HUMANITY AND BLEEDING HEARTS

In a recent Daily Telegraph, Bryony Gordon condemned the poverty of spirit of those who are already tiring of the Grenfell Tower victims and the painful dilemma over baby Charlie Gard. She is right of course - the milk of human kindness should not curdle quickly, if at all, and the Grenfell victims were housed in a combustible environment inexcusably. Yet I do not accept that we are obliged to take upon us all the sins of the world (that, I believe, was Another Chap’s chosen role); we help our fellow-humans as much as possible but there are limits to the material aid we can provide and we jib at giving them an open invitation to share our own crowded shores.

Grenfell Tower blaze kills 80

The pressing problems of the indigenous poor, the displaced and the armies of migrants are challenging but are capable of rational solution. No group can claim a monopoly of conscience or feelings of pity.  The great engine of progress in our society is economic growth. If growth can be achieved, our poor will be relaunched on a sea of prosperity, their benefits increased and new employment opportunities will open up. The genuinely displaced, those actually homeless from the wars in Syria for example, are refugees and must be given humanitarian shelter under UN guidelines. The UK will of course readily take her due share.

Migrants trudge through Central Europe

 The migrant army is fleeing the chronic poverty, corruption, instability and violence of their own societies in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. These unfortunates are economic refugees, merely seeking a better life. We owe them absolutely nothing other than our natural compassion but we will treat them fairly if they reach our country. Our border security is as porous as the rest of the EU. Economic migrants should in time be repatriated to their countries of origin, if practicable, and our government’s efforts concentrated on improving the economic and social systems of those states, admittedly a grindingly long-term policy target.

The narrative from Corbyn’s Labour and the Left would take a quite different angle. Our native poor were created by the “exploitation”, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, of labourers by rapacious bosses, who are still at it. The poor deserve special privileges to lift them out of poverty and confiscatory taxes should be levied on the rich to narrow the wealth gap so that all end up equally miserable and dependent on the Socialist government. The Grenfell Tower disaster is branded as “social murder”.  The notorious politics of envy and class hate runs riot, Marxist claptrap is presented as self-evident fact and Corbyn’s star is currently in the ascendant.

Soon to be our nightmare masters? John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Living a relatively sheltered life, I could hardly believe that Labour’s Leftie views carry any credibility and I am appalled to discover that whole generations have been fed this stuff and swallow it without a single choke. My eldest son, an idealist in some ways but no fool, lent me a book which gained currency from its publication in 1980 and is taught reverently in many public schools and colleges in the US. I refer to A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

I am only partly through it and I find it hard going, so opposed to every fibre in my body is the Zinn theology. He preaches the merits of the underdog, the underclass exploited by their superiors. Thus he paints a bucolic idyll of native Indian life destroyed by the Europeans, an account of the suffering of the black Africans and the horrors of slavery, descriptions of poor whites bullied by colonial masters, of the revolutionary impetus against the British with the propertied classes keeping control, on through Jacksonian era rent and labour agitation, Civil War, Reconstruction, robber barons and early trade unions, the later struggles of factory workers and women.

All this is no doubt well-researched but it is all slanted towards the Socialist cause. This picture of American history is distorted. In Britain, as in the US, history is made by leadership and decisive action by men of substance like Nelson, Wellington, Peel, Gladstone and Churchill, not to mention a later heroine, Thatcher.  Zinn (and Corbyn) reduce ordinary citizens to being victims living under oppression. It is nonsense – the great achievements of recent US democracy needed the oratory of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King; the legislative cunning and persuasiveness of LBJ and the populist clarity of Reagan.

Truly, the mettle of Britain has been sadly weakened. Nobody admires the dignified “stiff upper lip” any more. The tragic death of Princess Diana in 1997 triggered off an orgy of self-indulgent grief and since then every celebrity’s passing and every life cut short brings out flowers and teddy bears from hysterical strangers. Even Theresa May thought it “human” to admit to blubbing when she fouled up the recent election. For goodness sake, take a grip!  

The Conservative (and indeed the Liberal Democratic) national vision needs to be proclaimed with passion by its leaders. Cameron fell short and Theresa May has betrayed her inadequacy. In our topsy-turvy world maybe an odd-ball like Boris Johnson (or even solid David Davis) with oodles of personality could rise to the challenge. The electorate needs to be wooed and inspired, amused and impressed by its politicians, not patronised.

Is Boris the man?

Save us from patronising Labour, – I remember wincing years ago whenever Scargill referred to the miners as “the lads” – may we present a compelling contrast to their categorisation of us as “victims”. Let us bury for ever their neo-Stalinism and fight for an open society, trading freely, competing fairly, prospering together and living comfortably within our own institutional skin.

SMD

17.07.2017

Text Copyright ©Sidney Donald 2017