SubscribeTory leadership contender David Davis appears to making a bid for the remnants of what was Kilroy-Silk’s Veritas. Now the ex-TV presenter’s given up, he’s urging the government to ‘build a single nation’ and demand ‘respect for the British way of life’. Conservative Home reports that rival David Cameron is falling over himself to catch up. He’s promising to reverse human rights legislation that stops the deportation of suspects to countries where they’ll face torture or execution.
This all plays well to the home crowd, with Tim of an Englishman’s Castle offering the fair summary: ‘fit in or f*** off!’ [swearing makes Google Ads disappear]. And its good news for anti-Tories as there are no votes to the right (which is why Kilroy quit). So hopefully Davis or Cameron will win.
There’s a romanticised elegy to a particular strand of Englishness to be found within that same castle. It’s an interesting piece because the romanticism is suddenly broken. Tim’s sub-culture is being forced to fit in with a now more a more dominant English value: that inflicting cruelty on animals for fun is wrong. The elegy places the Church of England at the heart of the countryman’s sub-culture, yet in Manchester only two per cent find a role for the church at Christmas. There’s no doubting Tim’s an Englishman, but Mancunians are English too and with country dwellers forming such a small minority, they should be wary of calls to ‘fit in or f*** off’ with ‘a single nation [and] British way of life’. They’ll likely to find the dominant English culture is far removed from their own.
