TOWARDS A NEW IMPERIALISM

Speech given by A.D.Harvey at the Patriotic Forum’s 2018 Empire Day meeting

As many of you will know, my dear late father was a Methodist lay preacher, so being brought up in those traditions I was always used to talks commencing with a text. As my text for Empire Day tonight I will not be using a verse from the Bible however, but rather that famous quotation from the man who I regard as the greatest Briton ever, Cecil John Rhodes: “To be born British is to win first prize in life’s lottery”!

One of my first – and enduring – memories from my schoolboy days is of my first year in infants’ school, when on May 24^th we were told that it was Empire Day. Everyone was encouraged to bring along Union Flags and other patriotic artefacts and pieces of clothing with them, and were taught to sing “We come to school this morning, the 24^th of May, and we help in celebrating what we call our Empire Day”. Alas the following year the celebrations proved far more low-key, and after that the event disappeared entirely. An early example of “political correctness” I fear!

In spite of this there were two other great influences in my early years which confirmed me as an unapologetic Empire and Commonwealth man for the rest of my life. The first was the regular tours by Cricket teams from exclusively Commonwealth countries to the UK each summer. The first such tour I can remember – the first year when my parents had a television – was Ian Johnson’s Australian tourists of 1956. There was something about this touring party which I immediately took to. Quite unlike most of the soccer teams who I saw England playing against on television they spoke the same language and seemed to have the same culture and values – in short they were more like brothers than foreigners. The following year saw John Goddard’s West Indians touring, but they I’m afraid didn’t seem quite the same. The next season it was John Reid’s New Zealanders, and here I again detected the same fraternal attributes as with the Australians, but then the next year it was the Indians, who seemed to me even more alien that the West Indians. The following season however saw Jackie McGlew’s South Africans, and in them I saw something not only similar to my own countrymen again, but indeed something higher and even more attractive. It was then that my love-affair with my Southern African kith and kin really began.

The second big influence in my early life was the house-structure of my primary school, where houses were named after the four great Commonwealth dominions – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. I subsequently learnt that the same house-structure existed at the nearby Chatham Technical Secondary School, so I would imagine therefore that it was quite common around the country at the time. Strangely as my later life was to turn out, I was placed in Canada House, but when I became House Captain I wrote away to the Canadian High Commission and received back a huge package of materials concerning Canada, its people and society, which I read with avid interest and soon appreciated that here was another country which was not “foreign”, but rather predominantly populated by the same people as my own!

Alas this early enthusiasm for the British Empire and Commonwealth and all it had achieved was soon dampened by watching news footage on television of one country in the Empire being surrendered after another (usually with poor Princess Alexandra being asked to witness the ignominy of the Union Flag being lowered and the flag of some despotic ruler being raised in its place). What sickened me most about these sights wasn’t so much the spectacle itself, but rather the implication by the commentator that this abdication of our national inheritance was somehow a “good thing”! Just a few years after all these national humiliations the ultimate of ignominies took place, when the UK itself, under the leadership of the traitors Heath and Wilson, surrendered its very own national sovereignty and independence by joining the EU (then known as the Common Market). It was then that I decided to emigrate to South Africa, a country which I had learnt from an earlier visit still possessed all the virtuous attributes which I had learnt from my parents and from my history books had once made Britain great.

As we know, South Africa itself succumbed to the same cancer of “political correctness” barely a decade and a half later, and even though I was then forced to return to the UK I had by then experienced firsthand the “golden vision” of Western Imperialism in action, and this inspired me still. This I had seen not only in South Africa itself, but even more spectacularly in the erstwhile Rhodesia – a country which had once accurately been described as “more British than Britain”! In spite of witnessing seemingly non-ending defeats, retreats and surrender by my country and its people around the globe practically all my life, I however still detected the first signs of a reversal of these trends when I returned to the UK. Although the situation in the country with continuing membership of the EU was dire, it even so was clearly a better and more self-confident nation than I had left 14 years earlier. Yes, we have a lot to thank Margaret Thatcher for.

I threw myself into the active struggle for national revival immediately upon my return. I soon realised that there was a vibrant and growing anti-EU movement throughout the UK, but alas although an escalating number of people realised how harmful EU membership was to the UK and why we must therefore leave the EU as soon as possible, very few alas seemed to realise that this was only half of the task – what was also needed was for the re-establishment of close bonds with our brother nations of the core Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, New Zealand – and that other oft forgotten first-world Commonwealth country alas still trapped in the EU, Malta) – and then to go forward and start re-colonising as many other former parts of the Empire as possible.

Alas, however, I soon came to learn that oh too many anti-EU activists simply wanted the UK to leave the EU in order to become a glorified Switzerland – with some even believing that we could somehow place a “wall” around the UK and isolate ourselves from the rest of the world! Such an idea has of course been utterly nonsensical ever since the Industrial Revolution – but even if it was practical it is still completely undesirable. There are already large numbers of aliens inhabiting ghetto areas of London and other major British towns and cities, and they are increasingly damaging and destroying our very national identity, character and culture (as we saw in London and Manchester last year). These third-world immigrants and their descendants must therefore be repatriated back to their lands of ethnic origin, but the only way to do this is to ensure that we control and civilise the lands to which they must be re-settled, thereby making them so attractive that the aliens do not return over and over again. To put it simply, if we do not control the world, then the third-world minions will control us! Britain is an outward-looking global Imperial power or else it is nothing!

There are many faint-hearts and lesser-beings who assert that such a renewed global destiny for the UK isn’t possible. This, from my personal experiences in Southern Africa, I dispute absolutely. I have seen how a relatively small number of Britons have been able to tame and then administer large advanced nations, and to control the non-White population therein – and what is important is that on the whole these third-world minions have been pleased and grateful to receive all the advantages of our civilisation and standards of law and order. Two years ago, moreover, I visited one of the few remaining territories of the British Empire, Bermuda (whose national day is poignantly on the same day as Empire Day today!), and found that it reminded me very much of Southern Africa during “the good old days” – specifically of Port Elizabeth. There seemed to be practically no desire for “independence” among the non-White population there, who on the whole seemed totally happy and content to live with all the benefits which the Pax Britannica has brought them.

Whilst in Bermuda I came into contact with several of our American cousins, many of whom were openly supporting Donald J. Trump in the then forthcoming US Presidential Election. I discussed with them our own then forthcoming “Brexit” referendum, and all seemed to agree that it would be marvellous news for the West as a whole if both campaigns were successful. We hoped, but we didn’t expect – but as we all know that magic year of 2016 produced a double triumph for the re-emergence of Western self-confidence – a treble triumph if we also include the New Zealand Flag Referendum victory a few months earlier!

In the post-Brexit world which we now live in we must not sit back on our haunches and allow those with little vision who simply want Britain to become a glorified Switzerland to make all the running. We must forthrightly propose and advocate that a global economic, cultural and strategic alliance is created among all the core Commonwealth countries, with some form of close arrangement also emerging with our increasingly Anglo-centric American cousins. Our eyes should then turn to other parts of the globe where Britannia once ruled. I contend that there are many former British colonies currently suffering from famines, civil wars and corrupt administrations which would jump at the chance of resuming British Protectorate status. In recent years this has clearly been the case in Sierra Leone, the erstwhile British Somaliland, the Aden Protectorate and more recently Gambia – if only there were those in power with the political will and a sense of destiny.

As I say, I have seen the glories of British Imperialism, and these I am determined to work towards re-establishing for the benefit and rightful inheritance of my grandchildren. But it is not for selfish reasons of dynastic well-being alone that makes me realise that renewed British Imperialism is essential. As I stated in a speech which I gave to an earlier organisation called The Patriotic Forum (named in honour of a previous neo-Imperialist organisation which I had helped to found in Durban during the 1980s) in Torquay shortly after I was forced to return to the UK, we have a holy task to protect our planet’s wildlife from cruel and catastrophic destruction, and indeed to save our planet as a whole from environmental disaster, which the abdication of our Imperial responsibilities has caused. As Rhodes said: “To be born British is to win first prize in life’s lottery”. We must be worthy of the duties which this prize entails. The British Lion must roar again!