“Britain is about values, not institutions,” the unelected and never re-elected Prime Minister Gordon Brown was fond of saying during his three years as head of Her Majesty’s government. (Under Kier Starmer, I now look back with affection to such years.) To think that Britain is about values rather than institutions is to get things completely the wrong way round.
The fact that so-called conservatives now go around talking incessantly about values is illustrative of the fact that their minds have been considerably taken possession of by the ideological prejudices among which the Left are ordinarily at home. It is precisely the conservative proficiency for calling the populace back to the actual and the concrete, over the ideational and ideological, that gave them their importance in the political arena, which they have now all but entirely lost.
Having forgotten that Britain is about institutions, rather than values, we have all entered the relentless battleground of ideological squabbling that characterises modern social discourse, and it’s likely that there is no way out. Worse still, having lost a sense of the primacy of the institutions, whatever might have been a coherent conservatism of the Anglo kind is fast morphing—especially among the young—into a new ethno-nationalism in a final attempt to grab hold of something concrete over the passion-charged abstractions that are otherwise constantly flung about.
If we don’t recover a sense of the primacy of the institutions, and do so very quickly, I fear that all moral and political discourse of the future will be characterised by a competition to root arguments in the concrete in the most nightmarish ways. What we might be heading towards is the clash of two undefined worldviews, a Leftist worldview based on unending moral transgression as emancipation from a spectral white supremacist colonial patriarchy, and a Rightist worldview based on a Darwinian racial hierarchy that’s terrified of immigration because of what it might do to genetic purity, prefrontal cortex size, and average national IQ. And as these two grisly groups have it out, mostly online and progressively in the public square, the actual country in which we live will quietly become a desolate Islamist slum. Thereafter, perhaps in only a decade or less, tweedy Englishmen will hide out in the Shropshire Hills or the Wye Valley wondering what the hell just happened to their homeland while everyone was busy quarrelling about values.
What Britain in particular desperately needs is a public conversation—coinciding with public action—not about values but the actual health and functioning of its institutions. Reflecting upon his father’s working-class patriotism at the end of England: An Elegy, Roger Scruton wrote that his father “knew in his heart that England was not a nation or an empire or an enterprise but a country, whose law was the law of the land.” Certainly, the ancient common law of England, embodied in a network of courts, dependent on a guild system of legal inns, is probably the most important example of this land being one of institutions. But it is a land of institutions all the way down—from the Monarchy, the Houses of Parliament, and the Established Church, through the Royal Navy and the regiments of the Army, the police forces, and the Royal postal service, all the way to those most local and organically emerging institutions like local clubs for hobbyists and the thatched pub on the street corner. England in particular and the United Kingdom in general is a land in which a certain way of life is represented in concrete institutions. And a way of life is an initiatory pathway into an existent social organism, it is not a hodgepodge of ‘values.’
It is precisely the noxious values-speak of centralising commissars, like Gordon Brown for example, that has turned the monarchy into a pitiable celebrity family, the Church into a juggernaut of anti-Christian Marxist progressivism, Parliament into a competing Church of the religion of DEI, and the Armed Forces into the military wing of glob-homo, while the police forces have morphed from Peelite uniformed civilians into the secret Watch who covertly monitor thought-crime and appear in the dead of night to punish Tweeters. There is a reason why it has been beaten into us that everything is about values, not institutions: because if everything is about values, then progressives—who naturally treat the ideological as more real than the actual—will always win.
Institutions, not values, are what render explicit and official what is otherwise a received and settled way of life. No Englishman ever said he would die for British values. He said he would die for King and Country. Since we have insisted that everything is about values, no Englishman will die for anything, and now the government is pressing—with a view to passing—new laws so that if Englishmen won’t die for a cause, they can at least be killed. Britain probably has under a decade before it entirely slips into the void, and bringing it back from the brink of annihilation where it is presently—if indeed that’s now possible—will not be achieved by values-speak.
Modern Brits should not fixate on the rise of sundry skin pigments among them or names that not long ago would have seemed exotic—even if such things have contributed to the disruption of their particular way of life. What Brits should be worried about is the eclipsing of that way of life, which was always expressed in its institutions, whose existence in turn protected and conserved that way of life. What we have now is not a way of life, but many parallel ways of life—largely caused by implementing the ‘values’ of multiculturalism and diversity—which the institutions have been co-opted into protecting. The institutions, therefore, are corrupted and must be brought back to a state of health, that they may achieve their purpose, namely conserving the way of life that brought them into being.
The visible transformation of Britain’s ancient cities and towns into settlements for alien populations is bad enough. To walk down an English high street and hear every language and accent except those that belong to these isles is now very common. But that is nothing compared to the much darker side of this deconstruction of our way of life: English girls offered up by our corrupted institutions to the insatiable appetites of conquering hordes of Moguls. If anything should awaken the people of these isles from their slumber of indolence and defeatism, it should be the torture and rape of their daughters. And if that’s not sufficient to stir them to action in defence of their way of life—which begins and ends with the recapture of their institutions—then this ancient kingdom deserves its bleak future.
‘Values’ are not going to salvage the United Kingdom, which—as I say—on its current trajectory probably has under a decade left before it entirely slips into the abyss. The reform and recovery of our institutions is what is desperately needed, and that means filling them with good men and women who have not only inducted themselves into our way of life, but who will do all they can to protect that way of life. That all means, of course, a future with a very, very different kind of elite.
Institutions, not Values: Salvaging Modern Britain
“Monks Eleigh, Suffolk” (1912), an illustration from P.H. Ditchfield: The cottages and the village life of rural England (London, J.M. Dent & sons ltd; New York, E.P. Dutton & co.) by A.R. Quinton (1853-1934).
“Britain is about values, not institutions,” the unelected and never re-elected Prime Minister Gordon Brown was fond of saying during his three years as head of Her Majesty’s government. (Under Kier Starmer, I now look back with affection to such years.) To think that Britain is about values rather than institutions is to get things completely the wrong way round.
The fact that so-called conservatives now go around talking incessantly about values is illustrative of the fact that their minds have been considerably taken possession of by the ideological prejudices among which the Left are ordinarily at home. It is precisely the conservative proficiency for calling the populace back to the actual and the concrete, over the ideational and ideological, that gave them their importance in the political arena, which they have now all but entirely lost.
Having forgotten that Britain is about institutions, rather than values, we have all entered the relentless battleground of ideological squabbling that characterises modern social discourse, and it’s likely that there is no way out. Worse still, having lost a sense of the primacy of the institutions, whatever might have been a coherent conservatism of the Anglo kind is fast morphing—especially among the young—into a new ethno-nationalism in a final attempt to grab hold of something concrete over the passion-charged abstractions that are otherwise constantly flung about.
If we don’t recover a sense of the primacy of the institutions, and do so very quickly, I fear that all moral and political discourse of the future will be characterised by a competition to root arguments in the concrete in the most nightmarish ways. What we might be heading towards is the clash of two undefined worldviews, a Leftist worldview based on unending moral transgression as emancipation from a spectral white supremacist colonial patriarchy, and a Rightist worldview based on a Darwinian racial hierarchy that’s terrified of immigration because of what it might do to genetic purity, prefrontal cortex size, and average national IQ. And as these two grisly groups have it out, mostly online and progressively in the public square, the actual country in which we live will quietly become a desolate Islamist slum. Thereafter, perhaps in only a decade or less, tweedy Englishmen will hide out in the Shropshire Hills or the Wye Valley wondering what the hell just happened to their homeland while everyone was busy quarrelling about values.
What Britain in particular desperately needs is a public conversation—coinciding with public action—not about values but the actual health and functioning of its institutions. Reflecting upon his father’s working-class patriotism at the end of England: An Elegy, Roger Scruton wrote that his father “knew in his heart that England was not a nation or an empire or an enterprise but a country, whose law was the law of the land.” Certainly, the ancient common law of England, embodied in a network of courts, dependent on a guild system of legal inns, is probably the most important example of this land being one of institutions. But it is a land of institutions all the way down—from the Monarchy, the Houses of Parliament, and the Established Church, through the Royal Navy and the regiments of the Army, the police forces, and the Royal postal service, all the way to those most local and organically emerging institutions like local clubs for hobbyists and the thatched pub on the street corner. England in particular and the United Kingdom in general is a land in which a certain way of life is represented in concrete institutions. And a way of life is an initiatory pathway into an existent social organism, it is not a hodgepodge of ‘values.’
It is precisely the noxious values-speak of centralising commissars, like Gordon Brown for example, that has turned the monarchy into a pitiable celebrity family, the Church into a juggernaut of anti-Christian Marxist progressivism, Parliament into a competing Church of the religion of DEI, and the Armed Forces into the military wing of glob-homo, while the police forces have morphed from Peelite uniformed civilians into the secret Watch who covertly monitor thought-crime and appear in the dead of night to punish Tweeters. There is a reason why it has been beaten into us that everything is about values, not institutions: because if everything is about values, then progressives—who naturally treat the ideological as more real than the actual—will always win.
Institutions, not values, are what render explicit and official what is otherwise a received and settled way of life. No Englishman ever said he would die for British values. He said he would die for King and Country. Since we have insisted that everything is about values, no Englishman will die for anything, and now the government is pressing—with a view to passing—new laws so that if Englishmen won’t die for a cause, they can at least be killed. Britain probably has under a decade before it entirely slips into the void, and bringing it back from the brink of annihilation where it is presently—if indeed that’s now possible—will not be achieved by values-speak.
Modern Brits should not fixate on the rise of sundry skin pigments among them or names that not long ago would have seemed exotic—even if such things have contributed to the disruption of their particular way of life. What Brits should be worried about is the eclipsing of that way of life, which was always expressed in its institutions, whose existence in turn protected and conserved that way of life. What we have now is not a way of life, but many parallel ways of life—largely caused by implementing the ‘values’ of multiculturalism and diversity—which the institutions have been co-opted into protecting. The institutions, therefore, are corrupted and must be brought back to a state of health, that they may achieve their purpose, namely conserving the way of life that brought them into being.
The visible transformation of Britain’s ancient cities and towns into settlements for alien populations is bad enough. To walk down an English high street and hear every language and accent except those that belong to these isles is now very common. But that is nothing compared to the much darker side of this deconstruction of our way of life: English girls offered up by our corrupted institutions to the insatiable appetites of conquering hordes of Moguls. If anything should awaken the people of these isles from their slumber of indolence and defeatism, it should be the torture and rape of their daughters. And if that’s not sufficient to stir them to action in defence of their way of life—which begins and ends with the recapture of their institutions—then this ancient kingdom deserves its bleak future.
‘Values’ are not going to salvage the United Kingdom, which—as I say—on its current trajectory probably has under a decade left before it entirely slips into the abyss. The reform and recovery of our institutions is what is desperately needed, and that means filling them with good men and women who have not only inducted themselves into our way of life, but who will do all they can to protect that way of life. That all means, of course, a future with a very, very different kind of elite.
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