I am, damn it, proud to be English

SIMON COOKE voices below a peculiarly English form of patriotism. England is a land of emotional understatement and it shows in their form of patriotism. Their emotional understatement serves them well but is rarely understood by outsiders. I have no feelings similar to those expressed by Cooke below despite being of substantially English ancestry and culturally in many ways English.

But I am a 5th generation Australian and am very much a product of Australian culture -- which is a culture of relaxation. There was a time when Australia had a lot of half-millionaires. When they got to that stage they decided that further financial progress required too much effort and instead retired to the golf course and fishing

I am similar. I got into the lower rungs of being a millionaire via real estate investment but many years ago I sold all my properties and concentrated on blogging instead. My Serbian girlfriend does not understand that decision at all. And her Serbian patriotism is intense

Australian culture is just about the opposite to the hard-driving culture of America and we feel very thankful for that. America seems insane to us

Take in the view and whisper a little prayer of thanks for the men and women who made this place we call England. Because it is beautiful and we should be proud of those who made it beautiful.

In the latest instalment of The Hookland Chronicles, David writes about an encounter with J. G Ballard, that most suburban of England’s great writers. It starts with Ballard’s advice:

In many ways it was a ride in a BBC cab with J.G. Ballard that led to the creation of Hookland. To be achingly specific it was only one sentence. His advice was: “Concentrate on place, nothing without a sense of it is ever any good.”

Much is said about identity and lived experience. A good deal of it is little more than selfish indulgence and much else is a sort of political cosh to strike down the baddies. But identity matters and Ballard was right as are the Hookland Chronicles: our first, longest and strongest identity is with place. When, in opening his poem in praise of Sussex, Kipling spoke about men having small hearts, he described this truth.

So my identity isn’t about my sexuality, my gender or my skin colour. Nor is that identity shaped by an intersectionality implied by those things. No, my identity is defined by a series of places, by where I was born in South London, by Hull, my university, by an adult life in the South Pennines, by Upton Park and Bradford City Hall. Above all, my identity is shaped by the place that contains all these places, the thing that defines so much about what I believe and how I feel.

That place is England.

Where to begin? In my last speech as a Bradford councillor, I spoke about the places I’d represented for all those years:

“I was sat on top of Denholme Edge the other day eating a ham and tomato sandwich, admiring the view. Much of what I see from there is Bingley Rural. And it is beautiful. Anyway I was sat there and I got to thinking. Each way I looked, into every nook of the places in that view there was a story – something that had been done to make the place a little better.”

What you see from Denholme Edge is a picture of England. Denholme isn’t a posh or grand place, most of you will never have been there and, if you have, it is most likely just driving through on the A629. Like all the places I represented, Denholme exists because of wool. The town, don’t ever call it a village, was noted for wool sorting, the process of separating the different qualities of wool. Today it is an ordinary place, a mix of flats, back-to-back terraces, a few streets of semi-detached homes and a couple of modern estates. The Edge is the ridge behind the town, running from Edge Bottom up onto Thornton Moor.

Everything we see from that ridge is shaped by men and women over hundreds of years, thousands if we include the shadowy remains of a Roman camp and the last few stones from an Iron Age fort. This is England, a kempt place without wilderness, a place made by men. When we talk about England's ancient woodland or its wonderful landscape - ‘outstanding natural beauty’ as the bureaucrats call it - we are not talking of the truly natural since even the shape of the hills involves the scars of quarrying and agriculture’s management of the land. What we look at from Denholme Edge is a place shaped by the love and care of people, mostly forgotten, who lived in England.

If you look at the Wikipedia page for the song “There’ll Always be an England”, it comes across ever so slightly sneering: “...the song invokes various clichés of English rural life, liberty, and the Empire”. But while it isn’t the greatest song and filled with clichés, it still makes me stand up a little straighter and smile. On occasion singing it will bring a tear to the eye because the song is uncomplicated and unquestioningly proud of England:

“There'll always be an England

While there's a country lane

Wherever there's a cottage small

Beside a field of grain

There'll always be an England

While there's a busy street

Wherever there's a turning wheel

A million marching feet”

As with all the best patriotism, the sentiment isn’t about the great and good, there is no harking back to glorious victories, ancient monarchs, or great leaders but rather an invoking of the ordinary, of you and me as the definition of England. Everything about England was shaped by the English, not by the list of names you learned in history but, as Kipling’s charm puts it:

“...the mere uncounted folk

Of whose life and death is none

Report or lamentation”

If you are in England, take a moment to pause and look around you. Not for signs of greatness but for signs of love. Look over the wall at the allotment gardens with their neat rows of beans and cabbage lined up behind a rickety old shed. Walk round the park and take in a green space within the busy city. Wander along a suburban street, have a nosey into front gardens. And find a hill to climb where you can look out at the place that your fellow English men and women have made. It doesn’t matter whether that view is a slightly tired old mill town like Denholme, the Georgian wonder of Bath or the rolling Downs of Sussex or North Kent. Take in the view and whisper a little prayer of thanks for the men and women who made this place we call England. Because it is beautiful and we should be proud of those who made it beautiful.

https://simoncooke.substack.com/p/i-am-damn-it-proud-to-be-english

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Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday released his plan to address homelessness in the U.S., which he says has contributed to the decline of America’s once-great cities

“The homeless have no right to turn every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs,” he said in a video statement. “Americans should not have to step over piles of needles and waste as they walk down a street in a beautiful city -- at least, a once-beautiful city. Because they've changed so much over the last ten years.”

The 45th president argued that the majority should not have to “suffer” in these areas because of a “deeply unwell few.” If reelected, Trump said he will get the homeless off the streets and given access to the help they need.

“There is nothing compassionate about letting these individuals live in filth and squalor,” Trump argued.

“For a small fraction of what we spend upon Ukraine, we could take care of every homeless veteran in America,” he pointed out. “Our veterans are being treated horribly. Likewise, with all of the money we will save by ending mass unskilled migration, we will have a huge dividend to address this crisis in our own country.”

Urban camping will be banned and those who violate the bans will be arrested, he said, clarifying that the individuals will be given an option to get treatment if they are willing to be rehabilitated.

As for where they will be taken, Trump said “large parcels of inexpensive land” will be opened where a range of medical professionals, social workers, and drug rehab specialists will care for the homeless to address their problems.

“For those who are just temporarily down on their luck, we will work to help them quickly reintegrate into a normal life,” Trump continued. “For those who have addictions, substance abuse, and common mental health problems, we will get them into treatment. And for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage. It's a tough task, a very tough task.”

He said the plan is better than some of the alternatives being tried—such as housing them in hotels without addressing their underlying issues.

“This is how I will end the scourge of homelessness and make our cities clean and safe and beautiful once again,” Trump concluded. “We will do it. We will bring back America.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2023/04/19/trump-on-homelessness-n2622124

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Death of meritocracy in Britain: Since the Victorian age, hard work and talent have been the passports to success. But more and more of our institutions are in thrall to a new doctrine

What’s the most important document in modern British history?

Some people might point to a party manifesto, such as Labour’s blueprint for the post-war welfare state in 1945, or Margaret Thatcher’s free-market programme in 1979. Others might dig out a speech by Winston Churchill, an Act of Parliament or perhaps even a bestselling book.

For me, though, the chief contender has to be a long-forgotten report published in the early months of 1854, known as the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. Compiled by two Whitehall officials, it looks pretty dry and dusty today.

Yet the Northcote-Trevelyan Report was the cornerstone of our modern meritocratic age.

Breaking with centuries of aristocratic patronage, it called for a new civil service, based purely on individual merit. With exams to determine the best young candidates, all that mattered was what, not whom, you knew.

And if you wanted to move up the ladder, the only criteria would now be ‘industry and ability’, rather than family ties and upper-class connections.

Back in the 1850s, the Northcote-Trevelyan Report felt like a revolution. Yet it gave Britain the most envied administrative system in the world.

It was the first step in a long series of reforms, from the introduction of grammar schools to the expansion of universities, designed to encourage bright young boys and girls to aim for the top, whatever their backgrounds.

And though the prose may have dated, the principle remains as compelling as ever. Who could disagree with the emphasis on individual merit? Who would deny that people should get their jobs based on effort and talent, rather than accidents of birth?

Yet as shocking as it might seem, the age of individual merit and social mobility may be coming to an end.

And according to one veteran observer of British politics, the reign of the meritocratic idea is ‘threatened as never before’ by the rise of a new aristocracy, greedier and more selfish than ever.

But this isn’t an aristocracy based on birth or breeding. As the former Economist political editor Adrian Wooldridge writes in The Spectator magazine, it’s a new elite united by their obsession with their own virtue, their contempt for our history and their unbending fidelity to a single concept: wokeness.

For those people who swallow the line that wokeness just means being kind, Wooldridge’s argument must sound pretty shocking. But as he shows, the woke revolutionaries explicitly reject the Northcote-Trevelyan emphasis on the hard work and talent of the individual.

At the heart of wokeness, after all, is the idea that group identity trumps everything. There’s no escape from your group’s history: as soon as you are born, you are indelibly stamped as either a victim or an oppressor.

This is, of course, an idea born in the U.S., where the legacy of slavery and segregation has left a generation of academics, teachers and intellectuals with an almost demented obsession with race and gender.

Wooldridge gives the example of the former San Francisco Board of Education Commissioner, Alison Collins, who has actively campaigned against ranking students on merit. At an extraordinary public meeting in October 2020, Collins claimed that the idea of meritocracy was the ‘antithesis of fair’.

Indeed, she went further, insisting that the very idea of standardised testing — as pioneered by Victorian Britain’s civil service exams — was a ‘racist system’.

To most of us this might sound completely bonkers. Yet in the strange world of American education, Collins is far from alone. One of the most controversial prophets of the woke movement, the prize-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi, claims that choosing people based on their ability, without looking at their skin colour, is a relic of the wicked colonial past.

‘The only remedy to racist discrimination,’ writes Kendi in his bestselling book How To Be An Antiracist, ‘is antiracist discrimination.

‘The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.’

In other words, he thinks schools, universities and employers should actively discriminate against white applicants, purely because of their skin colour and their inherited guilt. Never mind that, say, a little girl born in the 21st century can hardly be blamed for the history of slavery. For Kendi, the mere fact of her genetic heritage is enough to damn her.

It’s a sign of how unhealthy the debate in the U.S. has become that instead of being politely but firmly escorted to the local asylum, Kendi has been festooned with awards. But the truth is that he’s merely the ruthlessly entrepreneurial face of a much broader movement.

Ever since the 1960s, the trend in U.S. institutions has been to prioritise the group, not the individual.

As a result, a society that once claimed to be the most open and democratic on earth is now in thrall to the idea of hierarchy — based not on birth or breeding, but on virtue and victimhood.

If you think that sounds overblown, here are a couple of recent examples. The first, reported only a few days ago, comes from the University of Texas, where an award-winning psychology lecturer, Professor Kirsten Bradbury, gave her students a test on personality disorders.

Here’s one question. ‘Which sociodemographic group is most likely to repeatedly violate the rights of others in a pattern of behaviour that includes violence, deceit, irresponsibility, and a lack of remorse?’

You can probably guess the answer. ‘Wealthy white men.’

As it happens, Professor Bradbury is white. And as an academic at one of the biggest institutions in the U.S., she’s almost certainly very well paid. So we might call this a case of the pot calling the kettle . . . well, white.

The second example is even more shocking. This is a chart produced in 2020 by the National Museum of African American History and Culture — part of the Smithsonian Institution, probably the most prestigious U.S. educational body of all.

The chart gives examples of ‘whiteness’ and ‘white culture’, which it clearly regards with disapproval. Sinister aspects of ‘white culture’ apparently include ‘hard work’, ‘self-reliance’, ‘the nuclear family’, ‘competition’, ‘delayed gratification’ and even ‘rigid time schedules’.

You and I might regard these things with approval. But to the Smithsonian’s woke commissars, they are clearly hateful and must be rejected at all costs.

It’s tempting to dismiss all this as Americans being American and to assume that it could never happen here.

In reality, however, this woke ideology — a simplistic, moralistic creed which divides people into oppressors and victims, the damned and the saved — has already seeped into many British institutions, where its pitifully tortured jargon has become depressingly familiar.

Most NHS trusts, for example, have ‘equality and diversity’ programmes; or perhaps ‘diversity and inclusion’; or, if they’re particularly virtuous, like the Solent NHS trust, ‘equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging’.

What’s the difference between inclusion and belonging? Who knows?

In just the first three weeks of this year, the NHS advertised for 19 ‘diversity and sustainability’ posts, with a combined salary of a cool £1 million. Indeed, in total the NHS in England alone employs an estimated 800 diversity and inclusion officers, costing a staggering £40 million a year.

Talk to any nurse or doctor, and they’ll tell you that this is a racket, pure and simple. Like so many woke initiatives, it’s an exercise in cynical back-scratching, of no use or relevance to ordinary punters.

It’s the same story in our universities, queuing up to flagellate themselves — and the rest of us — for the supposed misdeeds of the British Empire.

Here the most flagrant racket is the Athena Swan initiative, an ‘equality charter mark framework’ (that dreadful jargon again) which rewards academics for ‘supporting and transforming gender equality’.

Not only does the Athena Swan programme put on events such as the hideous-sounding Enhancing Good Practice: Intersectionality in Practice, but it has a suffocating stranglehold over British academic research.

To get official research funding from UK Research and Innovation, the main scientific grant-awarding body, you have to complete an equality and diversity statement approved by Athena Swan, including support for transgender rights. And if you think this is all nonsense? No funding.

As one leading barrister, Naomi Cunningham, told The Times, this ‘represents a pretty totalitarian attempt to entrench gender identity beliefs at the heart of all academic endeavour’. But for an academic to question it would be career suicide, since no ambitious young researcher wants to destroy his or her chances of getting funding.

In many ways, then, the spirit of the post-Victorian era — the heyday of openness, scepticism, mobility and meritocracy — has already slipped away.

Instead, thanks to the uncritical adoption of American wokery, we have moved into a new age of religious obscurantism, in which evangelical hucksters tour the land, preaching the good news about diversity and inclusion.

For these woke entrepreneurs, as for the fanatics and witchfinders of centuries past, life is a constant battle between good and evil, saintly victims and imperialist oppressors. Racism, sexism and inequality are lurking everywhere, and every minute of every day must be devoted to the struggle — which is why so many of them piously refer to themselves as ‘activists’, even when they don’t actually do anything.

To question the tenets of their cult is to identity yourself as a heretic, who must be cast out without delay. That explains the hysterical reaction of so many so-called intellectuals to the Oxford scholar Nigel Biggar, who dared to argue that the British Empire wasn’t all bad.

And that explains, too, their vicious response to the political scientist Matthew Goodwin, who sent Left-leaning commentators into paroxysms of rage after making the blindingly obvious point that they constitute a new university-educated elite, utterly detached from the daily concerns of most ordinary Britons.

If you move outside these peculiar circles, as so many millions of people do, you might wonder why all this matters. Why should the rest of us care about the gibberish peddled by a deranged gang of academic misfits?

The answer, sadly, is that it matters enormously. First, because it has already polluted so much of our national life, from the mutilated, bowdlerised versions of Ian Fleming and P. G. Wodehouse in our bookshops to the grotesque waste of NHS funds on so many corrupt non-jobs.

But perhaps even more importantly, because it represents an assault on the very principle of meritocracy. For youngsters to get ahead in the future, they will need to appease what Wooldridge calls the ‘new class of woke bureaucrats’, who have seized control of the entry points to the professions.

Talent and hard work simply won’t be enough, and passing exams certainly won’t cut it. You will either need to show that you’re a victim, or prove your activist credentials.

And if you don’t know the codes — the new transatlantic jargon, the most fashionable new U.S. thinkers, the latest wild ideas about race and gender — then you might as well forget it.

The tragedy, of course, is that most ordinary boys and girls don’t stand a chance. Few want to see themselves as victims and most youngsters are far too sensible (and normal) to waste their teenage years as self-styled social justice activists.

Most don’t have professors for parents, priming them with the latest woke babble. And for those from ordinary, aspirational working-class backgrounds — the kind of boys and girls promoted by the meritocratic ethos of the 19th and 20th centuries — the barriers will soon seem more impassable than ever.

The dark irony is that all this has gathered pace under a Conservative government supposedly dedicated to encouraging aspiration and meritocracy. And if, as the polls currently suggest, Labour take office after the next election, then I suspect it will only get worse.

Needless to say, all this strikes me as utterly monstrous.

No schoolchild should have to carry the weight of the past and nobody should be judged by the colour of their skin, the heritage of their parents or anything other than their own hard work and natural ability.

And our young people should be free to follow the path for which their industry and talents best fit them, without having to tailor their language or opinions to the freakish dictates of a fanatical minority.

For if nothing else, a meritocratic, socially mobile nation is a successful nation. The Victorians learned that lesson and reaped the rewards.

Are we really about to forget it?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-12000873/DOMINIC-SANDBROOK-Death-meritocracy-Britain-thrall-doctrine.html

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American Jews: Still Targets After all these Years

Jews have been the targets of hate crimes for 2,000+ years. In present-day America, FBI data reveals that some 55% of all hate crimes are directed toward Jews, while they represent only 2% of the population. Thus, Jews are at least 27 times more likely to be the targets of hate crimes than their population numbers suggest.

It seems to many people as if Jews are more prominent and ubiquitous than 2% of the population: They are well-represented in the film industry, academia, and publishing. They have a disproportionately high number of attorneys, doctors, psychologists, and others in professional or healthcare services.

Enduring Targets

How can a group that has been virtually inculcated in all of American history and culture continue to be the target of misdeeds? A central continuing thesis is that because Jews tend to have higher incomes and higher education levels per capita than others in society, there are individuals who resent their success and social standing.

That said, over the years, here is what selected philosophers, authors, and politicians have had to say about Jews:

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: Energy is the basis of everything. Every Jew, no matter how insignificant, is engaged in some decisive and immediate pursuit of a goal... They are the most immortal people on earth...

John Adams: I will insist the Hebrews have [contributed] more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I would still believe that fate had ordained the Jews be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations... They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth. The Romans and their empire were but a bubble in comparison to the Jews.

Leo Tolstoy: The Jew... is the symbol of eternity. He is the one who, for so long, had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A person such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.

Winston S. Churchill: Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.

Eric Hoffer: The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese – and no one said a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity more significant than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations, when victorious on the battlefield, dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious, it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

Mark Twain, Perhaps the Most Insightful

Mark Twain: If statistics are correct, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Appropriately, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, and has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other person, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages, and had done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it.

The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

https://townhall.com/columnists/jeffdavidson/2023/04/16/american-jews-still-targets-after-all-these-years-n2622013

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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