Our children and grandchildren will put Jeremy Corbyn into Number Ten.
They will do this because, while their parents and grandparents belong to the nasty generation, the youngsters are the nice generation. They believe Corbyn. He stands for a future that will be kind, gentle and generous – in a word a nice future.
As a paid up nasty, I tell them that Corbyn is an extreme socialist demagogue, that socialism has never worked anywhere and that, when it is practised thoroughly as Corbyn intends, it will impoverish the people and compromise their liberty.
The nice young people tell me I’m only saying this because I’m nasty.
They complain about “austerity” and “the cuts.” Nastily, but truly, I tell them there have been no cuts and the country is spending and borrowing more billions now than it was five years ago, more in fact than it has ever spent and borrowed
The youngsters say that such truths as this are simply part of being nasty and that we ought to look for alternative truths, their truths, nice truths.
I say, “But that just means you’ve lost the meaning of “truth.”
“You’re just being bigoted and nasty again, granddad!”
I tell them that Corbyn is an IRA sympathiser, that he invited members of this terrorist group to the House of Commons only weeks after they tried to murder the British cabinet in the Brighton bombing. I tell them that Corbyn refers to the terrorists Hamas and Hezbollah as “our friends.”
They tell me not to say such nasty things.
I tell them that Corbyn is an admirer of Chavez and Maduro, that he agrees with their economic, social and political policies and he wants to see more of their sort of socialism in our country. I add that people in Venezuela are scavenging dustbins for food, that the country is the most murderous in the world, that there is imprisonment without trial, torture and the kidnapping and illegal incarceration of the political opposition.
The youngsters reply, “Why do you say such nasty things?”
“Because they happen to be true.”
“True for you, perhaps, granddad, but not for us. For your truth is different from our truth. Because you are nasty but we are nice.”
Then the youngsters recite all the nice things which are now features of their lives but were not available in the nasty old days, granddad’s days: “We have safe spaces in all our universities, so we’re not exposed to the ideas and opinions of speakers who offend us.”
I say, “But I thought the purpose of a university was to teach critical thinking – a place where ideas of all sorts are exposed and examined: in other words, an intelligent space which upholds the principle of free speech.”
They rebuke me: ”But we don’t want the sort of free speech which says all these offensive and nasty things!”
“Why do you want to pull down statues of the celebrated men and women of the nation’s past?”
“Because they had nasty ideas. They were empire-builders. They weren’t feminists. They didn’t support LGBT equality.”
“So you want to expunge their memory from the public realm, to make them non-persons as the Soviets used to do to those who had fallen from favour. You want to rewrite history?”
“Yes, because some of this history we find offensive and nasty, and we don’t want to have to hear about it.”
“But those who don’t understand the past will be compelled to repeat its mistakes.”
“No we won’t: because they were nasty people and we are nice people.”
“Why did you vote – two or three times in some cases – to remain in the EU and be governed by an unelected commissariat over which you have no democratic control?”
“Because the EU is such a nice idea.”
Finally, it’s the turn of the nice young people to ask me a question: “Why do you think we believe all the nice things we do believe?”
I am obliged to admit: “It’s my fault, that and the fault of my generation. For fifty years we have ensured that youngsters become sentimentalised and infantilised through a lousy system of state education. Consequently you can’t think straight and so you’re at the mercy of all the propagandising and social engineering of Britain’s institutional leftism. I admit I am of the nasty generation and quite the nastiest thing our generation ever did was to inflict this appalling state schooling on all you nice young people.”
On Thursday we might well get an indication of just how awful our gold standard education has become. The A level results will be out and the new post-Gove marking system implemented…
And not to be too sententious here but the plot of the story is laid out in some detail through books 8 & 9 of Plato’s Republic: from commercial man (and his honour-loving fathers) comes the generation of happy democrats, comes then the generation of diseased democrats, and the next click is: Authority.
What will a stiff drink of reality do to inelastic and fantasy-guided minds? (Everyone knows it is coming; la verite, as someone once said, se venge.) It is likely to depress many, and to anger many, but to cure very few. Pain may cause improvements where there are already inner resources / moral concepts, but pain is unlikely to create such concepts where none exist. It will track not like a circle (where pain creates new virtue) but like a spiral tending towards a centre called annihilation.
Yes, Tim, perhaps ‘the only hope is with the proles’ – but the socialist ploy of stupefying them with benefits and perverse entertainments seems to be working.
If only, if only. The ‘nice’ children are largely from middle class families and received a private education. Working class kids, in my experience, have little time for PC rubbish.
Yes, I agree in part, especially those whose “heritage” is white and working class – like their parents they are largely “conservative” in outlook. But it’s their half-wit middle class – usually female – teachers who are the carriers of this shocking deformity…
At this point I don’t see much alternative other than letting Corbyn drive the country into further ruin and hope that enough people come to their senses to apply the brakes come the next election.
Even if that were to happen, it will be a cycle repeated ad nauseum as it currently stands. We aren’t even three decades removed from the end of Thatcher’s tenure.
Not even taking into account the myriad failed socialist experiments the world over, the utter debacle of the Wilson and Callaghan governments should be warning enough to everyone. How many people in England nowadays (particularly those “youngsters”) would even have a spark of recognition at the mention of their names?
A long-term solution to the deeply-entrenched malaise in England is beyond me, but I would imagine that it would first require someone of stature articulating an actual (small “C”) conservative message to the people of this country, and showing them that their is another, better, way.