Gove Vs. May

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The news that Boris Johnson has pulled out of the race to succeed David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party is unequivocally good news from my perspective.

Though undoubtedly charismatic and popular with the lower elements of the population, Johnson has always seemed to me altogether too unserious for political power. The man is a clown, a children’s entertainer, and a slippery and duplicitous one at that. For many years the former Mayor of London has nakedly coveted the position of Prime Minister, and yet when asked if this is the case, his answers have been evasive, humorous, misleading, and sometimes wholly in Latin. This kind of behaviour should be off-putting to anyone hoping for a dignified or honest form of politics.

As to the reasons for his withdrawal, the old Etonian is being his usual un-candid self. It is widely speculated where it isn’t concretely understood that Johnson has been stabbed in the back by the former education secretary Michael Gove, a man with whom he has spent the last three months campaigning for a leave vote in the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.

If this is true, or if Mr Gove’s denial that this is true fails to convince enough people, then the Tory Party looks set to splinter into two roughly even camps; the Boris-loyalists, represented by the likes Nadhim Sahawi and Nadine Dorries, versus the people who actually care about the fate of the United Kingdom.

The first group will vote for anyone but Michael Gove; a gesture of petty vengeance against the bespectacled Scot for his treatment of their egg-yolk-splatter-haired idol. The second camp will meanwhile vote in good conscience for the person they believe most able to take the country in the right direction.

As you might be able to tell by my tone, I sympathise strongly and only with the latter camp. I have never liked Boris, and I don’t like Theresa May, now the most likely repository of his supporters’ votes, either. Ms May, like Johnson, is a career politician with no detectable commitment to the preservation of Britain’s native culture. She is the woman behind the notorious ‘Extremism Bill’, ostensibly aimed at curbing the free expression of radical Islamists, but so worded as to threaten the freedom of speech of those who oppose radical Islamists. She is also weakly moderate on matters of immigration, an attitude that has been well demonstrated by her hopelessly ineffective tenure as Home Secretary.

Michael Gove, by relieving contrast, makes for a much brighter prospect. As the Left has nigh on exhausted itself lamenting, Gove is known to harbour unusually healthy views on Islam, Islamism, US foreign policy and the State of Israel. His controversial 2006 book, ‘Celsius 7/7’ confidently and unapologetically attacked the culture of appeasement underlying the British reaction to Islamist violence and even went so far as to link radical Islam to the central tenets of the Islamic religion itself – an incredibly bold move at that time and one for which the author received a lot of vitriolic abuse from his peers.

Britain, I believe, would profit enormously from such a clear-headed attitude at the helm. Furthermore, should Gove eventually be elected Prime Minister, it would mark the first occasion since 9/11 that a politician genuinely sceptical of Islam has held power in a major Western country.

That is nothing to sniff at. It could be the start of something revolutionary.

D, LDN

OK.

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The 2015 general election result is in. Out of the three possibilities – great, OK or terrible – the ball has slipped into the second groove. We have an OK regime, a tolerable one, not especially healthy and not particularly self-destructive.

The Liberal Democrats have been shot to pieces and will find it difficult to survive. The Labour Party is far from dead, and will soon reinvigorate itself with younger generation of advocates (the favourite for leadership being, of course, the ‘British Obama’).

The UKIP grenade, much hyped as being nuclear in its fallout, went off with a silent puff. Farage has been fatally embarrassed. The faces of Middle England are shiny with tears. Chinks of hope for the future have closed.

The Islamisation process ongoing in parts of Britain has not been altered one bit by the result. It would have been quicker under the Labour party, and slower under UKIP. The Tories won’t interfere with it one bit.

That’s about all that can be said.

D, LDN.

Credit Where It’s Due.

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This was never meant to be a purely negative blog. I am not immune to enthusiasm and the rose-tinted view of the world. That is why I must praise the astonishing success of our Chancellor George Osborne, with whose leadership and talent, we have risen from a state of socialist bankruptcy to become one of the strongest economies in the world.

If you remember, when the Conservative-led coalition took office, cynicism filled the air like petrol fumes. And in some cases, that cynicism has been rewarded. Our defence budget has shrunk to disgracefully low levels for example. No real effort has been expended to solve the Muslim issue in our society, or to stem the flood of immigration that so weakens our solidarity and emboldens our enemies.

But the economy is a clear odd man out. More jobs have been created Britain over the past 5 years than in any other advanced economy. As reported in the budget speech on Tuesday, that number is 7 times higher than that of socialist France (for greater comparative illustration, Osborne added that more have been created in the county of Yorkshire than in our wayfaring maritime neighbour as a whole).

I am a patriot. I want Britain to succeed, to follow the American way and shun the socialist poisons of the continent. For those reasons, I must be honest and admit that Osborne has steered the ship in the right direction, even as the fifth column rotting the wood-beams of our living quarters remains untouched.

D, LDN.

Thomas Carlyle, Goethe and the Prophet Muhammad.

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Very few writers either merit or can withstand comparison with William Shakespeare. The only two I would dare to suggest are Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle.

The first, in his Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, demonstrated a perfection in writing that has never been (and may never be) surpassed. The second, in his history of the French Revolution and his essays on Heroism, exposed the wilder possibilities of language, blurring the boundaries of thought and emotion, poetry and prose.

So in the past few months of frantic intra-national diplomacy, it’s been saddening to hear so little about Scotland’s greatest writer. Andrew Marr’s ‘Great Scots’ BBC series surveyed in detail the likes of Hugh Mcdiarmand and James Boswell, but had nothing to say of a man who influenced history in a greater and more dynamic way than either of them.

War leaders and men of power are particularly drawn to Carlyle’s thrilling voice. When the meth-addicted dictator Adolf Hitler lived out his last few days in the Fuhrerbunker, the book at his bedside (which – I’m pleased to say – he never got the chance to finish) was Carlyle’s history of Frederick the Great. On the other side, Sartor Resartus (Carlyle’s satirical novel) was referenced approvingly by the allied commander in the Pacific.

Carlyle’s writing is in some ways alike Wagnerian music. It makes the reader want to become something better than himself. Through its chaotic poetry, it breeds an orderly ambition.

Consider the beauty of the following paragraph:

“Behold therefore, the England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer’s Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell.”

Alongside the connection with Hitler, you may have also heard Carlyle’s name associated with that of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims are known to bring him up because of the author’s portrait of the prophet in ‘Heroes, Heroism and the Heroic in History’ – a book advancing the Great Man Theory of history.

The following quote is taken from that work:

“Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments, — nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men toil for.”

Other positive comments are forthcoming from the same work. This use (or rather misuse) of Carlyle is typical of Muslim dishonesty. Carlyle, though he admired the impact of any great figure of world-history, retained a more exact part of his intellect for comparative judgement.

“Only a sense of duty could carry a European through the Qur’an.” he wrote in a section of the same book quoted less often by Muslim observers. In that same paragraph, he pronounces the book in general to be a “wearisome confused jumble” and Islam to be greatly lacking relative to his own (fiercely held) Protestant faith.

The same dishonesty that allows Muslims to make use of Carlyle also permits mistreatment of the reputation of Goethe. Regarded by Germans to be the equal of Shakespeare, the polymath Goethe was a notably cosmopolitan figure, run through with a very optimistic kind of xenophilia. His poems took elements from numerous foreign traditions, including in his ‘West-Eastern Divan’ volume, the traditions of the Middle East. That book contains poems which glorify the Prophet of Islam, sometimes comparing him to the giants of Greek and Roman mythologies and more or less (unlike Carlyle) maintaining a positive tone throughout.

However, the truth of the matter is that Goethe (writing in a less-informed age than Carlyle) had very little knowledge of the Middle East and Islam as they actually were (and still are). Indeed, his kindly impressions of the culture of Islam were drawn almost exclusively from the poetry of the Persian (pantheist) Hafiz. This is hardly valid.

More generally, the Muslim longing to find in Western thought a validation for their own historical glories is really quite revealing. Do they concede (even if just inwardly) that the West has the clearer mind and the intellectual upper-hand?

D, LDN

Scotland the Magnificent.

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It’s been reported today that the ‘Yes’ campaign has taken the lead in the referendum on Scottish independence, overturning a clear advantage for Better Together that has persisted for over three months.

Reactions to this poll on newspaper forums has been predictably (if lamentably) sectarian.

“Kick out Scots from the British military!” read one.

“Deploy the army on the border. No refugees!.” read another.

One particularly unbalanced observer went so far as to suggest the expulsion of ethnic Scots from the English north.

This is quite unnecessary. Though it would undoubtedly be a great shame to decapitate the UK after so much shared history (including two World Wars), we must realise that Scotland is a very proud country with an independent spirit that cannot be long suppressed. If the No campaign wins on September the 18th, it won’t be long before the calls go up for a rerun.

And I hope, if Scotland does choose separation, that we can co-exist in a spirit of friendship and mutual respect. Chauvinism demeans us all and Scotland is a magnificent country, with just as much to be said for it as England.

The greatest British prose writer of the last 500 years, Thomas Carlyle, was a son of the North. Another Scot, Adam Smith laid the groundwork for the age of capitalism. Scottish inventors gave the world steam engines, televisions, telephones, penicillin, tarmac and general anaesthetic.

As Winston Churchill famously put it – “Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind.”

Whatever happens, I hope the Scots continue to enlighten the world with their genius and industry.

D, LDN.