The Times - UK (2022-04-30)

16 saturday review Saturday April 30 2022 | the times

this than partygate. The potshots aren’t

just directed at this government, but at

pretty much every government going back

to the 1630s when Charles I drained the

fens of East Anglia, spelling doom for the

long-beaked bittern. Galbraith charts a

palimpsest of wrongheaded legislation.

While excursions into the terms of the

1928 Protection of Lapwings Act and the

1954 Wild Birds’ Protection Bill might go a

little over the head of general readers,

I sense that Galbraith, a former editor

of Shooting Times, is so passionate about

this subject that he can’t help but revel in

London, is the home of Jamrach’s exotic

animal emporium — in Victorian times

an “Asiatic deer” was on sale there. Was

this an early example of the muntjac

deer who have wreaked havoc on night-

ingales by grubbing up their habitat? On

industrialised farms, the sight of a trac-

tor is for one conservationist insepara-

ble from the image of rare grey partridg-

es getting squished beneath its roller.

Despite being an outsider, I got

sucked into this tale. First there is

Galbraith’s barrage of shock statistics:

the disappearance of 90 per cent of grey

partridges since the 1960s, an 80 per cent

fall in the lapwing population in the same

period, and a 94 per cent drop-off in turtle

doves since the 1990s. Then there’s the

despair of those he interviews. Who knew

“Jim is trying to recall the last time he

heard a nightingale in Suffolk” could be

such a heartbreaking line?

And there’s anger as well as sadness.

“The guys in the government office, they

don’t understand the countryside whatso-

ever,” one conservationist says. “They are

some of the worst bird killers there is.”

A few chapters in, I was more peeved by

meeting in In Search of One Last Song. The

quest to find out what is happening to the

birds of Britain takes Galbraith from the

cliffs of Orkney to the roof of a B&Q store

in Altrincham (lapwings, right, nest there).

One twitcher, Rob, dutifully guards a

patch of shrubbery on a Suffolk nature

reserve because a nightingale, after its

migration to Africa and back, always re-

turns to the same bush where it was raised.

Another eccentric, Colin Simms, writes

hundreds of poems about endangered

birds and lives off-grid. Galbraith’s attempt

to track him down forms a little subplot

through the book. “Everyone I pass is

Colin Simms or might be: a man on a bicy-

cle and a topless walker in a woollen hat.”

Like most Brits, I’m a townie. My avian

encounters comprise saluting magpies,

having my chips pinched by seagulls and

getting pooped on by pigeons. It’s a delight,

then, to jump into this slightly strange par-

allel world. Galbraith’s subjects, I notice, all

found their passion at an early age, collect-

ing bird eggs as children or encountering

an ornithologist in a coppice. They see

things that the rest of us don’t. For Gal-

braith, the Highway in Wapping, east

W

hen Luke Steele catches

someone killing hen har-

riers “it’s like busting a

runner with three grams

of coke in his sock on a

Saturday night. It makes no odds to the

kingpin.” The hen harrier is persecuted on

Britain’s grouse moors because it gets in

the way of the lucrative shooting business

(the bird of prey has a habit of eating the

grouse chicks). The killers tend to be

young locals in need of money; they are

easily replaced, so the hen harriers keep

turning up dead. County lines then, but

with birds.

Steele, a director of the campaign group

Wild Moors, is one of many colourful bird-

lovers whom Patrick Galbraith describes

Even townies like me

will be moved by the

eccentrics trying

to save our birdlife,

says Ethan Croft

In Search of One

Last Song

Britain’s Disappearing

Birds and the People

Trying to Save Them

by Patrick Galbraith

William Collins,

305pp; £18.99

Who is killing off Britain’s birds?

banish the thought that this book has been

written for an American audience more

than a British one. If there is a war on the

West, as Murray insists, his book provides

almost no contemporary evidence of it

happening outside the English-speaking

world. Is western culture besieged in Italy,

Germany or the Netherlands? What about

France or Spain? This book won’t tell you.

While deploring the culture wars, Mur-

ray is a happy warrior himself. He is right,

though, that many silly ideas emanate

from universities and American college

campuses. The corporate world, always

quick to identify a bandwagon, is happy to

leap aboard. Diversity audits and apolo-

gies for past sins — real and imagined —

are the fashion of the day. Plenty of these

self-administered lashings are really acts

of preening.

The determination to view everything

through a racial prism is distorting. As

Murray notes: “In the place of colour blind-

ness, we have been pushed into racial

ultra-awareness.” By any reasonable meas-

urement, Britain and indeed the US have

never been less racist. Yet despite, or per-

haps because of this, questions of race —

and privilege — often appear all-consum-

ing. Now, it is not enough not to be a racist,

you must explicitly be an anti-racist.

In “this age of unreason”, history must

human conflict The aftermath of a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in London

I

t is Douglas Murray’s misfortune that

his new polemic is published at a time

when Vladimir Putin has launched a

war that is, at least in part, against the

professed values of liberal western civi-

lisation. The invasion of Ukraine is a hot

war that puts the exhausting culture wars

evident in Anglophone academia and

wider society into some perspective.

Murray’s argument is that the western

world is threatened by an enemy within

that seeks to dismantle “everything good

that the western tradition has produced”.

He says: “There are many facets to this war

on the West. It is carried out across the me-

dia and airwaves, throughout the educa-

tion system, from as early as preschool. It

is rife within the wider culture, where all

major institutions are either coming under

pressure or actually offering to distance

themselves from their own past.” Blimey.

Tellingly, Murray claims in his introduc-

tion that these woke barbarians have even

captured the White House — ahistorical

revisionism “now exists at the very top of

the American government”. It is hard to

books

A furious blast

against woke

‘barbarians’

Douglas Murray’s

book has its faults,

but he is right that we

are lucky to live in the

West, says Alex Massie

be studied, but only partially. Murray

notes that the attention paid to the horrors

of the Atlantic slave trade eclipses any con-

sideration of the slave trade in the east.

Millions of Africans were transported by

Arab slavers, but since many were castrat-

ed their legacy literally disappeared.

Equally, obsessing over past wrongs con-

sumes bandwidth — and outrage — that

might usefully be directed towards the

reality of modern slavery. There are per-

haps 40 million people — equivalent to the

population of Spain — living in slavery

today. Slavery persists in countries such as

Mauritania, Ghana and South Sudan. The

present may be gentler than the past, but

humanity remains a work in progress.

The certainty and sanctimony of the

latter-day Savonarolas rightly appals

Murray. Our past can and should be

judged, but modesty should require doing

so with the knowledge that our own times

will one day be judged — and found want-

ing — in turn. There is, though, as writers

such as the black American critic John

McWhorter have noted, a religious quality

to this modern-day inquisition.

Murray, whose previous books include

The Madness of Crowds, The Strange Death

of Europe and a biography of Lord Alfred

Douglas, targets the tactics of this inquisi-

tion. For instance, “linked” has become a

weasel word hinting at connections to

infamy that are at best meretricious and

frequently utterly spurious. Thus the poet

Ted Hughes was traduced by the British

Library for his connections to Nicholas

Ferrar who was “deeply involved” with the

slave trade. That more than three centu-

ries had passed between their lives and

that Hughes was not a direct descendant

appeared to count for very little.

Yet even if — a significant caveat —

fashionable pieties about race and culture

are widely distributed, how deeply are they

held? Murray’s book offers no answer to

this or any other data-based question.

Sometimes he appears to be swinging at

low-hanging fruit. For instance, the British

writer Kehinde Andrews claimed last year

that “liberalism is the problem” because

“it is the Enlightenment values which

really cement racial prejudice” and while

ISABEL INFANTES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The War

on the West

How to Prevail in the

Age of Unreason

by Douglas Murray

HarperCollins, 320pp; £20