The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

I am visiting friends in Romania. It’s the first trip of the post-Speranza era. I shall write more about the touristic aspects later, but I have not yet gone into travel blog mode.

In a group of friend; Americans, Canadians and Romanians of varying political opinions, it’s been interesting to note the questions I’m asked about life in the UK. Our nation either needs much better PR or to get its act together. Gentles, you know I think it’s mostly the latter but – while I have my own serious concerns about our future – it seems the rest of the world has already written us off.

The Professor Jason Arday affair has pretty much confirmed the international view that our civilisation is at the fiddling-while-burning stage. If the once-great institution of the University of Cambridge has fallen, then the barbarians are well inside our gates.

I did my best to target the blame for Arday’s tragicomic story where it belongs – in American academia. That’s where Critical Race Theory originated and it’s from that vile, racist doctrine that the divisive, conflict-engendering nonsense of DEI stems.

America sees the world through the lens of its own racial conflicts. Its academics struggle (some with good intent) to make sense of their history from slavery through the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. Then they seek (sometimes in good faith) to create theories that lead to the bright sunlit uplands of racial equality.

That’s all well and good though, God knows, they get much wrong even on their own turf. The problem for the wider world is that they assume whatever flies in America applies elsewhere. Meghan Markle, who viewed Brits as Americans with funny accents and alienated us by calling our late dear Queen a racist – is the perfect symbol for North American simple-mindedness in this respect – a female Forrest Gump, without the redeeming kindness.

This has often been a sincere misunderstanding at the heart of much of their foreign policy. It helps explain why they sometimes struggle, as a global superpower, in ways that differ from how we British once did. They arrive in places like Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, unleash “shock and awe” on an overwhelming scale, and then genuinely expect local communities to be able to build stable institutions and constitutions more or less overnight. Yet in all their time as the world’s undisputed leaders, it is hard to find many figures who, like Lawrence of Arabia and some others in the British era, truly immersed themselves in the cultures and histories of the societies they were trying to influence.

Of course European academics must shoulder the blame for taking on the poison of CRT. They should have rejected it out of hand as the arrant nonsense it is. That was probably too much to hope for. Real scientists immediately seek to test and disprove new theories. That’s how scientific and technical knowledge advances. The social “sciences” are different. Their experiments always confirm their world view. When politicians promise “evidence-based policy-making”, the social sciences get to work on policy-based evidence-making to support them.

CRT was a gold-mine for such purposes. Social “scientists” everywhere got out their metaphorical picks and shovels. That said, the British academics could at least have introduced some nuance into its childishly simple oppressor/oppressed narrative.

This article from Spiked illustrates the damage CRT-driven thinking has done to all our institutions – not just academia. The author, Neil Biggar, writes of the discussions – to which he was a party – within the Church of England about reparations for the Atlantic Slave Trade.

I remember pulling my punches, partly because my view of the historical and ethical nonsense of reparations was not as clear and firm as it is now. But mainly because I was aware of how bad I would look if I said what I honestly thought. In the current, emotionally manipulative climate, when claims of racial harassment are so easily made and readily believed, it’s very risky for a white person to speak up candidly to a black person about race and slavery. So, I tied my tongue.

So it must also have been in meeting after meeting in various universities as the career of the late Professor Arday soared. He was as blatant a fraud as can be imagined – a fabulist who made no attempt to keep his lies plausible. I don’t know if he was a pitiful fantasist who lucked his way to the top or a bare-faced liar seeking gain. What he most certainly was not is a cunning fraudster deceiving the clever people on his path. They deceived themselves or – more likely – tied their tongues from the same cowardice as Lord Biggar’s.

Not only did the Church of England never directly invest in nor profit from the slave trade, there is literally no institution in the world (except perhaps the Quakers) with a clearer conscience on this matter. William Wilberforce, after a deep religious conversion in 1785, aligned his life with the CofE. He was a leader of the Clapham Sect – an influential group of evangelical Anglicans that fought against the slave trade. They worked with the Quakers and Christians of other denominations to persuade Parliament to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire.

Nor did the movement stop there. Britain tried hard to end slavery in the rest of the world too. The influence of our abolitionists was behind such noble ventures as the West India Squadron and the treaties with other nations we entered into to persuade them to abolish slavery too.

For example in mid-1850, the Royal Navy aggressively entered Brazilian territorial waters and ports to seize slave ships. This gunboat diplomacy enforced the British–Brazilian Treaty of 1826, which banned the slave trade. Threatened by British naval force, Brazil passed the Eusébio de Queirós Law in September 1850 to suppress the slave trade.

As Professor Lord Biggar writes in the referenced article;

I wish the leadership of my church no ill. But they’re stubbornly leading us into our very own Arday affair, where the nakedness of Project Spire will be exposed for all to see and those responsible for stewarding the church’s assets will be called to public account. I know that the reputational costs of rowing back will be high, but the costs of rowing onward will be much, much higher. Commissioners – and bishops, clergy and laity – who’ve been harbouring doubts and biting their tongues need to muster the courage, take the risk and speak up now. Before it’s too late.

That’s not just true in the Church of England or the Universities. If we are to save ourselves from the fate the world seems to think has already befallen us, the whole of British society needs to row back. We must reject the crazy notions we’ve uncritically accepted from the race-blinded professors of the US colleges.