‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ is one of my favourite wartime movies. This 1957 classic, with an ensemble cast including Sir Alec Guinness, is far more fiction than reality in terms of its depiction of the construction of the Siam–Burma Railway. Nevertheless, it is a tour de force of cinema, winning 7 Oscars including a Best Actor award for Guinness for his portrayal of Colonel Nicholson.
Nicholson is something of a flawed character in the film. Throughout, he is more concerned with demonstrating to his Japanese captors that the stoicism and nobility of his British troops wouldn’t be broken by the arduous task of constructing the bridge. It is only in the final moments he realises that he’s effectively committed treason in the name of honour by aiding the enemy. As gunfire and explosives rain around him, Nicholson says, ‘what have I done?’, before making a determined effort to reach a nearby detonator primed to blow the bridge to smithereens. Suddenly, mortally wounded, Nicholson staggers and falls on to the detonator, causing the bridge to explode and fall into the river, sending a Japanese troop train hurtling across the bridge to its doom.
I was thinking about this epic scene as I watched in horror the proceedings in Parliament last week. It truly was a watershed moment because, for the first time in UK political history, British democracy ceased to exist on its own terms. Parliamentary protocol was upended by a Speaker increasingly prone to go down the John Bercow route of unilaterally altering procedure to suit his own agenda. MPs sat terrified on the green benches, lest their stance on the Israel/Hamas war endangered their own security, as a baying mob projected the message of Israeli obliteration on the Elizabeth Tower outside.
Never have politicians in this country adopted a political position motivated almost exclusively by fears for their own safety. They didn’t do so during the dark days of World War II; they didn’t do so as they legislated to crack down on terrorism in Ulster for 30 years; and they didn’t do so with respect to the various sanctions on Russia. They didn’t need to because, in each and every case, the public numbers supportive of those causes inclusive of mob violence were so minuscule, they posed only a residual threat to the safety of our parliamentarians. It is worth remembering even the scourge of Northern Irish terrorism claimed just 4 political lives during the Troubles. Following the brutal slaying of Sir David Amess by a radical Muslim in 2021, how many of our elected representatives live in fear of a far greater number being killed because of a pro-Israel or anti-Hamas stance? Such is the hatred thousands of these pro-Palestinian morons spew forth each and every weekend, it wouldn’t be a great leap of faith for dozens of them to turn invective into violence.
Ask yourself two questions:
1). Would we have faced public protests on this scale, this frequency and this intensity 30 years ago?
2). If the Jewish population of the UK was four million and the Muslim population just 275,000 (statistical mirror opposites of their actual numbers), would there even be protests on the street over the situation in the Middle East?
If your answers to both questions is ‘No’, you have to stand back and consider what has befallen our once great country through a combination of mass, culturally immiscible migration and the spawning of regressive attitudes through the promotion of multiculturalism. The biggest irony is that both situations have come about due to the beliefs of those same politicians (following in the footsteps of their predecessors) who have campaigned for a Britain of open borders and mosaics of cultural diversity! Have they reached their Colonel Nicholson moment? When they realise their desire to transform Britain from a society of common values, shared history and a sense of identity has resulted – inter alia – in the injection of radical Islam into our land, like some lethal vial of sodium cyanide? Did they not see the signs 35 years ago, when emotionally-convulsed lunatics were burning effigies of Sir Salman Rushdie on the streets of Bradford over a few lines in a book of fiction? Did it never occur to any one of our political overlords or those charged with this country’s safety that importing more of these people and their warped theological obsessions would only result in a fractured land weighed down by the constant threat of violence? My own late Father, whose professional speciality was mental health nursing rather than political prowess, could spot it a mile off! He told me in the summer of 1989, as controversy raged over the publication of ‘The Satanic Verses’, that Britain would be a future land of trouble as militant Islam grew in numbers. How prophetic he was!
If any MPs have reached their Colonel Nicholson moment, all but one or two have kept it well hidden. Our own Prime Minister, a man as weak as a fasting anorexic, alas hasn’t come to terms with the enormity of what’s happening on our streets. During a vacuous speech to the nation last Friday evening, he still had to invoke the imagined spectre of the ‘far-Right’ to balance his criticism of Islamism. What ‘far-Right’? You mean all ten of ’em!? Insofar as the ‘far-Right’ exists in today’s United Kingdom it is purely reactive, tiny in actual quantity of disciples and easy to bring to heel. You couldn’t say the same about the thousands of radicalised Muslims and their Corbynite consorts, angrily goose-stepping through London each Saturday.
Unlike some, I no longer have faith in our rulers to restore both cultural homogeneity and respect for the rule of law to our land. In my view, the UK has undergone far too much population change in far too short a time for that. Of course I remain to be convinced, and I hope my pessimism can be vanquished by a sword of righteous determination. But I cannot see how the problems successive governments have engineered through their own ideologies can now be tamed when this new generation of politicians is frozen into immobility by its subsequent collective cowardice. MPs are lucky to be given £30 million for their own protection. What protections can they give the rest of us suffering at the coalface of their great migration and diversity experiment?
Visits: 36
As always Andy, absolutely on the head. Enoch was right.
You need to write more often, old friend.
I wish I could, Patrick. Have so much going on these days.