{"id":7080,"date":"2011-01-06T07:38:39","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T11:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=7080"},"modified":"2011-01-06T08:48:44","modified_gmt":"2011-01-06T12:48:44","slug":"mark-steyn-on-the-state-of-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/01\/06\/mark-steyn-on-the-state-of-britain\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Steyn on the state of Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

From a longer column on the general state of decline in the Anglosphere, Mark Steyn<\/a> points out the negative aspects of British public education on modern day “Britons”:<\/p>\n

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In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a form of child abuse, one that puts a huge question mark over the future. Why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it\u2019s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that\u2019s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? And what if you don\u2019t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is, in its own malign way, a remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which is that their society is a racket founded on various historical injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers.<\/p>\n

When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the \u201cabolition of want,\u201d to be accomplished by \u201ccooperation between the State and the individual.\u201d In attempting to insulate the citizenry from the vicissitudes of fate, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity. Churchill called his book The History of the English-Speaking Peoples<\/em> — not the English-Speaking Nations. The extraordinary role played by those nations in the creation and maintenance of the modern world derived from their human capital.<\/p>\n

What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ\u2019s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. One-fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no adult works. Just under 900,000 people have been off sick for over a decade, claiming \u201csick benefits,\u201d week in, week out, for ten years and counting. \u201cIndolence,\u201d as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a free society, but rarely has any state embraced this oldest temptation as literally as Britain. There is almost nothing you can\u2019t get the government to pay for.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And this bit where he shows that the British government defies parody:<\/p>\n

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For its worshippers, Big Government becomes a kind of religion: the state as church. After the London Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a \u201cBritish equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July,\u201d a new national holiday to bolster British identity. The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian Society, proposed that the new \u201cBritish Day\u201d should be July 5th, the day the National Health Service was created. Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation. A national holiday every July 5th: They can call it Dependence Day.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From a longer column on the general state of decline in the Anglosphere, Mark Steyn points out the negative aspects of British public education on modern day “Britons”: In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,79,84,7],"tags":[139,42],"class_list":["post-7080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-education","category-government","category-history","tag-psychology","tag-sociology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1Qc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7080"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7082,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7080\/revisions\/7082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}