Britain's Last Stand

...This, by the way, is not to suggest some mindless big tent or grand coalition in which there is no more argument...

...Thatcher had pushed and cajoled them...

...Can the world's great guarantor of liberty and law learn anything from the decline and fall of her great predecessor...

...However, as the American poet Alice Duer Miller wrote peaceful protesters at Peterloo...

...We who lived here had seen much to hate and to forgive too, oppressive courts and Kings, penal taxes, the merciless and stupid repression of rebellion from the judicial massacre of Protestant rebels in the Bloody Assize to the slaughter of withstand the temptations of Communism and Fascism...

...Because it was the loss of these battles that And yet even in Britain it is not certain that the struggle is finished or that the modernizes have already won...

...To British pessimists, the reason for this revulsion against success was all too clear...

...I believe that many who think of themselves as socialists and radicals must now also suspect that they have pushed the clock too far forward, and that the very people they hoped to help have been plunged into a new darkness of insecurity, ignorance, crime, and despair...

...It was fought over sex and sexuality, over marriage and religion, standards in education, patriotism and history, over tastes in music and painting, just as much as over the more traditional areas of political conflict...

...And it was lost...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 55 battle had been fought—as it is being fought in the U.S...

...Even in its later, devalued days, when it had been reduced to a paper Britain is to be incorporated in a new European superstate, with no concept of political opposition, of jury trial or habeas corpus, and an only shaky grasp on the idea of a free press...

...I do not see why, because I may disagree with them profoundly our opinions...

...If the decay of obligation, duty, and morality continues, danger and misery will soon be hammering at the front doors of all of us, Left and Right alike...

...Even so, by the time we came to our great test in 1940, we had achieved something quite unique—a peaceful, ordered, prosperous society based not upon power but upon the exercise of a free conscience and a universally respected rule of law...

...promise, the Bank of England's promise to pay the bearer the sum of one pound has always been an elaborate and grandiose document, bearing many marks of royal power and—in recent years—decorated with the images of British national heroes of literature, science, and military victory...

...It is as if the conservative elements in society have been hacking at a fogbank with blunt cutlasses, to all appearances attacking an imagined foe...

...It does not pretend that sovereignty is being lent, but openly states that it must be given up for good...

...Having been brought up at the very end of this period of heroic nationhood, I am glad and proud that it should have helped to keep so many good things alive...

...On the map of Europe's proposed regions, England does not even feature as a single unit, but has been sliced into artificial districts...

...What is now far more important is the future of the United States...

...For all its federal structure and the stars upon its flag, the embryonic United States of Europe is arranged so that power flows downwards from high authority, not upwards from the people...

...This simply has not happened before, either in the cultural revolution or in all the decades of European integration...

...The longer we leave it, the more illiberal, costly, and nasty the ultimate solution will have to be...

...Yet something important is bound to be lost to the world, once the ancient imperial capital sinks to the status of a mere provincial city, the Westminster Parliament becomes first a state legislature and then a museum, while the regiments and fleets which once conquered the world and controlled the oceans have been wound up and absorbed in European armies and navies...

...As for Britain, which is a convenient expression to cover the odd way in which English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish have been bound together under one flag, it will be dissolved in the rival sovereignty of European Union...

...Many who have never been to the British Isles have strong, clear ideas about that unique country, formed in an age when the history of England and of Britain was the founding myth of much of the civilized world...

...Our two countries are subject to the same diseases and fashions...

...today—in school classrooms, churches, TV and movie studios, theaters, libraries, publishing houses, newspaper offices, and art galleries...

...Even so, when the issue of the national future is presented in plain anthem, but a fact of nationhood, like a legal system, a frontier, or an army...

...I have quite deliberately aired some serious conservative criticisms of Mrs...

...For years the opponents of the cultural revolution fought their little isolated skirmishes and lost them...

...It was not as free as the United States, weighed down as it was by its far longer history, but it was extraordinarily peaceful and gentle...

...Once it had been lost, the whole future of the nation was in doubt...

...If we British are what we used to be, then this is a last unrepeatable moment at which we can halt our extinction as a culture and a nation...

...The Highland Scots and the Irish had seen worse still, and much of the world is peopled with the descendants of those who fled in despair from persecution, famine or clearance, or were transported by merciless courts...

...Even those who do not or cannot grasp the arcane political implications of a supranational central bank, of the loss of control of interest rates, of the effective merging of economies achieved by a merger of currencies, can quickly see the difference between a Bank of England note and the new euros, multilingual, pastel-colored, bland, and carrying pictures of non-existent bridges and windows, symbolizing a theoretical unity and openings to a vague if optimistic future...

...If this idea of England or Britain had not existed in the hearts and heads of millions of Americans and Canadians, then 1940 would have been for nothing...

...Many needed persuading that Britain or her Empire deserved to be saved...

...We have a common interest in climbing out of our trenches and honestly re-examining can freely continue...

...In the in the year of Dunkirk: "I am American bred...

...But if Britain gives up her nationhood, as the Blair government now wants to do, all British citizens, socialist or conservative, will lose the right to influence the fate of their country...

...As Robert Browning wrote of one such, "Venice spent what Venice earned," and in the end there was nothing anyone could do to save her...

...We knew that the pageant and the tourist poster were only part of the story, and that they hid dungeons, gibbets, famine, and squalor...

...Many British people will barely notice the abolition of their own country, for their history, culture, religion, and traditions already have been eroded or undermined and, in some cases, actively destroyed in the past half century...

...The radicals have completed their long march through the institutions so that the education industry, much of the media, and especially the broadcasting networks are largely in the hands of liberal conformism...

...In the tremendous debate which must now begin on this, all the other reforms and upheavals in Britain's daily life are involved...

...Largely as a result of this, Britain is also breaking up, and likely to be incorporated in a new European superstate which reaches far into the past in search of a centralized 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 and authoritarian mode of government, has no concept of political opposition, of jury trial or of habeas corpus, as well as a shaky grasp on the idea of a free press...

...Britain's wealth and power were terribly damaged by the bloodletting of two great European wars, whereas American prosperity has never been greater, and she actually benefited economically from the century of conflict.Yet Britain survived these physical blows and, only a few years ago, under Margaret Thatcher, she even seemed to be regaining much of her old confidence...

...It was a close-run thing...

...From this flowed our other great boasts, a language in which it is far easier to tell the truth than it is to lie, honored and efficient institutions, largely uncorrupt, which had earned the respect given to them, a democracy which was able to splits and cracks with the effort of envisaging it...

...The Abolition of Britain could be the prelude to the Abolition of America...

...view, as the irreversible abolition of British independence through the scrapping of the national currency, a majority recoil in mistrust and suspicion...

...The tyrannies that threaten us are still weak, and Britain can nowadays play no major part in resisting them...

...destroyed Britain, American readers, who are engaged in the same struggles, should know the causes of Britain's end...

...ble threat to Britain's entire way of life...

...The new Europe hopes to supersede nations, which it mistrusts, with "regions" which often cross old national boundaries...

...Suddenly, the fog lifts, and the great scaly monster of national abolition is revealed in all its ugly menace...

...It is to suggest that we need to protect and rebuild the unseen web of goodness which is essential for a free and democratic nation to continue to exist...

...It is often truly said that, in the minds of most Englishmen, the narrow seas between Dover and Calais are far wider than the Atlantic...

...A Britain left alone would eventually have had to make a shameful peace with one or the other of the two European tyrannies, and we would all now live in a world so different that the imagination This ideal Britain is about to be replaced by an entirely different country—a place of shrinking liberties, of bad manners and violence, of illiteracy and ignorance, of cringing conformism...

...This "No window, but on the plus side there's a gateway to another dimension behind the Lloveras print...

...At the first sign of weakness, her enemies were bound to dismember that empire, something the USA's foes cannot easily do...

...In return, I ask the Left to begin to reconsider its own record, especially in damaging the family, ruining the schools, and making Britain a land fit for pornographers...

...The history of the world so far suggests that the nation-state is the largest unit in which it is possible to be unselfish to any effect...

...It just might prove to be the opportunity for Britain—once again—to realize its danger at the last moment and, by realizing it, to avoid it...

...imaginations of the educated, the fair and open-minded and the democratic, the heraldic flags still flutter over the tents at Runnymede as King John resentfully agrees to limits placed on his power by the Magna Carta, the dry rattle of steel can still be heard in Whitehall as the House of Commons defies a swaggering King Charles I, London crowds still cheer as honest juries refuse to convict those whom the state seeks to persecute, the first Queen Elizabeth invents religious tolerance, Nelson and Wellington vanquish the overweening power of Bonaparte, leaving the world free and at peace for a century...

...What is more, the project is—by its own rules—irrer 56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 versible...

...At first sight it seems unlikely...

...Within that state, of course, family disagreements No independent nation manages without a currency—it is not a symbol of nationhood, like a flag, but a fact of nationhood, like a legal system, a frontier, or an army...

...British citizens now have only the brief space left before the next general election in which to decide whether they wish to endorse the burial of a great and civilized nation, or to halt a process which they never asked for or voted for, or were even asked if they wanted, which has brought about misery, decadence, and ignorance, and which threatens to abolish one of the happiest, fairest, and kindest societies which has ever existed in this imperfect world...

...Here at last is a full-scale battle against a recognizaThis appeal is not directed only to those who feel that they have become foreigners in their own land and wish that they could turn the clock back...

...Her age had gone, and larger powers had robbed her of her role...

...This mental pageant sprang to life in the free world's mind most powerfully in 1940, when every last element of it was summoned up by Winston Churchill to stiffen British and American resolve in the face of Nazi and Soviet power...

...If Britain chooses to merge herself into this new European power, or is maneuvered into doing so, she will cease to exist as the country she has been since before the Declaration of Independence...

...If we do not wish to experience it, if we believe that our society has already abandoned too many of its restraints and good manners, this is the opportunity to halt the process, re-examine what we have been and might be again, and to reassert a culture which has done the world a great deal more good than harm...

...What is more, a currency is a highly visible sign of who governs and who is sovereign...

...It was as if the political elite and the voters could not bear to carry on at the level to which Mrs...

...and Canada than she does with her neighbors across the Channel...

...For the first time, the long, gradual, and rather tedious process of European integration looks urgent and even dramatic...

...Britain's empire was stretched across the world rather than conveniently concentrated on one continent...

...Other great and picturesque states have been reduced to the level of tourist attractions and museums...

...It is dangerous for my country that the citizens who care most about it are still divided by sterile name-calling which dates from the Thatcher period...

...Thatcher, because her moral and cultural failures had serious consequences for her own cause as well as for the whole country...

...It will not matter if they want lower taxes or higher ones, more hospitals or more warships, smaller school classes or a new selective state education system...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 57...

...The world will be able to manage quite well without Britain...

...Under the plans for Economic and Monetary Union, the British will pass these decisions to a supranational power where they will always be a minority voice, and where their specific British traditions are despised or unknown...

...She certainly became far richer...

...They saw, in this deliberate sinking back into third-class status, the result of a long struggle for the national soul...

...The pound sterling, until the First World War, took the form of a gold coin actually known as The Sovereign, which so symbolized the power and hegemony of the British Empire that it was accepted as currency in most parts of the world...

...To outsiders, it was baffling to watch as the British petulantly dispensed with the most distinguished leader they had thrown up in a generation, replacing her first with the mumbling, directionless John Major and then with Tony Blair, a sort of pocket-sized Bill Clinton (in politics rather than personal life...

...Fortunately for Britain and the world, the idea of Britain did exist, and has continued to do so through the long, awkward years of the Cold War and the embarrassing decline of Britain from great nation to whatever she is now...

...I have seen much to hate here— much to forgive, but in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live...

...But I think it is important that Anglophiles—especially those in North America—begin to understand that the imagined ideal Britain which they have treasured for so long has been swept away and is about to be replaced by an entirely different country, a place of shrinking liberties, of increasingly arbitrary authority, of bad manners and violence, of illiteracy and ignorance, of cringing conformism...

...Political correctness," a very unfunny project to make it impossible to express certain ideas, has been alarmingly successful...

...Both Left and Right were wrong about the Thatcher government, which turns out to have been a much more complicated thing than it seemed at the time...

...The disappearance of the Queens head from these notes, though not in itself remotely important, will bring home to many otherwise indifferent British people that they have lost something important and lasting...

...Many of its moving spirits are jealous of America's role in European affairs and would like to see it diminished...

...This is the real meaning of the intense diplomatic and economic struggle now taking place over the nature and powers of the European Union—a grouping of nations which many Americans wrongly see as benevolent and friendly...

...We have been so safe from such threats for so long that most of us have never felt the insecure, passionate form of nationalism which is all too familiar to Poles, Frenchmen, and other less fortunate peoples...

...No serious independent nation manages without a currency—because it is not a symbol of nationhood, like a flag or an 'We need to put a human face on greed...

...about some of the great issues before us, we should be divided in the face of a common enemy...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 57perfect world...

...Britain, in Europe yet not of it, shares far more with the U.S...