Tag: Conservative Party

RIP Shane MacGowan

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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. (more…)

Sir Bobby Charlton

1,799 words

Proxy warriors

As I hoped to make clear in my piece last week on the Gaza conflict, Israel vs. Palestine is much like Liverpool vs. Tottenham (if you get the football reference) in that I would like both sides to lose.

However, daggers are drawn and fighting has commenced. It is all rather a long way away, but one of the great things about the modern world is that you don’t have to go out to get things. (more…)

Enoch Powell

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The following is being published in commemoration of Enoch Powell’s 111th birthday today.

Like the Roman, I seem to see “the Tiber foaming with much blood.” — from a speech by Enoch Powell

Enoch was the best parliamentarian I ever knew. — Margaret Thatcher

Enoch Powell was arguably the greatest Prime Minister Great Britain never had. He looms large in the national consciousness largely because of a speech he gave in 1968 at a hotel in his home town of Birmingham to an audience of Conservative Party members. There were no crowds outside attempting to cancel or deplatform him; that would come later. (more…)

Mizzy (right), who has been making TikTok videos about harassing random white people in London in highly illegal ways and then crying “racism” when anyone tries to stop him.

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Bad chemistry

I wrote in Counter-Currents in 2021 about Professor Kathleen Stock, a philosophy lecturer hounded from her post at my alma mater, the University of Sussex, by student activists for her comments and writings on gender identity. She has recently been “deplatformed” by Oxford University, and has now come under attack from a curious source: the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

You might assume these eggheads would be busy publishing peer-reviewed papers on enzymes, salts, and various reactions in test-tubes, but their remit seems considerably wider in these heady days of woke kangaroo courts. The RSC’s new journal, Digital Discovery, has as its mission statement to publish “theoretical and experimental research at the intersection of chemistry, material science and biotechnology.” (more…)

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Ian Kershaw
Personality and Power:­­­­ Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe
New York: Penguin Press, 2022

This book caught my eye when it came out a few months ago because its format reminded me of Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right, which I reviewed here some seasons back. That is to say, a collection of short critical biographies of a dozen or so worthies, assembled together on a common theme. (more…)

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Advanced robotics

Brassneck was a cartoon robot schoolboy from a popular comic I read as a young lad in the 1960s, The Dandy. Older British readers will also remember this comic’s great rival, The Beano, and Dennis the Menace (which was very different from the American Dennis). (more…)

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The Queen is dead, boys,
And it’s so lonely on a limb.
— The Smiths (more…)

Former Downing Street Press Secretary Alastair Campbell, who still imagines that people like him control what the masses think.

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The late comedian Bill Hicks had a skit in which he described the average Joe turning on the TV for the news and getting: Death! Famine! War! Disease! Aaaaargh! The guy turns off the TV and looks out of his back window to hear quiet, apart from the gentle drone of crickets. He thinks, “Where the hell is all this going down?” Another comedic Bill, Bill Burr, updated this observation recently on YouTube political channel Triggernometry. On Twitter, he said, everyone is screaming at one another. Then you go outside for a walk and everyone is smiling at each other. (more…)

Britain’s new “conservative” Prime Minister, Liz Truss (right), has just appointed the first cabinet in British history including no white men.

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In a 2009 essay for the for the London Evening Standard titled “Don’t listen to the whingers — London needs immigrants,” former Tony Blair speechwriter and Labour Party advisor Andrew Neather famously likened his government’s immigration policy to a dog owner rubbing the disobedient pooch’s nose in shit:

. . . mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural. (more…)

A self-portrait by Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), whose work has been deemed too beautiful by the National Museum of Wales such that cardboard boxes have now been placed in front of it.

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Royal Air Farce

As seasoned military historians will know, many of Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots during the Second World War were Polish. Today, however, those plucky air aces from a country that historically has been more warred against than warlike (and so know how to defend like furies) would find no place for them in the RAF, and they would be unlikely to get their wings not because of any aerial incapacity, but because they are the wrong color. (more…)

Kemi Badenoch, ironically the only true conservative in the lot.

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After Boris Johnson’s fall from grace, or whatever state you would describe his ineffective premiership as, the runners and riders for the inevitable Conservative leadership election immediately started jostling in the stalls. Almost all were well-known names in Westminster and beyond. Favorite — and extraordinarily wealthy after marrying into an Indian industrial family — Rishi Sunak had been Chancellor of the Exchequer; Priti Patel was, apparently, Home Secretary; and the weaselly Jeremy Hunt slunk around as Health Secretary. (more…)

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So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed
It would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed.
— Leonard Cohen, “Death of a Ladies’ Man”

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson could have walked straight out of a novel by Evelyn Waugh. His Englishness is close to caricature. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, Johnson followed a classic rite of passage for the British ruling class. (more…)

Canadian conservatives demonstrating their priorities.

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Canadian conservatives are a sad lot. They live in one of the most pozzed countries in the West — if not the most pozzed. Canada’s rulers aim to set new records for immigration every year, leading to the Great White North now accepting over 430,000 immigrants on an annual basis. (more…)