 Well, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to begin by thanking Hansen Gulchen for having had the great kindness to invite me back to the eighth conference of the Property and Freedom Society. This is my seventh conference. Sadly, I was unable to attend last year and I'm very glad to be here this morning and I'm very grateful for your attention. Now, Hans has asked me to speak on the subject of understanding England and the English, and there are various approaches that I could take to that topic. I could start off with Shakespeare, the changing of the guard, Churchill, the royal family tradition, or I could refer you to the rather sinister pantomime that preceded last year's Olympic Games, which some of you may have been unfortunate enough to have sat through. But whether I take a broadly right wing or left wing view of England, what I can say is that we English have an obsession with ourselves. We love to talk with ourselves, and we love to talk with ourselves to you foreigners. Indeed. Indeed. Some people talk about nationalism as engendering hate. In the English case, yes, we are an extraordinarily nationalist nation, but we don't hate foreigners on the whole we pity foreigners. And I'm afraid that includes, indeed it particularly includes Americans. But no, no. Of course, leaving, joking aside, of course I can make a case for the proposition that there are two great nations in modern civilization, two great nations which have done more than any other to produce the civilization in what we live. One is England, and one is Germany. And of those two, England is by far the superior. But that is not at all to denigrate the Germans, because the Germans, as I said, are one of the two great nations behind modern civilization. But rather than lapse into our favorite comfort zone, talking about things like the development of the scientific method, the development of classical liberalism of representative democracy, and generally of sweetness and light and reason, I'm afraid I cannot deny the fact that something has gone badly wrong with modern England. In fact, there is a good case to be made for the proposition that the whole country has gone barking mad at some point during the last generation. It's difficult to say when the madness came on us. I think it became undeniable that something was wrong when the Princess of Wales died 16 years ago. You may remember that she was running away from some newspaper people in Paris. She was drunk and coked up. Her driver was under the influence. They drove too fast, the car turned over, and that was the end of her. There are somewhat more entertaining, though perhaps less likely variants of that story. What I most remember about it, however, is the mountains of flowers that began to appear within a few hours of her death, and the horribly embarrassing fuel cortege. No tasteful Chopin death march, no dead march from Saul, no brass bands, just dead silence as the cortege passed through London while various hysterical women screamed out the name Diana. The country has never been the same since then. It is impossible to say that this was the cause of our present madness. It was simply one of the symptoms of the approaching insanity. But it has continued. I could fill an entire lecture. I could fill an entire morning by talking about the multicultural lunacies in England, but I don't think it would be terribly productive to do that. What I will do instead is to talk about the, what I could call the sexual frenzy that is taking place within modern England. Let me begin with the status of homosexuals in England. Now, I can talk about this with a great deal of confidence. Some of you might say, I can talk about it with a great deal of guilt. Ever since I was 15, I have been a strong critic of the legal disabilities under which homosexuals labored in England at school when you could perhaps get roughed up in the playground and when you certainly got some funny looks from other boys and teachers alike. I was proclaiming that consenting adults had the right to do with each other exactly as they pleased and it was not the business of the law to interfere and indeed it probably wasn't the business of anyone to pass adverse comments on this. It was an indifferent matter. I went through the 1980s proclaiming this truth in which I still strongly believe and when in 1990 15 men were arrested and charged with a number of offences so this was a private sex club, a sadomasochistic sex club and these men had been gathering together men in late middle age and beating each other up and banging nails through various intimate parts of their anatomy. They were monitored by the police for quite a long time and eventually they were arrested and they were charged with various crimes under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. One of the men was charged with the hideous offence of aiding and abetting an assault upon himself. Now, I wrote the earliest and by general agreement one of the best analyses of what is called the Spanner case and although these men were mostly found guilty and some of them went to prison for a while the law was subsequently changed to make such prosecutions not impossible in the future but less easy for the authorities to begin and I regarded this as a step in the right direction. Something that I'm afraid I did not fully anticipate was that as soon as the legal disabilities were removed from homosexuals they would be replaced by legal privileges and there are a number of cases which in their own way are as shocking and as illiberal as any of the persecutions that homosexuals and cells suffered in the past. I'll give you the most recent and the one in which I am most personally involved. A friend of mine is the Reverend Alan Clifford. He is the pastor of the Norwich Reformed Church. He is a strong Calvinist and a biblical literalist. I have a wide circle of friends and I am rather pleased that although we disagree on a number of matters of fundamental importance that Dr Clifford and I remain on very good terms of friendship. Dr Clifford, as you might expect, believes that homosexuality is an abominable sin and unless those guilty of homosexual acts repent, they will go to hell and suffer in everlasting torment which is an arduble proposition I suppose. A couple of months ago the Norwich Gay Pride movement decided to hold a parade in the city centre on a Saturday morning and the Reverend Clifford, as is his custom, turned up with four members of his congregation to hand out leaflets of things like Jesus has good news for gay people. Things of that kind. He leafleted this Gay Pride march and there were no untoward consequences. Then Dr Clifford decided to send out copies of two of his pamphlets and just for the sake of completeness, it's the sort of thing I would certainly do because I'm an expert in the art of spanning, he added the leaders of the Norwich Gay Pride to the mailing list of these two leaflets. The directors of Norwich Gay Pride complained about this to the police and on the following Monday morning Dr Clifford was visited in his home and he was told that a homophobic incident had taken place and he had a choice. He could pay a £90 fine and accept a police caution, i.e. he could admit his guilt and be given the tiniest slap on the wrist imaginable. £90, I'm afraid, is not very much nowadays in modern England. Or he could assert his innocence, in which case the file would be passed to the Crown Prosecution Service and he might be prosecuted for a hate crime. Of course Dr Clifford said, I am not guilty of any offence. He stated the law, he quoted some Bible texts and he sat back secure in the knowledge that God would look after his own. Perhaps God will look after his own because the Crown Prosecution Service would be mad, us and mad to take Dr Clifford's court. He is not some self-hating Anglican vicar who will turn up in court begging forgiveness and saying that Jesus loves gay people and he has won himself. Oh no, Dr Clifford, I assure you, will turn up in court with a Bible in his hand and he will fill the public gallery with members of his congregation and he will face down his prosecutors. Dr Clifford is a Calvinist, he is one of those people who drove the Catholic Church out of England in the 16th century and who pulled down the Stuart monarchy in the 17th century and he and his kind are not frightened of the Crown Prosecution Service or indeed Norwich Gay pride. But what you have is the legal prosecution of a street preacher, somebody who makes it part of his life's work to proclaim the word of Christ in the street. And he is not the only street preacher who has suffered the attention of the authorities. There are dozens of them. A friend of mine, John Cursey, has detailed them on the Libertarian Alliance blog. There are at least eight and there was another street preacher, an American street preacher arrested in Glasgow last week. I don't know what he's been saying but probably quoting the usual Bible texts about homosexuality. I must say that the great concern that many Christian evangelists show about homosexuality is disappointing that there are many other bad things about life in Northern England and to keep banging on about Leviticus chapter 18 verse 22 and 1 Corinthians 6, 13, et cetera, strikes me as not exactly a waste of time but perhaps a misdirection of resources. But that's not the point. The point is that Christianity is the established faith of my country and even if it weren't, people should have the right to preach what they regard as the word of God in public so long as they do not make obvious nuisance of themselves like some ridiculous man in Oxford Circus who regales people with a megaphone. But that is one example. One example of what you might regard as great sexual laxity in England. Another example is the case of Jimmy Saddle which may not, I rather hope it hasn't, which may not have travelled very far beyond England shores. Now Jimmy Saddle was a popular entertainer in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s and indeed the first decade of ascension. A very popular entertainer with his bleach blonde hair, his cigar and his taste in rather questionable music. And you only had to look at him to see that he was a thoroughly nasty piece of work and probably a bit dodgy as well. Indeed, when I was in my early 20s I was told that he had connections with organised criminals and if you got seriously on his nerves he might have your legs broken. I thought that was rather entertaining because I was in no position to get on his nerves and therefore in no danger of the attention of his friends. Now when Mr, not Mr Saddle, Sir Jimmy Saddle though that may have been taken away since I'm not quite sure, let's stick with Mr. When Mr Saddle died in 2011 he was sent off by the media with a great gust of hot air about his charitable work, his great personal saintness and about how the fabric of our national life had been diminished by his loss. And that carried on for about 11 months until eventually the media published what they had known all along but for 50 years Jimmy Saddle had had a taste in underage girls not in children of 7 and 8 or anything like that but a taste for girls aged 13 and 14 which is legal in many parts of the world and which indeed was perfectly legal in England until 1885 and which was regarded as a minor foible in the 1970s when Jimmy Saddle was at the peak of his thing however he was denounced as a pedophile and the hysteria began hundreds of women came forward claiming that they had had their lives ruined by him in 1962 Eventually Mr Saddle's relatives responded to the hysteria by joining in What they did was they had his gravestone pulled away from his grave it was brown smooth of its inscription it was then smashed up into small pieces and sent off to be used for building rubble of various kinds and this was filmed and you can see the film on YouTube it was bloatantly covered by the usual newspaper in England and many people said this is only the beginning of the price that he must pay to his victims his life is ruined this will help them in their recovery process et cetera et cetera Now I don't know about you but I regard that kind of thing as not just un-English but as deranged it is the kind of thing you would read about in ancient Egypt when some fear had offended against the ways of his priests and his mummy would ritually tawn from its wooden case and then ripped apart so that his future in the next world would be cut short I remember reading many years ago that in the 1820s some French royalists tore Voltaire's body from the Pantheon in Paris and destroyed it and again I regarded that and the historians who had described this event described it as a somewhat tasteless indeed a deranged act and yet last year in England that is almost exactly what happened with the gravestone of a dead popular entertainer as I said I could go on I could sit a whole morning I could have a whole day with examples of this on the other hand we must accept but just because something is reported in the mass media just because something is covered at great length in the mass media over many months does not mean that the great majority of people in a country agree with it or are going along with it you may have heard of a popular singer from the 1970s called Gary Glifer who was done over again for his taste in young girls now although he is regarded as one of the most evil men in history taking his place beside Hitler, Stalin, Paul Popp etc and although every time there is another paedophile mania in England the police arrest him and question him in connection with something I don't know what the fact remains that Gary Glifer has a large and active fan club in England on the carpet website and his records still sell in decent numbers one of the reasons why the Sun newspaper so hates Gary Glifer is that every time he is arrested every time he is prosecuted every time he is even sent to prison or some trumped up charge he still comes out and gets him for a nice expensive car and drives off his nice expensive house which is paid for by the continuing authorities from his records so the country could be said to have gone mad on the other hand this might be something confined to the media classes and the weak minded but undoubtedly something has gone wrong in England and what is it what has gone wrong again of the question I think one way of looking at it is to take a story a short story written by Rajat Kipting published in 1908 called The Mother High now this is a parable if you read the story it proves rather more than I would like to prove certainly this morning but it is an interesting parable nevertheless it's set in a beehive and the bees decide for whatever reason to throw off the repressive and outmoved hierarchies over the past and in future the work of these can eat the royal jelly and they can be impregnated by the unwilling drones and they also can give birth to young just as the queen has in the past and there will be no hierarchies of any kind in the future all these shall be equal and those bees who disagree with those propositions are at first shunned and then as the consequences of equality become increasingly plain dissidents have their heads nipped off in insect fashion and this continues to the point where the where the royal hatching rooms are filled with the hideously misshapen offspring of workers and where the hive is ruled by demented psychopaths and at last the beekeeper opens up the hive to see what's going on says oh dear this one's gone really bad and he gets out his can of killing spray and that's the end of the hive that's something like that has happened in England England is ruled by American-influent cultural narcissists they run politics they run the administration they run the universities they run the legal system they of course run the media they run everything their hold in England is absolutely hegemonic in America and as I said this is an American import it's very largely American import you can go on about people like Antonio Gramsci and the E. E. Altersair but all of this only came to England because it had been taken up in various American universities the Frankfurt school and the various neo-Marxists have come to England very much in American clothing now in America this mania is kept under control to some extent by a very large religious right and by a written constitution and by the fact that America is still a substantially decentralized place where it's possible for independent minded men to make money and where independently minded men are willing to spend money on causes that they support in America this stuff in America this stuff is kept to some degree under control Americans may disagree and say I'm dreadful in America let me just show this crop of news articles but it's not as bad as in England and the reason it's not as bad in America as in England is that we have no opposition we have no religious right the Reverend Alan Clifford is I suppose our equivalent of the American religious right but religion is just not very popular in England it is not something that ever gets people onto the streets I don't think it even influences voting very much we also have no written constitution whatever parliament says is the law whatever parliament says and the judges agree is certainly the law there is no stand you can take you cannot say you can't take my gun away the constitution says I can have it you can't stop me from publishing my newsletter the constitution says I can publish it you can't say it in England our authorities are absolutely sovereign and supreme now in the past the lefties and they've always been there in England although this is an American import the Americans got it from us in the 17th century so it's all part of the same family of manias in the past these people were kept under control in England by the fact that the government and administration were dominated by an hereditary land owning aristocracy and below them filling the minor administrative roles and dominating the House of Commons you had the gentry which is a junior wing of the aristocracy I don't think it has an equivalent in foreign countries these are wealthy people persons of independent means quite often landowners but non-titles and these were the people who kept the country sane these were the people who preserved the balance of the constitution and during the past hundred years those people have been pushed aside it would be untrue to say that these people no longer exist there is still a large landed aristocracy England many of the richest people in the country are landed aristocrats they own much of London they own much of the soil of England they are deeply involved in business and finance however the tacit deal at least since the second world war and perhaps since the third world war is that these people will be allowed to enjoy their wealth their titles will to some extent be respected in in social matters in return for that however they will not they shall not take any part in politics there are a number of exceptions to that I could think of a number of of landed aristocrats who were involved in the British Conservative and Libertarian movement but these are now all of them very very old sometimes in their 90s and the broad generality of the remaining aristocracy is that it keeps out of politics that is something for the middle class puritans and cultural leftists and so if you want to understand modern England if you want to know what's going on there you know what's going on there you know about the persecution of street creatures you know about the multi-racial frenzies you know about the deification of Stephen Lawrence and the raising of his mother to the House of Lords I'm sure you've heard about those things if you want to join the dogs and to explain what has happened in England the answer lies not exclusively because in something as large as this there are many causes but one of the principal causes of the imbalance in English life and the imbalance of the English constitution has been the destruction of the hereditary element in our natural life the Lords the Dukes, the Markuses the baronets the untitled gentry the people who ruled my country with great success in many centuries have been displaced, they've been moved aside and replaced by middle class cultural leftists and the title of the talk is understanding England and the English it may be interesting for this audience which is mostly foreign to have an answer to that question but it is very important I suggest for the English themselves to have some understanding of what has happened because our misfortune is that we do not know that we have suffered a revolution when the Russians had their revolution they had the stormy winter palace and the murder of a royal family the greatest German revolution history in 1945 was could be regarded as the termination of Germany the country was born flat it was invaded, it was occupied it was parceled up between the conquering with its conquering enemies many of its rulers were put on trial and hanged or locked up you could say that German history came to an end in 1945 or more optimistically you could say that whatever has happened since 1945 is a new chapter in German history but in England we have had no obvious and visible break with the past nevertheless, just as in Russia just as in Germany just as in France and most other European nations we have had a revolution and the country in which we now live is not the country into which those of us over certain age were born and um yes I finished now the if you want to understand England and the English in the 20th and 21st centuries a good place to begin is to look at the decline and fall of the hereditary Landon's glasses with those words on end thank you very much