THE FALL OF BRITAIN
(The "headings" are mine)
by Mark Steyn
WORLD WITHOUT WANT
Having succeeded Britain as the dominant power, in what other
ways might the mighty eagle emulate the tattered old lion? First
comes reorientation, and the shrinking of the horizon. After
empire, Britain turned inward: between 1951 and 1997 the
proportion of government expenditure on defense fell from 24
percent to 7, while the proportion on health and welfare rose
from 22 percent to 53. And that's before New Labour came along to
widen the gap further. Those British numbers are a bald statement
of reality: you can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global
military, but not both. What's easier to do if you're a
democratic government that's made promises it can't afford cut
back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless military
commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite?
In the grim pre-Thatcher nadir of the 1970s, the then Prime
Minister, Jim Callaghan, confided to a pal of mine that he
thought Britain's decline was irreversible and that the
government's job was to manage it as gracefully as possible. He
wasn't alone in this: an entire generation of British
politicians, on both sides of the aisle, felt much the same way.
They rose onward and upward, "managing" problems rather than
solving them. You can already see the same syndrome in
Washington. While Obama seems actively to be willing U.S. decline
as some sort of penance to the planet, many others have accepted
American diminishment as a mere fact of life to be adjusted to as
best one can. Yet, as noted, national decline is always at least
partly psychological. Even in the long ebbing of imperial
grandeur, there was no rational basis for modern Britain's
conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying
province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations
whose political, legal, and cultural traditions are entirely
alien to its own. The embrace of such a fate is a psychological
condition, not an economic one. Thus, Hayek's greatest insight in
"The Road to Serfdom," written with an immigrant's eye on the
Britain of 1944:
"There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about
by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides
special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held
less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are
precisely those on which the British people justly prided
themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The
virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most
other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like
the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance,
individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful
reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one's
neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for
custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and
authority."
PEOPLE WANT FREEDOM BUT NOT FREEDOM
Within little more than half-a-century, almost every item on the
list had been abandoned, from "independence and self-reliance"
(40 percent of Britons receive state handouts) to "a healthy
suspicion of power and authority" - the reflex response now to
almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government "do
something," the cost to individual liberty be damned. The United
Kingdom today is a land that reviles "custom and tradition,"
requires criminal background checks for once routine "voluntary
activity" (school field trips), and in which "noninterference"
and "tolerance of the different" have been replaced by
intolerance of and unending interference with those who decline
to get with the beat: Dale McAlpine, a practicing (wait for it)
Christian, was handing out leaflets in the town of Wokington and
chit-chatting with shoppers when he was arrested on a "public
order" charge by Police Officer Sam Adams (no relation), a gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community outreach officer.
Mr. McAlpine had said homosexuality is a sin. "I'm gay," said
Officer Adams. "Well, it's still a sin," said Mr. McAlpine. So
Officer Adams arrested him for causing distress to Officer Adams.
CRAZY STUFF GOING ON
In Britain, everything is policed except crime. The
government-funded National Children's Bureau has urged nursery
teachers and daycare supervisors to record and report every
racist utterance of toddlers as young as three.
Like what?
Well, if children "react negatively to a culinary tradition other
than their own by saying 'Yuk,'" that could be a clear sign that
they'll grow up to make racist remarks that could cause distress
to the anti-racism community outreach officer. Makes a lot of
sense to get all their names in a big government database by
pre-kindergarten.
While the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community
outreach officer is busy arresting you for offending the gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community outreach officer, in
the broader scene London now has more violent crime than New York
and Istanbul. From personal observation, an alarming number of
the men on its streets seem to affect the appearance of the bad
guys' crew in Pirates of the Caribbean, shaven headed with large
earrings, and the sprightly swagger of a rum-fueled sea dog
sighting one of the less pox-ridden strumpets in Tortuga. As for
the English roses, at about 2:00 on a Wednesday afternoon, in
order to enter a convenience store, I was obliged to step over a
girl of about twelve dressed like a trollop and collapsed in her
own vomit. But never fear, the government is taking action: in
order to facilitate safer binge drinking, police announced that
they would be handing out free flip-flops outside nightclubs in
order to help paralytic dolly birds stagger home without
stumbling in their high heels and falling into the gutter.
In 2006, on a train in South London, a 96-year-old man was
punched in the face and blinded in one eye. His 44-year-old
attacker had boarded the crowded tram, tried to push past Shah
Chaudhury in the aisle and become enraged by the nonagenarian's
insufficient haste in moving out of the way. "You bastard!" he
snarled, and slugged him. Much of the commentary concerned the
leniency of the sentence. Yet that wasn't what caught my eye
about the story of poor Mr. Chaudhury. In a statement to the
court, the victim "said he had been standing in the aisle of the
tram because nobody would give up their seat for him." He was
ninety-six years old and relied on two walking sticks. How can it
be that not a single twenty/thirty/ fortysomething in the car
thought to offer his seat?
Some years ago the livelier members of the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police were illegally burning down the barns of Quebec
separatists. When this became public, Pierre Trudeau blithely
responded that, if people were upset by the Mounties' illegal
barn-burning, maybe he'd make it legal for the Mounties to burn
barns. George Jonas, one of our great contemporary analysts,
responded that Monsieur Trudeau had missed the point: barnburning
wasn't wrong because it was illegal; it was illegal because it
was wrong.
That's an important distinction. Once it's no longer accepted
that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you
naught. The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code,
not as free-standing substitute for it. Beating up a 96-year-old
isn't wrong because it's illegal; it's illegal because it's
wrong. Not offering your seat to a 96-year-old isn't illegal at
all, but it's also wrong. And, if a citizen of an advanced
western social democracy no longer understands that
instinctively, you can pass a thousand laws and issue a million
ASBOs (the "Anti-Social Behavior Orders" introduced by Tony
Blair) and they will never be enough. British society has come to
depend on CCTVs-closed-circuit cameras in every public building,
every shopping center, every street, even (in some remote rural
locales) in the trees. In some cities, traffic wardens have
miniature cameras in their caps to film ill-tempered motorists
abusing them for writing a ticket. Britain is said to be home to
a third of all the world's CCTVs, and in the course of an average
day, the average Briton is estimated to be filmed approximately
300 times. So naturally the Croydon trolley had a camera, and it
captured in vivid close-up the perpetrator attacking his victim.
And a fat lot of good the video evidence did Mr. Chaudhury.
Churchill called his book "The History of the English-Speaking
Peoples"--not the "English-Speaking Nations." The extraordinary
role played by those nations in the creation and maintenance of
the modern world derived from their human capital. What happens
when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human
capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe,
the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the
highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate;
marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and
Muslims. A couple of years ago, the papers reported that
stabbings are so rampant in British schoolyards that a company
that specializes in military body armor is now manufacturing
school blazers lined with Kevlar.
For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is
to look at what LBJ's "Great Societ" did to the black family and
imagine it applied to the general population.
American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to
suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in
enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and
depravity. As the United Kingdom demonstrates, a determined state
can change the character of a people in the space of a generation
or two. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the
modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the "abolition
of want," to be accomplished by "cooperation between the State
and the individual." In attempting to insulate the citizenry from
the vicissitudes of fate, Sir William succeeded beyond his
wildest dreams: want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and
fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise
children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.
"Cooperation" between the State and the individual has resulted
in a huge expansion of the former and the ceaseless withering of
the latter.
For its worshippers, Big Government becomes a kind of religion:
the church as state. After the London Tube bombings, Gordon Brown
began mulling over the creation of what he called a "British
equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July," a new national holiday to
bolster British identity. The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian
Society, proposed that the new "British Day" should be July 5,
the day the National Health Service was created. Because the
essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for
a hip operation. So fireworks every Glorious Fifth! They should
call it Dependence Day.
One-fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no
adult works. Just under 900,000 people have been off sick for
over a decade, claiming "sick benefits," week in, week out for
ten years and counting. "Indolence," as Machiavelli understood,
is the greatest enemy of a society, but rarely has any state
embraced indolence with such paradoxical gusto as Britain. There
is almost nothing you can't get the government to pay for.
Plucked at random from the Daily Mail:
"A man of 21 with learning disabilities has been granted
taxpayers' money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a
prostitute."
Why not? His social worker says sex is a "human right" and that
his client, being a virgin, is entitled to the support of the
state in claiming said right. Fortunately, a 520 million pound
program was set up by Her Majesty's Government to "empower those
with disabilities." "He's planning to do more than just have his
end away," explained the social worker. "Refusing to offer him
this service would be a violation of his human rights."
Of course. And so a Dutch prostitute is able to boast that among
her clients is the British Government. Talk about outsourcing:
given the reputation of English womanhood, you'd have thought
this would be the one job that wouldn't have to be shipped
overseas. But, as Amsterdam hookers no doubt say, lie back and
think of England - and the check they'll be mailing you. To a
visitor, one of the most telling features of contemporary London
are the signs pleading with you not to beat up public employees.
The United Kingdom seems to be evolving from a nanny state into a
kind of giant remedial institution for elderly juvenile
delinquents. At bus stops in London, there are posters warning,
"DON'T TAKE IT OUT ON US." At the Underground stations, you see
the slogan "IF YOU ABUSE OUR STAFF, LONDON SUFFERS" above a
poster of Harold Beck's iconic Tube map rendered as a giant
bruise - as if some Cockney yob has just punched London in the
kisser and beaten it Northern Line black and Piccadilly Line
blue, with other parts of the pulverized skin turning Circle Line
yellow and even Central Line livid red. I found this one of the
bleakest comments on modern Britain: all the award-winning wit
and style of the London advertising world deployed in service of
a devastating acknowledgment of civic decay.
BIG GOVERNMENT BRITAIN
But why wouldn't you take it out on the state? In much of
Britain, what else is there? In Wales, Northern Ireland, and
parts of northern England, the state accounts for between 73 and
78 percent of the economy, which is about the best Big Government
can hope to achieve without full-scale Sovietization. In such a
world, if something's bugging you enough to want to kick
someone's head in, there's a three-in-four chance it's the
state's fault. Beveridge's "abolition of want" starts with the
abolition of stigma. Once you've done that, it's very hard to go
back even if you want to - and there's no indication Britain's
millions of non-working households do. The evil of such a system
is not the waste of money but the waste of people. Tony Blair's
ministry discovered it was politically helpful to reclassify a
chunk of the unemployed as "disabled." A fit, able-bodied
40-year-old who has been on disability allowance for a decade
understands somewhere at the back of his mind that he is living a
lie, and that not just the government but his family and his
friends are colluding in that lie. Big Government means small
citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, CATASTRO-
PHICALLY.
England is a sad case study because it managed to spare itself
all the most obviously toxic infections of the age, beginning
with Fascism and Communism. But, after Big Government, after
global retreat, after the loss of liberty there is only pitiless
civic disintegration. The statistics speak for themselves. The
number of indictable offenses per thousand people was 2.4 in
1900, climbed gradually to 9.7 in 1954, and then rocketed to
109.4 by 1992. And that official increase understates the
reality: many crimes have been decriminalized, and most crime
goes unreported, and most reported crime goes uninvestigated, and
most investigated crime goes unsolved, and almost all solved
crime merits derisory punishment.
Yet the law-breaking is merely a symptom of a larger rupture. In
Anthony Burgess' famous novel "A Clockwork Orange," the
precocious psychopathic teen narrator at one point offers his dad
some (stolen) money so his parents can enjoy a drink down the
pub. "Thanks, son," says his father, "But we don't go out much
now. We daren't go out much now, the streets being what they are.
Young hooligans and so on. Still, thanks."
Burgess published his book in 1962, when, on drab streets of
cramped row houses, working-class men kept pigeons and tended
vegetable allotments. The notion that the old and not so old
would surrender some of the most peaceable thoroughfares in the
world to young thugs was the stuff of lurid fantasy. Yet it
happened in little more than a generation.
"We time-shift," a very prominent Englishman told me a few years
ago. "Pardon me?" I said.
"We time-shift," he repeated. At certain hours, the lanes of the
leafy and expensive village where he lives are almost as pleasant
as they look in the realtors' brochures. But then the yobs come
from the previous night's revelries and swagger forth for another
bout of "nightlife"--drinking, swearing, shagging, vomiting,
stabbing. "So we time our walks for before they wake up," my
friend told me. "It's so peaceful and beautiful at six in the
morning." This is some of the most valuable real estate in the
world, and yet wealthy families live under curfews imposed by
England's violent, feral youth - just as Alex's parents do in
Burgess' novel, a work as prophetic as Orwell's or Huxley's.
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently
there." But viewed from 2010, England the day before yesterday is
an alternative universe - or a lost civilization. In 2009, the
"Secretary of State for Children" (an office both Orwellian and
Huxleyite) announced that 20,000 "problem families" would be put
under 24-hour CCTV supervision in their homes. As the Daily
Express reported, "They will be monitored to ensure that children
attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals." Orwell's
government "telescreen" in every home is close to being a
reality, although even he would have dismissed as too obviously
absurd a nanny state that literally polices your bedtime.
Montesquieu's prediction that "the last sigh of liberty will be
heaved by an Englishman" seemed self-evident after the
totalitarian enthusiasms of the Continent in the mid-twentieth
century. Today? The last sigh will be heaved by England's
progeny, in the United States. Is its heaving inevitable?
Must there be a "last sigh of liberty"? A progressivist would
scoff at the utter codswallop of such a fancy. Why, modern man
would not tolerate for a moment the encroachments his forebears
took for granted! And so we assume that social progress is like
technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal
combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?
THE LOTTERY OF LIF
(Mark Steyn's heading)
Unlike the French and the Russians, the British Revolution
happened overseas, in their American colonies, when British
subjects decided they wanted to take English ideas of liberty
further than the metropolis wanted to go. You can measure the gap
in the animating principles between the rebellious half of
British North America and the half that stayed loyal to the
Crown: the United States is committed to "life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness," Canada to "peace, order and good
government." Britain has always been a more paternalistic
society, with a different sense of the balance between "liberty"
and "order." That's what comes with being an imperialist. The old
British elite took it for granted that they had a planet-wide
civilizing mission. As the empire waned, a new elite decided to
embark on a new civilizing mission closer to home. It turned out
to be a de-civilizing mission. There is less and less liberty and
opportunity to pursue happiness in the new Britain, and little
evidence of order and good government.
Does the fate of the other senior Anglophone power hold broader
lessons for the United States? For many Americans, it will be a
closer model of decline than Greece. It's not so hard to picture
a paternalist technocrat of the Michael Bloomberg school covering
New York in CCTV less for terrorism than to monitor your
transfats. Britain is a land with more education bureaucrats than
teachers, more health-care administrators than doctors, a land of
declining literacy, a threadbare social fabric, and an ever more
wretched underclass systemically denied the possibility of
leading lives of purpose and dignity in order to provide an
unending pool of living corpses for the government laboratory. A
people mired in dependency turning into snarling Calibans as the
national security state devotes ever more of its resources to
monitoring its own citizenry.
You cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own
civilization without grave consequence. We are approaching the
end of the AngloAmerican moment, and the eclipse of the powers
that built the modern world. Even as America's spendaholic
government outspends not only America's ability to pay for it
but, by some measures, the world's, even as it follows Britain
into the dank pit of transgenerational dependency, a failed
education system and unsustainable entitlements, even as it makes
less and less and mortgages its future to its rivals for cheap
Chinese trinkets, most Americans assume that simply because
they're American they're insulated from the consequences. There,
too, are lessons from the old country. Cecil Rhodes distilled the
assumptions of generations when he said that to be born a British
subject was to win first prize in the lottery of life. On the eve
of the Great War, in his play "Heartbreak House," Bernard Shaw
turned the thought around to taunt a ruling class too smug and
self-absorbed to see what was coming. "Do you think," he wrote,
"the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because
you were born in it?"
In our time, to be born a citizen of the United States is to win
first prize in the lottery of life, and, as Britons did, too many
Americans assume it will always be so. Do you think the laws of
God will be suspended in favor of America because you were born
in it? Great convulsions lie ahead, and at the end of it we may
be in a post-Anglosphere world.
..........
WELL IN THE END THE ANGLO-SAXON NATIONS WILL GO INTO
FULL DESTRUCTION AND CAPTIVITY TO THEIR LOVER NATIONS OF
THE BEAST/BABYLON OF EUROPE. GREAT CONVULSIONS DO INDEED
LIE AHEAD. ALL FULLY EXPOUNDED FOR YOU ON MY WEBSITE
UNDER BIBLE PROPHECY.
......
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