Jake Warren

In July 1959, the Conservative MP and erstwhile professor of Classics Enoch Powell made a blisteringly excoriating speech in the House of Commons to criticise the Conservative government after the Hola Massacre in Kenya. African lives, he said, were worth as much as European lives. Dennis Healey, a Labour MP who would later become one of the major figures in the postwar British politics, said that Powell's speech had "all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes." Think of that while watching the video below. This comparison, I think, sums up the intellectual and moral degeneration of the European political elite, which appears to have accelerated since the turn of the Century. Until we have a political elite with the intellectual horsepower, civilised mores and seriousmindedness to be far more conversant with Demosthenes, Thucydides and Atistotle than acting out in cringy social media videos, we are doomed to further decline.