Education: reasserting our culture and values.

One of the curious things about education is that, having experienced it at first hand, everyone believes themselves to be an expert on it. This is particularly damaging in the case of politicians, whose record of interference in education during the post-war era has offered a prime example of the dead hand of the state going where it has no business to be. Meanwhile, those who supposedly are the experts – those who teach – have effectively presided over the decline of their profession through decades of mistaken ideology and a belief that their profession continues to offer the last resting place for the Marxist spirit of 1968.

It is difficult for us to imagine now, but there was a time not so long ago when our education system was largely independent of government. The universities, in particular, were held to be self-governing communities of scholars, which is the model of the university we inherited from medieval times. At Oxford, there was not even any formal government instrument that permitted the University to grant degrees; simply the acknowledgement that it had done so since time immemorial and should continue in a similar manner. The history of our schools begins with the grammar schools, established by the Church, and from these our great independent schools developed from collegiate foundations – Eton, Winchester, Radley – which were both closely allied to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and, because they were boarding schools, could accept their pupils without geographical restriction.

Grammar schools have been much in the news recently and it is worth analysing some of the motives behind the debate on them and its wider context within our education system. I must declare a personal interest here: I was myself educated at what was at that time the top co-educational grammar school in the country. It was an academically highly selective school that was tremendously successful and which gave its pupils an outstanding education.

The history of state intervention in the grammar schools begins in 1869 under Gladstone, with the Endowed Schools Act. This Act followed upon the Public Schools Act of the previous year and proposed to restructure the endowments of the grammar schools so that they were more evenly distributed around the country and so that there was better provision for girls’ education. The Act changed many of the grammar schools which had been endowed to offer free classical education to boys into independent co-educational schools teaching a broader curriculum. The 1907 Education (Administrative Provisions) Act then introduced a requirement that all schools aided by government grant must reserve 25% of their places as free scholarships for students from the public elementary schools. This reform effectively brought about the grammar school in its twentieth-century guise.

It is with the 1944 Education Act that we see a designated role for the grammar schools as part of the tripartite system proposed, under which they would educate the top 25% of pupils. At this point there were around 1,200 state funded grammar schools, including not only those of ancient foundation but many which had been founded in the Victorian era, with its strong emphasis on self-improvement. In addition, there were 179 direct grant grammar schools, at which between 25 and 50% of pupils were educated free of charge and the remainder paid fees. All these became the maintained sector’s response to the independent schools; academic powerhouses dedicated to the needs of the most able.

We should now consider this system in its wider context. The tripartite system – divided between grammar schools, secondary moderns and technical schools – was designed to ensure that educational resources were distributed according to the ability of pupils to benefit from them and the state to provide for them. It was predicated upon the assumption that academically selective education produced the best results in terms of educating future leaders of the country in all areas, and above all upon the assumption that a university education should place academic excellence at the forefront of its priorities and should be reserved for those who stood to benefit most from it. It was academically competitive and there were consequences for failure at any level of the process. If, for example, you failed the eleven plus examination, you were unlikely to go to university.

Until 1965, this resulted in a situation where the universities were almost entirely filled by the products of independent and grammar schools. Their reputation was extremely high and their independence in academic terms was unquestioned. In a 1969 contribution to the educational “Black Papers”, Professor Richard Lynn wrote, “British education has been designed primarily to produce an intellectual elite. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, such an elite is necessary to keep going the intellectual and cultural tradition of European civilisation.” There was no suggestion in those days that the universities existed merely to train students for a career. Rather, they provided an academic education and existed for the purpose of propagating academic virtues, of which scholarship for its own sake and teaching were chief. Their graduates were, of course, in high demand by employers, but outside the specific professions, this was as much because of their intellectual calibre and qualities of character as it was because of any specific knowledge they possessed. In those days, the attitude persisted within independent and grammar school teaching that if someone was of the intellectual calibre to have graduated from Oxford or Cambridge they were capable of mastering and teaching any subject required at school level within reason. There were many examples of classicists who taught English Literature, or physicists who taught mathematics, and of course many academic staff also coached sport and music to a high level. Indeed, such breadth was viewed as a positive attribute.

We cannot pin the blame for the decline in our education entirely upon the Labour Party. It is quite true that many in the Labour Party have seen opposition to selective and fee-paying education as a cornerstone of their egalitarianism. But the Conservative Party has throughout the past fifty years signally failed to show support for academically selective education and as a result has been as willing a participant in our decline as its political rivals. The expansion of the universities during the 1960s took place under a Conservative government, which accepted the recommendations of the Robbins Report. The major expansion which followed during the 1990s and which is still ongoing has likewise been initiated by Conservatives. While the Conservatives introduced the Assisted Places scheme at independent schools in 1980, they have so far done nothing to bring it back since Tony Blair, himself an alumnus of Fettes, abolished it in 1997.

And yet, while our politicians can all trumpet that they have got more people into university education, what they cannot address is the fact that when you convert a selective education system into a mass education system you inevitably devalue the end product. In the 1960s it was extremely rare to see graduates working in non-graduate jobs because there was no graduate employment available to them. Nowadays it is commonplace. This transition has involved the creation of a deliberate untruth and its maintenance by an elaborate and costly bureaucracy. The untruth is that a British degree, wherever it is from, is a product of universal value. There is no end of quangos and interest groups – the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, the Higher Education Academy, Universities UK, GuildHE – all of which are dedicated to maintaining that premise of “quality assurance”, to continually expanding higher education seemingly without limitation, and ultimately to what amounts to a universal higher education system whereby all who go to school can be admitted to a university.

It is interesting to note that the funding of education has told the truth far more than have the pronouncements from the powers that be. Until the 1990s, it was generally true that if you were successful in winning a university place, you would not have to pay for your education and you could access a grant that would cover your living expenses. With the rapid expansion in higher education and the conversion of the former polytechnics into universities came student loans to replace grants. Now, as the university sector expands even further, students in England and Wales must pay tuition fees in addition to the debts they incur for their maintenance.

Higher education has changed from an experience that was due to our brightest as of right to a commodity which is now available to all if they wish to pay for it, and particularly to foreign students who will pay even more than domestic ones. It is hardly surprising that if higher education is presented as a product within a marketplace – albeit a marketplace that consists entirely of a state monopoly – that the public will assess its value shrewdly and in many cases will decide that it is not worth the price being charged for it. That, however, cannot conceal the fact that for those who can benefit from academically selective higher education, that kind of education is increasingly subordinate to the mass higher education system, in which the scholarly ideal has been replaced by that of the Research Assessment Exercise and the demand for research to result in tangible product. Moreover any higher education is now increasingly out of reach for those without significant financial means or who are unwilling to incur significant debt against an uncertain return.

Education is the visible casualty of these changes, but it is not the only part of the picture. One very practical reason why governments have embraced mass higher education is because our society no longer has a large number of unskilled or semi-skilled jobs available. Where they are available, there is an increasing expectation that they will be filled by cheap immigrant labour. This leaves the unskilled native population to exist on benefits and occasional appearances on Channel Five. The government takes the view that the answer to this is to subject all to more education, hence its raising of the school leaving age. But this ignores the plain fact that of our population, a large number are not capable nor temperamentally suited to continuing their education. What they need is jobs, not an artificial means of keeping them off the unemployment statistics.

One curious characteristic of the decline of British education has been the willingness of those who have benefitted from its excellence to implement measures that have effectively denied the next generation the opportunity to benefit from the same opportunities as them. The losers in this are the academically able but financially impecunious. Social mobility is not something that should be the preserve of socialist politicians. During the 1980s there was much talk of Britain as a meritocracy, and yet the opportunities for those born in poverty to rise through the education system nowadays are fewer than they ever have been. Our politics, law, media and even the Olympics are now dominated by former pupils of independent schools. Since the effective abolition of the grammar schools the number of state school entrants to Oxford and Cambridge has fallen. This is not merely because pupils are not reaching the required academic standard but also because their teachers in too many cases believe that the top universities are elitist and that pupils should instead go to their local university much as they do their local school. In believing this, they condemn their pupils to fail.

An expectation has developed that those who are successful in our society will either pay for their children to be educated at independent schools, or will, usually for ideological reasons where they oppose selective education, send them to take their chances at the local comprehensive. The former option is becoming more difficult, because independent school fees are now pitched at a level that attracts the children of foreign oligarchs, and increasingly international students are taking more and more of the independent school places in this country at the expense of those from our own population who could benefit from such an education if only it were more reasonably priced.

The way in which properties are now sold according to the catchment areas of good schools tells us another fundamental truth; the education system may have abolished selection officially, but another kind of selection – one far less fair and far less transparent – is going on behind the scenes. We should not forget that the grammar schools had no catchment areas; they took everyone who passed the entrance exam regardless of where they lived. If you decide school admissions on the basis of property prices, you will create schools that are segregated by class and you will ensure that the poorest areas have the worst-performing schools.

League tables and OFSTED inspections are the government’s chosen means of reassuring us about the standards of our schools, but they are selective in the story they tell. Some examinations count for more than others, and schools have effectively played the system by entering pupils for them accordingly. On the other hand, weaker candidates have been withdrawn from subjects lest their results should reflect badly on the school’s standing.

And this brings us back to the grammar schools. When the Labour government abolished the tripartite system in 1965, it largely forced the maintained grammar schools to become comprehensives. Only in a few local authorities – just imagine today, local authorities defying central government! – did the grammar schools remain. In 1975, Labour ended the direct grant system and forced direct grant grammar schools to become comprehensives or independent schools if they wanted to continue. This left what remains today: 169 grammar schools in England and Wales and 69 in Northern Ireland.

We should ask why seventeen years of Conservative government between 1979 and 1997 did not see a renaissance for selective education, and indeed why further grammar schools closed or ceased to be selective during that period. The answer is that by this point, our education system had become one of the firmest bastions of the Left in the country. Its official endorsement of comprehensive education has been unwavering despite the eminently visible problems that have resulted from it. Any measure of reform or any challenge to the comprehensive system has been shouted down by the teaching unions, the university departments of education and the quangos – a group which Michael Gove used to refer to as “the blob”. He has said that these people believe that schools “shouldn’t be doing anything so old-fashioned as passing on knowledge, requiring children to work hard, or immersing them in anything like dates in history or times tables in mathematics…the result of their approach has been countless children condemned to a prison house of ignorance.” When I was at school, my teachers were drawn from all parts of the political spectrum. When I became a teacher myself, that was far less the case. My belief is that the comprehensive system exists to benefit one sector of society solely, and that is the teachers who find it ideologically to their liking.

By the end of my time in teaching it was axiomatic that whatever your politics, if you wished to teach, you would accept the Leftist orthodoxy that the profession had imposed and that you would not challenge it. That orthodoxy says, in essence, that all must have prizes and that the excellent are the enemy of the good. It sees education not as an academic pursuit but instead as a means of social engineering and vocational training, and as a means of reducing crime and social disorder. Over the years it has provided a happy home for all manner of Marxist nonsense and has enshrined teaching methods, particularly in basic English, that fail to achieve the same results as the traditional methods they replaced. It is not difficult to see the decline in the standard of written English in public life today compared to that of fifty years ago, and we have those teachers who promoted free expression ahead of spelling and grammar to thank for that.

Any education system will produce winners and losers. If we say that all must have prizes, then we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that those prizes will be of limited value. We cannot create their value merely by attaching government branding to them, for no-one believes that something is good simply because the government endorses it. Indeed, we had a situation in this country for many years where the products of the state monopoly, notably those of British Leyland, were regarded as markedly inferior to those of the private sector. The state can only win in education by deliberately retarding any perceived or actual competition. It does so through legislation – the Education Reform Act of 1988 effectively banned private sector universities – and for those entities that are private or independent in theory, it has devised a web of regulation and bureaucracy that in practice curtails their independence. OFSTED is one manifestation of this. Another is the devaluation that has characterized our exam system.

For many years, O and A level examinations were regarded as a gold standard. They were difficult to obtain and represented a high standard of achievement. They were unashamedly academic and required a high degree of factual recall. They could be taught in a way that stretched the most able and allowed for considerable extension activity. They were tested predominantly through timed examinations and not through coursework or continuous assessment. This was also the model of educational assessment maintained by the universities who were in turn responsible for the examination boards. While the CSE examination taken in secondary modern schools was not regarded as prestigious there is no question that it was a rigorous and well respected credential, as indeed were the awards of the former polytechnics. The fact that those awards were not degrees or were not O and A levels did not diminish their fitness for purpose, but it fostered a belief among egalitarians that they were second-tier qualifications and that they deserved the same titles as would be awarded to the more academically inclined. Unfortunately, this academic inflation has proved very costly. Because we no longer teach woodwork and metalwork in our schools, we end up importing our joiners and plumbers from Poland, and those who want to learn a skilled trade are unlikely to do so during their school years. The truth is that not everyone needs, wants or will benefit from an academic education, and when subjected to one against their will, it is unsurprising that many teenagers become disruptive and unco-operative.

It is interesting to note that while we have moved away from the academically selective model and from traditional modes of teaching and assessment, other former British possessions, notably India, have kept it and benefitted strongly as a result. The government determined to take the examination boards out of university control, to privatize them and to introduce competition. The result has been a race to the lowest denominator. The examinations are not invariably easier, but they have become increasingly turgid and reductive, with an emphasis on turning everything into something that can be easily and transparently assessed in simple terms. The GCSE examination, brainchild of Sir Keith Joseph and strongly opposed at the time by Baroness Thatcher, has been a misguided attempt to merge academic and vocational education, and the fact that a number of selective schools have turned to international examinations to replace it in recent years testifies to its limitations. It is also notable that many academically demanding schools now prefer the International Baccalaureate to A levels.

I believe that Michael Gove will come to be seen as the only Education Secretary of the past fifty years to have genuinely understood some of these problems and tried, in the face of overwhelming opposition from “the blob”, to address them. I hasten to add that this is not a general endorsement of Gove’s views or policy solutions, many of which I disagree with. He has, however, endeavoured to return rigour to our exam system and it may well be that he has, at least in some respects, succeeded. How lasting that success will be remains to be seen. Gove, after all, was replaced as Education Secretary because, so it is said, his approach was seen to be too confrontational; the opposition he had aroused included two votes of no confidence from three teaching unions, voodoo pincushions, anti-Gove T-shirts and an entire Twitter feed devoted to hating him. But the fact remains that we must confront the education establishment and we must win that confrontation if we are to achieve anything at all. The path of least resistance is to go along with the blob and do their bidding. The difficulty with that is that it fails those who lack a voice in this debate but whose interests need to be right at its heart: our next generation of pupils. Perhaps Gove, who was born far from privilege and won a scholarship to an independent school, understood this more than many of his colleagues.

I want to close by noting some aspects of the ethos of the grammar school. For all that academies and free schools may have some elements of it, they are still a long way away. The good grammar school is a highly structured and disciplined institution where academic values are at the heart of the life of the school and these are allied to an institutional endorsement of Christian principle irrespective of pupils’ own religious beliefs. It is formal in its rituals, encouraging teachers to wear academic dress, having a house system that is both pastoral and competitive, and maintaining high standards of uniform and behaviour. Often the school has an extensive history and distinctive, occasionally eccentric, traditions. What it teaches should be what the top selective universities demand. I well remember that my school did not teach certain subjects because those universities did not take them seriously at entrance, and that it disdained vocational studies altogether. Unlike the comprehensives, it is not a school where all are forced to study the same curriculum regardless of ability. Above all, it is a place where to excel academically is the norm and where to aim high is natural, with the expectation that the vast majority of pupils would go on to places at university and the best would go on to those which were rated most highly. If the grammar school is an elite, then it is not in my experience a complacent elite, but rather one where elite status must be earned anew by each generation of pupils and teachers. When such schools work, they offer a beacon of opportunity for those who, on merit, win a place at them. We need more of them. In 1997, John Major promised us a grammar school in every town, a phrase which has since been echoed by UKIP. It is time to restore our culture and values to our education system, and a strong grammar school system is the best way to do this.

With the writer on music Stuart Millson before the dinner

I was the invited speaker at the Traditional Britain Group Annual Dinner at the Royal Over-Seas League on 12 September 2015. Below is the speech given on that occasion. This transcript was also published at LewRockwell.com and at the Libertarian Alliance under the headlines “A propertarian speaks on the immigration crisis” and “Should the English people be abolished?”

My Lords, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me to address you tonight. I am going to address a few words on the current immigration crisis.

Let me begin with some considerations of principle. Freedom and civilisation are based upon a simple premise: that land should be privately owned. If we build a society based on the private ownership of land then there is no limit to our endeavour. For centuries, this was the foundation of the West; land was owned and managed by landowners who had a direct interest in its prosperity and an equally direct interest in the welfare of those who worked that land. If we seek the roots of the England we know and love, we find it most clearly in the private ownership of land.

In our time, this freedom has been challenged. Under socialism, and regrettably under governments that call themselves conservative, we have seen measures that have been designed to break the link between landowner and land, and instead to introduce a very different concept. This is the idea that sovereignty consists not in land but in the person. If the person is sovereign, then we will build a very different kind of society; indeed, we are unlikely to build a society at all, because individualism will cause that society to atomize into multiple and ever-changing identity groups.

Here, then, is the root of the immigration crisis. If we say that land is sovereign, then it follows that someone must exercise control over it. There are still substantial private landowners in Britain today, especially so in Scotland. But for our purposes, we should see land as it really is. There is no terra nullis in Britain today. Even that which is owned privately is subordinate to the Crown, and the Crown is effectively a surrogate for the people in its ownership and management of that land which is deemed to be held in common by the nation. I am not talking here of those private estates, such as the Duchy of Cornwall, which belong to the Crown, but instead of the vast mass of common land that we encounter every day of our lives and that is subject to the management of those who are, ultimately, servants of the Crown, whether as politicians, civil servants or local council workers. This is our land, and we are right to care about what happens to it.

This, then, is why as a propertarian, I find the immigration crisis so vexed by unclear thought. Land belongs to someone. If land belongs to the Crown, the Crown has a duty to manage that land in the best interests of the people of Britain, because it is on behalf of the people of Britain that the Crown holds that land in the first place. And that duty cannot be construed otherwise than to the people of Britain as they stand now. It cannot be a duty to foreigners or their governments, for how could that be in our national interest? Therefore we are faced with the prospect that the Crown and its servants believe that in permitting mass immigration to this country, they are actually acting in the best interests of the people of Britain. I believe they are quite wrong in this.

Let us now look more closely at what is going on at the moment. I believe that Janice Atkinson MEP has summed the situation up very well. Here is what she had to say,

“Let’s be clear about another thing: despite what the human rights industry and the massed ranks of taxpayer-funded charities and lobby-groups repeat, this is not a refugee crisis but a massive crisis of illegal immigration which must be resisted for what it is. A man who leaves Syria may be a refugee at the start of the journey. When he is illegally living in Calais and illegally attempting to enter Britain, he is an economic migrant and an illegal immigrant. The humanitarian consequences of the Syrian crisis are for the countries of the Middle East to manage. Not for Britain, not for France, not for Austria, not for Italy, not for the Netherlands, not for Poland, not for Romania. That cannot be said too often. Oil-rich, cash-rich petro-monarchies of the region must act. They claim to be our allies. Instead, some fund Islamic terrorism and allow hundreds of thousands to come to our countries against the wishes of our people.”

It seems to me that we have, since at least 1997, suffered a concerted political attack on our immigration system. The driving force behind that attack seems to be the belief that the person is sovereign; that anyone who wishes should be able to come to Britain regardless of the skills or abilities they would bring to our country or their cultural compatibility with it, and that the settled population of these islands should simply put up with it. We do not need to look far to find the cause of this. The Labour Party saw that immigrants and their descendants were among their core supporters. They believed that the more they opened our doors to immigrants the more they would create a Labour client state and effectively pack Britain with Labour voters. Others, influenced by the ideology of multiculturalism, saw mass immigration in the same way as theorists such as the Frankfurt School as a means of destabilising opposition to socialism and making the lot of conservatives a miserable one. In an interview in 2013, Lord Mandelson said “In 2004 when as a Labour government, we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties for people and encouraging them, in some cases, to take up work in this country.”

Now we are seeing the distinction between legal and illegal immigration further weakened. Having encouraged mass immigration, we cannot then profess ourselves surprised when people from countries where life chances are extremely poor decide that any chance to get across our borders is worth taking. We are told that if we send millions of pounds in international aid, and indeed if we intervene militarily in foreign wars, that we will help these people stay where they are and stabilise their countries. Don’t believe it. Those who are coming to Europe believe that the standard of living that their countries provide is inadequate by comparison with that of the West. They do not want mere safety, which is why they do not want to stay in Hungary. Rather, they see the prosperity that Britain and Germany represent, and they want to experience it for themselves.

What is happening to our immigration system is an erosion of its natural boundaries. Time after time, the Prime Minister assures us that we will get an immigration system that is tougher. When he says tougher, what he actually means is fairer; that is to say, fairer both to the immigrants and to those who are already here. And yet the changes made do not have the effect that is claimed for them, nor do they succeed in substantially lowering the numbers who enter Britain each year. I hear constant statistic-based arguments from both sides about whether immigration is economically beneficial. I do not believe that it is, because it artificially distorts our labour market. I certainly do not believe it is in anyone’s interest that we should have a class of super-rich international jet-setters employing an underclass of disenfranchised immigrants to do menial work that the existing population of this country is supposedly unwilling to do. But this is what happens when an aristocracy of land is replaced by an aristocracy of money. We should not think that Tony Blair and his colleagues are motivated by noblesse oblige or care for our society and our environment. Their motivation seems, by contrast, to speak all too plainly of short-term, materialistic, self-interested greed and tribalism in favour of their family and friends. Their interest is not so much in New Labour as in cheap labour. These are not the values we should have at the heart of our society and they are not values that have had any significant place in the Britain of the past.

But it is not the economic arguments that have the greatest impact on me, it is the cultural arguments. These are arguments that go largely unheard in the House of Commons. It is left to Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, to voice them. He says “Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity. Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders.” His is not the only country to say that it cannot accept more Muslim migrants.

Is it not sobering that our own Prime Minister cannot mount a robust defence of the Christian heritage of our country in this way? It must be admitted that were he to do so, he would not get a lot of support from the Church of England. But this is the crux of the matter. We cannot allow mass immigration by people, whatever their personal merits and humanitarian need, whose cultural commitment is to values which are profoundly different from our own, without a heavy price being paid. And the countries where those values are naturally at home – Saudi Arabia chief among them – are noticeable by their reluctance to assist in the present crisis, even though it is they who should be bearing the heaviest burden. As those rich Arab countries look at Europe, they must be reminding themselves of the old saying, “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”.

A further argument which is extremely important is that we must learn the lessons of the past when it comes to immigration. The character of Britain depends in large part on the fact that our country is relatively underpopulated. Even our cities, which have always been cosmopolitan in nature, are having to bear a burden that is far greater than they were designed for. The NHS, the transport system and local services cannot be stretched beyond their limit without breaking. We are seeing property prices being inflated by an artificial scarcity, and new housing being built not only on brownfield sites but often as infill development on greenfield sites as well.

As our towns and cities become more packed, our quality of life suffers. It also suffers from the failure to assimilate migrants by enforcing our cultural values. It should be the norm that the English language is spoken on our streets, for example, and it should also be used in commerce, so that we do not have shop frontages entirely in a foreign language. Immigrants should learn English, and we should monitor their progress until they can communicate clearly in the language. We should have the courage to ban the burka and thereby defend the rights and freedoms of women which were hard-fought in this country. We must ensure that immigrants do not jump the queue for council housing or other public services at the expense of our settled population, but that they wait their turn like everyone else. We should also ensure that British values are taught in our schools and that Muslim propaganda has no place there. One aspect of this that I came across recently is that music – singing or playing an instrument – is regarded as haram, or forbidden, by most Muslims. We should be clear that every child should be allowed the experience of singing and the opportunity to learn a musical instrument during their time at school, regardless of their religious beliefs. And we should not hesitate to deport from this country those who use our hospitality to argue against Western values and to encourage terrorism and armed jihad. That has no place whatsoever in this country. If people want to go to Syria to fight with ISIS, they should not be allowed back and should be treated as undesirable aliens. As recent experience has shown, it is very easy for the Home Office to keep people out of this country.

In short, where our cultural values and those of foreign migrants clash, ours should prevail and our national systems should enforce them. We cannot be equivocal about this. If we give in to cultural relativism, we are effectively signing our death warrant as a people and as a culture. We need to understand that the support of our culture requires its positive reinforcement at every level. It cannot simply be absorbed by osmosis,  and certainly not if we allow ghettoes to form.

I do not want to deny or diminish the human cost of immigration from the migrants’ point of view. We would not be human if we were not moved by the plight of dead children or desperate people. Those scenes rightly evoke an emotional response in us. But political policy cannot be subject to emotion; it must be made with a cool head and in a climate of calm and reasoned judgement. The decisions we make about immigration, whatever they may be, will always have a cost to pay. My belief, though, is that the balance of those decisions must always be firmly towards the settled population of this country, who look to their government to defend their interests. We cannot accept everyone who wants to come here, and if we do, we will have acted to destroy this country, not enrich it. We must have the maturity and the courage to say, as Hungary has said, that there are good reasons to say no.

Christmas talk to the Traditional Britain Group, December 2014.

It is said that Dom Paul Neville, Headmaster of Ampleforth College from 1924 to 1954, was at a meeting of the Headmasters’ Conference. The theme of discussion was preparation for life, and the various headmasters were vying to show how their schools were at the cutting edge in preparing their pupils for Life, in various ways. Dom Paul rose and said, “Gentlemen, I have been very impressed to hear how your schools are preparing pupils for Life. I have little to add to this discussion, because my school prepares the boys not for Life, but for Death.”

I am going to talk to you today about the significance of death from the perspective of one of the key concepts of traditionalist conservatism, that of legacy. The concept of legacy is as integrated into our society as the family itself; the idea that we may have an influence on generations to come. In a number of important ways, our legacy is not simply genetic in terms of descendance, but can also have significant effects on future generations unrelated to us. If we seek to stand for positive values in our lives, we can also hope that when we are dead, those values will not merely continue (for all true values are eternal) but that our engagement with them can assist others in turn to discover and be enriched by them in various ways.

When Edward Latymer, a London city merchant, died childless in 1624, he made several important provisions in his will. The will left a sum in trust that would provide “eight poore boies” from Edmonton and another eight from Fulham yearly on November 1st with a doublet, a pair of breeches, a shirt, a pair of woollen stockings and shoes. In return for being educated to the age of thirteen at a “petty school” the boys had to wear the red cross from Latymer’s coat of arms on their sleeves. The trustees are under a duty to carry out the provisions of Edward Latymer’s will “unto the end of the world.”

The effect of Latymer’s will has been far-reaching. From the original eight poor boys, the Latymer Foundation now has responsibility for three large and thriving schools; two in Hammersmith and one in Edmonton, and it was at the latter, which is the senior school of the Foundation, that I myself received my schooling. Had that not been so, I should never have heard of Edward Latymer. Instead, as in many other schools of a similar vintage, the Founder was commemorated each year on Foundation Day, which had the notable benefit of being a half-day holiday.

The lesson of what Latymer did can be summarized in this way: he was determined that the wealth he had created would not simply die with him, but would be used to nurture something that he believed in strongly. By establishing what would in modern times be termed a charitable bequest, he ensured that his estate would neither pass to distant relatives (although they did contest his will) nor into the clutches of government. His actions are a fine example of noblesse oblige: the doctrine that holds that to those to whom wealth is given, there falls a concomitant responsibility to administer that wealth in a way that benefits the common good.

It will come as no surprise to those who have heard me talk before that G.K. Chesterton is one of the writers to whom I make frequent reference. In his book Orthodoxy, Chesterton has this to say, “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” He continues, “Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”

What Chesterton refers to is the interconnectedness of human existence through the generations. All of us are the sum total of our ancestors in terms of our genetics, but we may well forget how like them we can be not only in our looks but in our character. If we look to the famous families of England these intergenerational traits can often be observed, and are aided by the ability to refer to portraiture from previous centuries that can reveal much about those who have gone before. We also share a more general commonality; not for naught did writers of past generations attribute particular characteristics to the people of the various regions of our island, or refer to the English race, or speak of us as the island stock, or indeed “this happy breed”. For those of us whose ancestry here reaches back some centuries, before the time of widespread immigration, we are each others’ kith and kin far more than is commonly acknowledged, even though it must be said that it is part of our national character to keep others at a certain distance. This shared heritage should not surprise us, since our island is not a large one, and for many centuries the English flourished unconquered.

In truth, we are living links in the chain that binds us from the dead to the unborn; we hold our lives in trust, and should be determined to pass to the next generation that which we ourselves have enjoyed, in as good if not better condition. Indeed, that concept of trust is enshrined in English law and is one of the crowning glories of that legal system. The Trustee has ownership, but his ownership is conceived exclusively as a duty. This remains the embodiment of intelligent conservatism, because it safeguards those things that are of value and prevents them from being dissipated or squandered.

How different our society is now from that which Edward Latymer knew! We should remember that in his day, there was no income tax – that would not arrive fully until 1842 – and few restrictions on what a man could do with his assets; his rights under common law were inalienable. It is still possible for someone to leave their entire estate to charity today, but otherwise there are many pitfalls that work to oppose any idea of legacy. Why should this be?

If we seek to understand how English society has been comprehensively destabilised during the past century, we need look no further than the obscenity of death duties. This Socialist measure is designed to forcibly redistribute wealth; to rob the wealthy of their inheritance, and to smash the hierarchy that is inbuilt into England’s history and character. Countless landed families have gone under; forced to sell the home that was theirs for generations and see their heritage squandered by here-today gone-tomorrow politicians who hate the established way of life of these islands and their people with a fervour I have never understood.

Many today comment on the shallowness of our society; its short-termism and the atomization of its people. Our society penalises those who save money and instead encourages everyone to live on so-called “easy” credit. It privileges two classes of people; those at the bottom who have no money and can therefore obtain the maximum in benefits that is available to them, and those at the top who have so much money that they can either engage in creative ways to hide it or simply not worry about it. Those in the middle are not merely squeezed, they are prisoners of a brutal and uncaring state machine that is designed to exploit their labour and remove their wealth for whatever vain pursuit may be in fashion at the time. Foreign expeditionary wars, High Speed Two, housebuilding on swathes of our Green Belt in order to house the ever-increasing numbers entering our country – these are the things that no-one seems to want and yet everyone is obliged to pay for.

While there is legitimacy to the Crown as a hereditary landowner and centre of wealth in the Britannic realm, there is none whatsoever in the aggregation of wealth by Parliament. The modern State is entitled to nothing; everything it owns it has gained by legalized theft from its subjects. Its sole aim is to keep its subjects in their place, so that the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor and everyone else stays worried, harassed and permanently short of money.

It is no wonder that our society should be shallow and short-termist if the result of aggregating even a modest level of wealth is that death duties of a swingeing forty per cent should forcibly redistribute it against your wishes. It is an absolute scandal that the government that maintains this robbery, backed of course by the ultimate threat of violence, should call itself “Conservative”. It is nothing of the kind: it has embraced a Socialism that Marx himself would have applauded, and it is the embodiment of the politics of envy that are so very popular with the Labour Party these days. Can we be surprised, then, that the most logical response to such measures is to resort to an empty hedonism; if you can neither take your wealth with you nor give it to whom you wish without contortions and expensive planning, it is all too natural simply to spend the lot.

I do not want to talk about legacy simply in terms of money, however. There remain personal elements of legacy that are part of living life as a traditionalist and that apply whatever the state of our personal exchequer. Indeed, these elements are considerably more important than any financial consideration, for they are not only actions taken with a view to the future but also actions that reveal and may indeed form our characters. Not for nothing is it said that success built purely on money and material goods is an empty vessel. Since we cannot immediately hope to displace the state or to abolish taxation, we should instead concentrate on what we can do to create value for ourselves.

The creation of value, of significance and of substance is something that will outlast us even if the things we have created no longer exist. Consider Socrates, a man who wrote nothing that survived him. Everything we know of his thought has been filtered through those who knew and were influenced by him, chiefly Plato and Xenophon, and also Aristophanes and Aristotle. For that matter, consider Jesus Christ, whose words were conveyed to us through his disciples. Theirs may be a barely tangible legacy, but they have created an immense sphere of influence throughout the entirety of Western civilisation. What we see here is a chain not dissimilar to the genetic chain I described earlier, but here it is a chain of ideas whereby one person influences another, and in turn builds those ideas into his worldview. The philosophy expounded by Socrates and by Jesus is not merely a set of dead ideas, confined to the distant past: it is a living legacy, debated and discovered afresh by every generation. To leave a legacy even remotely approaching this brings a satisfaction far beyond that of materialism; it is to know that something of us will remain alive when even our tomb has disappeared.

Even if our accomplishments are, of necessity, considerably more modest than those of Socrates, we can still derive great satisfaction from engagement in work of significance. Creative endeavour of any kind is an obvious means of adding value to life. But there are other ways towards the same fulfilment. Engagement in work that seeks to promote the betterment of our society and the improvement of the lives of others enables us to participate with the same spirit that inspired Edward Latymer. The raising of children who are educated to understand the importance of our core values is another crucial task, and one that must increasingly be undertaken in opposition to government.

If we are to dedicate ourselves to seeking this fulfilment, we must first realize that our lives are finite and that there is no time to waste. This is what my opening quotation means: if we prepare for death, we live our lives with a perspective that looks for the good that we can accomplish in the time left to us, and we actively consider the way we want to be remembered. We may be impelled towards that consideration by a religious belief, or we may simply want to honour life itself, for it is a gift, and one that is all-too fragile.

Whatever the case, we are unlikely to emerge from such contemplation with the view that the way forward is that of pointless nihilism. More likely, we will conclude that the values that are at the heart of us impel us towards a life of integrity. They will be values that, as we explore them more deeply, will reveal a moral code, and will moreover speak to those aspects of our character that we will want to develop. We all begin as deeply imperfect and flawed clay; we can mould ourselves into something that can transcend our past and achieve both self-respect and the respect of others.

We may find our value in a job, but there is no reason why value should be confined there. What people do when they are not at work is an area that continually surprises and intrigues me. Some people balance their lives so that their work is merely a means of paying the bills without interest in career or promotion; their passion is explored outside any environment of financial reward. And as for finance, all of us except the most impoverished can benefit from learning to live on less than we do; the consequence is greater financial freedom and in consequence greater personal freedom.

Whatever we do, its effect is to turn us outward. Spending time with others, particularly others who need us, is often one of the most valuable things we can do. What we are asked to do in such situations is not to give money, but to give of ourselves. We each have qualities and talents that can give pleasure and provide lasting enjoyment. Our lives are better for sharing them. The impact we have on the lives of others is something that will outlast us; it is the most important legacy that most of us will have the chance to leave.

It is not a coincidence that I am delivering this talk in Advent; indeed I did promise to others that it would be morally improving, and I hope it has been so without becoming a sermon. It is easy in today’s world to neglect our common humanity and I hope I have been able to counteract that impulse. Traditionalists may argue over exactly what it is that they are preserving, but I would maintain that it is a way of living in which people have context; where they feel a part of landscape, heritage, society and country in a way that binds them to their roots and enables them in turn to engage in propagation. It is, in short, the opposite of the Marxist society that promotes merely alienation and consequent misery.

And with that, I wish all of you a very merry Christmas.