The slogan cuius regio, eius religio (whose the reign, his the religion) was adopted in Europe in the mid-16th century to end the religious wars. It was an agreement among the monarchs that he who governs the territory decides its religion. Faith therefore was not a matter of individual choice of beliefs, values, morality and rituals. Rather, the subjects bowed to the superior power of the sovereign as his faithful followers.
Adherents of other religions either fled to more congenial kingdoms or else risked being robbed of all property and perhaps even killed. In time, however, church and state reached amicable separation and learnt to live in peaceful coexistence.
Looking around at the Western world today, it seems as though people, led by their political, intellectual and cultural elites, are intent on reversing the gains of the Industrial Revolution, discarding the fruits of the Enlightenment and erasing long-established empirical knowledge with regard to basic biology.
It seems the state in some countries might be enforcing its own new religion of belief systems and values articulated by a small elite that self-identifies as progressive social justice warriors. In this cause they have recruited private-sector companies to function as the 21st century equivalent of feudal dukes and overlords to enforce the core beliefs and rituals of the state-decreed religion, sometimes with cult-like attributes.
In 2015 the University of California advised faculty and students to avoid causing offence by saying “There is only one race, the human race”, because it denies “the significance of a person of colour’s racial/ethnic experience and history”. More recently we had the example of a shock-inducing diversity workshop at Western University in Ontario, Canada, with a slide giving as an example of microaggression the assertion that “the most qualified person should get the job”.
As I continue to hold fast to both propositions, I guess I am beyond redemption. I console myself with the thought that Martin Luther King, Jr. would today be called out as a racist for his dream of a society where people are judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. The Western presentation also warned that “white silence, white privilege, and white shame leads to a lot of white complicity in white supremacy”, which does rather suggest an obsessive compulsive disorder focused on whiteness.
The zeitgeist encourages the demonisation of everything European and the romanticisation of non-Western cultures and history. You can praise any culture in the world except Western but must blame only Western culture for all the world’s ills. The Albanese Government wants to insert a new chapter in Australia’s constitution to create an Aboriginal body, called the Voice, to make representations to Parliament and the Government. The Liberal and National parties are opposed and opinion polls currently show more voters intending to reject than to endorse the constitutional amendment.
The latest Newspoll (September 3rd) for the Australian has No jumping ahead 53-38. This is a dramatic reversal from the 56-37 support for Yes in February. Support has fallen also for the Labour Party and Prime Minister (PM) Anthony Albanese.
Universities are meant to be the bastions of academic freedom and robust policy debate. Australia’s university sector is essentially publicly funded. Not one university has taken a public position to oppose the Voice. But the senior leadership teams of several universities have put their full weight behind the Voice. Melbourne University, for example, did so on March 7th, months before anyone even knew the wording of the referendum question.
Nor have the universities’ public information sessions to promote dialogue on the contested policy initiative demonstrated a balance of speakers to argue the merits of both sides. As James Allan, a law professor at Queensland University, wrote in the Australian, this is “not just a form of virtue signalling with other people’s money; it comes close to being an improper use of taxpayer money”.
Worse, the fear among academics that speaking publicly against the Voice could damage their careers has a chilling effect and promotes preemptive self-censorship. It’s telling that the author of an article on this subject, writing for the Spectator Australia, chose to remain anonymous. My article in the Weekend Australian on July 29th elicited many supportive messages from university colleagues, along with regrets that they dared not voice their opposition publicly.
Corporations, on the other hand, engage in virtue signalling with shareholders’ money. In Australia this includes Qantas, once publicly owned but now a private company. The airline is giving yes campaigners, but not opponents, free flights to travel the country in their promotional efforts and has painted several planes with the Yes slogan.
Yet, on August 31st, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the consumer watchdog, launched legal proceedings against Qantas for defrauding the public by continuing to sell tickets for cancelled flights for up to two weeks after, and for delaying notification of cancelled scheduled flights to thousands of existing ticket-holders.
The airline has been exceptionally tardy in processing refunds for flights cancelled during the pandemic disruptions. The ACCC wants Qantas to pay a fine of over AUD$250 million. The airline is also hoarding half a billion dollars of unrefunded customer money from flights that were cancelled during the lockdowns. Thus, far from a virtuous corporate entity, Qantas has been severely infected with the culture of arrogance.
In some ways the biggest shock that genuinely has acted as a wake-up call for millions was the debanking of the well-known British politician Nigel Farage in June by Coutts Bank, a subsidiary of the National Westminster Bank. NatWest, as it is commonly called, is 39% owned by the British government after the public bailout of its predecessor Royal Bank of Scotland in 2008, which was renamed NatWest in 2020.
Having compiled an extensive, 40-page Stasi-style surveillance report on Farage, the bank concluded that his views did not align with their values as an “inclusive” organisation (yes, really). Then its CEO – a Dame, no less – lied in a private briefing to a BBC journalist to claim he had lost his account for falling below its minimum threshold but was caught out in the lie and forced to resign – but with a generous payout.
In truth Farage was cast out because of wrongthink: for leading Brexit, supporting Donald Trump and opposing Black Lives Matter (BLM). The defenestration was based on a dossier written seemingly by a pink conquistador that was a tawdry, political hit job.
Laughably, the reputational-risk committee that engaged in this Kafkaesque parody ended up destroying the reputation of the bank, whose clients have included Mafia bosses, dictators, and Russian oligarchs. Karma bites. (By the way, in Hinduism karma does not mean destiny independently of your actions. Rather, it means the opposite: you cannot escape but are destined to reap the consequences of your actions.)
The debanking scandal also highlighted the risk of the trend to a cashless society in the age of growing digitisation. We have been seduced by the conveniences of digitised life, oblivious, like frogs in boiling water, to the threats to privacy and, more critically, the enhanced capacity of corporate and state actors not just to engage in surveillance of our activities and preferences, but also to cut us off from financial life support.
From there to China’s social credit system is but a short step. Canada gave us a foretaste of that with Government-directed financial sanctions on the truckers’ Freedom Convoy and anyone who had donated to their cause, no matter how modest the amount or how indigent their individual circumstances. Few governments or financial institutions seem at all bothered with the multiple inconveniences inflicted on the elderly by the rapid move to a cashless society.
The faddish causes to which corporates are increasingly attracted and which they support financially include the ESG (environmental and social governance) and DIE (diversity, inclusion, and equity) agendas. The Human Resources departments of public and private sector, media and sporting institutions have been captured by proliferating numbers of DIE ‘experts’ who increasingly rule the roost over staff engaged in merely the core mission of the institutions.
This includes signing on to the central tenets of the social justice agenda of critical race theory, an open-ended rainbow spectrum of gender identity, #MeToo and BLM. Financial institutions and companies divesting from fossil fuel industries in pursuit of Net Zero is another example.
How about banks concentrate on banking services and Qantas on flying planes on time, without losing luggage and at reasonable prices?
The bigger picture is the rise of corporate fascism that fuses the power of the state, corporations (including media corporations), social media and technology giants. This was most clearly evident in their concerted coercion on all matters related to Covid but clearly is poised to embrace pretty much all of social life.
Call it the public-private tyranny partnership. Traditionally coercion and tyranny have been the preserve of states, with citizen consent the exclusive preserve of liberal democratic states. The private sector has been the domain of choice and competition where the customer is always right. Now the citizen must hew to state-dictated morality and the customer must bow to the corporate moral compass.
Paraphrasing Mao Zedong, do morals grow from the dollar-encrusted barrels of corporate guns wielded by executives aided and abetted by their DIE staff? They who hold and use political, economic and cultural power get to set and control the moral compass for society, and all must bow down to this, or else?
The puzzle is why public and corporate sector executives believe they have the qualifications, training, skills, and judgement to set the moral compass for society at large. This is especially so when their values are in fact out of alignment with the dominant values of the society in which they operate.
How then do we de-risk society from the looming threat of corporate fascism? The scope for individual action is limited but not nonexistent. After PayPal closed down the account of the Free Speech Union in the U.K., and of all activities associated with its founder Toby Young including the Daily Sceptic, I closed my PayPal account (this requires some perseverance).
Now when confronted with a PayPal portal for paying for a purchase from an Australian store or hotel, I call the provider and ask for bank details to make an electronic transfer, explaining my opposition to use a politicised financial service provider. If no alternative is available, I switch to another provider. For similar reasons, I no longer use GoFundMe and have stopped watching the Australian cricket team since they began taking the knee before every game. The choice for each one of us is to go along with the cancellation mob in order to get an easy ride, or to put up with added inconvenience in order to set things right again.
The more effective avenue for large-scale change, however, is through political choices. The cultural elites may well feel morally superior to the hoi polloi and console themselves with the thought that they are on the right side of history.
Meanwhile, though, they are decidedly on the wrong side of the people. By contrast, politicians like Giorgia Meloni, who became popular enough to become Prime Minister of Italy by appealing to family, faith and country – values that do align with that of most voters – are derided and mocked as mere populists.
The governing Conservative Party in the U.K. has lagged 20 points behind Labour in the polls for months. Its best and perhaps only hope for shaking things up is to challenge the received truths in regard to racial justice, gender identity and environmental agendas and revert to the Meloni formula, abandon Net Zero, end coercion in directing consumers away from stable and inexpensive sources of energy, reaffirm basic biological facts, protect women’s rights to safe spaces and dignity, and end woke policing and cancel culture in all public institutions.
So far PM Rishi Sunak and his cabinet ministers have engaged in brave talk but failed to take urgent and demonstrably effective action. Were the Tories to succeed in reversing their sliding fortunes in the U.K., the reverberations would be felt across the Western democratic world.
Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General. This article was first published by the Brownstone Institute.
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Hundreds of thousands of people arriving here have to live somewhere and presumably that will be in a HOUSE. If we don’t build hundreds of thousands of houses then it is clear to even the dimmest of people that there will NOT be enough HOUSES. But to Liberal Progressives truth is to be locked in a dark room and the key thrown away.
It is an invasion and a replacement. Musulmans, Africans, Ukes, Asians, a few Whitey’s to salt the dish.
As simple as that. The great replacement.
Erase your culture, your history, the anglo-saxons which did not exist apparently, your nationalism.
Open borders with a purpose with you and the ‘natives’ to be erased.
Make the migrants build their own houses…
It’s easier to use financial incentives or change the law and force homeowners/tenants to take-in immigrants if the government deems them to have space.
Didn’t the BBC do a drama about a migrant wave into Europe/UK 20-25 years ago?
Very concerning, especially when one considers who it is we are getting all over Europe. And it’s not like these men are arriving with any papers whatsoever. A re-share as it’s pertinent to this article;
”Unlike the mass migration occurring at the U.S. southern border, where the majority of Latin Americans crossing are Roman Catholic Christians, Europe’s mass migration comprises people with an Eastern and Islamic background who have a worldview at odds with the Judeo-Christian foundation of Europe. Assimilating into the host culture is problematic for most migrants, many of whom are illiterate even in their own language and find learning a European language too difficult. Islamist and fundamentalist Salafist groups prey on frustrated and angry Muslim youths who are incapable or unwilling to integrate. There has been an increase in sexual crimes and homicides and a precipitous rise in antisemitism and attacks on churches. Instead of reporting on jihadist attacks, the mainstream media provide cover for attackers by remaining silent, fearing accusations of “Islamophobia” or attributing the cause to “psychological problems,” but never to Islamism or jihad.
Although the erosion of European culture has been ongoing for decades, the continent is being permanently changed with the unabated flood of Muslim migrants, propelled along by the lack of political will to stop it. Any program that would interrupt the migration momentum would require “mass economic support to sub-Saharan Africa,” which “is not going to happen.” Absent a Marshall Plan for Africa and Afghanistan, “this is really unstoppable.” Over the next fifteen years or so, if Germany sustains its current migration level, it will be almost twenty percent Muslim. This demographic shift will irrevocably strengthen the presence of Sharia law, which runs “parallel” to Europe’s democratic order. “It’s a very sad prognosis for the future of Europe and for the future of Judeo-Christian culture on this continent.”
https://www.meforum.org/64536/soeren-kern-on-europe-alarming-new-migrant-crisis
Indeed, though very large parts of sub-Saharan Africa are Christian and I would not want to live there either.
In some of those parts Islamists are busily trying to kill off Christianity.
Doubtless, though I wouldn’t want to live anywhere in Africa
I take issue with the phrase “Eastern and Islamic background”. The vast majority of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists etc. have no problem integrating and while they don’t share all Judeo-Christian moral values they’re very rarely hostile to the West and want to replace our laws with their own religious laws. It’s only Muslims, or some of them bolstered by zero real condemnation from the rest, that think their values are superior, hate the West and represent a threat.
If you cannot protect your border, you cannot protect your culture and values. Poland Hungary and a few others are showing us how to do this by not accepting EU migrant quotas, despite the usual spitting fury from the mass immigration progressives that are attempting to destroy national identity which they see as the enemy of global governance.
So UK foreign policy and aid does not create safe homelands that people do not want to leave? Perhaps change foreign policy unless this situation is the intended result.
Yes, I was thinking something on similar lines, ie that perhaps it would be a good idea to cancel all the international debt and stop strip mining/exploiting and unsettling/disrupting all these countries …. unless the aim is in fact to trigger so many into coming here.
Reconquer Africa to end the abhorrent conditions in many parts of it would doubtlessly be a worthy goal but not a profitable one. Not to mention that the US left would go bezerk over it as that’s not a problem it’ll ever have to deal with. And there’s also a question of where to find all the people who would have to become soldiers. English OAPs would obviously be of little use here.
Unsayable in the circles Shriver moves in- the “educated” middle class
What’s the educated middle class?
People who are financially comfortably off with university degrees
The same as the uneducated middle class but with O’Levels.
I made the distinction because in my personal experience people on middle class incomes such as small business owners and tradesmen tend to be more socially conservative and happier to speak freely.
I was just making a joke tof. It was too good to miss.
Sorry
Maybe I have a form of “long Covid” that impairs the sense of humour:)
I found the original question somewhat odd….
No need to apologise tof.
This has been clear as the nose on my face for decades but in all the coverage it seems that the cause of the housing shortage is a mystery ..lol
I also think the “official” current population numbers of around 67 million are already way off.I remember reading somewhere that the supermarkets reckon, based on food consumption we are already scraping 80 million or so.
Plus always remember that the published numbers are all based on estimates as lots of illegals do not , by their nature , get included in census numbers ..
I think the water companies have been saying similar – you could argue that food waste means that supermarkets aren’t necessarily accurate about consumption, but the amount of stuff coming out the other end is indisputable.
A link without a paywall;
”Another defeat saw peers back an amendment stating that actions under the Illegal Migration Bill cannot conflict with the UK’s obligations under the UN Refugee Convention, European Convention on Human Rights and other agreements on child protection, trafficking and statelessness.
The new laws are key to the prime minister’s plan to “stop the boats” and aim to allow the government to detain and deport all small boat migrants, without considering their asylum or trafficking claims.
When the bill was introduced to parliament, home secretary Suella Braverman made an unusual statutory declaration that it may not be compatible with the Human Rights Act, but she said elsewhere that it was compatible with international law.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/small-boats-illegal-migration-bill-lords-b2365903.html
“European Convention on Human Rights and other….”
Which will be abolished if, sorry when, the government signs the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty / International Health Regulations.
Germany’s AfD party gaining popularity as citizens are sick and tired of non-stop migration and the dangers these migrants pose. They seemingly can’t even go to swimming pools anymore;
”The AfD has been the only serious party promoting a halt to mass immigration. The “center-right” CDU, which introduced open borders under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, has zero credibility on the issue. The other parties are looking to dramatically increase immigration numbers, with many of them promoting figures as high as 500,000 a year while also racing to naturalize foreigners just in time for them to vote in the next round of national elections.
The report details how the entire Columbiadamm swimming pool in the multicultural neighborhood of Neukölln, Berlin, was closed down due to over 40 warring youth. Welt lays the blame squarely at the feet of “macho culture” from immigrant youth. In Pankow, a swimming pool had to be shut down twice in one week due to mass brawls between young people.
However, the brawls in Berlin were far from isolated incidents. June has seen sexual and physical assaults at swimming pools across the country, including a case where seven different girls were sexually assaulted all at the same pool by different groups of men, including Syrians.
In the German city of Celle, 20 “rampaging youth” attacked swimmers, sexually assaulting them, including beating one female who rejected their advances. When lifeguards attempted to stop them, they threatened them as well. As a result, the entire swimming pool was shut down.
Just seven days ago, Germany’s Bild newspaper, the best-selling newspaper in Germany, featured an article with the headline, “Germany, your bad swimming pools” with the subheadline: “Can’t we just go to the outdoor pool in peace?”
https://rmx.news/crime/migrant-crime-in-june-from-clan-battles-to-pool-brawls-shows-why-germanys-afd-party-is-surging-in-popularity/
If you ever saw any footage of such swimming pools in summer (I did) you’d have noticed that they’re absolutely overcrowded, with maybe half a square meter per person (about 1 1/2 square feet). No wonder that violence ensues from that. The proximate cause for that is that green-left-extreme left coalitions like the one ruling Berlin simply refuse to invest in any local infrastructure save creating ad hoc housing establishments for more immigrants and painting random stuff in rainbow colours (oversimplification, but principally correct).
‘Court of Appeal has today blocked the Government’s Rwanda plan’.
Is the country run by elected politicians or unelected judges?
This is the war being fought in America, Israel and the UK.
Sunak and his globalist pals are happy to be overruled because it keeps the floodgates open.
Blair knew exactly what he was doing when he created the SC.
If the Conservatives meant business (we all know they don’t) they’d cancel it.
Bliar has been working for the Davos Deviants since he first got in to Parliament. He is probably the most treasonous person ever to hold a British passport.
Along with the traitor Heath
Thanks for reminding me. Yes, Heath too.
Why not simply do what France does and deny them the right to a house? If they are instantly better off coming here than staying in the EU they may well not come here. Even better would be to make them significantly worse off by coming here.
As to the depressed birth rate, no surprises there. Mike Yeadon warned of this before the jabs were even released. Now, what happened medically between 2020 and 2021 I wonder?
“U.K. housing crisis is that prices are so high because demand is strong, and demand is strong…..”
Think you’re a bit behind the times the bottom has just dropped out of the housing market as interest rates rise and government policies are discouraging ‘buy to let’. Trying to sell our house is hopeless even though we’ve dropped the price three times in as many weeks.
As for not building enough houses wherever I go there seems to be acres and acres of house building going on without the infrastructure to go with it. Thus water shortages and hosepipe bans absolutely f all to do with “climate change”.
There is another unsayable factor in the housing situation. I used to live on the South Coast, where there are very few immigrants. The local council leader, a Conservative, explained in public meetings that the reason new houses were needed was because the council now has to house 4 generations rather than three. We are living longer and because older people want to hang on to their assets rather than downsize, we have a housing imbalance for young people
Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi would be so pleased with the execution of his plan ….. if he were still around to see it being implemented so ruthlessly.
A partial solution is staring us in the face.
One simple piece of technology which would alleviate the lack of new builds is 3D Printing of houses. A concrete mix is laid according to a computer led 3D plan and all conduits for services are included in the design, saving time, materials and money.
Pioneered by China and taken up successfully in Egypt, Germany and The Netherlands, this would cut the building time to between a half and a quarter of current times and thereby reduce the labour cost andf selling price to a fraction of current prices.
Win, Win, for the country and for young people wanting to get on the housing ladder. Great!.
BUT, this would also reduce the developers’ profit, wouldn’t it. (surprise !, surprise !),
So, it won’t happen, unless the government directs it to be so, or produces incentives (aka EV cars). Too many brown envelopes and foreign holidays on private yachts, I suspect….
Those who agree with mass immigration, and think they are so ‘compassionate’, should
have the migrants live with them, rent free, no taxpayer support.