The Last Chance to Save Britain?

Where others see the river of time flowing as it always has, the reactionary sees the debris of paradise drifting past his eyes.

Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: on Political Reaction

The philosopher Mark Lilla’s observation could not better summarise an article by Lord David Frost in the Telegraph. We seem to live in an era when edge-of-the-cliff warnings proliferate. The BBC has the usual climate Armageddon story, this time ‘Three years left to limit warming to 1.5°C‘, but for Frost the end is more of an existential one and imminent for the Britain we have known. He looks back over the changes of the last three decades and wonders what how astonished we would have thought back then had we been able to see into the future and seen:

That we would have ignored the well-known fact of the mass gang rape of young girls across British cities for decades;

That the British state would be unable to build a railway line between London and Birmingham and would spend nearly £100 billion proving it;

That Parliament would allow women to kill their unborn baby at any point without committing any crime.

You might have said in response that surely there must have been a massive change in the demographic, cultural, practical and indeed moral characteristics of Britain to make this possible. You might have said “That doesn’t sound like the same country I live in now”, the country which had dragged itself out of a huge economic and political hole, played a huge role in winning the Cold War, and just finished building a tunnel under the sea to France.

Frost’s view is that there has been a severance of modern Britain from its past:

What we are living through today, in a phrase, is an unprecedented break in national continuity. As a country we are disconnecting from the old Britain. The Britain of our national story is disappearing, the Britain of the Romans through the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the Tudors, Nelson and Wellington, the two World Wars and even the Attlee settlement.

Gone is the Britain of Christianity and the Church as a core component of British identity, and moral judgement has become utilitarian, about what is convenient, disconnected from any traditional, let alone transcendental, set of values.

Fast receding is the Britain of real state capacity and national ambition, as we move from Victorian St Pancras to the hole in the ground at Euston, from the first nuclear power station back to the windmill.

He blames in part the mass migration of the last 10 to 20 years, transforming London into a foreign city. But, more important he argues, is the rise of secular progressivism that has “turbo-charged into aggressive wokeism, with its belief that the historical past is irrelevant and probably actively immoral, and its determination to produce heaven on earth by releasing people from one inherited constraint after another, including finally those of biology itself”.

He particularly focuses on the supplanting of ‘Great Britain’ by ‘United Kingdom’, and looks to a messianic hope:

We need politicians who can see what’s going on and who care enough to get the country moving again – and who can reach back to the past, back beyond that break in continuity, to get the national energy to make it happen.

It’s difficult to assess now objectively how much better or successful Britain was in the recent past. In 1940 young men were piled up on the beaches at Dunkirk or flying Spitfires and Hurricanes in the Battle of France and then the Battle of Britain. But post-War Britain was a derelict, seedy place, with all the signs of a worn-out, exhausted once-great power. And more often than not, modern newspapers are keener to recount fights on aircraft and drunken, bloodied brawls at Ascot than anything edifying.

Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s are likely to recall a world of strikes, rusting Cortinas and advanced industrial decline. Only the shabby tinsel of glam rock shone a light through the murk of Ted Heath’s three-day week and Arthur Scargill’s comb-over haircut flapping in the wind on the picket lines. But it’s also true that even among those who once derided Margaret Thatcher are plenty who now yearn for politicians with a matching level of vision and commitment and who could walk the world stage like titans.

Are we really on the edge of a precipice? If we are, the extent of the change is so deep it is hard to imagine how anyone now could reverse it. Or perhaps the truth is every age is condemned to watching the debris of paradise being washed past down the river of no return.

One thing is certain though. Boris Johnson was wide of the mark when he made his statement to the Commons on July 25th 2019 (the day after David Frost was appointed his Europe Adviser and Chief Negotiator for Exiting the European Union), announcing:

We will be able to look back on this period – this extraordinary period – as the beginning of a new golden age for our United Kingdom.

He was right about it being extraordinary though.