From Free Life No 38, July 2001

On Celebrating St George’s Day in London, by David J.K. Carr

With the benefit of some time having passed since April 23rd, I have had the luxury of being able to gather my thoughts with regard to the event and present here something approaching a plausible rationale behind my decision to launch a party to celebrate St. George.

First and foremost, I wanted the party to be just that: a party. An eat-drink-and-be-merry occasion with all manner of radiant people, chinking glasses and bonhomie. I am delighted to say that it turned out to be just that which, as far as I am concerned, makes it a success. My fear was that it would turn out to be a dour occasion for clenched fists and mutinous mutterings. My worst fear was that it would attract national socialist oddballs and their ilk. With palpable relief, I can say that it did neither of those things.

However, if I was to suggest that there was no political sub-text to the event then I would be lying because there was and is.

The instinctive sub-text was to celebrate the event as an overt smack-in-the-eye to what Sean Gabb has termed "The Enemy Class" and what others have variously referred to as the left/liberal elite or the Guardianistas. We all know who we're talking about: the bourgeois bohemians who have assiduously pursued their 'long march' from radical students in the 1960's to the commanding heights of every British institution today

Fortunately, they have ditched their trenchant opposition to market economics (after a fashion) but what still burns brightly in their hearts is an equally visceral and sneering contempt for England and the English. Having spend time among these people I have witnessed this first hand. As far as they are concerned the country that produced the Industrial Revolution, Classical Liberal philosophy, the concept of property rights, America, the Empire and Margaret Thatcher can only be evil at a cellular level and probably beyond redemption.

So redemption is not on the agenda; disposal is and it is currently underway with single-minded purpose and missionary zeal: English institutions are vigorously politically-corrected; the unique form of English Civil Society worn down to a nub and its heritage and culture ruthlessly cleansed from the landscape (e.g. the war on fox-hunting which, as we all know, is nothing whatsoever to do with the welfare of animals).

The end-game here is becoming increasingly clear in the proposed regionalisation of England into artificial bite-sized chunks ready for submergence into an EU Superstate. Once this is finalised, the Guardianistas will gracefully retire to their dachas and write their memoirs which will include a recipe for dealing with hard ingredients; soften them in the oven, chop them up, put them in the blender and dissolve them into warm, comforting Euro-soup.

A resurrection of St. George's Day will not stop this process or even slow it down but it may serve as posting of clear notice that there is opposition to their project and that that opposition is, itself, starting to galvanise. If that serves to bother them , worry them or demoralise them by even a jot then, in my humble submission, it is worthwhile.

Equally worthwhile (and necessary in light of other developments that I speak of below) is to reclaim St. George for the decent folk, the ordinary folk, the silent majority; the ranks and legions of the good neighbours and civil minded of this land and, at the same time, to rescue him from the obnoxious nazis and "pussy-hunter" football hooligans who, sadly, have come to be seen as his natural constituency.

But this is not solely about yaa-booh defiance; there is a far more serious and macro-political issue which needs to be addressed. That issue is the impending dissolution of the British Nation State.

I want to make is clear that I do not consider this to be inevitable because nothing is inevitable; the human agency just does not permit inevitability. I prefer to trade in terms of probabilities and likelihoods and the probability is, in my view, that we are living through the slow fragmentation of the nation we have known as Britain.

The reasons for this may be complex and nebulous; books are being written and will be written on the subject which will attempt to explain the causes in far greater detail than I am prepared or, indeed, able to go into here. Safe to say, that I regard the primary cause to be the upsurge in Celtic Nationalism and tribalism that we have witnessed since the1960s.

Such has been the momentum and vigour of this movement that it has led to the establishment of devolved assemblies for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I imagine that the hope in Whitehall is that this limited devolution would quell the nationalist cause but instead, it only seems to have inflamed it further, drunk, as it is, with its success thus far.

As we stand now it is very hard to imagine the Celtic countries accepting direct rule from Westminster again.

The United Kingdom is now held together as a semblance of its former self only by a constant act of mass bribery with English taxpayers being forced to underwrite the vote-grubbing ambitions of Welsh and Scottish politicians.

Nor has this act of institutionalised largesse assuaged anti-English sentiment by so much as a smidgen. In fact, if anything, it is growing worse.

Right now, nobody in England seems to mind this, apart from the activist few who are campaigning for an English Parliament (and, by implication, English Independence). But it probably cannot last and, just as business failure and/or redundancy has driven many a successful marriage onto the rocks, so recession or economic downturn can bring the issue of these subsidies from their present status of bobbing around on the fringes of national debate to that of a bright, burning, incandescent star on the political radar screen.

When this happens, can we expect the polities in Edinburgh and Cardiff suddenly to be overcome with an attack of reasonableness? Not in my view. Nobody voluntarily relinquishes their subsidies and growing pressure from the English electorate to put an end to them will only further fuel the Celtic sense of resentment and victimhood which is already their raison-d'etre.

It is my view that the United Kingdom in its present incarnation will not survive this and it will lead to some form of English independence.

This is not necessarily a process which I endorse or wish to hasten for, along with many others, I take the view that the Britain has been a remarkably successful nation state. In its 300 year-or-so history it has provided its people with relatively high levels of stability, prosperity and justice while, simultaneously, building the largest empire the world has ever seen. Whilst the morality of the latter endeavour is questionable, it is, nonetheless, an astonishing achievement.

But it is, and always has been, a construct built on the shifting sands of a bitter and unresolved civil war.

I am speaking, of course, the civil war that took place some fifteen hundred years ago when Angle and Saxon mercenaries pushed the native Britons into the fringes of these islands and locked them in there.

But this military victory of the Anglo-Saxons was not final and while they got on with the task of nation-building and empire-building, the Celtic sense of loss and injustice fomented and bubbled through more than a millennium of change, development and upheaval and ignited again (albeit bloodlessly) in our generation.

There is great significance in this: not just for our nation but for mankind as a whole for it provides a timely reminder of an immutable truth of human affairs - that the past is never dead.

Instead it lies dormant like a volcano only to erupt when least expected and even less welcomed. And when it does erupt it not only destroys everything in its shadow, it also changes the landscape around it forever.

We stand in the foothills of this smoking volcano and, as the lava flows of nationalism pour forth, the bricks-and-mortar of current arrangements and the rocks of established orthodoxies will explode or melt in the heat. When they do, a lot of things will suddenly be up for grabs.

This is where Classical Liberals come in, for, if all is up for grabs then it is we and our fellow travellers who must ensure that we are in a position to grab them. Many of us may regard the passing of the British Nation State with dismay but we must not make the mistake of being unprepared to address what follows for there are many dangers as well as opportunities. The dangers lie not only in the Guardianistas but also with the wrong type of English nationalism. On the one side we face the threat of living in a third-rate socialist basket-case and on the other we risk staring into what poet Tony Harrison termed "The Gaze of the Gorgon".

This is where St. George has a tiny role to play. His reclamation as a totem of English independence will not, per se, advance the good causes to which I subscribe to any degree but it will provide a symbol of the truly liberal, independent, confident and prosperous England that once was and could be again if the right things are done to bring it about.

Of course there are many people on our side of the struggle who will regard such a project with the utmost skepticism. And not without justification for the last one hundred years or so have witnessed the wholesale brutalisation of the principles of Anglo-Saxon liberty; a deliberate and systematic attempt to drive them into extinction that has been largely successful.

Nonetheless the ghost of Classical English liberty still haunts this land: it laid its boney fingers on the shoulder of Tony Martin; it sent a shiver down the spines of the establishment when the fuel protestors took to the streets; its echo can be heard in the "Liberty and Livelihood" slogan of the Countryside Alliance.

What was once can be again. The Celts have proved that. For nothing is written in stone, there is no such thing as "inevitable" and the past is never dead

David J.K. Carr sits on the Executive Committee of the Libertarian Alliance, and is a solicitor in private practice.