J > Recent Status Updates

Caring for his wife through mental health struggles: ‘For the next few weeks I desperately tried to keep our family together and maintain an aid of outward normality despite driving sometimes twice in a day to the hospital near Tunbridge Wells, wondering how we would ever repay the bank the money I had to borrow to buy the treatment refused [by striking NHS maintenance workers just before the Winter of Discontent]

c1975 ‘Such tactics, although apparently schoolboyish pranks, has a serious purpose.
The Government had lost its majority but was attempting to force through great amounts of highly partisan and controversial legislation. We were using the parliamentary system to restrain the Government from legislating with neither mandate nor majority, except that of the disreputable pacy with the Liberals… [whom NT despises!]

The interviews are rich and fascinating. Peppered, among many other things, with comments on how the existence of government welfare has undermined motivation, morale, communal mutual aid, etc. in this tiny community whose vital extended family structure dissolved. is this a cautionary tale for advocates of UBI!? Are we all headed for collapse given AI and pollution and further family/communal breakdown!?

Disruption of the individual and communal orientation to space and to time. Complete loss of rituals that used to shape and structure the life course. Nothing substantial or relevant in their place… So awful, so tragic. What were the government planners thinking when they uprooted these Ojibwa? (What did they think if they ever saw the results?) And done in the context of such an innocuous outworking of colonialism

Almost forgot… the Arab-Israeli conflict was apparently salient in the 1969 Epping constituency battle. Plus ça change …

Amazing how ‘topical’, in a sense, are the political (partisan/cultural) points that exercised Tebbit in the late 60s and early 70s when he was about to enter politics. Immigration, over-reliance on America, a welfare state that did not really encourage/facilitate work, “Marxist” influence in education and local government… It’s as if he’s producing ‘heterodox’ podcasts in 2026!

Almost too terrible to go on. The writing is clear, careful, somehow quite calm, but absolutely devastating.

Degradation and destruction are words with new meaning now.