Tired old Britain has put its feet up and withdrawn from the world
Despite the enterprise and valour of our citizens, our leaders seem set only on managing the country's decline, writes Simon Heffer.
Why is Britain putting its feet up? Photo: PA
Simon Heffer 6:03PM GMT 01 Feb 2011
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Just three weeks into my
A-level economics course, in September 1976, the British economy imploded to the degree that the International Monetary Fund had to come and run it for us. As is the way with 16-year-old boys, we were rather naïve, and therefore shocked that the country our parents had believed was a serious world power should be reduced to a banana republic in this way. Our economics master strove to instil in us the correct level of cynicism. Did we not realise that, since 1945, the main job of Her Majesty's Government had been to manage decline?
We learnt that lesson, only to have it countermanded by our experience of the Thatcher era; but then we had to learn it again. What we have witnessed in the past few years especially has not merely confirmed the point, but has provided further stark examples. There is nothing like running out of money to force the recognition that whatever our parents might have grown up believing about Britain, no one can easily believe it now.
This is a pity, because we are a fundamentally decent lot, with morally acceptable values. When we were a world power during the 20th century we used that power responsibly and for the greater good. The legacy of having been on the right side during two world wars gave us a moral authority that has now been all but squandered. I do not mean purely because of our obedience to America in the contrived and lethal mess that was Iraq; I mean because of our steady determination, since 1945, to fritter away the means of exercising that moral authority.
We see this with the tide of change through North Africa, possibly on an unstoppable course through the Middle East. This used to be a part of world we understood, and prided ourselves on understanding. The Arabists in our Foreign Office were deemed, with justification, to be the most intelligent and subtle analysts of that culture in the world. The mess America has made in the region in recent years should have come as no surprise: the diaries and letters of staff officers and diplomats who saw the Americans arrive in North Africa in 1943 reflect all the portents. Yet now, in the second decade of the 21st century, our reach in such places is minimal. Our Foreign Secretary expresses pious hopes for something called "a transition to democracy" in Egypt, and no sane person can disagree with him – but his opinion, and indeed Britain's, counts for absolutely nothing, and we should not fool ourselves otherwise.
At the simplest level, the amount of influence we can exert as a power depends on our ability to back it up with force of arms, and the will to use them if necessary. We have no such force of arms. Perhaps the defence cuts, which still seem to have been so reckless in their conception and so wasteful of expertise and commitment, were deliberately designed to confirm the final surrender of our will to be a player on the world stage. We have for a long time been in the second rank of nations, but the way this Government and its predecessor have behaved, we are about to enter the third.
A country is of course the sum of its people, but also of its institutions. Since 1945, the institution that has come to characterise Britain is not our disciplined and professional Armed Forces, but the welfare state. It is what Peter Lilley called "the something for nothing society". Welfarism has always had at its core the sentimental belief that living beyond our means is simply something that a humane society has to do. What happens when the bills come in will always be a later generation's problem. That generation is ours. That the spending cuts are just over a mere three per cent a year is a sign of how, even now, the desire to protect the claimant society overrides everything else. It overrides having highly professional and well-equipped Armed Forces in which morale is high and which protect our place in the world and give us some clout. Indeed, our place in the world is not an edifying subject upon which to reflect.
We only look as good as we do to others in the Western world because of the misgovernment of their own countries. Most of Europe is a basket case, brought down by an unfeasible political fantasy. America is woefully misgoverned, with vast pockets of incompetence and corruption, and a toxic political class. Yet we do so little to make things better for ourselves. Our public services are poor not because of the sums spent on them – which have been vast – but because of their appalling management. Labour destroyed the ethos of our Civil Service when it was in power by politicising it. A similar problem has occurred in local government and the quangocracy. Part of the problem is that these institutions are run by the products of our pitiful education system, in which our rulers continue to resist the creation and promotion of an elite. As we have seen in the past couple of years, the politicians whom such people support and advise are often themselves devoid of any ethic of public service, and indeed pursue their own interests to the point of criminality. It is little wonder they take such bad decisions about how we are governed, and that the tunnel has yet to show any light.
The conscious decision to accept decline rather than to fight it can only have terrible consequences for us. Mr Cameron seems to admire Sweden. But do we want to be Sweden? Do we so want to resign from the councils of the world and be of scant consequence, in a way we have not been since Spain ruled the known world in the 16th century? Do we feel we have so little to give? Or is it that our obsession with running a client state, and the costs of that, mean we cannot aspire to give any longer? Our Deputy Prime Minister is apparently so "fragile" that he mustn't be given any work after three o'clock in the afternoon,
so he can get home early and put his feet up with his children. Never mind that he may not have chosen the right calling in life, if that is the sort of regime he requires: is he not a metaphor for the Britain he and the rest of his class of politician now choose to run? Are we not now in an attitude of surrender to mental and physical exhaustion, and finding it hard to see how we can revive ourselves to count for something in the world?
All of us are confronted by evidence every day of the determination, enterprise, industry and valour of our fellow citizens. We do not sense acceptance of decline; we sense instead a frustration that so few opportunities are afforded us for improvement, that the tax system thwarts us, and that the unproductive and the defeatist are treated so lavishly at the expense of the productive and striving. We are not just in decline, but in withdrawal: and this is without the consent of most of us who pay the bills. If we do not now resolve to break out of this corrosive mindset, it will be nearly impossible for our children to do so.
simon heffer, 16 year old boys, banana republic, international monetary fund, level economics, economics course, british economy, serious world, acceptable values, moral authority, valour, north africa, cynicism, majesty, thatcher, obedience, 20th century, decline, tide, legacy
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