David Davis
In the late afternoons of our lives, various thoughts occur. I had a cyberchat with my colleague, the Dear Leader of the Libertarian Alliance, Dr Sean Gabb, at some indeterminate time overnight last night. We both agreed on some things:-
(1) He and I have spent the best part of our adult lives keeping on keeping on keeping on saying the same sorts of things, to the same sorts of people, all the time, 24/7. All the time, we are both getting older and more tired***. At least dear Sean Gabb has managed to get on the wireless rather a lot, and occasionally even on the television – usually as the political EnemyClass’s nasty-wicked-fall-guy-with-the-British-Accent. He doesn’t seem to mind this at all: he has the Patience of Job, truly.
***Never fear: we will continue to “lead you” until we fall down dead, or become “replaced” by younger and newer blood at the head of the British Libertarian Movement. (That makes us look rather self-regarding: trust me – neither of us is really like that at all.)
(2) Nothing that we do, or have tried to do, seems to cause any visible change. The unstated metatext of our exchange was that this is depressing. The prevailing agreed terms of public discourse don’t seem to be changing from the allowed metroleftist narrative. More and more of the properties of the country we thought we grew up in, seem to be being “changed”, deleted or modified in generally rather disagreeable ways.
(4) This marks us both out as “conservatives” in a sort of Old Liberal sense: it also points to us both being in some way English nationalists. This may be a fault, or it may not: we see no conflict between feeling some bond of identity with a particular nation, and being simultaneously classical-liberal minimal-statists.
(3) We are beginning to attract one or two good classical-liberal polemicists to our group of pariahs who are perforce made to inhabit the Chimpanzee Type Writers’ Nissen Hut, now and again.
We agreed that we should like to invite more Libertarian-minded writers who might like to have authorship privileges on this blog. One or two very worthy new people have recently joined us, and you will be seeing stuff written by them more frequently in the fullness of time. The only conditions we have always stipulated are that you ought not to pen anything that would get Sean Gabb and myself into trouble with the “Authorities”. As we all know, the rules about this sort of thing are being progressively made more and more obscure, on purpose.
But there’s always room in the Nissen Hut, and even in the winter there is plenty of good Wigan Coal from down the road, to shovel into the Central Brazier: the Chimpanzee Type-Writers even offer to help sometimes, inbetween typing the Complete Works of Shakespeare.
We do not and cannot know, whether we have wasted the major productive part of our lives on this venture, which seems hitherto to have produced what a chemist would call “no visible change”: this happens when he adds one colourless solution to another appropriate one, and no precipitate, bubbling, explosion, colour change or other event is observed.
However, we continue to utter “Inde, Sit Carthago Delenda”, in the hope that one day, it will be.