emperors nominated themselves as gods. Biden outsources that troublesome administrative business to the media. The New York Times has claimed the incoming administration is “the return of the adults”. One can only, as Bertie Wooster said, shake one’s head and pass on.

Joe Biden shares one political attribute with Donald Trump; his own party neither like him nor do they want him as president.

Just as many Republicans held their noses when Trump attained the presidency in 2016, so too Biden is not wanted by his own supposed fellow partisans, and he may well be a Trojan horse containing Kamala Harris and her people. Biden looks mentally and, frankly, morally frail, a man both bereft of any real intelligence save that of the rat-like, push-button, food-pellet cunning on which the political class rely, and the possible onset of a condition causing him to stumble through sentences in a way that makes George W. Bush look like Stephen Fry.

After yet another dirty and disputed election (they actually go back to JFK), a question really has to be asked of the USA. In a country acknowledged as the world’s superpower, and containing well over 300 million people, if the best of the best are a pugnacious boor and an old man clearly in the early stages of dementia, what does this say about that country? As the psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men asks of a man he is about to kill: if the rule you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?

Biden’s appeal, of course, is that he is not Donald Trump, in much the same way that Trump’s USP was that he was not Hillary Clinton. Trump appalled the political and media class with his 2016 victory, coming as he did from outside the ideological training camps of the establishment, or ‘the swamp’ as Trump’s (few genuine) people dubbed it. The legacy of Trump’s presidency will be more or less meaningless on the ground in 2021, as Biden’s people will have the incoming president repeal anything of worth Trump might have done. Trump has, however, distilled a strain of conservatism from a good many Americans, and his next political move will be watched with interest. The formation of the ‘Patriot Party’ is being more than whispered in the corridors of power, although he may end up just throwing rocks over the perimeter wall of Fortress Biden.

This is no mere metaphor. The implication of Biden’s absurd inauguration, which saw more troops in Washington DC than were at that time serving in Iraq and Afghanistan (and who later had to bed down in a car park) was that some redneck army was about to storm Capitol Hill, and this because – to give the media’s supposedly unbiased tone – a gaggle of trailer-trash, tornado-bait, white supremacist wastrels pranced about in the Senate House and sat in Nancy Pelosi’s chair. The Soviet-style optics of Biden’s swearing-in show what the next four years will be like for America. This could well be the power grab, and all under the false flag of healing division and the supposed social unrest ‘caused’ by Trump and his non-existent far-Right Wehrmacht. Watch for the politicisation of the American military. A lot hangs on it. Biden has already ordered that troops serving in Washington DC have their social media backgrounds checked.

As much of a failure as it seems to genuine conservatives, however, The Trump presidency did have its uses. It served to bring the deep state out of the shadows and into the light. The citizenry, the real people, are aware now that there is something going on backstage, and that something is rotten in the state of Washington DC. And, following from this revelation, it finally became obvious that the political divisions in America are genuinely partisan, although not along party lines. These are a mere mummer’s play, to distract and entertain. The significant divide is between the deep state and its operatives – from Nancy Pelosi through CNN Thunderbirds-puppet Anderson Cooper right down to the most raggle-taggle Antifa street-fighter – and ordinary people who want no part in what is taking shape.

One of the marked effects of Trump’s reign was that one part of the USA got to see just how much the other part hates them. It is axiomatic now that while creatures of the political Right may not agree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it, the Left will defend their right to be hurt by it and to do their utmost to see that you go to jail for saying it. Biden will do nothing to discourage this Leninist cultural mood music during his regime.

The hippies were fond of saying that whoever you vote for, the government always gets in. So, meet the new boss, same as the old boss? Hardly. Obama quietly advised Trump to go easy on the executive orders in 2016 but, it goes without saying, no such restriction applies to the incoming President, at least one of whose strings Obama may be pulling, and Biden had his pen out and was signing executive orders on Day 1 (I wonder which of the White House’s many rooms has a few suits of Obama’s in the wardrobe for advisory stopovers).

Obama had set a record for recent presidents – a president precedent, if you will ­– with five executive orders in his first week, trumping Trump’s four, Clinton’s one, and Bush’s zero although, in all fairness, Bush may not have worked out the click function on his biro. Well before the end of Biden’s first week in the Oval Office, he had signed 21 executive orders, with 12 subsidiaries having more or less the same effect. At the time of writing, like a cricketer enjoying his innings, he has passed the half-century mark to 52. America, welcome to Papal governance, by bull and edict, circa the Middle Ages. My apologies for the lapse into Latin, but if you don’t know what a statement ex cathedra is, you had better learn.

This snow-flurry of immediate legislation has seen Biden lead with race and its subsidiary industries, and the course of his term can be seen with clarity right from what Americans call the ‘get-go.’ Like an expert bridge player, Biden (by which I will always mean those who prop him up politically) has led with the only suit guaranteed to win any game just at the moment: immigration.

Immigrants and their corporate and moralistic lobbyists will see many things to please them in the new White House team, such as including illegal immigrants in the census, protecting the same from deportation, whatever they might do, and, notably, the possibility of a much-touted amnesty. This remains to be seen as it is a bigger ask than the usual tinkering with green cards, and the potential for problems for the regime lie in wait in the form of a possible crime wave. Always remember, it is far easier for an MS-13 gang member to move to America than it is for you to move to Japan. On a related subject, Biden will be ending what the Regime Media called the ‘Muslim ban’. It was no such thing, of course, and again this is not the best time for a wave of immigrants whose COVID status it will cost you money you don’t have to ascertain.

Now, it would seem obvious that in a time of a pandemic governments across the world have been accused of over-reacting to, accelerated immigration would not be a priority. But that axiom would assume a guiding logic, with the result being favourable for the host country. Biden – and the Democrat Party as a whole – has made it clear that the opposite is the intention. Crippling and wounding America has been the ulterior motive of every move that party has made since Obama (very much America’s Tony Blair) came to power and proceeded to double the national debt, champion Islam, play more race card aces than a saloon-bar card-cheat, and target his enemies (like the Tea Party) with a weaponised tax-auditing system.

Along with an influx of Muslim immigrants – which cannot reduce a country’s chance of terrorist attacks – there are already new ‘refugee caravans’ forming from Honduras and elsewhere. If they make it to the promised land, they will drain that land of resources by virtue of being negative social capital. Trump was right, for all his boorishness, when he pointed out that Latin American countries do not always dispatch their best and brightest to America, and also that some of the countries they are understandably escaping from are indeed, as Trump so eloquently portrayed them, “shitholes”.

Culturally, one of the most meaningful things Trump did was cut out the rot of critical race theory – a non-subject invented for political and cultural power and control – from America’s public sector. Despite occasional muttering to placate the UK’s few remaining Conservatives, Boris Johnson would never do that in the UK because it would spook the horses at The Guardian which, for reasons unknown, Johnson believes most British people read rather than an ever-dwindling number of snub-nosed readers who eat artisan bread and have children called Pandora and Oberon. If Russia carpet-bombed the London boroughs of Islington, Hampstead and Crouch End, it would halve the readership of The Guardian. I digress.

Biden will, of course, reinstate the chippy, joke-woke curriculum that has become the fad, because it does him no harm to do so. It must always be remembered that the credo of every modern politician is almost the same as the first line of the Hippocratic Oath. First do no harm. To myself.

To his credit, Biden (or rather that of his people; he is a stuffed shirt) has distanced himself from the ‘defund the police’ crazies, and would do well to steer clear of Black Lives Matter, who will demand more and more in terms of reparations, affirmative action, lighter sentencing for blacks and so on. I don’t imagine Biden can pronounce ‘anarcho-tyranny’, but I hope his team know what it is, and are against it rather than for it.

Biden has an immediate problem here, or his optics people do. The list of pressure groups and plain-old fashioned ‘political activists’ (aka ‘community organisers’. Obama was one) who will be queuing at the White House door for their quid pro quo in return for their bloc vote will be a long one. Biden had better hope that the media sides with him and not with the crazies and zanies of the hard American Left.

In terms of infrastructure, some of the Biden moves will be yawn-inducingly obvious. He has already started by pulling the plug on the K1 pipeline, and halting fracking. This will make America’s spurious ally Saudi Arabia happy as they had no desire to see an energy-independent North America. Biden will set about dismantling Trump’s wall immediately, shedding American jobs but pleasing the open borders brigade. America has just announced it will return to the jamboree of the Paris Climate Accord, which is bound to cost the taxpayer money. Trump’s tax cuts for the middle class will, it goes without saying, be annulled.

Money. As The O’Jays memorably sang, you can do bad, do bad, do bad things with it. Inflation will be the next problem for the new administration, although the media will be working with all hands on deck to claim that any financial problems encountered by the Biden White House was because of the scoundrel, Hitler-tribute-act Trump, memory-holing the fact that the pre-COVID economy was buoyant under the 45th President. No matter how confident the technocrats are, economics continues to elude them. I have never found a definitive provenance for this gemlike phrase, although noted Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis has been suggested:

Astrology became astronomy. Alchemy became chemistry. I wonder what economics will become

America is playing a dangerous game. ‘Quantitative easing’ may sound technocratically efficient and soothing, but it just effectively means printing money, which tends to mean inflation blooming into hyperinflation, as with Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe and Venezuela. In three months in 2020, ostensibly to ease the economy through the somewhat exaggerated melodrama of COVID-19, the Federal Reserve ‘created’ $3 trillion. It does not, of course, literally print money (ordinary people might be able to get hold of actual cash, and that would never do) but buys what are essentially junk bonds and creates an artificial financial ecosystem in a fiscal hothouse many believe is unsustainable.

Add to this the fact that Biden has already effectively signed off another household stimulus check, and that he has a pack of rabid socialists – such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an extraordinary fudge-brained bimbo who inexplicably has slunk in to the corridors of power – baying at him to shake the magic money tree even harder and increase the amount – and even make it a regular, monthly payment, sounding very close to the universal basic income which is in the minds of many on the Left – and the full nature of history’s biggest-ever financial gamble begins to become worryingly clear.

And it won’t just be the money supply that is at issue. It is what happens to the money that already ‘exists’. Cronyism certainly won’t be going anywhere. There is already evidence that Biden wants to reintroduce the so-called ‘Settlement Slush Funds’, an Obama monstrosity whereby corporate offenders pay not the victims of their misdemeanours, nor even the government, but a coterie of Left-wing pressure groups, including as just one example La Raza – ‘the race’ (imagine a Caucasian equivalent!) – the openly racist Latin American hybrid pressure-group of lobbyists and thugs currently attempting a reconquista. This reverses the dedicated and specific – and surely morally upstanding – work against this extraordinary funding hack by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of several Trump hires currently pulling a knife out of his back.

A priority of the Biden administration will be control of the media, particularly online. They don’t need to bother with the MSM who, if they acted any more like cheerleaders for Uncle Joe (where have I heard that name before?), would have ra-ra skirts and pom-poms and a college song. One of the most alarming events of 2020 – an alarming year all round – was the way in which government avoided accusations of censorship, de-platforming and banning various conservative voices by effectively outsourcing the dirty work at the crossroads to big tech in the same way a British bank has its call centre in Delhi. Biden won’t touch any of that. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. (With the economy, on the other hand, it will be more a case of, if it ain’t broke, fix it till it is.)

The Biden administration will be a disaster to everyone save the media, who will be campaigning as though they were the captain of the Titanic saying that the ship hadn’t sunk at all, he was just inventing the submarine. To say that America is becoming a banana republic that can’t even run a free and fair election may be to be unfair to banana republics. After all, they at least have cheap bananas, and what happens next to America is anybody’s guess. May you live in interesting times, said the Chinese sage.

  1. Alexander de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [↩]
Posted on by Ken Bell

A realm apart – why Brexit happened

SHUTTERSTOCK

This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe

Robert Tombs, Allen Lane, 224 pages, £11.22

KEN BELL praises an exceptionally historically-informed Brexit explainer

The small numbers who read the Guardian will no doubt disagree, but the argument over Brexit is now as much a part of history as the Free Trade debate that dominated life in the 19th century. As such, Robert Tombs in This Sovereign Isle has written the first of the many volumes that will dominate the reading lists for student historians. Luckily for the public at large, the book is also eminently accessible to the general reader as well, so I predict that this volume will go through many editions in the years to come.

Although Tombs never falls into the trap of arguing that Brexit was inevitable, he does make the point that for the British, membership of the EU was always a transactional issue and not an emotional one. Thus, when the downside of membership began to tell, there was no emotional appeal that could be made by the other side to try and even the balance. The Remainers lacked an Abraham Lincoln who could deliver a Gettysburg Address, because their side of the debate was just as transactional as that of the Brexiteers. Thus they were forced to rely on an increasingly hysterical version of the ‘Project Fear’ that had helped win the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. The problem in 2016 was that people just didn’t believe the howls, which allowed Boris Johnson to ask mockingly which catastrophe would come first, the world war or the economic collapse.

For the British, membership of the EU was always a transactional issue and not an emotional one

To be fair, as Tombs argues, Brexit was certainly helped over the line by the fact that the UK had managed to stay out of the Euro. Had we joined that common currency, the UK would have been in a similar position to the Scotland of 2014 and it is quite likely that Remain would have won. As it was, the result was close enough to argue that ‘Project Fear’ had a considerable effect on the final tallies.

On the other side of the English Channel, the Euro certainly helps keep difficult countries in line, as the EU demonstrated against the Greeks when it looked as if they were about to strike out for freedom. The mafia type threat: Nice economy you have here – be a shame if something happened to it, may very well be the one issue that keeps such countries voting the right way. Or to carry on voting until they get to the right way according to Brussels. That threat could not be used against the UK, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Gordon Brown for keeping us out of the Euro’s clutches.

Staying in Europe for a moment, Tombs makes the point that most of those countries were desperate to draw a line under their immediate pasts. The original six had the memories of defeat in the Second World War and political systems that had become illegitimate in the eyes of the populations. Later on, the post-Cold War entrants wanted to forget all about their Soviet experiences and similarly had discredited systems that needed to be put out of their misery. The EU for all those countries was in large part a stab at legitimacy and an exercise in forgetting the recent past.

The UK by way of contrast emerged from the two World Wars on the victorious side, with a legitimate political system intact. Thus roughly half the Brexiteers who were asked to give a single reason for their vote, answered that they wanted Britain to govern itself. They were able to say that because they had confidence in the British parliamentary system. It really was as simple as that.

The Remainers never seemed to understand that desire and so they discounted it as a factor. To them the Brexiteers were a caricature that they had created in their own minds and then decided that it represented the reality of their opponents. We were uneducated, old and we hankered after the British Empire, when actually, as Tombs shows, we just wanted to govern ourselves. Nevertheless, that mistake, which came about because Remainers tended to be concentrated in particular parts of the country where they did not come into day to day contact with Brexiteers, led them to overestimate their own numbers, and underestimate the need to get their vote out. As Sasha, Lady Swire, noted in her Diary of an MP’s Wife (https://brazen-head.org/2020/12/16/chumservatives) when her daughter called her as the results came in and complained that “white van man” had stolen her future, the result might have been different had the darling girl got her friends out of bed and chivvied them along to the polling stations.

One area that the author really should have been expanded upon was the 2017-2019 period that I think history will call the Rogue Parliament. If there is any truth to the argument of British exceptionalism, then this period provides a plethora of evidence for it. Many countries would have unpacked the rifles long before the period ended, but the British bided their time, seethed with rage at the antics that went on and waited for an election when they could exact their revenge against the guilty men who were responsible for it all.

The constitutional position, as Tombs makes clear, is that when a government has lost the support of the Commons, it should be voted down by a motion of no-confidence. Once carried, the rascals are thrown out and a new set of rascals elected in their place.

That did not happen during that roguish time, as an alliance of neo-Jacobin MPs, a compliant Speaker who clearly sympathised with them, coupled with a judiciary that seemed willing to flout established precedent all came together to try and force the government to act as they wished. The Fixed Term Parliament Act prevented the government from calling an election, and it looked for many long months as if the situation would continue to resemble the 17th century crisis that led to civil war, only this time as Tombs says, with “tragedy repeated as farce.”

Yet it ended, sooner than many of us expected, when the opposition folded and an election was called. Boris Johnson was given an 80 seat majority on the promise to get Brexit done and the Neo-Jacobins were packed off to a lifetime of obscurity. Readers of the Guardian will continue to whine and the rest of us will just get on with our lives, having rid ourselves on an undemocratic layer of government based in Brussels, which is all we ever wanted to do.