Melanie Phillips | Reflections on the Revolution in the West | NatCon UK

back in the 1990s I managed to secure for myself entry to an inner circle of hell by arguing that in general children were best served by being brought up by their own mother and father of course I said some marriages would always fail and of course many lone parents did a heroic job in bringing up their children but surely it was best to avoid such disadvantage wherever possible this was denounced as heartless cruel anti-feminist and of course right wing somewhat to my surprise therefore I was approached by a TV producer to make a film about my views on the destruction of the nuclear family since I was already canceled in all the best circles I asked the producer why he wanted to publicize My Views you're so reactionary you're now in the very Vanguard of progress he replied given what I then went on to stay in subsequent years about the destruction of Education multiculturalism the demonization of men islamization and anthropogenic global warming Theory I obviously became so Progressive I managed to advance to the very end of time itself and meet myself coming back now the onslaught all the traditional family was an early example of a world turned upside down in which certain kinds of disadvantage became a human right victims status weaponized bullying and bigotry against those who were denied this status and Untold numbers of children were sacrificed on the altars of mass fatherlessness the willful promotion of ignorance in the classroom and the infantilization of adults this all-out Onslaught on the nation and its core social and moral Norms has created what is now an age of unreason language has been hijacked and evacuated of meaning anti-racism means people are now judged and Damned not for the content of their character but on the white color of their skin people with male genitalia are said to be women and are indeed hailed as female role models dissent from any of this means vilification character assassination and intimidation it's reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts and the Soviet show trials liberal tolerance has been replaced by cultural totalitarianism and not just by The Usual Suspects on the left but now by many of the professions many businesses and I'm afraid to say across White Hall in short we are living through a five decades-old Revolution now as we know conservatism was supposedly created when Edmund Burke defended the cultural architecture of a free society that depended on traditional institutions Burke wasn't actually a conservative he was in many respects a radical opposing the unrestrained power of the monarchy and supporting the revolting Colonials in America but he did understand the acute threat the French revolutionaries posed to civilize life under the guise of progress today we have the equivalent of the guillotine in cancel culture our own Committee of Public Safety orchestrating a dictatorial reign of terror is composed of a labor party under sakir starmer and the university Vice chancellors and just as dantor and robespure were themselves finally consumed by the conflagration they'd Unleashed today's Revolution is also eating its own as one-time radical feminists are purged by those who believe that biological fact is fiction and fascism and yet we have no book the understanding of what it's vital to conserve today has collapsed instead we have some conservatives who support Mass immigration to bring down wages and do the jobs native Brits can't or won't do controlled immigration absolutely enhances a nation but uncontrolled immigration can bring it to its knees conservative party candidates for parliament are given lessons on white resentment in diversity and inclusion training sessions via the party's online trading platform and are being offered unconscious biased training conservative party candidates conservative government that genuflected to a hysterical teenager predicting the end of the world is actively promoting scientifically illiterate climate catastrophism and Net Zero goals which will take us all back to a pre-modern age a conservative government thank you a a conservative government is silently ringing its hands but silently presiding over a canceled culture which is destroying people's livelihoods and their physical and mental health a conservative government has flapped its hands but failed to stop the institutionalized child abuse through the transgender cult which is deconstructing what it is to be a human being a conservative government Michael goes Michael Gove who we heard here the other day is a rare politician who really does understand how education has ceased to transmit the culture and instead has been weaponized against it yet it was a conservative prime minister who sacked him as education secretary because he was rocking the boat too much if the conservative party doesn't defend education population capacity scientific reason or Freedom against coercion and bullying what is the point of the conservative party in Britain in Britain there has been no cultural War there has been a cultural route in their Long March through the institutions progressives have found every door was opened because conservatism progressively abandoned its role as conservators of the nation and its values it was the conservative party that destroyed this nation's self-governing democracy by taking the UK into the European community in 1975 and that assumed that this would remain a natural order of things in perpetuity it was the British people who when finally given the chance voted against the conservative government to get their Nation back but restoring restoring independent self-government does not mean the nation itself is restored to what it was any more than an emergency operation on someone with a life-threatening illness automatically restores them to health instead of conserving the culture that formed its national identity Britain had outsourced much of that culture to Europe along with Britain's powers of self-government when the conservative party signed away their Nation to Brussels it stopped conserving the nation's National character in order to put conservatism back into the nation we need to put the nation back into conservatism now to do that we need to understand why the conservative party is so confused over what this means after the second world war there wasn't one revolution but two following the Holocaust the left decided that since this monstrous evil took place at the very Apex of Western culture the West Was rotten and had to be remade into a Brave New World and the way to achieve that was the Long March through the institutions to turn the culture itself against the Western nation and its core values but after the war however there was another Revolution a revolution in conservative circles against post-war collectivism and the welfare state this became the dogma of the free market which viewed All State activity as an attack on individual liberty I'm not saying we should oppose the free market I'm saying it was made into a kind of fetish these free market ideologues who viewed every single thing through an economic prism and made a fetish of competition failed to acknowledge that there was something of Great Value between the free market and the state this was called civil society and was held together by bonds of tradition that linked the present the past and gave Society a future Margaret Thatcher who did many very great things she was a free market devotee and in this respect she was not a conservative at all believing as she did that tradition and intangible values constituted an old boy's Network that thwarted her agenda and promoted a Continuing Story of British decline she tried inappropriately in my view to apply Market forces to a range of Institutions undermine the bonds of trust that Define the professions and politicized the hitherto politically neutral civil service when the Berlin War Julie fell and the Soviet Union collapsed conservatives decided that their Fox had been shot I remember those discussions and those debates and I remember thinking at the time they have got this completely wrong looking for a new standard behind which to Rally they decided on Liberty as their standard failing to realize that this took them straight onto the same territory as the left while the left was promoting a free market in Behavior so-called conservatives were promoting a free market in economics in addition conservatives were frightened to resist what they viewed as an inexorable process of cultural change failing to recognize that it would only become inexorable if they didn't stand up to it they decided instead that they wanted to carry favor with their children and with the infantilized left in the media and in the other citadels of the culture subscribing to a large extent to the progressive mantras of egalitarianism and universalism they thought this would insulate them against charges of being the nasty party there was surely no more graphic and sad example of the way this actually led to Perdition then Theresa May's modern slavery act which has helped facilitate the Unstoppable tide of illegal immigration through the small boats crossing the English Channel it is so very sad that Mrs May the former prime minister cannot see how her very well-meaning initiative has helped erode the boundary that defines a nation so in short we have one faction of the conservative party which is a pale lavender version of left-wing equality of outcomes transnationalism and trashing energy supplies to prevent the reportedly imminent yet mysteriously ever movable climate apocalypse the other faction the other faction in the conservative party thinks conservatism is all about cutting taxes and letting the market rip from deregulating Child Care to the mass importation of foreign workers to undercut British workers neither of these Alternatives I suggest remotely embodies conservative values each in its own way represents instead hyper-individualism or the ideological attempt to remake the world to create Utopia which all serve to corrode Society rather than conserve it the belief that conservatism means freedom from the state is to confuse ends with means freedom is not an end but the means to live a good life if Freedom isn't bounded by Duty and obligation it leads to division cruelty and Anarchy neither neither State Control nor individualism can by themselves form a civilized society for that we need what Britain's late and much lamented Chief Rabbi Jonathan sacks called covenantal politics covenantal politics covenantal politics beyond the individual or the state it involved instead long-term binding reciprocal relationships based on promise and obligation rather than rights and short-term transactions it lies in the laws passed by national parliaments it lies in communal institutions in Traditional Values in continuity and in the transmission of national memory through an education system designed to transmit that culture to the Next Generation without tradition we are rootless without roots there is no Community without Community there is no Nation without Nation there can be no defense of the fundamental values we all hold dear thank you conservatism as I'm sure you all know is not a Creed it is about conserving and protecting the attachment to community through a cultural and political inheritance left unchecked the onslaught against Traditional Values will ultimately destroy the country as a shared National project and will its ability to thrive and even survive that's why the British public are currently repelled by the Tories as well as by the labor party neither speaks to People's most fundamental wish to live in a place they can call home where they subscribe to a shared independent and Sovereign National Project based on a set of inherited traditions and institutions which will be upheld passed down to their children and defended against attack in order to protect the rule of law democracy and freedom against oppression these are conservative values that's why people voted in their Millions for brexit so the big question the big question is whether conservatism can be rescued and the nation accordingly saved I would suggest the answer is yes they can but this would entail conservatively minded individuals adopting a very unfamiliar approach conservatives tend not to be activists proactively taking the initiative for change they tend instead to passively and wearily watch the tumult taking place all around them as a result conservatives are always caught on the back foot they are always having to defend themselves against the attacks from the left but playing defense like this on ground chosen by one's foes is to lose the battle before it's even begun conservatives against their tribal instincts need to get onto the front foot they need actively to take the ground from under the feet of the left now this can be done I would suggest in two ways first conservatives need to take back British culture by getting rid of the influences that have undermined and corrupted it you understand that there is now a whole generation of younger people who after several decades of de-education Simply have no idea even what of Priceless value has been lost conservatives now have to take back the universities and the schools by ensuring that what is taught transmits the culture rather than destroying it and promotes an open mind rather than snapping its shut conservatives need once again to prioritize marriage and they also need to make a bonfire of equality and human rights law which are causing such Injustice and denial of Human Rights it it will not be possible in my view to stop the illegal boats across the English Channel unless Britain exits the European convention on human rights now the government the government is absolutely terrified of doing any of this because it thinks that being seen to tear up equality or human rights law is terrible Optics but this is terrible politics and terrible cowardice for goodness sake for goodness sake Britain invented Liberty and equal rights through the common law it lost Liberty and equal rights when it made these contingent on coded Universal rules and judicial choices made between judges between competing claims conservatives need to make the case with pride for The Unique value of their own cultural traditions the second way they can take the ground back is to hobble the left through their Achilles heel what is the Achilles heel this is the fact that they don't actually care for the people or groups whose causes they wear on their sleeve they care about all for their own self-image as virtuous people so they need to be called out in terms on their own terms as for example racial bigots against white people called out as callous and cruel towards the children whose interests they have crushed called out as supporters of cultures abroad that enslave women and they are all too vulnerable and all these things and more cancel culture after all is driven by their Terror that they cannot win the argument they know that their arguments rest on Sand which is why they have to shut the argument down altogether the more vicious the attacks they mount the more they advertise this weakness as we can see from their hysterical and frankly often disgusting reactions to this conference they are terrified they are terrified Above All by the reality staring them in the face that they are utterly out of step with the Ordinary People of the country who may claim so noisily to Champion but whom they actually despise and fear and there's the irony there's the irony the historically labor voters of the working class red wall are in fact more conservative than the conservative party thank you red wallers are rooted in community in attachments to each other in Traditions and in patriotic loyalty to the nation they value conventional family structure on which they depend for their security and emotional well-being they value social orderliness they depend upon the networks of mutual obligation Bound by tradition that make a community of shared interests and values and form the place they can call home in short there are silent Millions waiting impatiently for a political class that will conserve all these things and defend the nation against those who would destroy it the political prize is there for the taking all that's needed is the courage to win it thank you very much

Channel: National Conservatism

Views: 102,084

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Id: egrbN28aaAI

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2023