Metropolitan Cathedral Liverpool
Source: Bigstock
My nearest Giant Catholic House of God, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King in the northwest English city of Liverpool, has just received Grade-I Listed Status from the U.K. government as a piece of nationally notable architecture; simply put, it means you can’t just knock it down and build an ice-skating rink there anymore. Known as “Paddy’s Wigwam,” as its central spire resembles a giant Red Indian tepee, and because it was aimed primarily at local Irishmen, of whom Liverpool has many, the structure was built in the 1960s in typical, eyesore Modernist style by right-angle-loving architect Sir Frederick Gibberd.
Its interior is rather nice and heavenly, full of light and brightly colored stained glass, but its exterior facade is…well, it looks like a big concrete wigwam, so what do you think? If it were at all physically possible, the government should have awarded the interior full Grade-I Listed Status and hired Godzilla and King Kong to attack the exterior with massive exploding hammers.
Unlike most cathedrals, Liverpool Lego took only five years to throw up, between 1962 and 1967, but takes only five seconds to make passersby throw up, as soon as they see it. Things need not have been this way, however, if original, immeasurably more impressive plans for the holy temple had been allowed to stand.
In 1933, work began on a previous, alternative cathedral design from Sir Edwin Lutyens. Commissioned by the then Archbishop of Liverpool Richard Downey, it was estimated the edifice would take 200 years to complete. It would have been the second biggest cathedral on the planet, after St. Peter’s in Rome, with a vast 520-foot dome, more than twice the height of the comparatively pathetic little swollen pimple of St. Paul’s in London.
“The most widespread example of terminal short-termism among Western politicians right now has to be the increasingly pressing issue of the Great Replacement.”
Work did take place on the cathedral’s crypt, the only part of the building ever fully finished. I sat some of my exams inside it as a university student around 25 years ago, being greatly disappointed to find no skeletal cardinals lining the walls, or coffins on legs for exam tables, just a sort of little school assembly hall with desks lined up inside.
But then WWII intervened, Archbishop Downey died, and in 1957 a new Archbishop, John Heenan, decided 200 years was a bit too long to wait, so he scrapped the whole thing and commissioned Gibberd to set up his tatty little tent thing there instead. Would it not have been better for Heenan to be patient, wait, and wind up with something far better in the end instead, even though it would only have been future generations who would have actually lived to see the benefit of it? You’d think a priest, of all people, might understand the value of the concept of eternity, but apparently not.
They say Rome wasn’t built in a day. These days, that just means nobody would ever actually bother building Rome at all—not even the Roman Catholics.
Nuclear Disaster
This kind of terminal short-termism is all around us in today’s West. I recall a video that went viral in 2022 of former U.K. Deputy PM Nick Clegg. Speaking in 2010, Clegg dismissed with a patronizing smile the very idea of commissioning any new nuclear power plants back then because they would not be ready until at least…yes, 2022.
Well, guess what? Twelve years later, 2022 did actually manage to come around at last, as future years do tend to do, leaving Britain with record-high energy prices caused, in part, by Nick Clegg’s consummate inability to see human life from any perspective other than that of a severely retarded mayfly.
For him, “2022” here was essentially just a synonym for “never.” Maybe that perspective would have been excusable in an insect, but not in a supposed human being. By “never” here, what Nick really meant was “when I’m long gone and out of office and can’t be held publicly accountable for anything anymore,” which thankfully wasn’t too long, the short-lived Ephemera vulgata being swatted away and voted out as an MP in 2017.
Back to the Future
The most widespread example of terminal short-termism among Western politicians right now has to be the increasingly pressing issue of the Great Replacement. In June, a new report estimated that, if current trends continued, white British people would become an ethnic minority in the U.K. by 2063, with Muslims alone making up 19.2 percent of the population by 2100 (longer-term forecasts show crescent-mooners becoming an outright majority there by 2180).
When this alarming projection was put to Richard Tice, the 60-year-old Deputy Leader of the (apparently) anti-immigration Reform UK party during a TV interview, he replied like so:
“2063 is a very long way off, it’s a few decades. I’m trying to do the maths quickly in my head, I’ll be long gone by then. I think the U.K. is a Christian nation, we should stand up and be proud of that. Let’s see what happens.”
2063 isn’t actually that long off at all, though; it’s 38 years. Just like Nick Clegg found with the year 2022, the year 2063 will actually wind up arriving in the end, you know, Richard: in approximately 38 years’ time, in fact. You say you’ll be “long gone” by then, but not necessarily. You might still just about be hanging on grimly in your bath chair aged 98 to “see what happens”—and, I predict, it won’t be terribly happy.
Plus, you have children, and maybe even grandchildren as well. “I’m trying to do the maths quickly in my head” too right now, but I’m making the wild assumption they might be younger than you? Say, by approximately 20 to 50 years, maybe? If one of your kids has a new baby, then in 38 years’ time, it will be…[does maths quickly in head again] oh, approximately 38 years old, I suppose. So, not yet 40, but doomed to live the rest of their life as an ethnic minority in what is meant to be their own country.
2063 may seem a long, long way off to mental mayflies like Tice, but that is only because 2063 hasn’t happened yet. At 38 years distant, it is the mere future equivalent of 1987, not 1066 or 1492. To many of those of us who lived through 1987, even as mere prepubescents, it doesn’t seem all that long ago: Margaret Thatcher winning her third term as PM, Ronald Reagan telling Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall,” “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles (very demographically prophetic, that), films like Beverly Hills Cop 2—not even the first Beverly Hills Cop—in cinemas, the first appearance of The Simpsons on TV… It’s hardly truly distant stuff like the Council of Tent or the Diet of Worms, is it?
If you honestly think historical epochs can be accurately measured by the distance between the PAL region releases of the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Nintendo Switch 2, then I would suggest your temporal horizons are somewhat limited.
The Children’s Crusaders
“What are the long-term effects, do you think, of the French Revolution?” Chinese Deputy Dictator Zhou Enlai was asked by Richard Nixon on his celebrated visit to China in 1972. “It is still too early to say,” he famously replied—which sounds like a long-term perspective indeed, but Zhou mistakenly thought Nixon was referring to the much more recent Parisian stone-throwing student radical rebels of 1968, not the storming of the Bastille in 1789.
During his own recent interview, Tice displayed similar chronological confusion. Pressed by his (far younger) interviewer on just how big an issue all this was, Tice Enlai balked at providing any proper meaningful response. “You’re obsessed with this stuff,” he scolded his interrogator. Yes, probably because he’s in his early 20s and he’ll have to live through the consequences of all this for rather longer than you will—and so will his children, just like your own, and their children’s children’s children.
Born in 1960, Richard Tice will have been lucky enough not to have been compelled to attend a madrassa in all but name. European schoolchildren today are often less fortunate. You’d think a city called Hamburg, of all places, would be safe from Muslim invasion, but even schools there are being forcibly turned halal; new reports demonstrate infant white German Hamburgers, frequently outnumbered by their Muslim peers in class, are being called “pig-eaters” and persecuted for chewing pork sandwiches at meal or break times. Little white girls are likewise being bullied for dressing like “whores”—that is to say, not in headscarves. Jewish students, meanwhile, get beaten up and called cockroaches; not only by their Muslim classmates, but by their tormentors’ parents.
So, when Tice says “Let’s see what happens” in 38 years’ time, he can already get an easy free preview just by looking at what’s going on in Hamburg schoolrooms right now. In 38 years’ time, these Muslim-majority children will be in the increasing position of being the median adult voters in many European cities and countries. What makes Tice think they will treat their non-Muslim peers any better once they’re fully grown?
In a 2023 interview, Wolfgang Büscher, of German Christian youth charity the Ark, complained that, in his extensive experience, Muslim children across Germany, allowed in as “refugees” by the state, were increasingly terrorizing non-Muslim kids with knives and threats like “First let’s cut the throats of the Jews, then the gays and finally the Christians!” So emboldened are they by supine lack of resistance that the mini-Muslims are even now threatening the adults like Büscher, too: “A 12-year-old boy came to me and said, ‘I hate you. We will take back the country.’ They reject our culture, our values. Their hatred is unimaginable.”
It was never your country to “take back” in the first place, you odious little shit: But it will be one day, unless someone non-mayfly-brained actually acts. Unlike 60-year-old Richard Tice, even 12-year-old Muslims are able to take a long-term view. That’s why they’re winning.
You Only Live Tice
Tice justified his apathy toward the West’s looming demographic apocalypse by citing apparent short-term economic grounds:
“The sensible discussion to have is [not racial or religious, but to ask]…what sort of population do we want to have? Can we make that population more prosperous? Can we have a high-quality, highly skilled immigration policy?”
No, we can’t; next question, please. Is having your grandkids living as perpetual dhimmis in a long-term Euro-caliphate really worth the short-term convenience of some cheap Arab labor in the factory-work and hospitality industries? Only if, like Nick Clegg, you don’t believe 2022 will ever truly exist just because it’s twelve short years away.
And Reform UK, don’t forget, is meant to be Britain’s leading anti-immigration party!
Reform have a charismatic and likable leader in Nigel Farage and are right now forecast to make up the next U.K. government. While they look by far like the best plausible option, and do promise to cut immigration and deport plenty of illegals, they seem content also to send out mixed signals about precisely how far they will go in doing so, as shown by Tice’s own recent words.
Reform’s excuse is that it will prove politically, practically, and presentationally difficult to begin sending people back to Africa, Asia, and Arabia on a truly large scale; which is certainly true, on a short-to-medium-term basis. But on a long-term basis, what will happen if we don’t?
Perhaps Archbishop Heenan was farsighted to bring a halt to Lutyens’ original design for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral in favor of a quick little 1960s prefab wigwam toss-up after all. If Lutyens’ elaborate dream in stone really would have taken 200 years to laboriously construct from 1933 onward, then as soon as the last few bricks were being laid in place, it would already have been time to forcibly reconsecrate the thing into a mosque.