After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (30 page)

Within little more than half-a-century, almost every item on the list had been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 percent of Britons receive state handouts25) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority”—the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something,” the cost to individual liberty be damned. The United Kingdom today is a land that reviles “custom and tradition,” requires criminal background checks for once routine “voluntary activity” (school field trips), and in which “noninterference” and “tolerance of the different” have been replaced by intolerance of and unending interference with those who decline to get with the beat: Dale McAlpine, a practicing (wait for it) Christian, was handing out leaflets in the town of Wokington and chit-chatting with shoppers when he was arrested on a

“public order” charge by Police Officer Sam Adams (no relation), a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community outreach officer.26 Mr. McAlpine had said homosexuality is a sin. “I’m gay,” said Officer Adams. Well, it’s still a sin, said Mr. McAlpine. So Officer Adams arrested him for causing distress to Officer Adams.

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In Britain, everything is policed except crime. The government-funded National Children’s Bureau has urged nursery teachers and daycare super-visors to record and report every racist utterance of toddlers as young as three.27

Like what?

Well, if children “react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying ‘Yuk,’” that could be a clear sign that they’ll grow up to make racist remarks that could cause distress to the anti-racism community outreach officer. Makes a lot of sense to get all their names in a big government database by pre-kindergarten.

While the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community outreach officer is busy arresting you for offending the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community outreach officer, in the broader scene London now has more violent crime than New York and Istanbul. From personal observation, an alarming number of the men on its streets seem to affect the appearance of the bad guys’ crew in
Pirates of the Caribbean
, shaven headed with large earrings, and the sprightly swagger of a rum-fueled sea dog sight-ing one of the less pox-ridden strumpets in Tortuga. As for the English roses, at about 2:00 on a Wednesday afternoon, in order to enter a convenience store, I was obliged to step over a girl of about twelve dressed like a trollop and collapsed in her own vomit. But never fear, the government is taking action: in order to facilitate safer binge drinking, police announced that they would be handing out free flip-flops outside nightclubs in order to help paralytic dolly birds stagger home without stumbling in their high heels and falling into the gutter.28

In 2006, on a train in South London, a 96-year-old man was punched in the face and blinded in one eye.29 His 44-year-old attacker had boarded the crowded tram, tried to push past Shah Chaudhury in the aisle and become enraged by the nonagenarian’s insufficient haste in moving out of the way. “You bastard!” he snarled, and slugged him. Much of the commentary concerned the leniency of the sentence. Yet that wasn’t what caught my eye about the story of poor Mr. Chaudhury. In a statement to the court, the new Britannia 205

the victim “said he had been standing in the aisle of the tram because nobody would give up their seat for him.” He was ninety-six years old and relied on two walking sticks. How can it be that not a single twenty/thirty/

fortysomething in the car thought to offer his seat?

Some years ago the livelier members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were illegally burning down the barns of Quebec separatists. When this became public, Pierre Trudeau blithely responded that, if people were upset by the Mounties’ illegal barn-burning, maybe he’d make it legal for the Mounties to burn barns. George Jonas, one of our great contemporary analysts, responded that Monsieur Trudeau had missed the point: barn-burning wasn’t wrong because it was illegal; it was illegal because it was wrong.30

That’s an important distinction. Once it’s no longer accepted that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you naught. The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it. Beating up a 96-year-old isn’t wrong because it’s illegal; it’s illegal because it’s wrong. Not offering your seat to a 96-year-old isn’t illegal at all, but it’s also wrong. And, if a citizen of an advanced western social democracy no longer understands that instinctively, you can pass a thousand laws and issue a million ASBOs (the “Anti-Social Behavior Orders”

introduced by Tony Blair) and they will never be enough. British society has come to depend on CCTVs—closed-circuit cameras in every public building, every shopping center, every street, even (in some remote rural locales) in the trees. In some cities, traffic wardens have miniature cameras in their caps to film ill-tempered motorists abusing them for writing a ticket.31 Britain is said to be home to a third of all the world’s CCTVs, and in the course of an average day, the average Briton is estimated to be filmed approximately 300 times.32 So naturally the Croydon trolley had a camera, and it captured in vivid close-up the perpetrator attacking his victim. And a fat lot of good the video evidence did Mr. Chaudhury.

Churchill called his book
The History of the English-Speaking Peoples
—

not the English-Speaking Nations. The extraordinary role played by those 206

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nations in the creation and maintenance of the modern world derived from their human capital. What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe,33 the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease,34 the highest number of single mothers,35 the highest abortion rate;36 marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. A couple of years ago, the papers reported that stabbings are so rampant in British schoolyards that a company that specializes in military body armor is now manufacturing school blazers lined with Kevlar.37 For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.

American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and depravity. As the United Kingdom demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want,” to be accomplished by “cooperation between the State and the individual.”38 In attempting to insulate the citizenry from the vicissitudes of fate, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity. “Cooperation” between the State and the individual has resulted in a huge expansion of the former and the ceaseless withering of the latter.

For its worshippers, Big Government becomes a kind of religion: the church as state. After the London Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mull-ing over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July,” a new national holiday to bolster British identity.39 The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian Society, proposed that the new “British Day” should be July 5, the day the National Health Service was created.40 Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation. So fireworks
every Glorious Fifth! They should call it Dependence Day.

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One-fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no adult works.41 Just under 900,000 people have been off sick for over a decade, claiming “sick benefits,” week in, week out for ten years and counting.42

“Indolence,” as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a society, but rarely has any state embraced indolence with such paradoxical gusto as Britain. There is almost nothing you can’t get the government to pay for.

Plucked at random from the
Daily Mail
: A man of 21 with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers’ money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute.43

Why not? His social worker says sex is a “human right” and that his client, being a virgin, is entitled to the support of the state in claiming said right.

Fortunately, a £520 million program was set up by Her Majesty’s Government to “empower those with disabilities.” “He’s planning to do more than just have his end away,” explained the social worker. “Refusing to offer him this service would be a violation of his human rights.”

Of course. And so a Dutch prostitute is able to boast that among her clients is the British Government. Talk about outsourcing: given the reputation of English womanhood, you’d have thought this would be the one job that wouldn’t have to be shipped overseas. But, as Amsterdam hookers no doubt say, lie back and think of England—and the check they’ll be mailing you.

To a visitor, one of the most telling features of contemporary London are the signs pleading with you not to beat up public employees. The United Kingdom seems to be evolving from a nanny state into a kind of giant remedial institution for elderly juvenile delinquents. At bus stops in London, there are posters warning, “DON’T TAKE IT OUT ON US.” At the Underground stations, you see the slogan “IF YOU ABUSE OUR STAFF, LONDON SUFFERS” above a poster of Harold Beck’s iconic Tube map rendered as a giant bruise—as if some Cockney yob has just punched London in the kisser and beaten it Northern Line black and Piccadilly Line blue, with other parts of the pulverized skin turning Circle Line yellow and even 208

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Central Line livid red. I found this one of the bleakest comments on modern Britain: all the award-winning wit and style of the London advertising world deployed in service of a devastating acknowledgment of civic decay.

But why wouldn’t you take it out on the state? In much of Britain, what else is there? In Wales, Northern Ireland, and parts of northern England, the state accounts for between 73 and 78 percent of the economy, which is about the best Big Government can hope to achieve without full-scale Sovietization.44 In such a world, if something’s bugging you enough to want to kick someone’s head in, there’s a three-in-four chance it’s the state’s fault.

Beveridge’s “abolition of want” starts with the abolition of stigma. Once you’ve done that, it’s very hard to go back even if you want to—and there’s no indication Britain’s millions of non-working households do. The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people. Tony Blair’s ministry discovered it was politically helpful to reclassify a chunk of the unemployed as “disabled.” A fit, able-bodied 40-year-old who has been on disability allowance for a decade understands somewhere at the back of his mind that he is living a lie, and that not just the government but his family and his friends are colluding in that lie. Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically.

England is a sad case study because it managed to spare itself all the most obviously toxic infections of the age, beginning with Fascism and Communism. But, after Big Government, after global retreat, after the loss of liberty there is only pitiless civic disintegration. The statistics speak for themselves. The number of indictable offenses per thousand people was 2.4 in 1900, climbed gradually to 9.7 in 1954, and then rocketed to 109.4 by 1992.45 And that official increase understates the reality: many crimes have been decriminalized, and most crime goes unreported, and most reported crime goes uninvestigated, and most investigated crime goes unsolved, and almost all solved crime merits derisory punishment.

Yet the law-breaking is merely a symptom of a larger rupture. In Anthony Burgess’ famous novel
A Clockwork Orange
, the precocious psy-chopathic teen narrator at one point offers his dad some (stolen) money so his parents can enjoy a drink down the pub. “Thanks, son,” says his father.

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“But we don’t go out much now. We daren’t go out much now, the streets being what they are. Young hooligans and so on. Still, thanks.”

Burgess published his book in 1962, when, on drab streets of cramped row houses, working-class men kept pigeons and tended vegetable allot-ments. The notion that the old and not so old would surrender some of the most peaceable thoroughfares
in the world to young thugs was the stuff of lurid fantasy. Yet it happened in little more than a generation.

“We time-shift,” a very prominent Englishman told me a few years ago.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“We time-shift,” he repeated. At certain hours, the lanes of the leafy and expensive village where he lives are almost as pleasant as they look in the realtors’ brochures. But then the yobs come to from the previous night’s revelries and swagger forth for another bout of “nightlife”—drinking, swearing, shagging, vomiting, stabbing. “So we time our walks for before they wake up,” my friend told me. “It’s so peaceful and beautiful at six in the morning.” This is some of the most valuable real estate in the world, and yet wealthy families live under curfews imposed by England’s violent, feral youth—just as Alex’s parents do in Burgess’ novel, a work as prophetic as Orwell’s or Huxley’s.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” But viewed from 2010, England the day before yesterday is an alternative universe—or a lost civilization. In 2009, the “Secretary of State for Children”

(an office both Orwellian and Huxleyite) announced that 20,000 “problem families” would be put under 24-hour CCTV supervision in their homes.

As the
Daily Express
reported, “They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.”46 Orwell’s government “telescreen” in every home is close to being a reality, although even he would have dismissed as too obviously absurd a nanny state that literally polices your bedtime.