My intention was to start this week by putting up my last post on EUReferendum but, for the time being, I have been dissuaded, there being better things to do with one's time or so I am told. There are various reasons why I have been having problems with the blog and the forum. No need to rehearse them here.However, recently I felt that there was a particular direction in which the blog and, much more so, the forum were moving – towards ideas of a closed in society with the state controlling (as who else would have the power) who should be employed or allowed to live in this country, the basis of it being those old friends of ours, blood and soil.
It's not I don't like that trend or that I think it is a remarkably stupid one or, even that it is contrary to British tradition; it's more that I thought that the blog and, of course, the forum should lead on this one. If we want a country where we say "keep out" to all who are not "indigenous" (it's in quotation marks because, given England's history, it is a term that is very hard to define) then the blog should be in the vanguard.
Clear it of rootless cosmopolitanism, said I. We cannot have a co-editor who is not part of the "indigenous" population but would prefer to see those Anglospheric ideas triumphing over the blood and soil ones; we cannot have a co-editor whose family sought and gratefully received asylum in this country. Lead from the front, said I.
The boss told me (more or less) not to be stupid and stop reading the forum if it upsets me. Well, that's easily achieved. I have not been reading most of it for some time and have now deleted it from my list of must check blogs. That's a bit like not listening to Radio 4. Amazing how well one can survive without it.
What next? Well, I turned to our manifesto and found to my surprise that it was posted almost exactly four years ago. Have we really wasted this much time? Not completely. The boss's writings on defence have been superb and, with some luck, even had some influence where it matters.
Between us we have managed to get some of the truth about the EU and the tranzis out into the big bad world but not nearly enough of it and not nearly wide enough. When it comes to the positive ideas, yes, we have failed, perhaps because we have not worked them out well enough ourselves or because we have not been able to reach the right audience (it's a poor writer who blames the audience so the fault is in us) or perhaps we have not concentrated enough.
The way forward is to build on the manifesto. We have no intention of creating a new party or a mass movement or any of those silly things that tend to be complete losers, particularly on our side of the fence.
But we do intend to work harder and develop ideas – a research programme and a sequence of policy ideas that will give some politicians and opinion makers notions on how to rebuild a liberal nation state that would take its proud place in the only group that matters in the world – the Anglosphere. Blood and soil will not come into it. We have been there in the twentieth century and have no desire to go again in the twenty-first.
Watch this space. This is not the Last Post (not yet) but Reveille.
