Britain, BC

Yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales; the People’s Patsy. Tony Bair must have thought all his birthdays had come at once; she was the talisman that allowed people to fall under the New Labour spell of introspection, the cult of the individual and the new age of careless platitude replacing wisdom. Okay, so maybe the epoch wasn’t conjured into being at that precise moment but I remember watching with some embarrassment as the British became, well, foreign.

Open grieving in the street, mass hysterical weeping, hugging complete strangers and ululating for the cameras; these were things we had formerly watched more emotional nationals doing. We British just didn’t do open displays of emotion; especially not over people we had never met. No, we were hard-bitten, cynical and renowned for the stiffness of our upper lips. Crying was for women and babies and grief was an intensely private, personal and internalised affair.

Maybe it wasn’t so, but it seems to me that Britain BC (Before Car-crash) was a more civilised, more orderly and generally better mannered nation. People generally got on pretty well and we didn’t have the sort of societal strife we now see after two decades AD (After Diana) and the Blair Witch Project. In these last twenty years we seem to have descended into a hell in which every possible minority form of existence is accorded parity with, if not supremacy over, the far greater and largely innocent majority, under threat of force of law. And while the government is strapped for cash, no expense is spared in policing dissent.

We have become weaker as a people, our identity has been fractured and continues to split along every more finely defined fault lines. Black against white, straight against gay, left against further left and islam against the lot. We have become so infantilised, our offence-seeking so legitimised that even the kind of idiocy flaunted openly by people like Dinah Mulholland is not only not ridiculed, but taken seriously and investigated as a hate crime. Think about that; having fun is now a hate crime. Thanks, Lady Di.

It is little wonder that the Brexit negotiations are at an apparent stalemate when so many have been taken in by the illusion propagated by the EU that every move we make, every thought we think is only permissible by the grace of the rights they have given us. AD Britain can conjure tears and protest at the drop of a hat. AD Britain willingly rejects independence, preferring to be nannied and coerced into submission. Submission, eh? No wonder islam gets such reverent assistance; it is the coming religion of the EU.

Britain, AD...

They say we won’t mark the 30^th or the 40^th anniversary of Diana’s death, but I say maybe we should. Future generations need to reminded how easily whole populations can be persuaded to act incoherently over insignificant events. No assault was launched, no Stormtroopers landed, but we were invaded by thoughts of inadequacy and interdependence as surely as if we had been brainwashed at gunpoint. We should always remember what Britain was like BC... and how it was eventually lost forever.