As Britain approaches a general election, commentators on the
present “British sickness” or “British crisis” usually dwell on
one of several areas. Here are some of them:
• Destruction of trust in the Parliamentary and
political system.
About half Britain’s MPs have been found to have broken either
the spirit or the letter of the law with dodgy expense claims,
“flipping” primary and secondary residences to avoid capital
gains tax and in other ways showing contempt for the taxpayer —
a contempt now being heartily reciprocated. It is hard to see how
any major party will be able to find enough cleanskins to form a
ministry after the next election. Coupled with this is the rise
to power of bizarre figures like Lord Mandelson, virtually de
facto Prime Minister although elected by no one, once
a young far-leftist activist, now a friend (if that is the word)
of Russian oligarchs and recently a shooting partner of Colonel
Qaddafi’s son on the Rothschild Estate.
• The threat to Britain’s political and national
identity posed by integration into the European
Union. This will, it is predicted, be
irrevocably sealed by the Treaty of Lisbon, and it has already
had far-reaching consequences in British domestic law. Despite
numerous promises, there seems no prospect of a referendum being
held by either a Labour or Conservative government.
• The threat to Britain’s historic cultural identity
through massive and aggressive Muslim
immigration. This has
already created large no-go areas for non-Muslims and
particularly unveiled women in London and some other cities. This
has been connected with selective attacks, in the name of
multiculturalism, on Christian institutions (a nurse of 40 years’
experience who suggested prayer to a distressed patient on a
training exercise recently was not rebuked or corrected but
instantly sacked). Other Christian workers have been sacked for
displaying small crucifixes as necklaces or lapel-badges. There
is also a rising tide of anti-Semitism, the last particularly at
some universities. Jewish, or to be correct Israeli, students
have actually been banned from attending some courses and journal
refused to publish contributions from Israeli academics until
protests came from America. Various government and private
organizations have banned staff from displaying toy pigs in
deference to alleged Muslim sensibilities. Police ordered one
householder to remove a display of toy pigs from her window lest
they be seen by Muslims passing on the road, though no Muslims
had actually complained. British police forces were recently
described as having become the paramilitary wing of the far-left
Guardian newspaper.
Young British Muslims appear to be becoming much more extreme
than their parents, probably largely in reaction to the cultural
decadence they are daily confronted with. A recent poll found 36
percent of British Muslims aged 16 to 24 believe those who
convert to another religion should be punished by death. Forty
percent of British Muslims would like to live under Sharia law
and 20 percent have sympathy for the London tube bombers. Masked
Muslims marched through London carrying placards proclaiming
“Behead those who insult Islam” and promising another 9/11 and
another Holocaust while protected by massive numbers of British
police. Anjem Choudary, Principal Lecturer of the London School
of Shariah, declared recently: “There is a spark that has ignited
and its flame has become unstoppable. We find ourselves in the
year 2009, waiting for Rome to fall, waiting for the White House
to fall and indeed waiting for Buckingham Palace to fall.”
Buckingham Palace, he foresaw, would become a mosque, with
suitable architectural re-design.
Then there are the revelations in October of Andrew Neather,
speechwriter for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.
Neather claimed a secret government report in 2000 set out to
deliberately change Britain’s national identity
and cultural makeup irrevocably and forever: “I remember coming
away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy
was intended — even if this wasn’t its main purpose — to rub
the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of
date,” he said. This is not only a matter of votes, as many
migrants do not vote for years, but also a matter of jobs,
prestige and perquisites for the Labour-supporting caring
professions.
• The “broken society,” with rates of family
breakdown and teenage drug abuse, drunkenness and pregnancy among
the highest in
Europe. Teenage
pregnancy has often tended to increase most rapidly in the areas
with the most extensive and expensive sex-education programs. The
taxation system seems — without any exaggeration at all —
deliberately created to reward unmarried motherhood and family
break-up. Even Russia, a byword for dangerous, drunken chaos, has
a lower rate of teenage drunkenness. Violent crime by girls,
generally operating in drunken gangs, is also increasing rapidly.
• Material and moral weaknesses in the armed
forces. Many deaths of servicemen and women
in Iraq and Afghanistan have been blamed on inadequate equipment,
a situation that remains unrectified after years of complaints
and official findings by coroners’ courts and others and
complaints and resignations by senior officers. For the first
time in many years the actual quality of troops, as distinct from
leadership or equipment, is being questioned. According to many
accounts the British Army’s performance in Basra left much to be
desired. The Royal Navy is now smaller than the French Navy and
cannot even arrest Somali pirates in case Britain is then forced
to grant them asylum under EU Law. It recently emerged that on
October 28, 2009, the armed British Naval auxiliary tanker
Wave Knight stood by and did nothing while pirates
a few yards away seized and kidnapped the British couple Paul and
Rachel Chandler, transferring them from their yacht to a hijacked
Singaporean container vessel. At the time of writing the
Chandlers are being held for a $9 million ransom. For the first
time since Admiral Benbow’s captains were shot in 1703 for
deserting him in battle the Royal Navy has been publicly accused
of cowardice, though if it makes any difference the real culprit
has been the culture of political correctness.
Other kinds of pirates have been dealt with more sternly,
however: Local councils have prohibited pirate flags being flown
as children’s parties as “unneighbourly.” Handing power to local
councils, an article of faith for both major parties, has
resulted in an overweening Nanny State with a peculiar
combination of wimpishness and Draconianism. To take one recent
example among countless others: when a coastal footpath was built
by a Rotary Club to allow ramblers to enjoy the scenery along
Loch Ryan, in Scotland, Dumfries and Galloway Council would
allow only organized groups to use the footpath, and only
if supervised by a “trained outdoor specialist.” Christmas lights
outside shops have been forbidden both on grounds of
multiculturalism and for health and safety reasons. In
“Operation Napkin” undercover police have been sent to dine at
Chinese and Indian restaurants, presumably with concealed
truncheons and handcuffs at the ready, to arrest diners asking
for “flied lice” or otherwise mimicking the accents of staff.
• Nanny-State Draconianism and senseless
punishments. An ex-soldier who found a
shotgun and immediately handed it in to police was arrested,
tried before a jury, convicted and at the time of writing faces a
minimum of five years prison for possessing it, the judge having
instructed the jury that the law against possessing firearms was
to be construed strictly and the fact the possessor was acting
innocently and with public-spiritedness was irrelevant. Police
are routinely arresting people simply to record their DNA
profiles on the national database, according to another recent
report. At the same time overcrowded jails and racially based
sentencing guidelines (magistrates have been directed to regard
black burglars and muggers as “quirky Lenny Henry characters”)
mean large numbers of serious criminals remain at large.
• A drastic decline in teaching standards, and at
tertiary level a collapse in the hard subjects.
Lesley Ward, president of the Association of Teachers and
Lecturers, claimed recently that countless children are not even
toilet trained when they started school, are unable to dress
themselves, can only eat with a spoon or their fingers and could
scarcely spell their own names, still less pass basic literacy or
maths tests. Regarding higher education, a third of Britain’s
university physics departments have closed in the last few
years.
• Continuing National Health
scandals. A few
months ago it was reported that up to 1,200 patients had died
unnecessarily due to bad conditions at the Mid-Staffordshirre
Foundation Trust NHS hospital. Ministers, including the Prime
Minister, apologized abjectly and claimed it was an isolated
occurrence and that such a thing would never happen again. Now it
has emerged that similar conditions of poor nursing care, filthy
wards and lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University
NHS Hospitals Foundation Trust have led to the deaths of up to
400 patients a year.
• A general attack on traditions and
values. A survey found three-quarters of teachers
believed it was their duty to warn pupils about the danger of
patriotism. With pupils possibly taking them at their word, war
memorials have been reported vandalized at the rate of more than
one a week for the past year. Ex-servicemen have found that Union
Jack tattoos, even if invisible under clothing, have cost them
the chance of jobs with police and fire departments, lest they be
found intimidating. This links to a general decline in historical
memory, with many surveys indicating that large numbers think the
likes of Winston Churchill or the Duke of Wellington are
fictional if they have heard of them at all, though they often
display exact and pedantic knowledge of the history of
rock-bands. One in 20 of 2,000 children aged nine to 15 surveyed
recently believed Adolf Hitler was a football coach.
All this is before even considering the more conventional stuff
of political debate — monetary and fiscal policy, levels of
taxation and spending — but here matters are in a more-or-less
comparable state. Britain remains in recession, lagging behind
other major economies such as
France,
Germany, the
U.S. and
Japan. The Governor of the Bank of England has
warned that the public finances are in such chaos that Britain’s
credit rating may be cut.
Many of the comments on apparently diverse social and political
dysfunction in Britain today are like the tale of the blind men
and the elephant: one touched its trunk and thought it resembled
a snake, one touched its tusk (“a spear!”) one its side (“a
wall!)”, the others its tail, (“a rope!”), its ear (“a fan!) and
its knee (“A tree!”). But diverse as these parts seemed, they
were all of a whole. The British elephant today is the result of
11 years of Gramscian leftism in power, not only or perhaps even
principally at the level of the national government, but in all
sorts of quasi-governmental institutions, and with an Opposition
often unable to acknowledge or recognize what is happening, and
indeed sometimes actively conniving with it. A few of the results
are almost comic, many are very serious, but they are part of a
single whole.
