Niall McCrae
After the humiliating boarding up of Winston Churchill’s statue on Parliament Square, the ordinary people of Britain look on in despair at what is happening to their country. A Tory landslide a few months ago seemed to have stopped the cultural Marxists in their tracks. But now we see the reality: the Conservatives are great at winning elections, but impotent in enacting conservatism. The establishment and all of our institutions are infected with cultural Marxism. It’s not only Covid-19 we are fighting, but the virus of woke ideology.
Black Lives Matter, as a campaign, would be fine by me if it was genuinely seeking to improve conditions for poorer black communities in Britain. But it isn’t. The activism we have witnessed in the last two weeks, spurred by a single incident of police brutality 4000 miles away in Minneapolis, has revealed a sinister, subversive force. The BLM website blatantly urges the fall not only of statues of eighteenth-century merchants and military heroes, but of capitalism and the structures of a civilised state. It wants to abolish the police.
How exciting this is for the BBC, left-wing politicians and the commentariat. Universities have devoted themselves to the cause (while continuing to invest in China, where our cheap clothes are made in slave labour camps). Most worrying has been the lack of reaction from the supposedly Conservative government. Where’s Boris? He and his cabinet seem to have gone AWOL. New Tory MPs are keeping their thoughts to themselves. As our cherished national monuments are desecrated by BLM and Antifa thugs, our representatives are too scared to raise their heads over the parapet.
This appeasement to a sudden and unwanted Cultural Revolution contrasts sharply with the robust response by a statesman down under, appropriately named Winston.
Winston Peters is deputy prime minister of New Zealand, a country that has become increasingly woke, as characterised by its leader Jacinda Ardern. Kiwis did not actually vote for Ardern, the Labour leader, as PM. She rose to the top in 2017 after the National Party was unable to sustain a coalition with Peters’ NZ First party. A controversial Maori populist, Peters was the queen maker, but he has been an antidote to Ardern’s identity politics, ensuring that New Zealand has not become a woke dystopia.
After a statue of Captain James Cook was vandalised in Gisborne, and that of Captain John Hamilton was removed from the city named after him, Peters confronted the BLM protests as they gained momentum in New Zealand. He described the demand to remove statues as a ‘wave of idiocy’.
‘Woke New Zealanders feel the need to mimic mindless actions imported from overseas’, Peters stated. ‘A self-confident country would never succumb to obliterating symbols of their history, whether they be good or bad or simply gone out of fashion’.
Peters exclaimed: ‘The idea that statues of Captain Cook, the greatest maritime explorer of his age, be pulled down because of the history that followed him is disgraceful’. A great orator, Peters came to his rumbustious conclusion: –
‘The woke generation are the equivalent of a person with no long-term memory, stumbling around in the present without any signposts to guide them. If a person, like a country, doesn’t know where they have come from, they have no way of knowing where they are going’.
The woke generation tell older people to ‘educate themselves’, but Peters turned on those who want to erase history and begin at Year Zero: ‘Grow up and read a book’. With race-baiting ascendant and thuggery given free rein, we need our own Winston right now. For as Burke warned long ago: ‘all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing’.