Flying Free (34 page)

A good 20 per cent of teachers should be sacked as useless functionaries. Parents, teachers and politicians have cowered away from their responsibilities. They want to be accepted by their peers and charges, so they adopt glottal stops and inept street-cred slang and doctrines of tolerance rather than imposing standards and encouraging aspiration.

In consequence, education is at the lowest level in modern history – no, in all history, because a peasant, albeit illiterate, had his songs, stories, skills and specialised knowledge.

An alienated criminal underclass has therefore proliferated, owing loyalty to no one yet desperate to give it to someone. Thirteen years of Labour rule have created the greatest gulf in living memory between the literate, self-disciplined, courteous and articulate – the employable – and the rest, who are without hope.

The privileged do not engage either. They live in gated communities and associate only with their own kind.

And then there is immigration. According to Migrationwatch, 80 per cent of all new jobs in Britain are going to migrant workers and 80 per cent of Britons believe that we should pull up the shutters.

The political class, appeasing as ever, does not wish to address the subject. The EU will not allow them to do so.

We are in an unholy mess.

But I am a bull-trader and I have faith in the British people. We have pulled ourselves out of unholy messes before.

We still have a great deal going for us – not least the world’s
lingua franca.

Despite ‘green’ taxes, which are a gift to the Indian and Chinese manufacturing industries, prices are rising radically in the far east and our technological inventiveness remains world-beating. Eighty per cent of the UK’s total economic productivity remains within the nation.

It is a bit like recovering from alcoholism or drug-addiction. The total
restructuring of a life is long and hard, but it cannot even start until the sufferer has stopped drinking or using. So the UK cannot begin to recover until we have won the freedom to act autonomously and responsively.

And then?

Ah. And then…

No glorious visions of lottery-style success, I’m afraid. Just assertion of a couple of fundamental common-sense principles and a few specific applications…

The EU, like all supranationalist, idealistic constructs, depends on gurdledum morality, which is to say a sort of universal principle of niceness rather than service or belonging.

Just impress upon your children the need to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, not to steal others’ property, never to distinguish between one category of people and another and to make appeasement gestures when challenged and lo! World peace and total obedience to the rulers because dissent ain’t nice.

This is garbage.

The tabloids consistently assert that morality is foundering. It is untrue.

People are as loyal, brave and dedicated to their moral duties – to their families, lovers and street-gangs – as ever. It is just that bigger communities and nations have been engulfed in a sea of apologetic gurdledum babble. We are no longer meant to serve our own because we are no longer permitted to identify our own. Morality surely starts out as a simple deal. We are more effective as a team. I won’t kill you or steal from you as you sleep if you will reciprocate. That way, we can both sleep. This extends in time to family, village, town and, ultimately, nation.

But two things are essential to this deal. The link between self-interest and pack interest must be clear and the limits of the pack must therefore be clearly defined. There must be an ‘us’ and a ‘them’.

We identify our pack – family, tribe, club, class, ultimately nation – by common terms of reference (culture), costume and, above all, language. To this day, we form clubs and associations to which we give loyalty. Trades,
crafts, sports, fan-clubs, gangs, social classes, political parties – all have their jargons, their jokes and their uniforms.

And with language comes not just identification but empathy. The cries of a friend cause pain and protectiveness. The cries of an enemy evoke, at best, indifference.

To what entity do we belong in a gurdledum world? With whom should we feel empathy? To experience pain on behalf of every ant in the grass is to cripple ourselves and so to dilute morality as to render it meaningless.

Face it, primitive or not. When we hear of a plane crash in Outer Mongolia, our first question is, ‘Were there any British people involved?’ and then, ‘Were there any children?’

This is no doubt reprehensible but it is also natural. When a child is brought up with no link to a culture or history (school history today consists largely in the Third Reich and, at A-level, the Russian Revolution), with no sense that, in serving her community, she is either furthering a cause to which she is committed or advancing herself within a recognisable group, why on earth should she serve?

She will be drawn instead to the first peer group to which she can feel moral obligation, in which she has status and can feel pride. This may be a family or club. Where these are absent, it will be a gang. Where even that is not available, it will be her boyfriend, her child, herself and to hell with everyone else.

I am not advocating nationalism but nationhood. I am advocating community – the sense that there is something beyond personal material gain which merits, rewards and values loyalty and service.

Religion has all but gone. The extended family has gone. The nuclear family, unsatisfactory throughout its brief existence, is all but gone.

Local identity is diffuse, with hereditary cultures and dialects swept away by imports.

And now even nations and cultures are things of which, we are told, we should be ashamed, because we are all part of an amorphous entity with many languages and diverse interests called ‘Europe’ or ‘the planet’.

So to whom – and to what – do we belong?

No answer has been offered by successive political systems which
deride loyalty and service but nonetheless require commitment to a vague theoretical morality.

The peoples of Europe
will
claim a part in determining their own futures. They
will
find entities to which to give their loyalties. If we are not careful, this will mean unschooled nationalism and partisan factions which offer an identity, a home and an illusion of autonomy.

If we are wise, however, we will take power away from the career politicians, concede to the requirements of modern technology and expand the base of democracy, allowing individuals and minority communities the chance to initiate real change in their own societies on their own terms.

This is what UKIP has always represented for me. It is not about the EU. It is about the UK. It is about independence and individuality.

It about the right of communities to self-determination, self-definition and free trade in a world whose traditional institutions have long since become irrelevant and diffuse; the evolution of democratic representation in a world where communication is instantaneous.

It is only even about nations so far as the nation is a sustainable unit which makes sense and commands the loyalty and identification of its inhabitants. It is also about the many other units which go to make up a thriving nation, a thriving continent and thereby a thriving world. If we all identify and cultivate our own gardens responsibly, we have served the planet far better than globalists who would standardise her.

I hope that we can introduce direct democracy on something akin to the Swiss model, where the signatures of a given number of people on any issue may generate a plebiscite at national or local level.

I see nothing wrong with the notion of a ‘postcode lottery’ in all sorts of things whereby one region enjoys privileges – or disadvantages – which others do not. Standardisation would be destructive and stupid. North Cornwall has seaside, Leicestershire hunting country, Islington cafes and double-deckers. The people of each should surely ordain the composition and day-to-day conduct of each.

Aside from the usual constraints admirably dealt with by Common Law, such divergences truly are no one else’s business.

Thatcher’s hacking down of the power of local councils was necessary because they were using political muscle to irrelevant ideological effect. It should never have been a consequence that local powers of
self-determination
and sense of community were thus destroyed.

I want to see county councils and individual communities afforded far more power over their own destinies. So, if hunting people have to head for Leicestershire to hunt or smoking people to Monmouthshire to smoke in bars, or the residents of one county can obtain prescription drugs to which another has given a lower priority, what of it? It fosters a sense of community, increases diversity and competition, and brings in revenue.

The English are at last beginning to assert their identity after half a century of shamefaced cringing. The flag of St George, once exclusive to skinheads, flutters once more above churches and football-grounds.
Jerusalem
is sung with pride by rugby and cricket-supporters.

It is about time. No one can explain to me quite why the English have shied away from asserting one of the greatest and most influential cultures in the world.

Post-imperial guilt? Well, maybe, but why are the Scots, Irish and Welsh, whose contribution to that same Empire was so great, exempt from the condition?

England has produced the world’s greatest and most influential language, all the great games, most of the great technological advances, many of the greatest writers, bands, architects and artists and the most successful legal and legislative systems in history. We have welcomed and absorbed people of every other culture – until, for some reason, we invented
multi-culturalism
instead.

It may have been necessary for dinosaurs to sink into extinction, but I am sure that they fought for their survival to the last gasp. They did not roll over on their backs and invite predators to feed on them. That, however, is what England did – like Polynesians in that state they call ‘paopao’ where they order the grave dug and admire their own coffin, then quietly die at the time they have predicted.

Other cultures have defended themselves long after their fate seemed obvious, which is why we now have Welsh- and Gaelic-language television channels. The Irish welcome all comers with broad smiles and open arms, but still play Irish music in the bars and the national anthem at the end of the evening. They are hosts, asserting and generously sharing their culture, not craven householders hiding in the attic and allowing others to ransack their homes.

In the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of persecuted Central Europeans, Irish, freed Russian serfs and others flocked into Britain. Their families are now essential components of our society. Most have not sacrificed their cultures or faiths – except voluntarily – in the process.

That was effective globalism and openness to worldwide influence. Multi-culturalism is simply institutionalised, racist condescension. Our cultures should all profit from evolutionary competition, interaction, debate and common cause.

I also believe that the future of the British Union lies in federalism. The component nations of the Union should govern themselves and England should stand responsible, distinctive and proud amongst them.

The regeneration of Englishness will happen willy-nilly, so will we manage it responsibly or wait for the disenfranchised to claim an identity for themselves?

History shows that idiots in search of an ‘us’ instinctively identify it by attacking and alienating a perceived ‘them’ rather than by nurturing and developing their own identity.

So again, how will we enable people to reclaim what is naturally and rightfully theirs? By conceding that right? Or by denying it and so requiring that it be fought for?  

I accept that the government – by which is meant the taxpayer – has paid for the National Health Service and for state education and so is entitled to require certain standards. This does not mean that those standards should inhibit diversity of choice for parents, patients, teachers and doctors.  

Where there is demonstrable failure, negligence or incompetence, act promptly, but do not anticipate it and so prohibit originality or choice.  

Education must be radically reformed. Not only must teacher-training be
rethought or abolished (heads, parents and governors are well able to select talented, committed teachers from almost any background, not just ‘career’ teachers, indoctrinated with the latest psychobabble theory), but selectivity in education must be reintroduced as a matter of urgency.

Competitive sport – and inter-school competition in debating, theatre and countless other fields – is of vital importance. The limbs of an effective body must be fit and their reflexes autonomous and quick. The head is there to interpret those reflexes and guide unified action where necessary. At present, the head has taken total control. The unused limbs are atrophied.

That our academic leaping salmon should be tethered to bottom-feeders is a disgrace, that there should be so little incentive to effort and talent shameful. Grammar schools must be at the heart of reform.

On the other hand, the focus on academic achievement at the expense of craft is snobbish nonsense. A cook, carpenter or IT technician, for example, is de facto literate and numerate, and the practice of such skills is more congenial for many students than book-learning.

The assumption that university education is a right is absurd and destructive. Once, all university education was a scholarship, won by the academically excellent and original. It was a mark of the best universities that they could take students with lower exam grades than were acceptable to their inferiors. They elected students who demonstrated flair and passion at interview and could therefore be counted upon to contribute to the institution.

Apprenticeships, however, should be afforded every bit as much status as university education. Academe is for the very few. It is in large measure irrelevant and should be proud to be so. Its functions, if any, only become relevant after – often long after – the event.