Monthly Archives: April 2017

Party Politics

Labour’s Slide is Social Nationalism’s Best Chance Yet in England

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In recent weeks, the decline of established or System political parties across the “West”(together with the System mainstream media that supports them) has become common currency among commentators. One does not have have to look at the United States, France etc to see that the narrative has resonance; it is happening in the UK too.

In Britain, a General Election is about to be held, an election which has only one serious contender for the mantle of government. In England, only the Conservative Party has any chance of forming a government. The bookmakers have that chance at something like 1/30 (thirty to one on) for a majority government, whereas Labour is around 40/1 against.

Day by day, new blows hit Labour: dozens of MPs quitting or about to quit; sitting MPs openly disrespecting the party leader, Corbyn; opinion polls showing Labour between 23% and 30% (mostly about 25%) with Conservatives on 40% to 50%; other polls showing how far Labour has fallen in its previous heartlands.

The latest polls from Scotland show the Conservatives on about 30%, second to the still-dominant SNP, but with Labour at perhaps only 18% (on some showings, as low as 15%). In Wales, the figures are equally stark: Con 30%, Labour 20%. We have not seen such in our lifetimes. I was born in 1956 and for most of the years since, until very recently, Labour dominated the heavily-industrialized regions of Scotland and Wales. The heavy industry is now mostly departed, along with the industrial proletariat. The volatile “precariat” which replaced it was still willing to vote Labour in return for social security, free education and the NHS. That bought or traditional loyalty and fealty is now rapidly breaking down. We see not even the possibility, but the probability that the Conservatives will push Labour into second place in Wales and third place in Scotland.

In England, there is, as yet, no “third party” to challenge the two main System parties. UKIP is a dead duck, becoming daily more akin to the Monster Raving Loony Party or one of the smaller faux-nationalist groups such as the English Democrats which are, in effect, offshoots of provincial Conservative Party constituency associations. UKIP built up slowly to a peak in 2014. since when it has steadily deflated. It will win no MPs in the General Election of 2017 and will slowly submerge into oblivion.

The Liberal Democrats are now reprising their role as the catch-all dustbin for homeless votes and voters. They may get a few seats in the upcoming election, perhaps ending with a small bloc of about 15. However, they cannot be seen as a party going places. Their success would be merely to survive at all.

Labour will be reduced to between 100-200 seats, probably around 150 (out of 650) in the 2017 General Election. Boundary changes before 2022 will then reduce Labour further. It is not now unlikely to see Labour as a party which, within a decade, may disappear entirely or dwindle to a few dozen seats. The only demographic which now favours Labour above Conservative is that of non-whites. That seems to be Labour’s future: a smaller niche party supported mainly by non-whites and public sector workers.

Peter Oborne has said that Conservative support is “a mile wide and an inch deep”. Very true. However, its main weapon is that it has no opposition. This is where social nationalism’s chance comes in. By 2022, the world will be very different. African millions will be heading to Europe, Middle East waves of migrants and/or refugees the same. The European Union may by then have collapsed, or collapsed in effect. There may be nuclear war in the Middle East.

In the socio-economic realm, we see that robotics and automation are taking away more jobs. In the future, even before 2030, that might include jobs formerly thought immune: doctors, lawyers etc. The voices asking for Basic Income might become a clamour.

In the above-mentioned conditions, a real social national movement could and, I believe, can triumph in Europe including the UK, more specifically in England. Identity. National/cultural family. Home. Homeland. Opposition both to Jewish Zionism and to Islamism (the socio-political expression of Islam). Grail Europe not Business Europe. Genetics and robotics in service of the people and its future.

free speech, historical, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Stray memories of life at the English Bar, Uncategorized

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Darcus Howe and the MSM: Cultural Musings

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Introduction

The deaths of two people came to notice particularly in the past week. One person had been a significant cultural influence in the Soviet Union, was world-famous, is still oft-quoted. The other was a West Indian immigrant to the UK, best known for his support for black rioters, gangster criminals and others, as well as his assault on British cultural norms.

The first was Yevgeny Yevtushenko [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Yevtushenko] about whom The Guardian newspaper published this by way of obituary: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/02/yevgeny-yevtushenko-obituary.

The second was one Darcus Howe: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darcus_Howe], about whom the Guardian said this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/02/darcus-howe-writer-broadcaster-and-civil-rights-campaigner-dies-aged-74.

It can surely be seen that even the Guardian was unable to make out Darcus Howe as being a greater cultural figure or a more positive one than Yevtushenko.

Comment and Personal Musing

I knew neither of the two recently deceased. I had heard of Yevtushenko vaguely, en passant, as a child and teenager, about the poet who was able to fill stadia in Russia with fans listening to his declamations. Black and white pictures from Life magazine and books. Later, in my twenties, I knew a few people who had been well-acquainted with Yevtushenko in Moscow. I even met his third wife on a couple of occasions during that time and once swam with her and her children (Yevtushenko’s) in a semi-private wooded beach area in some expensive part of Bournemouth, on England’s southern coast.

I never met Yevtushenko himself, though I heard plenty about him. His private life was messy, not always commendable, but that is hardly unusual in the biographies of poets and artistic people generally. One cannot judge a poet primarily by his private life (think of Byron etc). At a distance, he seemed to me to be a Soviet cultural windvane, able to change direction not so much with the prevailing wind but at the moment before it changed. Thus Yevtushenko was seen by some , e.g. Irina Ratushinskaya [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irina_Ratushinskaya] as an “official poet”, with all the moral compromise and material benefits which that term implied; by others, as a brave and anti-official –even a little bit anti-Soviet– quasi-dissident.

Certainly Yevtushenko was willing to argue even with such as Khrushchev on occasion. He was lucky, perhaps, to have been born in 1932 and not 1922 or 1912. He escaped Stalinism to a large extent. Also, he was born and mainly brought up in Siberia, where (ironically) the Stalinist pressure was slightly less. Having said that, he lived in Moscow from age 18, studied there, was never in political trouble. I once heard privately that his mother had been an informant (“secret co-worker”) for the KGB and went weekly to an address not far from the Lubyanka to receive her stipend, signing for it on a list which had all the other names blanked out via a kind of stencil. Perhaps. That would not imply, however, that Yevtushenko himself was implicated with such work (and as I heard it, his mother only went through the motions anyway, giving little but avoiding conflict).

Certainly, Yevtushenko lived rather well by Soviet and indeed Western material standards. Robert Conquest [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest] described that as “well-rewarded collaboration”. By the 1970s, if not before, he had a house or “dacha” at Peredelkino [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peredelkino] with (I believe I was told), 4 or maybe 5 bedrooms –unheard of luxury in the Soviet Union for all but the highest-regarded citizens. He also had an apartment near the Kremlin with no less than (from memory) 14 rooms (a friend of mine was offered the chance to stay there for a week while it was unoccupied; she returned to London gushing about how wonderful it was and how she had not realized that people in the Soviet Union lived like that!); the apartment had been occupied at one time, I was told, by Beria [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria] though Beria did have a mansion in Moscow, perhaps in addition. Yevtushenko also had a house on the Black Sea, situated, I believe, at Yalta.

Yevtushenko is now known for several “soundbites”, in today’s terminology, as much as for his poems: “in Russia, a poet is more than a poet”; and the 1962 lines usually slightly changed to (and improved?) “double and triple the guard on Stalin’s tomb, lest he return….and with him, the past” [http://osaarchivum.org/files/holdings/300/8/3/text/60-4-47.shtml].

Whatever one’s view of Yevtushenko, there is no doubt that he was a significant cultural figure, who personified the changes in the Soviet Union from Stalin’s rule, through the Thaw of the 1950s and early 1960s and on to the retrenchment which led up to Gorbachev, corrupt laxity and then complete collapse. Yevtushenko himself spent his later years living partly in the USA, paid generously by the University of Tulsa (Oklahoma) and the City University of New York (CUNY). A weathervane to the last.

As to Darcus Howe, I know little of him beyond a few items recently read, though I do recall that rather menacing figure on “British” TV from time to time, always promoting the idea that the blacks in the UK had been and were oppressed by white British people and culture.

I cannot imagine that Howe ever contributed much to the UK, though others, in the mainstream media especially, seem to think otherwise. On Twitter, the death of Yevtushenko was like an express train at night, flashing quickly through a country station (Zima Junction?) without stopping. Darcus Howe’s death was trending for far longer. The mainstream TV and radio almost ignored Yevtushenko’s death (and life), while eulogizing about the life of the West Indian rioter and troublemaker. Channel 4, the tax-subsidized “independent” channel, was especially loud in its praises.

Where the msm did notice Yevtushenko’s death, the reports concentrated mainly on his poem “Babi Yar”, about the death of Jews in the Ukraine during the war with Germany. Typical.

The cultural sickness of the West can be seen in the juxtaposition of the two recent deaths and how they have been treated. The time must come when real merit is respected, when people are able to properly discriminate between what is worthwhile and what is not. Most of the existing cultural organizations and faces must be removed.