ALIEN NATION

Michael Wharton laments the

emergence of an odious, degraded and conformist country

`DAMN you, England!' cried John Osborne in one of his well-publicised the- atrical outbursts in the Fifties. What he was complaining about, I forget: the short- comings of dramatic critics, perhaps, or snobbery, or the royal family or some such innocent matter. If it was really about the terrible state of England, his aim was off the mark. In those days, England still exist- ed. Seen from the year 2000, that time when wartime austerity was fading away at last seems one of blameless pleasure and virtuous simplicity.

This is not to make the notorious mis- take of looking back to an imaginary 'gold- en age', though there is bound to be a subjective element, a regret for lost child- hood and youth in such thoughts about the past. But the chasm between then and now is wide and terrible.

The inexorable process of England's dis- appearance, which is reaching its consum- mation under the Blairite dispensation, with its obsessive hatred of the past, its incessant gabble about 'change', 'youth', and 'modernisation', its total subjugation to America, had, of course, already begun in those days. Wilson would soon be talk- ing of the 'white-hot cutting-edge of tech- nology', which was to transform everything.

The English countryside, still in my own lifetime the most beautiful in the world, was already threatened by what the archi- tectural writer Ian Nairn called `subtopia'.

Big Blair is watching you

The Labour government was out of power, but socialism was still advancing. With a strange loss of nerve, amounting at Suez to a nervous breakdown, the British Empire was already melting away, soon to be in the hands of rulers incompetent or worse.

The left-liberal grip on public opinion was already tightening. That English patriotism, which could hitherto be taken for granted without any shouting and boasting, was becoming a matter for sneering jokes. Not to believe in internationalism, in what was later called 'One World', was beginning to seem misguided, if not positively evil.

Yet with all the evidence of collapse, something recognisable as the England of the past, with its splendours and miseries, its virtues and faults, its blessed anomalies and absurdities, was still reassuringly in place. It is heartbreaking for us who love these things — as it must be a matter of gloating satisfaction for left-liberals — to reflect on how it has been lost.

We have lost our countryside, disfigured or buried under mean housing estates and factories and enormous road systems, transformed by factory farming. By the end of the Fifties, hedges and wild flowers had already gone from most of lowland England; wild birds were dying out, equally the victims of poison and machines. With them went old quietness and seemliness. And, as people began to notice that loss, the 'environment' was invented and, as though by an inexorable 20th-century law, itself became an industry and an instru- ment of state control.

In alliance with the expanding 'leisure' and 'planning' industries, it began to turn England, once so full of unexpected mar- vels, into a country where 'museums of scenery' and architecture became alterna- tive attraction to people's fun fairs, theme parks and working reconstructions of farms, factories and mines.

Various absurdly named bodies — the Countryside Commission, English Her- itage, English Nature and so on — came into being and were soon covering hill and dale with a dense carpet of acronyms. Like almost everything that has been hap- pening in England during the last 50 years, these bodies, with their mission to educate and control and, incidentally, to discourage anybody with an interest in nature or history from discovering any- thing for himself, are instruments of creeping socialism, steps towards the Total State where all are nominally equal and all, in the cant Blairite phrase, 'have a contribution to make to society'.

In the last 50 years we have not only lost our country, we have lost our people, at least in large centres of population; and most of all in London, transformed by mass immigration and the alien manners and cus- toms it has brought, most significantly in the ever-growing barbarism of popular music and entertainment. In 50 years what was a largely homogeneous European Anglo-Celtic nation has been turned into what is officially called a 'multiracial soci- ety', a thing neither wanted nor asked for.

What for left-liberal thinkers is a won- derful and admirable achievement has been brought about in the first place by exploiting the sense of decency, fair play and tolerance — things proverbially English — and secondly by propaganda, backed by law and education, making peo- ple ashamed and even frightened to acknowledge the most obvious differences between races.

One of the most pernicious effects of all this is a pervading feeling of neurotic guilt and, paradoxically, a morbid obsession with `race' itself. This can take most eccen- tric forms. Not long ago, during a more than usually violent outburst of 'anti- racism', the race-crazed eternal student Jack Straw announced that there would have to be a quota of black policemen in north Wales because, although there are hardly any black inhabitants, the odd black visitor might occasionally appear on holi- day. (The same methods of pseudo-moral- istic entrapment backed by coercion are now being used to impose the legal and social equality of homosexuals on an unwilling, even hostile majority.) As for the general loss of our minds, and even our hearts and souls, the biggest influence of the last century has been the growth of television, which was just start- ing up in the Fifties. Since then, when it was no more than an interesting novelty, this most evil and unnecessary of all the evil and unnecessary inventions of the 20th century has swollen into a blood-chilling monster, employing hundreds of thou- sands of people, some of them quite capa- ble of useful work, in devising and broadcasting an unstoppable deluge of what is at best trivial and silly, and at worst degenerate and wicked.

This power has infected and corrupted the rest of the 'media', so that even once `serious' newspapers are full of odious and degrading drivel, much of it concerned with the puffed-up, vainglorious television workers and personalities themselves. It has fostered criminality, brutality and cru- elty and pervaded the minds of the sug- gestible with images of polymorphous sexual hedonism. It has softened the brains of supposedly great big grown-up politi- cians, public men and bishops, so that they will still be found arguing about sex educa- tion in schools when war, plague, famine and pestilence are raging all about them.

The corrupting ideas spewed out by tele- vision do not stop with popular entertain- ment. They are powerful even in the field of the popular science which has taken over in the collapse of religious belief and the flounderings of the churches amid the ruins. When people are led to believe, in their misunderstanding of scientific pro- nouncements, that they are 'really' animals or insects or electronic machines, the more weak-minded will be led to behave accord- ingly, unchecked by what seem obsolete notions of morality. 'I can't help myself; it's in my genes.'

Everywhere, illusion flourishes. In the rage of fashion, anything and everything can be turned on its head. Thus it is a received opinion in Blairite England that the `arts' are flourishing here as never before, and are the admiration of the world, when it is plain that they are grow- ing daily more trivial and superficial, the chosen domain of blowhards, charlatans and their ingenious promoters.

What a strange place the country once called England has become! The Blairite dispensation, with all its agencies, is working all out to ensure that the left-lib- eral consensus, whose basic principle is The countryside in August the deadly fallacy of absolute human equality, shall be accepted by all as the only permissible way of thinking about the world and, in due course, as Orwell foresaw, the only possible way of thinking about anything when the words for think- ing otherwise have been censored out. The old words, and the good old English attitudes of common sense and bloody- mindedness, will no longer be conceivable in the humbug-ridden country described by Blair as `a beacon to the world'.

It is a malign phantasmagoria, where the ancient institutions of the monarchy and Parliament are being stealthily abolished, and the last remnants of a ruling class have already disappeared. We are living in a country where weird, unreal shapes, phan- toms of the night, 'thought forms', per- haps, of a type commonly found hitherto only in old Tibet, are floating about on the edge of our consciousness, sham personali- ties and celebrities, presented as if they were figures of high importance: Lord Alli, the millionaire homosexual Asian life peer whose fortune comes from low-grade tele- vision programmes; Lord Winston, the Arch-fertiliser; devious, shape-changing Mandelson; gargoyle Serota, with his per- forming troupe of fashionable rubbish- artists; grinning Branson, the people's businessman, tipped to be the first presi- dent of the British Republic; the gruesome Gallagher brothers; and hordes of million- aire photographers, hairdressers, fashion designers, arrogant, mad scientists and foul-mouthed footballers.

What has summoned this ghastly crew of popular idols from limbo to infest our country? Who will send them back again? The `ordinary people', 'the silent majori- ty', 'Middle England' — there are so many names for official sneering — seem to be waiting in a daze, helpless and hyp- notised. Yet there are plenty of good, sensible and able people living and work- ing in England now. Are they so content- ed with their comfortable, mostly prosperous lives, their statutory two cars per family, their two children, their gyms and golf courses and holidays in distant places? 'They have little pleasures for the day and little pleasures for the night; but they have regard to health.'

They do not think of what may be in store for them: the total multicultural One World State where all must conform and, because it will be convenient and comfortable, all but a few malcontents will find it acceptable as the Germans found its obverse, the radical Nazi state, acceptable.

Will they ever raise themselves and dis- perse this nightmare, bring back something of the England that has been lost and give it life for the future? They have nothing but themselves to rely on. They will get no help from any established political party. They had better lose no time. Even stranger reversals may have happened in history. But I cannot think of any.