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.
The television duly arrived
and I plugged it in. The first programme I saw after a gap of thirty years was
one of those American shows in which individuals and families expose their
social pathology to the idle gaze of millions. A middle-aged, lower middle-class
woman was complaining about the conduct of her three daughters, aged (if I
remember right) 12, 13 and 14. They had left home, and were now - if the mother
was to be believed - drug-taking prostitutes.
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.
I confess that I was
transfixed by this. It was both terrible and fascinating, rather like a
rattlesnake. And I was soon to realise that these ‘reality’ shows (do they
reflect reality or mould it?) have scouts - I cannot in all conscience call
them talent scouts - everywhere, even in remote regions of the globe such as
the one in which I happened to be practising medicine.
Just around the corner from my
hospital lived a man notorious for his drinking, which led to various medical
crises. On a bed, he resembled nothing so much as a beached whale. One day I
was called to his house because he was reported to be dying. I rushed round as
fast as I could, only to be told by one of his daughters that I could f… off, I
wasn’t needed any more. In the meantime, apparently, he had revived.
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.
A short while later, my wife
and I happened to watch an interview by a minor and singularly silly comedian
of a man who called himself Tony Blair. We had never seen him before, and what
he said was so trivial and facile, and his appearance on such a show was so
completely undignified, that we assumed that it was someone imitating the
well-known politician of that name rather than the man himself. It was only
later that we discovered that it was indeed the future leader of our country,
and no mere impersonator of him; we were not reassured.
It might be argued that, in a
demotic age, politicians have to consent to indignities if they are to be
elected; if so, it is hardly surprising that we repeatedly elect nonentities
distinguished only for their ambition and relentless pursuit of office.
Unfortunately, mediocrity and ambition often combine with vast self-regard; and
there is no better example of it than Anthony Blair.
It is not appreciated in America just
how ferocious and inveterate an enemy of freedom Mr Blair is. Perhaps the most
dangerous thing about him is that he doesn’t know it: he thinks of himself, on
the contrary, as a guardian of freedom, perhaps the greatest such guardian in
the world. But his government has created 3,000 new criminal offences in ten
years, that is to say more than one per working day, when all along the problem
in 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.
It would be almost correct to
call Mr Blair a fascist, were it not for the fact that he is completely unaware
of it, and the notion of an unconscious fascist seems ridiculous. His emphasis
on youth as the source of all wisdom and strength is reminiscent of Mussolini
(he is slightly less emphatic about it these days, now that he has aged so
considerably); his notion of the Third Way (something that is neither
capitalism nor communism) has distinctly fascistic overtones, and reminds one
of that very great political philosopher, Juan Domingo Peron; and he once
claimed the Labour Party, of which he is the leader, is ‘the political wing of
the British people,’ which is less than reassuring for the 75 per cent of
the British adult population who did not vote for him at the last election.
(This cardinal fact, incidentally, has never really obtruded very much on his
consciousness, or given him pause to wonder whether, on the basis of such
slender support, he has the moral authority to change society in whatever way
he thinks best.)
I don’t mean that 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.
The latest mad - and
extremely bad, vicious, totalitarian - proposal by Mr Blair is that every
British child should be screened for criminal tendencies before they have
developed. Once the statistical stigmata have been discovered, the child will
be handed over to the experts who will carry out their ‘interventions’ to
prevent further criminalisation. The state, in short, will repair the damage
that the social structure that it has so assiduously fostered and encouraged
over the last few decades has done. This would all be beyond satire if it were
not for the fact that Mr Blair and his government takes it seriously. Mr Blair
is always on the lookout, not for new worlds to conquer, but for new worlds to
poke his nose into and to ruin, or ruin further.
How are we to explain the
obvious assault on liberty in Britain? I don’t think any overall plan has
been formed; there is no conspiracy of evil men around a table in the dead of
night.
It is far worse than that, and
more sinister because more difficult to oppose. A little coterie of evil men
could, at least in principle, be opposed and defeated. But Mr Blair and his
acolytes are not evil men in the sense that they perform acts which they know
to be bad: they are much too accomplished at self-deception for that. They are
able to present themselves, not entirely untruthfully, as motivated by a desire
to do good, and thus they muddy the waters until the waters are not even
translucent, let alone transparent.
Nevertheless, Mr Blair and his
acolytes understand viscerally if not consciously that serious social problems
are their locus standi in their drive to achieve complete control of the
population. Social problems, when they are on a sufficiently large scale,
create two large classes of dependents: those who are dependent on the
government because of their own behaviour, and those who are employed by the
government to alleviate the inevitable consequences of that behaviour. In other
words, a very large vested interest is created in the continuance of the very
behaviour that causes social problems.
That is why a government such
as Mr Blair’s appears to be so very active in trying to solve problems, for
example that of the educational failure which is prevalent in 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 recognize 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.
In Britain, it is not so
very long ago that most - of course not all - people had an idea of virtue that
was intensely focused on their own individual conduct, irrespective of whether
they were rich or poor. People did not in general believe that poverty excused
very much. One of the destructive consequences of the spread of sociological
modes of thought is that it has transferred the notion of virtue from
individuals to social structures, and in so doing has made personal striving
for virtue (as against happiness) not merely unnecessary but ridiculous and
even bad, insofar as it diverted attention from the real task at hand, that of
creating the perfect society: the society so perfect, as T S Eliot put it, that
no one will have to be good.
It is that kind of society in
which Mr Blair and his acolytes believe; by happy co-incidence, they also
believe that they are the very men to bring it about. If it means that power
has to be delivered up into their hands and the hands of the vast apparatus
they direct, that every child must be surveyed for criminal tendencies and then
handed over to psychologists, social workers, probation officers, counselors
psychiatrists, and so forth, all at the expense of freedom - well, it is a
price worth paying, both for those who pay it and those who do not.
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