Tuesday 25 August 2015

Stormy Weather

England. It’s lovely. We have all of history, climate and culture on our side. If ever there really were a chosen race it was the people who maintained this island kingdom free of invasion for a thousand years. Blessed with a taciturn exterior but fiercely loyal to our friends and our flag, England and its people are, or were, the very best of the world. Oft derided as a mongrel nation we had the enviable character of a stoic with a secret; only the English could truly know the English. We not only showed the world how to behave, we walked our walk; even the lowliest English-born bore the heart of a champion in their chest. Cannon fodder maybe, but with a sense of patriotism unsurpassed.

I grew up with rainy Sunday afternoons watching Kenneth Moore shoot down the Luftwaffe, cheering on Noel Coward as he defied the U-Boats and identifying with Richard Attenborough as the plucky everyman, digging tunnels to return to Blighty and to the fray. I also grew up with fierce-bright long summer holidays, roaming the fields and building straw-bale forts, lolling in hedgerow dens chewing sugarbeet and barley ears. And then there were the deep, cold, hoar-frost winters; how we survived without central heating, fleeces and Gore-Tex© is a mystery as deep as why the country voted Labour in 1974.

But of course we know exactly why we elected the government that ended with unburied bodies and undisposed rubbish; Europe. Or, more specifically, what we then called The Common Market. Yes, the referendum was badly handled, but the instincts of the British Left, as piss-poor as they were in government, were still with the working man back then and they knew, if they would not say it openly, that there was far more at stake than trade. They knew – as today they ALL know – that at the heart of the European Projekt is the total obliteration of the nation state and today it is the majority will of the political classes to complete that erasure.

In pursuit of ‘harmonisation’ – becoming mediocre through diversity - the face of this green and pleasant land is defaced with political windmills which boldly demonstrate the impunity with which local democracy is overruled. The little man who wields the vote has no further say after he has cast it in favour of the party which promised the earth but instead continues to deliver us, piece by piece into the ravenous jaws of the Euro-juggernaut. In our history we believe at least that we would not have stood for it. Now it’s by no means certain we have that shared identity and will to remain unshackled.

The captain of HMS Beagle wouldn't have been the kind of man to succumb to Europe’s demanding embrace. Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy was made of sterner stuff. Naval hero, one-time Governor of New Zealand and founder, in 1854, of the Meteorological Office, he was one of that happy breed of men who existed a century before the state broadcasting corporation  became the mouthpiece of a softer establishment in thrall to the destructive experiment of socialism. This week we learned that the Met Office is to lose the contract to supply the BBC with weather forecasts.

Whether or not you believe in the advance of Cultural Marxism, this severing of connections between one national institution and another is surely yet another example of the progressive dismantling, the fracturing of a sense of identity; who else but the UK Met Office should be supplying weather information services to the nation in which it is based? But there are many precedents; much of UK services and infrastructure is in foreign hands, foreign control. Bought and sold we can no longer tell where Britain ends and the rest of the world begins. EU-Mission accomplished.

Have you put the cat out?
"I think we may be in for a bit of rain, dear..."

Come the referendum we genuinely will not know what we are voting for, but right now we should be demanding the reinstatement of the contract. The success of D-Day and Operation Neptune relied on the support of Meteorological Office and as a former ‘Met-Man’ myself I have more than a passing association with its worth. But casting all that aside, the Met Office should be kept on for one reason and one reason alone... who else will have the sheer brass neck to optimistically promise this sceptred isle of many shining facets the sheer fantasy of a bloody barbecue summer!

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