G.M.W. Wemyss's Blog

I don’t wish to shout, but....

Each and all and every man jack of you, wherever you may chance to live, I call upon: to give your aid now. Even if it means not buying a book for Christmas. Even if it means not buying our books for Christmas.

If you cannot make a contribution as I am shortly to suggest, I really do expect you at the very least to direct all your friends and followers to these links, and advert them to the appeal.

As I should hope you might have heard, a succession of gales and storms have battered the UK. There is flooding. There is danger to life as well as to property. Amongst the areas affected are the River Eden (including – although it’s not nearly so bad there as at, for example, Appleby-in-Westmorland – the Upper Eden, including Mallerstang); and the confluence of the Rivers Severn and Vyrnwy, at Melverley.

I therefore strongly urge you to make such contributions and assistance as you can manage to:

The RNLI.
The Kirkby Stephen Mountain Rescue Team.
The Cumbria Wildlife Trust (you might, if you like, earmark the Upper Eden Support Group).
The Upper Eden Community First Responders Team;

and, in Melverley, and Oswestry generally, to contact, and enquire of as to what help is wanted,

The Rector, S Peter Melverley;
Melverley Village Hall; and
The Oswestry & District Agricultural Society.

All are, I believe, Registered Charities.

Let’s get cracking.

The past few weeks have been daunting.

I have been speaking to friends on the Continent as well as in America: my dear friend, that very wise woman and ultimate Parisienne, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet of the Sunday Telegraph; Alessia Casoli, one of the Word Witches who are such material aid to me as editors; of course, to Markham Shaw Pyle; to Jeffrey Mora, my staunch and sensible American friend; to George Knight, one of our coming authors. The times seem out of joint; and so they are. Civilisation – and Paris surely represents civilisation in a very special way – clashes with Dark Age barbarism; as Mr Pyle rightly notes, American university students, to protest Woodrow Wilson’s having been a racist who re-segregated the US Government, demand … racial segregation, and ‘separate but equal’ facilities and amenities; Mr Corbyn – but I must not go on.

It was an admirable and laudable thing that the Rt Hon. Hilary Benn MP did yesterday, and I have written to tell him so. I said to him as I have said publicly that he has inherited the mantle of Arthur Greenwood. He ‘spoke for [Britain]’, as Mr Greenwood did in September of 1939. He saved from ignominy the Party of Major Attlee and Major Milner, Captain Alexander and Captain Bellenger and Mr Ernest Bevin: a party which matters immensely to and is a glory to Britain, for all that I, as a drily Thatcherite Conservative, often disagree with its views and aims.

And yet ... that is in its way part of what is so alarming. I do not say this lightly. But as the author of The Confidence of the House: May 1940 and one of the co-authors of When That Great Ship Went Down: The Legal and Political Repercussions of the Loss of RMS Titanic, of '37: The Year of Portent, and of the forthcoming volume on the July Crisis of 1914, I think I am in a position to say it.

The times are out of joint because, even as modern civilisation confronts pre-mediaeval barbarism, we in the civilised nations are plagued by the follies of 1914 re-enacted against the politic stupidities of the Thirties and the appeasement years: including shrieking fools, cowards, and quislings who pride themselves in declaring that they should not under any circumstances fight for Queen and country, or the local equivalents thereto.

There is a reason why, novels and rural rides aside, one writes history. There are reasons one ought to read history. And it is imperative that ignorance of history, or, worse, a credulous belief in false history, not be permitted to cause its bitter re-enactment, either as tragedy or as farce.

I am writing this twelve hours prior to the expected declaration of the results of the Scottish Referendum. I have imposed political purdah on myself for this time, even to the extent of replying to comments on posts which were put up prior to polling day. What I am meditating here is principle: general considerations not specific to this vote.

I don’t of course know how the Referendum is to go. I have my suspicions and my hopes, but no knowledge. What I should like us to consider here is the...

Tomorrow, the die shall be cast. One of the four home nations, and that the least populous, shall decide the fate of all; a wee subset of British voters living in Scotland on an arbitrary date shall decide for all Scots in the UK whether their families are to be separated by an international frontier.

Never mind that there’s nothing Green about a Scotland depending on North Sea oil and wholesale fracking.

Never mind that such a Scotland should be in the red all the same, unable to afford its pr...

This is the abstract and argument, as it were, of Mr Wemyss’ extended essay, available here.

Within the week, the fate of the United Kingdom, and of Scotland, shall be in the hands of a few: not all of them Scots; not all the Scots. Those who happen to be living in Scotland and are eligible to vote because they are British.

I am Scots – Wemyss, Stuart, Duff, Craufurd, Chattanach, Macintosh, Shaw, Henderson, Gunn, Ay, and descended also of Clan Donald. I am also English and Welsh and Anglo-Irish...

Very soon, members of the British electorate who are resident in Scotland shall vote – and only they shall vote – on the fate of the entire United Kingdom as a political entity.

Allow me to put that again. Those who’ll vote, or who are at any rate eligible to vote, in the Referendum are not the set of persons in the United Kingdom we might define as ‘all the Scots’. They are not all Scots, either: residence is the sole criterion as amongst eligible voters. And they are eligible voters by virtu...

Much has happened in the past thirteen years to blunt the sharper pangs of memory and – regrettably, in its way – to dull the outrage. New outrages have occurred. Other issues are clamant of attention, not least in the UK. And we do not know but that before this day’s sun sets, yet newer outrages shall mark it.

Yet we remember.

We must.

And we must keep faith with them.

We remember that on this day, a fine, mild one in New York, and over Pennsylvania, and on the Potomac, savage barbarians engaged...

The reliably contemptible Alan Wilson, suffragan in the diocese of Oxford, has once more condescended to bestow his lofty wisdom upon the smocked peasantry in the pews. (As suffragan Bishop of Buckingham, he can – and dear God, does he – speak ex cathedra only from his accustomed throne in the Grauniad and, urbi et orbi, through gracious pronouncements to Fleet Street generally.) He has denounced other bishops as hypocrites and closet cases, and called – Deus vult! ­– for the crusading cleric...

A position paper by the historians GMW Wemyss and Markham Shaw Pyle

VV Putin – and it really is quite remarkably difficult not to write that as, ‘Putain’ – is not, personally or as leader of his kleptocratic, kakistocratic regime, bold by nature. Bullies and jackals are never bold: they crumble and scuttle when opposed with firmness. Vladimir Vladimirovich is not bold: he has been emboldened.

That he and his regime view Ukraine in the fashion in which the Pædophile Information Exchange viewed n...

Nine-and-ninety years ago, the world was at war. Had been for a few weeks. Had no idea that it should be for four years, and then have an armistice just long enough to raise up a new generation of reinforcements.

And next year, it will be the seventy-fifth anniversary of the second act of those wars, after the long intermission.

And twelve years ago?

Twelve years ago, in the city of New York, in the city of Washington, in rural Pennsylvania, the same evil walked once more. It did not don the rai...