Rock On!

“And where do we go from here?” As David Essex sang in his breakthrough hit ‘Rock On’ all those years ago, when life was so much simpler. And even though Heath was, in that very year, illegally consigning our national sovereignty to the dustbin of history, the actual EU was but a twinkle in a despot’s eye. The lies that took us in, the lies that sustained our continued deeper entanglement and the thoroughly outrageous fear-mongering which accompanied the Remain campaign in 2016 were mere harbingers of the apoplectic threats and approbation being bandied around today.

We have come a long way from 1973. Back then, while there was (and always will be) poverty and hardship, much of the population at least recognised the fruits of success, of empire, of being quite literally world-class in every field. But still more were growing up to experience a lower tier of nationhood. Coming second, third even, against nations with a stronger sense of self, supreme among which was the United States, it seemed logical to some that a European economic counterbalance was necessary.

The next forty years – except for a brief respite in Mrs Thatcher’s decade of hope - were spent in attacking the bastions of privilege, disparaging the notion of free enterprise and carefully rewriting the record to show the British not as a proud, successful, happy breed, but a mongrel nation, utterly dependent on others for its every triumph. This trend was accelerated over the last twenty years, as Tony Blair’s fanatical embrace of all things EU set in train the full surrender all autonomy to the Brussels cartel.

Today, you can’t turn on the television, flip the pages of a magazine, or even pass an advertising hording without being bombarded by a bizarre and unreal depiction of Britain as this weird ultra-cultural, post-national experiment; an amalgamation of  all proclivities as equal participants with every possible departure from the mathematical mode now recognised, illiterately, as ‘normal’. Two daddies, three mummies, every-inch-tattooed-and-pierced circus freaks, paedophiles, degenerates and all possible ethnic and gender self-descriptions accepted as absolutely equal in value to the societal model which drove our evolution for millennia. This can’t be entirely right.

Acceptance and tolerance are good; they are wholly to be encouraged. But normalisation of the abnormal opens gates which may better remain locked... or at least heavily guarded. And nobody knows how this rapid overturning of all that was understood, by things which are not understood, will end up. In a country with a strong sense of self, there would be curbs on dangerous freedoms, constraints on those who went too far. But we have been turned into a non-nation and berated for daring to hold to former standards. When anything goes, you’d better watch where it’s going.

So into this febrile, shape-shifting landscape enters Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and what an entrance it has been. One poll puts them almost level with the Tories and totting up support for both the BP and Ukip it easily bests both the Tories and Labour. What welcome is received by this new attempt to honour what seventeen million people voted for? Why, to be branded universally as racists by those who peddle race as their entry card into every debate, assume difference as their credentials to speak for the many. David Lammy, in particular, uncannily echoes Joseph Goebbels, in repeatedly demanding that those views should never be heard.

We're going to need a bigger boat...

You see, to Lammy and his camp followers, their own very clear Nazism is good Nazism, the righteous end justifying the means, while ordinary people are held as too stupid to tell the difference. Ordinary people, despondent at the loss of their democracy, fall prey to the bad Nazism of national pride, shared identity and tolerance of others, not seeing (in their ignorance) that to be a 'good' Nazi you must root out tolerance wherever it is found. It is madness and no end is yet in sight. Where do we go from here?