Book Review: The Pioneers – Makers of New Zealand

June 11, 2025
, , , , , Book Review

By Mike Butler on Breaking Views

Don’t forget the old pioneers

The Pioneers – Makers of New Zealand, a new book by writer-publisher John McLean, reminds us of those who built New Zealand, tells how, and explains why their contribution should not be forgotten.

McLean descends from an unusual pioneering family of Scots who did a double migration, first to Nova Scotia in 1793, and then on to Waipu, in Bream Bay, Northland, in 1854.

The people behind contractors John McLean and Sons also descended from this group. This company built bridges, railways, most of Wellington’s wharves, the entire Auckland electric tramway system, as well as the early stages of the Otira Tunnel under the southern Alps, starting in 1907.

This is the third book in a trilogy that McLean has written about the New Zealand pioneers, the others being Voyages of the Pioneers to New Zealand 1839-85, and Sweat and Toil, the Building of New Zealand.

Direct quotes from pioneers bring to life his latest story of those early days, when men, sometimes couples, travelled all the way from England, Scotland, or Ireland, to get in on the ground floor of a new colony.

Attracted by the lure of wealth, cheap land that they could own, the safety of British law, and the familiarity of British culture, they, often unexpectedly, found themselves faced with the daunting task of having to clear dense native bush before they could build shelter, let along plant anything.

Sometimes the forest was so dense there was not even enough room to swing an axe.

Without government welfare, and without money to make the long trip home, mostly to nothing, most pioneers had no option but to do keep going until the hut was built and the farm planted.

In a nutshell, “no other option but carry on” is the pioneering spirit.

That early energy and determination began to fade in the children of the pioneers, at the turn of the century, prompting Lord Ranfurly to say, in 1904, that “the people of the colony were growing too fond of going to the government for everything and were raising children that were unfitted for a pioneering life”.

“The king hit to the pioneering qualities of enterprise, hard work and self-reliance came with the introduction of the welfare state by the first Labour government which took office in 1935,“ Mclean wrote.

His close look at reactions to arrival in a new land, their houses, food, cooking, drink, clothes, transport, religion, social and sporting activities, their effect on the environment, and the origin of the towns, among numerous other chapter headings, sheds light on the culture that the descendants of British early settlers have that seems invisible but which is omnipresent.

For instance, the habit of a Sunday roast that came with the pioneers had become a feature of life in Britain as the main meal of the week that was slow cooked while the family went to church, ready to be eaten when they returned home.

The forebears of the sparrows on your lawn were introduced to counter voracious caterpillars that invaded from the virgin bush to eat every blade of new sown grass.

Whiskey, beer and cigarettes, racing, cricket, rugby all came with the pioneers.

McLean shows that relations between pioneers and Maoris were mainly of mutual benefit, except for when some tribes rebelled in some areas in the 1840s and 1860s.

The military response to those rebellions led to the creation of military towns including Hamilton, Cambridge, Pirongia, and Kihikihi, numerous redoubts (settler forts) signposted as historical reminders, as well as extensive land confiscations in parts of the North Island as a consequence of insurrection.

McLean’s easy-to read third book on the New Zealand pioneers will rekindle in those of us with forebears who came here early a renewed understanding and respect that may have been sidelined as unacceptable, or which may have just drifted away with the passage of time.

The Pioneers – Makers of New Zealand, John McLean, Winter Productions, 256 pages, illustrated, is available from independent bookshops or www.trosspublishing.com

THE WAR AGAINST ELON MUSK AND FREE SPEECH

June 7, 2025
, , , Freedom of Speech

By John McLean

When riots eventually broke out in Britain in August, 2024, against the British government’s subversive policy of changing the kingdom’s demographics by allowing millions of Third World chancers to arrive in Britain where even illegal immigrants are housed free of charge in nice hotels (a luxury not available to the native born) the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, seized with both hands the opportunity of using the riots as a pretext to limit free speech – just as Jacinda Ardern did in New Zealand in 2019 after one man, Brenton Tarrant, shot some Muslims in two mosques.

In both cases these manipulative Prime Ministers clicked in to the media hysteria around these two unfortunate events as they believed that a traumatised public, manipulated into “group outrage” by the mainstream media, would accept such violations of freedom that would be unlikely to be accepted in more normal times. By no yardstick could the riots be justified but that does not mean that the issue of mass migration that triggered them should not be recognised as a very serious problem.

By blaming “social media” for the riots Starmer, with the help of a compliant media (BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, etc.) managed to shift the debate from the serious issue that provoked the riots to the alleged “danger” of social media.

This war against social media is strongly supported by the mainstream media, consisting as it does of government stooges of mainly definite Left wing views. Mainstream media, with its “group narrative” of events, fears the power of the free wheeling ideas that are expressed on social media and which are so often outside the agreed narrative of the sinister combination of government, academia and mainstream media.

The more that people engage with – and get their news from – social media, the fewer newspapers they will buy and the more likely they are not to watch the BBC or, even worse, New Zealand’s TV1 News at Six. That means less revenue from the sale of newspapers and from advertising from mainstream media and more for Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) and other social media platforms, leading eventually to the demise of mainstream media and the sacking or redundancy of more and more of its reporters. We saw this in New Zealand with the closedown of TV3 with the loss of hundreds of jobs. 

This fear was also what motivated London’s Independent newspaper on 13th August, 2024, to write an article headlined “How To Delete Your X Account After Elon Musk’s ‘Vile’ Site Helps Fuel Far-Right Riots”. The article itself was effectively an instruction manual for readers to quit X, guiding the reader through the technicalities of what buttons to push, etc. 

Fear of the growing power of social media is also why Stuff on its website took to writing at the end of its online articles: “Be a Friend of Facts. What you’ve just read was written by a fiercely independent reporter and general good human. Our journalists tell it like it is. They’re trained to know facts from falsehoods, science from spin, politicking from public interest…Our journalists are free to report the news across Aotearoa without corporate or government influence.” There are at least seven false statements in this mighty piece of misinformation, including the name of the country. Thus by its own words does Stuff show the greater truth of social media over mainstream.

They have reason to be afraid for their jobs for during the weeks of the protest at Parliament in Wellington against the brutal and unnecessary Covid mandates and lockdowns more people were getting their online information and news from Voices for Freedom and other online groups on social media than from the mainstream media. All this helps explain the continuing hostile articles in mainstream media against X and other social media platforms. 

Starmer and his gang of crusading female ministers singled out Musk, the owner of X, as the prime target of blame for the riots that swept through the working class areas of Britain – even more so than Tommy Robinson. And yet neither Musk nor Robinson were even in Britain at the time! Starmer has threatened to force X to “restrict” posts that some of its more than 350 million users might put on it – posts that are “legal but harmful”. This would include any post that dares to question the economically damaging and yet ineffective “net zero” policy or indeed global warming itself.

In the words of the leader of Britain’s Reform Party, Nigel Farage, “What we should be allowed to do on social media is to speculate, to ask questions, to try to put facts out, put facts out that wake up the rest of the community. And while you’re engaged in something like that you can never guarantee that what you say is 100% true….Now, Starmer, by cracking down on that, poses the biggest threat to free speech we’ve seen in our history”. 

Starmer must have been a very shonky lawyer not to understand that it is not technologically possible for a social media platform to sift out instantly views that in Starmer’s narrow opinion are false. In the case of United States v Alvarez the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views”. How could X or other platforms  work out what is true and what is false since this can only be done through debate, fact sharing and comparisons within a legal framework that allows it?

As Hannah Cox wrote in Newsweek on 15th August, 2024, “The Brits are in a full-fledged free fall into oppression where citizens will be terrified to push back, unable to meaningfully participate in their government or their society, where neighbours will turn on neighbours”. In other words, a snitch society of Left wing crusaders scouring the Internet to find posts that are off the official narrative and which they can claim are “false”. Just like in the days of the Stasi in East Germany under the Communists.

As part of their war against Musk, which is really a war against free speech, both the British government and the European Union have brought in legislation (Britain’s Online Safety Act and the E.U.’s Digital Services Act) to try to get rid of X by financial means. The British Act demands that social media platforms actively identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm from “illegal” material – something that, as already mentioned, is technologically impossible. The E.U. allows them to fine X a total of 6% of its global annual revenue while the British Act goes for 10% of the same. 

State regulators (censors) cannot be trusted to decide what is “true” speech and what isn’t. Remember the whopping lie that Jacinda Ardern told during the contrived Covid hysteria when she said that she would continue to be “your single source of truth”!!!!!! This was at a time when she was propagating the lie that her government’s chosen vaccine was “safe and effective” when in fact it was neither.

A further part of the Starmer government’s attack on free speech is a proposal to force schools to teach children as young as five to spot “extremist” content and “fake news” online. This is a form of child abuse. Starmer, in his earlier incarnation as Director of Public Prosecutions, used to prosecute people for child abuse. Should he ever feel the same inclination again, perhaps the best place to start would be for him to look in the mirror.

“English classes might be used to scrutinise newspaper reports, comparing their style and language to fake news, while pupils may be taught how to identify fake news websites via their designs,” wrote London’s Independent on 11th August, 2024. Why not use English classes to teach these deprived children how to speak and write basic English grammar, something that teachers now find too boring and insufficiently ideological to satisfy their brainwashing instincts.

The use of the word “extremist” is most disturbing because, if we are to maintain our freedoms and way of life – or even, let it be said, our traditional demographics – it is both natural and desirable to be “extremist” in upholding them. As the Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, said in 1964, “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice”. Therefore, when the authorities try to demonise people for being “extremists” or, more particularly “Far Right extremists”, they should not only be disbelieved but also called out and exposed.

Since she resigned and fled the country in a hurry Jacinda Ardern has devoted herself to what appears to be her first love: online censorship or, to be more precise, dictating to people what we can think and say on the Internet. In her usual manipulative way she calls it the “Christchurch Call”. The aim of this particular piece of censorship is to combat “online extremist content” – no doubt people like Barry Goldwater for saying “extremist” things in defence of liberty. In her intolerant mind the word “extremist” really applies to any view that gets in the way of her own views and prejudices; this was on public display during her would-be Covid dictatorship. Our forebears have died in the world wars for freedom of speech and we need to be as “extremist” as possible in defending it.

The war against Elon Musk is being waged on several fronts and is very disturbing since X is probably the last bastion of free speech in the world. In the words of Musk himself, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and Twitter (now X) is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”.  

Oh dear! How dare he utter such heresy. A horrified Under-Secretary in Britain’s Labour government, Jess Phillips, damned X as “a place of misery” (for over 350 million users!). She would know all about misery as her habitually sad face epitomises it – the last person you’d ever want to meet at a party.

John Swinney, the First Minister in Scotland’s devolved government, chimed in and screamed, “The conduct [of X] is unacceptable and needs to be tackled”. His predecessor as First Minister, Humza Yousaf, went further and declared that Musk was “one of the most dangerous men on the planet”. Yes, dangerous to types like Yousaf for providing a platform for people to criticise the secrecy and incompetence of the Scottish government. 

During his brief and disastrous term as First Minister Yousaf introduced unprecedented restrictions on free speech, especially in respect of “transgenderism”, which is itself a violation of nature since biologically every person born male has thousands of male only cells while everyone born female has thousands of female only cells and these can never be changed during a human life. 

When British commentator Posie Parker pointed out this eternal and proven rule of nature at a park in Auckland, she was physically attacked and had to be rescued by the police. So much for free speech in New Zealand, where it is now subject to the “thug’s veto” – as was so plainly obvious during Julian Batchelor’s tour of the country to oppose the poison of “co-governance”. The hate campaign against social media has been well thought out and no repetition of such slogans as “hate speech”, “racism” or “Far Right” should distract us from its real purpose of straight out censorship. 

Another weapon that has been used against X is cyber attacks to prevent people being able to tune in to its debates with Donald Trump and Ron de Santis. 

In New Zealand the government’s war against free speech is now so all encompassing that there is even ideological training of police officers who have been ordered that ANY reported incidents of “hate speech” that are not offences still have to be recorded as “hate incidents”, the test of a “hate incident” being anything that the complainants feel is “hateful” towards them as a member of a minority group. But there is no “hate” against Europeans as a group- e.g. the Maori Party’s constant and racist hate campaigns against European New Zealanders. The test for this “hate” is entirely subjective (what some member of the public decides it should be) and not objective. The police do not make reports for other matters that are not offences without good reason so why should they do so for this? Under the defective leadership of Police Commissioner Andrew Coster (an Ardern appointment) the men and women in uniform are fast becoming “thought police” in the manner of the old Soviet Union.

In this war by the authorities against the right of the individual to express himself or herself on social media we must fight back with all our strength. Hopefully this article has shed a little light on the subject. There is more information on this vital matter in the book “Free Speech Under Attack”, published by Tross Publishing (www.trosspublishing.com) 

RHODESIA – THE VICTIM OF COWARDS

June 5, 2025
Uncategorized

In my recently published book, the British Empire; A Force For Good, the section on Rhodesia is confined to 21 pages since the book had to cover all the other colonies and possessions that Britain once had on every continent and in every ocean. I had some rather sharp things to say about the trickery and deceit of various British government ministers – mainly Conservatives – towards Rhodesia between 1965 and 1980 but did not have the space to include some new and interesting material that my research uncovered. It is for this reason that I now give an expose of the true characters of Lord Carrington and Lord Soames – two of the three destroyers of Rhodesia, Margaret Thatcher being the third.

We shall start with Carrington, a hereditary peer who was described by the U.S. Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, as “that duplicitous bastard” and by Ian Smith as “the most two-faced of them all”. When, according to a participant at the Lancaster House conference on Rhodesia, General Walls was offered certain undertakings by Carrington in the form of an unwritten “gentlemen’s agreement”, he turned them down immediately on the grounds that Carrington was not a gentleman and therefore any verbal undertakings that he might give could not be trusted.

During his political career Carrington demonstrated his cowardly nature by the way that he allowed himself to be intimidated by Mugabe and other thugs during and after the Lancaster House conference of 1979 – in particular his failure to uphold the agreement (Annex D, clauses 11, 25 and 36) which required that those parties that intimidated voters would be banned from contesting the election. 

The other parties adhered to this to the best of their ability but not Mugabe’s ZANU (PF) which intimidated voters on a massive and organised scale, especially in Mashonaland East, Manicaland and Victoria. Canvassers for other parties were killed by Mugabe’s organised thugs and some of these victims were buried alive. Prior to voting ZANU (PF) terrorists moved in to native compounds on farms and let the farm workers know in no uncertain terms what would be the consequences if voting in their particular area did not show a big win for Mugabe.

There were more than a thousand affidavits attesting to these many acts of violence and intimidation from responsible people, some of them from official British “observers” (election monitors and policemen). Instead of banning ZANU (PF) as required to do by the Lancaster House agreement Carrington and his sidekick in Rhodesia, Lord Soames, looked the other way.

Two years later this Foreign Secretary’s neglect in respect of Argentina’s barely concealed intentions in respect of the British colony of the Falkland Islands more or less gave the green light to the dictatorship in Buenos Aires to launch their full scale invasion which resulted in the deaths of 258 British soldiers and 649 Argentinians.

In disgrace Carrington resigned in a hurry, leaving the Foreign Office in crisis and an enemy flag flying over British territory for the first time since 1945. He did not even have the courage to take sole responsibility for the mess; instead he took with him into resignation the junior minister at the Foreign Office, Richard Luce, a man superior to Carrington in both character and ability.

Carrington’s cowardice and deceit while he was Foreign Secretary showed that he was a most persuasive liar whose word could not be trusted – as stated by Alexander Haig, Ian Smith and others who had dealings with him.

Carrington was first accused of cowardice during the Battle of Arnhem in 1944 when, as a 25 year old junior officer in the Grenadier Guards, he refused to advance with his tanks to Arnhem, where they were desperately needed to help relieve the British and American soldiers trapped there. Instead he halted them at the northern end of the Nijmegen Bridge over the Waal River and then bunkered down for the night of 20th September, 1944, like a frightened rabbit.

There were American paratroopers north of the bridge and they expected the British tanks to advance the eleven miles to Arnhem before dark. Knowing how important this was, one of the American officers, Captain T. Moffatt Burriss, approached Carrington who said that he would not order the advance because he did not have the orders to do so. This was almost certainly another of his lies as his superior, General Horrocks, had told the Americans, “My tanks [including Carrington’s] will be lined up in full force at the bridge, ready to go, hell bent for Arnhem. Nothing will stop them.”

“OK, I’m going to give you an order”, said Burriss, an officer of equal rank but in a different army. Carrington refused. “You yellow son-of-a-bitch”, said Burriss.

Then, during the late afternoon, a more senior American officer, Major Cook, moved in and asked Carrington to give the order to advance. Another refusal. In desperation the Americans then got Colonel Tucker and eventually General Gavin to request the advance of the tanks but Carrington replied that he didn’t want to advance at night. There were British soldiers besieged at Arnhem and General Gavin said, “If they were my men in Arnhem, we would move tanks at night, we would move anything at night to get there”, but Carrington just closed the hatch of his tank and bunkered down for the night. He could have signalled for further orders but failed to do so.

In an article dated 29th August, 2019, in Key Military a certain David Truesdale tried to make the case for Carrington. However, because he gave a false description of Carrington’s character – “one of the most distinguished statesmen of the post-war period” and “much admired for his statesman-like qualities, personal honour and integrity”, Truesdale’s reputation for veracity is suspect to say the least. In trying to grease up to his “hero” he even went to the unbelievable extreme of saying of Carrington “the Lord wrote….” Please note the capital “L”, which is usually reserved for the Lord Jesus Christ. Such wordage might have passed in the eighteenth century but to write in such terms in the 21st century brings the content of the whole of Truesdale’s article into question, if not ridicule. So much for Carrington but what about Lord Soames?

Christopher Soames, the son of a rich brewer, served in the elite Coldstream Guards during the Second World War. He is recorded as having received a minor award for bravery but, during the six years of World War Two, these were given out to Guards officers more or less as a matter of routine – rather like in the late nineteenth century when almost every general in the British Army had a Victoria Cross which at that time seems to have been awarded more for seniority than for bravery.

Within his regiment Soames had a nick-name, which was “Daffodil”. And we all know what colour a daffodil is. The reason why others in the regiment referred to him as Daffodil was because, whenever there was any fighting to be done, Soames always found a reason to be on an errand way behind the lines or else to feign sickness. Not surprisingly, the others in the regiment – both officers and men – noticed this and resented the fact that, while they were risking their lives in the fighting line, there was one manipulative and malingering coward who wasn’t.  

Always on the lookout for the Main Chance (and for a drink), Soames found it at the end of the War when he met Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary, and married her. He then traded on his father-in-law’s name to worm his way into Parliament, becoming the Conservative M.P. for Bedford. He let it be known to those who mattered in the Conservative Party that he had Churchill’s ear and this resulted in promotion up through the ministerial ranks.

In Harold MacMillan’s government he was made Minister for War, which made him the Minister for the Army. On his first day in this position and with the hide of a rhinoceros he rang the commanding officer of the Coldstream Guards and said, “It is such an honour for an ex-member of the Coldstreams to be made the Minister for War that I would like to celebrate the occasion by coming and having lunch with the officers in the Mess.” The C.O. had to say “yes”.

For a London based regiment lunch is the big event of the day for the officers who can gather for a hot lunch and discuss regimental matters with their fellows. Evenings are not so well attended since the officers go home to their wives and families or else, being London, attend other social events outside the regiment.

Normally there would be at least twenty officers at lunch but on this occasion of Soames’ visit there were only two: the Commanding Officer and the Adjutant. Both had to turn up by virtue of their positions. All the other officers, who had a choice, stayed away and so Daffodil had to eat a quick lunch at the big table with only two others. He never went near the Coldstream Guards ever again. Instead, Margaret Thatcher inflicted him on to Rhodesia as its Governor where he exercised his trademark cunning and cowardice to play his part in destroying the most wonderful country that Africa has ever known.

As a result of their experiences in the Bush War Rhodesians know only too well how important it is for every man in a fighting unit to do his duty since cowards can cause the deaths of their fellow troops. That is why it was so despicable that two such cowardly and deceitful men were allowed to destroy Rhodesia in the way that they did. Margaret Thatcher had a lot to answer for – not just in respect of Rhodesia but of Hong Kong as well. She was the only Prime Minister to have handed two prosperous and happy colonies over to the communists – Rhodesia by means of a rigged election and Hong Kong by no election or referendum at all. Just her constant lie that the British had to hand over all of Hong Kong to China whereas in fact it had to hand over only the back-country New Territories, which were on a 99 year lease, and not Hong Kong Island or Kowloon which were the heart and soul of Hong Kong and could have been retained, which is what the vast majority of the people wanted. As I wrote in my book, Margaret Thatcher might have been the Iron Lady in Britain but out in the Empire she was the Double Traitor.

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