MY WEEK began quite wonderfully in Southern Spain, where I had grabbed a break from TCW thanks to Margaret’s sterling ‘holding the fort’ for me. So, there I was on Easter Sunday with family and grandchildren for the culmination of Santa Semana – their Holy Week – and the last week of Lent.
As we climbed the hill to the church, the bells had started their sonorous peel. People were flocking in from every direction, following the sound of a drum beat and brass band. We caught up and followed it to the church, but there was no hope of getting in. Crowds of Spanish filled the square outside, all dressed in Sunday best: boys and men in suits and polished shoes, children as well as priests in their vestments, being guided into position; the blue uniformed brass band still massing, with girls, boys, young women, young men intermixed with their seniors. Hundreds of them. It was already a spectacle, but it still didn’t prepare me for what was to come.
Perhaps I am getting old and sentimental, but I found what followed intensely moving.
Over the heads of the people, first I saw the Procession of the Cross emerging from the west entrance of the beautiful white church. Slowly and with great solemnity, the Paso (the ornately decorated platform featuring the risen Christ and the Virgin Mary, which is the centrepiece of Semana Santa) emerged. With my iPhone (inspired by Russian Ark) I made my best effort at a one-shot film, all the while with the Paso moving towards me. The bells, the slow march, the drum beat and the rising crescendo of music, the men’s faces in this clip, cannot be put into words.
Men, young and strong, women and girls, shoulder to shoulder, supported the platform around the town for nearly five hours before returning to the church. If that was not an act of faith and community spirit, I do not know what is.
The last time I remember participating in anything like this was in my village Church processions in the 1960s, which my father, as the local vicar, led. But they were nothing to the number, discipline, commitment or community spirit of these ordinary Spaniards, elevated by this reaffirmation of their faith.
Where has such spirit gone in Britain, I thought sadly. Despite Spain’s left-wing government, for all their horrendous immigration, asylum extortion and squatting nightmare in Barcelona and elsewhere (the result of their politicians’ crazy welcome), in communities such as this one, tradition is alive and well, with full family participation, including young people.
The depressing contrast of communistic Britain hit me on my return. Forget family life and tradition. My welcome back was the news that what our children have to look forward to is an interminable and soulless school day: from the age of four, lasting from 8am to 6pm, ‘sold’ by appalling DfE doubly trolling propaganda.
Starmer’s latest ‘breakfast club’ assault on the family is to be the new normal. ‘Another attack on the family,’ I tweeted. ‘More State and less parent is not a solution that is good for children or their parents. Will it be free overnight clubs soon? A recipe for more alienation and unhappiness and collapse in empathy.’
A daytime orphanage, in fact. Until I was eight I went home from my state primary school for lunch every day. That was when there was a mother at home and parents understood it was their responsibility to give their children at least two good meals a day, not knowing what their children did or didn’t eat at school lunch or what the quality of it was. It was when parents understood that cooking for children, preparing their meals, is an expression of love and care for them. Richard Morrissey says it all in his ‘Breakfast clubs and the state takeover of children’ article this week.
Today’s children are treated as an inconvenience to parents, and that’s what Starmer’s low bribery is normalising. That’s what his persuasive words of ‘we are easing the burden on you’ mean. Will it improve children’s ‘life chances’, as Bridgit Phillipson says? No, I don’t think so. This is pure newspeak. Their point is to break the bonds between child and parent, to ensure it’s the State, not the family, that controls children’s minds and thinking. Morrissey sets out the actions needed to help parents if they really meant it.
If Phillipson was really concerned about children’s life chances, she’d be worrying about their long hours away from home; about herding them, leaving them prey to peer-group influence and the sort of Lord of the Flies behaviour that I witnessed last week in South London. A crowd of black boys, between the ages of 9 and 12, were streaming along the pavement towards a bus stop when a police car passed by in slow traffic. With a shrill cry from ‘the leaders’ in front, they charged behind the car en masse, shrieking and hurling abuse, virtually trampling an old man in a wheelchair, stopping only when the police car gathered enough speed to get away.
So much, dear Keir, for school parenting, I thought.
But then again, like the rest of his ruling class, he doesn’t ‘know the meaning of love’, as N S Lyons explained last week in his brilliant essay on the family and the nation.
The big question for me is, does Nigel Farage? His one-man personalised rally-style campaign for the council elections next week seems to be working politically. People will be voting for him next week, I suspect, not his candidates, whether or not reassured or dismayed by his tack to the Uniparty left and his dissociation from Trump. He has become the opposition, fronting a highly visible and ever more professional-looking campaign by contrast to the invisible Kemi.
I will vote for him, though still asking whether, if he gains power, he’ll prove the great disrupter we need. Can he do a ‘Trump’ or a JD Vance on the real problems described so well by Paul Collits? ‘The deep household recession, the ghastly fruits of mass immigration, the crashing of our energy economy, fiscal incontinence on a grand scale, rampant and largely unchecked anti-Semitism, ongoing attacks on free speech, endless wokeism’ along with relentless two-tier justice and immigration trolling.
Will he re-embrace Rupert Lowe, who remains the lone voice in Parliament refusing to mince words, a man whose hugely retweeted tweets, whether on climate insanity, DEI, or deportation, illustrate the gulf between the mass unrepresented demographic and the corrupted, intransigent and ruthless Uniparty elite that the Supreme Court, far from challenging, represents and fosters?
What I am praying for is that political success will strengthen, not weaken, Mr Farage’s radical resolve. We cannot continue sacrificing our children to the State, along with their health and wellbeing. I only hope that he and the people who vote for him understand just how fundamental this is.
