What Yet Could Be

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our regular corespondent, Terry Field of England, France and Florida, seems to have taken a lead from the Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge in this epistle, perhaps having awaken from a restless sleep to pin the following vision of what yet could be. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, above, awoke in 1797 from a dream and quickly recorded Kubla Khan, an imaginary world of a massive Pleasure Dome.  

Understanding Mr. Field's vision does require an extensive knowledge of British and European politics and history.  And a willingness to let one's imagination float a bit under what, a 'Pleasure Dome'?- GNH

Let’s be chipper about Brexit. It COULD all work out well !!! by Terry Field

The dream of success goes something like this.

The mechanisms for leaving the European Union have been prepared in advance with care and cool deliberation by highly talented political operatives. It is probable that there will be a declaration of a general election on the day in October that offers an election date of 1^st November.

In the count-down to that election, there will be no Brexit intervention by the government. None. The clock will tick down, since it was set in motion by the May Government and ratified by parliament. In the interval of 25 days between declaration and election, only the clock will act, The Johnston Junta – for elected by 100,000 unrepresentative Antiquities, makes it just that – is driven by a considered response long ago structured by the very talented Mr. Cummings and a small number of others. Most of them in Trumpies in Washington.

There will be attempts to stop this. In the courts. In the Parliament. Perhaps involving the functioning of the monarch.

BUT

If this process is stopped half way through the election period ending on the 1^st November, then the entire body of the Brexit Party, the present Conservative Party voters, a proportion of the Labour vote, and the DUPers will all vote to reinstate the exit process. And they will all vote within the framework of and directly for the ruling Conservative Party. 

No other choice offers the prospect of effective exercise of power.

 The Greens, the communist party aka The Labour Party, the assorted lost folk of the ‘no-particular party but I am ever-so Politically Correct’ voters will fragment into their little tribes, and proceed to wipe each other out in the election – this is a first past the post system. Ruthless and effective in dumping the duds and no-hopers. Only focused strength and tactical voting will win. And the Tories have that in their grasp. Farage will be the only one voting Brexit Party.

Johnston will walk it.

Then, here will be a real choice, and it will be his to make.

At that point he needs nobody at all. He dumps Dominic Cummings; he has served his purpose.

Does he need no-deal?  Not at all. The election is his. He commands the stage like a colossus.

But then, even though Britain is weaker than America, that slow moving behemoth wakes up to the fact that Perfidious Albion HAS NOT LEFT YET!. It was stopped by the heroic opposition of left-leaning Tories in the last parliament.

Britain therefore still functions in the EU, as the process was stopped, by order of the courts and by Parliament taking control of the agenda in the last moment and executing legislation via its control of  the business of the house. The naïve folk who stopped it thought they were thwarting Johnston, but they were in fact giving him electoral success and  the future. Johnston did not try to stop them.  He was secretly banking on it.

In a flash, they won him the election, smashed the Brexit Party, neutered Lib Dems, marginalized the communists aka The Corbyn Labour Party.

Now, in early November, he is a man with infinite possibilities.

He has a comfortable majority. He is clear of the flatheads from the DUP. He sees an eviscerated Labour Party before him on the opposite benches. He sees a bunch of- as ever- infinitely malleable Lib-Dems – gushing rage and impotence – and the odd Green from the never-never-land of Brighton and Hove. The ERG simmer and bubble, but his parliamentary majority of the fully corrupted consign them to insignificance.

In America, the Plan cobbled together by Trump and the man he thought he could control, Johnston, for smashing The EU via the British trojan Horse has entirely unraveled. Britain – those perfidious swine – they have NOT LEFT!! And they show no sign of so doing.

Johnston, being an Oxford Educated classicist, read Cisero and the fate of Catilina – he knows JUST how fast things can change. And when he sees an American  ‘friend’,  arrive from Washington, he well knows the short sword is there to one day open his political viscera when his guard is down. And leaving the EU is not just dropping one’s guard to America, it is helping them point their sword at the British jugular and pulling the blade to the national neck for them.

When compared to the United States, outside the EU Britain has in real effect the fire power of Zimbabwe on a bad day now. He thought of that when the American mustachioed lunatic Bolton (a man who makes Herman Kahn look cuddly) visited offering ‘sector by sector’ deals in the twinkling of an eye – just as long as the UK dumps its entire foreign policy and inserts the Foreign Office into a cobwebbed annex of the State Department.

Now the fully empowered and totally unencumbered Johnston looks benignly on Brussels, and EVERY Tory MP short of the headbanging ERG needs HIM in another five years’ time!!! He is electoral gold. He is their pimp. They will do what he wants, where he wants it, when he wants it. He OWNS the Tory Party.

They – the Tory MPs - all know the moment of nationalistic madness has passed. Farage has left the country and taken up a roll in Mississippi running a radio station  called Darkbart. The Tory ranks now all look to five years’ time and a re-run of the gravy train.   

Below Nigel Farage, a Brexit leader

They will follow Johnston ANYWHERE!!!

Even up and into the Berlaymont Building and never leave it!!!!!! Oh those Crepes Suzette!!!

SO NOW the real agenda begins. Europe is stuffed. Deflating and shrinking, very fearful, assaulted by both America and China, full of race competition violence, full of mutual suspicion, trying to form a European Army but incapable of forming a brigade, with NO direction, run now by a clearly somewhat deranged blond female German failed political nonentity with a nice line in power-haircuts and hordes of children by NO political sense at all.

Thus now Johnston then approaches his real target. NOT powerful, always-dangerous Washington keen on using Britain to smash the rival EU; no, he approaches both Russia and Brussels via Berlin at the same time to forge the only rational European structure and one that should have been done LONG ago. Meanwhile Germany and Russia have taken about all they plan to from Trump. They are open to offers. Any offers. And Johnston has the offer of the millennium for them. Which they accept as though it is Christmas. Which, happily, it actually is.

He invites Europe – in reality Germany (The Frogs always do what they are told) - to reconstruct its democracy with looser outer ties to the stragglers – the lazy latins and the dreamer British. BUT he also invites Russia in. IT oozes raw materials, space, brains and many good Germans there since the 18^th century pretending to really be Russian. Germany wanted to do this for decades, but it had and has NO political legitimacy to propose this. IT thought Britain opposed it, as indeed it did, before America went away and Trump cut the mooring line for the British once ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’. Germany of course  also  risked American anger with French rage were it to openly contemplate Russia as a part of the European scene.

Yet now all has changed.

America is gone to Trump Heaven, China is run by a new Stalin-like figure, and Johnston is free to re-forge the European Great Game. He alone can do so. He can bring ALL the parties together in the European continent including Russia – now to be fully together and unified in a grand bargain. Remember; Britain has NOT left the EU yet. France sits in the corner steaming. China is mad as hell with Russia at this unanticipated development,, but in one bound Russia is now free of both the fear of China in the Pacific east; and it can relax entirely about America.

Johnston has recreated 1913 all over again.

Only now with a love fest between Russia and Germany that will endure and grow. 

The REAL Europe, of Britain, Russia, Germany fully co-operative  -  are united as was always the dream and ALL others are out of the picture.

Above, Terry and his wife, Fina, spend their summers in Normandy, their own Pleasure Dome not far from the sea.

The United States is where it was before the First World War. Nowhere at all. Just very big, isolated and self- obsessed. It really has become a nowhere in the new Johnston-designed now. It can buddy up to Japan, suffer from the Yellow Peril for all of eternity, but the action – the real action - is once again in the full and complete Europe. The vitality of 19^th century Europe is here once more. The concentration of synergies commands the world.

Britain of course will then have returned to be itself. A political free-radical, doing its own thing. There is no transaction charge in the capital markets in London. It sails free and vigorous to endless commercial opportunity. In a flash, across Europe, socialism, the infection of the 19^th century injected into the twentieth, is now dead, buried, and gone. Germany and Russia command Poland far more profitably than they did when they tried it with tanks and there is no mess to clean up. Indeed, there has never been a better time to live anywhere between the Rhine and Moscow.

And Johnston, the lightweight, reviled liar, cheat, leaver-of-wife man-we-love-to-hate, has changed the world entirely.

And with no help at all from Dominic Cummings. who now passes his time in an asylum in Surrey, where through the haze of drugs he wonders just what happened to his version of reality. - Terry Field

Teresa May Steps Down

by Glenn N. Holliman

This afternoon I received the following email from a leading member of the legal profession in Pennsylvania.  I wonder if some of you all are having the same or differing thoughts than Dan? - GNH

Glenn,  Today  on CSPAN I stumbled across Theresa May's last Prime Minister's Questioning session in Parliament on Wednesday.   I got to see the last 30 minutes and the entire 30 minutes almost made me cry.  

Here was a woman whose civility, honesty, decency, compassion and knowledge of the details of government were obvious to all (except the front bench of the Labor Party who did not ask any questions and who did not rise to give her a standing ovation at the end).  Theresa May was praised by the speakers from all the various parties and it was obvious that she is greatly respected for her human qualities.  

I suppose historians will rate her as a less than average Prime Minister, but the affection in Parliament for her today should be emphasized, particularly at a time when such qualities in political leaders are in very, very short supply.      

It is so sad that the two leading English-speaking nations in the world  have political leaders who display none of Theresa May's human qualities and will be perceived by historians as con men devoid of any principles and as clowns and buffoons.

Feel free to transmit these sentiments to Terry and all your friends in Europe. - Dan whose picture is above

COMMENTS:

From a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in Tennessee: 

"The Economist months ago made the best commentary in its indirect, snarky way when it mentioned surprise May was managing to stay afloat and then added parenthetically, "although wooden objects tend to do that."

From a businessman and political observer in Jerusalem:

"What is the alternative? It seems that there were 2 choices and the lesser of 2 evils was chosen through 

political maneuvering. The deeper question is how and why Britain, the home of civil people got to this point

 with 2 such people at the top. 

The next question is whether we need street fighters today to counter the sophisticated street fighters 

who are leading those nation's trying to attack the civilized world. Can civil leaders do the job today?"

Terry Field in his Garden

Becoming Unhinged 

by Terry Field in France ruminating in his garden

Watching Britain change from afar is an unpleasant experience. It is hard to watch the failure of the political structures to both represent and be themselves modified in order to reflect the needs and expectations of the society. 

A prime minister will be elected by about 160,000 members of the Conservative Party to, by all accounts, remove Britain from the European Union with no agreed treaty, thus removing the country from all its global trade agreements, and disconnecting it from, quite literally, thousands of legal structures that support and facilitate all the international and many internal national functions and actions on which the population depends.

In addition, even at this stage after three years of social psychosis and ineffective government, the poor of the country have become relatively and absolutely poorer to a degree not seen in the last 58 years of recorded data.

In my last blog, I referred to the potency of the fascistic method, defining it quite closely. I consider present events to be a full justification of my suggestion that it is the dominant political method and force found in present politics inn Britain.

I repeat my warning made some time ago. States can and do fail, and from that failure, recovery in the current global condition may become not possible. I consider that Britain is in real danger of experiencing this dreadful reality. The mania that drives this isolated and deluded lunacy will dissipate when catastrophic failure results. But recovery will then be extremely difficult. NO rational, skilled informed person possessed of real knowledge that I know of, and I seek for one with zeal, feels that what Britain is doing is other than deranged.

Racism is tiresome and infantile. But so is the cult of the false victim.

Many of us have watched the appearance of the small number of new, radical, very culturally and socially challenging members of the House of Representatives with amusement as foreigners, and with stressed concern of one is an American citizen. It has been interesting to see persons described as ‘black’ or ‘of colour’ ‘beating up’ their democratic party ‘colleagues’ for not being sufficiently ‘supportive’ of their needs. It has been a curiosity to see some large numbers of Americans on the ‘left’ of their local politics demanding vast ‘reparations’ for damage done to them over and since the period of slavery. 

Watching a woman try to demolish the quite harmless Mr. Biden for not fully and supporting the attack on local state senators when she considered he should have done so raises the question in the mind of this, and I suspect very many observing foreigners.   ‘Why and when did this hysterical rage and sense of unsatisfied entitlement appear when there was no such sense expressed in prior generations, during the time when injustice was, by any measure, far more severe and painful than it is now?’ Adults never used to behave like this. But where are adults now?

This writer suggests it is a false mania, a false rage, an inauthentic sense of victim hood. It seems to be all of a piece with the free untrammeled ability of people in the Anglo-Saxon world to express personal pain simply because the social mores make such personal expression permissible.  Excess personal liberty born of the particular socio-economic cultural and economic circumstances has fed into, and been amplified by, the poison of universal social media. The collapse of work and its replacement by work-posture behavior adds to the sense of personal free choice and isolation from consequences. All this feeds the personal Ego, and infects it with a mania of unhappy isolated grievance.

In such a condition, and where political responses to new socio-economic states have in the past taken a century to develop (an example, industrialization began around the start of the 19^th century, but the Labour Party only appeared as a political force in England in the early 20^th century) one can only conclude that the claims of oppression, of ‘racesim’, or any other silly ‘ism’ and all the other white noise of enraged accusation is simply displacement for the real problem. 

The problem that the physical and cultural condition of the old advanced world has changed out of recognition, together with the shattered environment, but whose political and social ideas of how to live are redundant and irrelevant.

In a world where AI removes all work after the coming fifty years, referring to socialism, Marx, Das Capital and Engels is a little like an engineer referring to the wooded wagon wheel as a solution to linear induction train systems.

We are like children in a playing ground. We do silly things, of no worth, and why? Because outside the wire fence of the playing field the real world of which we seem to no nothing at all is racing ahead.

I am living in a time of social infantilism. With men largely de-sexed and emasculated, whilst in much of the West, a good proportion of them, in some countries almost half of them are infertile, and women are behaving with such detached pain and silliness  as to make one weep.

And all the time climate change offers a now unavoidable and very rapid return of ages when we had no means of surviving at all.

Vote Democrat; Vote Republican. Vote Labour; vote Tory, Vote Le Pen; vote En Marche.

With 76% of global insect life gone in less than 40 years, a blink of the eye, and reducing by 2.5% PER YEAR – who the bloody hell cares!!???

The British Ambassador Resigns

By Glenn N. Holliman

David Collingwood, British educator and keen observer of the human race, emailed the following from his holiday villa in southern France with permission to post.   

"If you feel that you’d like to publish this, you have my full authority.  Here, in la Vaucluse, it is a comfortable 30 degrees Celsius: I write in the shade of olive trees at the table in our Provençal garden; ahead is the unmistakeable outline of Mont Ventoux; around, thousands of cicada chirrup merrily; above is the cornflower-blue sky beloved of Cézanne; and by my right arm is a glass of chilled rosé. What could be better? No wonder I wax lyrical today.  Warmest good wishes and bisous." - David

The high profile story here, as, one would hope it is over there, is the maliciously-leaked (confidential) correspondence of Kim Darroch, the British Ambassador to the USA.

Left, David, wordsmith and 
intellectual of the Midlands, shares an insight.

He did what all ambassadors do: he assessed state and actions of foreign governments and advised his government accordingly. As an ambassador quite rightly expects his correspondence with his government to be confidential, he must be blunt and honest, rather than diplomatic.

Right, Ambassador Kim Darroch. 

That a potential British Prime Minister - Boris Johnson - would refuse to give his full support to a British ambassador, beggars belief. 

Right, the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson?

That a nation’s leader - President Trump - would lower himself by resorting to social media to question the judgement of any ambassador is shocking. 

No gentleman would admit to reading another’s correspondence: he would distance himself from such behaviour. Thus, the best, and correct, response to Sir Kim’s (leaked) reports would have been not to respond at all. The alternative would have been for Mr Trump to have condemned the criminal and treacherous behaviour of the perpetrator of the leak.

Without naming specific prime ministers and presidents, I look back with nostalgia to times when the leaders of both our nations at least made a pretense of dignity and courtesy, behaving in a manner befitting their high office. - David Collingwood

Political Collapse in the U.K.?

By Glenn N. Holliman

Since businessman and economist Terry Field wrote this article, the Prime Minister, Teresa May of the United Kingdom, has given her resignation notice.  The Conservative Party, the oldest continuous political party in history, is in disarray divided over how best, if at all, to leave the European Union.  Many suspect that May's successor will have no more success guiding a 'soft Brexit' than Ms. May has attempted.  Below is Terry's latest analysis of the whys and wherefores of the situation. - GNH

Political collapse has arrived in England. Where can it lead?

The British Prime Minister has strained her arm muscles this morning. She has shoved the sofas in front of her cabinet office door, to prevent any further remaining cabinet members from entering the room and suggesting yet again that she should go. Thirty-six resignations down the line, no agreement to settle with Europe in sight, and the politics of the street dominating and overshadowing a Parliament worse AND probably more anarchic and more incompetent than any since the one Cromwell broke up. 

What is happening in England is not inconsequential. Indeed, it is a part of a set of changes that rips the country from over two centuries of its past – a successful past until the dread decision to join France in 1914 and the gross impoverishment that followed on the Hitler war.

Left, Barb Holliman points out an 'item' that Terry, in his dark glasses, has overlooked in their discussion on the collapse of the British Empire. 

The first, obvious change is the collapse of the mechanisms of wise government. For centuries, Britain, beneficially isolated by the navy, both safe and able to range across the seas to gain opportunity was sheltered by the comparatively wise and benign government and guidance of an enlightened aristocracy, whose structure, stable as a result of primo geniture, was able to act as a ‘guardian’ to the progressive developments of commerce, of trade, and later of industry and the linkages to the vast colonial empires – the first being in North America, and later in India and the eastern and African countries.

As the franchise was extended progressively through the reform acts of 1832, 1867, 1884 and then into the first decades of the twentieth century, the guiding hand of the commercial interests and the aristocracy, in the form of the Whigs and the Tories, facilitated a near continuous beneficial growth in all aspects of life in the empire and at home in the British isles.

Even as the franchise broadened, as the effect of industrialization generated the Labour Party, and as power moved from landed interests to trade, commerce and the cities, the power and authority of the aristocracy and the great commercial interests, functioning on inherited power and the eternal sense of duty – noblesse oblige – maintained a ready ear to hear the complaints and aspirations of the people. 

The country changed to the benefit of the population. All understood the sense of place, but they also knew what to expect from each other – and from the classes they could see but were not members of.

In short. The system worked, and the politics reflected that and reinforced it.

Then came 1945, universal education for all to 16, later 18, and the maturing of the effect of the universal suffrage as all began to seek representation from those who would prosecute their own class- or sectarian – interests.

As this full-hearted sectarian engagement of all possible interest groups gathered pace, in the wider world, Britain was becoming relatively – and in many parts of the countries that composed the whole – absolutely poorer. The great cities fell to pieces and the inhabitants suffered deprivation, isolation and poverty, despite the post war recovery, whose effect was to greatly advantage the non-industrial south over the dying industries of the north, great social fractures opened up, and the class divides widened. The parties of the left became more vocal, would-be radical, and aggressive with demands, 

The conservatives postured that they were now ‘of the centre’ – Harold MacMillan famously saying that ‘we are all socialists now’ and their memberships began – horror of horrors – to accept those who were state educated, and elevated to civilization by acceptance – albeit in small numbers – into Oxford and Cambridge.

The line held from 1970 until recently, with all pickled in aspic as the left controlled the media and the civil service, the European Union commanded the broad integrationist agenda, and the right was marginalized to being viewed as close-to unhinged.

Then came 2008. The collapse. The evacuation of surplus funds, of easy state borrowing, the impoverishment of state debt exploding to guarantee the foreign bond holders of the City mega-banks that Brown and Balls had willfully created, to milk of mis-stated profits to buy votes by the million. 

The party was over. And it never started up again. Meanwhile, China and India began their remorseless rise to gigantic power. China is well on the  way, India is slower but will undoubtedly get there. In the west, most commentators in England consider the United States as being in decline and perhaps approaching internal instability.

The psychological effect of this in England is very profound. More so than in continental Europe. Why so? Well, since 1940, England has well understood that its physical survival has depended upon sheltering under the American power’s wing. That to be alone a second time would tempt fate that another Himmler may one day in the future – from some place as yet unknown and not even considered dangerous – stamp his psychopaths on the people of the islands from which there would be no escape. SO America was essential. And like a father standing guard over a child, it is both resented and loved.

Yet now it (America) declines. And into what? And how long will it take before senility and ineffectiveness takes over there. We in England know how fast collapse from immense power to nothing-at-all can take. It is lightning fast; and it happened – quite directly, and quite recently – to us.

Thus the first reaction in Britain – it being pragmatic- is to see if its new uncle in the east is likely to be beneficial as its father in the west has been. So we court China. We flatter it; we eschew the Dalai Llama now, we pitch for their ‘investments’, we invite their unsmiling Head Man to address our parliament (where he reminded us what parvenus we are) and hope to enter some of their highly controlled ‘markets’.

And yet there is a nasty reality we cannot shake off. That we are weak, unskilled, poor and alien to the new eastern Uncle. Who we now fully understand cares entirely for himself and not at all for us. Our friendly father (America) in the west, still affectionate to us (why I simply do not understand now save for history and sentimentality) may be ‘in decline’ but by any reasonable expectations is still unlikely to ‘decline’ to anything less than an immense power, if not any longer the sole global power.

All this has de-stabilised England. It has entirely lost a sense of place and a sense of safety for the future. The ‘austerity’ following on 2008 caused generalized discontent, and the parties moved to the margins – the Labour Party to a retro-socialist obsession, with a mini-Lenin type at the head, and the Conservative Party sought to find the centre-ground in partnership with the Liberals. The depth of the impoverishment of the state following on 2008 was such as to doom any such centre -politics from doing other than enraging a population drunk on decades of state largesse provided on the back of ruinous state and private borrowing.

The centre in Britain has collapsed. With England split between the socialists on the left, and a new form of English Nationalist party that is emerging before our eyes in the form of the moth emerging from the chrysalis of the old one-nation, aristocracy-led, socially only lightly-engaged Conservative Party. May was the last attempt to sustain a Eurocentric, essentially centrist, ‘managerialist’ Conservative Party. It is no coincidence that May is a Grammar School product, taught to ape the mannerisms of the old aristocracy, but on a pathetically modest scale.

SO what is happening now to that political dispensation – a dispensation that is the latest iteration of a party over 200 years old? The new party (Conservative) emerging from the old one is becoming a very different creature indeed. This new party rejects everything that has gone before, even as it claims to being intent on reviving it. This new party is at its heart a true reflection of the contemporary England – an essentially working-class, total work state, where the vast majority of the population is functionally educated, disconnected from the world in a way their antecedents were not for centuries past. These people live and breathe their little island. They have entirely forgotten their imperial past (save for a periodic dollops of deliberately out-of-context emotional gloop served up as socialist ‘social cement’ by the profoundly unhelpful BBC).

In less than half a single lifetime, the entire world view of their grandparents has been destroyed, thrown into the trash can, and replaced by a sort of anarchy of disconnected newness, intended to both serve the needs of local commerce, and to deconstruct the class and other social inter-relationships that both grew out of the past, and offered sophisticated connections to it. The citizen is entirely cast adrift, made new, made isolated, turned into a socially compliant consumer unit, but with a quality of life and a sense of security and happiness worse than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution. 

In this condition, all must work all the time. As in the former Soviet Union, children are farmed out to care agencies as parent work from youth to decrepit old age – and they are taught that this is the only way to live, that anything else is unimaginable and undesirable. To sustain this absurdity, the people are subjected to a level of conditioning and psychological management from the earliest years that Dr Goebbels would simply marvel at for its extent and it unyielding continuity. Winston Smith in 1984 observed the poisonous lunacy. I doubt such awareness is available to the inhabitants of England now.

The extent of disconnection is perhaps greater in England than in any country on earth. And into that comes people like Nigel Farage of the Brexit Party, and Boris Johnson and the like in the Tory-Conservative party.

Out of this free-floating condition comes Farage and Brexit. The simple solution to remove fears, recover what is lost, shine a light on a bright new future. In all humility the writer understands how the uneducated masses can be so taken in, but it is still, after all that happened in the 19^th and twentieth centuries, a simple wonder that the level of naivete required to facilitate such potent but grotesque politicking is so readily available. To be sure, the depredations of gross amoral and atheistic state socialism has accelerated the disaffection, compounded with the ‘no more money’ sign going up outside the British exchequer, but something far darker has taken over. And that thing is the collapse of the western perspective on how to command a state and an economy. 

Watching China, the monolith full of what looks so often like clever ‘clones’, the direction of societies in America and in Europe looks amateurish, chaotic, and worse, ineffective. We are invited observe the stupefying achievements of the communist party in China, the vast new cities, the 1200 km long artificial river to take water from the south to the north, the ‘belt and road’ system connecting them to the world of the east, Europe and Africa. And against this we have nothing but obvious indebted tiredness. Only tiredness, and the rage so many special interest groups, all ripping the body politic apart for personal advantage, with mutual suspicion and open hatred everywhere. In America look at how Democrat voters absolutely hate GOP voters and vice versa. A vision of insanity.

So in Britain, the response is simply to hell with it, we will look after our own interests, think only of ourselves, trust nobody south of Dover – or west of it now, and thus espouse the safety of nationalism, of patriotism, of the certainty that we can do what we want, and the others had better get out of our way. 

Hence the New Tory Party. Aggressive-assertive, Britain first and last, free to act across the globe, contemptuous of the moderation of its aristocratic past approach, keen to reject European states it sees as the direct inheritors of the chaos of the violent past. For this New Tory Party, economics is trumped entirely by patriotic feeling, by national awareness, by corresponding diminution of regard for ALL others. This latter is the subliminal way the New Tory Party faces up to the recognition of the decline of its American protector.

British humour is always close to the surface but often understated.  This hedge is in Nap Hill near High Wycombe.  The home owner's political beliefs are unknown.  Perhaps the human being consumed is the old Tory Party?

For many of the members of the New Tory Party, their disconnected pragmatism encourages them to accept Huawei and scorn the American reaction. For them, daily commerce and the promise of China trumps all else.

For them there is NO cultural continuity in the west that matters – that is for them simple sentiment and of no worth. They never understood what the Reformation, the Renaissance and all that followed on actually meant – for them it is French flummery – so moving society to China and bending the knee to the Chinese state so long as there is a yen or two to be gained is exactly the same as their grandparents taking the Yankee dollar after 1945.

Cultural values, civilization, commonality is nothing to them. Only the daily trade gain is of moment. And those people are the ones who drive the New Tory Party now. They are driving the future. And the amusingly bumbling Labour Party run by a bunch of whining dysfunctional superannuated Leninists are nowhere in the national conversation.

Of course the BBC gets NONE of this. Nor does the rest of the local hack media.

Britain, via the New Tory Party, kicked into action by the oddity that is Farage, is comprehensively rejecting the enlightenment and all that came from it in the west, to replace it with whatever works, however totalitarian, however alien, however dangerous in the long term, however likely to cut the West adrift from its points of origin, of its origins from Greek classical luminosity so searing it lasted for two and a half thousand years

Make no mistake, Britain is at the start of a deep revolution. One that is cutting the past away. Hacking at it with machetes and letting the people move without any sense of direction to new and never-before-experienced shores. It is the  New Tory Party, at present engaged in formulating a potent poison to dispatch the unimaginative and heroically timid May. - Terry Field

Brexit and Cultural Challenges

The below comments are from an English friend of Stephanie McCarthy, our writer and photographer in Australia.  She passed them to me which I share along with her pictures of some of the incredible avian life.  The sobering challenges of differing cultures in contact with each other is as old as when homo sapiens left Africa and began to migrate across the world, sigh....- GNH

From England, some Concerns about Brexit and Assimilation of Cultures
from a British Observer 

I had to add my comments to both yours (Stephanie's) and Terry Field's recent Brexit and immigration et al.  We are going in the rudderless direction of a banana state if someone soon doesn't come up with a meaningful deal on leaving the EU. 

I have to say that they (the EU) have not been entirely helpful in this process as, obviously they don't want us to leave.  I think they should have thought about that and given some concessions when David Cameron flew to Brussels to obtain just that and came away with nothing, which prompted the Brexit vote.  

There are certainly faults on both sides - Theresa May was too soft at the beginning of the negotiations and allowed the EU too much say in what they, and us, can and cannot do.  I can't see what good a postponement of the 'deal' will do unless someone can come up with a wonderful plan in the interim.  What a mess! 

In all probability we will remain in the EU as they don't want a no deal Brexit any more than we do but that is highly likely as an alternative to Theresa's plan being accepted.

On to the atrocity in New Zealand.  We were bowled over by the outpouring of the people there, the vigils and the hugs given to Muslims.  While we in no way condone what happened, we both said that the reaction of the New Zealanders just wouldn't happen here.

It's probably because we have so many Muslims here (open door policy of the Blair government) and also the fact that there is no way they will attempt to integrate with the rest of society.  

The latest news is that a head teacher in a Birmingham primary school (90% Muslim pupils) has had his attempt to open up the children's narrow views by introducing subjects such as gay relationships, same sex relationships etc., thwarted  as the parents of the children have made such a fuss that he has been forced to backtrack.  

They will never integrate until the Imams discover they are in the 21st century and start preaching the values of the host country and allow males and females to worship together.  It is only recently that these same schools in Birmingham segregated girls from boys in class (because it is their culture) until the local authority was involved and came to a compromise whereby the girls were in the same classroom as the boys but in a separate part of the room.  Some compromise!

I dread to think what will happen to this country.  As you say, Britishness has all but vanished as time after time we have bent over backwards to placate the immigrant.  

As Julia Gillard (New Zealand) once famously said, and I paraphrase, 'you came here of your own free will and if you are at odds with the customs of your chosen country I suggest you use that free will and take the return journey'.  But they won't as it's too easy to obtain benefits, for which we tax payers pay. 

Soap box is being put away now but I thought our views would be of interest to you. - a British Observer

A Letter from Normandy

by Glenn N. Holliman

My friend, Terry Field, fears that he is that ‘Voice Crying in the Wilderness’, largely alone trying to alert humanity that we stand in the midst of a new age, a radically  changing climate moving the planet, this good Earth, to a new and disastrous reality.  A reality he strongly argues that billions of peoples do not understand or acknowledge, and a political leadership remaining in denial of what is happening to all of us as we read these lines. 

Terry, an Englishman of considerable education and business experience and with homes in both the United States and France, writes this reflection upon his return to his restored manor house and garden in Normandy.  There he and Fina will experience another summer of French wine, calvados, multiple cheeses and tending to the roses and orchard. They will worry in frustration that their great grandchildren will face a different, much less inviting world, one with famine instead of the abundance of our generation.  And alas so should we. - GNH

A Note on Climate and Moral Blindness

by Terry Field

On returning from the warmth and comfort of Florida, to the changeable weather and quiet isolation of Normandy, life seems to be the experience of a dream. All is the same, yet nothing is the same.

The wide ocean separates worlds of different minds. I stand on the same earth of the same planet, but that is about all that is the same. Any mature reflection of the so-profound different ‘seas’ human beings swim in force one to accept that there is simply no commonality. Not of purpose, not of understanding of place, not of the deepest of desires, not even of the recognition of what it is worth living - and perhaps dying – for.

This is a dark realization, since such an awareness stops one adopting any real hope or expectation that in the face of what the most intelligent and the most sensitively aware on earth understand to be our darkest of dark predicaments, that there will or even can be a composite response to correctly perceived reality.

The depth of the difference in thinking and ‘being’ between such as France, Florida (and by extension, much of ‘rural’ America) and England – three countries I have some understanding, entirely removes any likelihood that the different minds will ever agree needs to be done, since they do not begin to agree on what matters, what is valuable, what is, to use a word not often applied, ‘sacred’.

It is a personal tragedy to properly recognize that the world as has been with human life is collapsing like a burning Chinese lantern.

And yet any sense of the dread reality is ‘internal’ to the individual, and hard to communicate to the legions of the intentionally or naively, profoundly un-aware. I used to consider that it was not just possible, but probable, that all people possessed of reasonable intellects and characters susceptible to rational discourse would immediately respond to the truth of what is happening, if only the tableau of reality were laid before them. A decade or more of observing mendacity bigotry and corruption has entirely removed any such expectation.

SO where are we now?

We are at the point where many thousands of readily observable degradation of species conditions across the entire large planet illuminates our daily observation that all is dying in front of us. All we need to do is look, and open our eyes, in order to see.

We are at the point where the air, the earth, the soil, the seas, fresh water, are all degrading, disappearing, becoming ever-so much more removed from the myriad creatures who need them for life. We are one such species.

We are at the point where the degradation of the real physical, biological, ecological global ‘stock’ is observably and rapidly declining to the point of multi-species collapse that is of itself accelerative to the point of all-species disappearance. Including Human life.

We are at the point where our civilization, having developed the employment of economic measurements that purposefully and deliberately exclude in value all that is worthwhile in the world, has resulted in the clear appearance of the comprehensive end point for the life of human beings, of our civilization, but far more importantly, the life of -literally – millions of species across the planet.

The global power-elite are advised by civil servants who, if they are not incompetent, know these realities. And yet the political class has steered us all to the point where it is impossible to see any mechanisms that can support the recovery of the stability of universal global life, without bringing in its train the inevitable loss of the great majority of human life, particularly human life compressed into high density urban centres.

Above a quiet winter evening in Florida, 2019. Terry is writing and Fina and my wife, Barb, discussing flowers and the quiet joy of sitting outside on a January evening. 

The large numbers of people now expressing an overt concern over their future and the future of their offspring are – very unfortunately – not effective nor are they helpful. Their terrors are justified. Yet none of them appear to understand that to even have a tiny chance of arresting this very-fast developing catastrophe, actions of such an extremely radical nature would be needed that the inevitable and unavoidable consequence of such actions would be the very rapid starvation of the great majority of people now living.

And we are at the point where, if this is not done, then all human and most other life on earth will be extinguished.

Within a century.  And long before that, all semblance of civilized order will have been long forgotten.

 In the context of reality, not our obsessional social fantasies, can anyone tell me why the sewage of Brexit, the squalor of Trump, the posturing of the mass-hysteria of the Ocasio-Cortezes of this world are other than trivially absurd and offensive? – Terry Field