From Free Life, Issue 27, September 1997
ISSN: 0260 5112

Two issues of Free Life in the past year! This will simply not do. Of course, I have my excuses. I have been busy with other things. I have not been well. I have been depressed about the prospects of English Liberty. And I could say much else. But none of it justifies the nonappearance of a journal that is, when I think about it, the main project of my life. So let me apologise to my Readers and turn at once to the fall of the Tory Party. Yes, I did write about this in my Editorial. Yes, it may be bad journalism to go back to it. Then again, I am not a journalist. More importantly, I may have changed my mind since writing the Editorial.

I still hope that we are living through an age of political realignment, and that the Conservative party in its present form cannot be expected to survive. On the other hand, we are not dealing here with iron filings in a magnetic field, but with human beings. There is a certain logic to collective actions that makes events seem inevitable to future historians, and - though more rarely - makes them predictable before they happen. But this is not the same as the inexorable laws of human development that the Marxists used to pontificate about. As with the Liberal Party, the Conservatives may be saved by luck or by individual character and stagger on for decades after they should have faded away or been transmuted into something else. And, as I write, an uncomfortable little scenario is running in my head.

It is the summer of 1999. The economy is in recession. Of course, all the clever economists blame Kenneth Clarke: he played with interest rates all through 1996, and Gordon Brown has inherited the results. Even so, the handling of the recession has been incompetent. In particular, the minimum wage has had a measurable effect on unemployment among the low-paid. There is a crisis in our relations with Europe. This may have to do with the Single Currency or with some other issue. The cause is unimportant. All that does matter is that the debate over Europe in the Labour Party - cleverly papered over since Neil Kinnock's conversion - has reopened. The Cabinet is divided in two factions, led perhaps by Gordon Brown and Robin Cook; and Tony Blair is trying desperately to keep in with both.

There are other problems - with devolution, with electoral reform, with the welfare state. Then there is the Labour majority. At first, this had seemed a guarantee of Labour rule for a generation. But no one had noticed the number of fools who got in as a result of the unexpected Tory collapse. Nor had anyone noticed the number of local politicians who got in, and who had soon given to Westminster a name for corruption not seen since the 18th century.

Faced with a stricken Government, William Hague has unexpectedly blossomed. No one remembers the video he made with the Spice Girls when he was still trying to present himself as a young man. Other, more questionable things have been forgotten. He is now the man who knocks the stuffing out of Tony Blair every Wednesday in the House of Commons, but who can also charm the media with a clever joke or impersonation. Under his leadership, the Tories are winning every bye-election that comes up - most recently in Coketon, which had returned a Labour Member ever since 1906, but where the Tories now have a ten thousand majority. Everything looks rosy for Mr Hague and his Party. They are going to win the next election. The 1997 result is being written into history as an aberration.

Everything is fine, except that the Conservative Party has changed only superficially in opposition. There is still an utter intellectual and moral void at its centre. The Party will return to power, but the grand rolling back of the British State will be no more happen under William Hague than it did under Margaret Thatcher or John Major.

The thought of this scenario almost keeps me awake at night. It means none of the intellectual revival that I assumed before the election would follow a bad but not catastrophic defeat for the Tories. It means none of the drivelling stagnation that I hoped while writing my Editorial would precede the Party's inevitable capture by libertarians. It means instead having both main parties alternating in power and competing only over who can best manage the stabilised social democracy inherited from Margaret Thatcher.

I ended an earlier article on this subject by quoting Revelation: "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues". This was a call for libertarians to disengage from the Party, and wait until the time became right to go back in and take it over. Perhaps I was wrong here as well. Perhaps our example should not be De Gaul waiting for the right moment, but the Militants of the 1980s whose attempt to take over the Labour party was frustrated only by the absurdity of their doctrines. Since ours are probably true, our use of their methods may have more success.

Now to Hong Kong, a subject on which I cannot write without a keen sense of patriotic shame. We have just handed over six million of our fellow subjects to the bloodiest tyranny that ever existed. There is a treaty, guaranteeing certain rights to the people of Hong Kong. But there is no means of enforcing this treaty. Its execution is entirely in the hands of people who are not so much unwilling to respect the rights of free people as unable to understand what these rights are. I have no doubt that the shipping magnates and bankers of Hong Kong will continue to prosper. But the ordinary people will soon be caught in a web of administrative corruption that will slow and perhaps end the personal self-improvement that made Hong Kong so special during the last decades of British rule. As for the pro-democracy people, they have already been warned of how far they can go before they can expect the usual Communist response to dissidence.

I am not ashamed that my Government refused to allow the people of Hong Kong to come and live in this country. After long and painful reflection, I am not sure that free immigration at the moment would advance the libertarian cause. I am not even sure that a civil society as weak as ours has become could survive the strains imposed by even a partial relaxing of control, to let in two or three million people.

Nor am I ashamed that my Government chose to leave Hong Kong. It is not in British interests for there to be British forces stationed all over the world, facing down potentially hostile powers. Imperialism had its joys and even benefits when it could be done on the cheap, with a few gunboats and white soldiers. During the present century, however, its costs became crippling; and my regret is that the Empire was not disposed of after the South African War had warned us of these costs.

No, I am ashamed because, while we could not defend them forever, or let them come and live here, we did not have to hand the people of Hong Kong straight over to the Red Chinese. We could as late as the early 1980s have given them at least the option of independence. If they had taken that option, the Chinese might have been compelled to choose between accepting an accomplished fact from which they benefitted in any number of ways and destroying that source of benefit. Despite their many other faults, these people are no fools, and could reasonably have been trusted to trim their ambitions to their interests. Instead, the Government gave way to the China lobby and put profits before honour.

Indeed, I suspect actual corruption in high places. Looking at the returns to be expected from getting privileged access to the Chinese market, one of the larger British banks or trading companies could easily have spared a few dozen million pounds on bribery. In a country where Ministers can be bought for a few thousand in cash, and a couple of nights in a Paris hotel, that sort of money would clear every obstacle to transactions far more sordid than the sale of Hong Kong, and would raise up the same clamour of the great and good in defence of the rightness or unavoidability of the transaction.

Of course, I have no proof of this. On the other hand, it would surprise me if any were ever found. Among the Establishment, corruption has been raised to a fine art. Labour politicians and the humbler Tories must make do with the cruder bribes of cash in envelopes or retainers from shady PR companies. Not so those who can rely on extended and solid networks of trust. Here, the nature of a bribe can be so hidden that even those making and receiving them can persuade themselves that none has taken place.

I am Lord Flop, a very senior politician. I do a huge favour for Barcland Bank. Eyebrows are raised in the media, but no financial reward ever comes to me from Barcland, and my action drops out of the news. Many years later, when I am retiring from politics, I am taken on as a consultant by Midley's Bank, on a retainer of half a million a year. In return for this, I perform a few basic duties. The shareholders grumble. The publicity department sends out reams of gushing news releases, crying up my experience and personal contacts with world leaders, and how useful these will be to the Bank. At last, I die and am buried amid a great waft of hot air about my incorruptible virtues. Nobody knows that Barcland owed me a favour, and was in turn owed a favour by Natloid, which in turn was owed a favour by Midley's.

There are other means of corrupt payment in British politics. I can, for example, be paid a large sum which I hide in an offshore account during my lifetime. This saves me the trouble of saving for my children. I spend every penny I earn from my offices. When I die, no one thinks to ask where I got the money that emerges from my estate. Then there are the small but more common favours of mutual nepotism: I get young Defancy a safe seat in the Commons. His father gives my son the management of Defancy & Co.'s Singapore office.

In an Establishment like ours, buying and selling Hong Kong would have been no burden whatever. I have no evidence that this is what happened. I certainly dare not name those who most likely to have gained from the deal. I can only say that whole business looks corrupt, and therefore probably was corrupt - and that the corruption has placed an indelible stain on the name of England.

I did promise Al Baron that I would publicise his trial and acquittal in this issue. My only problem is that I am still unclear about what exactly happened. The facts, as I understand them, are roughly as follows:

Some time early in 1996, Mr Baron's welfare benefits were cut off. He was accused - though I think without formal proof - of having made dishonest statements about his real financial status.

Later in the year, Mr Baron made a written complaint to the Police about the benefit fraud investigator, a Rita Broadway. He accused her of various immoral and possibly illegal acts, and ended his letter with what he describes as "some rather volatile language". This was construed by the Police as a death threat, and Mr Baron was arrested and charged with two counts of witness intimidation.

While on remand in Brixton Prison, Mr Baron went on hunger strike and sent off a volley of increasingly odd letters to just about everyone he knew. In his letters to me, he said he was proposing to defend himself in court, and needed my help to prepare his case. He said he wanted to get Gerry Gable into the witness box. Mr Gable is the editor of a scurrilous magazine called Searchlight, and does a good trade in smearing people as "fascists" and "nazis". Mr Baron has been suing him for libel since 1993, and claimed reason to believe that he had first alerted the benefit fraud investigtors. I sent back some very frosty replies, telling Mr Baron to pull himself together and trust to the lawyers who were already doing their best to get him off the charges. I also sent two packages of books, one of which was returned to me by the prison authorities, and the second of which simply vanished.

Mr Baron's case came into court in April 1997. He went ahead with his threat to defend himself, and spent several days in cross-examination. I did not attend, but imagined Mr Baron in court, dressed in his torn suit with the flaired trousers, asking irrelevant questions of Mr Gable, making Mrs Broadway cry in the witness box, and arguing law with an increasingly angry Judge. I warned him he was effectively locking himself into a prison cell for at least the rest of the century.

Astonishingly, the trial went rather well. The Judge was more indulgent than I expected. Mr Gable admitted to having agents in the British National Party who incite the sort of acts that he campaigns for tougher laws against - though I fail to see what this has to do with the alleged offences. Better still, the Jury may not have loved Mr Baron, but seem to have felt little sympathy for Mrs Broadway, and were certainly unimpressed by the Police. They acquitted him on both counts.

Mr Baron was acquitted on election day and went straight home to his flat in Sydenham, where all his possessions had been left untouched. He is presently writing a book about his experience and continuing his suit against Mr Gable. He may even be about to have his benefits restored.

The real test of freedom in a country is how far people like Mr Baron get before being locked away or murdered. By this test, England is still surprisingly free. He will never make a penny from his journalism. There has been one murder attempt. But he remains at liberty, ready to continue wasting his talents on promoting holocaust revisionsism, social credit economics, and some quite alarming views about homosexuality.

Though he might hotly deny it when he reads these words, Mr Baron has not done badly on the whole from having been born an Englishman.