A crack in the edifice?

One very encouraging aspect of the Austrian Rights success in last weekend's elections was that for the first time in an European Union country, 16 and 17-year-olds were able to vote. We are often told that the next generation will be far more conservative than ours, could it be that the future might be brighter than it some times seems.

It is early days, even in coalition, it is unlikely that Heinz-Christian Strache's Freedom Party or the Alliance for the Future of Austria headed by Jorg Haider will have a role in government, however this result will have shaken the establishment parties, and was certainly a morale boost for European Nationalism.

From a PR perspective Austria is not the ideal country for such a result, her past makes it easier for the left wing to dismiss her people as unreconstructed Nazis in a way that a similar result in Sweden or the Netherlands could not be. Austria has after all been the victim of of a campaign of poisonous propaganda for decades, as we saw recently when the international media attempted to present a deranged pervert, who had imprisoned his daughter and her subsequent offspring in a basement as being somehow representative of a nation.

However, in other ways, Austria is the perfect setting for the opening salvos of the fight to restore Europe, as it is a nation which represents so much of what is great about Europe. Over the centuries Austria has been the souse of great art, music, literature, architecture and of culture in general. Beyond art, Austria was the birthplace of many great scientists, and philosophers, it has a great and noble history.

Let us not forget that some four centuries ago the armies pf Islam were defeated at the gates of Vienna, let us hope that history is about to repeat itself.

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Click here to read the Green Arrow's take on the Austrian election

Burning the house down

"It may change your vote" is perhaps optimistic, given how few US voters will see it, but, as over here the iconic Bradford and Bingly Bank faces nationalisation, having burnt their fingers with sub prime mortgages, it is certainly an interesting take on current events in the financial world.

"I agree with John"

Mbeki's legacy

Mbeki's Legacy
by Marian L. Tupy
This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on September 22, 2008

President Thabo Mbeki, who has led South Africa since 1999, agreed Saturday to go quietly after the ruling ANC asked him to resign. Mr. Mbeki leaves behind a largely incompetent government fraught with nepotism and corruption, and a despondent country with weakened institutions, declining education and health standards, out-of-control violence and an HIV/AIDS pandemic. Troublingly, Jacob Zuma, the man who is likely to replace Mr. Mbeki, inspires even less confidence for the future of South Africa.

To understand the disappointment of the last decade in South Africa, it is important to contrast Mr. Mbeki with his predecessor. When Nelson Mandela emerged from his 27-year incarceration, he preached forgiveness and compassion and set about to forge a nation in which the whites -- his former jailers -- had an important role to play. Mr. Mbeki, on the other hand, remained a Marxist ideologue who never overcame the pain and prejudices of his life in exile.

In Mr. Mbeki's view the West oppressed the rest of mankind. Obsessed with race and colonialism, Mr. Mbeki undermined the response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa. To him, orthodox science "portrayed black people...[as] victims of a slave mentality." Rejection of the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy was necessary to confront "centuries-old white racist beliefs and concepts about Africans." Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of South Africans died needlessly while Mr. Mbeki defended rejectionist scientists who claimed AIDS wasn't caused by HIV.

Similarly, it was Mr. Mbeki's warped ideology that led him to support Zimbabwe's dictator. Robert Mugabe couched his devastating economic policies in revolutionary terms -- as a just fight against alleged British plots and other delusions. For eight years the South African begged for more time for his "quiet diplomacy" while Zimbabwe burned. If the recent power-sharing deal between Mr. Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai works, it will do so not because of Mr. Mbeki's diplomacy but because of his departure. Mr. Mugabe may yet find it more advantageous to compromise with Mr. Tsvangirai than to deal with Mr. Zuma who criticized Mr. Mugabe in the past.

Mr. Mbeki' accommodating policy toward Mr. Mugabe exemplified a growing gap between the high-minded principles the South African claimed to follow in foreign affairs and the sordid reality of his policies. He cozied up to Cuba, Iran, and Libya. At the U.N., his diplomats worked with China to prevent a debate on human rights abuses in Burma. South Africa's intelligence minister visited Iran last year, where he praised Hezbollah and Hamas. In sum, Mr. Mbeki never encountered an anti-Western tyrant he did not like.

At home, he exhibited the authoritarian tendencies he had learned during his stint in the Soviet Union. He transformed the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation into a personal propaganda machine that banned some of his critics from appearing on it. He banished some of his competitors in the ANC by accusing them of trying to assassinate him. External dissenters, like the opposition Democratic Alliance, were weakened by persistent accusations of racism. That stifled public debate over the direction of South Africa's economic and social policies, including a murder rate that is nine times higher than that of the United States, and a healthcare system which according to the World Health Organization is worsening.

For all of Mr. Mbeki's faults -- and there were many -- South Africans may yet look back at his tenure with nostalgia.Mr. Mbeki was rightly praised for following good macro-economic policies that saw the budget deficit and public debt fall, and growth increase. But being reasonably tight with the public purse did not make Mr. Mbeki "business-friendly" -- as he was sometimes mischaracterized. Businesses in South Africa are heavily taxed (at 35%) and regulated. They also have to follow onerous race guidelines in employment and promotion. Micro-economic over-regulation has kept growth low (expected to come in at 2% this year) and contributed to a 26% unemployment rate. The number of people living in absolute poverty has doubled since the ANC came to power in 1994.

Mr. Mbeki's breathless drive to monopolize power has led him to attack the independence of the judiciary. According to a High Court judge, he tried to influence the judicial proceedings against his nemesis, former Deputy President Jacob Zuma. It was that apparent abuse of state power that finally gave the ANC leadership an excuse to ask Mr. Mbeki to resign.

Following Mr. Mbeki's departure, Mr. Zuma will most likely take over after the election in 2009, while a caretaker president will run the state affairs in the meantime. But Mr. Zuma is a deeply flawed man as well. The accusations of corruption against him persist. Moreover, his judgment has been called to question. When, during his rape trial, he was asked about the wisdom of having unprotected sex with an HIV positive woman, Mr. Zuma replied that there was no problem, because he "showered" afterwards.

There are also questions about his commitment to South Africa's fragile democracy. Mr. Zuma once famously predicted that the ANC would remain in power until "Jesus comes back." For all of Mr. Mbeki's faults -- and there were many -- South Africans may yet look back at his tenure with nostalgia.

Marian L. Tupy is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

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Footnote:

AMERICA’S former president, Jimmy Carter, said the closest he has ever been to a fist fight was when former president Thabo Mbeki told him that anti-retrovirals for mothers infected with HIV/Aids was a plot of white people against black people
Read more here

Sub Prime explained

This clip has been around for a while, but it is suddenly much more topical

Spot the difference

Difficult one huh? Let me help you, the horse's ass is the one with the microphone.

Closer to the edge

The political establishment continues to assure us that we need more immigrants because they are, they insist, “good for Britain” and “help to boost out prosperity”. Yet after ten years of what virtually amounts to an open door, allcommers welcome, immigration policy, following on from thirty years of “light touch” regulations on immigration, we are hurtling into recession, with inflation galloping ahead and unemployment rising.

For decades we have been told that our health service would collapse without third world immigration, and now, by coincidence or not, we have standards of hygiene in out health service which is not much different to a third world country.

Beyond the issue of hygiene, which may, as I say, be a coincidence, far from assisting the health service, mass immigration is putting more strain on it.

As someone who has recently been required to accompany a relative who has had need of the health service, I have yet to visit an NHS waiting room where we, as white indigenous Britons, were not in the minority. From the array of national costumes one is inevitably confronted with when visiting any NHS hospital within a fifty mile radius of an airport, it is clear that a significant number of those benefiting from NHS treatment have not been in the country long enough to have contributed towards it.

Does anyone believe that as many health tourists would get in if we had proper immigration controls?

The added strain does not just come from health tourism, those immigrants who have settled here place added strain on our infrastructure and services, like everyone else, immigrants get older, those who arrived on the Empire Windrush are in their 80's now, and unlike the Poles, they did not go home, neither did those who followed, and those who came after them. We now have many thousands of immigrant pensioners ending their days in Britain, many of whom are dependant upon the Health Service. I would not begrudge any one treatment they need and have paid taxes for, but it is an open question as to whether, as a group, the immigrant community have made a contribution equal to the strain they place on services.

For example. immigrants still (allegedly) make up around 10% of the population, yet almost a quarter of all births in Britain are by immigrant mothers, and I doubt that many of them went private. It would seem that if we do need immigrants working in the NHS it is to cope with the additional demand on it caused by uncontrolled immigration.

In other areas, I have written frequently about the impact which the open door policy has had on crime, particularly, street crime, rape and knife and gun related assaults. However, on the other side of the coin, we have seem efforts to increase ethnic recruitment into the police service result in millions of pounds of tax payer's money being paid out to people who have made claims of racial discrimination, because tribunals are so dogged by political correctness they demure from calling many of the claimants the charlatans they are.

The downside of immigration is evident in so many areas, another unspoken problem is the disproportionate number of state dependant single mothers who are either immigrants themselves or who have been abandoned by fathers who are.

The terrorist threat we all face, and on account of which so many of our civil liberties have been stripped from us comes either from immigrants or the British born children of first and second generation immigrants, most of whom have been radicalised and funded by people not born in this country.

Tell me again how immigration benefits Britain?!!

If it is not immigration itself, the ideology which tell us it is a good thing can be every bit as damaging. Just this last week we have seen a financial crisis unparalleled since the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which, in part, ushered in the Great depression of the 1930's, and as a result of which hundreds of billions have had to be pumped into the global economy, and huge multi billion dollar corporations have had to be effectively nationalised, whilst major banking institutions have either collapsed or have been taken over.

Surely you say, that was caused by white spivs and speculators, she can't try and blame the world financial crisis on immigration ....can she?

Well, not exactly, perhaps not immigration to Britain, or at least not yet.

However, let us look at the root cause of the latest crisis, the sub prime mortgage fiasco in America, whereby loans were given to people who self evidently could not repay them. There were certainly faults after the event, whereby those loans were repackaged and sold on as something other than what they were, however, the original fault and the cause of the ensuing problems was the initial coal face lending, which was unquestionably business incompetence bordering upon madness.

Why did this happen, and why did banks think it was a good thing to do? The answer may lie in who was doing the lending, and who they were lending the money to.

The two huge mortgage lenders who the American government have been forced to rescue were Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae otherwise known as Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation and the Federal National Mortgage Administration. But who or what were Freddie and Fannie? The very word federal should give you a clue that there were not mortgage lenders as you and I know them, and indeed they were nothing like Bristol and West.

Those of you who think all corporations are the same may find this clip enlightening, it shows Dan Mudd the Chief Executive of Fannie Mae addressing the US Congressional Black Caucus, an organisation to which Fannie Mae has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last decade or so.

Mr Mudd doesn't sound like a conventional banker does he? That is because he is not, he is a man on a mission, Fannie Mae, like Freddie Mac saw themselves not so much as businessmen but as social engineers and in recent years their activities have been less to do with business as they have with ideology. Here, and here and here are further examples of the unconventional activities of Fannie and Freddie, which make what happened a little easier to understand.

These were great American institutions, they play a part in the majority of all US mortgage lending, but they didn't behave like mortgage lenders. What happened in America was the equivalent of what would happen if Ken Livingston and Lee Jasper had been put in charge of Bradford & Bingley, just on a far more massive scale.

Money was lent to people because they were black or because they were immigrants, whether or not they could repay the money was irrelevant if things went wrong the white guys would bail them out, which is, of course, what we did.

Of course there was more to the recent financial crisis, as ever with the stock market one can never underestimate financial institutions ability to self destruct, speculators misbehaved, causing the regulator to temporarily ban the practice known as short selling, which enables cynical people to bet on a company's failure. Furthermore, the ratings agencies did nothing to help the situation, when, for instance they downgraded AIG the single act which almost pushed one of the world's largest corporations into bankruptcy.

However, all that was after the event, at the very root of the crisis was sub prime lending, which could also be called politically correct, or equal opportunity lending.

The media will have you believe that the primary motive was behind excessive sub prime lending was greed and sharp practice, which are certainly part of the story but they are far from being the whole story. The driving force which led us into this crisis was that same ideology which worships multiculturalism and tells us that mass immigration leads to prosperity.

It defies logic, ignores facts and ridicules truths and has embedded itself like a malicious trojan in almost every aspect of our culture, and, not for the first time it has brought us close to the brink of disaster.

Pond Life by Joey Smith

In his new single the excellent Joey Smith responds to the dire Lily Allen so much more eloquently than I could. If you are in Britain I urge you to go out and buy it make it a hit and piss off the PC brigade.

Clarification

For those outside Britain who have no idea who Lily Allen is, she is one of those so called celebrities, like the substance dependant Pete Doherty who have joined the anti BNP campaign and has been including anti Nationalist lyrics into her songs.

The age of disinformation

On a recent Sunday evening the great beneficiary of the licence fee, the BBC, presented us with "Fiona's story" a disturbing portrayal of the disintegration of a family following the arrest of the father, who had allegedly downloaded indecent images of children from the internet. The father in question having been played by the talented Jeremy Northam, whom many of us will have watched dying a noble and principled death, on the previous Friday night playing Thomas Moore in BBC2's sumptuous historical drama "The Tudors".

In Fiona's Story Northam's role was far less principled and devoid of any vestige of nobility and, given the heavy handed feminist nature of the plot, his guilt was presumed and inevitable. However, even more inevitable was his whiteness.

Indeed as if to highlight the point, the story opened with his wife, the Fiona of the title,(played by a ghostly pale Gina McKee) singing hymns in a Church choir, thus establishing the Christian and Anglo Saxon roots of the family, so essential for any dramatised exploration of the contentious subject of paedophilia.

As they no doubt considered fitting to the subject, the BBC had obviously set aside their usual quota casting rules, and the cast was overwhelmingly white, the single non-white actor playing a social worker (surprise that one huh?) and as such placing her firmly on the side of right. Apart from that single role, and unlike almost any other BBC TV Drama set anywhere after 1960, no other ethnic minority actors could be soiled by association with such an undesirable subject matter.

It was, of course predictable that the BBC, so proud to be controversial and provocative when it comes portraying an effeminate and overweight Jesus in a nappy in Jerry Springer the Opera would chose to locate a drama on the subject of paedophilia in an overwhelmingly white setting. Upsetting white Christians wins a broadcaster brownie points with their friends at Common Purpose, upsetting non-whites, especially, at the moment, Muslims, is a very different issue.

To ask whether the BBC would have the courage to address the growing problem of Asian men grooming under age white girls, or the excessive brutality which passes for discipline in African and West Indian families, misses the point. Courage is not the issue, the BBC would not consider associating child abuse with the non-white community, because it would not suit their agenda to do so.

On the rare occasions that crime or vice is portrayed within the non-white community it is minor and forgivable or they are forced into it be an oppressive (white) society. The depiction of the unforgivable is reserved, Apartheid like, for whites only.

The exception, so far is in relation to Islamic terrorism, although TV dramas featuring a terrorist theme invariably seek to explain, and usually justify, acts of terrorism in terms of Western foreign policy and go to great lengths to expose Westerners as being no less reprehensible than those actually committing the acts, they have not yet found a means of denying that the vast majority of Islamic terrorists are Islamic. To deal with this dilemma, the thought controllers usually resort to the "tiny minority" lie, in which they seek to pretend that Islamic terrorists are an aberration, who's acts are in direct conflict to the teachings of the Quran and the wider Muslim community.

The night following Fiona's Story, Channel 4's Dispatches documentary "Undercover Mosque - the Return", used the "tiny Minority" lie, but added bells and whistles. After disclosing that extreme Saudi Arabian Wahhabism was being preached to women upstairs in supposedly moderate British mosques, the reporter assured us that such teachings would be shocking to the followers of what she described as mainstream "tolerant and inclusive Islam".

Some might call such a description as disingenuous, others might prefer a more blunt expression. Few would go so far as to claim that most Muslims are fanatical Jihadis who actively applaud terrorist atrocities, however, there are many ways to describe the Muslim faith, but "tolerant" is not one of them, and it is certainly not "inclusive". Yet such arrant nonsense is repeated as fact in supposedly serious documentaries.


When one might be forgiven for believing the disinformation could get no worse, the Metropolitan Police released an advert highlighting the dangers of carrying knives following the spate of teen aged stabbings recently seen on London streets. Of course, who do we see slipping a knife down the back of his pants, but a white boy?, who walks out of his flat whilst a girl screams at him "What have you done?" followed by a crowd, carrying a coffin, who look accusingly at him.

By implication, the white actor is the face of knife crime, however, the role might as well have been played by a middle aged Albanian woman for all the relevance it would have to the reality of knife crime, and, in particular knife related killings, in which white boys feature in around 10% of the crimes, primarily as victims. Knife crime in London is an overwhelmingly non white problem, and yet the Metropolitan police have spent thousands of pounds of tax payer's money creating a totally misleading and blatantly dishonest version of the truth. Do they really care more about preserving their fantasy than they do about saving young lives?

Surely even the most ardent supporters of a multi-racial society must see that we are being fed propaganda, lies and disinformation a scale which is positively Orwellian, or can it be that the brainwashing has worked, and they actually believe it is the truth?

Of lipstick and cartoons

A lot of (Republican) people in America are up in arms over an alleged insult by Democratic Presidential candidate Barrack Obama against Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Whilst addressing supporters at a rally in Virginia, Obama compared the Republicans' attempts to portray their policies as "change" as being equivalent to "putting lipstick on a pig". Following so soon after Governor Palin compared herself to a pitbull in lipstick, many have interpreted Obama's comment as a slur against Palin. Certainly the reaction of his audience, as can be seen in this YouTube clip suggests that they saw a connection.

Obama denies the slur was intentional, so, despite his quite obvious pause before delivering the line, and prior evidence of a habit of sexism on his part I will accept his word, with the caveat that if it wasn't a deliberate insult, it was a very dumb thing to say, given that an idiot would realise people were bound to make such a connection, after the publicity following Palin's speech .

However, of more interest are the words he spoke directly before the "pig" reference. To quote him, he said "John McCain says he's about change too. Exce- and and so I guess his whole angle is - watch out, George Bush - except for economic policy, healthcare policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy, and Karl-Rove-style politics, we're really gonna shake things up in Washington."

In this connection readers might find the Tom Toles cartoon (below), which appeared in the Washington Post four days earlier, of some interest.
It seems BO may have learnt some tricks from his Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden, who some may recall was caught plagiarizing a British politician (Neil Kinnock) in his 1988 campaign, the only difference is that this time Obama is plagiarizing a cartoon!

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Hat Tip Newsbusters

An innocent in a land of liars

He spoke the truth, but now they will destroy him.

How the British are destroying their country

The last testament of Flashman's creator: How Britain has destroyed itself
by GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER

(As posted today on Why South Africa Sucks)

When 30 years ago I resurrected Flashman, the bully in Thomas Hughes's Victorian novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, political correctness hadn't been heard of, and no exception was taken to my adopted hero's character, behaviour, attitude to women and subject races (indeed, any races, including his own) and general awfulness. On the contrary, it soon became evident that these were his main attractions. He was politically incorrect with a vengeance.
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Gloriously politically incorrect: Flashman, the rogue 'hero' of Fraser's novels
Through the Seventies and Eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue - the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults, and even gloried in them.

And no one minded, or if they did, they didn't tell me. In all the many thousands of readers' letters I received, not one objected.

In the Nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way.

This is fine by me. Flashman is my bread and butter, and if he wasn't an elitist, racist, sexist swine, I'd be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer.

But what I notice with amusement is that many commentators now draw attention to Flashy's (and my) political incorrectness in order to make a point of distancing themselves from it.

It's not that they dislike the books. But where once the non-PC thing could pass unremarked, they now feel they must warn readers that some may find Flashman offensive, and that his views are certainly not those of the interviewer or reviewer, God forbid.

I find the disclaimers alarming. They are almost a knee-jerk reaction and often rather a nervous one, as if the writer were saying: "Look, I'm not a racist or sexist. I hold the right views and I'm in line with modern enlightened thought, honestly."

They won't risk saying anything to which the PC lobby could take exception. And it is this that alarms me - the fear evident in so many sincere and honest folk of being thought out of step.

I first came across this in the United States, where the cancer has gone much deeper. As a screenwriter [at which Fraser was almost as successful as he was with the 12 Flashman novels; his best-known work was scripting the Three Musketeers films] I once put forward a script for a film called The Lone Ranger, in which I used a piece of Western history which had never been shown on screen and was as spectacular as it was shocking - and true.

The whisky traders of the American plains used to build little stockades, from which they passed out their ghastly rot-gut liquor through a small hatch to the Indians, who paid by shoving furs back though the hatch.

George MacDonald Fraser: Wrote a devastating denunciation of the forces he believed had destroyed Britain

The result was that frenzied, drunken Indians who had run out of furs were besieging the stockade, while the traders sat snug inside and did not emerge until the Indians had either gone away or passed out.

Political correctness stormed onto the scene, red in tooth and claw. The word came down from on high that the scene would offend "Native Americans".

Their ancestors may have got pieeyed on moonshine but they didn't want to know it, and it must not be shown on screen. Damn history. Let's pretend it didn't happen because we don't like the look of it.

I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.

My forebears from the Highlands of Scotland were a fairly primitive, treacherous, blood-thirsty bunch and, as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, would have been none the worse for washing. Fine, let them be so depicted, if any film maker feels like it; better that than insulting, inaccurate drivel like Braveheart.

The philosophy of political correctness is now firmly entrenched over here, too, and at its core is a refusal to look the truth squarely in the face, unpalatable as it may be.

Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis.

It comes in many guises, some of them so effective that the PC can be difficult to detect. The silly euphemisms, apparently harmless, but forever dripping to wear away common sense - the naivete of the phrase "a caring force for the future" on Remembrance poppy trays, which suggests that the army is some kind of peace corps, when in fact its true function is killing.

The continual attempt to soften and sanitise the harsh realities of life in the name of liberalism, in an effort to suppress truths unwelcome to the PC mind; the social engineering which plays down Christianity, demanding equal status for alien religions.

The selective distortions of history, so beloved by New Labour, denigrating Britain's past with such propaganda as hopelessly unbalanced accounts of the slave trade, laying all the blame on the white races, but carefully censoring the truth that not a slave could have come out of Africa without the active assistance of black slavers, and that the trade was only finally suppressed by the Royal Navy virtually single-handed.

In schools, the waging of war against examinations as "elitist" exercises which will undermine the confidence of those who fail - what an intelligent way to prepare children for real life in which competition and failure are inevitable, since both are what life, if not liberal lunacy, is about.

PC also demands that "stress", which used to be coped with by less sensitive generations, should now be compensated by huge cash payments lavished on griping incompetents who can't do their jobs, and on policemen and firemen "traumatised" by the normal hazards of work which their predecessors took for granted.

Furthermore, it makes grieving part of the national culture, as it was on such a nauseating scale when large areas were carpeted in rotting vegetation in "mourning" for the Princess of Wales; and it insists that anyone suffering ordinary hardship should be regarded as a "victim" - and, of course, be paid for it.

That PC should have become acceptable in Britain is a glaring symptom of the country's decline.

No generation has seen their country so altered, so turned upside down, as children like me born in the 20 years between the two world wars. In our adult lives Britain's entire national spirit, its philosophy, values and standards, have changed beyond belief.

Probably no country on earth has experienced such a revolution in thought and outlook and behaviour in so short a space.

Other lands have known what seem to be greater upheavals, the result of wars and revolutions, but these do not compare with the experience of a country which passed in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all.
This is not a lament for past imperial glory, though I regret its inevitable passing, nor is it the raging of a die-hard Conservative.

I loathe all political parties, which I regard as inventions of the devil. My favourite prime minister was Sir Alec Douglas-Home, not because he was on the Right, but because he spent a year in office without, on his own admission, doing a damned thing.

This would not commend him to New Labour, who count all time lost when they're not wrecking the country.

I am deeply concerned for the United Kingdom and its future. I look at the old country as it was in my youth and as it is today and, to use a fine Scots word, I am scunnered.

I know that some things are wonderfully better than they used to be: the new miracles of surgery, public attitudes to the disabled, the health and well-being of children, intelligent concern for the environment, the massive strides in science and technology.

Yes, there are material blessings and benefits innumerable which were unknown in our youth.

But much has deteriorated. The United Kingdom has begun to look more like a Third World country, shabby, littered, ugly, run down, without purpose or direction, misruled by a typical Third World government, corrupt, incompetent and undemocratic.
My generation has seen the decay of ordinary morality, standards of decency, sportsmanship, politeness, respect for the law, family values, politics and education and religion, the very character of the British.

Oh how Blimpish this must sound to modern ears, how out of date, how blind to "the need for change and the novelty of a new age". But don't worry about me. It's the present generation with their permissive society, their anything-goes philosophy, and their generally laid-back, inyerface attitude I feel sorry for.

They regard themselves as a completely liberated society when in fact they are less free than any generation since the Middle Ages.

Indeed, there may never have been such an enslaved generation, in thrall to hang-ups, taboos, restrictions and oppressions unknown to their ancestors (to say nothing of being neck-deep in debt, thanks to a moneylender's economy).

We were freer by far 50 years ago - yes, even with conscription, censorship, direction of labour, rationing, and shortages of everything that nowadays is regarded as essential to enjoyment.

We still had liberty beyond modern understanding because we had other freedoms, the really important ones, that are denied to the youth of today.

We could say what we liked; they can't. We were not subject to the aggressive pressure of specialinterest minority groups; they are. We had no worries about race or sexual orientation; they have. We could, and did, differ from fashionable opinion with impunity, and would have laughed PC to scorn, had our society been weak and stupid enough to let it exist.

We had available to us an education system, public and private, that was the envy of the world. We had little reason to fear being mugged or raped (killed in war, maybe, but that was an acceptable hazard).

Our children could play in street and country in safety. We had few problems with bullies because society knew how to deal with bullying and was not afraid to punish it in ways that would send today's progressives into hysterics.

We did not know the stifling tyranny of a liberal establishment, determined to impose its views, and beginning to resemble George Orwell's Ministry of Truth.
Above all, we knew who we were and we lived in the knowledge that certain values and standards held true, and that our country, with all its faults and need for reforms, was sound at heart.

Not any more. I find it difficult to identify a time when the country was as badly governed as it has been in the past 50 years.

We have had the two worst Prime Ministers in our history - Edward Heath (who dragooned us into the Common Market) and Tony Blair. The harm these two have done to Britain is incalculable and almost certainly irreparable.

Whether the public can be blamed for letting them pursue their ruinous policies is debatable.

Short of assassination there is little people can do when their political masters have forgotten the true meaning of the democracy of which they are forever prating, are determined to have their own way at all costs and hold public opinion in contempt.

I feel I speak not just for myself but for the huge majority of my generation who think as I do but whose voices are so often lost in the clamour.

We are yesterday's people, the over-the-hill gang. (Yes, the old people - not the senior citizens or the time-challenged, but the old people.) Those of ultra-liberal views may take consolation from this - that my kind won't be around much longer, and then they can get on with wrecking civilisation in peace.

But they should beware. There may well be more who think like me than the liberal Left establishment likes to think. When my views were first published in book form in 2002, I was not surprised that almost all the reviewers were unfavourable. I had expected that my old-fashioned views would get a fairly hostile reception, but the bitterness did astonish me.

I had not realised how offensive the plain truth can be to the politically correct, how enraged they can be by its mere expression, and how deeply they detest the values and standards respected 50 years ago and which dinosaurs like me still believe in, God help us.

But the readers' reactions to the book were the exact opposite of critical opinion. I have never received such wholehearted and generous support.

For the first time in 30 years as a professional writer I had to fall back on a printed card thanking readers for writing, apologising because I could not reply personally to them all.

Most of the letters came from the older generation, but by no means all. I was made aware that among the middle-aged and people in their 20s and 30s there is a groundswell of anger and frustration at the damage done to Britain by so-called reformers and dishonest politicians who hardly bother to conceal their contempt for the public's wishes.

Plainly many thought they were alone in some reactionary minority. They had been led to think that they were voices muttering to themselves in the wilderness.
Well, you are not. There are more of you out there than you realise - very many more, perhaps even a majority.
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• Edited extract from The Light's On At Signpost by George MacDonald Fraser (published by Harper Collins)

Pause in posting

I apologise for the fact that there have been no updates so far this month. I have been dealing with an unexpected family illness, which has kept me away from the computer.

I hope that things will be back to normal shortly.

Thanks for your patience

Sarah