Happy New Year everyone. And as – I think – Che Guevara once said, “Let’s hope it’s a good one. Without any tears…”
Here are some of things I’m hoping we’ll see more of in 2019. Unlikely, I know. But I think it’s important to start the year aiming high.
Democracy
As Churchill said, “it’s the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” But right now, across the world, a lot of angry voters have noticed that increasingly we’re all victims of a democratic deficit. In Britain, for example, we’ve all been taught in our schools that we live in arguably the world’s longest continuous democracy. But look at what happens when we put that impressive-sounding reputation to the test. In June 2016, 17.4 million of us – more than have ever voted for anything in British history – vote in a referendum to Leave the EU. And then what happens?
Yes, that’s right. The very Establishment we voted to overthrow because it had become so remote and arrogant and self-serving decides that we voted the wrong way. It then comes up with all manner of excuses as to why it’s quite impossible to deliver on our vote. So here we are, entering 2019 with the very real prospect of never leaving the European Union – as we were promised we could, if that’s what we wanted – but instead being stuck for ever more in limbo, unable even to take advantage of that juicy trade deal President Trump’s UK ambassador has just promised us we can have if only we do the right thing.
When democracy fails, history shows us, the people choose other options. Rarely are they peaceful or pretty.
Truth
Donald Trump is one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history. I don’t expect every media outlet to acknowledge this obvious fact. But I do find it a bit wearing that not even in the conservative mainstream media can you find anyone – except the odd licensed contrarian – admitting it. Right now, in the UK for example, it is almost impossible to read about Trump’s America from any perspective other than that of Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels, Hillary Clinton or anyone else who believes that the only reason he is president is because the Russians arranged it that way. In other words, almost everything one reads about Donald Trump is #fakenews.
I’m not suggesting that the mighty, wise and funny God Emperor Trump is without flaws. (Though I can’t immediately think of any). What I am saying is that if any of his predecessors – Obama especially – had been held to the same standards by the media establishment, half of them would have been impeached and Obama would now be in Gitmo.
Obviously I wouldn’t expect the left to give Trump a fair hearing. But the conservative mainstream’s failure to do so is inexcusable. What I think I despise most is its decadent frivolity. It bespeaks a fatal misconception that somehow, if Trump goes, we’ll soon be able to find a much better conservative leader of the free world. We really won’t though. His legacy as one of the greats is already pretty assured: the Supreme Court is no longer a redoubt for activist leftists; the Dow – despite the year’s falls – is still 30 percent up; his tax cuts were necessary and long overdue to what should be (but really wasn’t) one of the world’s regulation-lite, low tax, business friendly economies; his retrenchment from neo-con style interventionism – “isolationism” as it is, of course being called by armchair generals – seems to me a very sensible response to decades of pointless quagmire wars from Iraq to Afghanistan; and who else but a ballsy brinksman like the Donald would have negotiated so frankly and firmly with North Korea and China?
All that said, most of the people whose opinions I respect DO get Trump. And we love him all the more when he sends out tweets like this:
Candour
We need more candour in 2019, especially from our political Establishment. Candour is what keeps politicians honest and which guards them from the easy temptation of virtue-signalling. It’s also one of the qualities most respected by the voting public which is why politicians who tell it like it is and then do what they promise – Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italy’s Matteo Salvini – tend to do well in the polls. The mainstream media’s response has been to brand these politicians “populists” or even “far-right” demagogues. But maybe that’s because instead of pursuing the narrow, virtue-signalling agenda of the Davos globalist elite they’re actually saying and doing the stuff real people would actually like their politicians to do. What’s not to like, for example, about Bolsonaro vowing to combat “the Marxist trash that has settled in educational institutions” or Orban banning “gender studies” courses in Hungary’s universities?
There are lots of issues which I wish politicians would be more candid about. One is environmentalism, which has long since ceased to be about protecting their environment, and is now much more of a Mafia-style cartel which uses emotional blackmail and junk science to cream off a significant percentage of global GDP and divert it into the pockets of rent-seeking shysters.
Another is Islam. There is footage doing the rounds, for example, of a Manchester man detained over the New Year after allegedly stabbing three people. Even though in the footage below he can distinctly be heard yelling Allahu Akbar, the UK authorities have persisted in telling us that his motives are unclear. Hmm. Really?
Integrity
Political correctness is rotting our institutions. Let me give you a couple of examples:
The military, which used to be primarily concerned with defence of the realm, appears increasingly to be distracted by marginal – indeed counterproductive – goals like getting more women into frontline infantry units or (see the British Army’s recent recruitment ads) reassuring Muslim recruits that they can still whip out their prayer mats in the middle of an exercise in Snowdonia.
The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Last year, critic Quentin Letts wrote a very brave piece noting that in its eagerness to promote “diversity”, the RSC was sometimes jeopardising the artistic integrity of its productions. Rather than issue an indignant denial, the RSC’s artistic director Greg Doran effectively conceded that he now prized the goal of “social justice” – ie diversity quotas; social engineering – above creative excellence. This attitude is depressingly common in luvvie circles. But what the luvvies don’t appear to appreciate it is that this inflicts great social injustice on the people who matter most: the paying customers who give them employment and finance their increasingly cruddy productions.
What I’d like to see much more of in 2019 is businesses sticking to their knitting: movies seeking to entertain rather than push the woke agenda; crowd-funding outlets like Patreon matching talent with funding sources rather than trying to engage in policing people’s politics; charities like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds actually protecting birds rather than promoting the industry – wind turbines – which slices and dices them.
I call this “integrity.” It’s something almost entirely absent from the regressive left’s agenda.
Optimism
In the run up to the 2016 EU Referendum I was interviewed in a film called Brexit the Movie.
All those of us who took part in it were full of hope about the bright future that lay ahead for Britain outside the shackles of the European Union. Not blind hope but the informed optimism of writers, thinkers, economists who’d considered the issues and who recognised that a free-trading, low-tax, regulation-lite Britain would be considerably better off and a lot freer than one eternally bound by the ever-accumulating regulations of a corrupt, sclerotic, socialistic, anti-democratic superstate run by quasi-fascist technocrats.
Compare and contrast with the case for ongoing EU membership (or a barely-disguised version thereof) advanced by the Remainers: it’s almost entirely negative. “You can’t just leave because of these complex procedural problems which you’re too stupid to understand and which we didn’t mention earlier because we only just invented them,” is – to paraphrase – one of their main arguments. The other main argument is: “basically it will all end so horribly that if you don’t actually end up dead you’ll certainly wish you were.”
Just as Churchill won the Second World War by painting a word-picture of the “sunlit uplands” that awaited us once we prevailed, and just as Trump defeated the witch-criminal Hillary by promising to Make America Great Again, so now we should throw our weight behind those politicians (in the UK ones like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson) who talk the language of freedom, prosperity and bounty, rather than those – most of the rest – who talk as if all our glories lie in the past and can never be regained.
Sexism
My resolution this year is to be much more sexist. As a gentleman I believe it is my sacred duty to do my best to protect the fairer sex from doing stuff for which they’re largely unsuited – grinding their way through STEM-subject courses when they’d have been much happier doing English; risking their lives – and those of their male comrades – as combat infantry; letting themselves run to fat and dying their hair blue, when they’d be SO much more fulfilled if they tried to look pretty. Also, it seems to me that “sexism” is just a made-up leftist term designed to pathologise normal male behaviour. Girls are great but as we’ve known since Genesis they do have a tendency to get out of hand if they’re either not watched carefully or overindulged.
Currently we’re in this political climate – so weird and extreme it’s like living in a particularly dystopian Seventies sci-fi movie – where in the name of some fakenews thing called “equality” one half of the species has been given carte-blanche to trample all over the other half yet still be cosseted as victims and hailed as heroines. This is not a normal state of affairs and cannot continue forever because of the damage it is doing to relations between the sexes, to society generally, and to the survival prospects of our species. I don’t expect it to end this year. But there’s got to be a backlash soon. Consider me a part of it…
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