England Prevails

It's true, from the Magna Carta to the Home Office, from John of Salisbury to Jacqui Smith, and despite numerous warnings to the contrary, you've come a long way, baby:

Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution's principal tasks was "to alter people's actual psychology". Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people's psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.

The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the "global baggage of empire" was linked to soccer violence by "racist and xenophobic white males". He claimed the English "propensity for violence" was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were "potentially very aggressive".

Only aggressively stupid, Frau Straw, as they have allowed the totalitarian state to advance this far into their lives. Short of total collapse, it's here to stay, unless (however unlikely) the natives undergo a cultural revival laced with some of that dreaded latent "aggressiveness".

Perhaps, as is the case with many sub-sentient animals, if England threatens the young:

In September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher's first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: "It's racist, you're going to get done by the police!" Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed.

Hmm. I suppose this was not a sufficient affront to one's sanity to garner such a response. Never fear, England will do better next time, so long as the people willingly and knowingly entrust their children to its indoctrination-camps.

What if the people, particularly those clinging to the mysticism of the Days of Ignorance, are made to bow to the idol and kiss the ring of the State?

A bishop was warned by the police for not having done enough to "celebrate diversity", the enforcing of which is now apparently a police function. A Christian home for retired clergy and religious workers lost a grant because it would not reveal to official snoopers how many of the residents were homosexual. That they had never been asked was taken as evidence of homophobia.

Unless rolling over and urinating on oneself is a mysterious new strategy in combating the rampant and arbitrary abuse of power, this lands soundly in the camp of "failure". Of course, to have accepted the shekels of the State to begin with was to doom themselves from the start.

I am not yet so callous that I did not feel a small pang of pity for England-That-Was, or the erstwhile-unwilling Scotland and ever-rebellious Ireland, but there is no one to blame for this except themselves, and they deserve everything that is coming to them as a result of their folly, however horrific it may be. What they say is true: none of us is as stupid as all of us.

Perhaps, if the fires burn brightly enough at night from across the Atlantic, some will remember the last days of the United Kingdom and guard against those same mistakes, if just for a little while.