It’s a familiar manoeuvre. Take a minor case (in this instance, a septuagenarian protester outside an abortion clinic in Glasgow) inflate it into a civilisational battle, and then draft in Donald Trump as saviour of “old British values.” That’s the story Jake Wallis Simons spins in the Telegraph, and it’s nonsense from start to finish.
Rose Docherty was not arrested for being silent. She was arrested for breaking buffer-zone laws designed to ensure women can access abortion services without intimidation. To call this a “free speech” issue is to assert that one person’s unsolicited “offer of conversation” is more important than another’s right to medical care without harassment.
“The conjured Britain of ‘faith, flag and family; hard work, fair play and modest patriotism’ is a retroactive invention. It is nostalgia weaponised into ideology.”
Enter Trump, stage right
What turns this from a local skirmish into a morality play is the invocation of Trump. According to Simons, the Crown Office dropped its case only because the US president intervened. Never mind that Scottish prosecutors do not take orders from the White House; the point is symbolic. The only hope for Britain’s “old values,” apparently, is a misogynist reality-show huckster across the Atlantic.
This is more than hypocrisy. For years the Right raged at supposed “foreign interference” in British affairs. We had Brussels bureaucrats, European courts, even Greta Thunberg. But when it’s Trump, the intervention becomes heroic. What matters is not sovereignty but ideology: who speaks, and on whose behalf.
The myth of ‘old Britain’
Simons sketches an older Britain: faith, flag, family; borders and tradition; pride in armed forces; modest patriotism. It’s the usual checklist of Telegraphian virtues. But the picture is false. The Britain he imagines was also the Britain of criminalised homosexuality, backstreet abortions, deference to aristocracy, censorship, and empire. To claim it was a land of “fair play” is to bleach away its history of class rule and colonial violence.
“What Simons calls ‘old British values’ were never timeless; they were always contested, fought over, and redefined in struggle.”
Nostalgia here is less memory than weapon. “Traditional values” are reconstructed as culture-war props, a cudgel against feminism, multiculturalism, and any politics that dares question hierarchy.
Authoritarian inversion
The sleight of hand is obvious. The article denounces creeping authoritarianism while backing the most authoritarian project in modern British politics. A woman with a placard is cast as free-speech martyr, but Palestine Action blockading an arms factory is condemned as terrorism. Strikes, protests, migrant solidarity, climate resistance — all are criminalised. Yet the Right insists that authoritarianism flows only from the “woke” state.
The truth is simpler: what matters is not speech in the abstract, but whether speech threatens property, patriarchy, or power.
The silent majority that never was
Simons ends with the old Nixon trope: the “silent majority.” Rose Docherty, he insists, stands for thousands like her, a reservoir of Britain uncorrupted by multiculturalism and moral relativism. But the so-called silent majority is anything but silent. It owns newspapers, dominates broadcast studios, and sets the terms of parliamentary politics. When the Right claims silence, it is really claiming victimhood. Which is an old trick of the dominant class.
“When your ‘traditional values’ need an American strongman to validate them, they are no longer tradition but imported culture-war kitsch.”
The dialectic of decline
What Simons laments as cultural collapse is better understood as ideological decay. The myths of “old Britain” no longer cohere, so the Right imports Trump and Vance to prop them up. The irony is delicious: Britain’s defenders of sovereignty now pin their hopes on an American president. This is not tradition; it is dependency. Foreign dependency.
In truth, there is no “silent majority” waiting to restore faith and flag. There are competing social forces: women asserting reproductive rights, migrants demanding justice, workers striking for wages, and yes, conservatives clinging to myth. The fight is not between “old Britain” and “elites” but between the dominant class and the rest of us.
