RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not to say ‘I told them so’, but in June, 1975, I wrote to lament Britain’s dismissal of old friends, traditions and, indeed, national self-esteem itself. All these years later, as UK voters make their verdict known, I yearn to hear that decades of folly and false promise are finally at an end.
On June 4, 1975, I sat down at my clattering typewriter in the offices of the Daily Telegraph in Fleet Street and embarked on a melancholy task. As one of the leader-writers opposed to Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community (as it was then called), I had been asked by editor Bill Deedes to write a fairly light account of the referendum campaign that would appear on morning of the vote. Bill said he wanted my squib to offset the solemnity of the editorial, but my suspicion was that he was a secret No voter who wanted it to offset the Telegraph’s admonition to vote Yes.

In principle Bill could have ordered a “No” editorial, but pressure from the establishment for an endorsement of Britain’s EU membership was so overwhelming in 1975 that it would have seemed eccentric, unpatriotic, even treasonous. So I read through “the files” of the previous month and started bashing it out:

From the Establishment and the respectable anti-Establishment, from the Economist and the New Statesman, from the Lord Feather [of the TUC] and Mr Campbell Adamson [of the CBI], from Mr Wilson and Mr Heath, from the Royal Commission Volunteers to “Actors and Actresses for Europe”, from the farthest reaches of the civilized West End, the same advice, the same dire predictions of life outside the Market (“God, it was hell out there in 1972”), the same comforting assurances of a bright future inside, less ecstatic admittedly than similar forecasts before we had entered (“Come in, come in, the water’s lukewarm”) have been proclaimed with an almost religious fervour.

Religion itself had been conscripted for the European cause. The Bishop of London, preaching in St Paul’s, had said that those concerned about sovereignty were guilty of the heresy “My Country Right or Wrong” which was “essentially selfish and inward-looking”. As for Big Business, that spoke with one voice: the CBI’s Ralph Bateman declared that it would be “madness” to leave the EEC, and Mr Barrie Heath told the workers at Guest, Keen & Nettlefolds that membership of the EEC was not a political issue at all.

“Is he Sir Barrie?” asked Mr Enoch Powell, the leading right-wing campaigner for a No vote. “No? Well, he soon will be.” He was too—given a knighthood three years later “for services to exporting”.

Australia played a discreet part too:

There was a commendable reluctance on the part of overseas dignitaries to interfere in Britain’s internal political arguments. Mr Gough Whitlam, for instance, revealed how he had virtuously resisted the blandishments of certain anti-Marketeers to call for Britain’s withdrawal. Why had he refused? Because he did not wish Britain to lapse into the sad decline of Spain, he declared in neutral Australian tones.

But that, of course, might have been delivered in the spirit of “Let them have what they want—good and hard” in revenge for Heath’s betrayal of the Antipodes and the Commonwealth in the European negotiations. At least I sort of hope so.

In Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian novel, Submission (2015), which takes place in an imaginary France ‎in 2022, when the Muslim Brotherhood has won elections and rules the country in alliance with the Socialists, the non-Jewish protagonist, a professor at the Sorbonne, tells his Jewish student, who is escaping to Israel with her family, that there ‎can be “no Israel for me.” This is one of the most poignant observations in the book.‎

Another is the protagonist’s reflection that the increasing violence, even the gunshots in the streets of Paris as a ‎civil war threatens to explode during the run-up to the elections, has become the ‎new normal: something that everyone is resigned to as an inevitable fact, barely reported in the ‎media and treated as unremarkable by his fellow lecturers. Even after the Muslim Brotherhood wins the ‎elections, and the Sorbonne is turned into an Islamic university, with all that this entails, his colleagues treat ‎this development as nothing out of the ordinary. Houllebecq’s indictment against the silence and ‎complicity of his fellow intellectuals in the face of the Islamist encroachments on French society is ‎scathing. As a matter of course, in the new France, where freedom of speech comes at a prohibitive ‎price, Houllebecq now has to live under 24-hour police protection. Submission, by the way, was published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks.‎

The resignation and the precarious pretense that everything is normal in the face of rapidly deteriorating ‎circumstances, is a predictable human reaction, testimony to the sometimes practical but lamentable human capacity for adaptation to most circumstances, whatever they may be. ‎Historically, Jews have excelled in this discipline, simply because they had no choice. Just like Houllebecq’s ‎protagonist, they had nowhere else to go. However, whereas there “can be no Israel” for the lost ‎professor, today, unlike the last time Jews were threatened on a large scale in Europe, there is an Israel ‎for the Jews. Uniquely among all the peoples of Europe, the Jews have a welcoming place to go. ‎Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Western European Jews choose to stay put in Europe.‎

The great man-caused disaster of the last century is not global warming. It is socialism.

Consider the utter tragedy playing itself out in Venezuela, a formerly relatively prosperous, resource-rich, Western nation that now faces the economic, political and cultural abyss after embracing the Bernie Sanders-on-steroids policies the Left always promises will bring about justice, fairness and equality.

As one heart-wrenching account details:

In the last two years Venezuela has experienced the kind of implosion that hardly ever occurs in a middle-income country like it outside of war. Mortality rates are skyrocketing; one public service after another is collapsing; triple-digit inflation has left more than 70 percent of the population in poverty; an unmanageable crime wave keeps people locked indoors at night; shoppers have to stand in line for hours to buy food; babies die in large numbers for lack of simple, inexpensive medicines and equipment in hospitals, as do the elderly and those suffering from chronic illnesses.

Venezuela indeed has experienced a war, but not one involving armies. The nation has waged a war on liberty itself.