What do these six things have in common?
Britain surrendering sovereignty over the Chagos Islands while paying for access to Diego Garcia. Entertaining endless demands to pay “slavery reparations”.
Refusing to stop paying billions of pounds in overseas aid. Constantly offering concessions to Brussels. Trying to accommodate Iran. And being soft on Islamists who openly want to destroy our way of life.
On the surface, they might not seem connected at all.
But according to one deeply experienced government insider who has just written a brilliant essay, they are all part of the same failure within Britain’s political system.
A politically weak ruling class whose governing worldview is plagued by anxiety over historical guilt, and views defending Britain’s interests as morally suspect.
The author of the report, Sir John Jenkins, knows Westminster inside out.
A former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Libya, Jenkins also served as the Foreign Office’s director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Now, writing for the reputable Westminster think-tank Policy Exchange, Jenkins has just shared his candid thoughts about what is really going wrong in the ruling class — and he points to many of the same issues that we have raised in this newsletter.
His report is titled Danegeld and Danegeldism — in reference to the tribute money that the Anglo-Saxons once paid to the Viking raiders on these islands, in their misguided belief that if they just kept making concessions then the external threat would eventually disappear.
But instead, this soft approach and never-ending concessions only encouraged more and more demands, hollowing out the community from within.
Now fast forward to today when the same mistaken worldview — what Sir John Jenkins calls Danegeldism — has captured the Westminster class.
In Chagos, we entertain spurious demands while surrendering our strategic leverage behind contested legal arguments and constantly expanding ‘human rights’ laws.
In the intensifying debate over slavery, our leaders are similarly considering demands for billions if not trillions in “reparations” payments, turning their elite anxieties over historical guilt into very real pressures on today’s struggling taxpayers.
On foreign aid, our leaders have turned overseas assistance into a permanent moral obligation despite never seriously examining what impact it has on the nations that receive this aid, or what benefits it really brings to Britain.
On Brussels and the European Union, our leaders constantly turn towards the EU to compensate for weaknesses they are unwilling to address at home — hoping that the EU will deliver the growth they have failed to generate themselves, or somehow resolve Britain’s spiralling immigration crisis despite failing to manage its own external borders.
And when it comes to Islamism, successive Labour and Tory governments, along with the British state, have unsuccessfully sought to use non-violent Islamists as a barrier against violent jihadists.
They have wrongly believed, for example, that engaging with the likes of Muslim Brotherhood might help to contain more violent groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, when in reality all this does is increase the influence of Islamist organisations that are hostile to Britain, encouraging them to make even more demands.
What unites all these examples and more, argues Sir John Jenkins, is what lies at the root of today’s ruling class in Whitehall and Westminster, which is …
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