Personal reflections ahead of Christmas
Treading a path into an uncertain future. Robert feels blessed to live in a safe and secure part of the country. This tree-lined avenue in his village once led to a stately home, sadly demolished. Now it is a gateway to fields and woodlands where he loves to walk and reflect. But many others are less fortunate.
By Robert J Davies
It is getting to that time when we look back on the passing of another year and ahead to the next one. It is hard to do so with much optimism at the moment. I sometimes get accused on Twitter, when tweeting on behalf of the RCM, of being paranoid and fearful and jumping at shadows. There’s some truth in that, although more so on behalf of others, than for myself.
I feel very blessed living where I do in a small village of just a few hundred houses. It is big enough for a proper sense of community and social interaction but not so out-in-the-sticks that all one hears is birdsong, livestock in the fields and the tap-tap-tap of woodpeckers up in the nearby trees. That’s lovely of course but for me, as a reasonably sociable person, I want people around me too and the chance to talk to them - all the more so as one who has long worked from home away from the buzz and banter of newspaper offices where I once ploughed my furrow. It’s also nice to be on mains gas and not dependent on two great big red bottles of propane sitting outside the back door like some of our friends and family around here.
Our village has a church and a corner shop and a little filling station and general stores at the other end. There’s a pub and a doctor’s surgery and a social club and wherever you go, everybody knows you. We have a long, wide high street - one of the widest in the country because it used to double up as a mini livestock mart a century and more ago. And there are fields, lanes and woodland in abundance, just a couple of minutes’ walk away. As you’d expect, a close-knit place like this doesn’t get much crime and we rarely ever hear a police siren. However, I have had to learn the hard way not to leave the garage door wide open with its contents on full display. Rural areas suffer theft too. But that’s the thing about living around here - you don’t expect crime and you feel a great deal of trust in the people alongside you.
So it is not particularly for me or my family that I worry, but the future of my fellow countrymen and, as we say on our Beliefs page, the future of generations of Britons to come. They will one day be born on this island hoping for a reasonable quality of life. I fear that, as things stand, they may well not get it. There is an absolutely horrendous culture war going on based on an aggressive form of egalitarianism promoted by the Left and which culminated in the passing of the terrible, Stalinist 2010 Equalities Act. A Conservative government that was truly conservative would want to do something about it - although literally as I write this I am noticing on my Twitter feed that the name of an absolutely horrible French philosopher is currently trending: Michel Foucault. Fortunately for the worthy reason that Liz Truss, Equalities Minister, is seeking to overturn many of the current ideas that he gave birth to. It is Foucault (who incidentally had some positively dreadful things to say about children’s sexuality and adult interactions with them) who we have to thank for much of today’s dogma on equality of outcome / anti-racism / hardline feminism etc. If Liz Truss is willing to take a potshot at all this and introduce some common sense, then all credit to her. But we’ll believe it when it happens.
As for me, my political activism, through the creation of the Rural Conservative Movement, has from the outset been motivated purely by the desire to do good and fight against postmodernist nonsense exemplified by Foucault, even if it comes at substantial personal cost. I am inspired on my journey by other conservative voices on the Right whose fame as compared to my obscurity will undoubtedly have won them many more enemies than I have so far acquired.
Canadian philosopher and clinical psychologist Professor Jordan B Peterson was a great inspiration to me to get out and try to change the world - but put your own house in order first. It was in part thanks to him that this house of ours runs far more smoothly now than before. With two school-age kids it was becoming cluttered, the garage was strewn with countless items which we had long since fallen out of love with but couldn’t bear to throw away and my office on our top floor was an appalling repository of paperwork, piles of books and any number of miscellaneous items which were not conducive to any form of work. Of course, sorting out the chaos in one’s own life is far easier than tackling the chaos in society at large. It is a thankless task, and a huge one, and difficult to achieve even if we all pulled in the same direction which in complex, diverse, modern Britain happens rarely if ever.
Something Douglas Murray said in an interview on the New Culture Forum channel was also inspirational. In 2019 I became increasingly concerned, and frankly, scared, of the left-wing Twitter mobs and their appalling attempts at doxxing me, closing me down and trying to wreck my livelihood. But as Mr Murray said, those of us who aren’t answerable to an employer can’t be fired as a consequence of speaking our minds. He pointed out that very many people are not in that fortunate position. It made me realise that the Silent Majority are silent in part, because they fear to speak out. Those, like me, who are self-employed, and therefore reasonably immune, have a duty to do so on behalf of those who cannot.
And so this year, I chose to come out of hibernation and carry on - returning to Twitter and developing this website as the driving force for Rural Conservatism. I wish to develop a philosophical and ideological basis for the Movement, adapted to Britain’s needs in the 2020s. We need to become like an oak tree - dependent on the soil beneath our feet and deeply rooted in it. Only a very radical approach can save Britain now, one which will turn on its head all the fashionable, lazy, left-wing virtue-signalling and woke nonsense. If you agree, then help. If you can’t spare time, then spare a fiver or two. (We’ll be publishing a Donations page soon). If we all do our best to save Britain we can at least, one day, look our grandchildren in the eye and say that we tried. Who knows? We might even succeed.
