Sallust: Is the UK Heading Towards a Cultural Collapse?

Spectator Australia has a piece by Julie Sladden on ‘a nation in crisis?‘ No prizes for guessing which nation that is. She reluctantly visited Britain in February this year to attend a conference. There’s nothing like seeing how your nation appears to others:

I was right to be worried. As I crisscrossed the country after the conference, I visited with friends and family, made new friends and spoke with strangers, taxi drivers, locals, farmers and fellow travellers. What I saw and heard shocked me. The change that had taken place over a few short years could only be described as alarming.

Once a beacon of stability, democracy and economic prosperity, I noticed social, political and economic fractures that have widened, leaving me concerned the UK is in terrible danger, heading towards a cultural collapse.

The symptoms of this crisis were widespread – evidence of significant migration, declining cultural cohesion, increasing surveillance, policing of freedoms, economic stagnation and a loss of national pride – many of the same problems we have recently witnessed in parts of Australia. But – in true British style – the UK is doing things on a much grander scale, with less sunshine.

From city to countryside it seems everyone is struggling. Like other countries, the UK is suffering an enormous post-pandemic economic hangover, with a cost-of-living crisis, high taxation, and soaring energy costs placing an unbearable burden on ordinary citizens.

In the cities, this burden hits home. The eye-watering price of a bag of groceries makes it hard to comprehend how people afford to eat (many said as much), let alone fill up their cars or pay the power bill.

In the countryside, the farming sector is also under siege. Signs on fences denounced inheritance tax policies that threaten to decimate family-owned farms. The local pub was rich with stories reflecting the pressure cooker of economic strain on British farmers.

The surveillance state is well established in the cities. Despite the expense I took a few cabs, enjoying the ‘knowledge’ imparted by taxi drivers navigating the streets of London. “I expect a weekly notice,” one told me. “They see everything now,” he said referring to London’s CCTV. “You can’t sneeze without someone saying bless you.” Many told me of the Government’s encroaching reach into their lives, from extensive CCTV coverage to digital monitoring. It seems, policies that were initially justified to ‘keep people safe’ had morphed into tools of public control.

Sladden recounts the experience Allison Pearson recently had at the hands of British police officers, part of the reason for a new phenomenon emerging as free speech disappears:

Result? Self-censorship is rife.

As the ability to speak freely has changed so, too, has the mix of people, culture, and religion. I noticed a change in the multicultural mix, particularly in the cities. The 2021 Office for National Statistics (ONS) data also reports a shift in religion with Christians now in the minority – having had the biggest downturn of all religions – and a 44% growth in Muslims over the past decade.

This religious shift appears to be embraced by leaders Prime Minister Keir Starmer and King Charles III, who opened two of the UK’s most iconic landmarks – Windsor Castle and Westminster Hall – for historic Iftar events during Ramadan. Celebrated as powerful gestures of inclusion and national unity, these events included Islamic worship and Qur’anic recitation. As the distinctive call to prayer echoed through the portrait-lined walls of St George’s Hall, I couldn’t help but wonder what the Knights of the Garter of centuries past might have thought.

It seemed to me that Britain had been sold out. This once proud and resolute nation, with a strong sense of identity known both to itself and the world, has lost its way – a shadow of its former self. And many didn’t even realise it was happening.

But, as with a terminally sick patient, where there is life, there is hope. There is a path forward, one that demands courage, strong leadership and a return to core values. The United Kingdom stands at a crossroads. The decline is not inevitable, but reversing it will require bold, unwavering action.

Worth reading in full.

Perhaps at some point the people who lead this country will wake up to the palpable sense of demoralisation and disintegration they’re presiding over. But if you read Richard Littlejohn in the Mail it’s difficult to believe there’s much chance of that:

Manufacturers in every sector are being forced out of business by the highest electricity prices in the developed world, caused by ‘sustainable’ subsidies, Labour’s ban on fracking and refusal to license new North Sea oil and gas development.

Since the national steel strike in 1980, which I covered in my previous incarnation as an industrial correspondent, the number of people employed in steelmaking has fallen from 100,000 to three men and a dog. Former sites have been bulldozed and turned into housing estates or shopping malls.

If and when Scunthorpe shuts, we will be utterly dependent on foreign imports of high-grade steel. We won’t even be able to build railway tracks for HS2. We’ll have to go cap in hand to countries like India and China, where steel is produced using coal-fired blast furnaces which pump out far more planet-destroying pollution than Miliband’s War Of The Worlds windmills are designed to eliminate.

And you can bet your bottom Yuan that, in the event of a looming World War III, the Chinese would cut us off immediately, leaving us up the proverbial without a paddle.

How the hell did we end up at the mercy of potentially hostile foreign powers?

Now the Government has belatedly woken up to the threat from Russia, it is reduced to considering invoking emergency powers to prevent our ability to produce adequate steel supplies from disappearing for good.

It would be a start but nowhere near enough.

Never mind ploughshares into swords. Where are the factories which will turn nationalised steel into tanks and other weapons vital to the defence of our realm?

If Mister Ed’s astronomical electricity bills don’t force them to shut down or relocate to a more economically friendly country, then a combination of Rachel From Complaints’ tax rises and Ginge Rayner’s workers’ rights reforms might deliver the coup de grace for what’s left of British industry.

Also worth reading in full.

Sallust writes for The DailySceptic where this article was sourced