Day 14: Northwick to Stoke Gifford

Vets

In 2017 I met a veteran in Bulawayo who was more or less destitute. He was living on a meal a day yet had served the UK and Empire all his military career. And he was dying of prostate cancer, and he couldn’t afford treatment. The services charities were more or less skint.  So what to do?

I asked General Lord Richards (David) whether he would assist if I set up a committee to raise money. He agreed. I then asked Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former Foreign Secretary, if he would act as chair. He agreed.

We had a stroke of fortune in that Penny Mordaunt was Secretary of State for DFID, and when we approached her, she agreed that DFID would fund the operation in partnership with the services’ charities.

So it has come to pass that over 6,000 veterans across the Commonwealth now have two meals a day.

In Zimbabwe, we have established a basic medical programme whereby all the veterans get not only two meals a day but also free pills for diabetes, heart complaints, nervous disorders, and cancer scans.

Three cheers for Richards, Rifkind and Mordaunt.

All is Vanity

Upper-class individuals care a lot about status. Up until the 1980s, they indicated their social standing by owning expensive goods such as a Maserati. However, luxury cars are now more accessible, so proving innate superiority has become much harder. How can they broadcast their high social status to the masses? A clever solution has been found – “luxury beliefs”.

These are today’s new vanity plays, whose sole purpose is to boost the speaker’s reputation in the eyes of listeners. Those who do this know they are insulated from the pernicious effects of the drivel they are touting. 

So, when you hear someone supporting drug legalisation, open borders, defunding the police or permissive sexual norms; or using terms like “white privilege”, they are engaging in status display. “We belong to the upper classes,” they are declaring – but they never face the social consequences of what they are promoting.

For example, when you hear someone bewailing the effects of police “stop and search”, you can be sure they don’t have to worry about their own child being struck with a zombie knife. Another will bad mouth capitalism whilst living on a fat state pension. And I know a young Harrovian who advocates the joys of communism – to be sure, he knows nothing of the reality of the gulags, and I don’t think he’s even read Animal Farm. All he’s doing is demonstrating his luxury belief. Then come the Scottish “hate crime laws”. There is no better example of the consequences of this nonsense, for it won’t be the “progressive” political classes who reap the consequences, but rather the poor souls existing on benefits in the slums of Edinburgh and Glasgow.     

“Luxury beliefs” links naturally with “virtue signalling”. The expression of such views is not to fix a problem but rather to demonstrate how “progressive” the speaker is.

The most damaging luxury belief is the notion of sweeping away the very idea of the stable family. Socialist “experts” claim the traditional family is old hat and pretend that children are bound to thrive in all types of care. But this is rubbish – most mandarins and thinkers live in stable relationships, but those at the bottom on the ladder don’t and their families continue to deteriorate. In 2007, when we started the Oxford Community Emergency Foodbank, families were usually a traditional unit. In 2024, it’s rare to see a child raised by two parents.

Those who are focusing on smartphones and devices as the reason for the misery of the young should look instead at the two-plus generations of unmarried parenting. Today, divorce has been normalised and few couples are prepared to “hang on in there” for the sake of the children – the only thing that matters is one’s own happiness.

The result? We are seeing Zoomers in their twenties raised by a single parent – who were also raised by a single parent. The mandarins have snipped the golden thread of stability that links one generation to the next and are instead passing on chronic instability. It’s hard to turn the clock back – and I doubt even Starmer knows where to look for the key.

Poet Philip Larkin wrote:

“Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself”.

Leader of the Free World

The BBC’s John Sopel wrote that it’s a shame Americans speak English because otherwise we would understand that America is a foreign country.

It’s difficult not to notice – despite all the other worries we face, such as the guy with the funny haircut and bombs in North Korea, Putin’s ghastly war and the miseries in Gaza and Iran – that the leader of the free world, his finger poised on the nuclear button, has the intellectual capacity of a pickled gherkin. And another thing – people in the US don’t seem outraged when the Donald announces the legal system has been rigged against him. Why? US judges are elected and have to please voters along party lines. Al Capone would have loved it.

How can the USA, supposedly the greatest democracy in the world, pretend to be a role model to, say, Zimbabwe?