We should tread carefully when we condemn to Hell that ‘nasty imperialist’ Rudyard Kipling who might well not be the villain we choose to make of him

 This post began as a short review of Kim, but somehow grew and grew. It is no longer a review of Kim – which I have still to write – but a wondering at why Rudyard Kipling is still, it seems almost uniformly, written off because he was an’ imperialist’.

I am at present reading Kim, or rather re-reading the novel, and came across a short commentary by googling ‘views and comments’ about Kim. As it turns out there are surprisingly few such commentaries, if you ignore The Kipling Society website, and frankly I was hoping for non-partisan views. I suspect Kipling Society members might not be as neutral as I might like.

I am re-reading the novel because I was not overly impressed at my first reading (and still have to finish the second) and wondered whether I had missed something. From experience I know that an almost immediate second reading often does pay off.

Perhaps the failing is mine, but my second reading is proving to be useful. I am not sure (and if you do have the time, consider also doing second readings and you might understand what I mean). I doubt, though, that I shall much be changing my opinions of Kim and suspect I shall be making the same points that first occurred to me.

Incidentally, some novels – I’m thinking of the English translation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls - do not tempt enough to encourage a second reading. In that case it didn’t help that I was wholly unfamiliar with the early-19th century Russian culture and milieu it was satirising and I discovered some time ago that translations all-too-often do not convey intended subtleties.

One pertinent point, although ironically not one particularly relevant to the novel as ‘literature’, is Kipling’s supposed imperialism and, ninety years after his death, how he is still, more or less in passing, written off as ‘an

imperialist’ as in ‘an unacceptable imperialist’ (and, as is the joke, ‘not in a good way’).

The observation is almost a tacit invitation to condemn him wholesale as a novelist, short story writer and poet.

And the ‘fact’ of Kipling’s ‘imperialism’ has to be added to the ‘Everybody knows’ file, as in almost all folk ‘know it’ and are suitably put off by the man and his work.

Yet, I suspect that many, perhaps most, who cleave to that view have not read a great deal of his work, if any perhaps, and would be hard-pressed to tell you why ‘Kipling's imperialism’ was ‘a bad thing’, except that ‘imperialism is a bad thing’ as – ‘everybody knows’ – are ‘slavery’ and ‘homosexuality’.

I add the last two to underline how much ‘morality’ is more malleable than it or we might care to admit, and that we can never quite rule out backsliding and a ‘re-evaluation’ of our current moral presets if pragmatism and circumstance so demand.

For example, at present for ‘vital’ economic and commercial reasons – and, no doubt, ‘national security’ which seems to be this year’s sexy new concern – Britain is desperately wooing China and in its desperation to be an acceptable new pal to Beijing is very keen indeed to ignore that China is engaged in a kind of updated imperialism and is none to observant of what we in the West regard as ‘universal human rights’. That, in anyone’s book, might qualify as a very clear case of double standards.

So what does our current pragmatic sidelining of ‘universal human rights’, making them, when necessary, less ‘universal’ than we otherwise insist they are, tell us about our ‘moral values’ (and our intellectual consistency)? 

It seems, then, that if and when – as in ‘look, we need a more sophisticated relationship with China' (and not at least for the Chinese to buy a lot more from us)’ – ‘imperialism’ is not always such a bad thing when it suits, the crucial yardstick being whether condemning it or not is in our ‘national interests’.

I should make clear that I am not attempting and shall not attempt to ‘defend’ imperialism. It was an aspect of its age, and pretty much all European nations had an ‘empire’ at one time or another (as, of course, did several African, American and Asian nations over the centuries and, so, marking Africa down as ‘essentially primitive and undeveloped’ is very much uninformed, but best not muddy to waters too much, eh? Take a look here at Africa's history of civilisations and ‘imperialism’).

How badly or very badly these imperial nations, their rulers, their place-men and their elites behaved is neither here nor there and even today there are not a few apologists for British imperialism.

‘Yes,’ the argument runs ‘we might have subjugated many nations, plundered their resources and killed quite a few of their folk. But so did the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and if you look at it overall, we were certainly not as half bad as they were. Oh no!’

Often such apologists go on to insist that British imperialism was not – could not have been! – ‘all bad’, as for example, what subborned nation got in return for our – I suppose the word they would like to use is ‘benign’ – imperialism.

Look, they declare, we gave them a working model civil service and a fantastic railway network.

So they will carry on, often in the manner of a bar / pub bore [delete as applicable] or a barrack room lawyer, and demand to know why, if British imperialism was so terrible, why did so many of its former colonies adopt Britain’s parliamentary and legal systems?

‘Answer me that, eh!’ they will insist, and follow up with triumphalist ‘. . . and doesn’t that prove something?’

To that the only response is that ‘no, it doesn’t prove anything all’. All it does is to demonstrate that those systems were, in the opinion of the newly free colonies, rather good and useful and thus worth emulating. And note, it was because pragmatically they were thought to be worthwhile that they were copied, not because they were British.

. . .

Putting aside for a moment the matter of considering how ‘imperialist’ Kipling was, the immediate question remains if we are considering him as an artist: why on earth should the man’s ‘imperialist’ views have any bearing at all on the quality of his art?

Do we castigate Shakespeare for misogyny in The Taming Of The Shrew? Was Will of Stratford possibly anti-semitic given his portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant Of Venice. Might Will, given today’s current preoccupation with ‘trans issues’, be accused of some kind of arcane transphobia in Twelfth Night? Was he defending paedophilia in Romeo And Juliet?

Why is Edward Elgar (right), he of Land Of Hope And Glory, a very popular piece then played all over the British Empire and still played in Britain essentially celebrating Britain’s might, not similarly castigated? It makes no sense at all.

Consider the ‘celebrated’ British sculptor Eric Gill, celebrated the world over (at least by those who celebrate sculpture and sculptors) who, it was revealed in 1989, almost 50 years after his death in 1940 was a paedophile who had sex with at least one of his daughters and, apparently, also the family dog.

His sexual behaviour was common knowledge among his family and some friends, and he recorded details of it in his diaries.

Yet in the first biography of the man, published in 1966, there was silence on the matter, and it wasn’t until a second biography was published in 23 years later, in 1989 that it was made public.

There was certainly ‘outrage’ – folk delight in being outraged, it diverts attention from their own none-too-admirable behaviour – but not over Gill's incestuous paedophile but that the biographer published while a Gill daughter was still alive. The cad! How could he! 

So, was his ‘art’ less ‘good’ once all that was known and that Gill was a nonce? Can art lose in artistic value under such circumstances? If two people viewed a work of Gill’s art where one knew about his paedophilia and the other did not, would the piece ‘not be art’ for the one viewer, but a magnificent piece for the other? Discuss at your convenience.

And what are we to make of the continuing reluctance of churches, galleries and the BBC to remove Gill’s works now we know he liked to shag young children, including a daughter, and animals?

Obviously, these are all rhetorical question and, as obviously – I hope – the answer were one still to be demanded, is ‘no, of course, not. Now stop wasting my time’.

Yes, there is a dilemma, but it is not the dilemma we hypocritically choose to believe it is. But I don’t wish – here - to sideline myself into a complex and pointless discussion of ‘the nature of art’, although, as always I have lot to say on the matter, and please alert me if you really do want me to waffle on about it.

That of course, leaves us with the condemnable alleged ‘imperialism’ of Kipling and the suggestion that because of it, he should be ruled out of court. But would it really be equitable to banish Kipling for not opposing imperialism but to give Gill a pass (for some reason or other)? Yet again, discuss.

. . .

The introduction to my Wordsworth edition of Kim, by a Professor Cedric Watts, usefully quotes the novelist Julian Barnes when he observes ‘What a curious vanity it is of the present
to expect the past to suck up to it’.

Quite, and with that observation, Barnes gets right to the essence of ‘what to do with Rudyard Kipling and his imperialist views?’

I suggest the answer is not just ‘nothing at all’, but that we might add ‘and try to read Kipling more carefully before you make your silly snap judgments’.

More clearly: Kipling did broadly support the imperial status quo – he was born in the middle of the 19th century in 1865 and already over 50 when with the end of World War I the ‘British Empire’ was well on its way to collapse (though that wasn’t for another few decades and, for example, the nations fo the Indian subcontinent did not regain their freedom to rule themselves for another 31 years).

But a more attentive reading of Kipling’s work demonstrates he had a far more nuanced take on Britain, India, the British and the ‘Indians’, and he was and is far more even-keeled than those who condemn him for his ‘imperialism’ might care to admit.

In Kim, Kipling certainly did – and as a matter of course as in ‘there can be no doubt at all!’ assume without question that ‘British rule of India’ was worthwhile and all-round for the best.

And, yes, he does present us with ‘ethnic’ Indian characters who appear to agree with him about British rule being very much for the best. And, yes, he does for example and uncomfortably for some, talk of the Asiatic mind, the ‘native’ mind and, for example, how the native prefers to sleep.

None of which is too promising for anyone attempting to get Kipling off the hook. And, of course, all of us, whether we live in Old Blighty, China, Singapore, Vietnam, Europe, the US, Argentina, India and, I don’t doubt the bloody Moon, suffer badly from what I have very recently come to know as ‘chronocentrism’, that the age in which we live is most certainly the best of any that have come before and without any doubt the world has been leading up to this perfection.

It follows from that, or better for those suffering from ‘chronocentrism: that everything about our age is ‘right’ and so our current abhorrence for imperialism is pretty much the final say on the matter!

Really? No, not really. In fact, complete nonsense. The sad fact is that ‘morality’, ‘moral systems’ and the like are as much subject to weekly, monthly, annual vagaries as are hemlines and beards in fashion. You want to ‘prove’ that ‘some values are universal’, go ahead. And get in touch as and when you have done so, though I doubt I’ll hear from you this side of Armageddon.

So yet again one might wonder, with Barnes, at the ‘curious vanity’ of the present ‘to expect the past to suck up to it.’

Frankly, it gets worse: implicit in that vanity is the unassailable conviction that ‘we are right and those who disagree are simply wrong’ – essentially and not least ironically the exact same attitude British imperialists adopted and its apologists adopt and which we now choose to abhor. Funny old world, eh?

. . .

Kipling had an unusual childhood: as a youngster of five he was shipped out of India by his parents when he was five to be fostered in England (which was apparently the common practice for Anglo-Indians). Why, I don’t know, as there were many excellent ‘English schools’ in Bombay, where he first grew up, and elsewhere in India.

Raised until then, as were many British children, by ‘native servants’, he first spoke ‘native languages’ and Urdu was his first language English was at first his second. From his childhood and later his work in India, in fact, he was very taken with ‘the natives’ and ‘the Asiatic mind’, and portrays both as often far more intellectually agile, sharper and more cunning than their British overlords.

With the exception of Colonel Creighton (who speaks perfect Urdu, which in itself indicates an implicit respect for an aspect of Indian culture), ‘the white man’ is shown to be something of a clodhopper, prone to drunkenness and slow wits.

A variety of ‘Indians’ pose with their British ‘overlords’ just before the ‘Indian’ mutiny in 1857 and 1858

Though he is clear of the distinction between the European and the Oriental, never does he state, or even hint, that the former is superior to the latter.

Kipling is always keen to stress the sheer diversity of the many different ethnic groups in India, and at no point does he crassly deal with ‘Indians’ as though the ‘Indians’ were some kind of unit: there are Pathans, Afghans, Sikhs, the hill people, those who live in the plains and others, and many, many more, and each has a distinct identity, outlook and often culture. And although for us lazy white honkeys it is easiest to refer to the ‘Indians’, it seems to be a certain kind of nonsense, even today.

He describes the different groups, their virtues and vices, from the untrustworthy Brahmin priests (a common trope among ‘Indians’ themselves) to the kind and generous village folk always ready to feed a passing stranger, suspicious farmers, duplicitous and murderous employees, proud women, kind prostitutes, a jealous young boy prepared to kill Kim who he regards as a rival and many more.

None is presented as ‘a type’. None is reduced to a caricature: the delight Kipling feels in their company and the people they are is palpable and, I suggest, wholly at odds with what one might expect of an overbearing imperialist who considers the folk he is ruling as somehow Untermenschen. That might well have been the attitude of many British in imperial India, perhaps most, but it was not Kipling’s.

That still leaves the question of why Kipling was tarred and feathered with that brush and is still written off today as ‘an imperialist’ and all that conveys or many, whereas others of his time were and are not. 

And to that question I have no answer at all.

Me, I’m not much one for reverence – too much often does more harm than good, especially when folk insist on ‘authenticity’. Fuck ‘authenticity’

It’s odd how an interpretation or performance of some toons can make or break that toon. And how we all vary in which interpretation or performance we like and dislike. I’ve just heard Send In The Clowns on Radio 3 and as almost - almost - always with that song, I cringed a little.

It seems almost always to be done with reverence (as in ‘with total fucking reverence’), thus upping the cringe factor a quite a bit. In my book - and I stress these things ARE personal - most cringey are when female thesps (the ones who are not primarily singers) sing it, as in Ms J Dench at ‘the Proms’, natch.

Unfortunately, I can’t off-hand think of an example which has zero cringe, though in the right hands it is a great song. It’s just with that song the right hands seem to be rare as hens teeth.

Here’s another example: watching Turn: Washington’s Spies a few years ago (and re-watching it now), I first came across the long-traditional sailors’ shanty Spanish Ladies sung by the Australian Sarah Blasko. For me Blasko hits just the right note, understated melancholy and fuck-all reverence.

In the video it’s the first one, followed by, several crass fuckers bleeding reverence from every pore, and then another female singer who again misses by a country mile, though not quite as as badly.

It’s a delicate thing: like almost everything, get it right and spot on and you’re laughing. Get it wrong . . . well, take up bowls or something.

What to do about Donny’s threat to back him or else? Tell him to fuck off – politely, of course, by simply ignoring it and him. Yes, America’s economic power is still mighty, but he is becoming an irrelevant figure of fun more and more by the week (and thus screwing things for his White House cronies)

Occasionally, I am asked on Quora to answer this or that question. One of the most recent was

Does Europe, including the United Kingdom, have any realistic option other than acceding to President Trump’s demand to take over Greenland? It would help if he could say why exactly he wants Greenland.

Here is my response, and I am posting it here and now, because if I am right and Donny will be carted off shouting and screaming sooner rather than later, it would help. It might even gain me the, wholly spurious, of course, reputation as a visionary. And if I am wrong – who’s going to remember this post?

We certainly do, and it is simple: defy Trump and carry on defying him until he is no longer in power, and that might well be sooner than many think.

Trump faces a range of enormous problems, most political and some personal. Imminently, the Supreme Court will rule on the appeal against a court’s judgment that he does not have the constitutional authority unilaterally to impose tariffs.

Their decision is likely to go against him and cause him all kinds of problems. He might – he is not the sharpest blade in the box – try to tough it out, but that would compound his growing problems

Perhaps worse, if that is possible, what seemed like an iron grip on the Republican right is weakening considerably with a growing divided in MAGA with many supporters, for example, upset with many of his recent actions, not least that the man who assured them ‘no more foreign wars’ bombed Caracas, kidnapped the Venezuelan president and is talking, apparently seriously, of invading Greenland.

It also doesn’t help Trump that despite his, wholly fantastical claims that the US economy is thriving and he grades it A+++, relevant economic data, little by little, his demonstrating the opposite: it is not thriving and inflation is creeping up.

When prices for basic groceries, second-hand cars and rents (due to a decline in new home sales) are rising, it doesn’t matter what the man in the Oval Office is assuring you – most recently that it will all come good by the end of 2026! – it ain’t true!

MAGA men and women are reportedly also increasingly uncomfortable with the antics of ICE agents – yes, they might agree that ‘illegals’ should be apprehended with a view to deportation, but not like this. Some knuckle-draggers (with whom I have been mixing it on Truth Social until my accounts are banned) don’t mind at all, but many more don’t like the violence.

This creeping erosion of MAGA support also loosens Trump’s grip on the several hundred spineless Representatives who hitherto had bowed and cowed to him at every turn with both eyes on the threat that if they,

Demented? I’m not demented! I’m a wholly stable genius and I’ll bomb anyone who doesn’t agree with me, then I’ll sue what’s left of them for billions!

did not, they would be ‘primaried’. So what? they ask themselves, it doesn’t look certain look all that certain I would lose my seat. And, of course, those congressme and women who will not be standing anyway and the senators who will not be up for election and now casting about to establish where they left their spine.

Furthermore, although the ‘mid-terms’ are still nine months away, it seems very unlikely they will not become an electoral disaster for the Republicans, not least because, apart from the possibility that alternative non-MAGA Republican candidates might stand for election, the crucial independents have long lost faith with Trump and given they swung the vote his way on November 5, 2025.

What should worry Trump is that talk of ‘the 25th’ – invoking the constitutional amendment allowing for a president to be removed from office if he (no she, so far, natch, this is the macho ol’ US of A) – is also being whispered in Republican circles, the principle being ‘save what can be saved’. The far-right – Miller, Vought and Thiel – have a ready-made stood in VP Vance to replace Trump if and when, and when is looking more likely.

There is not doubt Trump suffered a mild stroke a month or two ago, and it is disconcerting that he now has visibly to fight off falling asleep in meetings. But arguably worse is that he shows definite signs of not being ‘all there’, unhinged, if you like, hence his, frankly, inexplicable recent decisions.

Talk that he might be suffering from frontal lobe dementia – as his father did in the last ten years of his life – are not mere Democrat mischief-making. So, the White House movers and shakers ask themselves, can we take the risk? Maybe it is time to put Donny out to pasture?

Thus, in short, what options does the UK and Europe have about Trump’s demand to own Greenland? Just the one – hold out till the old fraud is well under lock and key in some very comfortable, secure hospital in rural Pennsylvania. The new regime might show itself to be just as fascist but perhaps not quite as looney as the current one.

For 80 years we enjoyed liberal democracy – is the tide now going out? Everyone and his dog seems to think it’s now cool to be a right-wing cunt

A few years ago, I mentioned to my daughter – now 29 – that I had an ongoing but very definite feeling that rather far-reaching unwelcome changes were on the way. I most certainly could not put my finger on it, but it was a foreboding sense that the, frankly rather cosy, world and world order we had until then been accustomed to were on their way out.

I should, however, also point out that of 1,001 folk who predict the future or confess to such forebodings, 1,000 will get it wholly wrong and we only remember – and celebrate as some kind of visionary – the lucky schmuck who did ‘get it right’.

He or she – though almost probably a ‘he’ – will be only to happy to bask in glory and henceforth also consider themselves to be far-sighted and, of course, even more worth paying attention to.

As I was already 45 years old when my daughter was born (I shall be 77 in November), I had been more accustomed than her to the then current world order and had rather more memories and experience of what was a comparatively cosy world here in Britain and other Western nations, though if anything that world had become even more cosy in the 29 years of her life.

My description of ‘comparative cosiness’ will undoubtedly outrage some, given that many are always keen to be outraged as often as possible about any number of matters – if they’ve not been outraged at least twice before lunch, they are decidedly miffed.

Thus the ‘left’ – the quote marks are intended to indicate that the description is so flexible and malleable as to be more or less meaningless – will shout at me for ignoring the poverty that exists in the otherwise affluent West and other social injustice of many of our governments’ arrangements.

The ‘right’ – ditto – will scream at me for ‘ignoring the danger’ posed by ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘Muslims’ and how bloody lucky we were to ‘get out of Europe [they mean ‘the EU’] in time!’)

However, I suggest life for the vast majority in the Western world has been ever more than acceptable than not: we do not in the West, as in the former Soviet and now non-Soviet Russia, run the ever-present risk of falling to our death from a high window if we step out of line. We do not, as in China, Iran, North Korea and too many other countries, risk a long term in jail for speaking out against the ruling party and its apparatchiks.

Not as hopeful as many might like, eh?

Incidentally and bizarrely, along those lines rather too many in the US accept as ‘fact’ the claim, by J D Vance and Elon Musk that Britain – my home country – is now a fascist state.

As ‘proof’ they cite our laws on protecting free speech and that folk can be hauled before the courts and tried for ‘hate speech’. So many MAGA cretins insists ‘there is no free speech any more in the United Kingdom and it is now a fascist country’.

That those laws are specifically designed to protect sexual and racial minorities is a detail they conveniently and unsurprisingly ignore. They also insist that Britain is now overrun with gangs of Muslim rapists and that women are afraid to go out at night.

. . .

Economically, the West has certainly had its ups and downs in my lifetime, but compared to the existence of previous generations over the past two centuries, life has become progressively ever easier. We can, for example, insure ourselves for anything.

That doesn’t prevent catastrophe but does mean that if and when catastrophe struck, the consequences were really not as dire.

On the other hand if you were a rich or even not-so-rich bod in the 16th and 17th centuries when you lit your home by candlelight, an overturned candle leading to you home being burned downed could mean ruin – there was then no such thing as ‘home insurance’.

Yes, we still develop cancers, suffer heart attacks and can unexpectedly face unemployment. But in the second half of the 20th century we, at least in Europe as well as elsewhere, became entitled to free or subsidised health care, and could apply for a range of state benefits to help us when we need assistance. There is also a greater range of legal protective remedies for everyone.

It might not be too much of a stretch to suggest that one reason for the comparative ease of our lives since the end of World War II is that most countries in the ‘developed world’ politically operate a system of ‘liberal democracy’.

In fact, living in a ‘liberal democracy’ seems so much the norm now that many of use can’t conceive of not doing so. The intrinsic problem is that metaphorically ‘liberal democracy’ might have made us fat, soft and lazy.

. . . 

Twenty-four years ago [in 1992], an American historian, Francis Fukuyama, suggested that mankind had more or less reached the final stage of its development. He did so in his book The End Of History And The Last Man, and his thesis might well be – satirically – be summed up as ‘well, that’s it, lads and lasses, we’ve reached perfection. Enjoy!’

Even at the time when I read about its publication, the title and Fukuyama’s claim, I remember thinking ‘and who the fuck do you think you are kidding except yourself?’ But apparently I was in a minority and others did opt to kid themselves – almost predictably, Britain’s Sunday Times, in full pontifical mode, described Fukuyama’s work ‘as one of the 12 most influential books since World War II’.

The book appeared in the wake of one very significant change in recent world history: the mighty Soviet Union collapsed in on itself in pitiful ignominy in 1989 and its many satellite dictatorships behind ‘the Iron Curtain’ followed suit.

Certainly it will be clear to future historians that the writing was on the wall for Communist Russia and its political minions: most were economic basket-cases and their systems were decaying ever more by the year. But at the time it, almost, seemed to come out of the blue.

This, all the wiseacres predicted, was the time when ‘Western values’ and capitalism would take over. And no free market can exist, to the thinking went, without political freedoms as in the political freedoms guaranteed us by a liberal democrat system.

Really? Don’t you think that China and Vietnam, economically and commercially very successful, politically less free than we in the West would like, disprove that point wholly and reduce it to the status of triumphalist nonsense?

Nevertheless: drum roll please as ‘universal liberal democracy’ is about to take over and humanity could now at long last breathe a sigh of relief. Nirvana!

NB Both China and Vietnam had some way to go to establish their successful economies at the time Fukuyama was spreading the good news.

In tandem in the early 1990s was the development of the internet or as it was then called ‘the worldwide web’. It too, in its superhero guise of ‘the information superhighway’ – and I did not make that up – would ensure peace, peace, prosperity and peace everywhere.

The reasoning ran that as ‘information’ became readily available to everyone with a web connection, democracy would spread and creep into every nock and cranny where so far it had never thrived. Once again, rejoice!

It didn’t quite happen like that (and I can’t resist adding a mealy-mouthed ‘of course’ in a ‘told you so voice’). Most recently, the totalitarian dictatorship in Iran was instantly able to close ‘the information superhighway’ and the ‘free flow of facts and information

Fukuyama argued – this description is from Wikipedia – that ‘the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and Western free-market capitalism, as well as the Western lifestyle may represent the final step in humanity's sociocultural evolution and political struggle, alongside becoming the final form of human government, an assessment meeting with numerous and substantial criticisms’.

That’s the theory. The practice has, though, several years on, turned out to be rather different. And an irony is that it is the Achilles heel of ‘liberal democracies’ which has meant it might now slowly all be coming unstuck.

Certainly there are many ‘understandings’ and ‘interpretations’ of what living in a ‘liberal democracy’ entails, but I suggest one of its prime and essential principles is that ‘all votes are of equal value’ – everyone has a say not matter what they believe politically and to which mast they nail their flag.

A liberal democrat – note, small ‘l’ and small ‘d’ – will assure you, because for her or him it is axiomatic, that no ‘intelligent’ and ‘rational’ man or woman would ever not subscribe to the ‘broad range of liberal democratic values’. It’s as obvious was wiping your bum after taking a dump.

‘Yes,’ our liberal democrat will carry on in the manner of an Anglican / Episcopalian clergyman hoping to persuade you that ‘the church’ is now very broadminded and long ago divested itself of its former reactionary tendencies, ‘there is a broad range of values in a liberal democracy, raging from those espoused by – presumably intelligent and rational – Conservatives to those espoused by – presumably intelligent and rational – Left-of-centre socialist to those.’ 

It all again ends with a ringing chorus of ‘rejoice, rejoice for we are all in this together’. The exceptionally irritating might even repeat the, by now distinctly clichéd line, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ apparently misattributed to Voltaire. That sentiment, they believe, proves how exceptional broadminded they are.

But things seem to be changing, and the – I’ll say it – complacent to downright smug confidence of card-carrying liberal democrat’s is increasingly taking a battering.

A case in point might be – though this is my interpretation – the conviction of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in the 2016 US presidential election that no one in his or her right mind would elect a total fraudulent buffoon like Donald Trump.

But they did and did so again eight years later in November 2024.

Here in Britain there seems – to me – to have been a similar smug complacency in play in the June 23, 2016, Brexit referendum: no one but no one in her or his right mind, our assorted bien pensant believed, would ever vote to leave the European Union!

But they did – as in a British majority did, Northern Ireland and Scotland overall voted to Remain – and the UK left, to its own demonstrable economic detriment.

As I say, things are changing and the tide of ‘liberal democracy’ worldwide seems now to be on its way out to sea

rather than coming in. It seems that in Europe and certainly in the US, more and more people are attracted to the political outliers, to the point where they are no longer outliers.

Here in Britain there seems a very real prospect of the Conservative Party (the Tories) the hitherto traditional home of those who identify politically as ‘conservative being eclipsed by Reform UK, now led by that disreputable carpetbagger Nigel Farage (right, doing his bit for the cancer industry).

But I shall not here delve any further into what seems to be going on as it would be yet another detour and I must, must, must avoid though.

Pertinently, though, is that where the Conservative Party likes to tout itself as a ‘broad church’ and can comfortably encompass those on the ‘not too far right’ as well as what were once referred to as One-Nation Tories, bods who had a social conscience, Reform UK nakedly and proudly parades its intolerances of pretty much everything.

Nothing new there, that a far-right party should do that, but Reform UK is gaining widespread voter support, drawing support not just from the Tory Party but, apparently, from former Labour supporters. And – that Achilles heel again – those who dress towards ‘liberal democracy’ where every vote counts must lump it. There is fuck-all they can do about it.

Cross the Atlantic and examine the situation in the United States: the far-right is most certainly on the rise there and although Trump’s bizarre behaviour seems to be alienating increasingly many independents (upon whose votes he will have to rely), it would seem his core support his still holding firm.

Thus his extraordinary programme of deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to Democrat states, ostensibly to round out ‘illegal aliens’ but certainly intended to intimidate the folk who live there is proceeding with impunity.

Two undoubtedly patriotic ICE agents serving their country and keeping it free of nasty free-loading foreigners, though their prime means of doing that seems to be stuffing their faces with burgers and hot dogs – you don’t get to be that fat by chance alone

And it is not an exaggeration to point out those ICE agents (two pictured here) have had almost no training and seem to have been recruited from the several far-right white supremacist gangs who turned out in DC on January 6, 2021, at Trump’s behest to ‘stop the steal’.

Worse than that, they seem to have absolute immunity for any of their actions, which now include the extra-judicial killing of a female protester, with the Trump administration claiming the death was justified because she was a ‘domestic terrorist’ who had attacked the ICE agent who shot her dead.

Further afield, the far-right is on the rise – as in ‘liberal democracy’ and its values are in retreat – in many other countries, from Germany, France, The Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, the Czechia, Sweden, Denmark and Italy.

I can’t speak for the Near, Mid and Far East as I don’t know enough about their affairs, except to say that many were never ‘liberal democracies’ in the first place – try Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar.

. . .

It is all very odd. There is a firm belief that ‘history’ is essentially a slow progress towards enlightenment. The belief began in the Enlightenment itself (cap E) two and a half centuries and has, to use a clumsy phrase, ‘ruled the roost’ ever since: it is summed up in the word ‘progress’.

The obvious objection, however, is that ‘progress’ and what is ‘progress’ is is as clear as mud – you pays your money and you makes yours choice.

A good example might be our attitudes to male and female homosexuality. In many countries, same-sex marriage is not just legal but now well-established can commonplace, and the ‘liberal democrat’ cheers. But is that ‘progress’?

Well, yes it is ‘progress’ if ‘progress’ is understood simply to mean a development; and ‘developments’ are morally neither here nor there. It is us who declare them to be ‘a good thing’ or ‘a bad thing’, yet for many the notion of ‘progress’ (as in ‘social progress’) a priori ‘a good thing’. Is it really? Says who? 

And thus we are back to the dilemma faced by all moral philosophers that there is no ‘fixed point’, no universal absolute imperative.

Is ‘progress’ a ‘good thing’? I am not going to answer that question because I don’t think there is one, just as there is no answer to the question ‘how long is a piece of string’.

You needn’t fret, however, because there will be several thousand folk out there only too happy to provide you with an answer and while they have your attention, equally as happy to lecture you as nauseam about many other moral questions.

Me? That’s not really my bag.

Ah, Life! Where would we be without it! Certainly not in a world drowning in debt with a lunatic as president of the United States. Become a vegetarian, Donny, at least you'll lose some weight – ever seen a fat vegetarian?

Two days ago I posted on this blog and kicked off by describing that, like it or not, there is just one certainty in this life, that sooner or later we will fall off our perch. That is, frankly, as unoriginal an observation as one might make, yet ironically we all tend to scoff and regard it as at best a negative, at worst nihilistic position to adopt.

If that is your attitude, perhaps you should consider that ‘life’ or ‘nature’ or whatever you choose to call it is ‘amoral’ – it is neutral. ‘Morality’ is essentially ‘man-made’ (and to some extent cultural) in that sense, and the best minds in history have attempted and failed to ‘prove’ that there is some ‘independent’ imperative to do what is ‘good’ and refrain from doing what is ‘bad’.

Before the Enlightenment when, as far as we know, there were no ‘atheists’ and everyone was urged to obey the will of ‘god’ or ‘the gods’ there was most probably little debate about ‘morality. Some in Pagan’ religions might well have questioned what ‘the gods insist is done’, especially as in pantheon there were many rival gods and you were free to hitch your wagon to another god if what he or she commanded more to your liking.

It got way stickier, of course, in monotheistic religions where questioning ‘god’s will amounted to serious blasphemy and would well end in you being killed.

In nature and ‘life’ there is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’, though observing other mammals and especially primates seems to show that their behaviour tends promote what benefits ‘their group’ of which they are a member – whether pack, herd, flock, call it what you will.

There are instances where a ‘group’ member is banished by the rest of the group for some kind of unacceptable behaviour, but that is way off showing that those mammals have a concept of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. It is also quite

possible that a kind of evolution played a part in the development of what was ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ behaviour in that groups which tolerated behaviour which did not benefit ‘the group’.

It is essentially mankind’s innate tendency to anthropomorphism, in this case to assign moral values, when we look at the world around us and which moves us to treat as ‘awful’ when a lioness stalks, takes down, then kills a young antelope.

Another aspect of an unconscious anthropomorphism as in attributing our human notions of ‘cute’ and ‘ugly’ to manifest itself int he current mania for ‘wildlife preservation’: I’m struck that no one goes all gooey over the Tasmanian devil (right), the jackal or alligators.

. . .

What could be described as our confused double standards might be demonstrated by our attitude to ‘higher’ animals, other primates and other mammals as a source of food. For millennia, with notably and demonstrable exceptions, mammals have preyed on other mammals or insects for sustenance.

There are also abundant herbivores thought we can be pretty certain that mammals and other animals that have a plant-based diet did and do so for ethical reasons, that killing another animal for food ‘is wrong’.

Well, we gorillas finally decided to move into a wholly vegetarian space after some of us read Eugene Mahlzeit’s fascinating and, frankly, compelling analysis of the economic and ecological damage the world’s still very widespread culture of carnivorism and how future generations will increasingly suffer from a kind of spiritual malaise as the impact of their meat-eating becomes ever more apparent worldwide. We were also getting very fed up with all the stringy bits that stick in your teeth and are a right bastard to get rid of

Yet among us humans, vegetarianism of the ‘principled’ stripe is firmly rooted in the belief that it is ‘wrong’ to eat meat and that it is thus wrong to rear and slaughter animals for consumption.

The question might then be posed to convinced vegetarian that when considering ‘less evolved’ animals, those that might be categorised – clumsily, of course, but here usefully – as ‘lower’ animals where is the ‘cut-off’ point when it is not morally wrong to slaughter other ‘lower’ beings for consumption.

In response we might be treated to a fair amount of waffle, ranging from confused logic this way to evasion, ‘redefining what the question is / should be’ and instances of that oh-so irritating line ‘well, it does epend on what you mean by . . .’ But a definitive, respectably intellectual answer there will come none, simply because there is none and can be none.

Another bod so questioned might respond ‘yes, exactly! And that is why I am vegan. I don’t eat eggs, drink milk or eat cheese, fish or touch anything derived from a living being’. The cynic in me might suggest that rather too often a kind of metaphysical halo will appear above the head of said vegan as he or she wades on, but perhaps that is unfair.

Who knows? You decide:

I am neither vegetarian nor vegan, although de facto I don’t each much meat at all, and at my age – no longer 50 as you might by now have guessed from my general crustiness – would not choose to eat a steak, however well-prepared.

What meat I do eat is what my English wife (and who is not a great cook sadly says the guy who does like food) presents to me. This will be a little minced beef in a chilli or a pasta dish. I don’t like her roasts or here roast chicken because he is not a good cook at all (and, thankfully, doesn’t read this blog).

But though I am not a vegetarian nor a vegan, for the past 29 years, I have felt uncomfortable about the notion of rearing pigs, cattle and sheep simply to eat them. Shamefully, perhaps, that doesn’t suggest to me at all that I should not even eat the little meat with which I am presented. But – well, there you go: I’ll settle for your disapproval and possibly even outrage.

The moment I began to feel uncomfortable was on August 6, 1996, when my daughter was born. And – harking back to the immediately previous post on this blog – that really was ‘a watershed’ on my life. Nothing was the same

Not my daughter, of course, but one of the long-horned, shaggy coat cattle that live on the more and who is some mother’s child

again afterwards.

I can still distinctly remember when, a week after her birth, I held her in my arms standing by a window in our bedroom and ‘showed her the world’. I doubt very much she knew what the hell was going on, but I was struck by the ‘miracle of life’. There I’ve said it. But it went a lot further than that.

I obviously knew she was to be born and for nine months I had lived with my wife’s tummy getting bigger and bigger. But when she was born, it was as though she had come from nowhere! Suddenly, there was a new person in this world!

Here I might add that from the first moment of her life, popping out of here mother’s womb, a little blue, scrunched up and nothing like the newborns you are shown on television and in films, she was another person, a person in her own right.

‘Life’, living beings, are all about us and from that moment on I became much more conscious of that: we live next to a farm here in North Cornwall where my wife grew up – our cottage and the farm are just a stone’s throw away – and were my brother-in-law rears beef – for consumption after the have been slaughtered.

But it was ‘life’ in all its forms: not just the cows and many cats which proliferated in his barns, but rabbits scurrying across Bodmin Moor just up the road, the sheep grazing there, the badgers, foxes, stoats, weasels, dormice, rats, squirrels that live all around: in all and each of them I saw ‘life’ and realised I had never been conscious of ‘life’ before.

But there was no cut-off point: the trees, grass, bushes, worms, spiders, ants – there were and are also manifestations of ‘life’.

Don’t worry, I am not going to run all dewey-eyed and pretentious about some kind of conversion to fucking ‘Gaia’ and how we don’t value ‘the planet’ as we should.

We don’t, but frankly given the amount of famine in the world, the ways many not lucky enough to life in our western civilisation might face disease and death daily, it is a particular self-centred and insensitive man or woman who plays all that down in favour of ‘saving the planet’. Yes, ’save the planet’ but not at the expense of many.

NB One of the crassest comments I have ever heard was in a conversation when someone mentioned ‘famine’ and someone else commented that ‘it’s not as bad for some who because they are used to it’.

. . .

The Christmas before my daughter was born, my brother-in-law and his young family went off for three days over Christmas and my wife did all his farming duties and I helped her. And among the young cattle she was feeding were two calves who, unlike the other 50 or 60 odd were not at all shy. The did not retreat when I reached out to them over the gate, and I would have been able to feed them by hand had I wanted to.

It seems, and I am not ‘the expert’ and am just repeating what I have been told, that some beef farmers keep a bull to inseminate cattle and and specialise in rearing their herd from birth. After a year or so, these young calved are then sold on to other beef farmers who specialise in raising the calves for sale and slaughter.

My wife explained that the two bold calves who did not shy away from me had very likely, for some reason, been hand-reared and unlike the other calves had not learned to be ‘afraid’ of humans. Far from it, they seemed glad of my hand reaching out to them and, believe it or not, I felt about those two as one might feel about a pet cat or dog. (We have a Jack Russell.)

Please don’t read too much into that: I am no card-carrying milquetoast why-oh-whying about man’s inhumanity. But – there’s always a but, isn’t there? – I began to see ‘life’ everywhere. It was those calves and their far shyer companions in the herd, dogs, cats, rabbits, foxes, horses, birds, yes, even chickens and pheasants (of which we have many in this rural neck of North Cornwall).

And now I must be off to go shopping. Lord, isn’t ‘life’ exciting for some.

Pip, pip

And once again . . .