EU People’s Vote, Liberal Elite Versus “community, place, belonging ” (Paul Embery).

“For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet“?

Those familiar with French politics will know all too well the gaggle of former left-wingers who have discovered patriotism, moral order, and nationalism barely disguised as “republicanism”.

Amongst many many others, Jean-Claude Michéa (admirer of George Orwell’s ‘common decency’) “«Les classes populaires ont presque entièrement disparu du champ de vision de l’élite et des classes moyennes… », Alain Finkielkraut “Alain Finkielkraut fustige ”une nouvelle élite barbare” et les ”collabos de la modernité” Michel Onfray, ( Michel Onfray contre les élites ) Michel Houellebecq (Les élites haïssent le peuple) have for a long time attacked the liberal ‘elite’, political ‘correctness’, the ” “nouveau progressisme”, unbridled free markets, fragmented identities, and  individualism.

The alternative?

France, the French People, perhaps the terroir, maybe the land and its memories – whatever takes their prejudiced fancy.

Many are, like the anti-Charlie Emmanuel Todd, advocates of “national solidarity,  leaving the Euro and economic protectionism (“il faut sortir de l’euro et pratiquer le protectionnisme.  la solidarité nationale et la fraternité.)

If like Todd they do not generally support Marine Le Pen it is because she does not include all the French people in this destiny.

It would not take long to find these currents  in the ideological soup across the whole continent.

So it no surprise that we are now seeing a similar stream of support for Family, Flag and Community against the” liberal pro-EU elite” as they call it)  in this country as the Carnival of Reaction following Brexit unfurls.

Disgracefully not unfrocked Priest, Giles Fraser, micturated recently with a stream of urine against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’.

Paul Embery, a public shit house for Family, Faith and Flag, is world class in this game of who can pee higher against ‘liberal elites”.

Brexit voters weren’t duped by propaganda.

PAUL EMBERY 26th of June. Unherd.

This is his comment on the Saturday People’s Vote march.

“Listening out for the hysterical outpourings of the grieving liberal intelligentsia can be an interesting pastime. It’s almost as if they are trying to outdo each other in their paroxysms of utter contempt for the mob.”

Indeed the stout working class types pictured above did not get as much publicity as the People’s Vote elite.

Embery has a word of advice for the limousine liberals (as the US original of this copied ‘patriotic’  diatribe had it in the past). The “explanation for why millions of working-class people voted for Trump and Brexit. But you’d need to rub shoulders with them every once in a while to know it.”

Thanks for the tip!

Here it is at greater length:

Left behind by globalisation, witnessing their communities rapidly changing from the effects of deindustrialisation and large-scale movements of people, suffering the effects of low wages and poor housing, they took the opportunity to hit back against a cloth-eared liberal establishment that had treated them with disdain for too long. Treat people like cattle, and you’ll get kicked.

You don’t have to be a cheerleader for Trump or Brexit to recognise this obvious truth.

Me old china, the Leave campaign was led by the wealthy (like his mate Arron Banks), and the public school educated and supported by the mass right-wing press.

And, we shall say to Scholar and a Gentleman Embery, that, well, let’s just just say that Disdain is Trump’s middle name….

That if they were ‘left behind’ – every tout for Brexit’s cheapest answer to everything – they are going to be stuck in the wilderness  after this bunch of chancers running EU withdrawal get their way.

Yet….

Apparently this is not the main issue.

Emberey’s new conspi theory it that the same ‘elite’ is now out to attack ‘free speech’.

For the new sinister agenda is not just to subvert the referendum result, but also to establish a compliant media where, in future, only the ‘facts’ as interpreted by these enlightened progressives and their chosen experts may be allowed to see the light of day.

Of course they know they can’t get away with crude bans on platforms giving air to alternative opinions, so their methods are more insidious. Thus we see increasingly restrictive laws designed to suppress freedom of speech, support for state-backed regulation of the press, boycotts of mainstream newspapers, and the sinister threat to reputations and livelihoods for the crime of saying the wrong thing.

He continues, outraged,

This mix of draconian legislation on the one hand and a repressive and intimidating public atmosphere on the other is toxic. The end goal is to batter us into submission so we think twice before expressing unfashionable opinions.

You can see it in the activities of outfits such as Stop Funding Hate – an authoritarian and menacing campaign dressed up as ethical and progressive. This group demands a boycott of any company which advertises in newspapers spreading “hate” (for which read ‘newspapers whose editorial line we dislike’). Several firms, fearful of damage to profits and reputations, have capitulated. They know the group is serious. It would happily see businesses, large and small, go to the wall and be forced to throw thousands of ordinary workers on to the scrapheap for the crime of advertising in the ‘wrong’ newspapers. So much for its high-minded ethics.

Its target isn’t really hate, of course; it is alternative opinions, particularly those traditional, some might say old-fashioned, opinions to which millions of Britons still hold true, but which are considered beyond the pale by the liberal elite.

Here is the wily plotters’ statement,

After what it called “decades of sustained and unrestrained anti-foreigner abuse, misinformation and distortion”, the United Nations has accused some British newspapers of “hate speech”. UK experts are now warning that hate crime is being “fuelled and legitimised” by the media. Relentlessly hostile and often inaccurate headlines have been described by charities as “dangerous”. But, indirectly, nearly all of us are funding them.

We’re taking on the divisive hate campaigns of the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express by persuading advertisers to pull their support.

There is a version of Godwin’s law that rightward drifting left-wingers always cite George Orwell at some point.

So it is no surprise that Embery says, “Our radical tradition is that of the Levellers and Chartists, of Tom Paine and George Orwell…”

He ends with this,

I along with millions of other working-class people voted for Brexit for reasons of democracy, community, place, belonging and accountability. Don’t tell us we did so because of something we read in the Daily Mail or on the side of a bus. For if you believe that, you really understand nothing of your own country.

No I know nothing.

Though I would say that “community, place and belonging” sound to me very much like ideas that echo the ideas of the far-right French writer Maurice Barrès (1862 – 1923) of la Terre et les morts, the notion that we are above all else rooted in our national soil and carry on the memories of our ancestors, and the same author’s criticism of the  Déracinés – the cosmopolitan rootless.

I would add that my fights (sometimes physical) with those at school and in my North London homeland, including in a factory,  with those who used to say “good ‘ole Enoch” in the late sixties and ‘seventies,  did not take place with ‘left-wingers’ of the Embery stripe telling me that really Enoch Powell has a point….