Sunday West 47

The King, the Tories, the Army

Good morning, welcome to all new subscribers, and thanks to everyone who has recommended to friends. WSoH is now read in 145 countries - still no fans in Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Syria or Papua New Guinea, but I’lll continue to try cracking those markets.

Since the last newsletter I’ve written:

On the crazy fact that you can be locked up in Britain for making a joke, or visited by police for a statement of opinion.

On the orchestrated community get-togethers that follow large-scale atrocities.

On the problem of conscription and what we fight for.

On the benefits of exercise and how I was a (relatively) late convert to PE.

On whether the Tories really are ‘lurching to the right’.

On the king’s esoteric religious belief and support for persecuted Christians.

On British politics since October 7.

I also appeared on Russell Hogg’s Subject to Change podcast, talking about Alfred the Great.

****

Elsewhere, Post-Liberal Pete on whether low fertility can really be turned around.

The grandmother effect is a real phenomenon. Research has demonstrated that having a living maternal grandmother increases the number of offspring born by their daughters by about 20% whilst another study found that a grandparental death leads to a reduction of approximately 5 percentage points in the five-year probability of childbirth amongst their offspring. The grandmother effect gives us an insight into some of the cultural factors which underpin higher fertility rates in predominantly rural societies, given that in rural areas people are more likely, on average, to live near extended family and given that there is a positive and statistically significant association of parental support with adult daughters' entry into parenthood. 

I’m not sure what I think about the wider issue, but the more I read about sub-replacement fertility, the more I feel it’s related to the crisis of authority and can’t be turned around without significant cultural changes which we’re not prepared to countenance. It’s obviously an issue that concerns people, since this is my most-read piece on Substack (although, as it turns out, Russia’s leaders so seem to have a stomach for the fight).

****

You’ve probably read this Patrick Radden Keefe piece on a mysterious death in London, which is characteristically good. I read his Empire of Pain recently and will post on it soon.

****

James Marriott on how elite schools use progressive politics to boost their own moral standing.

Wealth should come with humility and a sense of responsibility, not with smugness and complacency. The richest children in the country should not be taught that they are ethical heroes and that the schools educating them are bastions of equality. It reinforces one of the most pernicious trends of our time: the very wealthy have come to believe not only in their material but also their moral superiority.

Witness the panels on diversity and inclusion at Davos; or the fact that Yale’s infamous insider Skull and Bones society now preens itself over its diversity; or, most infamously, Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of the “deplorables”. The idea is that superior moral insight — especially in matters of gender and race — is a function of elite status, while poverty implies moral degeneracy.

****

I watched Dear England recently, which is just as good as people say; or at least, the first half is very good, the second half is essentially agitprop, but well-made agitprop can leave even the cynics and unbelievers leaving with a smile and praising Comrade Stalin. In the Spectator, John Sturgis wrote about another era of the England team and a forgotten saga in cancel culture.

Glenn Hoddle remains unique among England managers – possibly among any football manager anywhere ever  – for having been sacked over a theological issue. This strange episode unfolded 25 years ago. Since his playing days, Hoddle had stood apart as a born-again Christian when the norm for footballers remained the George Best booze-and-birds lifestyle. But his religious beliefs didn’t excite much wider interest until he took over the England team. And then they did, particularly because – as well as the usual coaching staff – Hoddle began introducing to squad sessions… a faith healer. 

The funniest anecdote about the Eileen Drewery saga involves Arsenal’s Ray Parlour, who lost his place in the team after a bit of banter. As his team mate Ian Wright later explained: ‘I remember Ray Parlour got blown out by him because he never takes anything seriously, and when you go in [to see the faith dealer] your sat there and she comes behind you and hovers her hand over you, and Ray Parlour said, “short back and sides please” – she told Glenn Hoddle and Ray was out’. I would have laughed.

****

Ralph Leonard on Ilhan Omar.

It shouldn’t be surprising that immigrants can be shamelessly nationalistic about their homeland, have intense pride in their identity and history and not quite shake off long-held ethnic grievances. It’s why someone like Dua Lipa can be an Albanian irredentist — or why German Turks tend to vote for the Social Democrats in German national elections, but when the Turkish elections come around many vote for Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative Islamic party, the AKP. 

This may sound like a paradox, but there is a rationality to it. For ethnic minorities in a Western country, it’s usually the Left-liberal or social democratic party that will try the hardest to garner their vote, even if they aren’t particularly liberal in outlook. Meanwhile, the Right-wing parties are often regarded as, ironically, not conservative enough or too hostile because of racism. 

****

N.S. Lyons writes one of the best substacks around, and his piece on Poland is well worth reading, and troubling.

So Brussels set out to undermine Poland’s right-wing government as punishment. By freezing the funds ahead of the election, then blatantly signaling they would be restored only if Tusk was elected to implement his plans, the EU effectively held out a massive bribe to help induce the Polish people to vote correctly. Naturally, as soon as Tusk took power the EU quickly moved to release some $5 to 7 billion in initial funds for a job well done. This after Tusk’s coalition immediately began packing the National Council of the Judiciary (a constitutional body overseeing Polish judges) with its own partisans – despite the allegation of PiS doing something similar being exactly what provoked the EU’s howls about “undermining judicial independence” in the first place. But then, “There’s lot of appetite in Brussels to help Tusk out and release at least part of this money and ensure that this change in Poland is reflected not just in rhetoric but in some hard cash being handed out as incentive to continue with those reforms,” as Jakub Jaraczewski, some kind of NGO creature, accurately summed it upfor the Financial Times.

****

Freya India on why young women are so risk-averse in love.

Social media is full of young women warning each other and listing out red flags and reasons why you should dump him or dodge commitment. He compliments you a lot? Love-bombing. Says I miss you too soon? Run. Approaches you in person? Predator. It’s all so cynical. It’s all about how not to catch feelings; ways not to get attached; how “you’re not gonna get hurt if you have another man waiting”! We blunt romance and passion with this constant calculation of risk, this paranoid scanning for threats, and by holding back to avoid being hurt. We encourage each other to be emotionally absent, unfazed, uncaring. We even call it empowerment! It’s not. It’s neuroticism. I think we are a generation absolutely terrified of getting hurt and doing all we can to avoid it.

****

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on how the Tories won the battle for Britain’s soul.

However the Tories had consequently been borne up, one union leader said that Disraeli’s government of 1874-80 did more for the working classes in six years than the Liberals had done in a generation, attached as they were to laissez-faire principles. Disraeli’s tradition never died. The rather dubious figure of Randolph Churchill coined the phrase “Tory democracy”, which he privately said was “mostly demagoguery”, but he was too modest. That brilliant German writer Sebastian Haffner much later said that Churchill had hit upon a combination of patriotism and welfare that would sustain not only the Tories but all European parties of the moderate right over the next century.

As Tucker Carlson would put it - not any more!

****

Mary Harrington on why it’s good to be cringe. In fact, society needs cringe.

“Cool” is perhaps the essence of “counterculture”, in the paradoxical, post-1960s sense of something that’s both anti-normative and yet unavoidably bound up in normalisation. “Cool” is also, by virtue of its elusiveness, structurally antisocial. Something stops being cool when everyone starts doing it, or wearing it, or whatever. That means that as long as you operate under the sign of “cool”, you can’t build anything lasting, or broad-based - because the moment you do, it stops being cool and the glamour migrates somewhere else. By the same token, ordering your social life around “cool” requires a certain ruthlessness: a willingness to exclude old friends, ditch old haunts, or cut someone dead, the moment they no longer have the magic fairy-dust. It’s anti-loyal.

****

Ollie Ryan Tucker on soft power.

The term was coined by Joseph Nye in the late 1980s in response to what he described as “as misleading theories of American decline” which had “diverted our attention away from the real issue — how power is changing in world politics”. At a time when critics were drawing parallels between British decline in the late nineteenth and the United States, Nye argued that the US still possessed the ability to achieve its desired outcomes. For Nye, soft power was instrumental to enduring American power. 

My own feeling is that soft power tends to follow financial power, while the cultural establishment in Britain completely misunderstands what attracts people to Britain, because it’s a Britain they despise. Stuff like this also really damages our brand.

****

Will Lloyd on the radical old.

The roles of old and young have reversed. Peel the skin off every radical political movement of the past decade and you will find age, not youth, flowing through its veins. …

Radical pensioners were the lifeblood of Extinction Rebellion. The movement was defined not by students but by pensioners with too much time on their hands. Just Stop Oil, ER’s successor, has the same greying foot-soldiers. Attending any trial of its members is revealing. You look at the defendants, activists who glued themselves to national highways, expecting to see students with nose piercings and instead see cardigan-wearing pensioners. JSO activists who’ve been processed by the courts include a 76-year-old grandmother who climbed on to an M25 gantry. Her co-defendants last year were aged 72, 65 and 56.

I wonder: is this just the nature of a more political – and social – generation who have always been active in politics, or do they just have too much time on their hands?

****

Finally, Robert Colvile on the post office

This is an incredibly depressing story. But it teaches all manner of important lessons. Beware of politicians who think they know more about industry than industry does. Beware of “national champions”. Beware of monopolies, both public and private. Beware of the way that bad decisions cascade through the generations, not least because the people who built the shoddy software are often the only ones who know how to maintain it.

Thanks for subscribing, and have a good day.