If Boris Johnson fails to get us out of the European Union by October there will be a general election. Brussels has long planned on it; they expect us, like the French, the Dutch and the Irish, to keep voting until we get it right and surrender our sovereignty. Everybody else has, why should the Rosbifs be different ?
Which is why, on Frau Merkel’s orders, Theresa May agreed to the planting of a political landmine, the Irish backstop, in the withdrawal agreement. No government, except perhaps one led by IRA fan Jeremy Corbyn, would agree to the permanent surrender of its sovereignty, still pay taxes as well as handing over an enormous fine to Brussels for having the cheek to try leaving a corrupt industrial cartel.
Four parties will contest the election; Tory, Brexit, Labour and Liberal Democrat. Tory Remainers would rather see the total destruction of the Conservative party than leave it to people who they think of as people who eat with their hands. Farage will field a full list of candidates, Labour will vote for a referendum. Which leaves the Lib Dems.
Although colonies of Lib Dems can be found anywhere white, middle class England still exists, in picture post card scenery where you can see your GP on the same day and it’s safe to go out at night; their chief habitat is leafy Kew and Richmond. There, as my colleague Alistair Millar wrote in the Salisbury Review a little while ago, there are no tower blocks, slums, or ghettos. The only migrants to be seen in Kew are Swiss au pairs wheeling expensive prams, Polish and Chinese language students hurrying to class. Otherwise the streets are filled with comfortable, self assured English who assure you, ’It will never happen here.’
The trouble is that it has already happened in the rest of modern Britain with its non white majority cities, feral teenagers, drug dealers and gangland murders, or the North with its grey, East German landscapes and decaying shopping centres. If there is violence in Kew it is of the respectable Miss Marple variety, a drawing room corpse perhaps, not the open knife fights in the streets just across the Thames in Brentford.
The Lib Dem world is an England of the mind rather than physical place, and one who many Tories will be tempted to vote for at the next election. What choice will they have? Farage reminds them of a pushy double glazing salesman, Corbyn’s housing plans will have promised their homes to illegal immigrants, and Tories Remainers will have smashed their idol Boris.
There is an alternative. If Boris creates a pact with Farage to keep Corbyn out, by not fielding opposing candidates,there is a an excellent chance of returning a parliament which will vote to leave without a deal. The beauty of it is there doesn’t even to have to be a an election. Just the threat of it will bring EU negotiators, like Larkin’s priest and doctor in his poem Days, ‘in their long coats running over the fields.’
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The gang fights – 1950s to 1960s – Teddy Boys then Mods and Rockers. Passers by were not targeted. That started wih football thugs and skinheads now anyone is fair game.
Another relevant point would be that violence in the past does not justify insouciance towards violence in the present. Numberless people died from diseases in the past that we do not permit to flourish now. We have the capacity to minimise crime through surveillance and force that our ancestors didn’t have, and we have a duty to use our modern powers just as we have a duty to use antibiotics.
Maybe I’m just a bit (or even a lot) thick, but Myles Harris’ article seems to me to be sound and fair. He is looking hopefully forwards to a resolution of at least our main problem, not Europe but the EU. So please, following commentators, don’t turn this one into a nonsensical mud slinging match (like on another recent article – “Boris on the side of free speech …”). Incidentally, even if Boris is being more optimistic at the moment than the future prospects might warrant, at least give him the benefit of room to manoeuvre, before condemning him as a liar – and he could hardly be a worse liar than some other “Honorable” and “Right Honorable” Members of the Mother of Parliaments have recently been.
‘It’s not like there weren’t gangland killings or razor gangs wandering around in the 60s is it? But of course they were generally white men so that was all right then.’
Ah, the oldest chestnut in the bag! The above is true of course, but it is the vast scale and demonic nature of today’s carnage that marks the difference. Crimes that were once very rare – almost unheard of, in fact – and confined to a vanishingly tiny cohort of criminals, are now commonplace. The stabbings and shootings, the acid attacks, the bashing of old people occur daily up and down the land, eliciting hardly more than a shrug from the demoralised populace.
The present anarchy is not without its gruesome comedy, especially for us up ‘ere in the far north – Yorkshire. Everyone has heard of Rotherham but there has been almost no reporting of what has happened since – save for an excitable chap getting jailed for trying to fill the gap left by the media. There have been a procession of gangs perpetrating rapes of schoolgirls now numbering (this is a shot in the dark I’m afraid) up to 1000 men in about 22 investigations. Meanwhile, in Birmingham, it is reported (with a straight face) that Muslim parents object to the sexualisation of their children. No one has mentioned Aisha (aged 6 or 9) bedded by a C7th fellow (aged 54) who we understand is revered by said Birmingham demo mobs, and even further afield.
The human mind is an unfathomable mystery.
This is an impressive work of fiction. Sadly some morons will swallow it hook, line and sinker.
It’s not like there weren’t gangland killings or razor gangs wandering around in the 60s is it? But of course they were generally white men so that was all right then.
Your comment, young man, neatly illustrates the thrust of the article.
You seem to have wandered into an adult conversation by mistake
Andrew, I agree that there was just as much crime in Britain’s cities in the 1960s as there is today. Also in the 1860s, 1760s, 1660s, 1560s and so on.
But something new has happened since the 1960s. Some perpetrators of crime nowadays can’t be caught or punished because they have a privileged skin-colour. Many victims of crime nowadays can’t get justice because they don’t belong to the specially privileged groups of official “hate crime” victims. The native population of our country is treated as inferior by the police, the courts and every Home Secretary before (I hope) Priti Patel for no other reason than having a lot of ancestors who were born here.
From before the 1560s to the 1960s, such injustice would have been regarded as utterly wrong. It needs to be put right.
That is the best answer on here. Thankyou sir.