The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana by Peter Hitchens

encounter books ^ | 2005 | Peter Hitchens

[dennisw]

"I am a modern man. I am part of the rock and roll generation—the Beatles, colour TV, that's the generation I come from."
       —Tony Blair, in a speech a Stevenage, 22 April 1997

Introduction

A Modern Man

The Prime Minister did not realize how significant these words were when he blurted them out in the middle of the most puzzling and mysterious general election campaign in modern British history. He may have known that they were important, but did he know why? For they offer the best explanation for his victory, and a convincing reason to believe that the Tories will never again hold power in Britain. During the next few years it will become clear that the 1997 election was a historic choice between two utterly different ideas of Britain, a choice which had little to do with economics, or even politics, and everything to do with the far more important issue of what kind of people we are.
       Many of those born, raised and educated in surroundings normally associated with Tory thinking and values no longer actually share those values. Few people under the age of fifty now possess what could be described as a Conservative imagination. Their attitude towards sexuality, drugs, manners, dress, food, swear-words, music and religion has little or nothing in common with the traditional idea of Conservative behaviour. As the far-from-leftist commentator Richard Littlejohn cackled derisively shortly before the election, 'John Major is probably the last man left in Britain who wears a tie on Saturdays.'
       In these words a dozen other messages are contained about a generation and a way of existence which seem doomed.
       Since the election, the death of Princess Diana has widened the crevasse between the old culture and the new. Because it was the first royal death for more than a generation, it gave Britain an unexpected opportunity to take its own temperature, and to discover that it was suffering from a rather unpleasant fever. Those brought up in the older tradition were astonished, puzzled and even hurt to hear pop songs and applause at a funeral, and to see mourners who wept at one moment and took photographs of the cortège a few minutes later. Those brought up since the changes took hold were equally surprised, puzzled and annoyed by the restraint and self-discipline of the other half of the nation, seeing it as a failure to show correct emotion.
       There was no doubt about which half dominated. Television, by taking the side of the new, emotional, victim-loving faction, made it seem as if the pro-Diana, anti-Windsor mood was universal and unchallenged, causing many people to wonder if they were personally flawed because they did not feel the sensations that TV was reporting and encouraging. This was a bizarre dictatorship of grief, quickly noticed by the Prime Minister's public relations men, who then used Diana's glamour and appeal to imply that Labour's radical programme of constitutional change was in some way a vindication of Diana's life. The brilliant, cynical phrase 'The People's Princess' frightened those who knew anything about the way in which dictatorships are born. Diana had become a grotesque combination of Marilyn Monroe, Eva Perón and John Lennon, martyred by the mythical 'establishment', the strange false enemy whost alleged existence was and is the excuse for Labour's slow motion coup d'état.
       Once, such a coup would have been impossible because the British people would have been instinctively suspicious of it and rejected it. Yet in the thirty years before the 1997 election, a long and profound set of changes in the British way of life had brought to maturity a generation to whom the past was not just a foreign country, but a place of mystery which was easier to mock than understand. Born in the collapse of British confidence which followed the diplomatic, economic, military, religious and imperial decay of the 1950s, the new culture simply was not interested in many of the concerns which the Tories tried to drag into the campaign.
       These seemingly superficial changes were far more important than they appeared. Into the vacuum left by the end of British self-confidence a new conformism has come rushing, probably more powerful than the one which went before. This is often dismissed, half-jokingly, with the casual phrase 'political correctness'. But this imported expression does not even begin to encompass the power and danger of the thing. The new empire of ideas reaches into the most intimate areas of life, and those who do not accept it are judged to be personally at fault, not simply politically or philosophically wrong. Unmitigated by any lingering attempt to loathe the sin rather than the sinner, unshakeable in its certainty that personal righteousness is reserved for those who share its views about South Africa, landmines and the homeless, it is the most intolerant system of thought to dominate the British Isles since the Reformation.
       This overthrow of the past has not been planned--such things cannot be orchestrated though they can be skillfully guided--but has followed the coincidental disappearance of rival or alternative moral and cultural forces and structures. So many features of this country's life crumbled at once, that the new culture had to take the place of patriotism, faith, moral- ity and literature. The issue of what a person knows or believes has been confused, as it never used to be, with the idea of what sort of citizen he or she is.
       This revolution, though well under way, is not complete. Still to come are the destruction or at least the serious diminishing of the monarchy, the reduction of the power of the House of Commons, the transformation of the practice of law, the end of the pre-eminence of privileged institutions like the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the disestablishment of the Church of England and the dissolution of the 1707 union of England with Scotland. Its effect on education, broadcasting, newspapers, customs and institutions has been so devastating that it is fair to compare it directly with Mao Zedong's concentrated effort to bury China's past, thirty years ago. The most important difference between the Chinese Cultural Rev- olution and the British one is that ours is still going on, long after China has halted and even reversed its attack on tradi- tion and ancient institutions. (Deng Xiaoping made an immense effort to restore proper examinations and academic rigour to Chinese schools and universities.) The obvious differences are less significant. Of course we have not dragged aged professors through the streets in dunce's caps, burned our libraries or murdered those who resisted. But we have gravely devalued knowledge and academic qualifications, made many thoughts almost unthinkable, sundered many of the invisible bonds which once held our society together, and inflicted upon our country a permanent and irreversible change in morals, values, customs, taboos, language, humour, art and even eating habits.
       At the centre of all this change is a deep shift in the way the British people view themselves, their past and their future. Fewer each day now consider themselves to be British. Instead they are choosing the narrower loyalties of the UK's smaller nations--to such an extent that even the English have begun to feel a vague nationalism and the forgotten St George's Cross has reappeared in the hands of English football supporters after two centuries when it flew only from church towers. The Church of England, the only other purely English institution, is barely known to most football supporters, who probably think that churches flying the red-and-white flag are joining in the general soccer fervour. This may seem to be a 'symptom' rather than something important in itself, but there are far too many such symptoms and they amount to a transformation with enormous significance. Until now, historians and commentators have dealt with its many aspects one by one, but there are so many important connections between them that they make more sense taken as a whole, because they show bow many pillars of the old order collapsed at once.
       This is not to suggest that there has been some sort of conspiracy with a central Red Guard command plotting the next step, but that a series of important coincidences have combined with the spirit of the age and the growth of a new type of middle class, mainly state-educated and state-employed, to bring about an entirely new culture. It is that culture which produced the Labour election victory on 1 May 1997 and which, having voted for the breakup of the United Kingdom, is now about to be persuaded to accept the incorporation of the remains into some sort of European federal state. How can such a thing happen, only fifty-five years after Britain emerged from the Second World War as a great power, its national spirit strong, its culture confident and its independence and integrity confirmed by victory?
       A good starting point for this era is Sir Winston Churchill's funeral in 1965, and a good finishing point is the startlingly different funeral of Princess Diana in 1997. The death of Churchill, an unchallengeable father figure, was a final farewell to a reassuring past. By travelling back to that not-very-distant time it is possible to see the extent of the changes which have overtaken us. Even in the commonplace features of life, a comparison between the day before yesterday and today reveals differences which are more than a mere adaptation to the modern world. Examine school textbooks, especially on history and geography, from forty years ago, and set them beside their equivalents today. Do the same with advertisements, guidebooks and other unselfconscious documents which show how we really felt about ourselves and our way of life at the time. You will find that you are investigating the inner life of a wholly foreign country.
       Many of these trends and tremors began long before 1965, and it is necessary to go further into the past to examine them. Some of the changes in our society began with campaigns or fashions in thought which started before the First World War. Most are more recent, finding their roots in events like the Lady Chatterley trial, the satire boom, and the mysterious birth of British rock music.
       One of the great blows to stability has been the change in family life, from the first appearance of the teenager in the late 1930s, to Edmund Leach's disturbing Reith lectures of 1967, which blamed the traditional family for most of society's problems. There has been a transformation in the way in which people arrange and furnish their houses, the sort of food they eat and where and how they eat it. Cheap pre-cooked fast food, the freezer and the microwave, have practically ended the, formal meal around the table, and allowed family members to remain in front of the television or at the computer keyboard without needing to interrupt their activities. The spread of central heating and double glazing has allowed even close-knit families to avoid each other's company in well-warmed houses, rather than huddling round a single hearth forced into unwanted companionship, and so compelled to adapt to each other's foibles and become more social, less selfish beings. Clothes have also undergone a complete change, in styles and materials, even in purpose, for children as well as adults, while hairstyles for both sexes express the alteration in the balance of power between men and women, parents and children. Children no longer dress as children, but as miniature adults, with their own scaled-down adult fashions, underlining the truth that they actually owe more loyalty to their peers than to their parents. The alteration has even changed the streetscape, leading to the disappearance of hats and the decline of coats, the rise of the trainer and the near-disappearance of the leather shoe. Uniforms, too, serve a much less layered, deferential society, and a more violent and unsupervised one. Policemen have tossed aside their formal, restrained tunics and their helmets, and now waddle about, hung with weaponry and radios, in militaristic pullovers and flat caps. Thanks to the years of terrorism, servicemen and women long ago gave up appearing on the streets in uniform, and there are now so few of them anyway that a planned change in the rules is unlikely to have much effect.
       How have we been persuaded to make and accept these changes, not all welcome or helpful or needed or much desired? Scores of different pressures led to them, many of them rooted in the destruction and disruption of the Second World War, the austerity and chaos after that war and the manic suburbanization of the country that came with the new prosperity. In this time of unsettled change and constant uncertainty in superficial things, it was easier than ever for people to be persuaded that more significant parts of their lives should be altered for ever.
       Other physical changes have propelled and exaggerated these new ways of thinking. The atomization of society by new types of housing has broken up the old sense of belonging. The crazed over-use of private cars and the triumph of the supermarket over the personal service grocery have kept us from meeting our fellow-creatures as effectively as any strict regime prison, and often reduced us to the level of objects rolling along someone else's production line. Greater than all these things is television, which has replaced individual imagination with images provided and selected by others, but also, and perhaps more importantly, destroyed the old forms of social sanction, a fear of the neighbours' opinion or the even greater fear of upsetting the family. Television provided new judges of our behaviour, who were wittier, cleverer and more open-minded than anyone we knew in person. It also transformed child-rearing and narrowed the horizons of childhood itself.
       Once, programmes for children had some reference to the outside world, to the old traditions of story-telling. Now, programme-makers devise Teletubbies who are living televisions, with little screens in their stomachs, a simple reflection of the fact that children learn to live their lives through the screen.
       Closely linked to this takeover of our brains by TV studios has been the rebuilding of our towns, cities and villages. Life in isolated boxes, next to neighbours with whom we have nothing in common except a postcode, has pushed people into the arms of the new electronic culture. With the deportation of people from crowded city centres to remote estates, the whole shape of our urban life has been altered. Streets are wider, roads straighter, a highly literate cityscape of ornate shopsigns and wordy advertisements has given way to a post-literate one of pictograms, posters and logos. Detail has vanished, replaced by sweeping (and windswept) prospects. Smelly but characteristic features of town life, such as breweries and cattlemarkets, have been uprooted, as have most small urban industries, so that few of us can see any connection between what we consume and its real origins in the field, farmyard or slaughterhouse. Specifically local or specifically British styles of architecture have given way to the international blandness of concrete and glass, fresh air to air conditioning, actually needless in our temperate climate but forced on us by the strange style of buildings which we have chosen. The universal conscription of women into paid work has emptied the suburbs, rich and poor, so that streets, parks and gardens are depopulated during the day. Distances between home and work, home and school, and extended families have grown far greater.
       Lonely and self-reliant, much of our social life concentrated in the workplace rather than the home, we have become a people dependent on television for a simulation of social contact in our leisured hours. Yet few seem to realize the power of a medium which stole into our lives while we were not paying attention. Early television was nothing like the modern force which has now displaced all other forms of culture and entertainment. Its effect on the imagination has been the motor of the new morality and the new conformism.
       The age of books allowed each individual to form his own picture of the world. Each of us had his own deeply personal idea of what the great characters of fiction and history were really like, from Henry VIII and Richard III to Oliver Twist and Sherlock Holmes. We were able to imagine ourselves facing their problems and dilemmas, our thoughts enriched but not taken over by the things which we had read. But the arrival of cinema, and then of television, imposed on all of us the imagination of one director or one actor. However brilliant and apposite their portrayal may have been, it drove out our own. It made each one of us more like the other, it narrowed the gaps between us and made us simultaneously less alone and more conformist. We have all noticed the way in which mass culture has flattened out accents and made us dress and even walk in standardized fashions. The smaller, milder regional dialects of southern England have begun to vanish, replaced by the Estuary English used by many broadcasters. Even the stronger dialects of the north of England have accepted many terms and forms which are southern or American in origin.
       This regimentation has also affected our thinking, and our ability to choose. In a society of stable values and unchanging tradition, this would not be specially important, and the cinema had far less impact on 1930s Britain than television was to have fifty or sixty years later. The effect of television, especially colour television, on a society whose values were all open to question and whose morals were dissolving was explosive, and continues to be.
       The condition of 1960s Britain was rather like the huge scrapyards of the time full of the steam engines which had been such a characteristic part of the urban and rural landscape for the previous century. Those cemeteries of rusting iron monsters were a melancholy metaphor for the state of the nation. Britain had been living on her Victorian inheritance, an elderly but rather grand steam locomotive, hiding her leaky valves behind shiny paint and well-polished brass, obsolete but magnificent. Now the truth could not be concealed any more. In a matter of a few months, a whole way of life was condemned to be cut up with blowtorches and turned into lawn-mowers and tumble-driers.
       I myself clearly remember standing on the Portsmouth shore on the sultry August day in 1960 when the Royal Navy's last battleship, HMS Vanguard, was towed to the breakers' yard. The great 44,000-ton sea monster had been a relic when she was completed in 1946, too late for the war in which she was meant to fight. She had been built for a world that no longer existed, and had spent the last few years of her life as a hulk, unable to move under her own power. Yet with her beautiful lines and enormous guns (dating from 1916 and rarely if ever fired) she was one of the most impressive and evocative sights of her times. It was typical of those times that, as she was dragged to her last resting place, she ran aground on a mud-bank. Nothing, it seemed, could go right for us any more.
       For as a people, we were already rather unsure of ourselves, privately aware that much of our grandeur was empty and obsolete, unable, like Vanguard, to move under our own power. In some ways, there are painful similarities between the state of 1960s Britain and that of the Soviet Union just before the fall of communism. Both lived on and in the past, sustained by a more or less mythical view of the Second World War. Even twenty years after the war, the cultural shadow of it still lay across the country. In films, in literature, even in children's comics, the war against Hitler was the main scene of drama. Newspapers quarried their metaphors from it, language was heavily influenced by it. The armed services, normally a closed world at least twenty years behind the times in modes of speech and morality, were given a far greater role in national life than at any other time before or since. The clipped accent of the officer class had its life prolonged way beyond its rightful span. Our image of ourselves as a people was lifted up into heroism by our honourable and solitary defiance of Hitler in 1940, and we liked to see ourselves as the inheritors of Henry V and the imitators of the Greeks and Romans.
       Of course, these ideas had been quietly subverted for years by the Left, and were secretly despised by a small but influential part of the educated middle class. George Orwell had rightly pointed out in the early months of the war that Britain was unique in having an intelligentsia that despised patriotism. That current in national thought had been suppressed by many things: Russia's entry into the war had allowed even the extreme Left to appear patriotic; the discovery of the extermination camps had transformed a defensive 'imperialist' war into a Just War, even if only with hindsight; and the powerful myth that the Tories had all been appeasers, whilst the Left had been keen to fight the Nazis (though largely false), had allowed the intellectuals to claim the war as their own. The Suez catastrophe and humiliation, imperial withdrawal from Asia and Africa, and the simple passage of time eventually permitted open mockery of the war years to emerge, round about the time of Churchill's death.
       Another, quite separate influence also undermined and belittled Britain's image of herself, and the British people's view of themselves. The influence of American culture on this country has turned out to be one of the great paradoxes of modern history--the arsenal of conservatism and capitalism has done more to eat away at British self-confidence and British institutions than the Soviet Union or the Communist Party ever did. One reason for this is that high-octane American ways of behaving and speaking are simply too powerful for this much smaller and narrower country. The other is that the growing realization that the USA was the true victor of 1945, and not we ourselves, has shaken our self-confidence more deeply than most of us care to admit. Patriotism, deprived of a home country that it can happily love and respect, has a nasty habit of turning into an angry rejection of the motherland, combined with a purblind admiration of some other nation. This was probably the explanation for the outbreak of pro-Soviet treachery among an educated élite sixty years ago. It is also part of the explanation for the admiration of all things American which became such a strong feature of British life in the years after Churchill.
       How else can we explain our rapid conversion to things the older é1ite did not much like and often despised, from commercial television to the basing of all transport policy upon the car, to the increasing use of American terms in language? Even our criminals and our police began to behave like Americans, and our very different racial problems began to take on American characteristics, while observers used American terminology to describe them. It cannot just be the backwash of wartime American wealth. We became affluent ourselves long ago. The unspeakable truth was that by 1941 we were a defeated nation, whose conquerors had neglected to invade us. Impoverished, beaten in battle in Flanders and Malaya, condemned as it seemed to grey years of sacrifice with no certain end, we were invaded by our allies instead. The old power of British traditions, the magic of British uniforms and the authority of British upper-class voices, the power of British ceremony, began to crumble from within at this point. It simply could not compete with the vigorous, wealthy, well-fed, sheer success of the Americans who were suddenly mixing with us, and whose influence was deep and swift because of the common language and the natural friendliness which almost always springs up between these two peoples.
       The Americanization of our sex lives was probably more important than all these put together. American attitudes towards divorce and adultery, the collapse of American puritanism (so well described by David Halberstam in his extraordinary book The Fifties) under the blows of Kinsey and the contraceptive pill, fanned out across this country like an infectious disease. The ground had been prepared by the wartime experience of the American way of life. Now, hurried along by Marshall Aid, Hollywood, TV, popular music and the return of American servicemen to fight the Cold War, America's supposed 'classlessness', actually a fiction, mocked our minutely graded caste system. The triumph of Elvis Presley, whose influence was rightly seen as revolutionary by American conservatives, brought an entirely new thing into our lives--the sexualization of the young, combined with the narcotic emotional power of modern rock music. Even in the vast and flexible society that is the modern USA, Presley was the cultural equivalent of a 100-megaton explosion. In Britain's narrow, restrained atmosphere, the charge was more powerful still. Presley dug beneath the fortifications of British sexual reserve, leaving them so weakened that John Lennon and Mick Jagger could knock them down completely.
       The vastness of the USA, combined with its great social mobility, has always encouraged people to uproot themselves from failed lives and start out again somewhere else. In the past, Britain's smallness and its settled class system have compelled us to be polite, restrained and repressed, or face chaos. Japan's elaborate manners and customs are a similar response to living at close quarters on cramped islands. Until the war, British people were probably more inclined to accept adultery than divorce--which is actually a licence to remarry rather than (as so often portrayed) a permit to leave a failed or troubled marriage. Hollywood's culture of serial divorce, followed soon afterwards by the pulsing sexuality of rock and roll, were unleashed on a Britain whose whole family structure was already seriously undermined by the prolonged separation and disruption of conflict, and by the wartime conscription of millions of women into the workplace, and its false message that women--even married women--could be as independent as men. In fact, this could only be achieved with the support of an impossibly expensive welfare system of nurseries and state canteens, whose disappearance in the late 1940s and 1950s seems to have given the British family a brief respite from attack. However,instead of women adapting to cope with the absence of a wartime welfare state, governments decided to rebuild that welfare state, even though there was no war to justify it.
       This was because the damage to the foundations of the traditional family was permanent. As a result, the arrival of North American feminism led to one of the highest rates of female employment in any of the West's advanced nations. This was at least in part because it came just as industry and business were discovering that women made ideal and compliant employees.
       It would be very wrong to blame the Americans for everything. All these things took place as part of an epic struggle between state and family, a struggle with its roots in the war, intensified by the creation of the welfare state and brought to the highest pitch of intensity by the moral chaos and dependency culture which came into being in the Thatcher years--paradoxically the years when the Left believed that they were actually losing the battle to a right-wing counter-revolution. One of my main contentions is that Thatcherism was a miserable failure on its own terms, and actually speeded up the triumph of the state.
       Margaret Thatcher fought two great battles, the Cold War abroad and the battle against militant trade unionism at home. She was successful in both, and exhausted her moral energy in them. But, like her victory in the Falklands conflict, her triumphs actually concealed deeper failures. The defeat of the USSR only cleared the ground for a new battle against German domination of Europe, advancing behind the smokescreen of European Union and armed with the weapons of supranational statism. Her victory over relics such as Arthur Scargill left intact the monstrous new growth of public sector unionism, whose main purpose was not to hold the nation to ransom through costly strikes, but to act as a gigantic lobby for the endless expansion of the tax-financed employment sector. In this battle, the cultural institutions--the BBC, the universi- ties, the education establishment and the (tax-funded) artistic é1ite--were bound to be the allies of the state and so of the statist European ideal.
       The two Britains which faced each other in April 1997 were utterly alien to one another and unfairly matched. One was old and dying, treasuring values and ideas which stretched back into a misty past. One was new and hardly born, clinging just as fiercely to its own values of classlessness, anti-racism, sexual inclusiveness and licence, contempt for the nation state, dislike of deference, scorn for restraint and incomprehension for the web of traditions and prejudices which were revered by the other side. Culturally, Labour had been in power for years and, as a result, its leaders and supporters always seemed enraged that they were not also in control of the government. The final years of the Tories were marked by an almost fanatical fury among Leftists against the rather pitiful figures of the Tory leadership. Cartoons in left-wing papers portrayed John Major as a decomposing corpse. One particular Labour election broadcast, which would have warmed the heart of Josef Goebbels, showed speeded-up footage of some of the uglier Tory leaders, cruelly edited and set to mocking music. The broadcast, which also contained a blatant lie about Tory pension plans, was filled with the righteous hatred which revolutionaries feel towards those they plan to overthrow. If anybody had been in doubt that the new government viewed the Tories as enemies rather than as opponents, that broadcast would have warned them of what was coming.
       We were seeing something much more than a change of government. There was the air of a putsch about the way in which stage-managed platoons of Labour Party employees pretended to be a cheering crowd in Downing Street, each issued by commissars with Union jacks which they privately despised and which they intended to render obsolete in the coming months. This was how the modern men, the men who had grown up with colour TV and the Beatles, stormed Britain's gates.

[kalee]

Thanks for posting this very interesting assessment.

[Mr Ramsbotham]

To partake of the pop culture is one thing, but when you define your political existence by it, your country's doomed.

[Mr Ramsbotham]

Just an afterthought: the author looks upon superficial aspects of British life such as language, dress and sexuality (things bound to metamorphose with time) as causes of what he views as Britain's decline, when in effect they are the merest symptoms of the true cause, which is, in a word, socialism.

[nopardons]

bttt

[libs_kma]

bookmark for later

[rcocean]

Good article, even though the British have been writing about the decline of Britain since 1902.

My guess, based on nothing, is that the average Britain is wealthier, happier, and has more freedom than ever.

Society as a whole may have its problems but Brittan has never been more wealthy or secure.

The Tories have the same problem that Repubs in NY have.
Once the social conservatives leave, or change to social liberals, you become a permanent minority.

There aren't enough country club conservatives to win elections. Get rid of the "horrible religious right" and you're left with Christie Todd Whtiman and 35% of the electorate. And supporting massive and cheap immigration doesn't help.

[rcocean]

Good article, even though the British have been writing about the decline of Britain since 1902.

My guess, based on nothing, is that the average Britain is wealthier, happier, and has more freedom than ever.

Society as a whole may have its problems but Brittan has never been more wealthy or secure.

The Tories have the same problem that Repubs in NY have.
Once the social conservatives leave, or change to social liberals, you become a permanent minority.

There aren't enough country club conservatives to win elections. Get rid of the "horrible religious right" and you're left with Christie Todd Whtiman and 35% of the electorate. And supporting massive and cheap immigration doesn't help.

[MoralSense]

b

[Godebert]

" My guess, based on nothing, is that the average Britain is wealthier, happier, and has more freedom than ever."

Wealthier? Perhaps.

Happier? Doubtful.

More freedom than ever? Not true. Take for instance the right to keep and bear arms....which for the British has been all but completely eliminated.

The British have become more "subjects" to the socialist state than they ever were to any monarch.

[Godebert]

The two Britains which faced each other in April 1997 were utterly alien to one another and unfairly matched. One was old and dying, treasuring values and ideas which stretched back into a misty past. One was new and hardly born, clinging just as fiercely to its own values of classlessness, anti-racism, sexual inclusiveness and licence, contempt for the nation state, dislike of deference, scorn for restraint and incomprehension for the web of traditions and prejudices which were revered by the other side. Culturally, Labour had been in power for years and, as a result, its leaders and supporters always seemed enraged that they were not also in control of the government. The final years of the Tories were marked by an almost fanatical fury among Leftists against the rather pitiful figures of the Tory leadership. Cartoons in left-wing papers portrayed John Major as a decomposing corpse. One particular Labour election broadcast, which would have warmed the heart of Josef Goebbels, showed speeded-up footage of some of the uglier Tory leaders, cruelly edited and set to mocking music. The broadcast, which also contained a blatant lie about Tory pension plans, was filled with the righteous hatred which revolutionaries feel towards those they plan to overthrow. If anybody had been in doubt that the new government viewed the Tories as enemies rather than as opponents, that broadcast would have warned them of what was coming.

I remember when Diana died and the sickening popular and leftist reference to her as "The People's Princess". Much of what has transpired with the schizm between the Tories and Labour is applicable to our own country's politics.

[toadthesecond]

Take for instance the right to keep and bear arms....which for the British has been all but completely eliminated.

To be honest, the vast majority of the British population don't care. In my own case, in my 45 years as a resident of the UK I have met one person who has shown the slightest interest in firearms.

[leprechaun9]

Let's see elections in the United States were influenced by whether or not the candidate wore boxers (not the senator) or briefs; whether or not he placed Astroturf in the back of his pick up; whether or not he played the saxophone; how charasmatic he looked on TV.

When these life threatening decisions become factors in elections, what does that say about the gullibility of the voters?

[ken5050]

Excellent essay. About the only minor disagreement I'd have with the author, is rather than starting his thesis at the time of Churchill's funeral, I'd move it back a decade, to when the Brits threw Winnie out of office right after the war, when he had just saved the country and their collective rears..

[leprechaun9]

I believe Peter Hitchens is the brother of Christopher Hitchens. About a year ago, C-Spam carried a broadcast of a debate between the two of them. It was one of the best debates I have seen broadcast.

[celebrate88]

The Brits maybe wealthier due to the "exchange rate" but they are not happier. Here in central Florida just in my area 25% of the population are Brits who moved here to become "American". They come to Central Florida buy a house, buy a business from an American, hire only Americans and then send their children to universities in America. They move here because of the American Dream of owning property and developing a business. They state it is impossible to do this in the UK and with the exchange rate the pound makes it possible to escape. Somedays it is odd to come home and see teens playing cricket instead of flag football at the park. The negative has been the inflation of real estate prices in our area because they know the Brits will buy it because to them everything is half off. If the pound crashes then the real estate in Florida will also drop.

[UltraKonservativen]

in my 45 years as a resident of the UK I have met one person who has shown the slightest interest in firearms....

The issue with the second amendment of the Constitution is not wether you want to own a fireman BUT THAT YOUR RIGHT TO DO SO CANNOT, MUST NOT BE IMPEDED. Not all supporters of the right to bear arms own guns.
The day may come (consider the ever growing islamofacist threat in various European countries including Britain) when having a firearm might save your life. On that particular day you will show "an interest in firearms."
It is hard to believe that a "benevolent Government" could turn evil but history clearly shows it has happened many times before.

It may sound a bit corny or simplistic but "The second amendment is the reset button on the Constitution".

[Huber]

ping

[lainde]

Very thoughtful assessment. I hadn't realized the magnitude of the change. They don't seem to have a young, aggressive conservative class that is willing to challenge the assault on the family, deal with the rising crime rate, capitulation to the EU, lousy medical system etc. Of course we're struggling with many of the the same issues here. After reading this article, as an American, I'm feeling vaguely "guilty" (LOL).

[Jim Noble]

In my own case, in my 45 years as a resident of the UK I have met one person who has shown the slightest interest in firearms.

You will meet the second someday.

At the worst possible time, in the worst possible way.