Once again, we are living in Solzhenitsynesque times (Article published in Country Squire Magazine)

Article published in Country Squire Magazine

Once again, we are living in Solzhenitsynesque times

The Soviet dissident and intellectual, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, famously said: “to destroy a people, you must first sever their roots”. Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in a Gulag for criticising Stalin and knew a thing or two about ideology, hard labour and anti-Soviet propaganda. Today, in a different time, geography and ideology entirely, our own Prime Minister seems to be waging war on his people with Twitterers being imprisoned for expressing opinions that challenge the woke dogma. The Prime Minister’s aim in this war might too be to sever Britons from their roots. Like so many left-wing ideologues, he aspires to the Rousseauesque blank-slate, the social tabula rasa where traditions and identity have been extirpated. Then, he can fill the void with the ideology de jour – radical wokeism. I reckon this nefarious ideology runs pretty thick through the Prime Minister’s veins: he made his name as a human rights lawyer defending the hordes of illegal migrants that invade our shores every day of the year. He chose this career path for a reason. He thought he might be able to put right what he wrongly perceived to be the ills of the past.

The war I refer to is the war on straight, white men who face constant discrimination because they do not fulfil the ‘diversity’ criteria, the war on white women who no longer feel safe in their communities and of course the war on the countryside, the farmers and the people whose livelihoods depend on the rural life. This year has seen a vicious attack on those that feed us with plans to tax inherited agricultural assets. Last week’s proposed ban on trail hunting (where dogs follow an artificially placed scent trail) amounts to pure spite and like most bans is once again driven by ideology. Such unnecessary actions really make it feel like a ‘war’: these forthcoming reforms could have a devastating effect on rural communities, but No.10 won’t care a single iota about that. If you put two and two together, you would have to conclude that Starmer seems to despise the countryside and the people that live there because he thinks it is ‘too white’. It fails his diversity criteria which form the cornerstone of his liberal guilt.

Over the last ten years or so, Britons have been told repeatedly by the likes of Sadiq Khan and those that populate the Front Benches that “Briton was built on diversity”. This is of course a lie; a lie saturated in ideological clap-trap. This is what Solzhenitsyn would have called “a false slogan characteristic of a false era”. Briton was built on the quiet strength of these farmers that Starmer seems to wish to ruin, many of whom now face an existential threat. Sadiq Khan tells us in his Christmas message that “Christmas is a time for diversity”. No, it isn’t. Christmas is a time to celebrate the birth of our Saviour. And if he doesn’t like that truism, why doesn’t he just leave?

We need leaders that cherish their people and their traditions, not leaders that bear an ideological grudge against them. My hope for 2026 is that those who are being persecuted – the free speech advocates that are spending this Christmas in prison, the DEI sceptics, the farmers and the good country people that think our traditions are worth preserving – will hold the line. Next year will be the year where the most duplicitous government in history will attempt to shoe-horn the population into the digital prison through their digital ID scheme. It will be the year where Starmer attempts to continue Blair’s legacy by attempting to fade out field sports. But, it will also be the year where sadly anger spills over into civil unrest.

Solzhenitsyn was expelled and deported from the Soviet Union in 1974. Four years later, he gave an unforgettable address at Harvard University. The packed audience expected him to share some personal insights of Soviet Union repression, but instead he turned his guns on his host and place of asylum – the West. He spoke of how the western world had lost its civil courage, become spiritually impoverished and how its leaders lacked any back-bone. He went on to remind the bemused audience that the decline in courage that he had witnessed in the West is always accompanied by moral mediocrity and over-legalistic structures, and is the beginning of the end for a nation. In this remarkable lecture, Solzhenitsyn tells us the problem with the West is there are too many human rights and not enough human obligations (to God and society which have grown dimmer and dimmer). Nobody could have imagined that a dissident who had been sentenced to years of hard labour at a sharashka for voicing an opinion could have made such a statement. Solzhenitsyn was a prescient thinker, and Starmer, the human rights do-gooder lawyer turned politician, is the personification of that spineless milk-sop that he had in mind when he delivered the lecture. He would have thought such a political candidate to be ‘demeaning’.

When we listen to the ideological woke drivel pour forth from our leaders, it is clear that we are living once again in Solzhenitsynesque times “where the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the State”. Unfeasibly perhaps, this time around the State is not the Soviet Union but what Russians call the ‘once’ Great Britain. The political communism of Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet Union ended in complete ideological defeat. It is the duty of Britons to ensure the radical wokeism that Mr Starmer represents enjoys the same fate. Sooner or later, I am confident that this will happen and the long road of restoration can begin. Let’s hope 2026 marks once and for all the decisive turning point where we can bury the unimaginable follies of the recent past.