Burning questions
Whatever pitiful handful of old-school Ainglishters may still be left ain’t gonna like the answer much, I bet.
What would Churchill think of the land of Lucy Connolly and Henry Nowak?
THE emergence of vigilante patrols on the streets of Rochdale following the release from prison of a convicted grooming gang ringleader is, at first glance, a local story. Such episodes are easily dismissed as spontaneous expressions of public anger, the predictable consequence of a controversial criminal case. Yet to do so would be to overlook the more interesting question. Why are citizens beginning to assume responsibilities that belong exclusively to the state?The significance of vigilantism in Rochdale and elsewhere in Britain lies not in the number of people involved but in the assumption that underlies it: that the authorities either cannot or will not perform one of their most elementary duties. Political legitimacy depends as much on what citizens believe governments are capable of doing as on what governments actually do.
Taken in isolation, the events of recent years in Britain prove very little. Western democracies periodically experience shocking crimes, controversial court decisions and failures of public administration. No single episode tells us much about the condition of a nation. The picture changes when exceptional events begin to accumulate with unsettling regularity.
The Southport murders, where three young girls were killed and many others injured, sent shockwaves throughout the entire country. Beyond the horror of the crime itself came intense scrutiny of the state’s capacity to prevent such atrocities. The public debate that followed was as much about confidence in government as it was about one criminal.
None of this means that Britain stands on the brink of civil war as some commentators suggest. Such a conclusion is unsupported by the available evidence. Hyperbole makes for clickbait, after all. But what if vigilante patrols are not an isolated incident, but the first visible symptom of a broader crisis of confidence in the British state’s capacity to perform its essential functions?
One cannot help wondering how Winston Churchill, the historian rather than the statesman, would read Britain’s present predicament. In A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, he chronicled Britain as a nation shaped by successive waves of transformation. The native Britons gave way to the Romans. The Romans departed. Angles, Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans each left their mark upon the island. Civil wars, religious upheavals, industrialisation, imperial expansion followed in turn. Britain’s story did not end there. The post-war decades brought new waves of immigration from the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and Africa, adding yet another layer to a nation that had always been shaped by change. To Churchill, these were not interruptions in Britain’s story. They were Britain herself.
Would he regard today’s anxieties as merely another chapter in that long and often turbulent history? Or would he conclude that something more fundamental is taking place – not simply another transformation, but a gradual erosion of the confidence that has long enabled Britain’s institutions to absorb change without losing their authority?
Time alone will answer that question.
Yeppers; like it or not, it most certainly will. Actually, it’s my own belief that it already has, and that it is now much too late for No-Longer-Great Britainistan to have any real hope of reversing course and saving itself.
To date, no civilization, however mighty, wealthy, successful, and/or rigorously defended has endured forever—not the Greeks, not the Romans, not the Ottomans nor the Mongols nor the Picts nor the Saxons etc etc etc. Our English cousins had a darned good run for sure, several centuries at or near the top o’ the global heap. Alas, that run is now well and truly over, and the British future now looks for the most part swarthy, anarchic, Moslem, and frankly, bleak.
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