The End Of A Nation

At the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965, the Labour Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman noted (for his posthumous diary): ' Oh what a lot of old and grey people filed in, the tired viscounts, the rear-admirals, the decadent Churchills and Marlboroughs. And the Labour Cabinet do not look impressive either. I truly believe we are witnessing the end of an epoch, possibly the end of a nation.' Crossman was the keeper of the intellectual flame of the Labour Party when there was such a thing. He was slightly premature with his prediction, I believe, but it has come true with a vengeance in relation to the British 'Nation' in the last 15 years. The symbols of Britain's decline have been stripped bare since the greatest Moloch-image of all, the hell-catastrophe of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Britain has long since cut and run, tail between legs, from Basra Airport, their hotel for their humiliating final year of bribing the local militias not to attack them. The Afghan fiasco continues into year eleven and Libya is developing into God knows (Hague and Fox certainly don't know) what. Historians of modern Britain point to the Suez debacle as the beginning of the end of a phase of British life, the age of deference as it is often called. It became clear then to a whole generation that the liars and careerists with Oxbridge accents at the helm of UK plc were just clowns after all. The clowns are still there but they present a much more blood-spattered and bedraggled spectacle than they did in the late 50s and early 60s.
The recent sleaze-fest around the Murdoch, News International phone-hacking scandal is a symbol and barometer of how far Britain has sunk. It's not Newscorps plc we are watching crumble, Mordor-like, before our eyes. It's no less than UK plc. Look at the organisations who have their grubby fingerprints all around this cesspit. It's many of the principal institutions of the country. Both major political parties have been in bed with Murdoch for years, the Met has been taking money and covering up, The PCC criticised only the Guardian in their report on hacking, the phone companies must be involved, the Press Association looked the other way. These are only the UK organisations we know about. Meanwhile the victims included the Dowler family, unnumbered bereaved military families and now the Royal Family, possibly the 9/11 families and the hapless Gordon Brown. Indirectly, thanks principally to the Guardian, we discover that the UK is infected by this corruption to the bone marrow. Alex Salmond must be rubbing his hands. Good luck to him and the others who want a permanent divorce from the nightmare.