Mrs Thatcher privatised British Telecom, British Airways, British Leyland. But we still have a nationalised British political culture: the reflexive gripe that, if something’s wrong with your local hospital or your local school, it ought to be fixed by some secretary of state in a Whitehall department. It never will be. But the way to get some dynamism and creativity into the system is to denationalise the problems, and make them local issues to be solved locally, in a thousand different ways. As Mrs Thatcher recognised, the British are an inventive people. Unfortunately, though she freed them to apply that inventiveness to their economic life, they’re artificially prevented from applying it to everything else. It’s time to complete the revolution.
***
Indeed, that is why Britain is doomed.
Churchill saved it for nothing.
We hear a great deal about British bravery during the Blitz, but wasn’t that mostly short-term stoicism? The Englishman’s usual sanguine temperament — a “can’t be chuffed” indifference –ratcheted up to account for the temporary annoyance of falling bombs?
I always say we should read the newspaper upside down, and that the real story is in the comments section.
This is true at the Daily Mail, but the “real story” is just as depressing as the purported one, it’s just not as obviously awful.
Indeed, hundreds of right thinking people will take the time to weigh in, and sensibly denounce the DM‘s outrage of the day.
But note those comments carefully:
Not content to declare, “Political correctness gone mad!!!” — an expression we’ve been using for 25 years while things have gone madder — British commenters inevitably add:
“Someone should DO SOMETHING!”
That “someone” never seems to be them.
