UK IMMIGRATION by Paul Rhodes

There are many categories of immigrant into the UK. Comprehensive figures are never given. Here are examples:-

Regular immigrants and dependents
EU Citizens who register
EU Citizens who do not register
Commonwealth & Dependency citizens with “The Right of Abode”
Those with Patriality
Spouses (an average of 25,000 per annum from the Indian SC)
Work Permit Holders who are granted leave to remain
Student Visa holders who are given leave to remain
Refugees & Asylum Seekers
Economic Migrants (usually holders of a visit visa, they simply stay on)
Illegals

And so on.

The UK’s population increased (gross) by around 1.9 million in 2006/7:-

Legal Immigrants 574,000 ONS
New Births 734,000 ONS
“Overstays” 400,000 ONS *
Illegals 200,000 **
________
Total 1,908,000 Gross
_________

* This is the figure published by the ONS for those visitors to the UK who simply stay on

** This figure is extrapolated from the number of illegal immigrants discovered at our major ports. Around 10 % of vehicles were stopped and searched in 2006

The number of people leaving the UK was given as 200,000 by the ONS. This includes those UK citizens who still return to the UK to use NHS services and those who receive a UK Government pension, heating allowance and other Government allowances and payments.

The contribution made by immigrants to the economy has been an argument used by Politicians, Civil Servants and others who support mass immigration. At a recent House of Commons Committee hearing the costs of providing immigration services was put at £8.78 Billion, as follows:-

Costs of crimes committed by Immigrants £4000 Million
Asylum Support / Processing £1600
Money Sent Home £1400
Border Controls £0690
HIV Treatment £0330
English Lessons £0280
Ethnic Minority Awards Scheme £0169
Security £0174
Translation Services £0100
The Commission for Race Equality £0032
Higher Education £0006.7
Local Authority Race Relations £0003.1



A Treasury Report stated that Immigration might add 0.5% to our GDP or reduce it by the same amount. Politicians and Civil Servants have never willingly issued comprehensive figures on the costs of immigration or the number of immigrants. To do so would have been to reveal their incompetence. Some investigative journalists and the odd whistle blower have revealed the true extent of the “problem”.

A recent TV documentary on this subject interviewed a Somali woman living in East London with her three or four children. Her husband had left and was thought to be living in Kenya. Her income, from the local authority, was given as £34,000 per annum. This of course included all kinds of income support, child benefits and so on.

The last time I looked at the UK’s crime figures 15% of all jail inmates were “foreigners” and 25% came from ethnic minorities. I have worked in over 50 countries and cannot think of one who was so lax with its immigration policies and policing. Immigration is the one factor that affects each and every facet of UK life be it education (including special needs and interpreting services), crime (police, courts, jails, legal aid etc) health, transport, housing, utilities, social services / special needs. All lurch from crisis to crisis.

Government spending increases year on year to pay for these services and taxes increase. Each year the Government goes deeper in to debt. The UK’s share of global trade decreases year on year and our negative trade balance increases. The Government just hopes that our GDP / Tax Revenues will grow year on year. Increasing taxes be they direct or “stealth taxes” can be / is counter productive.

The UK is now one of the most densely populated countries on earth with a population in excess of 64 millions. England alone has a population density of around 1100 people per square mile (USA 7.1, China 341, Canada 8, France 280, India 764, Germany 495, Russia 22).

The UK has over 64 million people, personal debt exceeds GDP and Government debt is now around £500 Billion and growing by around £35 Billion per annum. The UK is increasingly dependent on others for manufactured goods, energy and food. Around 80% of the UK’s energy is generated by oil / gas / coal fired power plants, in France the figure is 20%.

Politicians argue that mass immigration drives up our GDP and yet, as stated earlier in these notes, it may reduce our GDP. What it does mean is that all services come under increasing pressure year on year and in many areas are failing. With this level of population we are highly vulnerable to any glitch in world trade particularly any factor that would reduce our importation of oil and LNG.

I have attended many meetings on this subject. The Politicians who have spoken have at best been naive. In truth they have been disingenuous and economic with the truth. They have never had the figures for immigration and misquote (or are simply ignorant of the contents of) the 1951 UN Charter for Refugees.

I see little or no prospect of the UK’s economy gaining momentum or expanding. We are a service- based economy and in difficult times it is the service sector that suffers most. The UK has over 8 million people who are “commercially inactive”. Over 25% of all jobs are Government jobs. We have seen what can happen when credit dries up or interest rates take a hike.

There is little prospect of levels of immigration diminishing as the UK is the destination of choice for many economic migrants, we are members of the EU and 500 million EU citizens have the right to come to the UK and finally the worlds population (having grown from 1.6 billion to 6.4 billion between 1900 and 2006) is set to exceed 9 billion in the next 35 years.

Nationalist Conservatism by David Hamilton

Conservatism was an attempt to preserve traditional ways and differed from Liberalism but became Liberal, Classical then Social Democratic - abstract rights, capitalism, economics, laissez faire and self interest- now Cultural Marxism.

Like the other parties they offer the electorate incentives to get into power and at election time pretend they will introduce popular policies like controlling immigration but once in office pursue their own agenda. This should be a criminal offence and the Party name subject to trading standards law.

Academic Conservatives have tried to revive Conservatism by turning it into a competing ideology but it has no goal only living life by belonging to a historical community and culture and passing it on to one’s children. It is not a different opinion in a rational debate but an attitude and temperament in life. Rational plans and formulae are for the rationalist-ideologues: which is why these are “intimations” not a blueprint and cannot be stated a priori like utopian ideologies. There is more to human nature than reason.

It is not just reaction to current dominant doctrines nor a rejection of future utopias as fantasy in order to re-live a past utopia, not an attempt to turn back the clock to a bygone time but is a traditional way of thinking and feeling for one’s own ethnic community. The turning point is now as we who feel alienated and dispossessed begin re-developing a tradition for our common good and to revive our collapsing civilisation. We value wisdom over rationalist ideologies.

Wisdom is passed down by tradition, especially the family and develops from naivety through learning the lessons of life, how people behave and what they are capable of doing to each other, to practical wisdom which we pass it on to our children to
prepare them for life. Received ideology is arrested development.

We are born into a family, community and nation with history, culture and a civilisation that pre-exist us and we imbibe it as we grow up: It lives in us, and we in it. This has a conscious and an unconscious effect which makes us what we are. We have piety for our past and reverence for the achievements of our ancestors and a duty to pass it on to our descendants. It is an affective relationship that endures in time not a rationalisation into independent individuals interacting; much less the Cultural Marxist prejudice of slotting selected groups - blacks, homosexuals and women - into abstract categories with legal privileges.

We belong to a nation as Edmund Burke explained: “A nation is not an idea only of' local extent, and individual momentary aggregation: but it is an idea of' continuity which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space. And this is a choice not of one day, or one set of people, not a tumultuary and giddy choice; it is a deliberate election of the ages and of generations; it is a constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice, it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral and special habitudes of' the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time(1)

Enoch Powell defined our belonging succinctly in the debate on the 1981 British Nationality Act “Your nation is who you will fight for.” T.S.Eliot, our ways, ”… the term culture... includes all the characteristic activities and interests of -a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.” (2)

Our Christian faith activates our spiritual natures but Ideology is a secular religion which replaces national religion and having no spiritual content gives rise to earthly fanaticism. It has nothing transcendent only a forced move towards utopia on earth instead of heaven.

This developed from the French Enlightenment: one of the most significant events in human history that changed the human focus from looking back to the past for wisdom, the Bible, Aristotle and Plato, say, to working towards a vague, future utopia. It requires an idea of the person as abstract and malleable, with substance removed conceptually to fit them into a mental blueprint for utopia - Marxism's classless society, the feminists’ androgynous society, the liberal brotherhood of man and the Nazis' thousand year Reich of pure Aryans.

The present Utopia is the coffee coloured, Multi-Racial society. Norman Pannell urged a practical approach to immigration at the 1958 and 1961 Conservative conferences suggesting immigrants have health checks and those who are criminal be deported; Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod countered at a fringe meeting with his utopian belief in the brotherhood of man.

The Ten Commandments are duties which have been more important than rights in our historical and cultural achievement with the greatest art, literature and music inspired by God. A nation based on the duty of men and women is conscientious about responsibilities and obligations: a right-centred society is one in which individuals assert their personal desires. They are encouraged by Human Rights Acts to demand rights, with no consideration for the consequences of those demands on other people, like the right to protest and demonstrate conflicts with the right of pedestrians and motorists to use the public roads.

Human Rights are the modern Rights of Man. Conservatives believe in liberty but derived from belonging to a nation and is opposed to the universal, abstract rights of liberals and the group rights of cultural Marxists.

Because of the Human Rights Act “travellers” are being given our countryside. They buy farming land and convert it into caravan parks, then claim right of settlement. In the Spectator of December 17th 2005 philosopher Roger Scruton urged rural residents to save their countryside by clubbing together and buying it.

Rural communities should “take power into their own hands” as they had shown that the Hunting Act cannot be enforced we must now rescue our countryside from outsiders who are favoured by the Government. Neighbours (we) should club together to buy small parcels of land from desperate farmers then rent it back at a peppercorn rent.” They have done this in Professor Scruton’s neighbourhood and saved them from both travellers and agribusinesses.

The Conservative sense of nation was described by Cambridge don Dr John Casey in an address to the Conservative Philosophy Group. In the nineteenth century,” culture was taken to be the whole life of the people, and not just its highest achievements in, say, the fine arts. This involved an attempt to understand society and the nation through the sum total of its practices, traditions and institutions.

This tradition of thought has always had political implications, since the public institutions of the nation - religious and political - are clearly part of the whole life of the people. And the term most frequently invoked to express the whole life of the people, including the sense of itself as a political entity, was nation. The idea of the nation was something that could include the life of local communities, relations between classes, and indeed all those ways in which people impose a sense of themselves upon merely economic arrangements.” (3) He was persecuted and recanted but it still stands as an example of how we can become homogenous again safe from imported gang murders, muggings and Muslim bomb attacks.

Civilisation is created by effort and genius and must be renewed daily but is being undermined by our rulers for a new world order. Through studying history we learn that civilisations decline and fall when they become decadent and the people indulgent, as in Egypt and Rome which is why history is being phased out of state education.

People expect the state to solve their problems and spoiling them makes them dependent for not only material needs but their beliefs which are provided by the media and opinion formers so they become decadent and indulgent. Discrimination against us is presented as moral superiority - affirmative action. We who have emotionally bonded with our people and territory and belong here are being dispossessed by our rulers for unrealistic hopes of one world and those they brought here as cheap labour.

It takes totalitarianism to make disparate groups unite and our lives are being increasingly regulated. A hospital visit needs a password and our confidential relations with our G.P.s have been destroyed now that our personal medical histories are put on a national database. We are becoming state property.

The “Enlightened” ruling and cultural elites try to dismiss our views as prejudice but when examined their views are rationalisations of their prejudice in favour of other ethnic groups. In fact it is more accurate to define our ruling elites as an “Ideological Caste” because only those who think and act in the correct way are admitted and any who say the wrong thing are forced to publicly apologise or destroyed.

London's Science Museum cancelled a talk by Nobel prize-winning geneticist Dr James Watson, winner of a Nobel Prize for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, had been due to speak at the museum, because he suggested black people were less intelligent than white people. Watson, told The Sunday Times he was "inherently gloomy about the prospects of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas all the testing says not really."

The Science Museum, said "We know that eminent scientists can sometimes say things that cause controversy and the Science Museum does not shy away from debating controversial topics...However we feel that Dr Watson has gone beyond the point of acceptable debate and we are, as a result, cancelling his talk." Where was their reasoned argument? That was naked prejudice on their part.

Sir Winston Churchill tried to heal the rupture in our national continuity in 1955 by having a bill to control immigration drawn up which was not ready until June, two months after he stepped down because of his health. He wanted the Conservative party to adopt the slogan “Keep England White.” (4)

The fifth Marquess of Salisbury, grandson of the great Conservative Prime Minister and descendent of Lord Burleigh adviser to Queen Elizabeth1, wrote to Viscount Swinton in 1954, in a letter preserved at the Public Records Office, ”We are faced with a problem which, …With each year that passes, and with the general improvement with methods of transportation, the flow increases. Indeed, if something is not done to check it now, I should not be at all surprised if the problem became quite unmanageable in twenty or thirty years time. We might well be faced with very much the same type of appalling issue that is now causing such great difficulties for the United States. The main cause of this sudden inflow of blacks is of course the Welfare State. So long as the antiquated rule obtains that any British subject can come into this country without any limitation at all, these people will pour in to take advantage of our social services and other amenities and we shall have no protection at all.”

That Queen Elizabeth I had “Blackamoors” expelled from her realm in 1601 shows what a Conservative value it is.

The Daily Telegraph of 4/10/07 reported, “Foreign criminals are moving out of big cities and infiltrating rural towns and villages. The gangs include Jamaican "Yardies" selling crack in Hereford and Cambridgeshire, Chinese criminals called "Snakeheads" in Lancashire and Norfolk, Albanians running prostitution rings in Hampshire and Colombian cocaine networks in Chelmsford, Essex.

A television series, “ Crime Invasion — Britain's New Underworld”, for
the Virgin 1 satellite channel, was presented by Rageh Omaar, a journalist who has worked for the BBC. Omaar said: "Crime in the UK is changing and making the series has shown me that it is happening right underneath our noses." The chief constable of Cambridgeshire, Julie Spence, has said that immigrant workers were importing their national feuds and criminal behaviour to rural England.”

Democracy is a myth. Few people bother to vote. It attracts inadequate and ignoble people to office because it involves bribing and deceiving people into voting for them; it attracts hypocrites who preach family values and commit adultery or who preach equality but send their own children to public schools. As few voters read the parties manifestoes they have no mandate. The main issues are general movements that political parties conform to, not attached to a political party. In our time it is multi-racialism and all three follow it.

Culture is treated as independent of people and anyone can come and adopt it like putting on and taking off clothes. Aristocracy is a form of rule that suggests permanence and continuity as they embody the nation and its traditions. A warrior class based on the land, their duty was to defend the nation was well as rule it.

The House of Lords must be re-created as the new chamber will be for rewarding members of the political elite and to stack decisions in the elites favour. Only the gullible think this will be democratic. It is part of the ongoing takeover of our lives by moneyed elites whose loyalty is to themselves and whose vision is the dissolution of our nation for unworkable Globalist aims. They are using people for cheap labour - both outsourced and imported. Re-creating the Lords will be a step back to aristocratic and monarchical rule.

Rights were demands of the capitalists that led the French Revolution. Our main historical references are the American and French revolutions and the nationalist revolutions of 1848. It began the destruction of the natural order of sceptre and crown for rule of the Liberal-Capitalist class where membership was not by blood but money. They wanted the disestablishment of religion, the dissolution of nationhood, the denial of race as a social factor, and finally World Government or Utopia.

The media elites manipulate the masses into supporting these ideas. The main issues of the day are movements that political parties conform to: they are not
attached to particular parties and the major movement of our time is multi-racialism and all three parties conform to it.

Traditional prejudice conveys wisdom to new generations but Liberals and cultural Marxists think they have transcended prejudice yet beneath their high-mindedness is the prejudice that immigrants are essentially good but whites are essentially bad and they take sides with immigrants a priori - the rationalisation comes after: “They are going to become English”, “they are bringing diversity”; “Islam the religion of peace”, “they are enriching our culture”, “the hospitals could not run without them”, “we need their doctors”.

This justifies them asset stripping the third world of workers and doctors. It is motivated not by guilt but shame: if you feel guilty you are remorseful and seek to make amends which our elites do not do but direct immigrants into our communities so we are used to make amends for them.

They live in lovely areas or safely in gated communities while ordinary people get mugged, burgled and raped, and put at risk of Aids and T.B. They do not spoil their own areas but use worthy causes like Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England to preserve them. When centres for asylum seekers are proposed for the countryside, the elites are in uproar to keep them out. Political, intellectual and corporate elites are selfish and think only of themselves. The one gets cheap labour, the others pose as moral beacons to the un-enlightened. They loathe their own people and do not care how much we suffer as long as they feel virtuous.

Many illegals work unlawfully long hours for almost nothing and have their liberty restricted by their masters and classic hypocrisy is the elites apologising for historic slavery while importing wage slaves! This is opposite of the Conservative virtue Noblesse Oblige: the obligations of the noble to the lower orders who reciprocate by loyalty and service.

Modern Noblesse Oblige would be adopting economic protectionism. This value was preserved in opponents of immigration including working-class Socialists as the British are naturally Conservative. In the Commons immigration debate on the 5th of December 1958 Labour’s Frank Tomney (Hammersmith), remarked “We have been sent here by the electorate to give expression to issues which concern them.”

Conservative Cyril Osborne (Louth) 25th March 1965 spoke up for the working class in an immigration debate in the House of Commons. He said that in 1958 he could see the social evils and could still see them, “…for more than ten years I have begged this house – my own side as well as the party opposite – to face this problem which haunted me, as it still haunts me because I could see the social evils”.

If anything goes wrong it cannot be others so they blame their own people and the connative word is “racism”. It is only applied to whites. We are the scapegoats for the setbacks on the road to their utopia.

The ideas that we are told rule our lives are but rhetoric. Equality masks hierarchy. Dr.Frank Ellis left Leeds University after an Inquisition for speaking of, amongst other things, “humane repatriation.” The University stated: “Dr Ellis has acted in breach of our equality and diversity policy, and in a way that is wholly at odds with our values. Second, in publicising his personal views on race, Dr Ellis has recklessly jeopardised the fulfilment of the University’s obligations under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. As a public body, the University is required under that Act to promote good relations between people of different racial groups.”

Modern society has been built on the foundation of "equality" and therefore statements like this type threaten its roots. The analogy with the 17th century Papacy persecuting Galileo is apposite. Yet the elites are a hierarchy. The law was passed by the rulers then acted on by bureaucrats and academics lower down the hierarchy and finally the students protested obediently. Equality is imposed from the top, down a hierarchical chain of authority. That is the natural state and our recognition of natural hierarchy is only acknowledging what Liberals and Cultural Marxists try to deny!

Nationalist Conservatives are protective of civil society which took centuries to grow! If we are split up by introducing masses of aliens, the basis of civility, which is trust, is destroyedbecause they have different ambitions and goals and each group become rivals and neither we nor they, know when historical enmity will surface.

A major value is Tradition: ribs that hold communities together. One of the most important is our language and there is a new political vocabulary developing, un-self consciously. Take the word English. During the Empire the home countries were subsumed under the word British and it is PC to say British now but people are describing themselves as English, Scottish, Welsh and Ulster to emphasise their national identity.

This happened with flags and the authorities’ rationalisation against is re-claim them from extremists! We need a concrete vocabulary with which to explicate the world around us and describe human nature. The Welsh have it right in their great anthem “Land of my Fathers”. “English” is changing as the English affirm their collective identity, mentally disentangle from the EU and the term British disintegrates. This reflects change in British relationships. Country is vapid but land means something. Anglo Saxon words are folksy and Latin more abstract so our political vocabulary requires old English words.

Joseph de Maistre, the Savoyard counter-revolutionary, encapsulated the unreality of abstractions in his famous quote, ”In the course of my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians; ... but man I have never met”

The ruling bureaucrats of the E.U. and our regional Government are restricting our vocabularies through P.C. so that we speak and think in the way they want us to, and are devising an artificial way of describing Muslims to avoid calling some terrorists. This totalitarian control of thought through language began with the French revolutionaries, was continued by the Bolsheviks, Mao’s cultural revolution and in the west by cultural Marxists with their gradual cultural revolution.

Take our degraded art and literature: it is for talented people to re-link with spiritually uplifting art and re-grow it. For example, in Poetry, re-link with our original Anglo-Saxon forms such as the beautiful internal rhyme of alliteration, whereas end rhyme is dull and monotonous; or, Medieval because of the importance of Ballads as a vehicle to convey our suffering under our elected representatives who are against us. The matter of Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham is precedent.

The family is exemplified in Monarchy. The institution of Monarchy is the embodiment of the nation and the Monarch is on our stamps, our court cases are Regina v X; we walk and drive on the Queen’s highway. The throne goes automatically to her successor. It is not the person but the office. The king is dead long live the king. It is continuity but also has a deep archetypal import that touches our deepest instincts.

The natural form of Government is absolute Monarchy. It is the summum bonum of our family system and the family is its reflection. King and Queen are Father and Mother of the nation. Our current royal family are badly advised and reflect the general chaos instead of setting an example. I once read that the Queen Mother liked Ali G!

This is propaganda to make them more ordinary in deference to demands by the tabloids and their global-elite owners but has made them contemptible. We must begin working towards absolute monarchy. They have archetypal importance to their people and a relationship with the whole nation not certain classes and factions.

From the fifth Commandment we learn to honour our mothers and fathers. The family is the beginning of civilisation and we have warnings from one-parent families to go by - the misery and trouble they are often in. The bonds that unite us are affective not rational - we feel that we belong and are comfortable. We feel at home. We like our land because we have bonded with it and this bond has been sanctified by time. These affections grow naturally within the family where responsibility for our community begins and is perpetuated in creating and rearing children and renewing our community so what was handed down to us is passed on.

Homosexuals do not have this fulfilment as they have no further stage to move onto and remain in adolescence. Our babies have been devalued as little more than attributes of the woman’s body, her rights are paramount and the father does not count. Abortion is erasing our posterity and 6 million babies have been killed since the 1967 Abortion Act!

Fetishism is being popularised by our cultural and intellectual elites. This is deriving thrills from injury and degradation. It is the erotic form of hatred and consent is no excuse because if not countered evil spreads and soon those who do not consent will be abused and bullied by perverts. With outside forces working to destroy our boys and girls parents must regain sovereignty over their families and take responsibility for their children and Home School to rescue them from state corruption which is teaching them to give their land away and to become sexual perverts.

An early progressive William Godwin wrote in Political Justice(1793) that marriage and parental duties are irrational and believed as utopians do that society would become better and that men and women would in the future not behave so narrowly but for the benefit of everyone. The family is not narrow: its influences emanate outwards. Nearly all our traditions and institutions have been destroyed so we are going to have to re-link with many of them and grow others from our roots.

The cultural Marxists are planning “Faith Schools” to allow other ethnic groups to instil standards of behaviour and education but try to ruin ours. Jim Knight, the schools minister, was reported in the Daily Telegraph of 8 October 2007 as saying the Government was considering how to simplify the balloting process adopted under 1998 legislation.” Ministers are paved the way for the adoption of fresh powers to abolish academically selective education. They said parents should get the chance to force the closure of grammar schools in their area if the majority of families opposed selection by ability.

Jim Knight, the schools minister, said the Government was considering how to simplify the balloting process adopted under 1998 legislation in which schools could be forced to drop the 11-plus.” The education Guardian on Monday June 25, 2007 told us the other part of the political elite the Conservative party ”announced last month that if it won the next general election there would be no return to
grammar schools on the grounds that they do little to benefit children from poorer backgrounds. Instead, the party has promised to continue Tony Blair's flagship education reform and support the expansion of the academy schools programme - independent state schools sponsored by business.”

We must counter these attempts to destroy our children by cultural Marxists. Parents must take back responsibility for their sons and daughters from the state. We need to re-introduce grammar Schools or even found new public schools to impart traditional values like honour, duty and service; others must consider Home Schooling networks to give their young the standard of education the state schools are denying them and to instil self-worth and a sense of belonging instead of teaching them to give up their country to outsiders and to become sexual perverts.

We must revive local fairs and festivals and develop our Folk music traditions by taking traditional forms but using words and sentiments suitable for our present time to express our sufferings under the elites. These are not rationalist formulae but suggestions for our creative young people to develop in practice. They will forge natural, emotional bonds with their own people, their traditions and civilisation.


1. Reflections on the Revolution in France.
2. Notes Towards a Definition of Culture. T.S.Eliot
3. Peter Hennessy, 'Having It So Good - Britain in the Fifties' (Allen Lane, 2006) p 224. Hennessy's reference is: Peter Catterall (ed.), 'The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years, 1950-1957' (Macmillan, 2003) p 382.
4. Salisbury Review. Autumn 1982.

See also:

pat buchanan.org. November 1998; and
"Death of the West” 2002.(St.Martins Press); “
"State of Emergency” (2006.St.Martins Press)
Michael Oakeshott.1948.Rationalism in Politics.(Methuen)
James Burnham.1964.Suicide of the West.

The free-market and globalisation could wreck one corner of rural England, says Stuart Millson

What could be quieter than the location of Lydd in Kent, the Romney Marsh town whose church tower is known as “the cathedral of the marshes”. To the west of Lydd, army ranges and the road to Rye and Camber. To the east, the road to Old and New Romney which cuts through agricultural land known primarily for sheep farming. Along this road, just outside the town, is Lydd Airport – a small aerodrome which was once used by Dan Air (a famous name from the 1970s) for short-haul services to France, and which continues to cater for a modest, yet growing amount of low-key traffic.

However, the peace of Romney Marsh could be shattered forever if the go-ahead is given to the Middle Eastern company which owns the airport, to run large-scale passenger services. Already, there are some ominous signs – and signposts. For example, on driving up to the gates of Lydd airport, the passenger is told that he or she is at “London Ashford Airport” – a very imaginative approach indeed to marketing and geography, given that Lydd is a 70-mile or so drive from the capital city (which already provides the burgeoning population of the South-East with three airports).

Global business lobby

A number of environmental action-groups have been formed to counter the threat of this latest proposal for airport expansion (the North Kent marshes, with their unique wetland bird habitats were spared a couple of years ago after furious local protests); and the issue has been brought to public attention in the form of some evocative newspaper articles about the spirit of Romney Marsh. But as ever, the global business lobby exercises huge power – and perhaps surprisingly, there are also many individuals within Kent business organisations and local authorities who believe that the only raison d’etre to life is to build new motorways, ring-roads, and more ring-roads to run rings around the existing clogged up traffic system. “If we need a new road, build it” exclaimed one business-Stalinist at a county local business convention in Ashford in 2001 – the “gentleman” apparently having not a single thought for any other consideration or consequence.

Let us be clear what is at stake here. As the Campaign to Protect Rural England warned, not only would the expanded airport cause immense problems with overloaded marshland roads, but the daily impact of Boeing 737s roaring across the small coastal communities and villages – trailing kerosene in their wake – would make for an environmental disaster. But the problem would not be confined simply to the marshland… Circling jets, waiting for their landing slots, would disturb the peace, quiet and solitude of the North Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty – the mass of aircraft making it increasingly difficult to sustain the rich and enriching local bird population, particularly rare species, and the patterns of bird migration across nearby Dungeness, home of an RSPB reserve. Once again, CPRE provides a perfect clarification of the matter at hand… and what a pity that one leading Conservative and Cameronite chose to deride this valuable body of concerned and dedicated volunteers as “the campaign to preserve posh people’s gardens” – a truly depressing comment for a supposedly “green party”.

Artificially-inflated population

In an increasingly overcrowded South East, with an artificially inflated population, and the ongoing phenomenon of the London overspill moving further and further away from the horrific problems of congested and crime-ridden Inner London, there has never been a greater need to preserve what remains of the remoteness of the Kent countryside. And in the case of Romney Marsh, there is so much within that “fifth continent” which stands for the England which we need so desperately to preserve: the reed-beds and heron-priested banks of dykes and waterways which criss-cross the landscape; the mediaeval church of St. Clement at Old Romney – which looks as though it has grown roots into the very soil; the vast skies and sunsets over the Channel coast, where the Home Guard kept watch in the dark days of the last war. I wonder if such places would ever inspire David Cameron to venture down for an environmentally-concerned photo-opportunity – or is “the environment” just about expensive trips to the North Pole, US Government spokesmen talking about “carbon footprints”, or the plight of the Third World or faraway countries and indigenous peoples?

Once again, the future of a recognisable and rooted place, with its own special culture and local quirks – not to mention a rare ecology, natural history, and treasured tranquillity – stands or falls on the decision of faceless officials, and the whims of foreign entrepreneurs. And despite the current clamour for “green taxes” and for the increased taxation of air travellers, there seems to be a strange predisposition on the part of our rulers toward building new airports and extra runways – a peculiar mismatch of aims! For hundreds of years, Romney Marsh has maintained its sense of separation and feeling of wild mystery – providing a sanctuary for many weekend visitors, and a pleasingly rural habitat for the people who live there. How terrible that the slow passage of time – the essence of any civilised or conservative society – should be sacrificed to the short-termism of the global free-market, and the balance-sheets of the money-men and philistine modern state bureaucracy. We need to preserve the natural and national heritage of our island – we need to save Romney Marsh.

Odyssey through our Present Discontents: Culture Wars and Importing Crime - David Hamilton

Since the decline of our traditional, aristocratic rulers and the growth of unhealthy values like tolerance and cultural relativism we have been plunging into crime and degeneracy which has harmed our young people and is now spreading to the rural middle classes. If we take an odyssey through our present discontented we get a clearer view of what is happening around us.

The Daily Telegraph of 4/10/07 reported, “Foreign criminals are moving out of big cities and infiltrating rural towns and villages. The gangs include Jamaican "Yardies" selling crack in Hereford and Cambridgeshire, Chinese criminals called "Snakeheads" in Lancashire and Norfolk, Albanians running prostitution rings in Hampshire and Colombian cocaine networks in Chelmsford, Essex, a new television series claims.

The disclosures are featured in Crime Invasion — Britain's New Underworld, a new series for the Virgin 1 satellite channel, presented by Rageh Omaar, a journalist who has worked for the BBC. Omaar said: "Crime in the UK is changing and making the series has shown me that it is happening right underneath our noses." Julie Spence, the chief constable of Cambridgeshire, said recently that immigrant workers were importing their national feuds and criminal behaviour to rural England.” I have personally been approached by people smuggled in by snakeheads to buy cheap tobacco and CD.s in pubs as far afield as Cheltenham and Sheffield.

One of the weapons used by the new left is what is known as the “Culture Wars.” Modern, popular music transmits raw uninhibited energy, emotion and excitement often with catchy tunes but is negative and corruptive. Those who doubt this should listen to, say, “Heavy Metal” or “Rap” then perhaps some Tudor church music and compare the feelings and images that are aroused. The first produce the desire to hurt or mistreat others, the second, an uplifting spiritual sense and a good feeling towards God and others.

Rock stars are part of the cultural elite. Prime Minister Harold Wilson used the Beatles to present himself as relevant and modern as Tony Blair later used Oasis and the stars work closely with the Royal family for their pet charities. Rome under the Caesars kept people quiet with what the satiric poet Juvenal scorned in his tenth satire as Bread and Circuses. Issuing bread and occupying the public with shows managed and controlled them; now, the idea is to manipulate us into a way of thinking and behaving; culture and entertainment are a major part of social engineering.

These usually begin as wholesome pastimes but in a declining civilisation become corrupted. The Romans sank into a debased barbarism by slaughter in the Amphitheatre. Our current deterioration into barbarism makes use of images more than reality, though the emotional impact creates the sensation and can lead to the reality. The state of a civilisation can be assessed by its art. There are deep similarities between our collapsing civilisation and the collapse of Greece and Rome and we need to use their historical example as guides to correcting our own folly. In each there is a coarsening of the presentation of the artistic subject, a shift from a deep explication of human behaviour and motivation to a sensational presentation of violent or lascivious action. This deterioration in moral refinement occurred in the plays of Euripides, whereas Socrates and Aeschylus dealt with the profound questions of life, of existence and our relationship to the Gods. One of the greatest emotionally structured plays of all time, which influenced Aristotle in his definition of dramatic structure, was Oedipus Rex. This ends with Oedipus blinding himself off stage, the revelation of incest and suicide, which is a gathering up of both motivation and action and provides catharsis, the release of emotion, which is a social good for it helps prevent it turning against the others. It is not degenerate or sensationalist because it deals with an aspect of fate and how the Greeks viewed the meaning of their lives. This differs from modern drama, which is a focus on the surface action communicating not glimpses of God but feelings of evil.

The modern manipulators are leading us into degeneracy. In a recent TV series "I'm a Celebrity Get Me out of Here", simple people, described as Celebrities, were so degraded as to eat live worms and stick insects. There are several levels to this: there is cruelty to lesser animals; encouraging children to eat insects and slugs in the garden and the decline into more degradation of our people and culture. On a “reality” programme one masturbated a pig and on another one fried and ate Kangaroos testicles. This is to degrade our people and culture. Many think that the presentation of certain “lifestyles” in T.V. programmes is innocent, but they are arranged and presented to be sympathetic and thus to change people’s attitudes which is social engineering. The Soaps are used to promote “gay” lifestyles. This does not happen by serendipity. It is planned in meetings. The “Goodies” are shown sympathetically and glamorously, every character they want us to imitate is attractive and cool; the “Baddies”, those they want us to hate, are thick and unlovable. It does not occur in a vacuum but in tandem with other developments and helps to manipulate acceptance for the Government plans to equalise the sexual marriage laws.

An area where the human soul meets good and evil from the unconscious mind is in art. The proper function of art is the transformation of real life through the spiritual and emotional functions of the human mind. Traditionalism is presented as living in the past but at an art exhibition in Birmingham I was disappointed to see how quaint these artists are. Someone had a photograph of herself sat on the loo was originally done in 1969 when rock singer Frank Zappa had a publicity poster of himself sat on the loo!

Every year these time-warped artists stage a ritual by setting up an ordinary member of the public. The script is this: an elderly person takes a youngster, say grandchild or niece, to an exhibition and is shocked by something on display, like an unmade bed or something that requires little imagination, and complains to the press. Then the curator is quoted as saying, “Art is to make people think, and to provoke feelings”. This hackneyed response has been used on each occasion for the last 30 years.

I once went to the Ikon gallery in Birmingham, which is financed by taxpayers’ money confiscated by the Government as well as funding by companies. The young gulls there soon refused to speak to me when I explained they are mass produced artists all doing similar stuff. They have to do what the Art Council wants to get a grant. This is state art designed to degrade and destroy our culture and civilisation; so deep goes the hatred for our culture, our communities, our history and our traditions with the liberal middle classes who follow the tastes and standards set by elites such as Saatchi.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the modernist movement set about destroying the form and grammar of traditional art and thus the content, and made it both unintelligible and uninteresting. In the 60’s cultural Marxists of the new left became the elites. They and hate our culture and traditions and are destroying our young people.

In his St. Georges Day address of 1933, Winston Churchill warned, of the type who were taking over our political and cultural life,”…a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country who if they add something to the culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrine by a large portion of our politicians.”

George Orwell made the same point “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.”

Aristocrat rulers had sense of “noblesse oblige towards the working classes and a sense of responsibility but the elites, who grew out of the new left, corrupt them out of hatred and personal gain. The Discrimination Act of 1975 advises people not to use degrading language of certain selected groups. But our “cultural Marxist” elites continually degrade working-class people and our young. They mock them as “Chavs.” Our people rarely see themselves affirmed in adverts or on TV, only dark people without English features unless they are advertising our women to the world as whores. We are not supposed to identify with ourselves. The elites need have no conscience about bringing immigrants here to take our jobs by undercutting wages and pushing us out of our communities if they convince themselves we are worthless.


The television programme makers are on the lookout for something to laugh at but we are now the targets and this is done to us before the rest of the world. It is conveyed by images as well as words which are read as body language and semi-conscious messages. Whites are presented as fat, over weight, while ethics are bright and clean. A television programme “How clean is Your House” has two women visit inadequate parents to tell them how to bring their children up. They select lower class inadequates but never tell an inadequate Muslim couple how to bring their children up. One of these programmes is shown in 47 countries! This sends the message to potential asylum seekers that we are inadequate and weak and they can come here and everything off us including our women.

What are the effects of this constant debilitation of our people by the elites on everyday life? Ordinary people lose contact with our civilization and become disorientated, lost, suffer from bereavement and become depressed. Our culture is still amenable to the elites but our manipulated young and those from a de-culturalised background give up and do not bother. They cannot take refuge in a smaller cultural world like the elites who live in large houses in posh areas of London, or beautiful English villages as country gentlefolk. Ordinary people lose heart and, having nowhere to go descend into vices and viciousness. They are no longer civilized and do not know how to behave. They become prey to amoral meritocrats who use and exploit them.

The papers devote pages to the drugged and drunken antics of “celebs” and footballers while the celeb magazines and radio stations promote those who have degraded themselves on Reality TV shows. They show them leaving night clubs drunk and question whether they are wearing knickers or not. The people who make these programmes and write the magazines are educated and intelligent people so they know what they are doing to our young people. It is to redress the balance with the behaviour of ethnic communities. I looked at the covers of two celeb magazines: one stated, “Posh is looking tired and stressed. Is it too much partying?” The other, “Britney and Paris’ wild night out.”

We are being deprived of self worth and seeking it in drink and drugs. There is a trend in drinking amongst people as young as 10 -15. We see them all over the country in subways, on recreation grounds, schoolchildren drinking cans that they have been sold by shopkeepers. Our young people do not understand their loss of identity, the loss of the sense of who they are and loss of self-worth. What are the consequences? The degradation shows in their social lives when they try to escape from themselves.

A young woman told me how she and her cousin go on. “We were so drunk,” she said beaming. Two friends “were “so drunk they couldn’t stand.” I asked if they like getting drunk. “It’s social” one replied; the other ”It’s good fun.” “It is acceptable now like sex and dress.” Some Conservatives claim increasing prices would stop binge drinking but there are methods for getting drunk quickly and cheaply like “drinking glasses of water while drinking alcohol because it reacts in your blood and you get drunk quicker.” There is also a trick of gulping air down while you drink. I asked who originates these tricks. “Probably, the breweries”, she replied. Though they have been educated to see themselves as equal to men but in practice women’s vital organs are not as strong as men’s and they have a greater chance of liver and kidney damage as well as permanent brain damage. As Edmund Burke put it: ”If an idea is good in theory but not in practice, it is a bad idea.”

Children are selfish, but become civilized as they grow older and take responsibility for the world around them. This is becoming adult. However, our elites are preventing them from growing up and keeping them immature which is causing so much uncivilised behaviour. Bar owners and the drinks companies play on the weaker part of people’s nature rather like a sales scam would play on, say, someone’s greed. It is preying on the young’s need for fun and adventure with unhealthy adventures.

Young people drink drinks that have pretty colours and fruity flavours like soft drinks but are about 6% alcohol, or pretty, pleasant tasting cocktails. At the same time the hypnotic music pounds away disorientating them. There are often TV screens all around showing sport, pop acts or models on catwalks. This bar had a couple of bouncy castles upon which customers bounced gleefully, mindless that outside their bubbles of pleasure there is a dangerous, hostile world. Recent bomb attacks were outside London nightclubs. A cool bar is an unreal world and like being in a dream. There is also the use of the hallucinatory effects of drugs in adverts. I saw an advert for vodka shots, which was a square of undulating shades of blue light. You do not see these colours by drinking vodka, gulps of air or not. You see this by taking ecstasy.

On a normal evening in every town and city you see young women collapsed on the pavements usually being attended by paramedics and stretchered away comatose or with cracked heads. Is that all our young women are worth? They walk up to cars waiting at traffic lights and ask for lifts and often just open the door and get in. You see them staggering around the streets at 2 to 4 am lobbing their boobs out to stop passing cars for lifts. They are perfect victims for ethnics and asylum seekers who drive up and down the entertainment streets imitating private hire cars. People from other countries and ethnic groups have no respect for our corrupted women who they see as only good for one thing. A couple of dozen must be raped every weekend in Broad Street, Birmingham alone, and not know it, as many cannot remember how they got home. Later, they might want an abortion or find they are HIV-Positive!

The Times of August 11 2007 reported on “growing concern at the attitudes of some Asian men towards white girls which campaigners for women claim few people wish to address. Parents have complained that in parts of the country with large Asian communities white girls as young as 12 are being targeted for sex by older Asian men yet the authorities are unwilling to act because of fears of being labelled racist.
Ann Cryer, a Labour member of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, has been at the forefront of attempting to tackle the problem after receiving complaints from mothers in her constituency about young Asian men targeting their under-age daughters.

Although campaigners claim that hundreds of young girls are already being passed around men within the Asian community for sex, she said that attempts to raise the problem with community leaders had met with little success, with most of them being in a state of denial about it.”

Pop stars are arbiters of taste and behaviour and must take personal responsibility for the harm they have done to young people by creating degenerate images to make themselves millions. Young people identify with them and are beguiled by their rebellious and exciting images while in reality they live in mansions, employ gardeners, maids, cooks and butlers and send their children to the best schools. The man who destroyed old America, and undermined the western world Elvis Presley has a religious devotion 30 years after his death and his home Gracelands attracts worshippers on the scale of Lourdes or Mecca. These pop idols have replaced religious and national icons for millions of people.

John Lennon perceived this and on March 4, 1966, in an interview printed in the London Evening Standard, John Lennon made the following statement: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." The statement, being part of a two page interview, went unnoticed in Britain at the time. When it was printed in American teen Magazine "Datebook" a few months later a great uproar broke out. Jesus practiced what he preached and lived in poverty. How sincere was Lennon?

He was interviewed for Marxist magazine, 'Red Mole' by wealthy editor Tariq Ali who wrote,” A limo pulled up outside our office, to the astonishment of bystanders. My colleague Robin Blackburn and I piled in and were driven to Tittenhurst, his Surrey mansion. We spoke for most of the day, saw one of Yoko's avant-garde films (which Robin adored) and were driven back to London. The interview had gone extremely well. Both John and Yoko had been disarmingly frank. The very next morning John rang. He had been so inspired by our interview that he had written a new song. Could he sing it down the phone? He could. That was how I first heard "Power to the People".

Tittenhurst Park is a massive, white, 200 yr-old Georgian mansion in Ascot, Surrey. Lennon had an eight-track studio, in the 7 bedroom, 3 bathroom, 3 reception rooms and it stood in 70 acres of Parkland. Not only did he record "Working Class Hero" and describe it as a song for the revolution, he wrote his best known song, “Imagine” (no possessions) there. He died leaving $275 million! He had spent half of his time making money the other half promoting and donating to terrorists like the Ira and extremist Black groups. His widow Yoko is a billionairess! Madonna in real life tries to live as an English country lady while in public she pretends to be a rebel effing and blinding and snogging Britney at award ceremonies.

On internet “Community” sites for young people to meet others our young women present themselves as tarts and most say they “like getting drunk.” Their clothes and poses show them as anybody’s meat. They are imitating people on TV. talent shows and think they will be spotted, and slappers who have made fortunes showing their silicon boobs. Our elites promote these as role models for our young people, but only promote honourable and worthy people as role models for ethnic minorities. If you walk around an inner city school or community centre the walls are festooned with heroes from the histories of ethnic groups like Gandhi, Marcus Garvey or Harriet Tubman and a statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square.

Like Rome we are behaving as though we have been conquered. The immigrants are after our women and we are supposed to accept it because our elites have passed laws
to prevent us objecting. These are features of being conquered – we must not fight back but acquiesce. An imaginary conversation between a settler and a new asylum seeker,” Their women are easy. All you have to do is buy them a few drinks. There is nothing the men can do because their Government is against them.”

In “Deculturalisation of the English People” the Rev. John Lovejoy, who lived and worked with Australian Aborigines, compared what is being done to us with what was done to them. He concludes that as well as the loss of culture the taking of their women that destroyed them.

On an entertainment street some bars are used for pills and others for cocaine and most door staff are pumped up on steroids. The drug goes with the music. The coke-heads are hyper and constantly making a sort of chewing motion. The staff of these bars put Vaseline on lavatory cisterns to try to stop customers doing lines of coke on them but the owners are usually on it themselves and door staff are often dealers.
Another mode of destruction is Clubbing on Ecstasy. It is a special occasion like going to church on Sundays.

There is an unfinished part of us that is reaching out to become satisfied or whole and this gives a temporary and artificial substitute. A common feature of ecstasy clubbers is a need to escape from themselves which in a healthier age would have led to a mystic journey in solitude as eremites counting their beads and communing with God. In our degraded times they are prey for the hard-headed business people who use any fashion to make money out of their own people.

A young woman explained to me: “It heightens the music, makes it more epic.” In common with others it helps them to dance longer, but the important effect is that “It fills you full of love towards those around you, if a girl is being sick in the toilets you pull her hair back for her. I have only seen two fights in eight years of clubbing.” She compared this with aggressive pubs when people are drunk and violent fights ensue. It is a response to the betrayal of the needs of our young people by our Christian leaders and has fuelled artificial communities and the illusion of transcendence through drugs.

The importation of cheap labour is justified by blaming us: “Eastern European Workers Shame Lazy Brits” scream the tabloids. It is incredible but the Labour Government and Trades Unions have virtually re-introduced Slavery as those encouraged here but classified as illegal immigrants work for almost nothing. On top of asylum seekers and families and spouses coming here, eastern European immigration makes a total of 1,000,000 per annum. Nurse graduates for example cannot find jobs.

The elites see only good in ethics but find fault in us. They pretend they are “essentially good,” while we are essentially bad. Unfortunately many immigrants keep letting them down by shooting and knifing people, grooming our young girls and planting bombs to blow us up. The elites keep reality hidden and pretend the multi-racial dream is a success because they cannot face what they have created but it is difficult to keep terrorist bombings secret. To risk a pun, they are hoist by their own petard!

The one who brought totalitarianism and oppression into our legal system with the Campaign for Racial Equality, in the 1976 Race Relations Act, was Roy Jenkins. Biographer, John Campbell (Weidenfield&Nicolson.1983) tells us, that he believed, “That immigration was good for Britain and if people resisted they should be socially engineered into accepting it. Commonwealth immigrants like previous waves of immigrants from the Norman Conquest, to the refugees of the 30’s, could help overcome “our natural Island lethargy”.

While we are escaping from reality the clever immigrants are taking over the professions and administration. What are our young going to do? Where are they going to work when millions are being brought here as cheap labour? Parents are betraying their children and need to take back responsibility for their offspring from the state.

We need to re-introduce grammar Schools or even found new public schools to impart traditional values like honour, duty and service; others must consider Home Schooling networks to give our young the standard of education the state schools are denying them and to instil self-worth and a sense of belonging instead of teaching them to give up their country to outsiders and to become sexual perverts.
We must revive local fairs and festivals and develop our Folk music traditions by taking traditional forms but using words and sentiments suitable for our present time to express our sufferings under the elites. These are not rationalist formulae but suggestions for our creative young people to develop in practice. They will be able to forge natural, emotional bonds with their own people, their traditions and civilisation.

THIS (UN)HAPPY REALM - Derek Turner

Millions of years ago, in 1999, a fresh-faced Tony Blair said that he wanted to achieve “a better quality of life”. His proposed solution consisted of: “That is why sustainable development is such an important part of this government’s programme…and devising new ways of assessing how we are doing.” While environmental concerns are important, and while methodology does matter, as social analysis this left something to be desired.

In 2002, there was a government “life satisfaction” seminar, which led to an unofficial “analytical paper” filled with that inimitable, abominable New Labour mixture of management-speak and aggrievedness, which advocated “a happiness index”, “teaching people about happiness”, “more support through volunteering”, “a more measured work-life balance” and – surprise, surprise – further taxation of the wealthy.

No-one can doubt that happiness is important. Too many of Britain’s streets are gloomy, ugly and suspicious avenues, populated by a shuffling, scruffy mass who look almost as if they are living through some terrible catastrophe. We live in a society woefully lacking in public expressions of confidence and joie de vivre. Every aspect of life seems filled with quiet hopelessness, and a secret sadness.

‘Happiness’ pundits say that we are unhappy partly because we are made to feel inadequate by glossy advertising, because money is unevenly distributed, because we have long journeys to work, because we eat badly and don’t take enough exercise. There is something in what they say. It certainly would not do any harm if we were exposed to fewer advertisements of the sort that make children demand (and usually get) the latest trainers, if more people were a little richer, if we didn’t need to spend so much time travelling (and could thereby spend more time with family and friends) and if we ate fewer junk foods. And perhaps, as has also been suggested, some people would benefit if the NHS were to expend more time and resources on improving people’s satisfaction levels.

The happiness theorists take a tentative step into political incorrectness, by realizing that marriage is beneficial for individuals (and so society), adding to levels of satisfaction and even life expectancy. As the 2002 “analytical paper” was co-written by one of Tony Blair’s chief advisers, perhaps some of this kind of thinking might even find its way into government policy some day.

David Cameron is surfing the well-being wave too, telling the Google Zeitgeist Conference in 2006 that “Well-being can't be measured by money or traded in markets. It's about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture, and above all the strength of our relationships… politicians should be saying to themselves ‘how are we going to try and make sure that we don't just make people better off but we make people happier, we make communities more stable, we make society more cohesive’.” (quoted on bbc.co.uk, 22 May 2006).

We should applaud examination of the causes of unhappiness. But all these pundits aren’t cutting deeply enough. For people who say (correctly) that economics is not enough, many of their suggested improvements are themselves highly reductive.
The chief reason for unhappiness is, of course, the loss of religious faith. When God is removed from the cosmos, then many things automatically become existentially pointless, and the cruel, freakish, random nature of the universe is made brutally apparent. As the causes of this lie outside politics (and even beyond the established church) we must absolve the politicians of blame for this phenomenon.

And as an agnostic (albeit a pro-Christian one), I am myself a part of the problem, and it would be hypocritical of me to advocate what I do not believe myself. But there are things that politicians could do today to make Britain happier, if only they had the courage and the vision.

For instance, one of the deeper reasons that Britain is unhappy is because so many parts of it are plain ugly. While modern architecture is improving, there are still huge swathes of Britain that are dominated by 1960s tower blocks, 1970s shopping precincts filled with the same shops, bungalows and caravan parks and houses with PVC windows, industrial estates, ring roads and motorways. “To love your country,” said Edmund Burke, “your country must be beautiful”. But who could love Stevenage, or Cumbernauld, or Corby, or Croydon? David Cameron is right to select this as a major cause of unhappiness. More sensitive (and streamlined) planning controls would, in time, make a massive difference to Britain’s landscapes, and accordingly Britons’ happiness.

But society is ugly too. What else could we expect in a country whose ruling class includes John Prescott, Piers Morgan and Jordan? Who could love the Britain of the Sun and the Mirror, of football hooligans, of lachrymose social workers and whining teachers, of late-night vomitings and back-alley stabbings, and fag-smoking 13 year old mothers-to-be? David Cameron famously, fatuously said that “I love the Britain we have today” – but he is a member of a small and shrinking minority. It is less clear what could be done to alleviate this sickness of the soul, but statesmanlike politicians could, at least in theory, start to arrest the rot, one social sector at a time, through judicious financial and welfare reforms.

Another reason for unhappiness is that Britain simply has too many people – with more arriving all the time. It is difficult to avoid feeling that Britain is suffering from “crowding stress” – the phenomenon that occurs in overcrowded rabbit burrows, where there is constant fighting over space, mates and food, and the does re-absorb their litters rather than bear them into a world where room and nutrition cannot be guaranteed. In modern Britain, there are simply too many houses, too many roads, too many cars, too long queues for doctors and dentists, too much pollution and too much noise.

Another reason may be the relatively small proportion of Britain’s population that is under 25. Young people are naturally ebullient, whereas older people are more likely to be querulous and obsessed by comfort. More old people equals more grumpiness.

A deeper possible reason is simultaneously the most widely discussed and the least addressed – the vast chasm between rulers and ruled. This really is the fault of politicians, who claim to respect the vox populi, but who really push their own agendas – on everything from capital punishment to immigration. They say grandly when challenged that they are representatives rather than delegates; when one surveys the mess of modern Britain, perhaps we would be better off if it was the other way around. Whatever they say to get into office, when they get there the majority of elected representatives from the big parties ‘go native’. Even sincere politicians get sidetracked, and most simply disappear into a corrupted machine that tolerates crime and anti-social behaviour, that cedes more and more powers to the EU, that allows the British industrial base to continue shrinking, that presides over the dumbing-down of schools and the arts, and which permits the continued immigration of hundreds of thousands of ‘new Britons’ every year.

We live in a Britain in which there is no longer any common purpose, in which there are no common values, in which there is no long-term thinking, and which sees no permanence in anything. More and more Britons are rootless, bootless and fruitless – and are being simply crowded out of existence in the land they have occupied for millennia through uncontrolled globalisation, uncontrolled immigration, post-civilized post-modernism and punitive taxation.

More and more Britons have no faith in God, no faith in Man, and no faith in the institutions of their country. All this becomes a vicious circle of faithlessness breeding yet more faithlessness. Is it so surprising that so many people don’t get involved in politics, or even read newspapers or bother to vote – or that so many others simply leave for ever, to search for some meaning in Malaga that they could not find in Manchester? It is small wonder that the people of Britain when viewed en masse look rather like a defeated army. Could they be anything other than profoundly unhappy in the circumstances? What I – and many, many others – would like to know is who will be able to make us feel good about ourselves again.

ENLIGHTENED ENEMIES - THE HUME/ROUSSEAU FEUD RE-EXAMINED David Edmonds and John Eidinow

David Hume comes down to us as among the greatest of philosophers. He also exemplifies the man of pristine character, saluted in his own age for his uncommon virtue. Hume was immensely proud of his upright reputation; one might say he gloried in his goodness. In 1776, close to death from bowel cancer, he summarised his life in a short, unrevealing essay. He was, he wrote, "a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions".

His friend, the economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith, agreed, eulogising Hume after his death as the exemplar of as "perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit". Historians and biographers have gone along with this image - ignoring Smith's caveat ... "as the nature of human frailty will permit" ...

That human frailty had faced its severest test 10 years earlier when Hume offered to succour the radical author Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The year was 1766 and Rousseau had just cause to fear for his life. For more than three years he had been a refugee, forced to move on several times. His radical tract, The Social Contract, with its famous opening salvo, "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains", had been violently condemned. Even more threatening to the French Catholic church was Émile, in which Rousseau advocated denying the clergy a role in the education of the young. An arrest warrant was issued in Paris and his books were publicly burned.

In The Confessions, a literary landmark described as the first modern autobiography, Rousseau spoke of "the cry of unparalleled fury" that went up across Europe. "I was an infidel, an atheist, a lunatic, a madman, a wild beast, a wolf ..."

Fleeing France, he had found safe haven in a remote village in his native Switzerland. But soon the local priest began to whip up hatred against him, charging him with being a heretic. The atmosphere turned ugly. Rousseau was abused in the street. Some believed this lean, dark man whose eyes were full of fire was possessed by the devil.

One night, a drunken mob attacked his house. Rousseau was inside with his mistress, the former scullery maid Thérèse le Vasseur (by whom he had five children that he notoriously abandoned to a foundling hospital), and his beloved dog, Sultan. A shower of stones was thrown at the window. A rock "as big as a head" nearly landed on Rousseau's bed. When a local official finally arrived, he declared, "My God, it's a quarry."

Rousseau had no choice but to uproot once more. So where next? His saviour would be the Scotsman David Hume.

In October 1763, Hume had gone to the French capital as under-secretary to the newly appointed British ambassador, Lord Hertford.

Today, Hume is known above all for his philosophy, but then he was renowned for being an historian. His first philosophical work, The Treatise of Human Nature, had been, if not exactly ignored, then certainly not acclaimed as the sublime work of genius it is. But his epic six-volume History of England, which had appeared between 1754 and 1762, had become a bestseller, and made him financially independent. Turning his back on the previous mode of history writing as a sequence of dates, names and glorifications, Hume brilliantly combined character studies and the detail of events with an analysis of the broad sweep of underlying forces. The tone was thoughtful, civil, temperate. The series would go through more than a hundred editions and still be in use at the end of the 19th century.

Hume still felt, justly, under-appreciated. The "banks of the Thames", he insisted, were "inhabited by barbarians". There was not one Englishman in 50 "who if he heard I had broke my neck tonight would be sorry". Englishmen disliked him, Hume believed, both for what he was not and for what he was: not a Whig, not a Christian, but definitely a Scot. In England, anti-Scottish prejudice was rife. But his homeland too seemed to reject him. The final humiliation came in June 1763, when the Scottish prime minister, the Earl of Bute, appointed another Scottish historian, William Robertson, to be Historiographer Royal for Scotland.

The invitation from Lord Hertford must have seemed irresistible. Hume's friends travelling in France had already told him about his incomparable standing in Parisian society. And the two years he spent in Paris were to be the happiest of his life. He was rapturously embraced there, loaded, in his words, "with civilities". Hume stressed the near-universal judgment on his personality and morals. "What gave me chief pleasure was to find that most of the elogiums bestowed on me, turned on my personal character; my naivety & simplicity of manners, the candour and mildness of my disposition &tc." Indeed, his French admirers gave him the sobriquet Le Bon David, the good David.

Soon in the French capital it became social death not to be acquainted with him. In his Journal, Horace Walpole (on a prolonged visit to Paris) records, "It is incredible the homage they pay him." To a fellow historian Hume wrote: "I can only say that I eat nothing but ambrosia, drink nothing but nectar, breathe nothing but incense, and tread on nothing but flowers. Every man I meet, and still more every lady, would think they were wanting in the most indispensable duty, if they did not make to me a long and elaborate harangue in my praise."

The lavish attention paid by women must have come as a pleasant shock to this obese bachelor in his 50s. James Caulfeild (later Lord Charlemont), who'd once described Hume's face as "broad and fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility", observed how in Paris, "no lady's toilette was complete without Hume's attendance".

Hume was glorified both in court circles and in the so-called "Republic of Letters", that unique French Enlightenment territory of salons governed by outstanding women. The salons became the transmission system of the French Enlightenment, creating, focusing and broadcasting radical opinion. The female hosts were the firm regulators of tact and etiquette: they wanted the guests to shine but they could set the tone of the discussions and insist on clarity of language. Their art was the creation and maintenance of civilised conversation.

In the salons, Hume was introduced to the critics, writers, scientists, artists and philosophers who powered the French Enlightenment, the philosophes. They included the "cultural correspondent for Europe", Friedrich Grimm, and the editors of that vast compendium, the Encyclopédie, the pioneering mathematician Jean d'Alembert and the multi-talented Denis Diderot. Diderot had recognised Hume as a fellow Enlightenment spirit - a cosmopolitan. "I flatter myself that I am, like you, citizen of the great city of the world," Diderot wrote to Hume. Hume also became close friends with the passionate atheist Baron d'Holbach, a major financial supporter of and a contributor to the Encyclopédie. All four men would be crucial in Hume's quarrel with Rousseau.

One salon hostess was a vital link in bringing Rousseau and Hume together: the beautiful, clever and moralistic Madame de Boufflers, in whose dazzling salon, with its four huge mirrors, the young Mozart once performed. The intimate tone of the letters between Hume and Mme de Boufflers indicates that he, at least, became infatuated. A spell apart had Hume writing to her: "Alas! Why am I not near you so that I could see you for half an hour a day." She flattered him that she "admired his genius" and that he made her "disgusted with the bulk of the people I have to live with", ending one note, "I love you with all my heart". Sadly, Hume might have misread the silken manners of her court.

When the ambassador, Lord Hertford, was replaced, Hume's sojourn in paradise ended too. Britain beckoned. Mme de Boufflers asked him to assist the persecuted Rousseau in securing asylum in England. How could Le Bon David possibly say no?

Saviour and exile finally met in Paris in December 1765. There had, until then, been only a short epistolatory relationship between them - marked by mutual effusions of love and admiration. Here is Rousseau on Hume: "Your great views, your astonishing impartiality, your genius, would lift you far above the rest of mankind, if you were less attached to them by the goodness of your heart." After their early encounters in the French capital, Hume penned an unreserved panegyric to a clerical friend in Scotland comparing Rousseau to Socrates and, like a starry-eyed lover, seeing beauty in his adored one's blemishes: "I find him mild, and gentle and modest and good humoured ... M. Rousseau is of small stature; and would rather be ugly, had he not the finest physiognomy in the world, I mean, the most expressive countenance. His modesty seems not to be good manners but ignorance of his own excellence."

Several of his philosophe friends tried to shake Hume from his complacency. Grimm, D'Alembert and Diderot all spoke from personal experience, having had a spectacular falling-out with the belligerent Rousseau in the previous decade. In consequence, they had totally severed relations with him. Most chilling was the warning from Baron d'Holbach. It was 9pm on the night before Hume and Rousseau set out for England. Hume had gone for his final farewell. Apologising for puncturing his illusions, the baron counselled Hume that he would soon be sadly disabused. "You don't know your man. I will tell you plainly, you're warming a viper in your bosom."

At first all seemed well. Rousseau, not only a radical thinker but also one of Europe's most popular novelists, was a star in London. His arrival gave the press the opportunity to congratulate readers on this display of British hospitality, tolerance and fair mindedness. How different from the bigoted, autocratic French!

Of course it must have been galling for Hume, hailed in Paris, to be reduced, in the shrewd observation of an intimate Edinburgh friend, William Rouet, Professor of Ecclesiastical and Civil History, to being "the show-er of the lion". The lion stood out in his bizarre Armenian outfit, complete with gown and cap with tassels, and was almost everywhere accompanied by his dog, Sultan. Hume was astounded by the fuss, somewhat meanly putting it down to Rousseau's curiosity value.

He was still insistent on his love for Rousseau - at least when writing to his French friends. He told one, "I have never known a man more amiable and more virtuous than he appears to me; he is mild, gentle, modest, affectionate, disinterested; and above all, endowed with a sensibility of heart in a supreme degree ... for my part, I think I could pass all my life in his company without any danger of our quarrelling ..." Indeed, a source of their concord, Hume thought, was that neither one of them was disputatious. When he repeated the sentiments to D'Holbach, the baron was glad that Hume had "not occasion to repent of the kindness you have shown ... I wish some friends, whom I value very much, had not more reasons to complain of his unfair proceedings, printed imputations, ungratefulness &c."

Hume worked to find somewhere for Rousseau to live and to engage his friends at Court to pursue a royal pension for the refugee. Initially the immigrant was set up in rooms just off the Strand while Hume stayed at his usual lodging house near Leicester Fields (today's Leicester Square), run by two respectable Scots ladies. But Rousseau was not a city lover. London was in the midst of a manic construction boom. Fuelled by the triumphant end to the seven years war, the capital was the richest, fastest growing city on earth. It had become the lodestone for the talented and ambitious, with foreign trade producing new wealth and shaking up the class order. For Rousseau, however, the city was full of "black vapours".

He moved to the bucolic village of Chiswick to lodge with "an honest grocer", James Pullein. Then, in March 1766, the offer of a country house came from an English gentleman, Richard Davenport, an elderly patron of substantial means. Davenport had an empty mansion, Wootton Hall, in a corner of Staffordshire that seemed to guarantee the solitude for which Rousseau yearned.

En route to Wootton, the exile stopped off at Hume's dwelling in London on Wednesday, March 19 1766. It was their last meeting.

Rousseau was already seized with the glimmerings of a plot; he warned his Swiss friends that his letters were being intercepted and his papers in danger. By June, the plot was starkly clear to him in all its ramifications - and at its centre was Hume. On June 23, he rounded on his saviour: "You have badly concealed yourself. I understand you, Sir, and you well know it." And he spelled out the essence of the plot: "You brought me to England, apparently to procure a refuge for me, and in reality to dishonour me. You applied yourself to this noble endeavour with a zeal worthy of your heart and with an art worthy of your talents." Hume was mortified, furious, scared. He appealed to Davenport for support against "the monstrous ingratitude, ferocity, and frenzy of the man".

Hume was right to be afraid. He knew Rousseau was working on The Confessions: he might even have sneaked a look at early pages on the journey across the Channel. Rousseau wielded the most powerful pen in Europe. His romantic novel Héloïse demonstrated that power, leaving readers weeping and sighing. It was a publishing phenomenon: demand was so great that Parisian booksellers rented it out by the hour. Hume saw his own memory put at risk for all time. "You know," he told another old Edinburgh friend, the professor of rhetoric, Hugh Blair, "how dangerous any controversy on a disputable point would be with a man of his talents."

Hume's eyes were on France, in particular, and his reputation as the good David. His first denunciations of Rousseau were made to his friends in Paris; his Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau would be published there in French, edited by Rousseau's enemies. He studiously avoided communicating with Mme de Boufflers, knowing she would, as she did, urge "generous pity". Hume's descriptions of Rousseau as ferocious, villainous and treacherous ensured joyful coverage in newspapers and discussions in fashionable drawing rooms, clubs and coffee houses. The actor-manager David Garrick wrote to a friend on July 18 that Rousseau had called Hume "noir, black, and a coquin, knave".

In his reply to Rousseau, Hume (unwisely) demanded that Rousseau identify his accuser and supply full details of the plot. To the first, Rousseau's answer was simple and powerful: "That accuser, Sir, is the only man in the world whose testimony I should admit against you: it is yourself." To the second, Rousseau supplied an indictment of 63 lengthy paragraphs containing the incidents on which he relied for evidence of the plot and how Hume had deviously pulled it off. This he mailed to his foe on July 10 1766. The whole document managed to be simultaneously quite mad but resonating with inspired mockery and tragic sentiment. It was also composed with a novelist's instinct for drama. For instance, among the accusations Hume found trickiest to deal with was Rousseau's claim that on the journey to England he heard Hume mutter in his sleep, "Je tiens JJ Rousseau" - I have JJ Rousseau. In the indictment, Rousseau played brilliantly with these "four terrifying words". "Not a night passes but I think I hear, I have you JJ Rousseau ring in my ears, as if he had just pronounced them. Yes, Mr Hume, you have me, I know, but only by those things that are external to me ... You have me by my reputation, and perhaps my security ... Yes, Mr. Hume, you have me by all the ties of this life, but you do not have me by my virtue or my courage."

Hume was aghast: he could not hope to match prose that he described to a French sympathiser as having "many strokes of genius and eloquence". What he did, instead, was laboriously to go through the indictment, incident by incident, desperately scrawling "lye", "lye", "lye", in the margins as he went along. His annotations became the basis of his Concise Account

Among Rousseau's numerous charges were Hume's misreading of a key letter from Rousseau about a royal pension. That error embroiled King George III. The king was just one of the many prominent figures to be sucked into the quarrel: others included Diderot, D'Holbach, Smith, James Boswell, D'Alembert and Grimm. Walpole became a key player. Voltaire piled in too, unable to resist the chance to strike at Rousseau.

Grimm said that a declaration of war between France and Britain would not have made more noise.

In press coverage of what the Monthly Review called the "quarrel between these two celebrated geniuses" support for Hume was far from universal. While Rousseau was denounced for lack of gratitude, the Monthly Review was not alone in advocating "compassion towards an unfortunate man, whose peculiar temper and constitution of mind must, we fear, render him unhappy in every situation". Letter writers, under cover of pseudonyms such as "A Bystander", also took up the cudgels for Rousseau: one recurring theme was the lack of hospitality and respect accorded the exile, which shamed the British nation. There was poetical support in the St James's Chronicle:

Rousseau, be firm! Though malice, like Voltaire,
And superstitious pride, like D'Alembert
Though mad presumption Walpole's form assume,
And base-born treachery appear like Hume,
Yet droop not thou ...

This even-handed treatment was not what Hume had expected, and not the version he gave Mme de Boufflers, writing that there had been "a great deal of raillery on the incident, thrown out in the public papers, but all against that unhappy man". A cartoon depicting Rousseau as a Savage Man, a Yahoo, caught in the woods was more to Hume's taste. He described it to her with relish. "I am represented as a farmer, who caresses him and offers him some oats to eat, which he refuses in a rage; Voltaire and D'Alembert are whipping him up behind; and Horace Walpole making him horns of papier maché. The idea is not altogether absurd."

So, in less than a year, the relationship between Hume and Rousseau had gone from love to mockery by way of fear and loathing.

In hindsight, it seems unlikely that they were ever going to get along, personally or intellectually. Hume was a combination of reason, doubt and scepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination and certainty. While Hume's outlook was unadventurous and temperate, Rousseau was by instinct rebellious; Hume was an optimist, Rousseau a pessimist; Hume gregarious, Rousseau a loner. Hume was disposed to compromise, Rousseau to confrontation. In style, Rousseau revelled in paradox; Hume revered clarity. Rousseau's language was pyrotechnical and emotional, Hume's straightforward and dispassionate. JYT Greig wrote in his 1931 biography of Hume, "The annals of literature seldom furnish us with two contemporary writers of the first rank, both called philosophers, who cancel one another out with almost mathematical precision."

While they may be described now as thinkers in "the Age of Enlightenment", how far "Enlightenment" covers a common national experience or meaning is a matter of vigorous dispute. A particular reading of French history tends to shape the general idea of "the Enlightenment" as, broadly, the French philosophes' belief that the application of critical reason to received traditions and structures would bring human advancement. The dominating Enlightenment narrative becomes a small and easily identifiable group of brilliant people, a central activity, the Encyclopédie; the sweetness of the salons balanced by the risk of imprisonment, the focus on reason, and the whole enterprise terminating in the guillotine.

But neither Hume nor Rousseau fitted easily into that narrative and its intellectual consensus. Rousseau, in particular, inveighed against so-called "civilisation", taking aim at the Enlightenment's proud boast of progress (that there had been progress in the human condition, and that with the systematic application of rationality and information, improvements could be speeded up). "Nature has made everything in the best way possible; but we want to do better still, and we spoil everything," he wrote. In his emphasis, not just on reason but on feeling, on sensibilité, he would gain a posthumous reputation as the father of the Romantics.

But Hume, too, is a problematic Enlightenment figure. He used reason to demonstrate the limits of reason and he injected his empiricism with a destructive revolutionary force. Taking empiricism to its logical conclusion, he showed how, if we rely on experience, then we can have no complete confidence in the existence of the external world; we can have no confidence in the laws of nature that we take for granted, such as gravity, and we must drastically rethink our notions of induction, necessity and personal identity. Nor could ethics have a rational foundation. Logic was an inappropriate tool for dissecting morality, like taking a carving knife to water. Reason was a slave to the passions.

True, both Rousseau and Hume assailed the Church: it might seem that in this at least they were emblematic spirits of the Enlightenment. But in fact neither did so in a way that would satisfy the wits and cynics in the salons. Rousseau believed in God's existence, professed his love for God, and his faith in God's goodness ("everything is good, coming from God"), as well as his certainty that there was an afterlife and that the soul was immortal, which "all the subtleties of metaphysics will not make me doubt for a moment".

As for Hume, though he had been damned in Scotland for having too little religion, in Paris, where he squirmed at the disdain directed at believers, his burden was that he had too much. True, he had demolished the arguments purporting to prove the existence of God, including the argument from design - the claim that only a supreme and benevolent being could explain the wonder and order in the world. This argument, Hume insisted, was untenable. How could it account for the suffering in the world? How can we infer that there is just one architect of the world, and not a co-operative of two or more?

Hume also wrote that "I would not offend the Godly". Once, dining with Baron d'Holbach, he claimed he had never seen an atheist and questioned whether they really existed. D'Holbach replied that Hume was dining with 17 of them.

For biographers, the Rousseau affair has been a sideshow in the greater scheme of Hume's astounding achievements. But Hume's behaviour is revelatory. His relationship with Rousseau and the falling-out put him under pressure, and that pressure opens up the man. Through a detailed reading of the constant correspondence, we can see that Hume had not wanted to accompany Rousseau to England in the first place - hoping to delegate that task. And, while Hume was telling his French friends of his love for Rousseau, his cousin John Home, the "Scottish Shakespeare", had noticed only 10 days or so after Hume brought his charge to London, his frustration "with the philosopher who allowed himself to be ruled equally by his dog and his mistress".

A letter of Hume's to Hugh Blair exposes what lay masked by the outpourings of love: "[Living in his Staffordshire solitude, Rousseau] will be unhappy in that situation, as he has indeed been always in all situations. He will be entirely without occupation, without company, and almost without amusement of any kind. He has read very little during the course of his life, and has now totally renounced all reading: He has seen very little, and has no manner of curiosity to see or remark; He has reflected, properly speaking, and studied very little; and has not indeed much knowledge: he has only felt, during the whole course of his life; and in this respect, his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of: but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man ... stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin."

In fact, sensibility apart, all this was false. Rousseau was widely read and never without fulfilling occupations, including music and botany. In the English countryside, he was introduced to the collector and botanist, the Duchess of Portland, and they went on blissful expeditions in the Peak District together. And, of course, Rousseau was working on The Confessions. It was Hume's creative life that was over.

Behind Rousseau's back, Hume conducted an obsessive investigation into Rousseau's finances. He asked various French contacts to make inquiries on his behalf - though concealing from each friend that he had also asked the others. Mme de Boufflers was put out to learn that Hume had set both her and D'Holbach on the same errand. "To what purpose?" were these investigations, she demanded of Hume: "You will not become his denunciator, after having been his protector ..." Yes he would. There's no question of Hume's wanting the information to help Rousseau. He himself makes plain that Rousseau's character was at stake: was he a fraud professing to poverty?

He denigrated Rousseau in a letter to D'Alembert in such foul terms that D'Alembert destroyed the letters and replied, with others, urgently counselling the man of moderation to remain moderate. Rousseau, according to Hume, was exposed as "surely the blackest and most atrocious villain, beyond comparison, that now exists in the world".

But there was no plot by Hume, though Rousseau was not entirely wrong when he accused Hume of being a traitor. A satirical letter purporting to be from the King of Prussia, acidly mocking the beleaguered Swiss, was a central plank in Rousseau's construction of a conspiracy. The letter promised Rousseau sanctuary, holding out a lacerating incentive: "If you want new misfortunes, I am a king and can make you as miserable as you can wish."

In fact, Walpole in Paris was the author, composing the hoax (in French) just before Rousseau arrived to meet Hume. Walpole took it round very appreciative salons. The "King of Prussia" letter even made its way into the London press and to Rousseau's refuge in Staffordshire. The exile was very upset. Hume maintained he was totally ignorant of the spoof. But a little literary detective work reveals that he was present at a dinner where the joke started, and that he probably contributed its most wounding thrust - in one letter Mme de Boufflers, who was appalled by the satire, claimed this was common knowledge in Paris. Hume was at two dinners where Walpole read the letter aloud

Hume's handling of the affair was full of malevolence. His letters were flush with half-truths and lies: such as that Rousseau had called him the blackest of men, that he had proof that Rousseau had plotted for two months to dishonour him, that King George III was "very much prejudiced" against Rousseau - all plainly untrue. And after Rousseau returned to France to live under the protection of Mme de Boufflers, Hume informed Smith that Rousseau was being shunned. He suggested to Mme de Boufflers and others that for his own sake Rousseau would best be locked away as a madman. Le Bon David's reason had become a slave to his passions.

In Paris as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch on the Grand Tour of Europe in 1766, Adam Smith was among those who advised restraint. When he delivered his posthumous tribute to his friend "as approaching nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit", Smith had seen at first hand how susceptible to human frailty Hume was after all.