Being British is Bliss

Published: 23 March 2020

It is hard to imagine the people of any other country in the world, except for Britain, ignoring the advice of the government and health professionals and in the midst of a pandemic that is killing thousands around the world and plunging countries into chaos heading off to the seaside for the day. The fact that this behavior in Britain is exempt from surprise is not surprising either. We are immune to it. Every day we are treated by the tabloids to scenes and stories of sleazy, tacky, crude and crass Brits competing for top place in the league of obscenity.

When we lived in Britain my wife had the great misfortune, like the police and NHS, of being on the frontline. My wife was a teacher, which has to be one of the most thankless and God-forsaken jobs in the country. Never a day went past when she would return home with the sordid details of grossly behaved, self-centered school kids and their equally obnoxious parents. There was, in the several schools in which she worked and, we can presume from what we hear and read, throughout the entire British education system, a deeply entrenched, extremely disturbing and highly toxic ethos, a morally corrosive undercurrent that had seeped out of the PC mindset and (sorry to use this word) infected everyone.

At its core there was a contagious admixture, a poisonous combination of entitlement, egomania and absolute selfishness. My wife defined this psychological-emotional malaise as the ‘Me, Myself, I’ attitude. It was rife in almost every school she taught in, and what was more disturbing was that it was systemic as well as endemic. The more she experienced it, or rather the fallout from it, the more convinced she became that it was a product of 70-plus years of so-called progressive liberalism, which had, in its Tony Blair heyday, all but completely disempowered adults in favour of child empowerment.

The clue lies in that most celebrated of liberal words, the High Priestess of Political Correctness, ‘Rights’. Rights are everywhere, and everywhere you look are Rights. Not that teachers have any rights at all: it is open season on them. There were no signs on the school walls where my wife worked, as there are in banks, Job Centres and doctor’s surgeries, stating ‘Our staff have the right to work in a safe and abuse-free environment …’. Empowered school kids know ~ they have been taught by their parents (by government and the media) that they can be as disruptive, offensive and abusive as they like towards teachers, and can act this way with impunity, as they have the Rights and teachers have none. But this glib, blasé and malicious attitude does not end there. It is extended to adults in every sphere and at every level and is manifest in blatant disrespect for teachers, parents, neighbours, police, government and society at large.

Brits ignore social distancing

But we cannot blame everything on Tony Blair (can we?). Historically, the rot set in during the 1960s and has travelled ‘progressively’ down, mutating in strength and vileness, through subsequent layers of generations until it hit rock bottom, which is where we are today.

“’ere I’ve got my Rights!” was a mantra that was thrown at my wife when she was a teacher day after day after day. What was most telling, however, was the conjoined absence of the words ‘obligation’ and ‘responsibility’, and here was the rub: a ‘do as we please life’ underpinned by Rights but no acknowledgement of, no understanding of, indeed no knowledge of the fundamental prerequisites by which those Rights are granted, ie personal obligation and social responsibility.

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” — Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Critique of Practical Reason

Fast forward now and, as I have said, we are where we are today. In the midst of the greatest crisis that the UK ~ the world ~ has experienced since World War II, and with people facing death all around them, the Rights-infected British public ignore advice to self-isolate, ignore the need for social distancing and continue to congregate en masse at the coast, in parks and wherever they know they should not.

Brits ignore social distancing

If it was not so pathetically sad it would be laughable. I am tempted to call it Carry On Infecting, but that would just be cruel: it would be cruel to the people they will infect, to the people that will die, but cruel, most of all, not to mention insulting, to the doctors, nurses and health clinicians who are laying their lives on the line each day in administering to the sick and dying whilst trying to contain this dreadful disease.

Is the situation as hopeless as it seems? Possibly not.

In perusing The Guardian and The Independent recently (yes, I am sorry, but I do that sometimes), have you detected a distinct change of attitude in some of the columnists, one that suggests that even the most dizzy-headed kite-flying liberals have come down to earth with a jolt? Rights are important things, and let us not forget it, but there is a line where political theory ends and commonsense starts and that line today (and always) we should not be allowed to cross, either guided by a conscious respect for decency and humanity or where selfishness subverts this by any measure necessary to ensure the best result for the greater good.

“One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.” — Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Critique of Practical Reason

Copyright © 2018-2020 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.