𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

If you’re looking forward to a bracing walk with the dog and a pint of frothy ale in a pub this afternoon, I’ve got bad news. Basically, you’re Adolf Hitler.

If that beer was warm and your dog was a Labrador, especially a black one, then I’m afraid there’s no hope for you. You aren’t living in Britain at all.

You’re living in a far-right fantasy, because apparently none of those things ever existed. Anybody who thinks otherwise must be some kind of fascist.

That’s the impression left by rural minister Jenny Riddell-Carpenter’s extraordinary outburst at a fringe event during last week’s Labour conference.

The Suffolk Coastal MP warned the next election could be fought over nature and rural affairs, with Labour’s opponents conjuring up a vision of “warm ale, a black Labrador by your feet in a pub that doesn’t exist, and with symbolism of fox hunting all around them”. She then described this as “a very far-right nostalgic vision of Britain that we don’t want to have, and never really existed”.

Which makes me Adolf Hitler for starters, given that right now I’d love to be in that pub, supping that beer. Ideally a pint of Adnams, Suffolk’s finest. And I wouldn’t bother about the symbols on the walls, unless they were literal swastikas. I’m not so keen on those.

I grew up in a Britain where pubs were pubs, dogs were dogs and a black Labrador was just a black Labrador. Not anymore, apparently.

Funnily enough, I holidayed in coastal Suffolk in July, as I do every summer. I visited plenty of pubs, encountering locals, families, holidaymakers, dogs and people enjoying themselves.

None of them, as far as I could see, were engaged in some sinister far-right project. So is Riddell-Carpenter mad or is something else going on?

The answers are yes, she’s plainly deluded, and yes, something rather frightening is going on. Because Labour isn’t just taking aim at our beer, pubs and dogs.

It’s looking to destroy whole swathes of British culture and history. To replace it with what?

Riddell-Carpenter talks of her “progressive vision for the countryside”, and thanks to Ed Miliband’s stint as energy secretary, we already have a glimpse of it. Instead of farmers and rolling green fields, it’s set to become a land of towering wind turbines, solar ‘farms’, electrical substations and endless pylon and transmission lines on a scale never before seen. And don’t forget the data centres popping up like mushrooms.

Coastal Suffolk is ground zero, as pipes and nuclear power infrastructure slice through unspoiled historic landscapes. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves’s cruel and ignorant inheritance tax blitz still threatens to wipe out our family farms, despite being partially reversed.

Much easier to do that if you can smear anybody who protests as far right. But Labour’s assault on what makes Britain great is far wider than that.

George Orwell, whose pen name comes from the River Orwell in Suffolk, famously wrote in his novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future.” Labour has taken that totalitarian ideology to heart.

The left has embarked on an ideological sweep across our institutions, decolonising the curriculum, lecturing innocent National Trust visitors on the legacy of slavery, and smearing anybody who questions progressive orthodoxy on national or gender identity as racist, xenophobic or, yes, far right. They were bound to come for our pubs at some point.

When I grew up, Britain was proud of standing up to the Nazis (the real ones), and proud of Winston Churchill, whom we saw as a truly great Briton and war leader. Now, apparently, we’re the Nazis, Winston Churchill was an imperialist Zionist-colonialist, and our national flag is a source of shame.

Of course, many of Churchill’s views on race and Empire don’t hold up today, and he made plenty of mistakes, notably launching the disastrous Gallipoli invasion in the First World War. But that’s not what we cherish him for.

We remember him for uniting the nation in its hour of need and inspiring us to victory through some of the greatest political speeches ever written. No wonder the left is after him.

It wants us to feel ashamed, not proud, so it can do what it likes with us. Listening to Labour Party conference speeches last week, notably chancellor John Healey’s sentimental sludge, you’d think the only inspiring thing the British had ever done was vote for Clement Attlee as PM and send our sons down the pit.

Everything else is just a far-right fantasy. If Labour really wants Britain to fly to the extremes, making us ashamed of simple daily pleasures like a warm beer and cosy dog is going the right way about it. Right, I’m off down the pub.