BY ALEX STORY
As Goldfinger observed: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
It is a good observational rule, not least to judge our political rulers by what they do rather than what they say.
Early in October 2024, Keir Starmer removed the portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh. Both were painted in the late 16th century, a handful of years after the defeat of Philip II and his Great Armada.
Both were deemed old hat and reactionary.
After all, fighting for England’s religious and cultural survival is now deemed “far right.” In fact, hoisting your country’s flag on a pole in your own country will earn you a visitation from our increasingly unprepossessing police.
Starmer replaced the portraits of England’s saviours with the “works” of experimental finger painter Dame Paula Rego. Her art, it has been said by some, focuses “on strong and courageous women”.
Not the likes of Elizabeth I, though, who stopped her country’s invasion. As a beneficiary of the Patriarchy, Lizzie wasn’t courageous in the 21st-century sense of the word.
A couple of weeks later, on the eve of Labour’s first budget at the end of October 2024, Rachel Reeves, in turn, removed the portrait of Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor.
In her office at Number 11 Downing Street now hangs a portrait of “Red” Ellen Wilkinson, one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain and a dedicated member of the Fabian Society, as are half of the current British cabinet and a large number of Labour backbench MPs.
Further, only last week, David Lammy, the Lord Chancellor, removed a portrait of the late Elizabeth II.
He replaced it with Ghanaian “artist” Larry Achiampong’s variations on the Pan-African flags, commissioned with the support of the taxpayer-subsidised Arts Council.
Developed at great cost, the Pan-African flags are, to neutral observers, reminiscent of the Pride ones, not least because both, by design, reject reality.
After all, Africa is not one country, with one language and one religion, though Boko Haram and other Islamic groups, supported by the incredible silence of a suspiciously incurious Western media and political establishment, are working around the clock to gain the continent for Mohammed’s Peace Creed.
But, to David Lammy, history and current affairs are Terra Incognita situated on a flat earth, resting on the back of the Cosmic Turtle.
We remember that, while Higher Education Secretary in 2009, Lammy appeared on Celebrity Mastermind. It was an objective, hide-behind-the-sofa disaster. It should have been career-ending.
So much so that The Independent‘s Matthew Norman asked, in his opinion piece at the time, how can “Mr Lammy”, who “has a master’s in law from Harvard”, “have such a stellar qualification and tend, to put it generously, towards the dim?”
In absolute astonishment at Lammy’s inability to answer simple historical and current affairs questions—David mistook Marie Curie for Marie Antoinette, Versailles for the Bastille, Henry VII for Edward VI and Yugoslavia for Georgia—while at the same time being, ironically, Minister for Higher Education, Matthew Norman took one more, but very important, rhetorical step by asking a follow-up question:
The trend of removing portraits of our ancestors, that is the erasure of our memory, is not happenstance or coincidence. It reveals something deeper, darker, and more fundamental.
It is enemy action.
We are led by revolutionaries, against whom we are at war. Some might say that we are already in a “post-revolutionary state.”
With Lammy’s purposefully ahistorical removal of Trial by Jury, under the auspices of “backlog clearing” expediency, and its replacement with what will gradually become Trial by State-led Ordeal, they might well be right.
Knowledge, truth and their pursuit require cautious discernment and love of the subject; its absence demands revolution.
We are faced by the latter, while yearning for the former.
Being ahistorical means never taking responsibility for the devastation your ideology and its many permutations have left and will leave behind.
Certainty requires ignorance. It is their totalitarian shield, enabling them to bray their bovine, mendacious and accusatory slogans without shame.
Emotions over truth is their chosen path to victory.
Nietzsche believed that the laws of logic were reactionary as they “reduce everyone to the same level.” The German philosopher stood against the Christian notion of equality before our creator, under which all revolutionaries chafe.
They need to be emancipated from Christian constraint to reach their utopia—our hell.
Nietzsche believed that “to obey one’s instinct is noble, but to obey logic is to give way to the mob,” as John Carey reminds us in “The Intellectual and the Masses.”
To cave in to the populace and, God forbid, “turn the clocks back” is anti-progressive and anathema to our political masters.
We are led, if that is the term, by people who thrive on ignoring our concerns because to give in to them would mean letting go of their property-free, borderless and religion-free vision of the world.
Their method is to lie about everything, all the time.
It is, after all, boiling the water slowly that hides the murderous intent towards the proverbial and hapless frog.
But we ought not to bestow on our current politicians more cunning than they deserve. Sometimes the truth slips out, revealing a greater power, still nebulous but increasingly discernible, as it did when Starmer chose “Davos” over Parliament during an interview with Emily Maitlis before the 2024 General Election when asked about his political lodestar.
Much of the time, our politicians are puppets in a play. The “power” game is played somewhere else. Not here at home. Our institutions are the executioners of a higher power’s will.
That is what Lord Hermer meant when he reminded his audience in October 2024: “international law is the ‘Rule of Law’ writ large, adding that “States must comply with their international obligations“. No ifs or buts.
We are thus faced with enemy action, not coincidence or happenstance.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.