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<h3>For there to be unity on the right, there has to be an obvious frontrunner campaign organisation that can build and sustain a movement. When one comes along, the rest will evaporate. But none of the contenders have worked out how to build one. What hope for a reborn Conservative party minus Sir Graham Brady and his acolytes, but with respect for member power? </h3>For that you need an intellectual foundation, a vision, and detailed, credible policies derived from your intellectual foundation to implement that vision. You then need a working grassroots organisational structure and intelligent, credible leadership that can nurture talent. Oh, and a truckload of money.Of the players on the board, we have one-man-band nonentity quasi-fascist parties [who on earth are you alluding to, Pete? -ed], crank parties obsessed with vaccines, Laurence Fox's very online ego vessel, the incompetent populism of Reform, a defunct Ukip party, PopCons trying to rehabilitate the ever ridiculous Liz Truss, and a movement that think its only salvation is the politically spent Nigel Farage. And to top that off there's a strain of antisemitism creeping in.&nbsp;We have no serious policy thinkers to speak of, nobody thinking in terms of long term strategy, and nobody with the money to break a new venture out of the Twitter bubble. You have to build these things from the ground up with local campaigning, but you also need some kind of sponsorship/patronage from within the politico-media sphere to get any kind of recognition and momentum. The most we can ever dredge up is ex-MEPs and disgraced Tories to appear on GB News. The only outfit even close to having a clue how to do it is the SDP, who aren't even right wing, and will remain electorally insignificant for the next decade at least.With Reform circling the drain, there's nothing left to do but wait to see what, if anything, can be salvaged from the wreckage of the Tory party. It's plausible that a National Conservative party could be the successor to the Tories, but probably ends up being a liferaft for Tory flunkies who achieved nothing when they held ministerial posts, and it goes on to lose the 2029 election.I'm not trying to piss on your chips here, but the starting point has to be a realistic assessment of the materials we have to work with. We're not going to get anywhere without addressing the causes of the right's dysfunction.&nbsp;In any case, your premise is faulty. Uniting the disparate organisations does absolutely nothing, because they're all splinter groups of the same tiny cohort of autistic crackpots, halfwits and blaggers. (Seriously, who have we got who's seriously impressive?)You could unite them all under one banner but you'd still be losing deposits forever under FPTP, and will be completely disregarded by the media as not even significant enough to attack. They learned their lesson form the Ukip experience.&nbsp;Ultimately, I think we're going to have to build a movement from scratch that outperforms the existing dross, but if it doesn't get the fundamental intellectual foundation and pitch right, it will be yet another colossal waste of time, energy and resources.

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it

A large and important piece, borrowed from <a data-mce-href="https://www.turbulenttimes.co.uk/news/front-page/politics-government-kills/" href="https://www.turbulenttimes.co.uk/news/front-page/politics-government-kills/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Richard North's Turbulent Times</a>&nbsp; It is rare these days that I find myself being able to commend the writing of a legacy media journo, but even on second and third reading, the piece by Sherelle Jacobs in today’s Telegraph comes over as powerful and coherent.Headed: “The infected blood scandal exposes the toxic mendacity of our ruling class”, she tells us in her sub-heading that “Britain’s unspoken vice is elite secrecy”, adding that: “we are waking up to how long we have been taken for fools”.Her theme is as straightforward as it is powerful, asserting that there is “an unspoken phenomenon that quietly threatens the position of the British establishment”, one which might be described as “perma-gate” – the endless string of elite scandals that are shining a light on the corrupted machinations of the state.Like others – and especially evident on Twitter – Jacobs links three “national outrages”, starting with the infected blood disaster, moving on to the Post Office scandal and then taking in the pandemic response. Assessed individually, she argues, they elicit an impotent shiver of revulsion from a deferential, if disillusioned, nation. Together, though, they are dynamite.The picture illustrating her piece is a still from All the President’s Men and her text refers to the Watergate episode across the pond, which she says “exploded” faith in democracy and the ruling class – a single episode that exposed American statecraft’s amoral, expletive core.In Britain, though, this is coming more slowly, Jacobs avers. The suspension of our disbelief in the system is more painstakingly, yet no less profoundly, unravelling, “as we steadily gain a partial but in parts astonishingly detailed artists’ impression of the rancid paternalism that pollutes the state’s every tentacle, from the dingy IT offices of the postal service to the laboratories of backwater haemophilia centres”.This brings her to the release of the Infected Blood Inquiry’s report, which, she says, has left us to process the revelation that the NHS is not so much a sacred institution as a corrupted priesthood. In its paradoxically paternalist zeal for “clinical freedom” it has allowed doctors to follow unsafe treatment policies and practices, with some exploiting this so far as to experiment on children.But, as so often – and was certainly the case with Watergate, it is not so much the initial events which do the damage as the subsequent attempt to cover up the errors. And in this case, as the horrific fallout became clear, our hallowed health service refused to acknowledge its errors, instead retreating into a basilica of lies, obfuscation and destruction of evidence.If there was something seedily mafia-esque about the subterfuge that characterised the Post Office scandal, Jacobs characterises the cover-up surrounding “the biggest treatment disaster in NHS history” as one with whiffs of impudent zealotry.We must, she says, come to terms with the revelation that for years successive governments and the Civil Service disseminated fake news. With a bland militancy it maintained over several decades, it stuck to the mendacious narrative that the blood infections were a tragic and regrettable development, which occurred because of a lack of understanding of the risks.Helpfully, she points out that the Inquiry report – running to seven volumes – details how false orthodoxies (albeit described in the arid language of officialdom as “lines to take”) entrenched themselves. “Dogma became a mantra. It was enshrined. It was never questioned.”And then she comes to the politicians. As a collective, they frame the blood scandal as a historic “injustice”, churning out their platitudes about a “shameful” episode that is “hard to even comprehend”, culminating in a ritual apology from Sunak, no doubt carefully drafted by his advisors, calculated to balance gravitas with just the right amount of contrition.Jacobs dismisses this sackcloth and ashes routine as an “attempt at psychological distancing”, and it is here that she offers an observation that makes this piece so special. In this, she says, “we the public are partially complicit. Delayed justice has become a grim ritual of a country which loves authority just a little too much”.Picking up on all three current inquiries, she argues that what makes them so powerful is how they are exposing pathologies of the British state that are not historic but eternal. The past treatment of haemophiliacs, she says, speaks to an enduring culture of cover-up that officials have warned is still endemic in the NHS, with hospitals still hiding evidence of poor care.Crucially, she adds that the thing that this inquiry really hits home is that the British culture of elite secrecy is without parallel in the Western world. It is a national puzzle that one might call the British Question, harbouring an archaic ruling class code based on Victorian club governance has barely changed since it was established in the 19th century.The elite’s culture of honourable secrecy and patronising impunity, she says, has proved bomb-proof, surviving not only democratisation, but recent attempts to build better mechanisms of account into the system. Via a darkly brilliant process of “systems thinking”, an ossified bureaucracy has “learnt” how to preserve itself from democratic scrutiny – burying errors under layers of obfuscation planted by generations of civil servants who stick to an “authorised account of events”.It is here that I need to depart from Jacobs’ narrative to express my regrets that she never read my book, <a data-mce-href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Many-Not-Few-History-Britain-ebook/dp/B00LUURX68" href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Many-Not-Few-History-Britain-ebook/dp/B00LUURX68" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Many Not The Few</a>, which revisits the hagiography of the so-called Battle of Britain (which never really existed in the form so beloved of popular historians).<figure id="figure-xah0zh75glwgu7oko"><img id="xah0zh75glwgu7oko" src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/1ax9Cf5FXnbEfuUoBje2iGPvh2vmyIp3eb3noIO3bq6bcEVfIidSwTPb2iBL83pf.jpg" alt="" title="" class="object-cover bg-gray-100 " style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: 50% 20%;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionx="50%" data-positiony="20%" data-fullwidth="false" data-mce-src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/1ax9Cf5FXnbEfuUoBje2iGPvh2vmyIp3eb3noIO3bq6bcEVfIidSwTPb2iBL83pf.jpg" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: 50% 20%;"></figure> In my research, I found in the early stages of the air war, which centred over the Channel convoys and the ports serving them – known by the Germans as the Kanalkampf – that, surprisingly, despite the RAF having the home advantage, pilot losses were substantially higher on the British side.This was largely as a result of a pre-war Air Ministry decision that a dedicated air-sea rescue service would not be needed. While the Luftwaffe had its own rescue service, bailed-out RAF pilots were left to drown – at that stage of the war not even being supplied with dinghies.But what was particularly sinister about the affair was that when the Air Ministry belatedly realised the error of its ways and instructed the RAF to set up a dedicated service – which it did in November 1941, a year after the end of the formally designated battle – it backdated its propaganda and the historical record to make it look as if the service had been fully functional throughout 1940.On a broader note, I also commented on how pre-war policy on air raid precautions deliberately excluded the provision of deep shelters in London and, when the Blitz started in September 1940, East-enders were initially barred from entering underground stations for shelter, which were locked during air raids and guarded by armed soldiers.There is no doubt that these policy failures led to the avoidable loss of many lives, but the establishment – now the focus of Sherelle Jacobs’ wrath – did what it always did. It re-wrote history and pretended the failures had never happened, aided and abetted by shoddy historical research and a public determination to embrace the Battle of Britain myth.I was driven to conclude in my book that, if you rely completely and uncritically on government, its neglect may kill you. Having done so, it will seek to obscure its actions and its responsibilities for them.Now, Jacobs is writing that a succession of public inquiries reveals to us that our state secrecy is so prolific, so compulsive, so endemic that it threatens to effectively render Britain a failed democratic state.Such a claim, she hazards, may seem implausibly strong, but the fact remains that the state is technically failing, as it lacks a plausible system of democratic accountability and ministerial responsibility, with the only recourse to truth being the pantomime of public inquiry.These are as much a gravy train for lawyers as they are the public’s only vehicle, beyond elections, to hold state power to account. Even with their enhanced coercive powers, as we have seen from the blood scandal to Horizon to the Covid inquiry, they are systematically bogged down by subtly uncooperative officials.Thus, she concludes that Britain’s crisis of institutions is becoming dangerous. It is impossible to ignore the fact that an archaic, entrenched, corrupted bureaucracy – the origin of which predates our democracy by a century – shows little compunction over lying to its people.In her last paragraph she writes: “The ruling class’s favouring of closed government over democracy, of loyalty over objective truth, of order over freedom, saving face over the preservation of public trust, have emerged so strongly as recurring themes that they surely cannot continue to be a niche preoccupation of Leave voters and lockdown-sceptics, but a burning outrage that unifies the nation”.In one of the last paragraphs of my book, I wrote that, even in times of extreme peril – or perhaps especially so – salvation does not lie entirely in government. In such instances, it is necessary to take the initiative and make the government conform to the wishes and needs of the people, rather than the other way around. Government, I observed, is a poor master. But it can be an adequate servant if forced to be so.However, as Jacobs has remarked, this is “a country which loves authority just a little too much”. And before we can expect government to change, that must change. Government is not your friend and, as the evidence accumulates, it is clear that, if you let it, it will kill you.

Government kills

A lot of people my age were pressured by their parents to go to university, as they saw it as the only path to social mobility. At one time that might have been true, but in a functioning economy, it just isn't. My other half was pressured into a degree, and now she's a mid-level bureaucrat who wishes she'd trained as a plumber. So many white collar graduate jobs are bullshit jobs that serve no real world function, and they're depressing as hell.&nbsp;I felt that same pressure because everyone around me was going to university. I didn't particularly want to go, had no real idea what I wanted to do if I did, but the job market was pretty miserable, and I didn't know what else to do. So I went to Uni.&nbsp;That didn't last long. I was pretty appalled by the whole affair. I thought I was going to be surrounded by bright people who might somehow inspire me, and it would open the door to a new social life among intellectual equals. Oh boy was I disappointed. The calibre of students was pretty low. I think there were only about three other students in a cohort of 180 who were actually going to excel at it, but six months in, I couldn't have been less interested. It was good for the university to have all those deadbeats (me included) because it was lots of fee income with practically zero overhead.&nbsp;Nobody else was getting a good deal out of it. It was a giant con. Facilities were poor, teaching was poor, tutoring was virtually non-existent, and if you wanted to use any advanced equipment, you'd have to plunge yourself into debt and buy it yourself. I suppose there's no problem with that if you're fully committed to it, but I had no business being at university, and a functioning system would have rejected my application.&nbsp;But they don't do that. They'll take anyone with a pulse. Even now they're taking in young people who aren't temperamentally suited to academic study, who will drop out in months, leaving with a boat load of debt they can't manage. &nbsp;These are young people who were always going to be better off in vocational training or full-time work, and the lack of a degree is no real barrier to well paid work. The expansion of the British university system is one of the greatest British cons of all time, so it is no surprise to find Tony Blair at the root of this evil. His legacy has cheated entire generations who would have got by just as well, if not better, without setting foot on a university campus.&nbsp;This was especially true for me. I had to find my own way. Instead of spending three unproductive years at university, I gamed the dole system for two years, went nocturnal, and learned to code. I then took up contracting work, culminating in many years at Airbus. &nbsp; To date, I still have zero qualifications, I have no intention of getting any, and my only regret is that I ever applied to uni in the first place. It was a total waste of my time, and it was detrimental to my well-being. I'm sometimes tempted to do a masters for my own personal gratification, but it wouldn't open any doors for me, and it would be a criminal waste of £10k, especially considering who my money is going to.&nbsp;The bottom line is that we don't need to produce as many graduates as we do. It's actually detrimental to society to produce so many credentialed idiots. As much as anything, there aren't the jobs to sustain them, and all it does is contribute to qualification inflation.What makes it all the more abhorrent is the unbridled greed of universities. Not content with deceiving a generation of young British people, they're ripping off foreign students while selling degrees as a back door to the immigration system, expanding beyond their capacity, and dumping the externalities on the wider community. Entire tracts of towns are converted to student dwellings, and entire districts become transient and squalid. As a consequence, ordinary people can't afford to live in these places and face longer commutes from out in the sticks. Universities are wholly parasitic.&nbsp;Many argue that studentification of towns is the only reason these places stay afloat, which may be true, but that actually points to more serious structural problems in the economy. Worse still, the only beneficiaries of this Ponzi scheme are landlords, bandit property developers, Deliveroo drivers and middle class non-jobber academics who create more problems than they solve. University expansion was a sticking plaster to mask the youth unemployment epidemic, and in so doing, we created an unsustainable bubble. And now it's popping.&nbsp;Not only will many of these universities not survive, they don't deserve to, and nothing of value is lost when they fail. In fact, if these places revert to being sleepy, slightly depressed, little cathedral towns, they'll at least feel like home again, rather than a student doss house consumed by blocks of "luxury student apartments".&nbsp;If your job creation scheme university is contingent on fraud and deception, then it's doing more harm than good. It's just another pillar of a fake economy that stands in the way of addressing the structural problems in the labour and housing markets. We need to put an end to it now. [Editor's additional comments] Pete has nailed a crucial issue yet again... and I'll add that Basic IQ and reasoning doesn't seem to be used in selection any longer. It went out of fashion with the 11+ - instead, selection criteria now seems to include an evaluation of susceptibility for reprogramming by social engineering. &nbsp; <a href="https://practicalpie.com/the-milgram-experiment/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-mce-href="https://practicalpie.com/the-milgram-experiment/">Milgram's experiment on obedience to authority</a> proved Goebbels' proposition that a big lie repeated often enough will obviate reality and can override basic human decency. Tony Blair's legacy of a tainted education system really does not want people capable of critical analysis, leading to the ability to think for themselves. We should also point out that online and AI is completely overtaking the notion of classroom and lecture room learning. We need a different skill set to navigate this world, which involves more intuition, discovery, adaptability and logical reasoning. The teaching profession has little to offer when outside its traditional comfort zone.&nbsp;But look at <a data-mce-href="https://www.youtube.com/@MatArmstrongbmx" href="https://www.youtube.com/@MatArmstrongbmx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Matt Armstrong's YouTube channel</a> for a perfect example of initiative, intuition and making it up as he goes along - call it "need to know" if you like.&nbsp; Which is not to say that some sort of baseline understanding of fundamental science is not necessary. The wonderful <a data-mce-href="https://www.youtube.com/@ElectroBOOM" href="https://www.youtube.com/@ElectroBOOM" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ElectroBOOM</a> knows his ohm's law (or he'd be dead...).

Furthering Education

Taking it as read that the Tories lose the next election, they're not getting a whiff of power again until they catch up with the Will Of The Electorate (aka public sentiment) on immigration. Their big problem, though, is that however robust their immigration policies, they'll still be nowhere near where the public is. The direction of travel is further right all the time. Even centre-right immigration policies will fail to impress jaded right-leaning voters.&nbsp;The latest recommendations from @RobertJenrick are good as far as they go, but it's still shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. It does nothing to address the "sub-prime" illegal immigration influx of the last few years.&nbsp;Ultimately, we're going to need a massive overhaul of welfare, not least because we can no longer afford such massive liabilities and we most certainly can't afford to keep bankrolling the least productive foreigners to occupy the highest value real-estate. The lawlessness, crime and squalor will deter investment in London.But this is also a warning shot to the Reform Party, in that their idiotic "net zero immigration" policy still implies a massive influx of people. They're going to need a comprehensive and credible array of policies to address the multiple threads of immigration problems, from universities to the care sector, industrial policy and the detection of illegal immigration. If the Tories do travel to the centre right, Reform will look quite tame by contrast. Unless Reform is prepared to go further, there is no real reason for its existence.&nbsp;Right now, though, neither party is offering a robust approach to directly address the problems, and if you want to vote for a party that takes the issue seriously, then you have to look to the far fringes.At present, it seems Tories are afraid of their own shadow on immigration, with half the party convinced that they have to maintain the mythical centre ground to avoid a wipe out. They should try talking to their former voters, particularly the young, who are quite awake to the fact that our open borders increasingly deny them a shot at homeownership or even renting anywhere close to where the good jobs are. Nobody sane is going to pay £2k a month for a rented shoebox in a neighbourhood where third world tribes battle for drug turf outside the front door.&nbsp;On that note, reclaiming the streets is an absolute priority. Just getting a grip on immigration isn't enough. The Met police needs to be broken up and taken away from mayoral control. We then need our own Gendarmerie directly answerable to Number Ten. We need to put the fear of God into the ghettos who assume anything goes.&nbsp;For as long as the establishment parties show no sign of getting a grip, voters are increasingly going to withdraw from the process until something worth voting for shows up. And on current from, that won't be Reform either.&nbsp;It's interesting that the Irish are now mobilising against mass immigration, and sentiment is only going to harden further across Europe. This is becoming an existential issue for all of Europe. The only people who aren't getting the message are the British political class. They have no idea how out of touch they are. They have no idea how moronic they are. They have no idea how much they are despised. They keep wailing about the toxicity of public debate and the way they're received by the public, but they ain't seen nothing yet. And, boy, will they deserve what they get.&nbsp;They thought we didn't notice them bending over for the Islamist mob camped outside parliament. They thought we didn't notice them sweeping the brutal murder of the affable David Amess under the rug. They thought we didn't notice mobs of foreigners defacing our monuments and defecating in the streets. They thought we didn't notice emboldened Jihadists calling for blood on the streets of London. They think we haven't noticed their abject moral cowardice.But we noticed. And we're taking notes. We're noticing how the political class is trying to keep a lid on it. We notice their state of denial. We noticed the two-tier policing. We notice the false equivalence with an electorally insignificant "far right". We notice our cities turning into squalid, crime-ridden slums. We notice our living standards declining. We notice Britain becoming a more crowded, hostile and alien country that we can no longer call home. We noticed. We'll remember. We're coming to collect.

Halt... who goes there...?

I was down in London yesterday, a little off the beaten path. After four years of living in the Yorkshire countryside, you realise how much you take a high trust society for granted. You don't have to do a safety assessment before taking your phone out. You can sit on a street bench without assessing who's around you. But in London, the moment you step off the tube you really need your wits about you.&nbsp;London always has an exciting buzz to it, and there's always been an underlying sense of danger to the place. That's part of its appeal and what makes it attractive to young people. There's a sense of adventure. But at the same time, there a sense that the peace is fragile. Wait around long enough and something will kick off. Multiculturalism isn't "melting pot". There isn't a sense of mutual affinity or cultural commonality. You're very much aware that you're among foreigners and alien cultures.&nbsp;That too, I suppose, has been part of London's appeal. There is a certain novelty to it, and a break from the humdrum and sameness of provincial life. But that's in the knowledge there is somewhere to retreat to at the end of the day, where cultural norms resume, and you can make certain basic assumptions about personal safety. ie. that people who look like you, or members of your family probably aren't going to mug you or stab you, and there are shared values in the public sphere. This is what we mean by community cohesion. This is the only basis for any sense of belonging.&nbsp;As such, London is a foreign country. I have no affinity with the people I'm surrounded by. There's barely a common language now. You're on high alert the whole time, and on a subconscious level, it's exhausting. There's tired, and then there's London tired.Humans can become accustomed to this, and even learn to appreciate it. Even thrive off it. It creates its own culture. It's not surprising that many wouldn't have it any other way, and don't see a problem with it. It's immersive, and you soon adapt. Every day brings something different.&nbsp;For me, as a towering chap, I can take much of it in my stride. I'm generally not in danger. I would think very differently, though, as a single white female. That subconscious sense that danger is everywhere must be draining. More so as a parent. I'm not sure I would want offspring to have to run the gauntlet of gangs of feral black youths. I wouldn't want to stay there.And that's the thing about a high trust society. Life may not be as exciting, but you can take certain things for granted, and there are far fewer basic things to have to worry about. You don't have to reserve mental resources to running a personal safety programme. You don't have to double check your car is locked and shut your windows at night. You can relax in the public realm, and take your eye off your kids.&nbsp;I know there's probably Londoners reading this and chuckling to themselves. I suppose when you're immersed in it, you stop realising the habitual routines you go through, and you've seen enough to know when you're safe, but even for them, whether they admit it or not, there's side streets they think twice about going down. Districts they won't walk through at night. Parks they walk around rather than through. They've just learned to manage the dangers.&nbsp;Underpinning all this, though, is the fact that you're only ever one 999 call from help. In central London, you won't wait long for the police to show up, and notwithstanding the current state of the Met, they still have the authority of the state and the monopoly on violence. That's the only reason it all works. But what happens when the police are outnumbered? What happens when immigrant communities elect to ignore them and directly challenge their authority? What happens when they can determine their own law of the street? In some places that tipping point is already reached.&nbsp;And what happens, when there's nowhere to retreat to at the end of the day? What happens, when there's nowhere to move away to? What happens when that basic trust is nowhere to be found? What happens when there is no clear majority capable of asserting a dominant rule of law? What happens when warring minorities compete for control of the streets and nobody can restore order?It's easy to develop a fortress mentality when you spend much of your time on social media, exposed to a steady stream of violent imagery from the capital, and there's a lot of histrionics around election time about crime and public safety. We all know it's not as bad it seems. But all the same, there are signals that we cannot afford to ignore. The shift in London demographics tells its own story. White flight from London tells us that people crave a sense of safety, identity and belonging. It's fundamental to family and community. There is no community without trust in the public sphere.&nbsp;The danger now is that there is nothing of our own culture left in London for immigrants to integrate into. It's increasingly alien and foreign, and may of our other cities are going the same way. How then can immigrants learn from us to become part of us? Integration with current rates of immigration is simply impossible. How then can there be a sense of national identity when there is so little cultural commonality between county and conurb, country and capital? How can we ever be a functioning society? At what point does peaceful coexistence become an impossibility? This doesn't end well. Early reactions to this post have pointed out that other towns have their own problems, not least high crime "white trash" ghettos. I don't dispute that. But they are easier problems to resolve. Crack down on that kind of crime and there's immediate public backing. But any time the police try to get on top of machete crime in London, the race grifters are immediately out in force protesting institutional racism. There's nothing like the same challenges, and the police can generally do their jobs.When it comes to high crime provincial towns, very often you have a problem with Albanian gang crime, drugs and the inherent social problems that go with high unemployment and an easily gamed welfare system, leading to high welfare dependency. These are fixable problems. Unchecked immigration, however, creates problems of its own.&nbsp;In 2022 we saw outbreaks of unrest between Hindu nationalists and Muslims. There is zero chance of building good community relations or high trust in those circumstances, and policing it is just as much a refereeing job. It's closer to policing Belfast suburbs during the troubles. That's the true nature of the sectarianism that goes with multiculturalism. You would hope we would have learned.The problems are just as acute, if not more so, in places like Leicester, but as we've seen from the Israel-Gaza conflict, these spillovers can be deadly. We're now seeing Jews hunted by Arab-speaking degenerates in broad daylight. The bottom line is that if you import the Third World, then you also import their tribal Third World problems. For the moment, we are (just) able to contain it, but for how much longer? And what happens if a more serious conflict kicks off, say between India and Pakistan?The reason we're losing our cities is that anybody sane doesn't want to live among it when it does kick off. Those with the means to leave are leaving, and what's left are ethnic enclaves and ghettos where the state is unable to exert its own authority. Urban Balkanisation is here and now.We're then dealing with immigrant communities who will not integrate (because there's nothing to integrate into) and couldn't if they wanted to, because their native culture is too far offset from European high-trust norms.This isn't a case of a country boy being bewildered by London. I've had plenty of experience of the grimier bits of London, and it's noticeably worse in recent years. I've lived in the "diverse" areas of Leeds, Bradford and Bristol, and I've seen the crime for myself. I've experienced it plenty of times. There was a time when terraced houses didn't have bars on the windows, but now it's common enough to be unremarkable.&nbsp;This didn't happen overnight. Our cities became more crowded, more hostile, more transient, and more alien, making the bonds that make community possible unlikely. This certainly no environment to raise kids if you want to keep them on the straight and narrow.&nbsp;Community isn't council-sponsored diversity murals. It cannot be manufactured by bureaucrats. There has to be a sense of belonging, and a sense of commonality. That can't happen when there isn't even a common language. And without community, a district is just a dormitory. You can't even call it multiculturalism because there's no culture at all. Without a moratorium on immigration, our cities will become urban wastelands and occupied territories.

From high trust rural Yorkshire to 3rd world Londonistan

We need a grown-up debate about British agriculture.To put it bluntly, British farmers are completely fucked. In a global marketplace it's already difficult to compete since Britain will struggle to get anything like the same economies of scale. It's never going to be able to compete on price, and we're always going to need imports.&nbsp;Protectionism isn't going to do the consumer any favours, and it won't help British farmers, especially. To shield British farmers from global competition, tariffs would be so high that we would just end up with food shortages.&nbsp;The only thing British farmers can compete on is welfare standards and quality, to appeal to middle and upper income consumers. We can gear British farming in that direction, and there will always been a market for high quality foods.&nbsp;Still, though, it's difficult to see a future in farming, because animal feed, fertiliser and pesticide manufacture are energy intensive operations - as is grain drying and storage. Both Labour and the Tories are committed to long terms high energy prices.&nbsp;Then there's environmentalism and climate red tape. Everything a British farmer does is steeped in regulations. Some of it highly necessary, but much of it is the imposition of middle-class midwittery that champions organic and regenerative farming, and habitat preservation. Paying farmers to do anything but produce food. As @clim8resistance says, the decision to adopt so-called "regenerative farming" methods is a decision for individual farms to make. If the ideas and economics work for farmers, they can make that decision. Governments make terrible farmers, and should only legislate to the minimal extent necessary.It's true that the rural aesthetic is part of the national character, and we do want well maintained countryside, and farmers have a role to play in flood prevention, and we want them to be compensated for that, but farmers are no Net Zero implementation operatives. They're going to be spending most of their time filling out bullshit applications for sustainability payments and carbon offset schemes. As to land use and planning permission, fuhgeddaboudit. Everything is stacked against them. Policy is too heavily influenced by the green blob, made up of zealot NGOs who actually hate farmers and farming. The only sensible thing for farmers to do is to cease farming.I personally think abolishing the EU veterinary system would go a long way toward revitalising our meat industry, but that's not going to happen because regulatory policy is dominated by remainer wonks who prioritise "frictionless trade" over all other concerns, and the Windsor Framework pretty much guarantees any reform initiative will be stillborn. As such, there is no Brexit dividend for farming.&nbsp;Though I'm horrified that so much land has been given over to solar farms, I actually don't blame farmers for grubbing the cash while they can because producing food is a mug's game, especially when the supermarkets are gouging them. Moreover, deregulation only gets you so far. Supermarkets are pushing their own quasi-regulation under the guise of Corporate Social Responsibility, demanding farmers take measures to cut carbon in order to sell to them, allowing supermarkets to claim the efforts of farmers as part of their tradable carbon offset allowances. Farmers don't see a penny.Though corporates are now doing a reverse ferret on CSR, and further green measures in the Red Tractor scheme have been abandoned, that won't stop devolved governments meddling in things they know nothing about. As central government goes cool on Net Zero, the oafish devolved governments are doubling down. Farmers can't catch a break. The only people who have it worse are EU farmers, who now have to contend with a war on pesticides, fertilisers and land decommissioning under CAP reform. Though popular groupthink has it that we need to phase out fertilisers and pesticides, the bottom line is that farmers can have no profit margin without them.&nbsp;The only way British farming has a future is by becoming the agriculture R&amp;D lab of the world, creating new patents and pioneering SMR based nuclear desalination for irrigation, which can also serve as CHP for greenhouses. But again that means prioritising cheap, secure, abundant energy - which won't happen. The establishment parties are too wrapped up in the bogus notion of green jobs, so will keep flinging barrels of cash at the wind industry and other useless eco-boondoggles. Consequently, there are fewer and fewer ways for farms to stay afloat. They can't all diversify and run farm shops.&nbsp;Unless we have a grown-up debate about agriculture, I don't think the sector has a future at all. But we're not going to get a grown-up debate.&nbsp;Not least because farmers have such poor industry representation through the NFU - which is in bed with the green blob. Meanwhile, our politicians are too stupid to grasp the complexity and urgency of the situation, and there is zero hope of informed debate in the media, especially when their go-to talking head is the deeply moronic Brexit-obsessed Liz Webster. It seems the only way to make a profit from farming now is to be an ex-BBC motoring correspondent with a TV deal and massive cash reserves.&nbsp;Clarkson may be new to farming, but he might be the last man standing.<figure id="figure-1shbecxuoflw9q498t"><img id="1shbecxuoflw9q498t" src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/37zNEAshERc6EVRechuzYzBnx2yTOgxUBO8MkoHvA7BF1KsQSNlPVswaMkTnp31x.jpg" alt="EVERY DAY IS FUTURE. Global climate change strike - No Planet B - Global Climate Strike 09-20-2019" title="EVERY DAY IS FUTURE. Global climate change strike - No Planet B - Global Climate Strike 09-20-2019" class="object-cover bg-gray-100 " style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionX="undefined" data-positionY="undefined" data-fullWidth="false"/></figure>

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We need a grown-up debate about British agriculture.