Diamond Jubilee Debate: Has Britain Declined Under Elizabeth II?
THE SPECTATOR:
Yes
Is the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee a cause for jubilation? Certainly her reign has been a personal triumph: her iron sense of duty, gracefully performed, has been exemplary, if not an example often followed. For 60 years she has exercised a self-control that most of us find difficult even for 60 minutes; her recent state visit to Ireland put all our public figures of the past decades in the shade.
Not that that is very difficult, for there is no disguising that her reign has been an era of continuous and continuing decline. Of course, not even accelerating levels of British incompetence have been able to arrest the march of technical progress, and, in raw physical terms, life in these islands has improved greatly. It is now even possible to find passable food almost everywhere, even in the provinces.
But in relative terms, Britain has declined. When she came to the throne, the British car industry was the second largest in the world; now there is no major British-owned car company. In the land of the industrial revolution, foreign ownership and management is the
sine qua non of industrial success. Though we invented the railway, others must build them for us; though we invented nuclear power, we cannot by our unaided efforts build a nuclear power station. Even in football, our clubs are foreign-owned and the players foreign. The British are too undisciplined to be good at what they are most (regrettably and childishly) interested in.
What have the last 60 years done for our villages, towns and cities? British architects, devoid of scruple as of talent or aesthetic sense, have waged war on beauty and triumphed in the struggle. It is as though they personally resented the achievements of the past. Hardly a town exists that has not been ruined by the hacks of modernism and the blindness of the town-planners. It is lucky for them that there is no justice in the world.
But it is in intangibles that the decline has been most marked. In 1952, Britain was among the best-ordered countries in the western world, and now it is the worst. The recent outbreak of mass criminality can have surprised only the wilfully blind. The British are now among the least self-disciplined people in the world: it is as though they had undergone a
gestalt switch, so that what they previously decried they now honour, and vice versa. They are the fattest people in Europe: the characteristic smell of Britain is re-used fat. They treat the country as their personal rubbish tip — there is more litter here than anywhere else comparable — and they drink brutishly. They take more drugs than anyone else. They consume without discrimination and dress abominably because they have no self-respect or respect for others, an absence that is often evident in the way they work, no small matter in a service economy. They favour the uncouth over the refined and the stupid over the intelligent; their vulgarity, like their drunkenness, is not unselfconscious but militant. They mutilate rather than beautify themselves; they care for nothing except their odious entertainments, and their popular music is a paean to their hatred of life. They are individualistic without individualism. A consumer society without taste is a horrible thing to behold.
» | Theodore Dalrymple | Saturday, February 04, 2012
