After America - Mark Steyn [98]
What’s he studying at Cambridge? History. Despite that, and despite the prominently displayed words “THE GLORIOUS DEAD,” he had no idea that the monument he was desecrating was a memorial to Britain’s fallen soldiers. As the columnist Julie Burchill observed, Charlie no doubt assumed “the Glorious Dead” was a rock band.22
In 2008, when the economy hit the skids, Gordon Brown and other ministers of the Labour Government fell back on stillborn invocations of “the knowledge economy” that will always make Britain an attractive place to do business because of the “added value” of its educated workforce.23 (You hear the same confident bluster from American experts entirely ignorant of the academic standards of Asia.) Are you serious? Have you set foot in an English state school in the last fifteen years? The well of cultural inheritance in great nations is deep but not bottomless.
What happened to England, the mother of parliaments and a crucible of liberty? Britain, in Dean Acheson’s famous post-war assessment, had lost an empire but not yet found a role. Actually, Britain didn’t so much “lose” the Empire: it evolved peacefully into the modern Commonwealth, which is more agreeable than the way these things usually go. Nor is it clear that modern Britain wants a role, of any kind. Rather than losing an empire, it seems to have lost its point.
WORLD WITHOUT WANT
Having succeeded Britain as the dominant power, in what other ways might the mighty eagle emulate the tattered old lion? First comes reorientation, and the shrinking of the horizon. After empire, Britain turned inward: between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of government expenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to 7, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 percent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.24
Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: you can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford—cut back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite?
In the grim pre-Thatcher nadir of the 1970s, the then Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, confided to a pal of mine that he thought Britain’s decline was irreversible and that the government’s job was to manage it as gracefully as possible. He wasn’t alone in this: an entire generation of British politicians, on both sides of the aisle, felt much the same way. They rose onward and upward, “managing” problems rather than solving them. You can already see the same syndrome in Washington. While Obama seems actively to be willing U.S. decline as some sort of penance to the planet, many others have accepted American diminishment as a mere fact of life to be adjusted to as best one can. Yet, as noted, national decline is always at least partly psychological. Even in the long ebbing of imperial grandeur, there was no rational basis for modern Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal, and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such a fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one. Thus, Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom, written with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944:
There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to