The Union Jackal
November 2023

RIP Shane MacGowan

2,868 words

Tice work if you can get it

Scanning the European political landscape from their north London homes, the British media are clutching one another and shrieking like minor characters in a 1950s sci-fi movie when the aliens show up. Europe’s voters, albeit at glacial speed, are finally realizing that it is not just the sovereignty and culture of their nations which are under threat via governmentally-endorsed porous borders, but their personal safety and that of their families. And they are voting against that threat, to the appalled horror of the British media class. “What if that happened here?” they wail.

At present, however, the United Kingdom does not seem to have any prospect of electing a nationalist premier such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Georgia Meloni, or, as of last week, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the dull name that country prefers over the prettily evocative “Holland.” Where do you live? The Netherlands. Wow. Sounds fun.

Could Britain replicate this “shift to the Right,” as the media call it, as though it were a dance move? The Conservative Party has now been in power for 13 years, and even political dullards are beginning to suspect that they are the equivalent to America’s “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. Is there a political cavalry riding to the rescue?

With the British media united in the opinion that both the Labour and Conservative parties — two sides of the same counterfeit coin — are riven with infighting, a credible third political party and leader are clearly called for. The Social Democrat Party exists, and until recently had been recognized in the polls as a political tertium quid, but they resemble the instructions on a shampoo bottle in that there seems little point to them. Now, there is a stranger in town. Is Richard Tice, leader of Britain’s Reform UK party, the savior Britain so desperately needs? Cometh the hour, cometh the man?

The problem is that potential British Right-wing voters, comprised of disgruntled conservatives mingling with new victims of immigration, don’t yet know if Tice is the real deal. Does this roguish maverick represent Conservatism redux — he was a long-time member of the party — or is he just a multi-millionaire chancer bored with the property business in which he made his money, and looking for some fresh action in the political arena — an accusation also levelled at Donald Trump?

At first glance, Tice looks an establishment thoroughbred. Very rich, privately educated, and already blooded in the field of political battle, he was Nigel Farage’s aide de camp in the Brexit Party, the forerunner to Reform UK. He is also juiced in to the “Westminster bubble” (as the British governmental-media complex is known) by virtue of his journalist partner, Isabel Oakeshott, who I wrote about at Counter-Currents here.

Despite Tice’s accession to Farage’s abdicated throne, however, his former boss is still with him in spirit, like Banquo at Macbeth’s table. The political problem Tice faces is not just convincing the electorate, media hostility, and deep-state interference. Another hurdle is currently in the Australian jungle, where Farage is taking part in a TV reality show called I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. Whether the United States hosts this show I don’t know, but the British are obsessed with this type of hokum.

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Farage is still seen as the man who won the Brexit referendum in 2016, which enraged both Left and Right because it was a thinly-veiled vote on immigration. This angered the Left because it meant the presence of racism, as though they don’t see that everywhere just as Luther saw the Devil everywhere, and it piqued the Right because, despite winning the vote, immigration accelerated. But Farage is still a king who could, if he so wished, choose the time of his return, which unnerves Tice.

Farage is hinting at a return to front-line politics, and is actually one of the best-known politicians in Britain. He is also well-versed in pragmatics, having been a City boy used to the play of market forces and opinion. He would already know that there is no point in running on a ticket of saving the economy because economies can’t be saved. If economies malfunction, it is best to think of saving yourself. The pretense that politicians can somehow “save” the economy is just that: a pretense. They must know that the wheels of economic decline were set in motion when they first fired up the printing presses at the Royal Mint to print money which did not, in the important sense, exist. No, Farage has stuck to his guns and kept immigration central to his political program. Tice has very much followed suit.

Tice is currently involved in rather a public spat with Lee Anderson, Chairman of the Conservative Party, over allegations of financial incentives offered for certain favorable political decisions. Whoever heard of such a thing? Tice will learn quickly that politics is a dirty fight. With no disrespect intended to Mr. Anderson, a clubbable thug and apparently genuinely conservative, Nietzsche was on form when he noted that he who fights with monsters should look to it that he does not himself become a monster.

The main problem for the political Right in Britain — such as it is — could well be that Reform UK would divide the Conservative vote in next year’s general election, thereby handing the keys to 10 Downing Street to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and his gaggle of autists, socialists, and diversity hires. I still maintain that this may not be a bad thing because, if the British people think the economy is gasping and wheezing now, four years of proper socialism would be the pillow over the face. Sometimes, as that man said in ‘Nam, you have to destroy the village to save it.

Whether Tice will be positioned well enough politically after a Depression-style collapse (should one take place) to gain power will be one of the most interesting aspects of a general election which promises to be duller than ditchwater, and certainly not as riveting as that taking place across the herring-pond in the US.

Breakfast of champions

It’s difficult to get arrested during a demonstration in London, provided you are on the “right side of history.”™ Tommy Robinson, however, makes it look easy, because it has been decided he is not on that sainted side, and he was nicked prior to London’s anti-Semitism march on November 26. He was collared while enjoying what should be the inalienable human right of every Englishman: his breakfast. Trash London during Black Lives Matter riots or pro-Palestine tear-ups, and the police can be relied on to hold your latte. Turn up to do your job as a journalist and you won’t even get to eat your fried eggs. Oh, and you get tear-gassed in the eyes.

Robinson — not a stranger to these pages — was preparing to join London’s march against anti-Semitism for some vox pop when the police turned up to interrupt his great English fry-up. He wasn’t using the Palestinian flag as a napkin or cutting his toast into swastika shapes; that was not what brought him to the attention of police officers. A dispersal order under section 35 of the Anti-Social Behavior Crime and Policing Act was invoked, and Robinson’s instruction to leave the area was due to the fact that he might inspire “fear and distress” in others. Robinson is pugnacious but not a large man, and the threat he represents is ideological rather than physical.

Robinson can be seen being instructed to leave the area, and being arrested, here. The very end of this video, featuring Robinson in a police van, clearly shows that he has had some powerful agent sprayed in his eyes, variously described as tear gas or pepper spray. I notice that whenever Tommy Robinson is manhandled by the police, they always use tall coppers, just as they did at the funeral of the Kray twins’ mother, handcuffing Ronnie Kray between two big policemen to demean him.

The British deep state is making no secret of its working practices now. What Americans would have every right to term “Jan 6 bias,” whereby your treatment by the police and judicial system will be radically different dependent on your political affiliations, will only increase in Blighty. The last Home Secretary — the UK government changes them as regularly as bed-linen — was Suella Braverman, and she wrote a piece in The Times in which she referred to “two-tier policing.” Way to get fired, Suella. She was.

It is important to understand what is going on during this conversation between a breakfasting Robinson and representatives of the London Metropolitan Police Force, popularly known as “the Met.” This is a force whose members knelt before blacks during the London BLM demonstrations, a force whose leadership claimed that for pro-Palestinian demonstrators to clamber around on war memorials was not only not illegal, but for the police to arrest them may well break the law. The British police are deep-state shills. Here, as Robinson astutely points out, they appear to believe that their taxpayer-funded role is to audition journalists to assess their capabilities in the field of reportage. The mainstream media will be happy, as they really do not approve of the unaccredited upstart media class that rose to prominence with the advance in mobile-phone technology, allowing reportage from anyone, anywhere, at any time.

It is the practice of journalism, and the perception of what that practice should be by the ruling class, that is at issue here. The establishment much preferred things pre-Internet, when the only thing they had to fear was making mistakes too crass for even accredited journalists to miss. Now, op-ed has spread like Japanese knot-weed, and anyone can do it. Accreditation comes in the box when you buy a phone.

Robinson is a man of conviction — and, increasingly, convictions — who has never backed down. He has a family, has been through the thick of lawfare, and is a vestigial symbol of the British working class — the peasantry which the British media, essentially what nineteenth-century French novels would have called bourgeois, don’t care much for. He has since been barred from London until a court appearance in January, where all efforts will be made to send him to jail, and where all efforts will be made to have him killed. Britain may be about to find out if its version of the deep state has taken yet another step towards becoming the Soviet Union 2.0.

Doctor WTF?

The British television series Doctor Who ran its first episode on a challenging day for media attention, it being the day after John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, either by one of the greatest pots in sniper history or the first flexing of America’s deep-state muscles. It has just celebrated its 60th birthday.

The program was a marvelous conceit, mixing simple but literate narrative with the existential freedom science fiction grants, and became a national institution. Sadly, Doctor Who today belongs in a mental institution. Mind you, the series was always what the British call “a bit mental,” and as my personal favorite, the second Doctor, played by Patrick Troughton, shows here. He demonstrated it again during an episode which I think should be watched simply because I would watch any episode of anything if it were called “The Tomb of the Cybermen.” Troughton set the tone for the Doctor’s eccentricity, although that has apparently now been replaced with the same grim, earnest, woke lectures which infest all television — so I gather — from newsroom to advertising to soap opera.

In the original Doctor Who, which ran from 1963 to 1989 and then had a lengthy hiatus before being revived in 2005, an old and cantankerous gentleman who lived in a police callbox turns out to in fact a Time Lord who is able to shift between eras, in the callbox, and affect the course of history for the better. Oh, and the callbox was actually a TARDIS — an acronym for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, a very Kantian mode of travel — and far larger on the inside than it appeared outside. Plus, the Doctor had two hearts, as Time Lords do. At the time, it was like Mark Twain on acid. If you have absolutely no idea what I am banging on about, or are a Doctor Who fan who only knows the later years, this is a charming clip showing both William Hartnell as the first Doctor and the original TARDIS in action.

The secret to the series’ longevity is the idea that, every time the Doctor dies — which coincides with whenever the actor playing him decides to leave the role — he “regenerates,” as all Time Lords do, and morphs into a new body.  This conceit was a stroke of TV scriptwriting genius, and the actors themselves may have been pleased not to become too typecast. Many of the subsequent actors who played the part are still best known for their residency of the TARDIS.

Should you be a fan of the Doctor’s previous incarnations but are unaware of the latest one, I reluctantly offer you this. I won’t spoil things, but let’s just say that the Doctor is now a gay black man, and on the return of an older, whiter Doctor, that Time Lord is lectured on personal pronouns by an alien and nagged at by feminists over the lack of female Time Lords, as he “presents as a male Time Lord.” What is happening in the minds of the indoctrinated and televisually oriented young today is far stranger than any time-travelling eccentric at war with the Daleks.

The original theme music still sounds extraordinary, and terrified children in the 1960s. It sounds like Joy Division jamming with Kraftwerk, and was performed by the BBC Radiophonics Workshop. It really did scare children, my little brothers included. When a Doctor Who exhibition was mounted in London many years ago, it was called Behind the Sofa . . . because this is where children tended to hide when they heard the theme.

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I won’t say that the special effects were laughable, because they were extraordinary in the 1960s. and the perfection of CGI spoiled movies for kids. How many youngsters do you imagine stare in disbelief at the latest CGI movie? It’s just what happens now in movies; it’s been normalized, like a cowboy riding into town in a Western. It’s not the special effects that have spoiled this much-loved spot of English craziness, though. As ever, ideology has taken over from entertainment, and is a greater foe than that cruel race of Daleks, with its determination to exterminate its enemies. With the woke platoons, come to think of it, the personality types are very similar.

So, it seems that yet another wonderful childhood experience has been soured by the march of the martinets, and I wonder what they can ruin next. Might I suggest that The Prisoner is remade using a fat, black lesbian as Number 6? I may have a future in creative media . . .

RIP Shane MacGowan

The Pogues were a London-Irish band who came out of the 1970s playing a racketty hybrid of traditional Irish music and punk rock. Their original name, Pogue Mahone, was deemed a branding mistake, meaning as it does “Kiss my arse” in Gaelic, and so The Pogues were born. Their singer, Shane MacGowan, was a drunken roustabout who matured into a brilliant lyricist, blending Irish mythology with the spit and sawdust of the modern world as viewed through the bottom of his glass. Their music was also, as they used to say, critically acclaimed, and was far more than just Paddy tearing it up.

The band’s Christmas hit “Fairytale of New York” was their commercial high point, and the band gradually frayed at the edges, with MacGowan being fired by the other members in 1991 when his alcoholism and drug use became too much even for the London Irish.

Live, The Pogues were riotous, crashing through songs: a punk band, but with penny whistles and banjos. The drummer stood up to play his kit, which consisted of a snare drum and a floor tom. I saw them twice, and after one gig woke up under a road bridge with the toe-end of my right boot missing.

So, farewell Shane MacGowan, who finally succumbed at 65 to the ravages of hard, Irish drinking, and the rather more cosmopolitan fate of the drug addict. I am not suggesting that the auld fella will be going downstairs to the hothouse for all eternity, but I will leave you with why The Pogues were such a crack on the head with a shillelagh when they started: a track from their first album, entitled Boys from the County Hell.

RIP Shane MacGowan.

May the road, as the Irish say, rise with you.

The Union Jackal.