BRITAIN AND THE MESS WE ARE IN
The very first cast iron bridge ever constructed anywhere in the world. (Ironbridge, Shropshire)
Despite the fact that arguably our lives are far better today for us in Britain than they have been for a very long time, something has gone terribly wrong. Despair, disillusionment and fear of what the future holds for our children and grandchildren grip the hearts of many of our citizens, neighbours and friends.
The Telegraph a while ago told us that “Britain is broken – and nobody can be bothered to do anything about it” and “Broken Britain exudes dysfunctionality”. Recent polls show that seven out of ten people agree with this. How come we have gotten ourselves into this frightful mess? While politicians and the great and the good scratch their heads in bewilderment as to how we have come to this, at the same time they and rant incessantly and peddle hairbrained and nonsensical solutions. Continually, we are being told how bad things are and that problems are deepening and accelerating with breathtaking speed. This is not a matter of ‘doing the country down’, but facing the undeniable fact of national decline that has grown rapidly over the last decade.
Some of our fellow-citizens are obliged to live in the inhumane conditions one would anticipate in a third-world country. There is mould on the walls of their accommodation, they are forced to queue in food banks or send their children to school hungry only to look for scraps from dinner ladies. There have not been scenes like this even in wartime rationing conditions. Surely it cannot be right in such a favoured country as ours that at least 271,000, according the charity Shelter, are homeless and these are just those known about. Dossing down in the streets of our towns and cities at nighttime, in shop doorways, anywhere where there is some shelter, whatever the cause it is highly dangerous. Whether the problem is joblessness, the break-up of a family, drug misuse, trauma, mental health issues, in a compassionate society these people would not be there. Few there are who seem to care, especially in the higher echelons of society. They retire to their millionaire homes or disappear abroad taking with them the wealth they have acquired and not always honestly.
The suicide rate is through the roof in this our land of comparative plenty. We have never seen anything like it: 115 people take their own lives in the UK each week, 75% of them being men. Many others either attempt suicide or self-harm. What brings them to such despair?
This is all beyond shameful in a country that is the sixth-largest national economy in the world measured by nominal gross domestic product (GDP), tenth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP), and twenty second-highest by nominal GDP per capita, constituting 3.1% of nominal world GDP.
TROUBLE AT THE TOP
It is often said that a rotting fish starts to stink first at the head. The malaise that hit our country and its streets cannot be divorced from the moral decline among the highest levels of society. In a universal culture of greed and self-seeking, lying cheating have become culturally acceptable. A politician can lie or cheat and everyone recognise the deceit, but nothing will often be said or done. Our parliament has become a veritable cesspit and a den of corruption.
In her column in the Daily Mail, noted journalist and author, Melanie Phillips, wrote already in 2009: “The government is convulsed by spiralling revelations in which ministers and their aides are all swearing, plotting and spinning …Meanwhile the Metropolitan Police is reeling under mounting claims of brutality at the G20 demonstration… Indeed, almost everywhere the governance of Britain appears to be crumbling before our eyes.”
When establishment figures come together and complain, denounce and shake their heads at the actions of arsonists, rapists, muggers and the like, their protestations have a distinctly hollow ring about them. It is all phony and hypocritical, nothing but feigned shock and outrage. All the time they quite happily ignore the prompts of common decency and some will even brazenly break the law not even trying to hide what they do. What looters take from High Street shops MPs happily put down ‘legally’ on their expense sheets, one such claiming £5,900 for laptops. Yet another submitted a three months’ expenses claim for £14,301.60 which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television set. Tell me, what is the ethical difference between High Street looters and robbers and MPs’ expense cheating and tax avoidance. Instead of establishment double standards, surely a strong sense of morality and responsibility should apply not only to those living on grubby council estates, but also the rich and powerful living in the leafy suburbs. Not just so-called feral youth, but bankers, footballers, politicians, wealthy businessmen seem to have lost all sense of decency and morality.
The sense of obligation to society that many rich people used to possess has evaporated with ever fewer of them even bothering to pay British tax if they can get away with it. For some obscure reason, I cannot get Lewis Carroll’s poem The Walrus and the Carpenter out of my head. “’O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter, ‘You've had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?’ But answer came there none– And this was scarcely odd, because They'd eaten every one.” In smug callousness the senior Oyster stays back in the safety of the oyster bed while his siblings hurry to their doom. So, the well-healed British establishment looks on with puffed-up complacency while the rest of us get gobbled up.
Berthold Brecht’s parable If Sharks Were People has a stark familiarity in its message.
“There would also be a religion, if sharks were people. It would teach that little fish only really begin to live properly in the sharks’ stomachs. …Furthermore, if sharks were people little fish would no longer be equal, as is the case now. Some would be given important offices and be placed above the others. Those who were a little bigger would even be allowed to eat up the smaller ones. That would be altogether agreeable for the sharks, since they themselves would more often get bigger bites to eat. And the bigger little fish, occupying their posts, would ensure order among the little fish, becoming teachers, officers, engineers in fish box construction, etc. ...In short, the sea would only begin to be civilized if sharks were people.”
(From Stories of Mr Keuner)
SOCIETAL MELTDOWN AND MORIBUND MORALITY
It is difficult to measure and impossible to capture in any statistics the deep unease people feel in their own lives, the sense that society is collapsing about them and there seems little they can do about it. Nebulous it may be, but no less real for all that. A moral vacuum has opened up which is destroying in particular the Christian nature of our country. The writer P. D. James, who at one time worked within the Home Office, declared: “Our society is now more fractured than I in my long life have ever known it.”
There have been dramatic changes in our social values and the sense of decline is widespread. The glue that binds us together as a nation has melted. It could hardly be worse: family breakdowns, use of drugs, alcohol abuse, welfare dependency, along with many other things that defy mention. Multiculturalism has spawned a proliferation of various belief systems each vying with the next for supremacy. This has hardly enriched us but produced a clash of values and encouraged the growth of a vapid moral relativism. The decline of the nuclear family has had devastating effects: alone in terms of poverty, educational attainment of children and anti-social behaviour. The intrusion of the State into every corner of our lives. Yet it is the rights-based culture above all else that has encouraged the population to relinquish personal responsibility for their lives and actions.
The erosion of the ‘Protestant work ethic’ undermined by a corrosive welfare system has led to mass dependency on the State for almost everything, whereas benefits were intended as a last-resort safety net to stave off destitution. Government now pays more people not to work because of alcohol or drug addiction than it employs in the army. Employers complain that they cannot find recruits for even well-paid jobs because those who choose not to work believe they can live just as comfortably from State handouts. Others wonder why they have worked all their lives striving to pay mortgages and scrape together some meagre savings, only now to worry about whether the State will not confiscate their family home to pay for care in old age.
Those of previous generations would be disturbed most certainly by the demise of marriage between heterosexual couples and existence of marriage between homosexual couples, that a quarter of all children live with just one parent, the number of people paid by the State to remain idle, the value of hard work having gone and not to quickly return. Rows of seats in Churches remain empty and this is hardly to be wondered at considering the rapid declension and flight from Christian truth and morality within the Churches. A God-fearing ethos has all but disappeared in today’s Britain.
That which caused outrage just a generation ago is now celebrated. Within a lifespan, moral values have changed beyond recognition particularly with respect to sexuality. The sense of moral decline is felt to be overwhelming throughout all the social classes and throughout the country by those in employment and those jobless, by those married and those single.
CRIME OUT OF CONTROL
Recorded crime has risen to a 20-year high, yet the prospects of an offender being summonsed or charged has dropped to an all-time low at just 5.6%. Shameful episodes in high places added to this has given the public little confidence in courts, police or government.
Widespread concern is generated by feral youths preying on decent society and who seem to be totally out of control. Youths and indeed others treat it almost as a civil right to walk into High Street stores and walk back out again without having paid for the goods carried in their arms. The scale of retail theft at the time of writing stands at 953 million pounds per annum, although retailers are estimated to have spent more than 700 million pounds in crime prevention. In one year, shoplifting has risen by 27%. It has now become big ‘business’. As recent crime figures show, street thuggery and knife crime has risen exponentially. In previous decades flick-knives were the chosen street weapon, now this has been exchanged for machetes with frighteningly long blades. Children will openly boast that nearly everyone now carries some kind of knife for protection. A couple of decades ago gun crime was almost unknown so that a single incident would be front page news. This has changed dramatically. Police used to patrol our streets at one time, now they are rarely seen or swoop swiftly past in the safety of their patrol cars.
Laws passed to curb unacceptable behaviour have only served to make matters far worse and done nothing to hold back the rising tide of lawlessness. Politicians use their position to wring their hands and draw attention what they feel are the issues and propose solutions, but all to no avail.
Shaun Bailey, now Baron Bailey of Paddington, politician, journalist and broadcaster, said this: “Power and the capacity to dominate and intimidate others is the only thing that matters: if you want something, you go and take it. Don’t wait until you can pay for it. Get it now. If that means intimidating others into handing it over to you, that’s what you need to do”.
A generation has arisen that has taken possession of ‘rights’ their predecessors could never have imagined. Alongside this they do not think that they have the responsibilities those before them would have taken for granted: the care of elderly relatives, bringing up their children in a stable environment, working if able even in a job you do not particularly like. People think generally only of themselves and care little about the effect their behaviour might have on others. Is there then, now way out of this mess?
CULTURAL COLLAPSE
What must not be overlooked is that previous moral orthodoxies have been deliberately targeted by counter-cultural operators. Rudi Dutschke’s ‘long march through the institutions’ has triumphed and cultural vandals are to be found engaging in their destructive activities high and low in every stratum of society.
High up on the list of the concerns of many is the breakdown of the traditional family unit. Fewer people actually get married than in other European countries, of those that do a high proportion will end in divorce. The failure of marriages and at 24% the number of single parent families far outstrip the proportion anywhere in Europe. Young girls are far more likely to engage in under-age sex and end up pregnant.
A senior family judge, Mr Justice Coleridge, some while ago observed that Britain was in the grip of an ‘epidemic’ of family breakdown that would bring catastrophic effects, equally as bad as terrorism, street crime, or drugs. “In some of the more heavily-populated urban areas of this country, family life is, quite frankly, in meltdown or completely unrecognisable. In some areas of the country, family life in the old sense no longer exists.”
A further assault on our culture and way of life has come about through the dramatic increase in immigration from the developing world. It has turned a largely monocultural society into a multicultural one where no single religion now unifies the country. In its place we have what has been called a supermarket of different religions side by side, each confessing radically different moral and ethical systems.
Governments have been unable or unwilling to halt a steady stream of illegal immigrants, largely young men, into our country who unashamedly despise and even hate all that Britain stands for, our culture, our history, our religious beliefs and Christianity in particular. They constitute a real threat to the peace of our land, an enemy within. Yet they are supported in illegal activities by establishment figures under the banner of multiculturalism and democracy. A scandalous state of affairs.
Unless there is a radical change of direction, the situation in our country will continue to deteriorate. What can we do? There must be a way to push back on our demise, however modest.
Laws have now been brought into force that are deliberately anti-Christian so that anyone contravening them could easily face a fine or even worse. They support and propagate much that many right-thinking citizens find offence for many different reasons. Opening one’s mouth or even praying silently in the street have been heralded as crimes.
CHURCHES IN CRISIS
It can be no coincidence that alongside the inner disintegration of Britain there has been a deliberate rejection of the historic Christian faith and its moral teaching. Our politicians seem determined to prevent Christian beliefs from intruding on the values they have themselves determined for society. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and in the wrong place and the police may well be soon at the door. Christian festivals have been all but legislated away and replaced by alternatives that offend the average Christian. Religious education, rather than consisting of Bible stories and teaching has in many cases been replaced by a multicultural mush. Sunday Schools, once attended by most young children at least once in their lives have become as extinct as the dodo.
Churches on the whole seem to have lost their way, wandering aimlessly about under a thick cloud of scepticism and doubt. The historical faith of the Church, although captured in creeds and confessions, is set aside or even denied. Vast numbers of Churches distort and misrepresent the biblical Gospel with unashamed ‘wokery’.
Writing about the Church of England and its leaders in The Spectator a while ago, Rod Liddle said that they have “ditched its traditions and reduced it to a sort of superannuated ad-hoc branch of social services. It has lost all sense of mission and direction.” He continued: “it seems to have swallowed every convenient shibboleth of modern liberalism, every transient political fashion – just as have, by the way, our judiciary, our social services, our education departments. It has become an institution which is more politically correct than our government; you look to it for moral leadership and it offers none whatever.” Many believe the Church to be damaged beyond repair. Sadly, what Liddle wrote concerning the Church of England applies equally to most of the mainstream denominations.
Another author, Leo McKinstry wrote: “Children growing up today know nothing of the central tenets of Christianity: the Ten Commandments, the four Gospels, the Sermon on the Mount …We are living in a religiously illiterate society where young people are not given the opportunity whether to believe in God or not because they are so ill-informed about the religion which built our civilisation.” The generation of our people who were regular attenders of the many Sunday Schools that existed in the 1950s are now elderly or have passed away.
IS THERE ANY WAY OUT?
The inevitable question now arises: short of a revolution, what can we do about this appalling mess? My answer is very simple if surprising, we can do nothing at all. The reason for this is that as long as we continue to try to draw water from broken cisterns, nothing will change. Suggested answers to this or that problem flood the media. Ferel youths? Conscript them into the military? But would this just drag down the military yet further? Criminals? Our prisons are full, we need to build more, so we are told. Our prisons are a failure. Inmates only refine their nefarious skills to leave and reoffend. The rate of reoffending at the moment, according to information in the House of Lords library, stands at around 30%. Education, that is the answer! Education only breeds criminals who may be just that little bit cleverer than the rest. Immigrants? Turn the boats around, fat chance!
Until we arrive at that point where we are ready to abandon these useless sticking plaster solutions, nothing will change. So many imagine they know what the country needs, but it is clear that not one of them is truly aware of the miserable state we are in. Blind they are, leading the blind and partially sighted into the same ditch that they themselves are destined to fall into. What will it take to open the eyes of our people to what has happened and the cankerous malaise that is bringing us to our knees? Will it have to be a war, a famine, a cruel tyranny, or some kind of horrendous political or other kind of earthquake. The first step to a radical change must be a widespread realization of the true nature of our helplessness and impotence. Only then, will we be prepared for change.
D. William Norris
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“We must never allow good sense to stand in the way of rank stupidity” Anon