A moving funeral, but Britain is now a country where behaviour that was once unthinkable is now routine
By Melanie Phillips
What was so moving, in the end, was that Baroness Thatcher was buried as a simple Christian.
Borne on a gun-carriage to St Paul’s cathedral as a great warrior
statesman, Margaret Hilda went as a humble human soul to meet her
ultimate fate, as must we all. But what a faith she had, blazing out in
those magnificent, soaring hymns and readings that she had apparently so
carefully chosen.
The funeral ceremonial was pitch-perfect, solemn but beautiful and
uplifting, and choreographed and staged with flawless precision. This
after all is what Britain still does so well. So much so that some
foolish folk have allowed themselves to get carried away and claim that
this shows Britain essentially still remains the same great country it
always was.
What a short attention span such individuals must have.
Sure, the protests that had been threatened for the funeral, by
people whose gross disrespect for the dead suggests an equivalent and
alarming contempt for the living, were kept at bay or drowned out by the
many who made a point of standing up for elementary decency along the
route.
But Britain is now a country where behaviour that was once unthinkable is now routine.
Where the mob is unleashed every minute on social media to make vile
remarks, to bully and intimidate. Where reasoned argument has been
substantially replaced by vilification and insult. Where so many have
been moronically parroting the conformist whine of the day, that Mrs T
had been a divisive figure -- as if any true leader does not create
argument and controversy.
Where young people are so devoid of compassion or respect for another
human being, so convulsed by hatred as a result of their narcissistic
incredulity that there can be any viewpoint other than their own, that
they actually gloated and danced in the streets over the death of a
frail 87-year-old. And then they and those who shared their point of
view of Lady Thatcher actually accused her of making Britain selfish and
uncaring!
It is indeed becoming a selfish, brutalised, uncaring society. But
this is the result of fundamental social and cultural changes -- like
the fragmentation of the family, the refusal to transmit a common
culture through education, the balkanisation of Britain through
multiculturalism, the victim culture which gives a free pass to certain
privileged groups for their bad behaviour.
All these changes flowed from the tremendous onslaught by the left upon
the Judeo-Christian values of the west, and the replacement of the bonds
of duty which keep a a society together by a rampant
hyper-individualism and group rights which break it apart on the rocks
of selfishness.
Margaret Thatcher’s flaw was to view everything through the narrow
prism of economics, and thus fail altogether to appreciate the need to
shore up those bonds of tradition, custom and informal obligation which
could not be fitted into the model of the free-market.
She left the battleground of the culture war all but undefended.
Those politicians who came after her took a culture that was already
beginning to smash against the rocks of individualism and delivered, in
many different ways and under different political banners, the coup de
grace.
What has also been gradually eroded in this tragic process are
virtues associated specifically with England -- not with Britain, but
with England or Englishness, the dominant culture within Britain: those
knightly qualities of gentleness and tolerance, lion-hearted decency,
stoicism and emotional self-restraint, innate fairness and a passion for
order.
Does Dan Hodges, who apparently finds this argument so ludicrous, really
think we shall ever have another leader prepared to defend the Britain
that embodied those values?
Our leaders have spent years not defending but wilfully destroying
the bedrock characteristics of British national identity, based on that
dominant English culture, in order to replace it with something entirely
different.
Yes, we still do these great events incomparably well. Yes, there are
still the decent British who turn out in great number to demonstrate
their attachment to what Britain once represented. But they are being
replaced by younger generations who in their uneducated ignorance don’t
even know what has been lost, let alone care, and who can no longer even
think for themselves to go against the deadening consensus.
That’s why I felt it wasn’t just Lady Thatcher being buried in London
today.
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