Looking back, looking forward

I started my Twitter account two and a half years ago, just after the Colston statue was dragged down in that bleak summer of 2020. It was a product of my passion for our history, my love for sculpture and statuary, and my indignation at the silence from those institutions that supposedly represent the people, yet utterly failed to do so. I chose the account name because I wanted to keep it ‘single issue’ and otherwise apolitical, recognising that the ‘silent majority’ is not defined by a single ideology, only by common decency and a powerful sense of injustice when wrong prevails over right. (Most especially when that wrong is dressed up as ‘right’.)

Up until recently, I was rather successful in maintaining this focus, with a couple of notable aberrations when I attended freedom rallies in June and December of 2021. I always knew that the Covid policies of lockdown and forced medical interventions were seriously wrong, both logically and morally. But my comprehension of the sheer, unabated malice and corruption underpinning them - and the consequential collapse of my faith in politics and, indeed, human nature in general - has now reached a point where I just cannot feel comfortable suppressing it.

We live today in a technocracy where politicians have abrogated their responsibilities and become simply agents of elite organisations and corporations whose aim is not to improve lives, but rather to effect a continual transfer of wealth and power from the people to themselves. Critical thinking and judgement have been superseded by data modelling, in all its evident fallibility, in order to perpetuate an endless cycle of manufactured crises reinforced by a media that serves (and is served by) the same agenda. Every such crisis – from climate to Covid – unfailingly makes the masses poorer and the richest richer.

This awareness has also led me to question the so-called culture war. I have always believed this to be an important front in the fightback. There is an undeniable affiliation between the woke ideology and the globalist one in attacking the basis of the West’s nation states – including the entire existence of some like the USA, Canada and Australia – and seeking to replace them with largely unaccountable, supra-national entities such as the European Union, United Nations, and other ‘expert’ bodies.

But there is also a school of thought that holds this secondary front a distraction from the principal one calling out and challenging our seemingly inexorable march towards impoverishment and effective enslavement. Some argue that the powerful want to keep us divided with incidental issues as it distracts us from the real threat. And, even though I still believe the culture war is a real and important one, I have to recognise some truth in this.

I have come to appreciate that I am, above all, a libertarian. That nothing is more important to me than individual liberty. And, crucially, that this is simply incompatible with the political system we live under. The current political contest is simply one to determine who can tax and control us more. I no longer recognise the Conservative Party whatsoever and, given their continual betrayal of individual freedom in favour of the various consensus cults like wokeness, ‘Net Zero’, the NHS and, above all, Covid, will certainly never support it again.

I won’t go on (lest this brief missive morphs into that most tedious of texts, a ‘manifesto’) so will turn instead to elucidating what all this means going into 2023.

I shall of course continue to tweet about culture issues and coordinate campaigns to save our statues. These things matter intensely to me.

But I also want to be free to speak on other issues without hearing that execrable refrain of “stick to statues”. If needs be, I may rename the account. I recognise that many followers will disagree with the positions I have advanced above and may unfollow me. I will be sad to see anyone go, but of course accept it. I cannot go on overlooking truly significant issues in favour of retweeting yet another piece of click-bait about the latest author to be given a ‘trigger warning’. It is a matter of conscience and nothing is as important as being true to that. I remain the same person and hope that, based on my track record, many of you will continue to take an interest in what I have to say. So here’s to a free future… I hope to see you there.