Picture shows Jeff Banks fashion designer
Many Britons of a certain vintage will remember the clothes designer Jeff Banks. Some may have bought his clothes but many others will recall him from the BBC fashion programme ‘The Clothes Show’ where he was a popular avuncular presenter.
He disappeared from view, at least for me, but I assumed that he was part of the liberal BBC type crowd as so many creative types are and doing whatever he was doing to get by. However I was wrong. Mr Banks has popped up again but not with the sort of left leaning pronouncements that we’ve come to wearily accept from Britain’s creative practitioners but something quite else entirely.
He has produced a short video that I’ve seen on the X platform extolling the virtues of unity on the British nationalist Right.
Here’s a link to the video.
https://x.com/jomickane/status/2010382296197591105
I’m astonished to see someone like Mr Banks make a video like this. It’s not that I disagree with calls for political unity as political movements that are united are more likely to have political successes. Disunity on the other hand doesn’t play well with the public as we have seen with the US Democrats who are divided between those who want to focus on the concerns of the working classes and those who are pushing various sorts of identity politics. They’ve lost power in the US and the disunity is not helping their chances of re-election, at least having one of their candidates re-elected to the Presidency. In the UK we’ve also seen the perils of disunity most notably for me in the Labour Party of the early 1980’s where divisions were so great that not only did it help Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stay in office but political moderates left the party to form the Social Democratic Party.
What I am astonished with is that Mr Banks felt so comfortable putting his head above the parapet on this issue and talking about figures like Tommy Robinson, who is controversial in mainstream politics, in a relatively positive way. The fact that Mr Banks can make this statement is evidence that things have changed greatly in British politics. Ten years ago if Mr Banks had spoken relatively positively about Mr Robinson, Nigel Farage MP, Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe MP then he could have expected to be thoroughly cancelled. He would have been doxed, his business would have been destroyed by leftist activists and their media handmaidens and he would be forced into a low profile life for his ‘crime’ of speaking about what was politically unacceptable for culturally powerful leftists.
It’s a strong sign that the Overton Window has moved somewhat to the Right in the UK and it is now more acceptable for the likes of Mr Banks to speak positively about controversial figures and to align himself with causes such as the sort of cultural and civic British nationalism as espoused by the likes of Mr Robinson et al. Mr Banks is unlikely to be cancelled over his statement today and all I can see as regards to the leftist response to Mr Banks’s statement is impotent screaming from leftists online.
Whether you agree with the causes and the people that Mr Banks has spoken positively of and aligned himself with is immaterial, what’s important is that he can feel more comfortable doing this than he would have done in 2016. Mr Banks has more freedom now to express his views than he would have done a decade ago and for him to have that freedom pleases me as people should be able to express opinions, even difficult or challenging ones, without undue sanction either from the State or society. I don’t know how things are going to work out politically in the UK or whether the political changes in British society will end up working out either for good or ill but it’s now very difficult to deny that Britain’s political environment has change immensely since 2010 – 2016 period when leftists, pro-mass migration advocates, trans ideologues and ‘social justice’ campaigners called the shots.
It’s good to see open debate as it is by open debate we will test ideas and work out which works and which doesn’t and Mr Banks’s comment is just one small part of the open debate that might make our society healthier politically. There are a whole lot of ersatz political and ideological emperors who are having their nakedness exposed and discussed in Britain today and that can only be for the good as open debate is far far preferable to the suppression of ideas that some in authority consider beyond the pale.