Programming note: Join me tonight for the launch of a brand new Tale for Our Time. Tomorrow, Saturday, I'll be back for the latest episode of our Serenade Radio weekend music show, On the Town. It starts at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~A bite-sized chunk of my big-picture piece from Quadrant has now been excerpted in Australia's national newspaper, The Australian:
The biggest story of our time is that the entirety of the western world is sliding off the cliff – and most citizens of the west are not even aware of it, and have no desire to be made aware of it.
In that respect, I envy them. It is comforting to paddle one's canoe and insist that the ever louder roaring sound from up ahead is the crowd at a Taylor Swift gig and not Niagara Falls. To be sure, permanence is the illusion of every age, but only in our time do we choose consciously not to believe our lyin' eyes.
Nevertheless, the west is now weak by every measure. First, and most obviously, it is demographically dying. Second, it is economically moribund. Third, it is militarily feckless. Fourth, it is culturally suicidal... A couple of decades back, I would have kept the list going for another half-dozen sobering bullet-points, but let's just cut to the chase: We're nuts, and we're raising our kids to be even nuttier.
That last bit doesn't always work, of course: on the Continent, young voters are some of the most enthusiastic supporters of Germany's AfD, France's National Rally and other 'far right' 'neo-fascist' parties...
But "democracy" no longer quite works as it's meant to, does it? In Romania, the election got cancelled and the leading candidate arrested; in Canada, a globalist technocrat who's never sat in Parliament and is entirely unknown in his native land got parachuted in from Klaus Schwab's hollowed-out Alp. And, in between, western European elections have dwindled down to a grimly reductive standard operating procedure: the "far right" might occasionally "win" - in the sense of being the largest party in the legislature - but the "centre-right" has agreed to save democracy by only working with far-left parties. In Austria, the winning party has been excluded from a coalition of the losers. In the Netherlands, where the winning party has been admitted to the coalition, it is on terms that marginalise it and render its voters' concerns irrelevant. This uniparty continuity dooms to failure not just this or that individual government but the system itself. In Germany, after last month's election, the victorious Friedrich Merz has yet to take office but he's already being written off as a total wanker loser by his own voters:
More than half of Germans do not believe that Friedrich Merz will be a good chancellor, a new survey has said. According to the poll conducted by the Forsa polling institute for the RTL/n-tv Trendbarometer, 52% of respondents are sceptical of the CDU leader, compared to only 38% who think he will do a good job...
Voters who did give their support to the centre-right party did so thinking that Merz would deliver on his promises to take a tough course on migration and revive Germany's faltering industrial base while getting rid of radical climate policies.
So far, however, he has made a U-turn on his policies—even before becoming chancellor—in order to accommodate the Social Democrats. On migration, for example, he has backtracked on his vow to close Germany's borders to illegal and undocumented migrants, and on the budget, he is willing to indebt the country instead of pursuing fiscally conservative politics.
Yeah, well, that's your fault, Krauts. If you persist in voting for a "centre-right" party that pledges only to work with parties to its left - including its far left - all you're doing is volunteering to be the first to get screwed over on the morning after the election.
In the United Kingdom, if one were to dignify far more than it deserves Nigel Farage's conduct this last week in seeking to get his most effective MP gaoled as a violent sex predator (a charge not even the useless Brit media take seriously, and which even Nigel has given up talking about), it is because he - polling in roughly the same territory as AfD and National Rally - does not want to see Reform UK fall prey to a local variant of the Continental exclusion policy: oh, look - at the 2029 election there is no majority and the Tories pledge they're only going to work with respectable moderate mainstream parties such as the Greens and Sinn Féin.
When Farage says Rupert Lowe has been captured by the "online far right", he's saying that Reform's priority should continue to be aging lounge-bar whingers who, above all else, see themselves as the voice of Middle England and have no desire to remake themselves as firebrand revolutionaries. Of course, being a mainstream normie doesn't mean the uniparty won't shut you out anyway: ask Mme Le Pen, whose strategy of "de-demonisation" and reinvention of herself as a harmless cat lady Nigel seems to be trying to emulate. In France, the cat lady herself has a Paris prosecutor demanding she be gaoled for five years and banned from public office.
By way of a Rorschach test, here is a recent tweet from my former GB News colleague and soon-to-be Mark Steyn Cruisemate Father Calvin Robinson:
Ofsted is the Office for Standards in Education.
They inspect schools and other educational institutions in England to ensure they are "promoting British values".
The new interim chairman is a Mohammedan. pic.twitter.com/0RN2HAp4dM
— Fr Calvin Robinson (@calvinrobinson) March 13, 2025
This is correct: Sir Hamid Patel CBE is the new chairman of the British education system's regulatory authority - that's to say, Ofcom for readin', writin' and 'rithmetic. Yet the first comments I saw on the Tweet called it "disgusting" and said it made Father Calvin "look dumb" - because Sir Hamid is a respected educator whom the Headmaster of Eton likes.
I'd never heard of the bloke, and so I just looked at the picture and saw a man in Islamic garb who's now the head of a prominent UK government body. The white shalwar kameez was invented by Muslims as a response to the particular climate of South Asia, but like other Islamo-couture it's everywhere now, closing in on the Arctic Circle. Me a decade ago:
Just a lone stabber going full Allahu Akbar in a shopping mall in Turku. Two women dead, eight injured. As it happens, I was in Turku last year, driving up the west coast of Finland all the way to Kemi, a somewhat unprepossessing burg at the top of the Bay of Bothnia, where I'd had an extensive conversation, in the pedestrian shopping arcade, with an elderly 'refugee' in a dingy dishdash. And I'd intended to write something about how absurd it was that clothing designed for the deserts of Araby was now a not unfamiliar sight in southern Lapland, in a town that's more or less the last stop before Santa's Grotto.
So, when some people look at that Tweet, they see not a respected educator but something alien - and the portent of a future in which more and more of the people who count are dressed like that while they serve as Chairman of the BBC or Governor of the Bank of England. Alas, in a multicultural society where huge numbers of people are still able to drone "Diversity is our strength" with a straight face, even to draw attention to the above is "disgusting" and renders one really "dumb". Of course, you can always grumble into your beer about it with your mates down the pub - but in England the pubs are closing at the rate of fifty a month, and in the ones that are left Sir Keir Stasi's new Employment Rights bill has made provision for a "banter ban". In the future they're planning for you, you will be denied even the consolations of culture.
The question then arises: what comes next? The most important thing I linked to this week was an interview by onetime Steyn Show guest Louise Perry with David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King's College, London. If you're not into links, well, here's the whole thing:
Louise has the voice of a lovely English rose and Professor Betz is a mild-mannered soft-spoken Canadian, and such accents calmly discussing the road to "civil war" makes it far more unsettling than if it were just another blowhard roaring from his cyber-bunker. Especially when Mr Betz, who has advised governments around the Commonwealth on "counter-terrorism", says right at the end that it's too late to prevent it, and it's time to work on mitigation strategies to secure the nation's great artistic treasures and its nuclear weapons.
The idea that Britain and France are either a) lost or b) doomed to civic collapse would be dismissed by those whose principal concerns are capital gains and school fees. But both of these superficially stable nations have made recent territorial adjustments: the United Kingdom's present borders date all the way back to, oh, 1922, and until the Sixties French Algeria was divided into administrative départements no different from Provence or Normandy and inhabiting much the same psychological space in the national consciousness: in 1962 the million who fled, in a few months, from Algeria to metropolitan France was the biggest population displacement in Europe since the Second World War. As Professor Betz observes, during the thirty years of the Irish "Troubles" a few hundred terrorists were able to carry out destabilising operations at the highest levels of the British state, killing prominent politicians and members of the Royal Family, blowing up the Prime Minister's hotel, and putting a rocket through a Downing Street window.
Go back to the riots over the three girls slaughtered in Southport last summer and the ensuing lies by Starmer about who did it and why. The Troubles were maintained by a couple of hundred active insurgents drawn from a broader population of half-a-million "nationalists" in Northern Ireland. If you take seriously the bollocks peddled by the government and its media poodles, the biggest threat to social tranquility in the UK comes not from "refugees" or ongoing Islamisation but from the "far right". Okay. If you say so. In that case, do the math: England has a population a hundred times the size of Ulster's Catholic community. A take-up rate equivalent to the IRA's would be tens of thousands.
By doing what the uniparty has done in Germany, France, Austria, the Netherlands, etc, the state is not only delegitimising itself, but teaching the citizenry that nothing can be changed through peaceful civic participation. Eventually enough of them will draw the logical conclusions of that lesson.
Before the end of this decade, we will be in an entirely new phase.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.
