Growing up in Louisiana, we were always grateful for our next-door neighbor, Mississippi. As bad as things were in our impoverished, woebegone state, at least we were better off than Mississippi, bless their hearts.
I feel that way as an American about Great Britain now. It seems like only the day before yesterday, Americans looked up to Britain with respect and maybe even a little intimidation. In the 1980s, I told a British exchange student at my university that even though his accent was working class, he could walk into most stores in our city and most Americans, who back then didn’t know the difference between Cockney and Received Pronunciation, would treat him like a Windsor.
No more. The ubiquity of Anglo-American transatlantic pop culture via the Internet has taught Americans how to pick up basic class differences in British speech. The overexposure of the British public to American life has caused Yankee travails to play a weird role in UK public affairs, as if our dramas were theirs. And the ability to read British newspapers online and follow UK social media accounts exposes the woke insanity of British life in ways that recall the Mississippi of my youth.
As awful as wokeness is in the United States, I find it hard to come up with an example as egregious as the Leeds police squad that recently dragged an autistic teenager out of a cupboard hiding place in her home, and jailed her overnight for drunkenly telling a female officer that she looked like the girl’s own lesbian granny. The event was captured by someone on video, and popularized by this viral tweet:
As the father of a child who struggled with spectrum issues as a youngster, I had to try twice before I could get through the clip. It’s hateful, hideous. That this happened at all is ghastly. To think that Britain has a serious violent crime problem, but is using its police resources to police the thoughts and words of its own people, out of fear that someone somewhere might emit evil—well, it’s obscene.
I said “thoughts” as well as words, because Britain has criminalized praying silently outside of abortion clinics. You think I’m kidding? People have been arrested for standing quietly near abortion clinics, and directing their thoughts toward God.
If you follow the @WeAreFairCop Twitter feed, you’ll see example after example of British local police proclaiming their fidelity to wokeness. Fair Cop is an organization that monitors what it considers to be excessive and foolish policing in the UK—in particular, cases involving so-called ‘hate crimes’ registered by the police. These turn out to be speech that offends certain protected classes favored by British elites.
The First Amendment protects Americans from much of this, but there is one awful thing being pioneered in Britain that is probably coming to America, as, like in Britain, there are no laws against it. The UK is also leading the way in the vile practice of ‘de-banking’: when banks cease to do business with private citizens who politics they dislike. Populist politician Nigel Farage is the best-known of the de-banked, but it has happened to many others.
Last week, Sam Ashworth-Hayes published a column in The Telegraph urging his fellow Britons under the age of 50 to make plans to emigrate, because life is going to go downhill for them.
“The housing market has passed beyond dysfunction and into catastrophe,” he writes. Plus, Britain’s taxes are high, and the aging of its population means its people are going to be paying even higher taxes for fewer services. Worst of all, Britain seems incapable of mustering the wherewithal to solve its problems.
“There is precious little political impetus to fix any of these issues,” writes Ashworth-Hayes, adding, therefore, that “those who can go, should.”
That this appeared in the nation’s conservative ‘respectable’ broadsheet is shocking. I polled some British friends about their thoughts on the matter. One, a conservative who left of his own accord and who now lives in Central Europe, agreed, saying that Britain is now administered by a wealthy class that has no interest in doing anything for the common man, only enriching itself. No one to whom I spoke believed that Ashworth-Hayes’s diagnosis is wrong, though some said it was unpatriotic to consider walking out on your own country in her hour of need. (And no, I did not move to Hungary to escape American decline, or to escape at all.)
A parish priest serving in England said that the question is difficult for Christians.
“Part of me thinks the country even if in a dire state needs spiritual shepherds,” he said. “However, if it became clearly impossible to operate even an underground version of Christianity then it could be plausible to leave or go to the remote margins.”
That day may be coming. The collapse of Christianity in the United Kingdom has been widely noted. Christians are now in a minority in England and Wales, and the Church of England has been slated for extinction by 2060, on present trends. Scotland, once a stronghold of Calvinism, is now even more secular than England.
And hostility to what remains of Britain’s Christian population grows. Witness the aforementioned arrest of Christians for silent prayer near abortion clinics. To affirm traditional Biblical teaching on homosexuality is to make oneself a pariah, and quite possibly unemployable. Just last week, Scotland’s leader Hamza Yousaf, a Muslim, compared pro-life campaigners in the UK to the Taliban.
Indeed, an English expatriate friend, a devout Catholic from an old recusant family, told me that it was painful for her to leave Yorkshire and move abroad with her American husband, but she strongly felt that she had to do whatever she could to make sure her children had a reasonable chance of keeping the faith. She no longer believed that was likely in the very country where her ancestors had held on for centuries as Catholics, despite fierce persecution.
It is often said here in Europe that whatever begins in America eventually arrives here. But in America, it is sometimes the case that what starts in Britain eventually finds its way to the States. The so-called “special relationship” is not merely a political and strategic one. Americans are an ethnically diverse people, of course, but culturally, we remain broadly English.
Given that the American ruling class, like their British counterparts, have adopted wokeness as a successor ideology to classical liberalism, and a successor religion to Christianity, and given the collapse of Christianity among younger Americans, it is hard to resist the conclusion that today’s Britain is a picture of tomorrow’s America.
Granted, the U.S. economy is far stronger, which is one bright light, though insane levels of public indebtedness will eventually make America come a cropper. But culturally, Americans are on the same declining path, and one would have to be mighty credulous to look at the gerontocratic paralytics presiding over Washington, and conclude that America retains the political strength to solve its problems, while Britain does not.
The future is not fated. Things looked dismal for both the United Kingdom and the United States in the late 1970s—then came Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. But the countries those two visionary conservatives inherited were very different from the nations as they are today. Reassuring a friend concerned that Britain would be “ruined” if it lost its American colonies, Adam Smith said reassuringly, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” He meant that nations have deep reserves that may not be visible in a crisis moment. But just how much ruin is there left in contemporary Britain? Sadly for Britain and her admirers, we may all live to find out.
How Much Ruin Is Left in Britain?
Growing up in Louisiana, we were always grateful for our next-door neighbor, Mississippi. As bad as things were in our impoverished, woebegone state, at least we were better off than Mississippi, bless their hearts.
I feel that way as an American about Great Britain now. It seems like only the day before yesterday, Americans looked up to Britain with respect and maybe even a little intimidation. In the 1980s, I told a British exchange student at my university that even though his accent was working class, he could walk into most stores in our city and most Americans, who back then didn’t know the difference between Cockney and Received Pronunciation, would treat him like a Windsor.
No more. The ubiquity of Anglo-American transatlantic pop culture via the Internet has taught Americans how to pick up basic class differences in British speech. The overexposure of the British public to American life has caused Yankee travails to play a weird role in UK public affairs, as if our dramas were theirs. And the ability to read British newspapers online and follow UK social media accounts exposes the woke insanity of British life in ways that recall the Mississippi of my youth.
As awful as wokeness is in the United States, I find it hard to come up with an example as egregious as the Leeds police squad that recently dragged an autistic teenager out of a cupboard hiding place in her home, and jailed her overnight for drunkenly telling a female officer that she looked like the girl’s own lesbian granny. The event was captured by someone on video, and popularized by this viral tweet:
As the father of a child who struggled with spectrum issues as a youngster, I had to try twice before I could get through the clip. It’s hateful, hideous. That this happened at all is ghastly. To think that Britain has a serious violent crime problem, but is using its police resources to police the thoughts and words of its own people, out of fear that someone somewhere might emit evil—well, it’s obscene.
I said “thoughts” as well as words, because Britain has criminalized praying silently outside of abortion clinics. You think I’m kidding? People have been arrested for standing quietly near abortion clinics, and directing their thoughts toward God.
If you follow the @WeAreFairCop Twitter feed, you’ll see example after example of British local police proclaiming their fidelity to wokeness. Fair Cop is an organization that monitors what it considers to be excessive and foolish policing in the UK—in particular, cases involving so-called ‘hate crimes’ registered by the police. These turn out to be speech that offends certain protected classes favored by British elites.
The First Amendment protects Americans from much of this, but there is one awful thing being pioneered in Britain that is probably coming to America, as, like in Britain, there are no laws against it. The UK is also leading the way in the vile practice of ‘de-banking’: when banks cease to do business with private citizens who politics they dislike. Populist politician Nigel Farage is the best-known of the de-banked, but it has happened to many others.
Last week, Sam Ashworth-Hayes published a column in The Telegraph urging his fellow Britons under the age of 50 to make plans to emigrate, because life is going to go downhill for them.
“The housing market has passed beyond dysfunction and into catastrophe,” he writes. Plus, Britain’s taxes are high, and the aging of its population means its people are going to be paying even higher taxes for fewer services. Worst of all, Britain seems incapable of mustering the wherewithal to solve its problems.
“There is precious little political impetus to fix any of these issues,” writes Ashworth-Hayes, adding, therefore, that “those who can go, should.”
That this appeared in the nation’s conservative ‘respectable’ broadsheet is shocking. I polled some British friends about their thoughts on the matter. One, a conservative who left of his own accord and who now lives in Central Europe, agreed, saying that Britain is now administered by a wealthy class that has no interest in doing anything for the common man, only enriching itself. No one to whom I spoke believed that Ashworth-Hayes’s diagnosis is wrong, though some said it was unpatriotic to consider walking out on your own country in her hour of need. (And no, I did not move to Hungary to escape American decline, or to escape at all.)
A parish priest serving in England said that the question is difficult for Christians.
“Part of me thinks the country even if in a dire state needs spiritual shepherds,” he said. “However, if it became clearly impossible to operate even an underground version of Christianity then it could be plausible to leave or go to the remote margins.”
That day may be coming. The collapse of Christianity in the United Kingdom has been widely noted. Christians are now in a minority in England and Wales, and the Church of England has been slated for extinction by 2060, on present trends. Scotland, once a stronghold of Calvinism, is now even more secular than England.
And hostility to what remains of Britain’s Christian population grows. Witness the aforementioned arrest of Christians for silent prayer near abortion clinics. To affirm traditional Biblical teaching on homosexuality is to make oneself a pariah, and quite possibly unemployable. Just last week, Scotland’s leader Hamza Yousaf, a Muslim, compared pro-life campaigners in the UK to the Taliban.
Indeed, an English expatriate friend, a devout Catholic from an old recusant family, told me that it was painful for her to leave Yorkshire and move abroad with her American husband, but she strongly felt that she had to do whatever she could to make sure her children had a reasonable chance of keeping the faith. She no longer believed that was likely in the very country where her ancestors had held on for centuries as Catholics, despite fierce persecution.
It is often said here in Europe that whatever begins in America eventually arrives here. But in America, it is sometimes the case that what starts in Britain eventually finds its way to the States. The so-called “special relationship” is not merely a political and strategic one. Americans are an ethnically diverse people, of course, but culturally, we remain broadly English.
Given that the American ruling class, like their British counterparts, have adopted wokeness as a successor ideology to classical liberalism, and a successor religion to Christianity, and given the collapse of Christianity among younger Americans, it is hard to resist the conclusion that today’s Britain is a picture of tomorrow’s America.
Granted, the U.S. economy is far stronger, which is one bright light, though insane levels of public indebtedness will eventually make America come a cropper. But culturally, Americans are on the same declining path, and one would have to be mighty credulous to look at the gerontocratic paralytics presiding over Washington, and conclude that America retains the political strength to solve its problems, while Britain does not.
The future is not fated. Things looked dismal for both the United Kingdom and the United States in the late 1970s—then came Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. But the countries those two visionary conservatives inherited were very different from the nations as they are today. Reassuring a friend concerned that Britain would be “ruined” if it lost its American colonies, Adam Smith said reassuringly, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” He meant that nations have deep reserves that may not be visible in a crisis moment. But just how much ruin is there left in contemporary Britain? Sadly for Britain and her admirers, we may all live to find out.
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