The Gods of the Copybook Headings

David "Bible" Cameron

When I glanced through this story a week ago I didn't initially grasp its significance:

David Cameron last night called on the Archbishop of Canterbury to lead a return to the ‘moral code’ of the Bible.

In a highly personal speech about faith, the Prime Minister accused Dr Rowan Williams of failing to speak ‘to the whole nation’ when he criticised Government austerity policies and expressed sympathy with the summer rioters.

Mr Cameron declared Britain ‘a Christian country’ and said politicians and churchmen should not be afraid to say so. He warned that a failure to ‘stand up and defend’ the values and morals taught by the Bible helped spark the riots and fuelled terrorism.

Pausing to consider that one. A British Prime Minister has just told the Archbishop of Canterbury he is insufficiently Christian. The world is beyond satire. It should be clear that Cameron is hardly a Bible thumper, espressing a sort of hazy version of Christianity that boils down "be nice to everyone." He is not the reincarnation of William Jennings Bryan. Confronted with the nilhism of modern Britain he is grasping for something that might provide an answer. Being the default philosophy of British history, as well as most of the West, Christianity is being grasped at. That does not make Davy Cameron a Christian so much as a desperate pol.

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.

 

Davy's Double Talk

The Big Society shrinks a bit:

In his most forthright speech on the issue since he became Prime Minister, he will say that mass immigration has led to "discomfort and disjointedness" in neighbourhoods because some migrants have been unwilling to integrate or learn English.

Pledging to cut the numbers entering Britain to tens of thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands, Mr Cameron will say that "for too long, immigration has been too high".

Somewhere Enoch Powell is grunting his approval. The British Prime Minister then blamed the welfare state for creating a generation of loafers. 

He will say that the "real issue" is "migrants are filling gaps in the labour market left wide open by a welfare system that for years has paid British people not to work".

"Put simply, we will never control immigration properly unless we tackle welfare dependency," Mr Cameron will say.

Give Davy enough time and he'll start pointing out Britain's demographic decline. Then we'll have Mark Steyn grunting his approval. This being modern Britain anyone who brings up the topic of immigration will be immediately denounced as a racist. Even if the immigrants are white. A large number of recent immigrants to Britain are actually from Eastern Europe. They do the jobs that lower-class Britons are too dole dependent to bother doing.

Davy being a clever chap knows that to protect himself from charges of racism he must denounce someone, or something, of being racist. It's a trick that was common in Communist countries. You call your neighbour a reactionary before he calls you a reactionary. Luckily for the Prime Minister a great big soft target drifted into view recently. Even more luckily that target was his alma mater. 

According to the Press Association, David Cameron has been attacking Oxford University’s admissions record. He said: “I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year. I think that is disgraceful, we have got to do better than that.

”No, Prime Minister, I’m afraid it’s you who has to do better. As a five-minute glance at the Oxford University website reveals, Oxford actually admitted at least 20 black British students last year. And that’s only the number to have actually told Oxford their ethnicity.

Facts are stubborn things, unless you're a politician. Digging a bit deeper we find:

Some 16,591 students at Oxford disclosed their ethnicity as they started the 2009-10 academic year. Of those, 12,671 were white, 1,477 were Asian, 1,098 were Chinese, 838 were of mixed race and 254 of other ethnicity.

Black students accounted for only 253 undergraduates and postgraduates.It meant that almost a quarter of students were from ethnic minority backgrounds but just 1.5 per cent were black. According to the 2001 census, two per cent of the country was black.

In other words blacks are somewhat under-represented at Oxford. Considering they tend to come from poorer and less educated families this is hardly surprising. By jumping up and down and claiming - falsely - that Oxford admitted only one black person the Prime Minister could smear his old school as being racist, while earning brownie points with the British racial grievance mongering industry. 

Since this is Britain there is also a class component to the controversy. For years British politicos have been hammering Oxbridge on their failure to admit students from government run schools in greater numbers. The admissions officers at those two universities have frankly stated that products of the government school system are simply not up to standard.

Now what politician - even a nominally conservative one - is going to publicly admit that government education is a slow-motion disaster. That after nearly a century and a half the state schools simply can't match the quality of the old privately run grammar schools, which were largely destroyed by the post-war move toward comprehensive schools, much less hold a candle to the great and storied public schools.

The Heart of the Beast

A modern day Red Robbo shows us the soul of unionism:

Crow has a bust of Lenin in his office and embraces communism, though his priority is not so much a Soviet-style state as ensuring "opportunities for all." A "utopian society" where everyone is earning the same amount of money would be unrealistic, he admits; lucky, given his own six-figure remuneration package. Brain surgeons deserve more than general secretaries, he says. He just wants everyone to have a chance to be a brain surgeon. So is he really a communist? "Just because you go to the Virgin Islands doesn't make you a virgin," he says bafflingly.

He believes in aspiration, but only up to a point. "They should ban private schools and private health. It's OK if someone wants to spend money on a car or a holiday but when it comes to health and education that's a different matter," he argues.

Other elements of his political philosophy include an aversion to free trade and a desire for much heavier import and export duties. He insists: "They say the only way that we can compete now with China is making robots build cars. Now, that might be cheaper, but if you have robots build cars, how are robots going to buy them?"

The interview takes place at a posh London restaurant. Fascinating.

The Smartest Parasite in England

The more I read, the more sense it makes:

All my family have worked all their lives - they worked down pits, in the steelworks, and they've all died from illnesses related to that.

And they've had nothing to show for it at the end of it.

All that money they've paid in, they've paid out again to the bankers. I don't think my family would begrudge the pittance they give me every week.

My family, who've paid in all their lives and got nothing back, I'm just taking a little pension out of that.

I'm not outraged. This man is the Alfred P. Doolittle of our age. A towering mind that has peered beneath the surface of modern realities. 

Think about it.

Almost everyday of his existence, almost every breadth taken by this professional loafer, has been paid for by someone else. No medical impediments. His English is superior to many retail workers, and more than a few call center operators. There's nothing wrong with him, except he has come to the conclusion that working life is a mug's game.

There's the hassle of getting up in the morning, commuting to work, putting up with your idiot co-workers and your even dumber boss. You sweat, you slave and you save and the government takes nearly half of it all. Heaven help you if you get into a nasty divorce settlement. There's a fair chance that an ordinary, hardworking British bloke will reach middle age about as broke as neo-Doolittle, but with the added benefits of an ulcer and computer monitor induced eye strain.

Now you're saying that I'm missing the spiritual aspect of the thing. This neo-Doolittle has no self respect. Can't look himself in the mirror, because all his life he has lived at someone's expense. Do you think he cares? What spiritual benefits does a typical office drone derive from his job anyway? For most people work is just a paycheck. In another age that might not have been the case.

Since there is no moral aspect to work, no ethos of honest reward for honest toil, and it's just a grubby transaction, then why work? The welfare state has made the humbler lines of employment unattractive to the British lower classes. The popular culture and the education system regard capitalism as a gigantic scam. Why is anyone surprised that people - millions of them - go to the logical conclusion and just drop out of the workforce?

Like the economists keep telling us: People respond to incentives. Cultural no less than economic.

I Thought Handguns Were Banned in England?

I guess no one told this criminal:

The man chased an armed robber fleeing after an armed raid on a jewellers in a busy high street, grabbing the gunman by the arm.

Horrified shoppers watched as the robber took aim at his head in the Peterborough street. But the man, believed to be in his 20s, managed to knock the weapon out of his hand and wrestle the gunman to the ground.

The robber pulled free and disappeared into the grounds of Peterborough Cathedral. As police gave chase the hero, who is thought to be in his 20s, slipped away before he could be congratulated for his bravery.

Congratulated? In modern England? The constabulary might have arrested him for assaulting the criminal. The thug might also have grounds for a civil suit. If you're going to risk your life defending others, or yourself, from criminals, best to keep quiet about it. No good deed goes unpunished in post-British Britain. When you make owning a gun a criminal offense...

The Law is An Ass

From the unintended consequences file:

Players at Sprowston Recreation Ground Bowls Club, near Norwich, have for years given staff £20 in cash or vouchers at Christmas to thank them for their efforts.But now the club has received a letter from the local parish council warning that if they continue, they could be in breach of the Bribery Act 2010.

Derek Walker, 76, club secretary, said: "I just can't believe it. It's an absolute nonsense.

"The new laws, which were passed by Parliament last year but have not yet come into force, are intended to prevent corruption in foreign business deals involving UK firms.

But this is how many laws work in practice. Their intention might be to prevent this injustice or that, but wind up being interpreted in so literal a manner that their application becomes unjust.