I must sadly admit that some mornings, I am no end horrified to read news, commentary and opinions originating from the once-Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free.
How shall we extoll thee, who are born of … someplace else, and paddled there on a rubber raft, fully intending to scrounge generous benefits. The migrants appear to have no other motivation for getting into Britain, other than to use and exploit the place and native citizens in passing as they would a hotel room or a prostitute. In this cynical exercise, they appear to be enabled by a coterie of vicious people smugglers in it for the graft, spineless politicians who despise the people that they presume to rule, and clueless do-gooders performing conspicuous virtue-signaling whose malevolence is possibly only excelled by their utter haplessness… and determination to caution, arrest, or punish anyone not numbered among the protected class who protests the deliberate, calculated degradation of what was once an orderly, high-trust, and relatively safe society.

Sigh. This is depressing for personal reasons; three of my four grandparents emigrated from Britain early in the 20th century and retained every scrap of their Edwardian-era cultural baggage. I remember my paternal grandparents very well as they lived until I was in my twenties; their accents had softened and been worn away almost entirely, but the peculiar vocabulary and idioms of British English were preserved in a kind of verbal amber. This amber was refined and hardened when my mother provided us with kid-lit from that era; Kipling by the shelf-foot, Wind in the Willows, Christopher Robin’s adventures with Pooh, the adventures of Peter Pan, Child’s Garden of Verses – the whole lot. And then I went and read even more of the English lit body of work … to the point where I have since joked that I am fluent in both American and Brit English. When I first set foot in the land of my ancestors, in 1970 and again in 1976, it was an utterly schizophrenic experience. I had never been there, but it was all familiar. I knew this place, the culture, the language, all of it. I had walked it in dreams, through books and media, and the memories of grandparents and great-aunts.

Exhibiting a Union Jack or the red and white cross of St. Andrew appears to be right up there with the Nazi swastika, in the eyes of the British ruling class these days … something to be deplored by all correct-thinking people. The current British government apparently sees nothing unseemly in flying a Palestinian or a Pakistani flag in the same venue. And appear perfectly comfortable with arresting. convicting and imprisoning those mostly pale native Anglo-Saxons who criticize government policies on social media – or who object to having their wives and daughters harassed in the streets by foreign perverts, stabbed at dance class, or at worst and most notoriously, sex-trafficked by a set of long-resident and usually Muslim migrants. Indeed, the British government, bureaucracy and establishment media appeared to have been eager to shelter and protect the ethnic Pakistani sex-traffickers, right down to the present day … just as long as the white victims of such treatment are from working class, disadvantaged or dysfunctional families. Hope and glory, mother of the free, indeed.

The latest incident of this involves a young teenaged girl who brandished a knife and a hatchet in defense of her younger sister – against a couple of people harassing and taunting the girls. Of course the girl with the knife and hatchet was detained by police, as the low-life goaded her deliberately, and videoed the encounter. Of course he would be one of the privileged and sheltered pets of the ruling class crowd, just like the rest of the grooming-gang rapists. I wonder if he teases and torments zoo animals from a safe distance, or large dogs behind fences, too. (Long discussion thread here, to include more information and a give-send-go page for the girl – who likely needs all the help she can get which the Starmer government distains to offer her … because she comes from a rough family.)

Is that Britain that I remember still there, in any part? Reading the news over the last decade or two, one really has to wonder if there is much left of that Britain. The Britain that my grandparents remembered has faded and morphed into something that they wouldn’t recognize – and I’m not certain that I see anything like what I remember from those visits in the 1970s, especially not when it comes to the cities; London, which was shabby and comfortable, leavened with green parks and narrow streets lined with two-story brick row-houses all with pocket-handkerchief gardens, or the depressing streets of soot-grimed red brick which seemed to cluster particularly closely around major urban train stations. It seems that large tracts of English cities are now indistinguishable from Lagos, Karachi or Islamabad, that the ancient churches – which weren’t all that crowded when we visited in the 70s – are all but empty, save for holiday services or the occasional posh wedding.
Rue, rue Britainnia indeed. So much for never being slaves.