Just now, I was cycling home through a pleasant suburb of London. Taking in the buildings, I thought how generations of Britons before me had designed such pleasant urban areas and had, for the subsequent two centuries or so, inhabited them. They are buildings made from English bricks, from Sheffield steel, with British hands.
Almost the entirety of what we value around us was built by those born in these isles and whose lineages here extend through the ages. This is not to say no foreigner never contributed – of course they did – but the bulk of effort is and was ours.
It is, naturally, trendy for immigrants and their descendants to claim that they 'built' the UK. The Windrush lot may be responsible for many an enduring legacy (thanks for the grime music), but many centuries of British history rather suggests we were doing fine before they turned up. Rather, it seems, things are starting to fragment through a surfeit of foreigners.
One wonders how long it will take for the more recently arrived to claim similar things. Listening to Humza Yousaf - a man born in Lanarkshire but whose heart resides in sandier climes – such a process is already underway. Recently he took to social media that to claim, in an almost Life Of Brian fashion, that our Muslim friends invented everything from coffee to clocks, and much more in between.
It is in such a mind that I am reminded of Mark Steyn's observation a while ago that the West, collectively, was in the process of giving away the most valuable real estate – monetarily, culturally, architecturally – in the whole of human history to a gang of third-world gimmegrants whose own countries are, but for a smattering of colonial buildings, generally shack-like.
Canary Wharf may be many things – crass, a symbol to the Money God, boring – but it is the antithesis of a few muddy huts with corrugated steels roofs. Compared to small-town Afghanistan, 'chalk and cheese' does not quite do it justice.
It is the kind of place that only a few civilisations under very specific conditions could even dream to achieve, given the capital, skills and planning necessarily. More crucially, its mere name invokes the idea of wealth, progress and capitalism, having been constructed in an age of economic optimism and housing many of world's largest financial firms.
Yet, we live in less optimistic times. Vacancies in Canary Wharf's offices are high and our economy sluggish. The era of Canary Wharf's apogee was a different world – the peak of Western dominance. Embracing a slew of negative, nihilistic policies, it stands as a monument to another age.
Nothing better can demonstrate this than the imminent arrival of hundreds of 'asylum seekers' into the area. People whose first taste of the UK should be a policeman's truncheon followed by a swift deportation are to be housed in a hotel, and to be provided, in the Government's words, 'a full package of support.' What should be the housing of travelling bankers and salesmen is given over to a ragged crew of foreign chancers.
One is reminded of barbarians living amid the ruins of Rome, not understanding the magnificence of what surrounded them. Busying themselves with feeding chickens in the shadows of amphitheatres, temples and aqueducts, they had no cause to think of how such constructions came to be. They could merely live off that which was bequeathed by those too fragmented and indifferent to defend what they had.
The outrage at the move of foreign criminals – for they break the law upon entering the country illegal – is wholly justified. It has replaced last week's obscene revelation that the Establishment crooks in charge of our country had been secretly importing thousands of Afghans. Such is the rapid turnover of diabolical policies enacted by the Government that it is impossible to remain focused on one.
It is like someone going through your house and smashing things up with a baseball bat in front of you. While each new obliteration of a family heirloom distracts you from the last, the general sense of boiling anger only increases.
This, I think, is the only positive to draw. The general sense of fury is growing palpably. We are reaching a point where the demand of the state – that you should not notice the destruction being wrought right before your eyes – is becoming too intolerable.
Yet, the political system is not equipped to deal with this issue. Obviously, the Establishment parties have long been discredited, but there is little reason to believe that Reform has the required courage to deal with the many festering pustules wrecking the health of the body politic.
But let us take heart that, at least, the mood is beginning to shift. The Establishment's has turned up the heat too quickly in the proverbial boiling of the frog.
Frederick's substack : A Last Bastion Of Sanity