Time to decide who we are
The Rt Hon Boris Johnson, MP
By Robert J Davies
THE headline for this piece is pinched from Boris Johnson’s latest article in today's Daily Telegraph: My Plan For A Better Brexit. There is a lot worth pinching from Boris’s vision for Brexit and, more to the point, his vision for the future of this country although he certainly doesn’t get everything right. There is a worrying streak of globalism running through Boris Johnson which leads him to draw certain conclusions few of his supporters would understand. On the other hand, Boris or Doris?
Our Prime Minister is no doubt hurt by sneers that she is weak and indecisive. She possibly sees it as a point of principle and pride to prove how tough and independent she is by ignoring her Brexiteer critics and ploughing on with Chequers despite the fact that this blueprint for Brexit is universally disliked and derided. I personally have never met or spoken to a single person who thought there was the slightest merit in it. Certainly down the village pub it isn’t exactly going down a treat.
If Theresa May wants to save her job and book her place in history, she should stand before delegates at her party conference next week, declare Chequers dead and vow to pursue the kind of Canada Plus deal which Boris Johnson has outlined. If she is too pig-headed and obstinate to do so, then the Tories should depose her and hand over the reins to Boris and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The party cannot allow Mrs May to turn Brexit into a personal crusade to show how, like Thatcher, she also is a lady who is not for turning. Any of us, when we get something wrong, should be for turning – and that is surely a sign of strength, not weakness.
But to get Brexit right, requires an understanding of what sort of place the British people want this country to be. Leaving the European Union and becoming independent is only part of it. What happens then? Do we continue to tread the Leftist paths of multiculturalism, diversity, mass immigration, identity politics and transgender? Or do we finally say, “please, enough of this dreadful social engineering, let’s go back to being normal again!”
To watch BBC News or Channel 4 or any of the mainstream media, is to assume that Brexit is all about economics – the pros and cons of being inside the Single Market and Customs Union and what we will lose but also possibly gain by leaving. To the Left, and their friends at the BBC, if it can be proved that Brexit could hurt us economically, then it must intrinsically and self-evidently be a bad idea. There is no concept of still believing Brexit to be a Good Thing whether or not we might be economically disadvantaged.
An example of the depth of this misunderstanding can be found in the Welsh Valleys, which returned clear majorities for Brexit despite the fact that this was working-class Labour territory and – more to the point – deprived areas in receipt of huge wads of EU funding. Undoubtedly, for this particular part of the Kingdom, being in the EU is financially advantageous, yet the good folk of this region ignored that and voted to leave anyway.
Back to Boris’s article. What he gets wrong in it, is his claim that it was “not immigration but a concern about national self-determination” that was the single most important consideration for those voting leave. In fact, it was both and the two cannot be separated. The ordinary man in the street understands what politicians – Boris included – struggle with, that the short-term economic advantages of taking in large numbers of people from abroad are dwarfed by the long-term socio-cultural implications.
Aside from the fact that most immigrants are not skilled and instantly become a burden on the taxpayer, there is a simple untruth at the heart of the belief that labour shortages can be plugged by importing workers. It is not the case because (assuming they do find work) they will spend their wages on goods and services requiring the skills and labour of others, thus creating as many gaps in the labour market as they fill. The statistics prove it. And we are all painfully aware of what mass immigration definitely does give us: plummeting average wages and soaring house prices – a double-whammy very few of us in the real world find attractive. As for the costs to society in terms of community breakdown and the cultural, moral and spiritual implications – let’s save that for another article. It is Friday after all.
But Boris understands what Theresa May doesn’t seem to, that Brexit is something vast and historic and fundamental. It isn’t just a dour negotiation in which we give a bit and they give a bit. It’s about securing for generations to come, our independence and freedom and right to determine the kind of society we want to be. It is a marvellous opportunity for the forces of conservatism to push back hard against the Cultural Marxism which infects not only Labour but the highest echelons of the Conservative Party itself.
Such a sea-change will require a huge amount of soul-searching from a Conservative Party seemingly content these days to try to “out-Labour Labour” in the words of one Telegraph columnist. But surely the prize is worth it. Britain is becoming at best a very weird place to live and at worst a downright anarchic and dangerous one. Brexit is an opportunity not only to become independent once more but independent and normal again. The country desperately needs a strong leader who wants, not only to secure full independence, but to re-establish Britain as an identifiably British nation, ancestral home of the British people. And yes, that will mean looking after our own for a change – the still vast, but silent, majority. It need not mean losing our sense of compassion and responsibility towards our fellow human beings. Indeed, reasserting ourselves as a Christian nation will help us to ensure we don’t.
It is in the Tories’ gift as the party in power not only to secure a proper Brexit but to lay the foundations for a British nation to rise again from the nihilism of modern-day cultural and moral relativism. They need proper leadership; unwavering vision and utter determination to jolt Britain back onto a more wholesome path and well clear of Labour’s deeply unpalatable and aggressive egalitarianism. The rewards are potentially huge: to be in power for a generation or more and to consign Corbyn and his bunch of incompetent Marxists to the dustbin of history.
It’s a chance the party should seize with both hands. It may well require the removal of Theresa May and far more than that in any case. Ceasing to be their own worst enemy would be a great place to start. Stop being “nice” and man up!
