by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2007)
Some years ago, before Anthony Blair became Prime Minister of the benighted islands from which I write this, a newspaper got wind of the fact that I had not had a television for nearly thirty years. Would I, it asked, watch television for a week and report to readers what I thought of it. The newspaper said it would provide me with the television.
I agreed, but on one condition: that at the end of the week, the newspaper took the television away again. The editor thought this an odd condition, but accepted it.
At this point in the narration, the presenter of the show intervened and announced that the daughters were in the studio, and asked the live audience to give them a warm welcome. The three drug-taking prostitutes aged 12, 13 and 14 duly came trippingly down the stairway of the studio set, to a storm of applause as if they were conquering heroines.
He had three daughters, who were as cetacean in their body habitus as he. A reality show in the United States somehow got hold of the fact that all three daughters had had children, the apparent physical impossibility of it notwithstanding, by the same man. For this tremendous achievement, mothers and father were paid a considerable sum to exhibit themselves, like freaks, on the show: encouraging some, no doubt, to go and do likewise.
Britain was not a insufficiency of laws, but a lack of will to enforce those that we had. The law is now so needlessly complex, and so many laws and regulations are promulgated weekly, daily, hourly, without any parliamentary oversight, that is to say by administrative decree appropriate to a dictatorship, that lawyers themselves are overwhelmed by them and do not understand them. There could be no better recipe for the development of a police state.
Britain is just like Mussolini’s Italy, of course; history does not repeat itself in this simple way. But the surveillance of the British population is now among the most complete of any population that has ever existed. The average Briton, for example, is photographed 300 times per day as he goes about his normal, humdrum existence. Britain has an astonishing percentage of the world’s CCTV cameras in operation – something like a third of them. We now live in a security state. The wards of public hospitals are locked, and in the hospital in which I worked it was impossible even to get into the lavatories without knowing a secret code. The government has spent tens of billions on mad schemes to collate information electronically about us all, allegedly for our own good, whether we like it or not. None of these schemes has worked, thank goodness, or was ever going to, and the expenditure looks more and more like a giant malversation of funds in favour of the government’s favourite IT companies; but the very proposals, irrespective of whether they were ever workable or not, told us a lot about the government’s attitude to liberty.
Britain, but so seldom seems to achieve anything. Never in the field of human history, in fact, has so little been achieved by so many at such great expense. The solutions that are always proposed are little more than work-creation schemes for the ever-increasing numbers of graduates in useless subjects. If, in the meantime, those solutions have destructive effects upon our liberties, well, so be it.
The type of social structure from which the majority of child delinquents in Britain emerge is by now sufficiently well-known, and would be intuitively obvious to anyone who spent a day or two walking through a British town or city. I need hardly rehearse the characteristics of that social structure, or rather lack of structure, at least on the household level: households in which the members are constantly shifting, in which there is no stability, in which the gratifications of the moment, such as drinking to excess and drug-taking, are the supreme and only good, and so forth.
Yet the government refuses to undertake the smallest step in encouraging more stable households in the most vulnerable strata of society, very much the contrary. It will not even go so far as to recognise the most obvious truths about the social structure that it has encouraged with its policies. The reason for this is that, were it to do so, and were it as a result to take the most appropriate actions to solve the problems, the size and importance of the government would have to shrink rather than increase. And that would never do for megalomaniacs.
The assault on freedom in Britain in the name of social welfare is an illustration of something that the American founding fathers understood, but that is not very congenial to the temper of our times: that in the long run, only a population that strives for virtue (with at least a degree of success) will be able to maintain its freedom. A nation whose individuals choose vice rather than virtue as the guiding principle of their lives will not long remain free, because it will need rescuing from the consequences of its own vices.
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