Our modern rule wears shiny dark hued suits, 
Open necked and shirt sleeves rolled,
Showing us he walks in our boots,
Covering his hatred of those polled.
Slick and smooth his speech is art.
To say such much but give no meat,
As in his chest there beats no heart,
No feeling for our English street.
Another crow, he circles over
Picking bones that were once a nation.
A fresh blank slate he pushes closer,
Tradition crumbles to his elation.
A false choice we’re given, a fall forbode,
By kicking consequences down the road.
Our future rule wears St George’s rose,
In his steps England’s last hope grows. 

We have stories of the 13 treasures of Britain - cauldrons which never ran dry, flaming swords that knew the just from the unjust, magical chariots and such items. Some of these items appear in multiple nation's legends and a good number - such as turning water to wine, or feeding thousands - map onto Christ’s miracles. This similarity doesn’t make anything less true, but more so. Stories and miracles can repeat, and the people watching them today are essentially the same as the people who saw them 20 or 30 centuries ago.

An Iron age chariot burial, at Pocklington in Yorkshire.

I have written a little previously about how Arthur’s Excalibur exists, and I firmly believe it was a bronze age sword. Only those were pulled from stone moulds, and it was during that era that swords were cast into lakes as some kind of sacrifice. The magic of bronze means these artifacts are still in excellent shape in this epoch of plastic and silicon. It’s one aspect of the story which goes back to at least the ice age, the modern survivor is throwing coins in a fountain or putting a padlock on a bridge2.

Last summer I visited the White Cattle in Northumbria, tied to legends both here and in Ireland. These cattle, although they are almost undoubtably not some kind of primeval lineage (but a medieval one), still have an important role to play. Indeed, so important is their role that a secondary, back up, herd of them was created out of the way in Scotland to ensure the continued existence of these mythic creatures despite what modernity may throw at them.

They are not the only legendary creatures with contingency plans - the ravens at the Tower of London had their own plans for survival and replacement during World War 2 (and no doubt through to today). This is due to an old belief that if the ravens ever leave the tower, then the Crown and England will fall3. Something of a tourist attraction today, the birds are coddled and have their own warder. I believe their wings are trimmed to prevent them flying to far away. The legend may have been embellished and refined by Victorian folklorists, but the embers of the story come back to Bran the Blessed, a king in British/Welsh4 mythology whose very name means raven in modern Welsh.

It’s not only living creatures which are tied to the soul of Britain, but trees too. We might not have as many giant, ancient and named trees as other countries but we do have some of great importance. The tree at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall, made famous by Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood5, is one such tree.

A few years ago two men, for no logical reason whatsoever, cut down the tree at Sycamore Gap which caused a lot of upset and was a kind of spiritual crime. No genuine explanation for the vandalism has ever been offered6, and the anguish it caused has shown just what an important symbol and focus the tree was. Even if it was less than 200 years old, and of an imported species, its location and beauty let the English graft meaning onto it. In what can only hoped to be a poetic turn, the stump is still there and has shown green shoots as if it were coppiced.

During lockdown an Englishman marched the length of England to plant the ancient flag of Arthur’s kingdom there, which was intended to awaken something deep and hidden within England and to rescue the land from its decline and slumber.

Wake sleeping king of Britain's lands!
For our hills and hollows, rivers and sands.
Your spine of stone and eyes of fire,
Needed to turn us from our pyre.
Nation sunk and wilfully sundered,
Silent are dales where knights once thundered.
The return of our once and future king,
We await so green hope-shoots may spring

You don't have to be psychic to see our current leader Starmer resigning. He's never had much personal support and is now actively disliked by the MPs in his own party.

This is not the same idiot twice, but two different muppets.

Starmer’s a particularly strong example of the kind of void in government at the moment - he’s a a former human rights lawyer turned head of prosecutions (i.e. letting undesirables off, persecuting the English). He got such a large public pension from that job that it was created by an act of parliament.

His replacement will either by the guy who was just parachuted into a safe seat, Burnham the last mayor of Manchester (pro-EU, slightly more charisma, all the exact policies you’d not want) or Wes Streeting (failed health minister, zero charisma, probably not a total zero as a bureaucrat) or Angela Rayner (woman, muppet, literally cocks up everything she touches.)

Someone always takes the job. Look at the last Conservative government who ran out of credible candidates after they got rid of Boris.

So there’s going to be an election?

It’s unlikely, despite their unpopularity and generally shiteness, that Labour will call any sort of election as why would they? They have no need to until summer 2029 and are almost certainly going to do worse than their current status. They currently hold 63% of the seats, with likely allies holding another 12-14%. Problem is that this is off the back of just 33% of the total vote and Reform got 0.8% of seats with 14% of the vote.

The only likely election scenario is one where left wing parties make agreements and try to strike before Reform and Restore either ally or organise. Even then it would leave Labour with less power. Unless more people are engaged we’re looking at a split of something like 55:45 between left and right, where both traditional main parties crowd around the centre.

This Labour government has been quite right wing on many issues (screwing the NHS, military spending, benefits) it’s main issues are their perennial tax & spend nature (killed economic growth with payroll taxes) and their hatred of English people (likely shared by all parties except Restore).

Why do so many PMs resign?

Resignation, retirement or defeat are the normal ways out.

Cameron (Conservative) resigned because he wanted a referendum on Brexit, but for the vote to be remain. His goal was cutting off opposition to the right. A relatively democratic resignation.

Teresa May (Con) basically took a poisoned chalice as a compromise candidate that was acceptable to the pro-Brexit Tories (20% of MPs, 80% of party members) and the other side. Not a bad politician, but a compromise candidate never endures.

Boris Johnson (Con) was next. Total opportunism. He thought Covid was his Churchill moment and turned from being classically liberal to much more statist. Stabbed in the back by his party as they all worried about his personal popularity.

Liz Truss (Con) only lasted 50 days. Made the mistake of thinking the PM could take decisions, so the money people and the press destroyed her. Popular with party members but not MPs.

Rishi Sunak (Con) wet and Indian. Basically took the job as there was nobody else left who could unite enough of the party cliques.

The changes are largely down to the different system here. There’s no direct vote for PM, it’s a tradition they’re leader of the largest party but this is not a legal requirement. The closest equivalent is probably the Speaker in the US

It’s largely been turned into a matter for MPs, not party members. Party members are way less globalist and centrist, you only join a party as a grass roots member if you’re fairly passionate. The Conservative party essentially changed their rules to reduce or remove the influence of members as they didn’t want actual Conservatives. The Labour party is more messed up, as major trade unions vote in the process as well.

The 2 main parties are big, unwieldy and failing. They’ve spent 30 years triangulating over exactly the same policies as each other and now they have opposition on the left (Greens, Muslim independents) and the right (Restore, Reform)

This whole process makes little real difference to government legitimacy. It’s infighting between party cliques and jockeying for someone who’s not ballot box poison.

The bottom line is there’s been a total collapse in the talent going in to politics since around 2000. This same phenomenon exists pretty much everywhere.

Essentially we have an increasingly ineffective and narrow band of politics inside the government and little option to change it - voting for change doesn’t do much. The part that Americans miss is scale. The local level isn’t as big a deal here as we have 650 MPs in a country in a country of 68 million. They represent ten times fewer people each than your representatives do.

Why does your system make no sense?

It’s a series of compromises going back 10+ centuries.

Broadly speaking, Westminster systems are adversarial and based on a government and opposition. They are not designed for multi-polar politics. You can see this as they literally sit in 2 banks and not in a a kind of amphitheatre style semi-circle.

English (and by extension a lot of British) history has been a series of crises, fights, wars, treaties and rewards which have - on a long timeline - served to extend the power of House of Lords (until about 1700) and then House of Commons at the expense of the King.

There’s no real written constitution, and anyone who brings one up (or any other constitutional change) is pretty much guaranteed to be evil. Constitutions are either imposed by successful rebels, or the tool of oppressive governments - and we’re fresh out of option one.

Most of the underpinnings of the system pre-date political parties (proto-versions exist in the 17th century). So you don’t vote for a party or leader but a local representative. The King then invites someone to form a government, and that person then tries to get enough support to get laws passed. Parties are members clubs, and can and do kick people out.

It’s worth remembering that Britain, with the exception of the second half of WW1 and WW2, was a light-touch government with a very minimal state apparatus. Until Tony Blair. He’s responsible for most of the modern system’s problems, most modern problems and pretty much anything that’s awful today. The only major evil he didn’t do is selling government assets off. Blair is literally responsible for most change in how the government acts and how it interacts with people.

You can tell when massive centralisation started (Blair again) - at the same time the national government started promoting decentralised regional governments (Scottish parliament, Welsh whatever). Governing the whole UK (and empire before) has always been a bit of a balancing act but broadly worked as long as nobody looked too closely and you had a reliable old-boys network.

This does not include Northern Ireland, as their system is different, weird and largely irrelevant to the rest of British politics.

So what’s going to happen?

We’re going to change the actors, but not the play. Decline will continue until an abrupt inflection point. It can be hoped that there’s still an England left to restore then.

The biting cold can sap your will,

But inside you warmth will burn,

As to you forebears land you do return.

A chain of generations long unbroken,

With its deep and sacred bond awoken.

You are the man from the northern land,

On the shoulders of the ancestors you stand.

With spirit and line that will never end,

Enduring all that the fates may send.

Beyond the forests under ice blue sky,

Beneath the God of the North's watchful eye.

Hyperborea, land of the north wind.

Now we have that clear to everyone we can engage with the meat of the issue. If governments and parties continuously ignore what people want them to do, then they cannot be surprised when people express their political opinions on the streets. The ballot box and election are a proxy for violent struggle over who runs the country, and for this proxy to work it has maintain the elements of engagement and struggle.

I won’t argue that parliamentary democracies are in any way wonderful. I see a great many issues in them. I find the idea that a plurality of those who bothered voting on a given day within a 4-5 year cycle supporting something endows it with some moral authority particularly strange. It is the system we live by, and like any system it needs to work.

We know that we have a system where the thinnest slice at the top of society (financially) controls which policies are allowed1, and those policies are then enacted by our political elite. This elite consists of a rather placeless group of people who have more in common with each other than us - they’ve been committed hoop-jumpers since an early age, are rather shameless and also lack the originality or talent to become successful in their own regard. We’re a long way past the idea of our elected (or unelected) officials serving as a virtue or privilege, it’s more a case that they feel it’s their turn to loot.

The mismanagement of Brexit is a revealing case of this. A majority of Britons voted for something that the political class - both elected and bureaucratic - did not want. This led to the problem of a process being carried out by those who neither believed in it nor wished it to succeed. Even those politicians who pushed Brexit were frequently doing so through opportunism or personal gain, not particularly through conviction2.

The trouble we have now is that politics and government is largely deaf to the needs of their people. These popular wishes are not particularly esoteric, although they are not necessarily simple to deliver on. It’s not even that the government is unaware of what these things are - they periodically pay lip service towards them. However the state is far more interested in making sure the wheels don’t come off than in fixing things. That’s the nature of any complex bureaucratic system. Anarcho-tyranny isn’t a plan, it’s a defence mechanism3.

These wishes broadly include things like;

• Predictable laws and appropriate punishments4

• Living alongside people similar to themselves.

• Being able to afford a home, family and bills.

• Work, playing by social and cultural rules, effort, and lawfulness are behaviours which are rewarded.

• Feeling that their country is good, and there is a benefit to being of that nationality5.

• The nation being governed for the benefit of its people.

• Their children having lives no worse than theirs.

• A country which can defend itself.

• Being treated well when you’re sick or injured.

When people keep wanting these things, and their governments fail to deliver them it’s not a surprise that conflict results. We must remember what “politics by other means” may be6to avoid tragedy.

In reality, feudalism was a pretty successful system in variety of places starting from the time of Charlemagne and then falling apart through the demographic and social shocks of the Black Death. At its most simple, it was a system where the lord held land, and would give it out in return for service - this service could be either labour or military. The system was never as pronounced in urban areas, as they were organised on different lines and it does rather ignore the massive role of the church in the era.

People had Value

One immediate criticism of the feudal system is that the villeins1, those pretty much at the bottom, were not free. Freedom for anyone at the bottom of a social pyramid is an interesting questions, but these men were not free in the sense they could not move freely to another area. They were still free in the eyes of law, church and other institutions and had the right to own property. Freedom to move was also far less important in the medieval period - the legal system worked in a large part through collective responsibility and people vouching for each other, and tended to scapegoat those without local connections.

Villeins could gain their “freedom” by leaving their home manor for a set term - often a year and a day. The very existence of this restriction though highlights the fact that they had value to their lords. Unlike the modern world, where humans are fungible units treated as a line-item for AI to delete, the productivity of land relied mostly on the labour force available to work it. Villeins could even be fined for marrying outside their manor and denying the lord the benefits of the next generation’s labour!

Identity worked upwards

The pre-modern world, in part because of the feudal system had a very different system of identity. Essentially, identity worked upwards - from the parish to the manor, then county and country. Identity was built in layers from the most local upwards.

This can be contrasted with modernity, where identity was refashioned by urbanisation, classism, nationalism an multiple other sources to become a top-down project. Many nations - France and Italy2 for instance - spent a great deal of time and effort trying to break the pre-modern, local identity and replace it with a homogenised, national, one.

Identity was also a more or less fixed concept, unlike the post-modern, “liquid”3 identity we have now where nationality, gender, religion and even race have become flexible and changeable. Rather than a pyramid of either bottom up or top down constructions, 21st century man has identity as a jigsaw puzzle. This conflict between those with a modern and those with a post-modern identity is essentially the “somewhere vs anywhere”4 issue.

Rights begat Responsibilities

One of the most notable features of the feudal system was that it was a reciprocal system. Reciprocal doesn’t mean equal, or exploitative for that matter. It means that those above had responsibilities to those below and an interest in making sure that they were adequately provided for. No knight wanted a manor of starving peasants and failed crops. Equally, no lord wanted a retinue of poorly armed knights whose loyalty might be easily bought. A hierarchical system needs to work like this, where the each level is both dependent on and in service to the other levels.

Some of this was socially enforced, and some legally enforced. There were ordinances in England requiring men of certain ranks to employ a certain number of others, to have certain arms in store and other things. Trying to scrimp, save or cut corners was an insult to the system and those above and below you. With the decline in the working population through the Black Death a more competitive waged economy evolved and the feudal system started to fail.

The System Had Soul

One of the advantages in this pre-modern system over our current day was that it had some deeper philosophical underpinnings. There was a genuine belief that this was how God had intended the world to be, and there was a place for everyone in it. In comparison with a modern liberal system which views people as little more than costs or consumers and has evolved far past any serious religious or intellectual base.

Many analyses of the feudal area miss how important the monasteries were - they controlled up to a third of all land in England, particularly in the areas of best agricultural production. Whilst the medieval church is far from any ideal, the dissolution of its monasteries and lands did directly lead to a crisis for the poorest and most vulnerable people.

There was More than Money

Feudalism was not a wholly monetary system. Money came from worked land, and that was essentially where wealth was stored. Although you could certainly have absentee landlords, wealth was tied to place and could not readily be extracted or moved away.

Some lords did mortgage or sell lands to fund crusades or other martial endeavours, but were generally replaced by similar men.

Industry and Commerce Existed

It’s also wrong to see the feudal era as one devoid of capitalism. Especially in urban areas the pyramid of the system was more flexible with traders and artisans not fitting well into the system’s strict hierachy. THese people were no doubt important, and had some unique rights and freedoms but were in national terms a tiny minority.

And so?

I’m not arguing in favour of a modern feudal system here. I’m simply pointing out that criticisms of our modern world as “neo-feudal” are rather erroneous and that looking at the modern liberal, democratic and financialised world through the lens of feudalism reveals many of our era’s errors. I think the most vital benefit was that people and place had value.

In better days,
I could have hated them,
That congregation,
Of Evil doers.

Now forced to sit,
Amongst the wicked,
To deny wonder,
And slander works.

A soul is gathered,
In a sheaf of sinners.
Its life reaped,
With bloody men.

Feet now standing,
In a cursed place,
And hands are washed,
In darkest sin.

As for me?
Redeem me.
Show mercy.
For now I must turn,
To walk in truth. 

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3. The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies1.

By way of a thought experiment, let’s see what would happen if the third law were applied to the British NHS. Of course, this could never happen and is wholly theoretical. There’s clearly no political benefit from promoting something as a surrogate religion in times of pandemic, then running it down and selling if off after that. As someone who works as a nurse in the NHS, this is the sort of wild fantasy which amuses me on my day off.

I stress that this if fiction, and clearly no politician would think to do anything like this in the hope that the medical companies who donate to them can make a killing in future.

1. Make It A Third Rail Topic

The quasi-religious attitude which Britain showed towards its health service during the COVID pandemic really encapsulated one of the difficulties in the service’s future. It has become the metaphorical sacred cow of British politics and that prevents serious discussion about change. Should charges be introduced for some services? Should the NHS be involved in assisted dying2? Should a public-private hybrid system exist? None of these questions can really be discussed openly in Westminster as they’d all touch on the sacred status of the NHS.

2. Blame it for Other’s Failings

Everyone has seen the newspaper headlines about “Bed Blockers” and the concept scares people enough that I’ve personally seen people come out with some quite odd statements about being discharged from hospital3 In reality though, the phenomenon is largely down to the social care crisis in Britain. At some point in the past, it was decided that social care had to be delivered privately, at the lowest price point possible. This has attracted some of the worst people and businesses4 as care home owners (and some good ones) and meant the entire industry is something of a mess. Perhaps nationalising care is a good plan - some regions are already slowly creeping that way. Portraying the issue as an NHS one, not a social care one is a good way of knocking the health service down for something beyond its control. Personally, I’d love to see a few care home owners prosecuted for corporate manslaughter. At any given point though, all of those patients who are “Medically Optimised for Discharge5” are all waiting for carers or bed spaces in care homes and that’s rarely anything to do with the NHS.

3. Make it Terrible at Communication

The last time the government tried to produce a single, nationwide, computer system for the NHS is cost more than the London Olympics and didn’t work for a single day. The NHS is something of a by-word for miscommunication, missed messages and the left hand not knowing what the right is doing. Some of this is that information is often compartmentalised (for example in a single hospital speciality), others is that although care is meant to be driven from the GP level their workloads often prevent this. Add in a constant coming and going of staff, a lack of standardised communication and the levels of division and sub-division that exist and you have a recipe for chaos.

4. Make GPs Unfit for Purpose

The first point of call for anything that’s not an emergency in the NHS is your GP - general practitioner. Think family doctor. Whilst this is a speciality in its own right, make sure the British public isn’t aware of that and thinks it’s just a fall back for people who don’t specialise. Whilst we’re going, let’s sort of “privatise but not quite privatise” the GP system. This means they’re under pressure to deliver financially, have enough independence to refuse things and can’t actually get paid for essential things - like taking routine blood tests for housebound patients under specialist services. Add in an ever increasing workload and make it impossible to get an appointment and we’re well on our way to disaster.

5. The First Point of Call

Having undermined the GP system we now need to think of where people will go instead. The ideal is to funnel everyone to the least appropriate place possible - Accident and Emergency. This works even better if A+E is so under staffed it can’t triage people properly and has a 12 hour backlog6.

6. The Specialist Referral

Of course, if you have a long term and complex condition you’ll need to see a specialist. To do so, either you go into hospital in a catastrophic condition or wait for your GP to put in a referral. Some of those now have short wait times (for example for suspected cancer) but those for the most under stress specialities like dermatology can take more than a year to come through. Nobody is certain if this is inefficiency, demand outstripping supply or a deliberate ploy. A recent government plan suggested that they could introduce a target where 30% of referrals were refused, nobody could articulate where this number came from7 and it seems the policy is being quietly dropped.

7. Blame Everything on Funding

Ideally you blame it all on the previous government underfunding the NHS. Of course, beyond “more” you don’t really have a funding goal. Whilst it’s possible to spend 100% of national tax revenues on health care that’s not a smart plan. It’s easy to point at waste, and the NHS certainly does wasteful things. It’s also sadly true that there’s little to no incentive for people to use healthcare wisely - the Freakonomics guys noted this about the British system over 15 years ago and it remains true. The fundamental though is that aside from vague considerations of “more” nobody ever seems to have a discussion about how much money is needed and what for.

8. Make it a low status employer.

The NHS is a far more diverse than the public it serves, much as governmental organisations are throughout the western world. The NHS has relied on bringing staff over from other countries since its inception, and despite current crises in jobs and hiring this is pretty much still the practice. In a nice world where everyone holds hands and sings together8, this would make little difference. In reality, an organisation staffed largely by Indian and Nigerian immigrants would have some negative connotations for a great many people. The desire to cut costs on staffing is also a poor one, jobs backed by the state ought to be good jobs9 not ones treated as line-item costs. It doesn’t take a great imagination to see angry Daily Mail headlines about how the NHS functions as a visa-mill for foreign workers, and such a scandal could certainly be used to reduce public trust in the healthcare system.

In conclusion; The NHS does a lot of good, and tends to see people on the worst days of their lives, as well as their first and last days. It’s an organisation with lots of wonderful people working very hard and achieving great things. It does have its issues, and no country has tried to copy the British model as it comes towards its 80th year. I do wish it was less of a political football and that so many politicians, regardless of party, didn’t appear to be purposefully trying to weaken it ahead of selling off one of Britain’s few remaining nationally owned assets.

In the Latin countries of Europe a different archetype emerges. It tends to focus on the word “but” as in “he’s corrupt but he gets things done”. Leaders like Chirac, Sarkozy, Berlusconi and the like spring to mind. It’s amazing that leaders from such differing sectors of the political spectrum have such similar habits. It’s also worth considering that these countries have elected communists, dictators, neo-fascists, global banking stooges and crooks in living memory and the overall arc of their country’s politics has changed little. My personal belief is that rather than having a cordon sanitaire around a right wing or nationalist party (as in AfD in Germany or RN in France) the way that a state could neuter any outsider politics is simply to let them run the country. Novel policy and rhetoric would rapidly be replaced by boring business as usual.

The more Germanic nations of Europe seem to have a higher moral expectation of their politicians. This doesn’t translate into those elected actually being any more moral or effective, more the way they portray themselves. There’s a greater reliance on being goodthinkful and political correctness but at the end of the day, the parliament is still made up of people who have the same background, education and views. You get the impression they are randomly sorted into red, blue, or yellow coloured teams at 18 and remain their for life. Ideals and theories take a back seat to managerialism and playing the political game - a game designed to ensure that politics continues as normal regardless of elections.

Many nations have demonstrated exactly how well they can run without governments. Spain managed this for 316 days, Belgium managed close to 600 and neither was really any the worse for it. The modern state is run by its un-reformable and immovable permanent government - the civil service. Going against this body, as when the British government tried to enact Brexit, is largely a fool’s errand. The concept of the Deep State originally hails from the former Soviet bloc, where Communism collapsed at the start of the 1990s yet miraculously the same people were still running much of the state apparatus a few years later - and in many cases still are.

This last point touches on the managerialist and technocratic nature of modern governments. They seem more interested in the minutiae of managing national decline, and endless tinkering with minor laws (e.g. Keir Starmer trying to ban drag hunting) rather than tackling anything which is actually difficult or beneficial. We seem stuck in a loop where all politicians are cut from the same cloth - globalist, left wing on social issues, centre right and in awe of billionaires when it comes to economics.

It might just be that voting isn’t the answer.

What did intrigue me is that the film’s story is a pretty interesting take on the Iliad, with Caan’s Jonathan E being in the role of Achilles. The central conflict does in some ways ape that in Homer’s work, being between a shining individual and a greater power and the crux for the enmity between the two comes from an executive taking Jonathan’s wife from him, in much the same manner which Achilles lost his prize Briseis.

Much like greedy Agamemnon, the Energy company fear their side’s great hero and realise he has become something of an antithesis for their ideals.

Aside from James Caan’s mild befuddlement as he goes through scenes of trying to understand the political system he lives in, the parallels continue through the film. We see escalating moral and political pressure put on Jonathan to toe the party line and do as he is instructed, he is also offered a great number of incentives - none of which he particularly values. Much the same as Achilles, he is driven to excel at what he does and on his terms and is not to be dissuaded.

Jonathan’s vice captain on the Houston rollerball team, Moonpie, is our dystopian Patroclus. His brain-death moves Jonathan to unseemly lengths to keep his physical body alive in a medicalised echo of Achilles’ treatment of Patroclus after his death. In this re-telling though, Moonpie’s death serves to set out hero deeper into his course rather than to change tack.

Of course, Rollerball does not offer us a Hector but does end with the duel in the championship game and it has been made abundantly clear that the game is one in which life is at stake. The cinematic retelling leaves our modern Achilles completing his victory lap after defeating his greatest challenge, and ends before we see if our hero will share his mythic fate.

It amuses me how many parallels a rather ordinary 70s sci-fi film has with the foundational epic of western civilization, and how little this idea has been discussed.

My three main objections to the EU still stand to this day. As it is the second choice for aspiring politicians (after their national systems) it tends to collect a wide array of failed and unelectable politicians. These people, and the unelected who run many of the EU institutions, tend to skew far to the statist, socially progressive wing of politics. It’s an organisation which sits far to the left of mainstream European politics and despite the political shifts of the last 20 years has remained resolutely there. It creates a mindset where the answers are always legislate, expand, tax and subsidise.

Secondly, I am a firm supporter of subsidiarity - the idea that the best way of running anything is at the smallest and most local level. The EU is by its very nature diametrically opposed to this idea. I personally taught on some EU funded programs and saw some of the budgeting. By the time I got my post-tax 13 euros an hour so many layers of bureaucracy and handouts had taken place that it was almost impossible to track. On one project I was the 8th and final piece of the delivery puzzle, and the initial cost to European funds was over 800 euros per hour - for an after school English project.

My final objection, and one I also have to most politicians in my own country, is that they simply do not like their native population.

Brexit though, has been rather a let down in action. Part of this is due to it being undertaken by a group of British politicians who were, at best, lukewarm on the idea. They were in turn supported by a civil service who were actively against the concept and negotiating with an EU which took the chance to punish Britain where possible.

The timeline since 2016 has also been rather awful for Europe with only those countries still making up ground due to 2 generations of communist rule in the 20th century really growing. We see an Italy whose economy has been stagnant since the adoption of the Euro, Spain where the civil war seems to be re-fought over every issue, France where the social contract and budget are fundamentally broken, Germany the industrial powerhouse of Europe de-industrialising and the success story of Ireland leaving a country so overpriced and inflated nobody native can afford to live there. In short, with or without the EU, western Europe has had a devastatingly bad decade.

A major reason the fine margins of the referendum were pushed in favour of leaving was the insane policy of Germany’s Merkel to invite unlimited number of non-European migrants into Europe. More than any other individual, she affected the outcome of the vote. Brexit was in many ways about British people voting to control their own borders again and stop immigration both legal and illegal. Boris Johnson clearly didn’t get the memo, and was responsible for one of the great catastrophes of British politics the “Boriswave” of immigration where a few short years saw the small island add 2 million non Europeans to its population.

Boris touches on the next reason why Brexit has not delivered on its promises - the abject nature of British governments over the last decade. We’ve had a wannabe Churchill, bearers of the poisoned chalice, a woman who didn’t understand who her real masters were and was outlasted by a lettuce, an Indian billionaire’s husband who will be remembered for wearing skin-tight trousers in the pouring rain and from Labour a man so unpopular his own party want to defenestrate him despite the massive majority they enjoy.

Much was made of how Brexit would allow the possibility of funding the NHS more, or by the remain side of how Brexit would leave a huge vacuum in research funding. This misses the main point - those are political decisions. The government could have chosen to fund research more, but hasn’t. It could have chosen to fund the NHS more, but hasn’t. Even the free movement of citizens across Europe is a political choice - it could have been continued if the government had wished it to be so. The changes, red tape, frustrations and failings are the direct result of British governmental choices.

The successes of Brexit have been writ in rather small type. Britain was able to adopt and roll-out COVID vaccines faster than its neighbours in 2020/1, but five years later that doesn’t seem much to brag about. Leaving the EU finally allowed women’s sanitary products to be free of VAT, yet any saving was quickly consumed by the nearly 3.5% official inflation rate we’ve had since 2016. Brexit freed us from the shackles of EU rules on VAT, yet rather than taking steps to cut this non-progressive and economy slowing tax the government has kept it at a very European 20%.

The generation divide played its part in the referendum, and as the years go by we now have a younger generation who see little point playing by rules of the game in Britain. They know the system is rigged against them. Millennials still believed what they were taught about work, property and education but those coming of age now know they can’t win. Add in the growing sectarianism in British politics and the general sense of hopelessness and it’s easy to see why opinion polls look back harshly on the Brexit vote.

When the whole decade is looked at, it’s hard to get away from a sense of decline and mismanagement. Leaving the EU allowed British politicians to rule Britain, but they’ve done so without any imagination or ability and leave a divided country with a moribund economy and an insane tax burden. The same arguments as in 2016 can still be had, yet I see no evidence that the political class across the channel have done any better over the last decade.

British voters chose Brexit to regain control from the EU. Sadly, since then the British political class have done an atrocious job of governing the country. The main counter argument is that nobody else has been any more successful. Hardly a great situation to be in a decade on.

One of the theories which the 9/11 attacks, and the following War on Terror, pushed into the limelight was Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations. It wasn’t a well liked theory; nothing which based its deductions on notions of race and culture was going to be at that time. Added to that it famously noted that “Islam has bloody borders” and that the Muslim world was very frequently involved in conflict with neighbouring civilizations. These two points made it a hard sell amongst the think tanks and intelligentsia, although as Huntington himself asked “If not civilizations, then what?”

The book did manage to predict some conflicts, such as the war between Russian and Western cultures in Ukraine, some of the splits between African and Islamic cultures which can be used to explain conflicts as far apart as Nigeria and Somalia. On the other hand, it never really felt like it got the Asian divides right and painted the whole region with an overly broad brush.

The second main thrust of Huntington’s arguments was a demographic one. He tied into work done by others on the “Youth Bulge” phenomenon, where a surplus of young men (especially single ones) makes a a country much more unstable and prone to violence. Of course, it’s a chicken and egg argument because you tend to find that states with a lot of young men have often gone through disruptions and dislocations which have skewed their birth rates. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting enough idea and one which I dedicated my undergraduate thesis to. I remember arguing that it even if the idea was correct it wasn’t especially useful as there were few politically acceptable policies which could be created to alleviate it. Migrating the youth bulge to Europe en masse wasn’t something I believed to be politically plausible in 2004.

This has all come back to mind in light of Trump’s recent re-invigoration of the Monroe doctrine in the Americas. His Venezuelan success was followed up by the rupture with Europe over the future of Greenland. I have one American friend who interprets most of these issues as a cultural one where Europe excpects Trump to act more presidentially than he ever manages. This rather misses the point, by undermining your own new trade agreements and offering the stick (in a crude manner) rather than the carrot the United States has drawn the dividing line through the middle of western civilization.

This gives two interesting directions. The first is that we may see the US becoming more and more like Latin America. This runs from racial and demographic change, to growing inequality, through massive fraud and the rhetoric over imprisoning your political opponents. Perhaps the 2030s will see a more Latinised US?

In Europe it’s quite the opposite. For the first time since 1945 for many, and since the fall of the USSR for the rest, Europe has got to work out its own policies and directions internationally. We will quickly see that the EU isn’t really fit for purpose for doing so - it’s very existence is steeped in managerialism and bureaucracy which belong to the narrative of a spent, liberal, declining and weak Europe. Instead we’re likely to see a desire for a concert of European nations working in both their own and mutual interest. This also avoids the issue of keeping one of Europe’s nuclear powers (the UK) and one of the few nations who could genuinely aid Finland (Norway) out of any plan.

The current US administration has been quick to point out that Europe has enjoyed a period of security, largely underwritten by American military spending. This is true, but is somewhat offset by NATO standardisation playing to the strengths of American industries and arms. Europe does need to re-jig its spending - away from welfare and towards the future, but this isn’t dependent on some NATO guideline. European rearmament isn’t a simple thing either.

Any European plan though has to be tied into a total change of outlook for European countries - namely governing with the aim of building a country worth defending, a country which puts their own people first. In the light of 35 years of following America by default, of prioritising the Other over the Own and of Liberal Managerialism Europe’s real challenge is to create a new foundation to build a foreign and defence policy upon.

The church of Gesú in Rome is one the archetypal buildings of the Baroque era. Commissioned by the Jesuits during the counter-reformation, the building created something of a template for new churches around Europe. From the, then new, wide open spaces to the ornate and complex decoration which frames and surrounds your experience Gesú is a statement. It’s a statement of all the benefits and strengths of the old order, presented in a beautiful and emotional manner.

Baroque can be something hard to define in English, perhaps due to the relative scarcity of examples in Britain meaning there’s less familiarity with it. It’s not simply a style of art though, the same label has been applied equally to music and literature.

In musical terms, Baroque meant something new at the end of the medieval era, yet it wasn’t something which threw away all fruit of the past. It exploited new instruments and ideas to produce music which still sounds fresh to this day - Handel, Bach, Vivaldi and Pachelbel wrote music which seems to almost magically re-ocur in popular music to this day. The literature2 of this era is a golden era for the European mind, showing a grasp of complexity and depth which is hard to rival across any other era.

A new Baroque is needed for our times. It’s an antidote to the lowest-common-denominator simplicity of architecture and design. A riposte to the ikea-isation of buildings and life. It’s the best that reaction can possibly be, using the tools of the new to promote and share the eternal truths of old.

Castlegrail, an English writer who pulls in this direction often, has coined the term “Aristogressive” for this movement, based on pulling in the direction of the best and highest ideals.

I personally believe this is the way that artists, poets, musicians and designers can work against the grey, beige and plate glass world of Yarvin’s Cathedral. Through beauty, complexity, form and a celebration of the best and truest.

It’s an idea influencing my writing to an ever greater degree as I delve into the works of the original Baroque era and use their techniques of rhyme, metre, style and form to mark myself as apart from what the world loves.

Poets and writers, embrace this aristogressive idea. Use the forms, flourishes and details which are open to us as a reaction against the world of today.

Write with rhyme, choose structure not sameness,

Broadcast our ideals with intricacy and beauty.

Law and order has passed away,
No more world in shades of grey.
Entering a time of conflict,
When old mores do not restrict.
Wakens an era or tribal war.
Unlike what we have seen before.
Morality turning monochrome.
As choices made are coming home.
Final arbiter is not what's right,
But on which side you will fight. 

Reading about 16th century poetry has made me interested in the idea of octosyllabic couplets.

She creaks on stiff bones,
The image of old Europe bleeds.
People driven from their homes,
By some windblown seeds,
That now become rooted weeds. 
The emptiness of a faith forgot
As traditions die and rot. 

Yet still she can spring,
Like Athena from Zeus' brow
Then a new age shall begin,
Deaf to what bloodless lords allow,
Mother Europa comes not with a plough,
But she strides in shining splendour,
Dressed and armed for war.

53. In Defense of Tradition- Richard M Weaver.

I’ve never really explored the Southern Agrarianism or the writing of the post Civil War South. This book has some excellent short essays and articles, I found the longer ones far less engaging but the style and language in some of the short pieces was excellent.

54. A Country Parson - James Woodforde’s Diary

This is the diary of a relatively nondescript and mundane Anglican reverend in the 18th century. It contains some wonderful scenes and bits of information. I read an illustrated version, but have upgraded to the Folio Society edition which, although still abridged, is much more thorough. It does mean I’m essentially reading two editions of the same book back-to-back but it’s worth it. The larger version includes the parson dining with a pirate, mocking Dutchmen’s enormous trousers and marvelling at a three-wheeled wheelchair. This was perhaps the apogee of Englishness and the church of England as a social institution - he certainly is no theologian and the priesthood is essentially his career rather than vocation. One of the reading highlights of the year.

55. Field Guide to English Clergy

A well put together bedside book which gives 3-4 page portraits of the English church’s more colourful characters. Would make a decent gift for anyone who’d enjoy reading about some real English eccentrics and it’s the book that introduced me to the Woodforde diaries.

Glows of golden light within,
Family's home and nurtured hearth.
Times of coming shall begin,
Celebrate Him come to Earth,
The midwinter of His birth,
Family, faith and a month well-spent,
Welcome ever-green Advent.

Medieval manuscript of Gregorian chant