SET OUR PEOPLE FREE

Neil Clark says Left and Right should unite in

a patriotic crusade against the liberals who rejoice in their nation's failures

FOOT-and-mouth, Big Brother, inner-city riots — 2001 was a bad enough year for being British even before the start of this summer's sporting disappointments. The defeat of the British Lions down under, the Ashes humiliation (victory in the fourth Test notwithstanding), and the sheer bad luck of our leading contenders at Wimbledon and the Open Golf have only deepened the sense of gloom for most of us. Not for all of us, though. Incredible as it may seem, some actually rejoice at our nation's lack of sporting success. Already lips are being smacked at the prospect of a defeat for England in the fifth Test and for our footballers in Germany at the beginning of September.

After Wimbledon, a Guardian reader, Jeremy Langdon, wrote, 'Thank God Henman lost. The sight of all those women waving Union flags was becoming insufferable, and the thought of Henman on every billboard as a champion would have been too much.' Langdon's letter, and indeed the views of Guardian columnists like Matthew Engel and A.L. Kennedy, left one in no doubt as to what liberal England thought of the country's annual outbreak of 'Henmania'. Far better that a self-confessed Croatian nationalist won Wimbledon than Englishman Tim, with his 'insufferable' legion of flag-waving grannies. George Orwell once remarked that England was 'the only country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that it is a duty to snigger at every British institution from horse-racing to suet puddings.'

As an unreconstructed Clause Four English socialist who loves both horse-racing and suet puddings. I deeply resent the implied charge of liberal Intellectuals' that anyone keen on Union-flag-waving and shouting 'Come on. Tim' is in reality just one short step away from BNP membership. As in the case of their knee-jerk opposition to capital punishment, the liberal elite's opposition to all healthy manifestations of patriotism is both contradictory and illogical.

Contrast, for example, the liberal-left reaction to the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia with past British military action against the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland. The former was seen as a fully justified 'humanitarian' intervention against a wicked racist regime, the latter a shameful example of post-imperial aggression against heroic 'freedom fighters'.

It seems to me, though, a strange kind of logic which justifies the 11-week bombardment of a European capital city, but not action taken against those who planted bombs in crowded shopping centres in mainland Britain. Yet, while the liberalleft elite pop the champagne corks in celebration of the arrest of Milosevic (a man who has not been responsible for the death of a single British citizen), the killers of Lord Mountbatten are allowed to go free.

The liberal Left's hatred of their own country, of course, emanates from a deep sense of guilt over Britain's imperial past. The British empire was an unmitigated evil, for which we should never cease to be apologetic. Some less enlightened individuals may draw attention to Mugabe's rule of terror in Zimbabwe or the kneecapping policies of the IRA, but the guilty men in both cases are, of course. Cecil Rhodes and Oliver Cromwell, who caused all the trouble in the first place. It is the liberals' neurotic sense of guilt over Pax Britannica, which is responsible for many of our contemporary social problems. For much of the disintegration of our society has been caused by an abject surrendering of our own culture and traditions in the interests of a washed-down and meaningless 'multiculturalism'. Liberal commentators writing on the riots in Bradford came to the conclusion that part of the problem was that young Pakistanis had adopted the wicked ways of white English working-class culture. If only they had stayed pious, teetotal Muslims like their parents, there would have been no disturbances. Yet the problem in Bradford, and most of our major cities, is that traditional workingclass culture has itself been largely replaced by a violent rap culture imported from American inner cities, in which 'gang' loyalties and drugs play a key role. Correct me if I'm wrong, but dealing in crack and heroin never was a traditional North Country pursuit.

In the last 20 years or so. indigenous British culture, so loathed by liberals, has been in spectacular retreat on all fronts. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in our high streets. Up and down the country they have been taken over by a combination of fast-food chains, coffee shops and pizzerias, all trying to impose 'internationalised eating and drinking habits.

In London you can find restaurants offering every cuisine in the world, yet very few offering indigenous English food. London may well be a world city, but it is no longer a very English one. Our political masters tell us there is no alternative to all this. We must learn to accept our brave new world of internationalised Britain, with baseball caps, shell suits and sneakers as our new national uniform, chicken tikka masala as our new national dish, and Eminem as our new Vera Lynn. Those of us who prefer wearing a collar and tie, eating suet puddings and who can't stand rap, 'trance' or any other contemporary music, had better accept being labelled 'eccentric'.

It is their intense loathing of all things British which, of course, explains the liberal Left's obsession with submerging the nation into a federal Europe. The shilling, the sixpence and the farthing have long since been discarded in favour of a French coinage; soon it will be the turn of the pound. Imperial measurements have had to go (far too British), the Continental metric system being much more chic and sophisticated. Those recalcitrants who continue to sell food in pounds and ounces must be brought to court; in the great liberal view of things, they are far more culpable than those who push soft drugs.

It seems that only when the UK is broken up into regions and is a part of the United States of Europe will liberals finally be satisfied. In his brilliant, chat

lenging critique, The Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens concludes by calling on all those who care deeply about the future of Britain as a nation state to forget their past differences and combine to 'halt our extinction as a culture and as a nation'.

I believe it is time for those on the Left, like myself, who reject the anti-patriotism of Britain's liberal elite to answer Hitchens's call. This means fighting alongside Conservative Eurosceptics to keep the pound, and resisting all moves towards the European 'superstate'. It means supporting an independent British army to maintain British territory and the democratic rights of all those who wish to remain British, be they in the Falklands or Northern Ireland. And, most of all, it means initiating a patriotic programme of cultural and spiritual renewal so that traditional British values of self-restraint, politeness and decency once again come to the fore. In short, it needs a huge effort on several fronts.

Of course the liberal elite will sneer at these measures as 'unworkable', 'nationalistic' or even 'fascist'. Yet it was precisely because the Britain of 1940 felt good about itself that there was widespread patriotism and pride in Britain and what it stood for, that Britain alone had the confidence to stand up to and eventually defeat the real fascists. Moreover, it was because this healthy feeling of national pride was shared by all mainstream political parties in the 1930s and 1940s that the fascist movement was always marginalised here and never achieved mass support.

Now, though, our ruling elite is very different from that of 60 years ago. The patriotism of 'New Labour' is a watereddown, internationalised version which is so diluted that it means nothing. It is the patriotism of 'Brit Pop' and the Millennium Dome; the patriotism that allows flagship industries like Rolls-Royce to fall into foreign hands. It may be stretching a point to connect the comments of a Guardian reader on 'Henmania' with the disturbances in Bradford, but I believe a connection can be made. For, by consistently denigrating and denying all moderate manifestations of patriotism, liberals have only succeeded in pushing more and more people into the clutches of extremist parties. It is they who, by their rejection of the Union flag, have turned it into a symbol of far-right nationalism. Not without cause can the BNP make the case that the British political elite does not care for its own flag, and as all successful businesses seek to do, it has stepped in to fill a gap in the market. If the liberal elite and their views remain unchallenged, then inevitably the BNP 'market share' will continue to rise. It is the job of all of us who are alarmed at this, and who care about the future of Britain, to start the patriotic fight-back now.