Month: April 2026

Churchill’s thoughts on the day

A gathering in Westminster from all walks of life, packing into the Gothic Glory of the Speaker’s House in the Palace of Westminster, for a St George’s Day function, and I squeezed in among them.

All sorts of interests were there – the Church, cultural champions, a scatter of journalists, entertainers, the economic and political worlds. After the rousing speeches, from The Speaker and others, came the Churchill moment. An actor, giving us Churchill to the T, delivered part of a speech from a St George’s Day function in 1933 (during the Great Depression, and just after the Austrian housepainter seized power in Germany).

The whole of Churchill’s speech that day is interesting – not just the ‘St George for Merrie England’ part. He expressed some frustration that in his time it was becoming frowned upon to say ‘England’ to mean the whole of Britain, so he talked of England, and left the audience to guess which he meant. To hand the rest of the article to Winston S Churchill then, as first he looked down at the BBC microphones recording every word said:

They have been placed upon our tables at their own responsibility by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Think of the risk these eminent men are running, of their suspense. We can almost see them in our mind’s eye gathered together in that very expensive building with the questionable statues on its front. We can picture Sir John Reith with the perspiration mantling on his lofty brow, with his hand upon the control switch wondering whether it will not be his duty to protect his innocent subscribers from some irreverent thing I might say about Mr. Gandhi or about the Russian Bolsheviks, or even about our peripatetic Prime Minister.

And after an amusing diversion, imagining a modern St George facing the Dragon not with a lance but with a secretariat, handing it taxpayers’ money and signing a trade treaty, then he found his main theme which showed his foresight in newly the darkening world, and which is a lesson to us to this day:

Historians had noticed all down the centuries one peculiarity of the English people, which had cost them dear. We had always thrown away after a victory the greater part of the advantages gained in time struggle. England, so resolute, so dogged, so invincible in danger, had always collapsed in spirit and action after time danger has been warded off. The worst difficulties from which we suffered did not come from without. They came from within. They did not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They came from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who if they added something to its culture took much from its strength.

Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. Religion, we are told, has its part except to teach us humbleness. Patriotism, they declare, is worn out, except where paying income tax is concerned. Our clever talkers have derided these ancient themes, but what have they to put in their place but a. vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias? That is all they offer us in a world where the struggle for national self-preservation is daily becoming intensified.

They tell us that our day is done, our sun is set, and night is coming on. They declare, some with crazy exultation in their tones, that the decline and fall of England’s glory is at hand. If that be true it will be our own fault. Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then, indeed, our story is told.

Why should we break up the solid structure of British power for dreams which may some day come true but are now only dreams—some of them nightmares?

We are, as a race and society, perhaps more capable of bearing shocks and strains—especially long strains— than any other. Our institutions are capable of chancing with time and circumstances. We ought, as a nation and Empire, to weather any storm that blows at least as well as any other existing system of human government. We are at once more experienced and more truly united than any people in the world. It may well be that time most glorious chapters of our history are yet to be written.

See also

Books

Unruly international order

The rules-based international order was corrupted long ago, and the Foreign Office are in denial. It was devised on the assumption that we were making the rules, but now we are not; bodies of international co-operation are in the hands of those with other agendas, and no scruples about abusing our naïvety.

The League of Nations was created in 1920 by civilised nations of ancient culture, who knew that peace involves behaving like gentlemen who understand each other, with treaties to act as a shield. Twenty years later, we found what happens when understanding gentlemen are no longer there:  the bloodiest war in history.

Start again then with the United Nations – again, a meeting of old, civilised nations, and Russia, with more treaties and conventions and all sorts, as if more of what failed would work this time. It was a creation of lawyers in the expectation of the rule of law, worded in their idiolect, of “law” and “crime”. In truth, the H-bomb was more of a peacemaker. We had the comfort of treaties and understandings, and some new institutions to play umpire when disputes arose (other than those which caused bloodshed and rivers of new widows’ tears in every decade since).

Reading Ruth Benedict’s work on contrasting cultures would have given a warning, but The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was published two years too late, in 1946. The United Nations was founded by lawyers and philosophers from “guilt cultures”, where an honest man is expected to have an individual, internal restraint against rule-breaking. China, a prime “shame culture” nation was the first signatory to the UN Charter, but had little part in devising the system.

Time has passed. Wars have rolled over the globe and all expectations have gone. The founding nations have no more dominance, beyond their residual vetos on the Security Council. It is now a club of former colonies, ready to wreak revenge on the perceived wrongs of their old masters.

Furthermore, the majority of diplomats playing with the levers handed over to them are of “shame cultures”, in which the fear is not ones personal conscience but the shame of social exposure when exposed; and the levers were designed for disinterested lawyers and philosophers with internal self-restraint.

Those “laws” invented in the rush of end-of-war enthusiasm were short and necessary – keep your word, and aggression is a crime – but having established the fiction that relations of nations are governed by laws, that opens up possibilities for ambitious, aggressive politicians.

If western diplomats have convinced themselves that they are bound by international laws, others will invent laws to force the westerners’ hands.

Now the ex-colonies are in charge, and often governed by politicians who gained power by riling their populations into anger about the real or imagined wrongs of the imperialists. They do use imagined laws.  Decolonisation was out of nowhere declared a requirement of international law, and a committee was set up to condemn western nations for not dismantling themselves.

The Mauritian ambition to seize the Chagos Islands, an act of colonial ambition in itself, has been fought with imagined laws. For some time the treatment of the Chagossian plantation workers was used in every forum as a crowbar to condemn Mauritius’s old colonial master. When it became clear that these Chagossians want to stay British and for the islands to stay British, they have been discarded.

The opinion by an international tribunal, that parts of territories may not be separated when those territories are abandoned to independence, has no basis in any understood international understanding – but it was declared by a body claiming to be a court of law, so the Foreign Office accepted it without question. One actual, positive treaty obligation is that the United Nations tribunals have no jurisdiction over intra-Commonwealth disputes, but this apparently could be discarded. At the same time a letter stated on its face to be non-binding, was held to be an absolute obligation. There is no law there: only politicians inventing rules to try to shame Western nations, and Western diplomats have fallen for it.

The Russians can now do what they like in their ‘Near Abroad’. We hoped they would be restrained by appeals to international law; but even at the best of times this “law” was a convenient hypocrisy.  Now even that has gone.  China (the premier example of a culture without self-guilt) has being doing whatever it likes for a long time, and they play the Western guilt game too.  Russia and China have a free hand: there is no international law any more, because the idea has been abused into a nonsense.

See also

Books

Raising Low Sunday

Thomas Sunday, or Low Sunday, or Back-to-Normal Sunday? It should not be: Easter, the Resurrection, is a starting point, not an end. Jesus appeared to his disciples over the course of time, building excitement of what was to come next – the fulfilment of all he had been teaching them  in his ministry. After a week, they were still fizzing with it.

John’s Gospel alone gives us the story of Thomas, and a date:

And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.

This gives us ‘Thomas Sunday’, when that chapter is read – Thomas’s scepticism followed by joy of worship. The theme in many a church is doubt, or the question of truth (and if I hear one more sermon where the preacher tries to be ‘relevant’ by talking about Donald Trump, I may bellow and run out).

We should hear the chapter, and much more, but perhaps we should think more about the joy, and the terror? (Aye, the terror – after the Crucifixion, the Disciples must have had a reaction of despair mixed with guilty relief that their rollercoaster ride was over; now it was starting up again, redoubled.)

For most though, the calendar has ticked over, the holiday has ended and we have been back at work. I watched the people gathering in Coventry Cathedral this afternoon for their Low Sunday evensong, and it was a dribble of folk – not the joyous crowds of Easter Day. Admittedly Coventry’s Modernist, Sir Basil Spence edifice is not so edifying as a grand Gothic Cathedral is, but the Church is the people, not the building. No – it was a Sunday of back-to-normal.

It will be an effort to remember we are in the joyous post-Easter time. It is an effort worth taking, which should bring joy.

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Books

No libertarian space colonies

A longstanding Libertarian idea is that if a libertarian society cannot be created in the world, then private enterprises can create their own orbiting island worlds, making their own way, free of state control and without the legacy of constraining laws.

Until someone leaves an airlock open.

In a normal land, on Earth, we form societies and make laws for the reasons Hobbes set out:

The finall Cause, End, or Designe of men, (who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others,) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, (in which wee see them live in Common-wealths,) is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre, which is necessarily consequent (as hath been shewn) to the naturall Passions of men, when there is no visible Power to keep them in awe, and tye them by feare of punishment to the performance of their Covenants, and observation of these Lawes of Nature

A society built afresh, even if it is designed to be a tabula rasa, on no prior foundation, is nevertheless subject to the laws of nature, which is to say man’s own nature. You can dream of absolute liberty when alone in the virgin woods, but people coming together as a tribe or nation to preserve themselves, must create a social contract or destroy themselves. The laws their Common-wealth creates may be mild and only what is necessary, or intrusive and resented, but cannot be absent.

The more urban and industrial a society becomes, the more intrusive are its laws. Crammed into an orbiting habitat or a Mars colony, imprisoned in a bubble surrounded by the vacuum of space, those laws will be tight. The Libertarian idea is that they need not be:  a colony is not inheriting the laws of its ancestors and building on those, but starting afresh, with only such rules as are actually relevant and necessary to the survival of the colony. Survival is the key to what follows, and kills the libertarian idea.

The way laws are given to British colonies is this: the law of England applies, with such modification as to make them applicable in Rumbabaland or wherever. A space colony could do the same, and then repeal laboriously the inapplicable and unnecessary – no need for conservation laws when there is no nature nor wildlife nor rivers to pollute nor ancient monuments (it sounds an awful place already) and all sorts of spheres of life, where reluctance to interfere with Chesterton’s Fence becomes more and more as you go on.

Instead, the libertarian idea is that you start with no laws at all, and introduce only those which are necessary. Start with ‘Thou shalt not kill’, ‘Thou shalt not steal’; and rights of property have to be defined, and then laws of contract.

You resent government, and want to do without it, until you want someone to enforce your rights of property. (There have been nations with laws but no effective government – Dark Age Iceland, or Albania for most of its post-Roman history, relying on revenge and blood-feuds. It is not recommended.)

Britain became essentially libertarian, in comparison to the modern situation, in the age that led to the Industrial Revolution. That liberty  allowed innovation and industry to rise. With industrialisation came the desire to protect rivers and the atmosphere from what spilled from those belching furnaces, and to protect labourers from being ground up in the machines. With it came urbanisation, and taxes to build sewers and clean streets; to install gas-lamps and eventually electricity. Private Acts of Parliament overrode rights of property in order to carve canals, and then railways, and then roads. Then came town planning laws, and later town and country planning laws. The crush of the new cities, families cheek-by-jowl with their neighbours, brought more detailed laws on tenancies and interpersonal space, and on what vehicles one is allowed to run on the crowded public road.

(Much of this, one might think, could have been imposed on cities only, leaving the countryside alone. Law-makers do not work like that. We have got used to paying for the cities, as they earn for us, and to being stuck with their laws.)

In a space-colony, inhabitants are even more cheek-by-jowl. There is no getting away from the government, because it owns the space-station or colony complex. On Earth, we breathe free air; an unlimited resource, and fresh water tumbles from the skies into cool streams. In a space colony every drop of water and every breath of air, is a finite resource managed and distributed by the colony government. It gives that government the power of life and death over every inhabitant, moment to moment and in minute detail.

We curse the planning laws when they stop us building an extension or a new country cottage for ourselves on our own land. A space colony cannot be unconstrained: try knocking through a wall to build a lean-to, and all the colony’s air is sucked into space.

If the structure of government ceases to function in a normal country, we might not notice for a white. (Whitehall is barely functional now at the best of times.) We do nevertheless have basic law enforcement, and goodwill between neighbours, in nicer areas. If basic law enforcement ceases, riots and looting begin – even then the Earth sustains us: there may be famine in the artifices that are the cities and millions starving, but outside we still have sunshine and water and can live, if we can get food.

If government ceases in a space colony, life-support may break down and everyone dies. If inhabitants stop respecting the government and the rules laid down, the rationing of air, water and food is ignored, and everyone dies.

Interestingly, when Project Hyperion held a competition to design a ‘generation ship’ – an interstellar colony ship – one entry, Systema Stellare Proximum, assumed that every generation or so, society in the colony will break down into riots and anarchy, until re-established by tyranny. The colony ship would therefore have to be designed with this in mind. That is a more realistic analysis than any familiar science fiction. The colony would need to have an overriding artificial intelligence as an undisplaceable governing system to keep the ship alive in spite of the breakdown.

What of opportunity too?  The libertarian ideal allows any man or women to make his or her life however they wish. On Earth, that can be done. In a decently sized country, I could choose my path, looking for any opening or innovate in my own enterprise to create something new. In a closed, defined space colony, perforce autarkic and unexpandable there is little opportunity for anything but being allocated to a task.

This is all without thinking about the effect of inbreeding in a small colony – that would need careful regulation, in a way we would find unacceptable overreach into the personal sphere even in a constrained, modern society.

I can appreciate the hope of the libertarian, to build a new, free world by thumbing his nose at governments and making a new home outside the state’s grip; building it as a private enterprise to his own specifications. It would however be far more unfree than anything they have left on Earth.

See also

Books

Fiction:

Who is the Moon?

To dream of the Moon; so familiar yet mysterious, is part of humanity. I do not need codified myths, nor do you, nor scientific precision. Myths come down to us, but we can each invent our own. The ascent of Artemis II, named for a Greek moon-goddess, brings exact science to the matter, when we would prefer to indulge in fancy.

Brewer tells us that “Harris, in his Hermes asserts that all nations ascribe to the sun a masculine and the moon a feminine gender”, but Harris was not so dogmatic. It may be that way round in Mediterranean lands and the Near East, but in the Germanic world, the Sun is feminine and the Moon masculine.

In those classical lands, the Moon has a smooth, shining face; a welcome coolness after the working day, accompanied by adoring attendant stars; changeable, fickle, and the essence of romance. The Sun however is a harsh task-master, glaring down during the labours of the day with a lash.

In our lust frosts, the Sun is a gentle, warming presence; a delight we long for, stirring life in us, to whom we open our arms as she casts her golden locks about her. The Moon is icy, marking the passage of time; he marches with the hunter, and as a watchman betraying the night-stalker; he stands above, wearing a white beard in the cloud.

When we stopped looking up, we stopped marking the Man in the Moon (and his dog). When telescopes and science explained the marks on his face, we stopped making our own stories about the Moon. When we filled the night sky with the lifeless glow of our earth-bound lamps we shut the sky to to our imagination.

As Artemis II coasts onward towards the Moon, taking people to a place abandoned over fifty years ago, it is done with cold science, even if it evokes in its name an ancient myth. Maybe though it will make us look up again and, looking up, dream.

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Fiction: