Steamin' and a-Rollin'

The Trump train is thundering down the track bringing relief to small town America. The shiny new locomotive has been a long time coming and is eagerly awaited by the beleaguered townsfolk but just around the bluff the baddies are desperately strapping dynamite to the sleepers. They want to derail the train because to them it represents all that is bad about the world. It represents progress.

The oddest thing about the whole debacle is that they think that is they who are progressive; they even refer to themselves as, you guessed it, ‘progressive’. In their minds they simply cannot understand what is happening. Did they not bring great wealth... to the few? Did they not champion the rights of minorities... at the expense of the majority? Did they not educate the west... to blame itself for all the ills of the world? And have they not done enough for the poor and stupid... to keep them poor and stupid? For all this, they see no gratitude at all.

The Trump train is laden with picks and shovels, blankets and staples to tide the town over until it can build itself anew. The forgotten majority don’t understand, want or need quinoa, gender fluidity, or being forced to accept an unmanageable influx of new people of unknown provenance or purpose. They reject the idea that you can build real wealth out of thin air by promising nirvana but delivering nothing but words. And they are suspicious of sociology because it has robbed them of their identity. In a world of identity politics it is ironic that the people who built civilisation are denied their own.

Almost nobody who voted for Trump is a racist; they don’t spend their days dreaming up hatred for others. They want good, honest toil and good honest reward for their labours. And they want a stake in what they build, not a bill for the high stakes virtue signalling world built by the Obamas and Blairs. But the dynamite plotters, believing themselves the only true torch-bearers for American values, won’t even let them have that.

Over here, those who voted for Brexit are eagerly watching the USA’s own release from the bondage of progressivism as Donald Trump – hated mostly because he’s a rich white man with normal flaws and no dogged political ideology to sell – does what he said he would. But in impotent rage and blind to what they are revealing to the masses our own currently elected representatives are determined to represent only the orthodoxy of the last twenty  years and only respond to the clamour of the losing side.

John Bercow has led the Commons in what he imagines is striking a heroic blow for social justice, declaring outright hostility to one who has offered the hand of friendship. Just as with Berkeley students rioting against Milo Yiannopoulos, bussed-in left wing activists egging Farage and Nuttall in Stoke and any number of yowling, rabble-rousing ‘slebs’ urging defiance against democratic outcomes, the tactic of angry progressives everywhere is to shut down debate. Burning books, rewriting history and denying platforms to opposing views are in their blood.

Don't say it, Phil...

As a feeble excuse for Westminster’s weakness in calling to ban what they cannot counter, they cite a desire not to embarrass the Queen. The Queen has had to suffer indignity at the hands of parliament often in her 65 years on the throne. She’s had to suffer Bercow, for heaven’s sake. And for all his bluster, Donald Trump is no Mugabe; she will be fine. As they struggle to set the charge the train comes clattering around the bend; they're out of time. Hop aboard folks, wave a flag, it’s going to be a hell of a ride.