Farage admits quite straightforwardly that, on the assumption of an October/November election, he was preparing to launch his parliamentary candidature this week, with the prospect of six months in which to assemble a team, nurse his constituency, acquire at least minimal local data and raise funds. He also concedes that Rishi Sunak caught him unawares and, by springing a surprise election, made it impossible for him to prepare adequately to fight a seat.

All of this is demonstrably true. Reform UK’s greatest disadvantage is that it lacks a network of constituency bases across the country and, in an age of electoral electronic warfare, has little or no data – beyond the Brexit party’s minimalist records – as to where its supporters are located. Even Nigel Farage would have been courting defeat if he had embarked on a six-week campaign in a constituency where he had no campaign organisation.

However, while Farage’s explanation for his abstention from the parliamentary fight is true, it is not the whole truth. His disarmingly frank admission that Sunak had caught him on the hop concealed the guile of the practised politician, of which there are few more adept in this country than Nigel Farage. Yes, he was preparing to stand as a candidate, because that was what was expected of him, but he was doing so very reluctantly, for two reasons. 

The first was that the obvious disadvantages under which he would have laboured, even during a six-month campaign, would very possibly have ended in his eighth election defeat, with its consequent demoralising effect on his party. The other reason for his reluctance was the fact that being a parliamentary candidate would largely have confined him to his chosen constituency, with little opportunity to campaign on the wider stage, the role in which he could most effectively spread his message, raise his already high profile and increase the Reform vote.

Rishi Sunak obligingly freed him from that incubus. While those in CCHQ and Number 10 were exchanging high-fives over Rishi having shot Nigel’s fox, it does not seem to have occurred to any of them that Sunak’s version of Baldrick’s cunning plan had rendered Farage ten times more dangerous, while leaving the startled Conservative party with 158 seats to fill with candidates by 4pm on 7 June – significantly more than Reform still had to select. 

But that did not daunt the ideologues in CCHQ; in fact they loved it, because the different rules obtaining at an election have given them the opportunity to parachute into constituencies a large infusion of Cameroon social democrat candidates. These, being from the bottom of the barrel, will be even worse than the duff MPs from previous gerrymandered intakes who have brought a Conservative party filleted of any traces of Toryism to the verge of wipe-out. That will ensure the rump of survivors post-election will be of the deadbeat One Nation stamp that will surrender the right-of-centre ground to Reform UK, as Britain’s new conservative party.

The earliest collaborators in Nigel Farage’s six-year plan are Rishi Sunak’s advisers, in Number 10 and CCHQ. Farage has been hinting at and talking about this long-term strategy for some time, but only in the past week has he publicly defined it. The calculation is that, in the current election, Reform will gain millions of votes; if, by good fortune, it also wins several parliamentary seats, that will be icing on the cake, but it is not essential to the plan.

Farage has correctly diagnosed the situation: the public viscerally loathes the Tories and deeply distrusts Labour, but it will hold its nose and vote Labour, for the sole purpose of euthanising the Conservative party. That is Reform’s objective at this election: any ex-Labour votes will be gratefully received, but the goal is to remove the Tory party permanently from contention. More and more psephological studies are showing the startling extent to which that is a practical proposition.

For years now, the extent of voters’ disillusionment with and alienation from politicians of all stripes, due to their relentless lying, has been increasing. In this election, uniquely, the electorate is likely to imitate the tactics of the black widow spider: after Labour has served its purpose by driving the Tories to extinction, the electorate will then devour Labour. There will be no honeymoon period for Starmer: the public is visibly preparing to hate Labour, in place of the Tories, from 5 July onwards.

Nigel Farage has divined that and, knowing the weakness of the Labour team, coupled with that party’s talent for antagonising the public, is preparing to position himself and Reform, from 2025 to 2029, as the real opposition to Labour. That is why he is currently repeating the mantra that, after the election, “the Conservatives will be in opposition, but they will not be the opposition”.

How could the Tories be the opposition to Labour when you could not put a cigarette paper (still available, since Sunak’s precipitate election declaration extinguished his “legacy” statist, authoritarian ban on smoking) between Conservative and Labour? There is every indication that the incoming Labour government will be fraught, accident-prone and disastrous. 

If Farage can draw the voters alienated by its failure and, almost certainly, dictatorial tendencies under the Reform umbrella, then that party, despite the trip-wires of the first-past-the-post electoral system, could perform at a 2029 general election beyond the wildest imaginings of commentators today. It is only a possibility, but the fact it is possible is an indication of the tectonic shift in British politics, almost certainly mirrored by a similar movement across Europe.

Meanwhile, Farage is playing games, telling the Sun’s Harry Cole he has done big favours for the Tories in the past (obviously referring to standing down Brexit Party candidates in Tory seats in 2019) and saying to the Conservatives: “Give me something back. We can have a conversation”. He made it clear he was not suggesting any personal reward, such as a peerage. Realistically, the only offer the Tories could make that would create a ceasefire between them and Reform would be a commitment to proportional representation. 

But Farage knows Rishi Sunak could not concede that; and Richard Tice is adamant Reform will not stand aside again. So, what is Farage about? Fairly obviously, he is casting a fly over the Tory party, in the hope that a few desperate trout will rise to it, starting an internal squabble within Conservative ranks. It is pure mischief-making and we can expect to see more of that before 4 July.

History is leaving the globalist technocrats, the decline managers, the open-borders fantasists, the green obsessives and the WEF acolytes behind: national sovereignty is the returning reality. That requires national leadership. Watching Nigel Farage at Dover, the direct addressing of topics other politicians obscure, the straight answers to journalists’ questions – he made a complete fool of the Guardian correspondent – and, above all, the forensically articulated statistics on immigration, terrifying and existential in their significance for this country, the contrast with his opponents was extreme.

Like Farage, most of us cannot absorb a Sunak or Starmer speech or remember afterwards anything they have said. Starmer resembles the chap in the pub, wittering on about something, whom one greets genially before quickly moving on. Sunak is pitiful and looking more so with every day that passes. Yet that insignificant Gawd-’elp-us brought 685,000 net immigrants into Britain last year (1.2 million gross), an influx he could have prevented with a stroke of the pen, and must now be held to account for it.

The previous year, the net figure was 765,000, under the government of a party that, years ago, promised to reduce immigration to the “tens of thousands”. If the Tories had any absurd hope of tiptoeing through a six-week election campaign without being confronted with that betrayal, they should have confined Nigel Farage to a constituency, instead of releasing him like a bird of prey to harry them mercilessly with the record of their own dishonesty and indifference to the national interest.

Farage has just introduced a new argument into the election campaign and it is this: the election is over, the Conservatives have lost, so, instead of vainly trying to prop them up as a barrier to Labour, why not recognise that fact and simply vote for what you believe? For many voters, after six weeks of a campaign in which the Conservatives are almost certain to remain visibly doomed, that could become a very potent argument by polling day, toxic to Tory hopes.

The Conservative party has, as used to be said of effete Chinese imperial dynasties, exhausted the mandate of heaven. In terms of another oriental culture, its death is due to seppuku, not to enemy action. Labour has not laid a glove on the Tories: they have destroyed themselves. It will be interesting to see if Farage and Reform can rise to the occasion and displace them as the national expression of conservative opinion. Six years is a very long time in politics.

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That is shrewd timing. For decades, nay-sayers had forecast that the CANZUK monarchies (they are each independent) would retain their connection with the Crown for the duration of the late Queen’s reign, but the advent of a new monarch would probably lead to a severing of the traditional royal link. In fairness, some of that speculation was effectively a tribute to the exceptional success and popularity of Elizabeth II’s reign; now, with the new monarch crowned in a ceremony from which he was escorted by men of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other Commonwealth forces, the essentially seamless nature of the historical bond is becoming more obvious.

This is an important book and, as Andrew Roberts observes in his Foreword, “revelatory about how four countries can come together in an ever-closer union for the benefit not merely of themselves, but also ultimately for that of the rest of the world too”. Nothing quite like it has been attempted before: there have been detailed studies of the constitutions of the constituent nations and many geopolitical commentaries (which this work also is), but the distinctive feature of this study is its unwavering focus on the Crown as the cultural and constitutional lynchpin of this exceptional alliance.

The authors, both Canadians and therefore personally engaged with the issues they discuss, have done prodigious research; when they make firm assertions, as they frequently do, they support them with solid evidence (there are 30 pages of endnotes at the back of the volume), some of it previously little known. They have successfully avoided the chief pitfall of collaboration: the text reads seamlessly, as if it had been written by a single author.

They also know how to engage the reader’s attention at key moments in the narrative. Following the Introduction, which could be read as a stand-alone essay in its own right, Part I begins, literally, with a bang. It is headed by a Prelude, consisting of the text of an Admiralty General Signal to Her Majesty’s ships stationed off the coast of Korea, following the death of King George VI, 6 February, 1952.

“At 1100 tomorrow RN and Commonwealth ships prepare to fire a Royal Salute using live ammunition at the Queen’s enemies…”

 It is followed by an account by one of the commanding officers of the bombardment of the Communist shore batteries, as the Royal Navy combined ceremonial and offensive activities, followed by the reading of the Royal Proclamation and the drinking of the Queen’s health in the wardroom.

The authors are skilled at finding such apposite anecdotes to lend colour to their text. In fact, they are skilled at a considerable number of things: maintaining equilibrium among the four nations they are discussing; bringing their distinctive constitutional histories and past political leaders vividly to life; ensuring that their advocacy of the continuing value of the monarchy remains a consistent thread throughout their narrative, without becoming monotonous; and viewing their subjects within both the wider Commonwealth and the global geopolitical situation.

The structure of the book ensures that this detailed study retains overall coherence. It is divided into three parts. Part I (The Rise and Fall of the Crown Commonwealth) looks at the situation from the Queen’s accession amid rather fevered proclamations of a “New Elizabethan Age”, through the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, to the efforts to “phase out and end the Monarchy in an age of neglect and assertive nationalism”.

Here the authors take an interesting stance: “The popular view is that the British world succumbed to triumphant, long-thwarted nationalisms. The reality is not so straightforward. Historically, nationalism could not be ‘thwarted’ so long as it was based on a local patriotism that was simultaneously pan-British.”

 Their conclusion is that, by turning to the EEC, “it was actually Britain itself that set the pace”. Today, post-Brexit, that analysis seems hard to refute.

Part II (The Royal Sun Rises Again: Restoration, Revival and Reconvergence) examines the demise of the “Chardonnay Republicans” in Australia and the similar re-embrace of the Crown by Canadians, e.g. by restoring the “Royal” title to its military in 2011, an initiative in which one of the co-authors, Michael J Smith, played an important role.

Part III (Long To Reign Over Us?) considers the future prospects of the alliance under the Crown, as “strategic cousins in a multipolar world”. That is an important consideration, with Australia threatened by China and responding with the AUKUS security pact, whose further significance is that it unites two of the four CANZUK nations with the United States in a major defence initiative.

The chief contribution this book makes is to induct the reader into an awareness that the Crown Commonwealth is about far more than a casual choice for the citizens of three countries whether they should continue cleaving to their cultural heritage of monarchic government or opt to have a retired politician in a suit as their head of state. There are signs that some Australians, for example, are beginning to recognise that, in the Crown, they have an offshore heritage that, so far from negating their national identity, affirms it in what is becoming the incoherence of a post-globalist world.

The British reader should beware of regarding this study as an investigation of three Commonwealth nations, with the UK as neutral referee; being Canadians, the authors examine Britain as clinically as the other three kingdoms, with resultant aperçus that contribute a penetrating outsider view of the mother country and its politics. For example, they describe the controversial ex-prime minister Boris Johnson as “a rare UK politician with an instinctively pro-CANZUK outlook…”

This massively researched and authoritative work should be compulsory reading for the many Britons of vastly different backgrounds who have dealings of any kind – diplomatic, trade, cultural or even familial – with any of the three countries featured. It affords great insight into the recent past, present situation and future prospects of those important nations.

One cavil that it feels almost churlish to raise, in the light of the vast deposit of information laid before the reader, is to regret that the existing text had not been preceded by at least a brief account of the earlier history of the three former colonies, including Canada’s former relationship with the French monarchy. But, in fairness to the authors, it must be conceded that any abbreviation of the existing volume, running to 363 pages, would have been greatly to its detriment, while a longer text would almost certainly have caused insuperable publication problems.

In those circumstances, it is clear it would have been impractical to take the narrative back before the accession of Elizabeth II and that the Crown Commonwealth evolved sufficiently during her reign to merit this in-depth study. The question presents itself, however: if this volume is as well received as it deserves to be, might there be any prospect of a “prequel”?

Without underestimating the enduring republican undercurrent in a nation such as Australia, the authors are generally optimistic about the survival of the Crown Commonwealth. They canvass the possibility of CANZUK becoming a more official alliance in a changing world, but accept that it remains valuable even unofficially: “Whatever its faults, the system has been made to work, exceptionally well, in practice. There is no need to change it, even if it could be done.”

That is a persuasive argument, in a world reeling from the Covid pandemic, supply chain disruption, the Ukraine war, instability in the global financial system and the rising menace of China. It is not a propitious time to discard ancient family ties and these two authors have made that case persuasively, in this information-packed, perceptively argued and highly readable book.

The Enduring Crown Commonwealth: The Past, Present, and Future of the UK-Canada-ANZ Alliance and Why It Matters, by Michael J Smith and Stephen Klimczuk-Massion. (Rowman & Littlefield, £29).

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The debacle in Kabul illustrates to the point of caricature the incapacity of contemporary pseudo-democratic governments to deal with events that past administrations would have regarded as workaday tasks. The regulars in the lounge bar of the Dog and Duck, in a five-minute discussion of the evacuation of Afghanistan, would automatically have identified the need for civilians to be exfiltrated first, weaponry secured and the troops removed last of all. It could not be further from rocket science.

It proved too much, though, for the cognitive and intellectual powers of the present incumbent of the Oval Office. Imagine, for just one moment, the media and political reaction if this catastrophe had been presided over by Donald Trump. But why would we be surprised? The United States’ southern border, under Biden and that woman who used to be his deputy before she disappeared, is a wide-open breach in America’s sovereignty, through which are pouring Latin American gangsters and now jihadist terrorists. The world’s supposed sole superpower is a global laughing stock, its president having deadlines dictated to him by the Taliban terrorists.

Again, why would we be surprised? These are the same people – even the same Democratic political party – that blew up the world economy in 2008-2009, after the earlier Clinton administration had created America’s sub-prime mortgage crisis by coercing lenders into throwing money at unqualified borrowers from modish minorities; in one notorious instance a $500,000 loan was advanced on the security of an unemployment benefit cheque. The Department of Justice controlled the US housing market for years, pursuing a proto-woke agenda, until inevitable collapse provoked a domino effect around the world.

Europe was no better. Astonishingly, the proponents of national interest and common sense won the Brexit war and during that long process of attrition the nature of the arrogant, entitled elitist clique whose authority had been overthrown was exposed to the light of day. It was not a pretty sight. During the Covid pandemic the political class clawed back some of its powers of social control, with a majority of the public acquiescing on health grounds, but that does not mean it has benefited in the long term. The patent disarray, divisions and mistakes of the political class further undermined its authority, although Boris Johnson’s effective vaccine roll-out gave the Conservatives temporary credibility.

“Si monumentum requiris…” The state of British society today is testimony to what must surely be the approaching demise of the current political system. The supposed principal pillar of the social order is the police. Today, Britain’s police are driving around in gaudily painted, cartoonish “rainbow cars”, emblazoned with the symbols of a political movement, obsessively searching for “non-crime hate incidents”. Why are the police pursuing non-crimes when the solution rate for actual crimes in England and Wales now stands at a shameful seven per cent?

Britain was better policed under Sir Robert Peel – arguably even under the Bow Street Runners. For generations, Britain has taken pride in the political neutrality of its armed forces and police; now it seems our police forces report to unelected Stonewall, rather than to the elected Home Secretary. It is part of a wider phenomenon of “wokeness” – cultural Marxism – representative only of a tiny minority, colonising our universities, media, boardrooms, national and local government, without benefit of a single ballot paper cast in its support.

Yet, as recently as five years ago, there were still Pollyannas prepared to dismiss the existence of the “deep state” as a conspiracy theory. The problem with this ideological infestation is that the ballot box no longer determines who runs our lives and on what political agenda. Take a striking example: Nigel Farage. His seemingly minor political party won a landslide victory in a European election and he has entered history as the man who, more than any other individual, extricated Britain from the European Union. Yet even he could not overcome the obstacles that excluded him from the House of Commons, in the permanent custody of the party machines.

Now, however, we are approaching the decisive moment, the tipping point that could see the total overthrow of the Oligarchy and its pseudo-democratic system. Insufficiently chastened by the Brexit experience and reassured by the increase in the overreach of the intruder state under cover of the pandemic emergency, the elites are about to essay their most audacious imposture yet – one that, if they persist, which the Brexit precedent strongly suggests they will do, could finally end their power.

“Net Zero” is the epitaph that will be engraved on the tombstone of the globalist political class across the developed world. In all their projections of entitlement and their previous aggressions against freedom, they have been sustained by a faith as fanatical as that of the Taliban: their religion is climate alarmism.

For this green hysteria has not been a normal scientific alert, followed by further investigation, government consultation and the development of a response, as in conventional policy-making. Rather, it has been a messianic movement, based on exaggeration, fear, extravagant claims subsequently discredited, subornation of sensation-hungry media, mobilisation of impressionable youth and the systematic dissemination of a Grande Peur as a method of political manipulation.

Every aspect of the escalation of the climate scare reveals its true character as a political campaign rather than a scientific investigation. This is betrayed by the concentration of authority over the issue within the totally politicised UN agency, the IPCC; the showering of favours on pro-alarmist scientists and the marginalisation of those refusing to endorse the full programme; the application of the emotive label “denier” to sceptics and the early declaration that the “science is settled” and proponents of global warming would no longer debate with opponents. IPCC locuta, causa finita.

Revealing, too, were the scenes, unprecedented since the Children’s Crusade, of world leaders deferring to a Scandinavian truant schoolgirl, the unfortunate victim of unconscionable fear-mongering by her teachers – did that not signal that something far from the rational or scientific was occurring? Greta Thunberg knows nothing about climate science, beyond the indoctrination she has received, just as climate “models” will produce what they have been programmed to deliver. Remember “Hide the decline”?

Of course, there is climate change; there always has been. Northumbrian wine was once highly popular and the Thames froze over in winter in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. We should be alert to climate changes that will require some modifications and some expenditure, and should respond in a localised and focused way. The problem is that we cannot, because the kernel of realistic concerns has been buried in an avalanche of politically-inspired hysteria designed to facilitate punitive taxation and a regression to pre-industrial standards of living, as desired by the fanatics of Extinction Rebellion.

The astonishing reality is that the leaders of the developed world are preparing to squander trillions of pounds on a crisis that has not been transparently analysed by genuinely neutral and qualified investigators, to assess its precise scale and nature. Far too many questions on issues such as the percentage of the greenhouse effect caused by CO2 are subject to partisan manipulation. Some alarmists claim that total atmospheric CO2, both natural and anthropogenic, totals 72.3 per cent of the overall greenhouse effect; sceptics point out that this calculation excludes water vapour, which accounts for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, and that when it is factored in, the CO2 figure falls to 3.6 per cent.

Such radical differences in assessment (the alarmist excuse for excluding water vapour from calculations is that it is “customary” to do so) demand a complete reality check on the objective truth behind these contending claims. If man-made CO2 is a negligible proportion of the effect creating climate change, then wrecking the global economy will not prevent it. Estimates of the proportion of CO2 that is man-made range from 3 to 4 per cent, to an alarmist 29 per cent. Are we supposed to bet the farm on such incoherent and contradictory contentions?

Looming ahead is the climactic event of the alarmist campaign – COP26. This will be the alarmist cult’s Triumph of the Will moment, a rally at which world leaders will compete to make hair-shirt commitments on behalf of their subjects, pre-eminent among them Boris (with an extra agenda to placate Her Indoors). Britain’s contribution to putative climate change is vanishingly small, but our rulers have already made it clear they intend to throw cash measured in trillions at this problem, real or imagined, to gain kudos from the global elite.

They may be entering the endgame. When a population traumatised by pandemic is forced to drive only unaffordable electric cars, sees its energy bills ratcheted up to levels that will condemn pensioners to hypothermia, is compelled to replace domestic gas boilers with discredited and expensive heat pumps, and is subjected to extortionate green taxes – all creating the ultimate aggression in a long train of impositions, there is a real prospect that the political class may overreach itself and provoke its ejection from power. If you doubt that, take another look at the scenes around Kabul airport; there you see the naked impotence of an effete globalist order –  a Confederacy of Dunces – bereft of credibility and no longer capable of survival.

But that is a microcosm of a much bigger issue. Just as the Covid pandemic dealt a fatal blow to globalism, already in retreat due to the rise of popular disillusionment across Europe and North America (“populism” in the lexicon of the legacy elites), by highlighting huge supply chain vulnerabilities, the actions of national governments were already setting limits to the ambitions of Big Tech.

Big Tech, until now, has represented the technological equivalent of the Big Bang, expanding universe theory. To the MIT graduate nerds in Silicon Valley, there seemed no limit to the expansion of ever more sophisticated social platforms and associated cyber outreach. Commercially, Silicon Valley shared the historical axiom of Prussian foreign policy: “We must grow greater, or we shall grow less.”

The first limitation on that ambition turned out to be geopolitical. Russia, for example, has developed its own online infrastructure, but without blocking Western platforms, preferring instead to tame them by threatening to throttle their speeds. Twitter, so cavalier in its treatment of an American president, meekly complied with 91 per cent of demands made of it by the Russian government to take down objectionable content. Russia is a more desirable market than Belarus; but geopolitics has deprived US-based Big Tech of the ultimate prize of expansion.

China, with a population of 939.8 million internet users, increasing exponentially (by 10 per cent last year alone), is completely closed to foreign Big Tech. All the Western household names – Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, YouTube, Google, Spotify and the rest – are unavailable to citizens of the People’s Republic, served instead by Wechat and Weibo. The masters of the universe in Silicon Valley can only look enviously over the fence at this forbidden fruit.

So, for the first time, Big Tech is beginning to realise the limits to its expansion. Although that still leaves it with a massive market and huge possibilities for developing further creative technology, as the Prussian maxim already quoted indicates, entities that have evolved an expansionary centrifugal force suffer an implosion of morale and motivation if that integral process is halted.

That, however, is probably the least of Big Tech’s proliferating problems. It now also has a leadership deficit. Across the business spectrum, it is a well-known phenomenon that the people who create and grow a business are often ill-suited to leading it in the changed environment that follows large-scale success. The android presentation of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, under interrogation by Senator Ted Cruz in Congress, exposed the public-relations disaster that is Big Tech’s interface with the public. Almost symbolically, Bill Gates is embroiled in divorce proceedings that have raised questions about his private life. There is a fin-de-siècle feel about Big Tech, a sense that the first generation of leaders are yesterday’s men. Increasingly, their judgement is in question.

Big Tech has made a potentially fatal mistake in politicising its platforms. The golden rule in business, from which not even such massive corporations are exempt, is to maximise the customer base by cultivating as many people as possible, while taking care not to alienate anyone. In defiance of that key axiom, Big Tech has joined other corporations in going woke. It has done so at a time when its primary, domestic market is split politically down the middle.

In the climate generated by today’s culture wars, identifying aggressively with either woke or conservative forces does not imply a risk of alienating, say, 10 per cent of the market: it means provoking hostility from half of all potential consumers. Since, in normal circumstances, that is not a sane strategy, it can only be assumed that Big Tech has been emboldened to behave in this way on the assumption that its quasi-monopolist status makes it invulnerable to consumer retaliation.

That is a rash assumption. Such provocation as silencing the President of the United States during a presidential election alerts both public and politicians to the emergence of a new power – an unelected entity – with more clout than the US government and a complete absence of democratic accountability. To the public, that is deeply disturbing. To politicians of all shades of opinion it represents a threat. Democrats might have been pleased to see Donald Trump gagged, but the paranoia inseparable from their profession would also sound a warning: next time it could be us.

At the consumer level, it provides an incentive and, potentially, investment to develop independent social media platforms – conceivably even a second internet. Technological advances that would have occurred at an indeterminate time in the future could be accelerated by the desire of consumers to free themselves from the oppressive political policing of Facebook, Twitter, et al. No matter that near-genius pointy-heads will still congregate in Silicon Valley, attracted by both the mythology and the remuneration. To keep Big Tech ahead of the game, that may not be enough.

If governments resolve to cut Big Tech down to size, to slice and dice it, those same technocrats will not be slow to jump ship and join the rising-star enterprises. Sceptics credibly point out that the US government does not have the political will to curb Big Tech, that we have heard it all before, that it would be economic suicide to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs of American growth, and that these massive corporations have armies of lawyers skilful enough to postpone any resolution of litigation to an early date in 2143.

There is much truth in that argument. And yet… We live in times when radical upheaval is commonplace and seemingly unassailable assumptions, such as Britain’s continuing membership of the European Union, crumble unexpectedly. In the American context, there is already an unusual feature looming over the future of Big Tech: cutting it down to size is the sole policy, in an unprecedentedly polarised Congress, that is an across-the-aisle issue.

For, although the Democrats benefited significantly from the partisan policing of social media platforms at the last presidential election, they are no friends of Big Tech. Early in the campaign, Elizabeth Warren launched a broad-based and ferocious attack on Big Tech that would have gladdened the heart of any embittered MAGA-hatted Trump supporter, making it a primary target of the woke Left.

“Today’s big tech companies have too much power,” wrote Warren, “too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.”

Among her proposed remedies was legislation to prohibit companies with an annual global revenue of $25bn or more from owning both the platform utility and any participants on that platform. Lawyers and techies could both mount robust – and lengthy – arguments against such measures. There seems little prospect of anything radical being done in the immediate future. But that is not the point.

The point is that we are entering a new era in which, for the first time, Big Tech is in a defensive posture, trying to justify its enormous wealth and power, based on monopolist practices. There is a discernible parallel with the EU and its Remainer supporters meeting very inadequately the challenge of having to justify its existence. Once that negative impression of Big Tech is established in the public mind, it is only a question of time until it is brought to book.

Antitrust law is the most lethal weapon in the armoury of American justice. Lawsuits against Facebook and Google may be regarded as just the opening passes in a bullfight that will last for years. The picadors may not even draw blood. But the climate has changed from an assumption of settled ascendancy to permanently challenged hegemony. Late last year, prosecutors from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and more than 40 US states, asked the courts to break up Facebook. Even the EU is stepping up regulatory legislation to control Big Tech.

All of this is the merest preliminary offensive, but it indicates how the wind blows. Big Tech has behaved with reckless arrogance, allowing the prejudices of Silicon Valley liberals to antagonise that half of American society that is its natural constituency. Conservatives originally took to the internet like ducks to water, recognising it then as a haven of free expression, unlike the mainstream media, in thrall to the liberal consensus. Today, they find themselves gagged and cut off from the politicians they follow, trapped in a tunnel of woke censorship.

Although the pandemic drove more consumers onto social media and provided record revenues to Big Tech, more lastingly it delivered a death blow to globalism, which is Big Tech’s natural environment. Supply chain vulnerabilities are now the chief concern of world business: the realisation, following the Covid-induced production slowdown, that if China were to absorb Taiwan a world shortage of semiconductors would paralyse electronic activity, has concentrated minds and discredited globalisation.

Above all, after a binge of state expenditure calibrated in trillions of dollars, the US government is hungry for tax revenue. When it looks at Big Tech, what does it see? A bunch of fat-cat corporations with combined revenues of £1.1 trillion and market capitalisation of $8 trillion, contributing derisory rates of taxation to Uncle Sam. Facebook, for example, over the decade 2009-2019, paid just 10.2 per cent of its profits in US taxes.

Big Tech has created a perfect storm that must eventually sweep it away. Alienation of consumers, business practices that invite a crusade of antitrust litigation, refusing to plough back a reasonable proportion of profit in taxation to benefit Americans, finding itself on the wrong side of the exploded globalist delusion, and facing a crisis of leadership (does Mark Zuckerberg look like the kind of charismatic leader who could put a human face on the beleaguered Silicon Valley oligarchy?), the cyber-Titans are in terminal decline. Their attorneys will be able to postpone the reckoning for a long time, but during the war of attrition Big Tech will lose its market credibility, as it begins its long journey into night.

Unlike some very early saints about whom we know hardly anything – for example, there are at least two candidates who could be St Valentine – Ireland’s patron saint, St Patrick, is well established in history. We know a lot about him, or should do, partly from his own writings, which are still in print today.

The first surprising thing about St Patrick is that he was not Irish. He was a Roman living in Britain, probably in Wales. His parents were named Calpurnius and Conchessa, both Romans, probably well-to-do and Christians, as were most Roman citizens by the time of Patrick’s birth around 385AD. As a child he could have expected a fairly comfortable and uneventful life. But the opposite turned out to be the case.

As a boy of 14 he was kidnapped by Irish pirates and taken to pagan Ireland where he was sold as a slave. In Ireland the new young slave was put to work herding sheep on Slemish Mountain in County Antrim. After six years, when he was about 20, he had a dream in which God told him to journey to the coast where he would be able to leave Ireland. He obeyed the dream and at the coast found some sailors who took him back to Britain where he was reunited with his family.

But he did not remain with them. During his time in Ireland, a country dominated by pagan Druids, Patrick had grown very devout, clinging to his Christian faith. A few years after his return to Britain he had a vision in which the people of Ireland called him to come to them and convert them.

So, Patrick went to Europe, studied for the priesthood, was ordained a bishop and set out for Ireland where he arrived at Slane on 25 March 433. He got a hostile reception from the pagan priests, but he defiantly lit an Easter fire on the Hill of Slane and he destroyed the Druids’ most sacred idol on the Plain of Adoration in County Cavan. Thereafter, he spent the remaining years of his life converting Ireland into a completely Christian country.

St Patrick died at Saul, in County Down, on 17 March – now his feast day – in 461. The traditions relating to him are many and colourful. The fame of the shamrock derives from the fact St Patrick used it, when preaching, to illustrate the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity – three persons in one God: three leaves, one plant. But the shamrock isn’t Ireland’s national symbol: that is the harp. The tradition at the end of the festivities on St Patrick’s Day of “drowning the shamrock” means taking the shamrock from your lapel and putting it into the last drink.

The cult of the shamrock in recent centuries encouraged people to wear green. But St Patrick’s historical colour was actually blue, like the ribbon of the Knights of the Order of St Patrick. Nowadays, however, people celebrating St Patrick’s Day often make a point of wearing green, eating green food and even drinking green beer. In Chicago on St Patrick’s Day the river is dyed green for several hours.

St Patrick might be regarded as the patron saint of pub customers, since legend claims he once caught an innkeeper serving short measures and chastised him severely. Certain popular toasts drunk on St Patrick’s day include: “May the roof above us never fall in, and may we friends beneath it never fall out.”

What did Patrick himself drink? Unfortunately, though he brought Christianity to Ireland, the Irish had to wait another thirteen centuries for the arrival of Guinness. But there was no shortage of beer in Ireland in the time of St Patrick. It was brewed from barley and, less frequently, from wheat. Among the most common artefacts regularly discovered by archaeologists in Ireland are malting kilns, dating back to the beginning of the Christian era, i.e. the time of St Patrick.

The food it washed down in the 5^th century was healthy and balanced. The commonest fare was cereals and dairy foods: milk of various kinds, curds, butter and different kinds of cheeses. Porridge was widely eaten and the richer dishes included salmon, trout, eel, as well as pork and other meats. Meals were flavoured with watercress, wild garlic and other plants, eaten raw or put into broth.

By the 20^th century a St Patrick’s Day meal was likely to consist of bacon and cabbage. Over the centuries St Patrick’s Day developed more traditions. Apart from its religious observance, the first celebration of St Patrick’s Day took place in America, in Boston, in 1737. The biggest St Patrick’s Day celebration nowadays is in New York: there are six times as many Irish people in America as in Ireland, though Dublin still puts on a pretty good show. Sydney, Australia, is another massive St Patrick’s Day venue.

Probably the most famous legend associated with St Patrick is that he banished all the snakes from Ireland. Irish people telling this story like to hedge their bets by saying: “There have been no snakes in Ireland since the time of St Patrick.” That is quite true; but most scientists strongly suspect there may have been no snakes in Ireland before the time of St Patrick either.

The reason we know so much about St Patrick is that he wrote an autobiography called The Confession, narrating the events of his life and his spiritual development. Few saints are more loved by the people they once ministered to and whether or not St Patrick drove snakes out of Ireland, he ended the power of the Druids, who were accused by the Romans of performing human sacrifices – which had to be good news if you were on the roster for next Solstice.

So, regardless of your nationality, raise your glasses and drink a toast to Ireland’s much-loved patron saint.

It would be wrong to represent the Cold War as a conflict between Communism and Capitalism, as though free markets were, like Marxism, an ideology. The fact that capital acquired the “-ism” suffix should not delude us into regarding it as an ideology, alongside communism, fascism, conservatism, etc. Capitalism is not an ideology but a mechanism for wealth creation, pure and simple. It can exist under a variety of non-totalitarian political systems. The Cold War was a contest between Communism and Democracy.

Marxism, in contrast to capitalism, was an ideology that, as it lost practical credibility, relied increasingly on the quasi-religious fervour it inspired in its more fanatical followers. It is now an empirically discredited ideology or, in other words, a superstition. Its failure has partially been masked, however, by the extent to which it gained control of many of the commanding heights in Western society.

While Margaret Thatcher was promoting free-market principles in Britain, the shelves of university libraries groaned under the weight of Marxist claptrap housed there. University academics sulked in their tents while the world around them was transformed: it was independent think tanks that drove the Thatcher revolution. The volumes of Marxist apologetics still clutter universities while academics, now claiming the weasel identity of “Marxians”, continue to minister, mainly in a cultural context, to a druidic cult the world has left behind.

Today, however, Marxism is suddenly chic and Jeremy Corbyn is its prophet. Alarmed commentators are warning of the dangers of a Corbyn government. They are behind the times: there is grave peril to Britain’s interests even from a Corbyn opposition. Financial institutions are debating whether to keep their operations based in London or up sticks in fear of Brexit. In many cases the decision must be finely balanced and vulnerable to pressure from any unwelcome development.

Then along comes Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and level-pegging in opinion polls with Theresa May’s government, and delivers the most menacing anti-capitalist rant since Lenin addressed his fans at the Finland Station. To undecided financial institutions, that sends the message that London is an inhospitable venue for reasons that go beyond Brexit. Corbyn is repelling financial services from London with his vision of converting Britain into New Venezuela. He could crash and burn at the next general election and still have inflicted severe damage on Britain without ever becoming prime minister.

The instinct of informed commentators is to dismiss Corbyn’s attacks on free markets and free press as the ravings of an economic illiterate whose prejudices are the consequence of watching too many grainy Eisenstein films in polytechnic lecture theatres, his fiscal skills honed on an abacus during seminars at the Diane Abbott School of Economics. That is an accurate enough personal assessment, but it dangerously ignores two factors: some of Corbyn’s accusations are true and they carry an enormous resonance with the mass of the British public.

Consider what he said: “We will take decisive action to make finance the servant of industry not the masters of us all.” He added: “We need a fundamental rethink of whom finance should serve and how it should be regulated.” That will have struck a strong chord across Britain with the many victims of banks’ cynical dealings. It is not just snowflakes punching the air in student unions who are enthused by this, but also their parents and grandparents.

After the shock of 2008 many of us said capitalism urgently needed to reform itself, to re-forge its partnership with virtue, a symbiosis prescribed by Adam Smith. Smith wrote two best-sellers: not only The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the precepts of the two books being regarded by Smith as complementary. Contemporary capitalism has bastardised the principles set out in the former work and ignored the latter.

Capitalism should have been radically reformed in 2009 and the years following. Instead, the cracks were papered over, leaving the whole structure vulnerable to attack by the Corbynistas. Many banks and other corporations far beyond the financial services industry hid behind PC virtue signalling initiatives; some of their exaggerated “mission statements” have an almost cultish ring to them. This is a cosmetic exercise. It is no consolation to customers that the institution that is bleeding them white has 30 per cent female board membership. The reform that was wanted was in the organization’s financial ethics.

Even the virtue signalling reflects the arrogance and excessive outreach of corporations, epitomised by the assembled plutocracy at Davos aspiring to remould the world according to its own prejudices. It is time for the corporate world to get out of the business of social engineering, of which George Soros is the most egregious example, and put its own house in order.

If the financial services industry had the slightest self-awareness it would recognize that massive bankers’ bonuses are a provocation in an Internet-linked world whose denizens have, from birth, been brainwashed with witless notions of “equality”. Tall poppy syndrome rules Twitter. Every tabloid report of a banker’s inflated bonus or pension is worth tens of thousands of votes to Jeremy Corbyn. The tired old, supercilious justifications are fatuous: it is heresy to interfere with market forces (nonsense, the market doesn’t award bonuses, self-interested remuneration committees do); talent will go elsewhere (perhaps, until elsewhere catches up with a MeToo wave of remuneration realism).

Politically, the danger comes less from investment banks than the high street, since that is the sector that impacts directly on voters. Since the 1970s banks have perfected the art of lending not quite enough to SMEs, leaving them under-capitalized and doomed to failure, at which point the bank, after years of high interest returns, pulls the plug. There is a considerable constituency of families, ex-employees, friends, etc of victims of the banks, eager to wreak revenge. The list of delinquencies is endless: irresponsible mortgage sales, PPI, sharp-practice bank charges, poor customer services – it all adds up, fuelling public hatred of banks. Regulation? FSA, FCA, who is impressed?

There is a resemblance to the immigration crisis, which tipped the balance for Brexit. Hatred of the financial sector could swing an election for Corbyn. He has found a potentially winning theme. He has turned a nakedly Marxist platform based on old Trotskyite caricatures of fat men with top hats and cigars into a potential 21^st-century election winner.

Capitalism is on the ropes and the count is far advanced. Can it revert to the principles of Adam Smith and reinvent itself as a vehicle of prosperity for all? Or is the time too short and the system too corrupt? And what part, other than the fatuous imposition of quotas on boardrooms, will the government play in the regeneration and popularisation of capitalism? With Corbyn at the gates, we shall not have long to wait to find out.

On 23 June 2016 Britain voted to leave the European Union. With 17.4 million people voting for Brexit, this was the largest public support ever registered in British history for any course of action. Chamberlain had a lesser mandate for declaring war on Germany. Unlike a general election, with a mélange of policies jumbled in rag-bag manifestoes, it was a national decision on a single issue. Nobody voted for a so-called “soft” Brexit – the term had not gained currency when the suffrages were cast. The nation voted to leave the EU.

In doing so, the British people defied the elites who were horrified to see their grip on unaccountable power slipping. After their initial stupefaction, they quickly launched a ferocious campaign, deploying all their considerable resources, to frustrate the will of the electorate. The untutored public had fallen into the error of making a decision unsanctioned by the establishment, thus departing from democracy, as defined by the ruling oligarchy, and descending into “populism”. The counter-offensive was swift and conducted on many fronts.

The Conservative Party elected a Remainer as its new leader and she appointed uber-Remainer Philip Hammond to the most important Cabinet position, as Chancellor. Other prominent Old Believers such as Amber Rudd occupy Cabinet posts. What happened to the doctrine of collective Cabinet responsibility? Under the disingenuous mantra of “respecting” the 48 per cent of Remain voters the Cabinet was transformed from a vehicle of government into a disorderly student debating society.

Following any general election that produces a government with an overall majority, how many Cabinet posts are customarily allocated by the new administration to its defeated opponents? It is even more indefensible, when a massive plebiscite has mandated policy on a single issue, to award senior Cabinet posts to vociferous opponents of that policy. Opponents of Government policy have always been required to resign from Cabinet under the collective responsibility doctrine.

From that dysfunctional base, the unravelling of Brexit proceeded apace. Firstly, the Remain-minded Government elected, quite unnecessarily, to leave the EU via Article 50, the obstacle course devised by Lord Kerr of Kinlochard to obstruct, debilitate and punish any country that might have the effrontery to attempt to escape from the Brussels gulag. In a recent piece here on Reaction, Iain Martin gave a chilling insight into the mentality of Lord Kerr and his prediction that Britain would “come to heel” for the EU.

It is not strictly correct to term it a prediction, since the British establishment has spent the 19 months since the Brexit vote coming to heel at Brussels’ behest. The plutocracy was mobilized to bring judicial activism into play to give Parliament additional opportunities to hobble Brexit. The EU, from the first, treated Britain as some kind of inferior reprobate against whom it had endless claims. It suddenly emerged that the United Kingdom, a net donor to the EU for 44 years, “owed” Brussels around €100bn. This claim was initially greeted with outrage even by some Remainers, but conceded by our supine government and negotiators by an osmotic process whereby £40bn is already on promise to Brussels; be sure it will not stop there. Similarly, the “transition” period to avoid a so-called “cliff edge” was magicked out of the blue, provoked incredulity, and is now accepted policy.

To every imperious demand and accompanying insults our rulers’ response is to tug the forelock and submit. The problem is not just that Brexit negotiations are dragging – they have gone into reverse. Membership of the Single Market and Customs Union was formally ruled out a year ago, now it is back on the table, treated almost as a given by many Remainers. To be in the Single Market is to be in the European Union. Membership is being presented as a pearl of great price: the reality is that exports of goods of the 12 founder nations of the Single Market have been 14.6 per cent lower than they would have been had they continued to grow at the same rate as in pre-Single Market days and UK exports to the other founder members have been 22.3 per cent lower.

So the fabrication and fantasy go on: a return to civil war in Ireland if real Brexit goes ahead, dire warnings from the CBI (the people who forecast the end of civilization as we knew it if we failed to join the euro currency) and, leading the banshee shrieks of “We’re a’ doomed”, Her Majesty’s Treasury.

The Chancellor promised the globalists at Davos there would be only “very modest” changes in Britain’s relationship with the EU. In the same week Treasury officials were conceding that the previously fiddled figures, produced as part of Project Fear on the eve of the referendum and now hilariously discredited, were no longer applicable. New fiddled figures have been produced to discredit Brexit.

Just as criticism of pro-Brexit judges was condemned as “disgraceful”, denunciation of civil servants has triggered the usual pompous pieties about “our dedicated, completely neutral civil service” from the usual suspects. Cue out-to-grass mandarin at lunch: “Do you realize, in Victorian times, just 42 men governed five trillion Indians – all Wykehamists, of course (the officials, not the Indians)…” Zzzz… To anyone with any experience of the civil service machinery for frustrating government such cant is beyond ludicrous.

If you believe the mandarins are neutral on Brexit, one wonders what your position is on the existence of Santa Claus question. The whole Venetian Oligarchy, as Disraeli called the establishment that has ruled Britain since 1688, has worked to defeat Brexit. All of our institutions are compromised to the point of irrelevance. Recently Paul Marshall, chairman of hedge fund Marshall Wace, said of the Bank of England: “It has now come to embody anti-Brexit bias to such a degree that it endangers its credibility as an institution.”

Our supposed leaders have surrendered to Brussels because they want to surrender: the collective establishment mindset is irredeemably Remainer. Brexit has been walked back to the point where it seems likely 29 March, 2019 will be the date when we resume full membership of and contributions to the EU, but without voting rights.

The explosion of public anger that would provoke, and its consequences, are incalculable. Voters gave clear instructions to their government. If that government cannot or will not deliver and neither will the opposition, the current system is not fit for purpose.

MPs recently voted to vacate the Palace of Westminster during refurbishment around 2025. If they do not deliver a clean Brexit they may be leaving rather earlier than that and on a permanent basis.

The liberal left took refuge in contrived derision, claiming the incident was too trivial to be taken seriously. Nobody actually said “This is political incorrectness gone mad,” but that was the tenor of the reaction. This, from people who have spent the past decades professionally taking offence at affronts real and imagined of microscopic significance, lacked conviction. Nobody knows better than the PC left that the more trivial an issue is, the more important it is to police it, if social control is to be maintained. Now the boot is on the other foot and it is likely to remain there.

Christians have become the one sector of society against which it is legitimate, even meritorious, to discriminate. They have seen their religion marginalized, its symbols and festivals airbrushed out of British culture, and suddenly they decided they had had enough. At first Cadbury owned up to its motives: “We invite people from all faiths and none to enjoy our seasonal treats.” Clearly, it feared the word “Easter” would offend people of other faiths, so it had to be downplayed. But what if that offended Christians? Who cares?

As the backlash against both Cadbury and the National Trust gathered strength, supported even by the Prime Minister, the company changed its tune and added the words “this Easter” to its web-page headline “Join the Cadbury egg hunts”. On this issue Cadbury had previous: last year the company was criticised for removing the word “Easter” from the front of its Easter eggs’ packaging and re-labelling them “Milk Chocolate Eggs”. Undeterred, this year the traditional “Easter Egg Trail” was changed to the “Great British Egg Hunt” with the complicity of the National Trust.

This apparent storm in an eggcup signals a cultural change. Post-Brexit there is a new mood of zero tolerance for PC aggression. Next winter it will go ill with the first local council that bans a school Nativity play, carol service or religiously themed Christmas decorations. Winterval is over. Post-Brexit and post-Trump the PC Terror no longer commands the field in the culture war. The assorted cranks and social justice warriors who have so long imposed their deranged dogmas on the public are at last being seriously challenged.

So are their court jesters, the right-on leftist stand-up comedians. Viewed objectively, most stand-up comedy is as funny as root-canal treatment sans anaesthetic. The new generation of comedians, fostered by the BBC, regards didacticism – preaching the PC message – as more important than entertainment. Now Marcus Brigstock, having ventured beyond the safe space of a BBC studio with its audience of metropolitan liberal clones into real England on tour, is dismayed that when he launched into his 20 minutes of anti-Brexit abuse, people walked out every night, an experience he described as “unsettling”. The same reaction is reported by others of the liberal “comedy” community who have journeyed north of Watford.

Clearly those misguided audiences have been influenced by “fake news”. That term is much in circulation post-Brexit and Trump. When the liberal elites fabricated and spun news unchallenged, that was bona fide information. But now, new platforms have enabled conservatives to expose everything the liberal establishment tried to suppress or misrepresent, so that is called “fake news”, being disseminated in a “post-truth” (i.e. post-liberal monopoly) society. If you are concerned about being deceived by fake news, most liberals would direct you to the BBC, the iconic purveyor of impartial information.

Take the corporation’s coverage of Brexit in the six months following the referendum. Statistical logging by News-watch of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme’s Business News segment from 24 June to 22 December 2016 illustrates Auntie’s impartial coverage of Brexit issues. Of 366 guest speakers on the programme, 192 (52.5 per cent) had a negative view of Brexit, just 60 (16.3 per cent) were pro-Brexit and 114 (31 per cent) were neutral. So, three times more Brexit pessimists than optimists were invited onto the programme by the BBC. Most significantly, only 10 (less than 3 per cent) Business News interviews were conducted with supporters of EU withdrawal.

That’s more like it: the good old-fashioned tell-the-plebs-what-to-think style of news-mongering, denying the oxygen of publicity to the untutored, if majority, Brexit view. When 70 MPs wrote to Lord Hall, BBC director-general, complaining about extravagant bias in Brexit coverage, he majestically replied: “Impartiality has always been the cornerstone of BBC News. It remains so today.” The director-general added: “We go to great lengths to ensure that we balance our coverage and address all issues from a wide range of different perspectives. It is one of the reasons why the public trusts the BBC more than any other source of news.” It’s the way he tells them.

More aggressively, Nick Robinson, former BBC political editor, wrote in the Radio Times: “The referendum is over. The duty we broadcasters had to ‘broadly balance’ the views of the two sides is at an end.” That sounds as if the pestilential 2.9 per cent of Leavers, with their potential to utter fake news about the EU, may soon be eliminated from the Today programme’s output. Robinson’s claim, though at least more honest than Lord Hall’s insult to listeners’ intelligence, reflects the smugness engendered by yet another renewal of the unreformed and unreformable BBC’s charter. Everyone who values access to the truth has a duty to work in the coming years to ensure that charter renewal is the last. The BBC is not fit for purpose.

The significance of these and similar recent events, from Easter eggs to floundering comedians, is that Brexit is not an event but a process. Departure from the EU will not mark the end, but the beginning, of the long-abused British public’s reclamation of its country. The political class, deprived of its EU cover, will have to take ownership of its own domestic misrule. Then it will be judged by a public which increasingly looks like a hanging jury.