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Ouch, Baby, Very Ouch
Posted by Wyoh | Filed under Take A Stand
Over on The Line is Here (which, fyi, is no longer updated, kept for archival purposes), we have an entire category of entries devoted to “(Formerly) Great Britain,” illustrating the often jaw-dropping ways government is intruding into the lives of private citizens. It looks every day more and more as if reality is imitating fiction, as Kage Baker readers will attest, particularly the insane Nanny-State laws described in The Life of the World to Come.
And as the Prof has been known to observe on more than one occasion, “Great Britain is lost to us.” Well, maybe not:
Heaven knows my country has its problems. Our Parliament has been vitiated, our local councils scorned. Our public services are increasingly run by and for their employees. Britain is almost the last place in the Western world where you’d want to fall ill. (Labour politicians are trying to fabricate a row about the fact that I made this point on Sean Hannity’s programme, but everyone knows it to be true.) Our people are governed, not by their elected representatives, but by quangoes, human rights judges and Eurocrats.
Then again, each of these problems has its solution. Indeed, several solutions could usefully be imported from your country: dispersed jurisdiction, states’ rights, the separation of power, open primaries, regionalised welfare, elected sheriffs, a local sales tax. I’ve even co-written a book showing how all this could be done in just one 12-month parliamentary session: it’s called The Plan.
And where did the ideology that actuated the American Revolution originate? Who first came up with the idea that laws should be passed only by elected legislators? We did. That idea was Britain’s greatest export, our supreme contribution to the happiness of mankind.
Forget subsequent flag-waving histories of the War of Independence, and go back to what the colonist leaders were arguing at the time. They saw themselves, not as revolutionaries, but as conservatives. In their eyes, they were standing up for what they had assumed to be their birthright as freeborn Englishmen. It was Great Britain, they believed, that was abandoning its ancient liberties.
And here, my friends, is Britain’s tragedy. The things those colonists feared – the levying of illegal taxes, the passing of laws without popular consent, the sidelining of Parliament – have indeed come about. They have come about, not as the result of Hanoverian tyranny, but in our own age, driven by rise of the quangocracy and the EU.
To put it another way, British freedoms thrive best in America, and British patriots should be campaigning to bring them home. I’ll be staying here, Larry, working to repatriate our revolution.
A doff of the Liberty Cap to you, Mr. Hannan, and godspeed.
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April 7th, 2009
I can’t give up on the Brits. The faces you see on TV and the voices you hear in the media don’t represent the solid, underlying core of the people any better than they do in this country. They have a higher tolerance for being pushed than we do, but they have limits as well.
Kipling said it: But oh, beware my Country, when my Country grows polite!
April 7th, 2009
@apotheosis: That’s exactly what Rachel Lucas (who moved to Britain a short while ago) recently said, that it seemed the entire problem was that they’re just too polite.
April 7th, 2009
It was on that thread that I was introduced to that poem. I like her conclusions.
They are polite, which is a good thing for a society to practice lest it cease being a society.
They are patient. This is also a good thing, but can be overdone.
How much of either is too much? I don’t know. I see the growing discontent with our direction here, simmering in even the tamest people I know, and I figure the Brits can’t be all that different. They’re just not as given to waving their arms around and hollering. (Which, incidentally, is exactly what I’ll be doing on the 15th.)
April 8th, 2009
The problem, it seems to me isn’t just patience. It’s the growing dependence on .gov. We look around in disbelief at our situation and it seems that we don’t recognize that (unfortunately) more than half of the populace put us here. Not that it would have been that different with the JohnnyMac and Sarah show.
We have moved, as a culture, away from self reliance to .gov dependence and there’s no real way to opt out.
Least ways I can’t think of one.
*shrug*
Did we wait too long?