The head of the British Army, Gen. Sir Richard Danatt, is dismayed about the apparently growing rift between the army and the nation. Unlike in the US, he remarked last week, British people seem indifferent to the men who are fighting on their behalf in Iraq and Afghanistan. Issuing a heartfelt plea on his soldiers’ behalf, the general implored local authorities to organize homecoming parades for them and urged football clubs to give them free tickets as a sign of how much they are valued. Dannatt is no doubt right to worry that the crucial “contract” between the military and public is in danger of being broken, but his words smacked of desperation. Part of the problem is that — in contrast to the 1982 Falklands War when British soldiers ejected invading Argentinean troops from the Falkland Islands — the British interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan never enjoyed widespread popular support. But it is also the case that many soldiers are coming back to Britain with gross injuries to which the British government has not seemed especially anxious to draw attention. Unpopular wars are unlikely to become in the least degree more popular if their gruesome consequences are made manifest; nor is the crisis of recruitment by which the British Army is beset going to be eased by exposing maimed servicemen to public view.
It is no help to the army either that soldiers are simply not part of the visible fabric of British life in the way they once were. Throughout the British imperial era, Britain boasted an army many times the size of its current one and in the nature of things most British people were connected either directly or indirectly with someone who was serving his country. Moreover, the public prestige of the armed services has been greatly eroded by what is often referred to as the “decline of deference”, the steady dwindling of the respect that used to be routinely accorded to representatives of established British institutions, be they politicians, churchmen, policemen or members of the military.
Yet there may be a rather more unflattering explanation for the seeming national unresponsiveness toward soldiers who have in many cases suffered appallingly in the ostensible cause of preserving the free world. Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today program, widely regarded as one of the last bastions of civilized British values, the historian Christopher Lee bluntly asserted that it was just not that the British no longer cared about their servicemen but that they no longer seemed to care about people. The impression is that the whole quality of British life has grown nasty, mean and menacing.
Certainly, few weeks go by when the national news fails to yield a veritable glut of horror stories well-calculated to make the proverbial visitor from another planet feel that he has fetched up in a bleak and hazardous corner of the universe, one where existence comprises what the cynical 17th-century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, termed a “war of all against all”.
There was a Hobbesian quality about the conduct of the clients of the tottering, unhappily named, British building society, Northern Rock, as they frantically sought to lay their hands on their deposits before it was too late. The headline-capturing images of panic-stricken account-holders may well have suggested to the rest of the world that Britain is a sinking ship, and in view of the alarming extent of British public and private debt, the suspicion may not be wholly unfounded. What is especially disturbing about the recent high street hysteria is the thought that, if the British economy were to suffer a sharp downturn, the violence that increasingly plagues Britain (and which includes an epidemic of bullying in British schools) might soon assume nightmarish proportions. Even as things stand, the psychotic behavior that has become a familiar feature of the British social landscape can be so monstrous as to defy belief. If random shootings and knife attacks are now commonplace, so too is a sort of casual viciousness, which if not always life-threatening, often stops little short of it.
It is particularly disquieting that the viciousness in question often seems to be perpetrated in a festive spirit. In the same week that Gen. Dannatt was bewailing public indifference to British soldiers, it was reported that instead of hastening to the aid of a 50-year-old woman in palpably bad health who had fallen down in a Hartlepool street, a 27-year-old man, high on marijuana, voided his bladder all over her before daubing her with shaving cream. “This is YouTube material”, he exulted, as the plight of the hapless victim, who later died, was captured by a mobile phone camera. Dannatt’s speech also coincided with a report that East European immigrants in Cambridgeshire, a part of Britain once synonymous with rural placidity, are living in a state of constant apprehension on account of indigenous thugs for whom subjecting foreigners to grievous bodily harm has become a sport, a favorite form of weekend recreation. Nor is it just brutality toward human beings from which bestial elements of British society are deriving perverted pleasure. Cruelty toward animals is also rampant, with Britain witnessing a recrudescence of dog fighting. Last week, a group of men in Birmingham were convicted of involvement in what the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty toward Animals described as one of the biggest, most sadistic dogfights it had ever encountered. The men, it is sad to report, were of Muslim background.
What is bound to sharpen the sense of the precariousness of life in today’s Britain is the collapse of confidence in the police service. To be fair, Britain’s police have much to contend with, including the challenges posed by large-scale immigration (challenges which were not made any easier last week when the chief constable of Cambridgeshire complained that she lacks the resources to deal with the current influx of foreigners, thus seeming to identify immigration with rising crime). Even when the police are available, they cannot always be relied upon to intervene in order to keep the peace, or even to tackle a straightforward emergency. In 2004, police in Oxfordshire provoked general disbelief for standing idly by as a family barbecue descended into a bloodbath. The other day, there was similar public incredulity when a pair of police “support officers” failed to dive into a pond to rescue a drowning boy because they were under instructions that in such a situation they needed to summon properly trained colleagues.
It’s against this ominous backdrop that approximately 1,000 people are reported to be saying goodbye to Britain every day. They are doubtless decamping for a multiplicity of reasons, but it may be suspected that a common factor is the sense that Britain has become a morally ugly country that is rapidly losing its social cohesion, not to say its very identity as a nation.
As it happens, the political pundit Andrew Marr, has been presenting a Radio 4 series on what it means to be British or, more specifically, English, maintaining that what defines the English is their inveterate habit of ironic self-deprecation.
Not that you could guess this from listening to the boastful pronouncements of British ministers. The truth is that there was never a time when the people of Britain had quite so much to be self-deprecating about.
