Perfect Englishmen?

I don’t watch Royal weddings or take much interest in test matches.

I lived in Birmingham and London but would never identify myself as a ‘Brummie’ or a ‘Londoner’.

I loathe DIY and quitting  a soul-destroying 9 to 5 job was one of my better decisions.

A young person following my example might, if Max Hastings is to be believed, be the type to be involved in the lawlessness in England over the past few days.

In his column for The Daily Mail yesterday, Hastings blamed the liberal values in British society for this  feral behaviour.

Here are two short extracts from his piece:

“They [the young people involved in the riots]  do not watch royal weddings or notice Test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies. Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.  They have their being only in video games and street-fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious”.

The notions of doing a nine-to-five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.

More than anything this reveals the distance between establishment figures like him and ‘ordinary lives’.  At no point in this bigoted article does he even consider the fact that the selfishness, greed and rabid competitiveness he criticises are fundamental values of the capitalist system  he implicitly endorses.

Margaret Thatcher, still Britain’s most revered (and reviled)  post-war leader, denied the existence of ‘society’ as a valid concept and stated that the good Samaritan was a bad economist.  Leaders and institutions who follow such values either in word or deed cannot suddenly cry foul when the dire effects of rampant individualism and consumerism come home to roost.

This is not to justify the looting and violence in England’s cities but I think offers is a more credible cause to the shocking scenes than a lack of interest in cricket or royalty.

Max Hastings, who incidentally did not stick with his first wife and three children, once described himself growing up as  “an eager and somewhat credulous reader of P. G. Wodehouse, whose works formed my image of how young English gentlemen comported themselves”.  If Jeeves and Wooster are to be offered as models of Englishness then we are further up shit creek than I thought.

Link:

The moral decay is as bad at the top as at the bottom (Daily Telegraph – A more rounded article on the same issue)