Mind the Gap in the Salisbury Review

The author of Tomorrow is Another Country, Myles Harris, has popped up with a free article in the current Salisbury Review.  It is titled “Made in Broadcasting House” and, fairly obviously therefore, is an attack on the liberal media’s long culture war against the native British peoples.

Here are the best bits:-

Three weeks after the bombings an 18 year old black teenager was murdered by a white thug in Liverpool. Dreadful as it was it was given air time out of all proportion to its significance. Even though it came soon after the London bombings, it was instantly elevated to first place in the news. Senior police chiefs talked sombrely of it, pundits were called in to condemn it and the story was kept alive for months. This was in marked contrast to the way the BBC covered the ‘ordinary‘ murder of a 28 year old white man by a black man in the same week and in almost identical circumstances. It was hardly mentioned on the news, no mention of the race of the victim’s assailant was made and it was quickly dropped. It took a huge number of protests before the BBC gave the story adequate coverage.

The message was clear. Fifty six Britons may have been murdered by religious fanatics, a young white man of 28 may have been casually stabbed to death defending his girlfriend on the top of a London bus, but the murder of a black teenager was far more important. A black man killing a white man or Islamist terrorists killing and maiming people on the tube are crimes but they are not racism. A white man killing a black man is racism and therefore incomparably worse. Racism points to something deeply flawed in a society. So flawed - goes the unspoken message – we can begin to understand how the tube bombings themselves might be ‘explicable’ or even ‘justified‘ in the eyes of a racial minority such as British Moslems, (6% of whom thought them justified). Once we have accepted our racism we will be able to see our society as morally equivalent to that of the Islamist bombers. This view, that all actions are equivalent, that there is really no difference between our society and any other, has been creeping up on us for years. It is a product of extreme liberalism, and its ultimate consequence is a bestial society in which anything is permitted.

... For forty years the British - who had always believed to the contrary - have been told they are irredeemably racist and everything they have automatically thought to be good. We have been told that our police, the army, British tolerance and fair play, our justice system, are all irredeemably flawed. Instead we are constantly reminded that the police suffer from institutional racism, the British army tortures its prisoners, our security service is full of liars, uncontrolled mass migration is beneficial to the country…

At the moment traditional British society is lying whimpering in the floor of its cage under this assault. And like the battered wife awaiting a violent husband, urged on by the left, we are struggling to discover what it is we must do to prevent further blows ...  When all such possibilities are exhausted – and they always are - those who have learnt to be helpless do not remain passive. The beaten wife takes a knife to her husband, the dog lying whimpering on the floor sinks his fangs into the hand that produces a plate of food.

At this point Harris lapses into twittering on about an English Hitler being nurtured deep in the heart of white righteousness.  This is silly, self-defeating talk.  He has fallen into the very Marxian trap he was warning us against, internalising the moral worldview of the left and making it impossible for him to prosecute his argument to its logical conclusion.  And that, unsurprisingly to all who read us here, is that to survive we must repatriate to the status quo anti.

Now, notwithstanding Harris’ unnecessary and stilted conclusion, this is otherwise an entirely clear-eyed article of the anti-liberal type which MR readers know very well.  It is good to see in the dry, serious atmosphere of the Salisbury Review.  Like BNP council seats, it represents progress - albeit at the other end of the intellectual scale.

But it isn’t an argument one instantly associates with British Conservatism.  Too hard-edged, too racial.  After so many vile decades of leftist moralising, just too dangerous. 

As it happens the morally safe and “conventional” position on Conservatism is espoused in the other free article on the SR site - by the doyen of the old guard of the Tory right, Norman Tebbit, no less.

He manages to inform us that:-

The English, Northern Irish, Scots and Welsh possess these islands as our national home and have the right to defend them against any who seek to occupy them or restrict our liberty. It is for us alone to decide who may be admitted. At the heart of Conservatism is the belief that, since man is born free, laws can only make him less so. ‘Human Rights’ legislation, for example, imposes obligations. It cannot give us the rights which we have long enjoyed by right. Conservatives hold that people are sovereign.

... Also, since a society is a community with common traditions and institutions, it cannot embrace widely differing cultures. Hence there cannot be a multicultural society.

So far, so good.  But then he goes all spineless with this:-

... Let me end with a few words on the ethnic cultural divisions in Britain today. It would make life easier if we had a society without ethnic divisions, but in my view there can be a multi-ethnic society. However, since a society is defined by its culture there can be no such thing as a stable multicultural society. A multicultural society is a society in an instable state in transition or doubt of its culture and identity. I am now free to state this — the obvious — for during the last decade I have been abused as a dangerous extremist for doing so but now I am joined by Sir Trevor Phillips and the new Archbishop of York. Conservatives would not encourage the creation of ghettoes within which people could live in our territory, but in a foreign society. Clearly that involves the question of language and, of course, civil law and social practice, such as the propriety of forced arranged marriages.

So Norman - as right-wing and non-modern Tories get - is a believer in assimilation.  He thinks that the solution to the race question in Britain is a monoculture.  But, importantly, it is a multiracial monoculture governed by Tories like him - Tories who, perversely, think the people are sovereign.  It’s the fast-track to white racial extinction, of course, and “the people” are just beginning to understand it, however faintly for now.

But no such concern colours Tebbit’s thinking.  He is modern enough to hold to first principles which are politically pragmatic.  Assimilation does not “make life easier”.  That isn’t where the pragmatism lies.  No, it is all we can supposedly enact from our present, morally infirm position.

But this is plainly untrue.  It is all that the leaders of conventional politics have the moral firmness to enact.

I have said innumerable times that “relevancy”, “pragmatism”, “realism” etc have been the bane of Conservative politics since the rise of the industrial working class.  Disraelian realism saved the husk of the Party from itself almost a century and a half ago.  But it left Conservatism behind, unused, unwanted.

A terrible price to pay for political survival though this was, it is as nothing to what we face paying today if we follow Tebbit’s monocultural/multiracial recommendation.  In the darkness of the present it is not Conservativism or the Conservative Party which will disappear into the past, but ourselves.  It is for our very survival as we are, truly sovereign in our own homeland, that we must now make, or remake, our politics.

Harris, I feel, is close to incorporating the ultimate value of survival into his thinking.  Thereby, he will arrive at the kind of conclusion most of us do - sans Hitlers, I might add.  Tebbit and his race-blind kind plainly never will, which is a great shame because in so many ways he has been a long-time and staunch defender of the right’s general cause.

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, May 11, 2006 at 06:45 PM in Conservatism
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