The Hidden Hand of the Fabian Society

In one of our periodic and routine visits to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF)'s ideological front web site Heritage and Identity recently, we were disappointed to find the speeches made at their recent HLF sponsored conference Who Do We Want To Be? held at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre on 29 November 2005 had not been published. No matter, they will doubtless appear shortly.

The HLF is a major funder of archive projects.

Our regular readers will no doubt be aware we have earlier blogged HLF's previous conference on national identity in A figment of our imagination in which we noted how the HLF was using a front web site under the slogan Heritage and Identity and how HLF was socially engineering British cultural identity for EU ends. The same site was used to front this year's conference.

In searching for the name of the conference on Google we were surprised to find a conference taking place in the New Year (2006) with exactly the same title and theme. It is being run by the Fabian Society and is subtitled The Future of Britishness.

This is rather too much of a coincidence. While the HLF's own pushing of a pro-immigration and multi-cultural agenda (as against the arguments of Migration Watch that Britain has a largely indigenous population with its own distinctive culture) is obvious government ideology and policy, the occurrence of a Fabian Society conference on the same theme and with the same title puts the matter of collusion beyond doubt.

It takes only the simplest knowledge of the role of the Fabian Society to understand the reason for the exact parallel.

Lindsay Jenkins

Lindsay Jenkins in her book Disappearing Britain: The EU and the Death of Local Government (foreword by Lord Tebbit) explains

The Fabian Society is at the cutting edge of socialism in Britain, and since the First World War has been at the heart of the drive for a federal Europe...

Jenkins goes on to explain that the Fabian Society has strong links with the Labour Party and has an approach that is both subtle and clever, avoiding dogmatism and violent revolution instead espousing the subversive use of front organisations like the Study of Parliament Group, the Policy Studies Institute, the Federal Trust and Charter 88, inspired by the Soviet Union's use of front organisations. The Study of Parliament Group in 1966-1967 was an early advocate of regional government and sought to base its support for regional government on the Treaty of Rome.

The significance of this is staggering. Quite simply, the Fabian Society is driving forward an integrationist, Europhile, regional and anti-nation state agenda through government bodies like the HLF, rather in the same way that the Malvine Project is driving forward numerous cultural heritage programmes also in the cause of European integration (see Another Way Forward?) This is cleverly done so as to avoid any admission the government or HLF is re-engineering British cultural heritage as part of an EU agenda.

Dr. Brian Lang

The Heritage and Identity conference web page features Dr. Brian Lang, Principal of St. Andrew's University (dubbed Scotland's First University in their recruitment drive, recently bolstered by Prince William's four year undergraduate attendance there.) We wonder whether the Chancellor, General Council and University Court of that university are aware of their principal's backing of an overtly socialist, federalist and integrationist agenda which has originated with the Fabian Society. Perhaps they are aware, and are encouraged by EU funds (our own money returned to us minus subsidies for the eastern European accession states, of course.)

If so, this doesn't say too much for academic neutrality, objectivity and the development of an audience's critical faculties. Dr. Lang mentions nothing of criticism, only that the conference would be thought-provoking. The last thing the EU wants is criticism. The recent or impending conferences therefore combine to provide us with either a socially-engineered view of British culture suited to EU integration or a dumbed-down, quasi academic approach to a complex subject. Thus British identity is being moulded not to suit popular or actual manifestations of national identity but to suit EU integration, in other words to make us European.



Further reading: Where have all the intellectuals gone?

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