Brigadoon

“Brigadoon, Brigadoon, Blooming under sable skies. Brigadoon, Brigadoon, There my heart forever lies.

Let the world grow cold around us, Let the heavens cry above! Brigadoon, Brigadoon, In thy valley, there'll be love”.

Alphen, the Netherlands. 9 September. There is an old Danny Kaye film about a mythical Irish village called Brigadoon which appears to the people but occasionally and where all is perfect and problems such as they exist at all are reduced at a stroke to a merry metaphor. Since that bright, bad day ten years ago ended the age of the twin towers the Whitehall Village has become a political Brigadoon; fighting and appeasing the causes and consequence of 911 at one and the same time, with little idea of strategy or mission. It has been an awful decade for a Britain in which the disconnect between the governed and the unworldly governing class is now dangerously wide. Political correctness means that real issues are rarely confronted, only hinted at indirectly.

Elected representatives have been stripped of any meaningful influence as politics and law have become hopelessly entangled. Presidential but politically impotent prime ministers have been held to account by unelected lawyers whilst all became obsessed with serving that media mogul on the Sky. How the mighty are finally fallen. The cult of political celebrity has been little different in its vacuous waste from the celebrity culture that today obsesses Britain’s politically impotent masses.

Brigadoon has instead slipped into half-truths, half-policies and half-leaders. No voter has the desired government. Labour conned itself into power under the mantra of social democratic New Labour only to be captured by the Hard Left of the Party when an unelected and unelectable Gordon Brown was offered the chance to experiment on Britain. Today, the Coalition Government sees a small Liberal-Democratic minority exerting influence way beyond its meagre representation in Parliament, whilst the high-bureaucracy has become a focal point for competing ideologies as to how Britain should be run and its place and role in the world.

In Brigadoon there is no cultural or racial tension. In Britain lives are routinely being blighted by racism and intolerance. Indeed, as Brigadoon vowed to make Britain safe in the wake of 911, it simultaneously lost control of Britain’s borders. At least discrimination in Brigadoon is now more equally shared. Formal discrimination against the majority comes in the form of multiculturalism and ‘equal opportunities’. Employment today is offered not on the basis of quality or capability but race and gender. Those insidious little boxes on application forms asking for race and gender details are not simply for statistical purposes.

Beyond the bounds of Brigadoon an angry majority has instead been cowed into silence. Anti-racist and anti-discrimination campaigns simply pushed intolerance underground and at the same time made it worse. Too often too many take out their frustrations on minorities who, unfairly blamed for the fantasies of Brigadoon, not surprisingly huddle together for safety in urban ghettos. The indigenous population that could afford it has simply fled to the hills leaving the centres of many English cities dangerous places where poverty, hopelessness and too often hatred stalk the streets. At night and at weekends gangs and drunkenness rule the space law and order too easily abandoned. Today, a million of our young people are bereft of education, employment and training, and streets burn as police do nothing for fear of being accused of breaking politically-correct taboos. Damned if they act; damned if they don’t.

Even the very existence of Britain is now under threat. An enemy of the British state has virtually unchecked power in Scotland with his one professed aim to bring down the United Kingdom. The English of course are forbidden to comment on anything for fear of being accused of racism and/or imperialism. This is in spite of the regular provocations that now emerge from Edinburgh as their sons and daughters at Scottish universities suffer blatant fee discrimination. The broke and put upon English are however still expected to pay the Scots to stay in Britain and for the feral elite who ran Britain’s banks into the ground in their pursuit of greed.

Ten years on from 911 ‘Strategy’ has been done to death in Brigadoon; as empty a word as it is misunderstood. Trapped in the longest post-Imperial apology in history Brigadoon has been fighting and appeasing violent jihad at one and the same time. In the immediate aftermath the renowned British military was sent eastward to keep the threat at strategic distance, even as millions from some of the poorest and most conservative places on earth were allowed into Britain. And then came 7/7. Ten years on a thousand of our brave young men and women are dead and many more grievously-wounded fighting wars that cannot be won. The British military is broken, the wars un-won and London’s influence diminished the world over.

Ten years on Brigadoon has passed much of its authority to Brussels-doon and the European Onion in an attempt to create the perfect alibi for failure. It is an EU that is patently and patiently dragging its richer members down into the depths to pay for its failed members like some super-institutional Titanic. Huge burdens are now imposed upon Britain with absolutely no benefits to show for it, other than the strangely abstract that Brigadoon claims.

And yet there is still hope. The generosity of the British people remains as their support for starving millions the world over attest. Although Brigadoon, true to form, has exploited that generosity by getting the British people to pay for India’s nuclear weapons programme and armed forces. And, whilst the British spirit is bowed, it is not as yet broken. There is a genuine thirst to be proud again and many of the incomers simply want to be given the chance to be British. It will take at least ten years to recover from a disastrous decade but if Brigadoon can be kept out of our lives the good will and common sense of the massive majority of ordinary Britons of all creeds and colours will prevail.

“Brigadoon, Brigadoon, Blooming under sable skies. Brigadoon, Brigadoon, There my heart forever lies. Let the world grow cold around us, Let the heavens cry above! Brigadoon, Brigadoon, In thy valley, there'll be love”.

Julian Lindley-French