Beware of right-wing extremists

The Brextremist hard right culture wing of the Tory party, which these days is most of it, has been holding a conference in London this week to air its delusional and self-pitying views. The so-called ‘National Conservatism’ conference gave the Tories full throttle to blame all the ills of modern Britain on migrants, the EU, the poor, the trade unions, and a supposedly all powerful globalist liberal elite. The event was organised by the right wing Edmund Burke Foundation, one of those right wing think tanks with an opaque funding structure (take a look at https://burke.foundation/ and see if you can find their backers). The conference show-cased the reality-phobic right wing authoritarian, xenophobic and minority bashing politics which are in store for the UK unless the Conservatives are utterly thrashed at the next General Election. Sadly, an eventuality which, in my opinion, is looking less and less likely as that election draws closer.

The National Conservatism conference represents the Trumpification of British politics. It is nakedly and shamelessly nationalist and British exceptionalist and triumphalist, even as it denies that it is nationalist. The event platforms an authoritarian populist form of Conservatism which is all but indistinguishable from fascism. Delegates to the conference discussed the Tories’ favourite culture war tropes, a form of political masturbation which could not be further removed from the issues which will really determine the outcome of the next election. It’s the Daily Mail Comments Section writ large and in the flesh.

When I first heard about this conference, I imagined it was going to be held in some vast hall, like the QE2 Centre in Westminster. Instead, it was held in the Emmanuel Centre, a venue as tiny as some of the minds on display. The modern Tory party presented us with Suella Braverman as one of its great thinkers. That's the political equivalent of praising a toddler as a genius because it managed to get most of the poo in the potty.

It seems the Tories have given up on winning the next General Election outright and are contenting themselves with trying to deprive Starmer of a majority. The Conservatives have learned nothing since they were given a message at the English local elections. What they appear to have taken from that defeat, which saw them lose more than one thousand Councillors, is the same lesson that Liz Truss took from her disastrous and thankfully short chaotic term as Prime Minister. It’s the people who are wrong, the Tories need to double down on the extremism and go even further.

The populist extreme right of the Tory party has run Britain into the ground with Johnson and Truss, and a disaster of a Brexit which even Nigel Farage has had to concede has failed. So the Tories stick Sunak into power in order to take the blame for their inevitable (alledgedly) defeat at the next General Election, thus permitting the hard right-wing to take full control of the party again in the wake of the General Election. But even if they are defeated at the election, their ideas will live on through Starmer’s Labour Party.

This conference would be laughable were it not so dangerous, a direct threat to democracy railing against liberal values before our eyes. We had the ludicrous spectacle of Tory MP Marian Cates ranting against the UK’s low birthrate, which make inward migration necessary. According to Cates, the reason the birthrate is falling is ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘excessive education’ and not the late stage capitalism which she so strongly defends. Even as it makes a small number of people obscenely rich and condemns the majority to a cost of living crisis, unaffordable housing, soaring childcare costs, and the collapse of public services. But no, it’s really all the fault of university academics pointing out the evils of British imperialism and Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. It would be a joke were this woman not a legislator with the power to shape public policy.

Another speaker was right wing historian David Starkey, who insisted that left-wing activists are “jealous” of the Holocaust and want to replace it with slavery. I have no idea what that means although it’s obviously both asinine and extremely offensive. Starkey went on to claim that groups such as Black Lives Matter were attempting to destroy “white culture” and “do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust. And this was coming from one of the supposedly more intellectually distinguished contributors.

Right wing author Douglas Murray averred that people were not ‘allowed’ to be proud of being British. In his own words, he could “see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century”. The Holocaust, and a war of aggression that killed 70 million people are “mucking up.”  Just mucking up? In his book” The Strange Death of Europe”, Murray pandered to the tropes of the extreme right wing white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, arguing that Europe “is committing suicide” by allowing non-European immigration into its borders and losing its “faith in its beliefs.”

Another speaker at the conference was the academic Matthew Goodwin who asserted that during the past 50 years the people of Britain have been victims of a revolution imposed on them by the left. It’s clearly escaped Goodwin’s attention that over the past 50 years the UK has only had 13 years of Labour government, and that was the government of Tony Blair, whose wholesale adoption of previously Conservative policies was described by Margaret Thatcher as her greatest achievement, a cruel trick now being emulated by Keir Starmer.

In the UK, as we have seen with Trump in the USA, the Law and Justice party in Poland and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary, there has been a creeping right wing populist authoritarianism. An authoritarianism which prioritises ‘culture war’ issues and claims that an out of touch global liberal elite does not care about the working class. At the same time, it cracks down on the ability of trade unions to organise, introduces tax policies which favour the wealthy and has little to say about low wages, the casualisation of the workforce or the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, the real elite whom the right protect and defend. It’s a right wing which increasingly trades in conspiracy theories and which rejects any attempt to hold it to account, dismissing elections which it loses as ‘rigged’ or introducing measures to suppress the participation in elections of demographic groups which oppose it.

This is the future of British politics. This is what English fascism looks like in the 21st century, deeply xenophobic, reactionary, and hostile to any opposite views. Can we rely on Labour to protect us from this as its response to this nationalist right wing populism is to co-opt its garb, its language and its policies. 

Whither Keir Starmer and the Labour Party?

In a speech to the Progressive Britain conference in Central London last week, Keir Starmer insisted that he didn’t care if people think that his party’s priorities sound conservative. We’ve noticed that already, Keir, we’ve noticed. In an attack on the the Tory government of Sunak, he claimed it “can no longer claim to be conservative". That’s a mantle that Starmer is determined to adopt. Under Starmer, the Labour party has become a vehicle for the imposition of conservative policies.

Starmer seems to be a Labour leader for whom Tony Blair’s neo-liberal New Labour is dangerously left wing. In the speech, Starmer said that in order to secure victory at the next General Election, the Labour Party would have to “change our entire culture” and compared his efforts to reform the party to former prime minister Tony Blair’s symbolic rewriting of Clause Four, but “on steroids”. In this speech, Starmer signalled that under him, the Labour party will move even further to the right than it did under Blair and Brown, with the clear implication that he intends to shape Labour into a party which appeals to English nationalist Brexit voters in the midlands and north of England. The so-called red wall seats which fell to the Conservatives and were instrumental in delivering Boris Johnson his landslide Tory victory in the December 2019 General Election. The only reason that Starmer is able to pose as a social democrat is because the Conservatives are in the grip of people like the right wing authoritarian English nationalists of the European Research Group who are but a hairsbreadth away from outright fascism. However viewed objectively, Starmer’s Labour party occupies much the same political space as the Conservatives did under John Major. 

Starmer knows that his route to power depends upon winning those seats back for Labour. Despite his cant about achieving a Labour recovery in Scotland, he knows that he needs to win in England in order to have any chance of winning the next General Election. He can win without Scotland, he can’t win without England. The electoral arithmetic is very simple.

How Scotland votes can only make a difference when the outcome in England is finely balanced, there are just not enough Scottish constituencies to affect the final result when England votes decisively one way or the other. Scotland has only 59 Westminster MPs, a number which will be even lower following the planned review of constituencies which will see Scotland with only 57 Westminster constituencies. These new boundaries may be in place prior to the next General Election, which is not scheduled until late in 2024. England, on the other hand, will have ten more MPs than it currently does, with 543 MPs. Since Scotland does not return many Conservative MPs, and there is no sign that the Conservatives are benefiting electorally in Scotland from the current difficulties of the SNP. How Scotland votes will have very little impact upon the total amount of Conservative MPs at Westminster.

So despite what Starmer and the Labour party might tell voters in Scotland, Scotland and Scottish interests are not a priority for Starmer and his party. His assertion that voters in Scotland need to vote Labour in order to ‘get the Tories out’ is factually incorrect. Indeed, voting Labour simply means voting for an alternative vehicle for the delivery of conservative policies. Starmer has given us a Labour party shorn of any decency and idealism which it once may have had and which promises nothing more than to apply Tory policy, only more competently and with a sad face. Starmer is the true heir to Blair, a man who fakes sincerity as a means to tell a more convincing lie.

What we have now is a Labour party which is committed to Brexit, which promises to be every bit as vile as the Tories to migrants and asylum seekers, a party which refuses to repeal the authoritarian legislation introduced under Boris Johnson and his successors, and which, crucially as far as Scotland is concerned, refuses to recognise the right of the people of Scotland to choose another independence referendum by voting for a Scottish Parliament which is committed to delivering one. Labour pays lip service to the notion that the United Kingdom is a voluntary union of nations, but effectively denies that it’s an idea which has any meaningful political content. Starmer has consistently refused to spell out what the democratic route to another Scottish independence referendum might be. He’s not going to say what it is, even as he insists that it exists, because he is determined to prevent another independence referendum from ever taking place. He will only consent to one when his path to Downing Street depends upon it, but that’s the last thing that he’d ever admit to.

Nothing Starmer says can be taken at face value. He will say whatever it takes in order to win over those crucial votes in pro-Brexit English constituencies, and his stated refusal to do any deal with the SNP must be viewed in that light.

Starmer will be haunted by the memory of the Conservative attack adverts which did such damage to Ed Miliband in the 2015. The Tories had not expected to win an absolute majority in that election, but in the event they did, with the catastrophic consequence for the rest of us of them having the votes in the Commons to force through the EU referendum which was held the following year. Starmer will be determined to avoid giving the Tories the opportunity to mount a similar attack on him which might deprive him of the victory he craves.

The last leg of the Cornish Coastal Footpath

Although we had walked stretches of the Cornish Coastal Footpath over the years, it was actually on 7th January 2010 that I recorded in my blog that we'd decided to make completion of the entire route, all 330 miles of it, an objective. We've duly recorded what we've done on a map, and through my blog, and, now, after 13 years, we finally managed to get around to walking the final leg. We think it's quite an achievement for two septuagenarians and I'll commemorate it with more photographs than usual.

The last leg began and ended in the car park of the Rectory Tea Rooms in Morwenstow, It was just over 5 miles, with half of it along the coast. The elevation profile gives a good idea of how up and downy the coastal stretch was, but it wasn't as bad as we were expecting. The midpoint of the walk, and where we turned inland, Marsland Beach, marks the border between Cornwall and Devon.

The footpath drops from the starting point through the graveyard of Church of St Morwenna and St John the Baptist. We'll visit this at the end of our walk.

The path through the woods was a delight as we walked between the bluebells and wild garlic, the pungency of the latter not to everybody's taste.

The reverse view was equally delightful. It's a great time of year for woodland flowers.

The characteristic pink of Sea Thrift (Armeria maritima) contrasts with the blue sea.

Looking up the coast towards Devon. Hartland Point is the furthest promontory. And the route is not as flat as it might look. This is the land of hanging valleys with steep sides. Hanging valleys mean lots of ups and downs.

The gorse was at peak flower, with a heady smell of pineapple.

More of the coastline.

If you look carefully at the horizon, you might just be able to make out Lundy Island.

Looking back on the way we came.

And looking forward to where we are going, dropping down to Littermouth and then going up those rather infamous steps, recently renewed to provide a safer route.

But before we tackled the steps..............

......we stopped for a cup of tea with a view.

Suitably refreshed, we ascended the staircase and all 191 of the steps. Yes, we were sad enough to count them. And, as we couldn't agree on the total, I've quoted mine.

At the top (and we weren't particularly puffed), we looked across to Marsland Cliff, comforted by the knowledge that we wouldn't have to climb this one. All we had to do was to drop down to Marsland Mouth, just over the edge, and then turn inland.

Flowing down to Marsland Mouth is Marsland Water and this is the border between Cornwall (right) and Devon (left).  And crossing from one county to the other marked our completion of the entire Cornish Coastal Footpath.

We celebrated our achievement in the most appropriate way possible - with a scone. Cream first in Devon.

Jam first in Cornwall. Between you and me, I prefer the Devon way as I regard the cream as a substitute for butter. Makes sense to me but it's a differentiation that is fiercely defended.

The shaded walk up from the beach through the Marsland Nature Reserve - a gift to the nation by one of the heirs of the Cadbury's chocolate fortunes. When the foliage is fully out, this must be a very attractive green tunnel.

Not that way, but this way or that way. We chose this way and headed around Cornakey Farm.

In July 1842 the Caledonia was bound for Gloucester having left Falmouth with a cargo of wheat. It floundered in heavy seas and was wrecked off Morwenstow. of Scottish snow which stranded near Morwenstow. The figurehead was formerly in the churchyard as a memorial to the wrecked crew buried there, but since 2008 has been restored and placed in the church for safekeeping, with a replica where the figurehead once stood. The vicar at the time of the wreck was Rev. R. S. Hawker

In July 1842 the Caledonia was bound for Gloucester having left Falmouth with a cargo of wheat. It floundered in heavy seas and was wrecked off Morwenstow. of Scottish snow which stranded near Morwenstow. The figurehead was formerly in the churchyard as a memorial to the wrecked crew buried there, but since 2008 has been restored and placed in the church for safekeeping, with a replica where the figurehead once stood. The vicar at the time of the wreck was Rev. R. S. Hawker

Of Norman origin (though there must have been an earlier church here), although restored in Victorian times, St Morwenna and St John the Baptist retains a fair amount of Norman work, notably in the porch and the north arcade.  And most famously, for 40 years from 1834, it had as its vicar the remarkable Robert Stephen Hawker. A poet and free spirit, who was responsible for much of the restoration of the church and who chose to bury shipwrecked sailors, of whom there were many in these dangerous seas, in his churchyard rather than, as was the custom at that time, on the shore where they were washed up.

 The doorway to the porch is a really fine example of Norman architecture. It includes zigzag carving and flowers carved in heavy relief.

A sober reminder to all who pass under the sundial and into the church = Life is like a shadow. 

The carved oak pew ends date from the mid 1500s and are in incredibly good condition.

Hooray, the Tea Rooms were still open! What better way to end a walk?  That's it done. Now we can go back and walk again the stretches that we really liked.