An important article on Free Speech in the Daily Telegraph by Simon Heffer… (You can hear a ‘but’ coming…)

Martin Webster

Simon Heffer has an interesting article in The Daily Telegraph, “George Orwell’s chilling prediction has come true – it’s time to make a stand. The censorship of books, statues and history is an attempt to eradicate the past and enforce a single point of view”. It might be helpful to read the excerpts below first before returning to my commentary.

The points Heffer makes about the destruction of free speech resulting from the rewriting of Roald Dahl’s works are sound, as far as they go — but if he and his ‘Right Wing’ Tory kind wish me to express sympathy for the plight in which they now find themselves, I can only quote a phrase coined by the first Chairman of the National Front, A.K. Chesterton: “The level of the Thames will not rise appreciably as a result of any tears I may shed.”

Roald Dahl

Heffer and his kind of ‘right wing’ Tory believe that mass Coloured Immigration has been not been good for our country. But he and they have never revealed the cause of what I regard as a disaster — who was behind it — nor did they campaign with their might and main to halt and reverse it.

On a slightly digressive topic, he and his kind never wanted Britain to join the EEC — later the EU — and whined about our membership of it. But it took a brave non-Tory, Nigel Farage, then leading the United Kingdom Independence Party, to get the Brexit ball rolling. Thereafter, it took a sequence of chaotic Tory administrations to fumble the ball — whether by incompetence or deliberate slyness masquerading as incompetence we may never know.

Thanks to the Tories, a part of the United Kingdom — Northern Ireland — is faced with the European Court having the final say on trade between itself and all other parts of the UK. This is not, as Boris Johnson promised, “getting Brexit done”. His Brexit was not “Oven-Ready”. The full restoration of British national sovereignty may yet — and not for the first time — rest on an adamantine “NO!” from Ulster Unionists. (End of digression.)

What did Heffer and his kind do to oppose the imposition of the Race Relations Act and its subsequent increasingly oppressive anti-free speech amendments? Nothing. That Act was the start of the post-WW2 slide towards the suppression of rights and liberties hard-won by our ancestors over centuries.

The first draft of Race Relations Act was devised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1950s under the working title ‘Group Libel Bill’. All subsequent amendments were drafted by Jewish lawyers connected with the Board and pushed on to the legislative agenda of whichever party was in office, not only by Jewry’s massive media power but also by senior Home Office civil servants such as Neville Nagler who, on retirement, became CEO of — yes! — the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

Did we ever hear about any of this from Heffer and his kind, who must have known? No. To speak up against the anti-free speech iniquities of the Race Relations Act legislation would have been deemed to be “anti-semitic” simply because organised Jewry was so hugely associated with its promotion — another essential fact it was crucial for careerists not to mention!

Apologists for Tory cowards plead that to have campaigned for the free speech of “Right Wing extremists” would have destroyed the career of a chap like Heffer, a clever, talented and industrious man.

No column in the Telegraph. No editorships with that group or with the Mail group. No professorship at the University of Buckingham, (a “private university” stuffed with Jews). No publishers like Weidenfeld and Nicolson willing to publish your books. No lovely home near Saffron Walden in the bliss of rural Essex.

As I write this, a phrase pops into my head: “…All this can be yours! All you have to do is bow down and adore me!”

So Heffer and his kind went rather quiet when patriots — some of them, perhaps, rough diamonds — got pulled into court for “incitement to racial hatred”. These ‘Right Wing’ Tories sought to justify the abandonment of their free speech ‘principles’ by attacking “Right Wing extremism”. Jewry patted them on the head and gave them another biscuit.

Thus the slide down the slope to outright oppression accelerated.

And now — mercy me! — Heffer and his kind find themselves oppressed by the very same forces which over the decades since WW2 have worked to criminalise and crush the free speech of “right wing extremists”.

Only a day or so ago we learned that these forces of oppression now include the government (Home Office/MI5) organised security outfit Prevent, set up to steer young people away from terrorist activities. Prevent has issued to its agents lists of books, films, TV programmes, journalists and the like which only a few years ago were part of Britain’s mainstream cultural fabric. Interest in any of them nowadays must be regarded as an indicator of terrorist proclivities. Reports must be made to the authorities.

I wonder if Simon Heffer is on that list? He did, after all, write a far from condemnatory biography of Enoch Powell 25 years ago. Say no more! Nudge!-nudge! — wink!-wink! I’ll tip-toe to the telephone straight away.

Thus far I have only referred to “Simon Heffer and his kind”. Who are “his kind”? The most telling example I can give of the kind of person in that company is Andrew Roberts, to be precise: Lord Andrew Roberts. He is a long-standing toady to Jewry, though likes to be thought of as ‘right wing’. Early in his career as a historian he held at least one private lunch at his Chelsea home for the late Ian Smith, the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia.

As Roberts’ career progressed he found it expedient to make an attack on the late Dowager Lady Birdwood (Jane Birdwood) in the London Evening Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’ because she quoted extracts from the last chapter of his book Eminent Churchillians.

This chapter recounted how the Conservative Party in the 1950s stifled the efforts by Cyril Osborne MP to get the issue of Coloured Immigration to the UK debated in the House of Commons. Roberts described how Osborne’s efforts were crushed by the Establishment’s resort to blackmail, intimidation and bribery. Roberts ended his account with the words:

“… and so the greatest demographic change to the population of Britain in a thousand years was achieved without any democratic ratification whatever…”

Yet in his comments to the Evening Standard he found it necessary to call Jane Birdwood “a danger” simply for quoting his words —  which by then I expect he wished he had never written — which establish that the multi-racial society was imposed on Britain without any democratic legitimacy through the deployment of conspiracy.

Roberts’ elevation to the House of Lords must surely indicate that he performed a sufficient number of Acts of Contrition to secure the forgiveness of those who must not be offended.

Background to the above photo from Choice.

After the National Front and I parted company in December 1983 (I had been the party’s National Activities Organiser since 1969) I set up a small typesetting/graphics business. In about 1987 Jane Birdwood asked me to type-set/design her occasionally-published newspaper Choice. I soon discovered that due to her advancing years she wanted me to write most of the articles as well.

In late 1994 I picked-up on the publication of Andrew Roberts’ Eminent Churchillians and in the review of it I quoted from his text which exposed the fraud perpetrated on the British electorate in the matter of suppressing a debate in the House of Commons about Coloured Immigration. The review praised Roberts for revealing those facts.

Because Choice had always been an anti-Jewish paper, its praise for anybody — even if not on a specifically Jewish topic — was always pounced-on  by the Jews and, as in the case of Roberts, they ‘leaned on’ on the person concerned for the ‘crime’ of doing/writing/saying anything that Choice would find praiseworthy.

They clearly got on to Roberts big-time. Steward Steven, who was Jewish, the then editor of the London Evening Standard, made room in the paper’s ‘Diary’ for Roberts to distance himself from Jane and subject her to gratuitous abuse. She was then about 88 years of age.

Extracted quotes from Heffer Telegraph article: 

[with, towards the end, one or two apposite comments from myself…]

[snip]

“What is it about the past that some young people find unbearable? After all, no one is expecting them to live through it. Indeed, some of us who did find the present infinitely worse. …”

[snip]

“…Sadly, it goes far beyond children’s books, and indeed books generally: films, statues, television programmes, indeed, if they are allowed into the public arena at all. Are we really so delicate? Why tolerate this lunacy?…”

[snip]

“…We have arrived at our own endless present, or Year Zero, where the record, historical and otherwise, is readily falsified. Its rules are designed to prevent what that arrogant and self-regarding minority who feel obliged to police and alter the thoughts of the rest of us consider the ultimate crime: giving offence.

“Most of us have spent our lives encountering things that could, if we wallowed in self-regard, offend us deeply. We were trained to ignore them and get on with life. Now, suddenly, we cannot be trusted to do that.

“Therefore books, art, films and television programmes must be censored or suppressed, statues taken down as though the lives they commemorate never happened, streets and buildings renamed to eradicate thought criminals. Like Pol Pot, that minority feels a moral duty to erase the past to attain Year Zero. Sadly for us, their main qualifications are an overbearing self-righteousness, a profound ignorance of history and a deep misunderstanding of the idea of liberty that few of us share.…”

[snip]

“…a section of society with high responsibility for preserving freedom of speech and discourse – the trade of publishing – now willingly sacrifices its historic principles, for which people once risked prison, to censor books. …”

[snip]

“…People like an argument and in a free society deserve to be allowed one: they don’t want some affronted youth telling them they can’t read, learn and dispute something, like the Victorians covering up their table legs.

“Prof Biggar’s book committed the crime of stating a simple truth: that the British Empire did good things as well as bad. The hostility with which such a contention is met today is deranged: it is literally undebatable.

“Indeed, a prime motivation in wiping out the past and creating the endless present is the determination of a young generation of British people – ironically almost all white, and expensively educated – to make their fellow Britons hate themselves for their heritage.”

[snip]

“The climate has changed violently, precisely because we have allowed it to.”

[MW: Yes indeed! You and your kind allowed this change by your silence when “Far-Right Extremists” were in the dock!]

[snip]

“They inflict their control freakery on their elders, who are equally terrified to gainsay them.”

[MW: Yes — people such as you; people who put ‘respectability’ and personal career first and the survival of our race and nation nowhere.]

“If we don’t make a stand, it will end with destroying our democratic right to liberty, and sooner than we imagine.”

[MW: When have you ever ‘made a stand’ when it really counted? The time for making purely intellectual / political “stands” is at an end because the likes of you funked it when such stands could have been effective. Now we face, as Enoch Powell predicted ‘…The Tiber foaming with much blood…’.]

This post was first published in Professor Kevin MacDonald's The Occidental Observer on February 26th 2023. We are grateful for his permission to re-post.

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