Coming Soon to a Nation Near You?

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Megan O’Toole of National Post chronicles the alarming degradation of British society:

Britain’s Worst Hour

Surely, this can’t be related to the significant loss of the gospel in the Isles, can it be? And surely, it portends nothing for the USA, does it?

1 Comment

  1. Graham on April 16, 2009 at 5:04 pm

    Well, before becoming Prime Minister, Tony Blair did promise “New Labour, New Britain”. I much preferred the old one.

    Last year, there was the incident of a young girl having gone missing for several days, when in fact she had been taken by her mother’s boyfriend’s uncle in order so he and her mother could “find” her and claim the reward. The curious thing was that when interviewed by the media on a few occasions, the mother was unable to remember if she had 6 or 7 children. Then there were her “twins”- children born two years apart. Eh? Well, in that subculture, it is so unusual for a relationship to last long enough for a woman to have two children by the same man, that they use a special word for it.

    The Conservatives emphasise that their aim when in Government is to mend the “broken society”. The point they make is that it is breakdown in society which leads to widespread poverty, rather than vice versa. In particular, the welfare system has reached the stage where couples are financially better off to split up- but, for critics of the Conservatives, an attempt to rebalance the welfare state in favour of marriage (a start would be restoring the Married Couple’s Tax Allowance), is being “moralistic.” Under Labour, things have to be “non-judgmental”.

    However, almost any piece of legislation has a moral dimension.

    The drinking mentioned in the article. Well, Labour saw the idea that pubs had to close by 11pm as too old-fashioned for a modern society (it seems that anything that was in place before May 1997 is “old-fashioned” and out of place in a “modern society”). And they saw how on continental Europe, there are fewer restrictions on the sale of alcohol, and seem to believe that by sweeping away old-fashioned laws on this would turn hardened drinkers into people who would sit outside European-style all-night cafes discussing philosophy. Yes, but people who go to pubs to get “off their face” are not going to be turned into cultured people who discuss philosophy over a glass of wine just because the pub never shuts. They are going to people who drink and drink and drink.

    Too much “reality TV” (and we never had that when I was young) celebrates all that is bad and negative, making overnight celebrities. The Jade Goody “grief-athon”, as I call it, was just mawkish and sickening, and Sir Michael Parkinson has it spot on in his analysis. And yes, I am reminded of all the Diana stuff. I have “The Queen” on DVD, and watch it quite often, and cringe whenever I see the news footage of people going to London and becoming emotionally incontinent over Diana’s death. Those parts are painful to watch.

    Labour has not moved on from its obsession with “Cool Britannia”.

    The education reforms don’t surprise me. No doubt, this August, like previous Augusts, the Government will trumpet the “best ever” exam results and employers will complain that yet again, the new young adults they employ know less and have less of a work attitude that previous years.

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