Part of me feels that those who have helped to bring the country down — venal politicians, false educators, degraders of the media, thieving privatisers of the public domain — need to be fought to a standstill, here on this battlefield, by those with the energy, strength and clarity of mind to do so. For no one wants to believe that the country of his birth, language, upbringing and way of thinking cannot be redeemed.
But the thousands, and tens of thousands, leaving Britain — another million and more will be gone in the next five years, the largest category of them the young, the skilled, the professional — are not wrong. The country’s dilapidation has gone too far. Britain has been impoverished by the mismanagement of the national economy, the running down of manufacturing, and the voraciousness of free-market ethics.
‘Greed is good’, said the Daily Telegraph in October 2006. ‘Without the City’s enterprise, ambition and, yes, greed, the country would be considerably worse off’, its editorial declared. Today, too late, we have learned that such crudity does not serve.
Now, Britain has passed out of the hands — one hopes forever — of ‘New Labour’, the party’s grand Nonconformist moral inheritance ravaged by Blairism and Mandelsonisation. But what is the overarching ‘New Conservative’ project? Mr Cameron has declared it to be the creation of a ‘big society with big citizens’. There has been no idea so vacuous in the history of political thought. It cannot check the strides of those heading for the doors. Read more.
But the thousands, and tens of thousands, leaving Britain — another million and more will be gone in the next five years, the largest category of them the young, the skilled, the professional — are not wrong. The country’s dilapidation has gone too far. Britain has been impoverished by the mismanagement of the national economy, the running down of manufacturing, and the voraciousness of free-market ethics.
‘Greed is good’, said the Daily Telegraph in October 2006. ‘Without the City’s enterprise, ambition and, yes, greed, the country would be considerably worse off’, its editorial declared. Today, too late, we have learned that such crudity does not serve.
Now, Britain has passed out of the hands — one hopes forever — of ‘New Labour’, the party’s grand Nonconformist moral inheritance ravaged by Blairism and Mandelsonisation. But what is the overarching ‘New Conservative’ project? Mr Cameron has declared it to be the creation of a ‘big society with big citizens’. There has been no idea so vacuous in the history of political thought. It cannot check the strides of those heading for the doors. Read more.