The Blackberry Walk

Today, myself and a couple of friends wandered the small village of Cromford, west of Derby. The village is as picturesque a vision of the countryside as can be fathomed: rolling country hills as far as the eye can see; pretty churches and higglety pigglety shops and dwellings; and a kind of kindness and high trust that can only be found once unchained from the coughing city smogs. Walking around, we visited antiques shops and book shops. The antiques shops contain a mixture of war memorabilia and affects of the deceased; all the valuable nicknacks the next generation didn't want to inherit. And in one such antique shop was an old hardback book, whose spine read 'The King's England'. I rolled the poetry of the phrase around my mouth, 'The King's England': that is where I now am. The England of the shire is so different from the England of the city - there's an almost unrecognisable chasm separating the two. Looking around Nottingham, the multi-ethnic bustle, the distrust, the ugliness of the concrete buildings, the fumed air, all has very little in common to the old England preserved under an hour away by train. In that moment there was a soft shock of realisation that where I was was The King's England, rather than the England of the Commons. The British political system is strange, in that we have a kind of diarchy. David Starkey on his youtube channel describes how the British government has two castles from whence power comes, from Westminister in the form of the Commons, and from the Crown. Whilst the monarch had power separate from the Commons in the past, now of course that is no more, and this diachic structure of two opposing interests has been reduced to but the Commons. But whilst parliament is a kind of engine, churning through paperwork, a chamber of stressed men arguing over policy (however pointless an exercise the system may now have rendered it), the king simply presides. We have no president, for the monarch, albeit in name and ceremonial duties only, presides over the state. A king has no need to argue for policies, nor write new laws, for he is the king. If Henry VIII decreed that something would be the case, it would first be ratified by parliament, and then become law. There was no fight nor struggle for him, for his humble servants in Whitehall would carry out the nitty gritty, and he could continue composing music, for he is the king. In The King's England, there is no stress and turmoil of the follies of politics, just as the king has no need for those things either. The king presides, and his subjects obey. This simpler form of politics breeds a simpler form of life, a life not seeing individual participation in governance by the individual as a moral good. And as Carl Schmitt says, all culture is downstream of politics. Therefore, those in The King's England will live differently to those in the England of the Commons. The King's England is beholden to older, more archaic, and more natural systems of governance and laws. For instance, the honesty boxes of Cromford would be ransacked in moments in Nottingham. Strict governance with laws are necessary in low trust areas, in cities which are unnatural. And because the cities are unnatural, there is no self-organising natural law adhering the community together, and the strict legalism of the House of Commons is necessary. Whilst there's a kind of self-organising law in The King's England, rooted in high-trust, and maintained by community perceptions. This is not to say the king's courts are unnecessary, but that there's a kind of organic equilibrium in the countryside compared with a treadmill jog in the cities. These thoughts are young and quite disparate, I apologise, but I hope I'm beginning to piece this together. There's a sense of freedom in the countryside which I've learnt to recognise, but have only today been offered a way to explain it. It isn't the horrid freedom of J. S. Mills, to do whatever we deem right in our own eyes granted it doesn't hurt another, but the freedom of being a subject rather than a citizen. Political revolutions never begin in the countryside, not merely because they don't have the numbers to organise, but because they have no need of them. Whilst the cities compete to run ever-faster, and the government try to eke every last drop of productivity from those who work to make the GDP increase by a fraction, the city remains still, not evolving and building, but simply presiding.