The Last of England

Mid-year in the middle of England. Sun, wooded valleys, secluded stone chapels, homesteads and a range of fells across the horizon. The names have a kind of poetry : Beatrix Hill, Birkett Fell, Parlick and Penyghent. What a wonderful world it might be if we were not dragged down by the intervention of 'the doctors and lawyers, the professors gorged with sawdust, the merchants who sell blades of grass - the awful people of the Fomor', as James Stephens once wrote.

Nearly two hundred years ago, the hills here were ablaze with beacons, as Jacobite rebels took on the forces of the English State. The name of a narrow, winding road - Gallows Lane - testifies to the subsequent (and usual) fate of defeated warriors against the Empire.

Now various experts* have recently suggested that Britain has been fighting terrorism for hundreds of years, and will have to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But to me, history would seem to demonstrate the exact opposite of that curious hypothesis - instead of fighting terrorism, Britain's ruling classes have waged terrorism against their own people, chiefly but not exclusively on its Celtic fringes - as seen in Glencoe and during the Great Irish Famine.

What is today termed 'terrorism' was in fact mostly first devised and operated in its modern form during the 1940s by Britain's wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE). Malaysian leader Chin Peng was first honoured by Britain, then became a nasty terrorist in double-quick time. It is an obvious cliché that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter.

These days 'terrorists' must be becoming less tough; what the system media terms 'Muslim terrorists' have to be protected from attack in jail. But surely if these men they were actual, rough and tough terrorist fanatics, they'd be able to take care of themselves? Most likely they are just poor, inoffensive and innocent Mohammeds and Hanifs unjustly rounded up, exactly as poor Paddys and Mikes were 20 years earlier.The obvious - though unpalatable - explanation is usually the right one, as with the curious events surrounding two planes and three towers in NYC on that autumn day in 2001.


Not all of us - this writer included - can stay pleasantly contemplating trees and streams forever. The 'real world' beckons as I make a trip to my local bank, usually a dispiriting experience, amid the twee advertising slogans, queues and grim-faced tellers.

Some unpleasant and tedious neo-liberal political figures have a pet theory that Britain has become a successful property-owning democracy, full of prosperous people with ample financial portfolios. Of course, dear reader, you know the distinction between neo-liberal and neo-conservative? Neo-liberals destroy their own countries, neo-conservatives do that and destroy other peoples' countries as well.

But the actual evidence on the ground gives a different picture from the verbiage of sleazy politicians, strongly indicating that the prosperous, property-owning democracy is a myth, a foolish charade with no basis in reality. My bank features an endless pathetic parade of near-bankrupt small shopkeepers handing in £10 in copper pennies and even more desperate customers pleading to stop direct debits as their balances go into the red.

Despite the aura of respectability they attempt to convey, there is usually an underlying air of seediness about financial institutions. Perhaps it is permanently coupled to them by their nature. They are moneylenders, but with thick carpets to distinguish them from their lesser brethen. They are hucksters, but hucksters who happen to possess a few leather chairs to dot round a lobby. Paestum is grand - but the ruins of the New York Stock Exchange will only inspire disgust.

An on-going court case in this country sees a woman facing jail for financial 'crime' against a bank. Apparently Sarah Lee spent £135,000 a bank mistakenly put in her account. But wait a moment - has any customer complained that this amount has gone from their account? The answer, of course, is NO. The reason? Banks, as usurers, create money out of nothing, by operating the fractional reserve trick.

Yet their illegality is now legal, and the judicial superstructure of the financial state prosecutes the petty offender instead. Christians once outlawed usury; Muslims still do. Is this prohibition yet another reason for the phantasmagoric but exceptionally bloody 'War on Terror'?

As that neglected thinker Alphonse Capone once said : 'Why don't they go after all these bankers who took the savings of poor people and lost them in bank failures? Isn't it lots worse to take the last few dollars some small family has saved - perhaps to live on while the head of the family is out of a job - than to sell a little beer?'

There was once an interesting social and economic commentor in this country, by name of Will Hutton. Indeed, there still is a Will Hutton, but he went down the path of New Labour and thus ceased to be interesting. Judging from photos of the fellow, this transformation has been physical too, youthful eagerness becoming solidified into smug and fattened contentment.

Anyway, Hutton it was who proposed the idea of modern Britain as the 30-30-40 society. 30% are utterly disadvantaged, 30% insecure and 40% privileged. Of course, the 'privileged' in most cases are not really privileged, more often the recipients of steady, but frequently low, incomes.

The real privilege only belongs to the 1% who constitute the super-rich. This class has maintained a long war against the rest of us for twenty-five or more years, through policies implemented by its satellite politicians. The results are evident everywhere - public squalor, drug wars in the major cities, degrading material on television, the breakdown of social links.

As Graham Ford, son of a woman robbed by passers-by as she lay dying in a street in Harrogate**, commented : 'Sadly, we now live in a world without principles. This simply would never have happened when my mother was young. Back then the community cared about one another. Today, all people care about is making a quick buck, regardless.'

But beyond all this is the crime that is above all crimes of our time, namely the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. Unprovoked, nihilistic violence against sovereign states is an unforgivable wickedness. Undoubtedly, had it not been for the influence of the organised Jewish power structure, there would have been no assault on either country. It would be foolish to deny this, when so much is admitted.

But it is only a power structure, an ideology, and should not be confused or conflated with mere prejudice. Indeed, I find the oeuvre of one particular Jewish lady singer - alas for poor Alma Angela Cogan, gone too soon - to be redolent of the more civilised world that we have lost, squashed beneath the joint horrors of commercialism and militarism. Lost, I say, but more accurately stolen, by the purblind, stupid and greedy. Piggy eyes of Margaret Thatcher gazing at a balance sheet in a bank vault.

The RAF and USAF even bombed in Iraqi shepherds and flocks of sheep five years before the 'Shock and Awe' assault. But there is Karma, or cosmic readjustment, and those who have assented to such misdeeds never prosper in the long run. The Government, representing the interests of the one per cent, demands yet more prisons, yet more ID checks and more spy cameras to stabilise their sinking ship. Like Atlantis or Numenor of legend, many parts of Southern England have actually sunk beneath the water during the past few weeks.

Emergency services personnel claim, perhaps significantly, that this is an act of God, beyond their control. No doubt there would be less of a crisis if all those helicopters and army vehicles didn't happen to be thousands of miles away from home.

Morally, socially, politically, and now, even physically - England - is the sunken land.

All inhabitants of this sunken island might do well to ponder - mutatis mutandis - the words of Muhammad Ali : 'America doesn't have a future. The wrath of Allah will descend upon America - there'll be floods, fires and earthquakes.'

* Expert - Any man in a suit more than five miles from home.
** Situated in North-East England, once a staidly respectable garden town.

Printer friendly version

Email this article to a friend

Last updated 02/08/2007

Homepage