Britain needs a reset from hard-left fanatics

It is time for the Great Reset. Not the dystopian version favoured by Klaus Schwab, the caricature Bond villain running the semi-sinister, semi-comical World Economic Forum, but a radical reordering of every aspect of life in Britain and much of the developed world, to purge our institutions of the cranks, charlatans and neo-Marxists who have colonised the commanding heights of our society, while normal people simply tried to get on with their lives.

Now, we have reached the point where living normally is no longer possible, as a result of the stranglehold the hard-left fanatics, collectivised under the generic term “woke”, have secured over our speech, activities and even thoughts. It is not possible to live a normal life without a bank account: the creeping totalitarians perceived the potential for destroying opponents’ lives by de-banking them, a sanction they have now been employing for some time.

Their smaller victims – we now know accounts are being closed across the UK at a rate of 1,000 a day – suffered in silence. Emboldened, they went after less compliant prey, so that Toby Young and his Free Speech Union raised the alarm against PayPal, Richard Tice and the Reform Party denounced Metro bank; but it was when Coutts, the once discreet, gentlemanly bank that enjoys the patronage of the royal family, now in thrall to neo-Marxist ESG and DEI cant, expelled Nigel Farage that the balloon went up.

Coutts had selected the wrong target and, as a consequence, the whole imposture of Marxist banking is about to be blown out of the water. Entitlement dies hard: that is why Sir Howard Davies and his tin-eared board are still in place at NatWest, when it must be obvious to the meanest intellect that there can be no prospect of rehabilitating NatWest while that dead wood is cluttering the boardroom.

Busted flushes all, they expressed “full confidence” in Alison Rose, who broke the cardinal rule of banking by discussing a client’s financial status – untruthfully, as it turned out – with a BBC journalist, just six hours before Number 10 and the Treasury forced her out. Sir Howard Davies then proceeded, against the laws of probability, to make an even bigger buffoon of himself by referring to the departed CEO as a “great leader”, in terminology appropriate to a bank that had behaved in so North Korean a style as Coutts.

Davies’s behaviour is a microcosm of the leadership of all British institutions today, universally governed by buffoons. The farcical spectacle of the country’s most exclusive bank, which requires all its customers to be millionaires, attempting to project itself as “inclusive” might serve as a paradigm for the whole establishment.

Academics, once revered as repositories of learning and wisdom, are “decolonising” university curricula, so that students pay an average of £22,200 to be taught third-rate rubbish instead of great literature or accurate history.

The schools are worse because, to the great shame of our country, children are being subjected to intensive propaganda casting doubt on their sexual identity, with potentially disastrous consequences. Parents are being excluded from knowledge of what is taught in the name of sex education, frequently pornographic and universally anti-scientific: whether your child is told there are 72, or more than 100 “genders” depends on how insane the teachers are.

Schools are supposed to act “in loco parentis”, in the sense of continuing in the classroom the atmosphere and morals of the home; it does not mean supplanting parents and inculcating toxic falsehoods via obscene materials. So-called relationships and sex education in schools were made compulsory by the Conservative government in 2020. If that was not an open goal for Stonewall, what is? It is clear Tory ministers neither know nor care about the kind of material being employed in schools, while they play nodding donkeys whenever someone denounces the supposed wickedness of Section 28 under Margaret Thatcher.

That is the current character of British education, from kindergarten to the moment when a perfectly formed snowflake emerges from its Russell Group chrysalis and takes wings towards the City, business, banking, the civil service, lobbying (especially on climate), publishing, the media, “the Arts”, politics – or perhaps remains in academe to help lobotomize the next generation of undergraduates.

That is the dystopian, neo-Marxist landscape of Britain after 13 years of Tory government, a regime that has furnished the most extravagant example of Stockholm Syndrome ever recorded in the annals of psychiatry. Why were the Tories so enfeebled as to embrace the tenets of their enemies and repudiate anyone who retained traditional beliefs? Because they were not Tories, is the answer, just ambitious opportunists eager to assume the protective colouration of their environment.

In contrast, Nigel Farage played the key role in leading Britain out of the European Union, while a supposedly Conservative prime minister led the Remain campaign. Many people contributed to Brexit and all of them were necessary to achieve it. The difference with Farage, however, was that he kicked the door open, by driving the government to concede a referendum: without him, we would be an EU member state today.

Now, the same man has faced down a bank that holds 19 million accounts and is compelling the government, in bed with crony bankers for so long, to heed belatedly public anger and bring these rogue institutions, bailed out by taxpayers’ money, to heel. It has to be root-and-branch reform, with all the old, passive leftist boards cleared out and rules so tightened and backed by sanctions so severe that no Briton will ever again be turned into a non-person for his political or social beliefs.

That also entails retaining cash transactions, essential for small businesses, and seeing off any plans for a CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency, paving the way for a Chinese-style social credit rating, enforcing ideological compliance.

And while we are at it, can we please discontinue the latest weasel term that has crept into public discourse: “legally held opinions”? Opinions are subjective and involuntary; to require them to be “legally held” legitimises thought crime. And what if the law is changed, as has happened repeatedly in the past 15 years, with the precise purpose of criminalizing certain opinions? If we are to end the creeping totalitarianism engulfing our society, we need to go back to the drawing board, to tabula rasa, and uproot all the weeds of leftist intolerance.

That means repealing the Equality Act; outlawing all expressions of political opinion by commercial organisations – no more rainbow provocations to customers every June – and, for that matter, the police, their cars and uniforms decked out in the colours of a political movement; and making it illegal to discipline, intimidate or dismiss an employee, in either the private or public sector, on the grounds of their opinions.

Losing a bank account is disastrous, but so is losing one’s job. There have been increasing numbers of reports of people being dismissed for harbouring normal, scientific opinions, such as biology being the determinant of sex. It beggars belief that sensible people have been put into the dole queue for holding accurate, common-sense views, while those proclaiming extravagant, demonstrable lies rule the roost.

What has happened that such injustice is tolerated? The whole trans nonsense must be swept out of all positions of influence, especially where children are involved, and scientific truth reinstated. It is curious that those who, in the context of climate alarmism, insisted “Follow the science” (though the science, in that instance, had been distorted) prefer to ditch science in favour of “feelings” when it comes to biology and sexual identity.

The whole country needs to stand up and reclaim Britain for sanity. If there is one area above all where a Great Reset is needed, it is in the arena of climate change. To tune into BBC Radio 4 at any hour of the day or night is to hear the shrieking of Bedlam’s climate-demented inmates.

Net Zero must be ditched: it only took the Uxbridge by-election to hose the greenwash off the hypocritical Tories. On climate alarmism, again, we need to go to tabula rasa and reappraise the situation objectively. The government should assemble a panel of genuine climate experts who have not taken the IPCC shilling, discounting computer “modelling”, when the result is dictated by the data fed in, in favour of empirical evidence.

The great fallacy regarding climate change has been the assumption that because the perceived threat was global, it required a supranational, one-size-fits-all response. This has led to the absurdity of Britain, which produces a paltry one per cent of greenhouse gases, beggaring itself in pursuit of net zero while China, responsible for 28 per cent, opens more coal-fired power stations and grows its economy.

We need a response tailored specifically to Britain’s needs, a bespoke climate policy. Increasing temperatures could be a benefit in our position in the hemisphere, but as an island we must pay particular attention to coastal defences, in case of sea level rises. For that, we need authentic, unbiased scientific information, not the extravagant propaganda of climate alarmists.

In contemporary jargon, the urgent task facing us is to expel “woke” delusions and their fanatical supporters from every area of life, not just banks. Even beginning that Great Reset will embolden those who only tolerate the situation out of fear to detach themselves from this toxic ideology.

The operation is likely to be uncertain and patchy at first, but expertise will develop. We can learn much from hard-nosed American conservatives. Against woke corporations, the boycott has proved a formidable weapon (cf. Bud Light, Target, Disney). An app has been developed in America listing offenders: a customer might be about to lift a product from a supermarket shelf, until a glance at his phone informs him it is blacklisted by conservatives. Not an ideal way to live, but the only way to crush the hard left.

Those protesting injustice will also learn to personalise issues, to prevent perpetrators enjoying anonymity. For example, if a Christian preacher is arrested, instead of saying “Barsetshire police”, mentioning the chief constable by name will make him a controversial figure.

This, not the WEF’s nightmare prescriptions, is the Great Reset that we need to implement. The crucial question it will resolve is which is to prevail in Britain: the prejudices of a small, intolerant minority or the wishes of the overwhelming majority.

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