The Gods of the Copybook Headings

The End is Not Nigh

Most of you show up here every week to feel the gloom. The world is going to hell and we're along for the ride. It's gotten worse since my grandpa's day. The men were men then, not little sissies with earrings. All true. Honesty, or what passes for it among the unpaid pundit class, obliges us to see both sides of the sacking of Rome. 

I'm not suggesting we see it from the vandals perspective. Which seems to be  the reaction of the British policing establishment at the moment. Just to observe that Rome was sacked quite a few times before the Empire itself went dark. Even in the days of the early Republic the Eternal City got the once over from the Gauls. 

That first time, in 387 BC, is instructive. The Romans learned from the disaster, reforming their military and political system to become more proficient. It was a another eight centuries before another non-Roman army took the capital. Even Alaric's capture of the city in 410 AD wasn't the end of Rome. It took another seven decades before Romulus Augustus was deposed. Civilizations may die from suicide rather than murder, but it usually takes a few attempts.

The riots that have taken much of urban England are not the end of civilized life. Fond though I am of the decline of Empire meme, the country has been through far, far worse. Just keeping to the major riots since the Restoration: 1668 Bawy House Riots, 1780 Gordon Riots, 1791 Preistly Riots, 1816 Spa Fields Riots, 1819 Peterloo Massacre, 1830 Swing Riots, 1832 riots surrounding the passage of the Great Reform Act, 1896 Newlyn riots, 1907 Brown Dog riots, 1919 Epsom Riot, 1919 Battle of Bow Street, 1958 Notting Hill, 1970 Garden House riot, 1975 Chapeltown race riot, 1980 St Paul riot, a string of riots in 1981 including the one in Brixton, another Brixton riot in 1985, 1990 Poll Tax riot, 1995 Brixton riot (seeing a pattern there), 2001 Bradford riot and 2005 Birmingham race riots.

While the British are hardy the elegant practitioners of the riot in the French manner, it is a form of social disturbance to which the sceptred isle is not unfamiliar. A few common elements. It does tend to be poor people who riot. This doesn't mean that they are desperately poor, or rioting to obtaining food and basic clothing. The focus of the recent British riots has been less on bread and Marmite and more on plasma screens and high-end sneakers. 

Put yourself in the shoes of the urban poor. The welfare state takes care of your basic needs. Perhaps you work some cash jobs on the side. You'll never get rich and probably never work in a job where a criminal background check is required.  The police have essentially declared parts of where you live no-go zones. Whatever education you had was from the state-schools in bad areas. Family breakdown is common. A motivating and positive system of belief is alien or incomprehensible. Hope, God and government are meaningless. 

Violence is a way of life for such people. It take little to spark fights, which are daily occurrences. A large fight that the police are unwilling or unable to contain transforms itself into a riot. Like any fire it will grow until it runs out of combustible material i.e. stuff to loot and people prone to looting. In a rich country like Britain crime is driven to a great extent by calculation. Can I get away with it? The tepid response of the British police gave a pretty clear signal of yes.

This is not the end of England. It might be the end of Davy Cameron, depending on how he handles the fallout. Too many foreigners have a Masterpiece Theatre view of "this precious stone set in the silver sea." Then there are the bits that look rather like the EastEnders. Still others something that Orwell would have recognized only too well. Real countries, especially big old ones like Britain, are too complicated for simple explanations.

A falling off in educational, political and social standards is certainly evident. The Leviathan of the British state is a grave threat to the future of the country. But we've been here before too, in the 1930s and 1970s. In those times were was still a British Establishment worthy of the name. Politicians could quote Virgil while making public speeches and be understood. Britain emerged once from Hogarthian squalor, it can do so again. There has always been a great deal of ruin in the country, even in the good old days.

 

Out of the Clear Blue Sky

Achtung! Spitfire!

In 1931, the British Air Ministry sent out a demanding new specification for a fighter aircraft. It was a remarkable document for two reasons. The first was that throughout its existence the Royal Air Force had been dismissive of fighters. The conventional wisdom was that bombers could not be stopped. Instead, foreshadowing the nuclear doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the correct use of air power was widely presumed to be to build the largest possible fleet of bombers and strike any enemy with overwhelming force. The second reason was that the specification's demands seemed almost impossible to meet. Rather than rely on known technology, the bureaucrats wanted aviation engineers to abandon their orthodoxies and produce something completely new.

The Letters of Ellen Terry

TLS:

By these criteria Ellen Terry was a remarkable letter writer indeed, and her letters invariably have an air of improvisation rather than premeditation. This she achieved by being notably eccentric in her approach. Punctuation, grammar and spelling were of interest only to the extent that she could make them work for her own ends, achieving the emphases and, crucially, the sound that she wanted. Her writing is supremely, almost madly, alive with single, double and triple underlinings, crossings-out, gaps, unexpected capitals, multiple dashes, strung-out hyphens, parentheses, squiggles, blots, and sudden variations in the size of her script. It is regrettable that neither of these volumes contains any facsimiles, a weakening omission.

Friends from Cambridge

NYT:

The five spies from Trinity College, Cambridge, may have betrayed their country during the cold war, but they performed an indisputable service for British literature. A number of works have either been inspired or enlivened by the misdeeds of Kim Philby, John Cairncross, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt. In Anthony Powell’s panoramic “Dance to the Music of Time,” for example, Lord Widmerpool gets into political hot water for what his wife derisively calls “his little under-the-counter Communist games.”

Then there is the Irish writer John Banville’s elegant roman à clef, “The Untouchable,” which explored Blunt’s life. And novelists of such varying stripes as Ian Fleming and John le Carré have drawn sustenance from the treachery that emanated from 1930s Cambridge, where enlistment in the worker’s revolution seems to have easily accompanied sipping claret, participating in debauches and collecting Poussin paintings. After Burgess and Maclean, and later Philby, fled to Moscow, the K.G.B. must have sometimes wondered whether the information they supplied was worth the sheer bother of having to put up with these spoiled brats.

The Greatest Briton?

A hard choice in that land of giants. James Watt, however, is a serious contender:

When the Bank of England introduces its new £50 notes later this year, two men will appear on them: James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton. It is an extraordinary honour – but then, Watt's was an extraordinary life. For many Britons, he was "the greatest benefactor of the human race", the man whose steam engines had powered the Industrial Revolution on which Britain's prosperity was built. When, on his death in 1819, he became the first engineer to be commemorated in Westminster Abbey, it was seen as a fitting reward to a man who was seen as equal, in his own way, to Newton, Archimedes or even Shakespeare.

I can still remember when the Industrial Revolution was regarded as a kind Dark Age. A horrible epoch before the advent of the merciful welfare state. The increasing recognition that steam lifting millions out of poverty, far more than any government program, is an important and positive cultural shift. James Watt was a far greater humanitarian than Lord Beveridge or Mother Theresa.