If Idealism Won’t Save This Country, Perhaps Selfishness Might

By Tim Haydon.

 

Liberalism: The Ideology of the Good Times

The facts of life – the struggle for personal survival – are right-wing.  Liberalism and leftism are denials of this truth.  Right-wing attitudes bring the good times about.  Leftism/liberalism squanders the fruits of them because it takes them for granted. It forgets or despises the attitudes and struggles that produced them, making the fundamental error of assuming that they were somehow inevitable. Liberalism flourishes when times are good and seem to go on being good or to be getting better.  Liberalism is a luxury only the affluent can afford – or think they can.

The Good times Allowed Mass Immigration

That’s one good reason why left-liberalism was able to get away with the unannounced flooding of this country with millions of foreigners during New Labour’s disastrous tenure of office.  The country was then in the grip of an enormous, credit-fuelled spending spree, based on Gordon Brown’s claim that he ‘had conquered boom and bust’.  People ‘never had it so good’.  Two, three, or more cars per family were commonplace, as were multiple holidays abroad. The more expensive supermarkets boomed.  At Christmas, children were given toys or electronic gizmos costing hundreds. All very remarkable when one considers that for decades after World War Two, cars were a luxury for the middle-classes, holidays abroad were unheard of for vast swathes of the population, eating out was a rare event, chicken for dinner was a once a month or twice-a year luxury, and televisions and washing machines were owned only by a minority and many children wore hand-me-downs.

Personal Affluence Dulled Concern for the Country as a Whole

Because people were doing so well personally, while many of them still didn’t like what was happening to their country as their neighbourhoods were changed overnight by influxes of migrants – at the behest of those who thought they knew better than they did what was good for them and were determined to see that they got it – they didn’t feel the pressing need to defend Britain and its character that they might otherwise have done.  That this was so represents a deep change in the attitudes of the British.

After all, their fathers and grandfathers had not fought against invasion in the Second World War because they wanted a higher standard of living, but for other, higher, more idealistic reasons –  mainly so  that there would always be an England – their England (or Scotland, or Wales , or Ireland), their ancestral homeland – the cradle of their culture, freedoms and way of life.

Extreme  Individualism

The muted reaction to the immigrant takeover of Britain is the result of the long-term trend  towards liberal atomisation of the population, made possible by rising standards of living. The population is increasingly a crowd of strangers rather than a real community glued together by common ethnicity, religion, culture and history.  This liberal individualism is part of a broader trend towards a deeply materialist world-view. (See the article ‘The Daily Mail, The Decline of Christmas and the Decline of the West).

It can be traced to the rise of the bourgeoisie, a class dedicated to commerce and to material wealth beginning in 11^th century.  The Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century, while an attempt to roll back the materialist tide, was a bourgeois outgrowth and ironically furthered it. Where Catholicism requires ‘good works’,  ie engagement in the community, as a prerequisite to salvation, Protestantism requires grace and faith alone (sola fides). Of course, many advances in social well being can be attributed to Protestantism. But this aspect of Protestant doctrine tended to diminish the sense of community welfare.  It encouraged the idea that working for one’s own good was working for God, leading to Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic theory of the rise of capitalism.

Individualism and the Loss of ‘Community’

The historically developing materialist world view has brought about a secular Britain, one of whose  most disagreeable features is an extreme form of individualism. This extremity may yet have some way to go before it reaches its nadir, but seems now to be in sight of it, for the simple reason that it is hard to see how much further it can develop.

Individualism today is all about doing one’s own thing; about looking after one’s self; about greed being good, about not caring what anyone else does. It is not about caring much for the common good, beyond putting a few pounds in a collecting box for charity, which in any case is more about feeling good about oneself than being truly caring. Such attitudes are intrinsically hostile to a sense of community. That’s why David Cameron’s call for ‘The Big Society’ fell so flat.

Liberal Individualists  Care Little About the Country and Less About its Future

Believers in this ideology or attitude, which means most people nowadays, especially those in the elites who have the greatest influence on how the country is run, tend to have no concern for the future because they won’t be in it. They are therefore unimpressed by forecasts that the country will be dominated by Islam at some point this century.  This is true whether or not they have children – and many don’t because they are expensive and atheistical materialism puts immediate self-interest first.

Nick Robinson’s BBC Immigration Debate Focused on Economics

This is a key reason, although not the only one of course, why the response of many to mass immigration has been muted until recently and why that response has largely been restricted to considerations of economics and associated matters.   Nationalists, or patriots if one prefers, who have objected to it for more idealistic, less selfish, self-centred reasons have been successfully  marginalised by  the cheerleaders of extreme individualism; the left liberals and neo cons. The BBC’s Nick Robinson programme about immigration recently focused on economic and associated matters, showing the kind of bias by omission at which that organisation is so adept.

Hostility to Immigration is a Feature of Those who are Affected Personally 

So hostility to the immigrant takeover of Britain has mainly been a feature of those who have been impacted by it personally and materially rather than those who take a broader, more thoughtful, less selfish view. The former are those who have seen their personal livelihoods affected, their own neighbourhoods transformed and the quality of their own lives reduced by immigration. These people have hitherto been the working-class.

Immigration and the Working-Class

Working-class people have of course been effectively disenfranchised by the main political parties. Their traditional champion, Labour, has abandoned them in favour of minorities, including immigrants, whilst continuing to trade on their ‘brand loyalty’ and buying their votes with benefits. The Tory Party is a liberal party whose neo-con policies have the same ultimate affect when it comes to immigration as those of New Labour.   So white working-class people have simply had to put up with what mass immigration has been doing to them as best they could, believing that a vote for a minor party was a wasted vote and a threat to their benefits, especially after Nick  Griffin’s Question Time debacle.

Immigration and the Middle Class

The middle class, on the other hand have hitherto benefited from the influx of immigrants, who have provided affordable nannies, household help, plumbers, builders and others. Now though, things are changing.  While before the members of this class has been content to let working-class people stew, despising their calls for help as ‘racist’, they are now panicking about the growing impact of immigration on their personal well-being. A recent study by Ipsos Mori found that among those with the lower incomes (below £30,000) concern centred on the threat to income and jobs. Among those with the highest incomes (over £75,000), the concern was about the impact on services and the potential drain on the benefits system. It is likely that anxiety about this drain does not so much reflect concern that possible beneficiaries might miss out, but that taxes might have to be increased to pay for it.

Building on the Green Belt

However, another issue has raised its head – one which will impact negatively on all levels of the comfortable middle -classes. The National Trust warned in December last that the Government was presiding over a ‘steady erosion’ of the Green Belt. The Trust complained that half the councils of England with Green Belt land were preparing to allocate some of it, ahead of development of brownfield sites, in an effort to meet the Government’s 5-year housing land supply target.  The Campaign to Protect Rural England said earlier in 2013 that the numbers of houses planned for Green Belt land had doubled to 150,000 in the preceding twelve months.

Building Housing near Leafy Villages

All over England, the residents of leafy villages and expensive, pleasant suburbs are seeing plans being published for massive levels of housing developments, needed to house the increase in the population the country has been experiencing, which could change the look and ambience of these places out of all recognition and possibly reduce house values.  And this trend can only continue.  The Labour shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, has promised a major programme of new town construction if his party is returned to government, with 200,000 new homes a year being built by 2020.   Unsurprisingly, the residents of the places likely to be affected are up in arms.

Now we learn that David Cameron has been keeping under his hat until after the election plans to build two ‘garden cities’ smack in the middle of affluent Southern England. These new cities could be built in Buckinghamshire, Warwickshire or Oxfordshire, where Cameron has his constituency. Nothing could be more effective in bringing home the reality of the immediate effects of mass immigration to the affluent residents of these areas than to have huge new cities with tens of thousands of houses, many of them quite possibly stuffed with immigrant families on their doorsteps.

Personal self-interest may yet recruit the hitherto somnolent middle classes to the nationalist, patriotic cause. Saving themselves may yet save the nation. Let us hope so.