On February 9th 1945 I reached the age of ten. That’s an impressionable age for a young boy, especially if events have a bit of drama attached to them – and in 1945 there was plenty of drama. During the final stages of the war the German concentration camps at places like Dachau, Auschwitz and Belsen were being liberated; in July Winston Churchill was ditched as prime minister to be replaced by Clement Atlee and his Labour government, while later in the year two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.
But for many the mood of the year was epitomised by the cheering crowds in central London who celebrated VE day on May 8th. Patriotism was in the air, because we had good reason to be proud of ourselves as a nation. For more than two years – from the declaration of war on September 1st 1939 to December 12th 1941 when Pearl Harbour brought American into the war – Britain had faced Germany, Italy and Japan alone, except for its Commonwealth allies. Then, finally, we had won, with the help of America and Russia.
Our middle-class Conservative-voting family was fully in accord with this feeling of national pride, particularly because my father was an intensely patriotic – but not jingoistic – man. He had fought in both world wars – in the trenches during the first one and for a time at Bletchley Park in the second. But he was clever and well read. Under his guidance I was brought up on a mixture of Macaulay, Kipling, Sherlock Holmes, Bulldog Drummond, John Buchan and Biggles, with the general belief that to be born British was to win first prize in the lottery of life.
This background makes it difficult for me to understand the motives and attitudes of the Remainers who did so much to oppose Brexit before Boris Johnson’s glorious landslide election. How did such people come to despise their own country so much as to reject the value of its independence?
Not so long ago, the British Establishment was supposed to be composed of former public schoolboys making important political decisions behind the scenes in smokey back rooms, London clubs and exclusive restaurants.
Today, unfortunately, there is a new British establishment which has taken over our civil service, academia, the BBC, the quangocracy and the judiciary – who have been described, with some justification, as being the enemies of the people. Until recently, this new establishment had also taken over parliament, but its grip there has been severely weakened by the election. It is generally referred to as the liberal-left elite, but has been given other names including the liberal metropolitan elite, the chattering classes and the bien pensant , though many of its pensées are distinctly mal. I prefer to think of it as the moronic metropolitan mafia.
One of the many failings of this mafia – and the principal driver of the anti-Brexit delusion – is this profound distaste for a legitimate pride in one’s own country. For nearly a century it has denigrated the British way of life, depicting us as unrepentant former slave-traders, brutal colonialists and racist xenophobes These people see patriotism as a dirty word.
For many reasons, though, we have good cause to retain a pride in being British. Through luck, geography and the national character, we have for hundreds of years defied tyrants, from King John to Charles I, and built up unsurpassed traditions of freedom and democracy which include habeus corpus, innocent until prove guilty, trial by jury and lay magistrates. These noble traditions we have bequeathed to many of our former colonies (including the USA) but are not found in Continental countries.
The fundamental difference between us and our friends across the Channel is summarised by the very British expression ‘there’s no law against it’. In Britain the law generally sets out what is forbidden, whereas Continental law sets out what is allowed.
The metropolitan mafia’s denigration of its own country’s values becomes all the more strange when the alternative is considered, because the EU is hardly a benign institution. However noble the intentions of its founders may have been, it is obvious that the EU has become a corrupt, incompetent and grossly anti-democratic tyrannical bureaucracy, more likely to precipitate a third world war than to prevent one. The inability of the metropolitan mafia to understand this suggests that it is they who are the thickos, not the blue-collar Leave voters in rustbelt northern cities who have been treated with contempt.
Nevertheless the metropolitan mafia’s influence is strong and its hatred of country so malign that in some cases it borders on the treasonous. Who, for example, were the Ministry of Defence officials who condoned and encouraged war crimes accusations against British soldiers serving in the Middle East, accusations which were subsequently proved to be wholly false? And who were the Treasury civil servants who concocted those absurd Project Fear predictions, driven by nothing more than petty political malice? Such people should at least be dismissed, if not imprisoned.
Despite its manifest defects, the moronic metropolitan mafia won’t be collapsing any time soon. It is an arrogant, spiteful clique which bears grudges over long periods.
If I were Boris Johnson I would set up a unit of three or four people dedicated to exposing and ridiculing its follies, blocking the appointment of left-wingers in high places and imposing financial sanctions on recalcitrant institutions. This unit should hack into the emails of the metropolitan mafia, spy on its dinner parties and eavesdrop on its pub conversations to reveal the shallow nastiness of its true beliefs.
Grumpy Greybeard 