First on the road to hell?

Mark Steyn's middle name is, I can only assume, Jeremiah. This month's Maclean's bears his latest prophecy; and the prophet has England in his eyes; and not just England, but England crumbling, dead and blithe all the while – we can almost see it caught in his lenses as they well at the corners, and the anathema is pronounced – and it has left me wondering something.

Is the story merely that? Is it merely just goodbye to England - definitely to the English? It certainly could be. But as one surveys the Anglosphere emigration options – a Brisbane suburb, perhaps, or something modest in British Columbia; or maybe a farmhouse in Steyn’s vigorously individual New Hampshire… As one does so, a nagging, awful thought occurs. Under the red, white and blue of Australia’s great emblem I could live and die at peace; or under New Zealand’s. But is this peculiar horror, this ugly death of England – and death it is, though as in all decay or scorching, there is established a hope of renewal through the fertility left by fire – merely the single, traumatic, wicked psychological blow it seems to be? Will it merely knock the civilised world as the transformation on the ground gradually breaks in the minds of men? As, say, the top-hatted chivalry of the English gentleman, a stereotype sustained over the years in the face of all reason, is written over by the happy-slapping, knife-possessing, porn-swallowing, rape-endorsing (half the male population, according to statistics cited by Her Majesty’s Leader of the Loyal Opposition, do not believe it wrong to force a woman to have sex against her will), alcopop-sucking, drug-in-nose-stuffing, shop-lifting wrecks – the reality all around us?

Such facts as these now begin to take inevitable purchase in the world’s brains. The stout Georgian farmhouse, or the slender, voluminous Edwardian terrace, give way to squalid high-rise death-traps; and tea and cream and scones become stinking burgers, falafel and kebabs. The changes have long been happening, but they are now at a critical mass; and at last the old caricatures must yield and the new ones take hold. It is my prediction that in short order the old affectionate stereotypes of England will be gone, unsustainable in the face of the brutal, godless, wretched –and very real – mess of the 21st century. But is that – awful as it is, and honest as it is – all?

For there is a reading of history – indeed the mainstream one for many a century – that England is England, and a triumph in the world, because it has been early; in a sense, the punctual country in history. For the punctual country has as much to its advantage as the punctual man. We had our middle class, and our contracts, trading, books and legal system when Europe squatted in the medieval mire; there are more 13th, 14th, 15th century houses standing in England than in all of the European continent combined. Then we had our revolution and civil war, well over a hundred (almost two hundred) years or more before the Continent: and all the lessons learned, absolutism curbed, and conflicts, stresses and tensions in the body politic decanted into beautiful, complex and effective parliament long before they were even throwing up the barricades. Then because of this, of course, we had the Industrial Revolution before anyone else – the small, cold islands of Britain trumped the marvels of Alexandria, Greece and Rome in the space of a few decades.

So. Now we are sitting in puddles of our own making; and thoroughly stupid and dangerous it is to do so. But will be the only ones for long?

Given this past dynamic of history, isn’t our predicament terrifying for Anglo-civilisation outside Britain? I just wonder if the Mother of all Parliaments will be repeated in the Mother of all Declines; are we about to birth ruin in the English world? Or presage it, at least? Have we just reached critical mass before everyone else – experiencing the kind of cultural, physical and moral problems from mass immigration, increasing irreligiosity and relativism that countries such as America are only now experiencing in patches or sewing on a larger scale?

Because we were first in prosperity and democracy, we were first in modernity; and perhaps will be first out of it. I mean: though we no longer lead the world – as a densely-populated, advanced, diverse, socialism-soaked, multicultural-mobbed, economically prosperous, supremely irreligious, divided, fearful, unconfident, unpatriotic nation – all of this *beyond* any equivalent nation, though they are all increasingly so – do we represent what much of the English-speaking-world is set to become, along with much of the European, unless it is somehow averted? Perhaps we are simply, as we have long been, farther ahead in the process. Certainly, as one looks over at the British-Australasian countries, there is a sense that they lag behind us, but are keen to catch up as we take the steps down to hell at full gallop. Gay marriage is illegal in Australia, and there in no question of that changing, apparently. And yet now the Liberals propose civil partnerships - gay marriage, as we have learnt in Britain, in all but name, and an accelerant for gay adoption, gay IVF, and all sorts of exotic, contrived social experiments. And now of course a mainstream comedy programme (ABC’s Chaser’s War on Everything) use their editing and technological skills to mimic the Prime Minister fellating the Foreign Secretary. I have nothing against homosexuals, just as I have nothing against those who like playing Scrabble, but where this leaves decency, tradition, majority culture and civilisational stability, I don’t know… Not in good health, I should say.

We have been at the forefront of the troop of mankind as the long war of time and the world and modernity confronted us all, and more than anything this has been a boon and a help. But now, perhaps, we are something in the way of the canary, or the first row going over the top from our trenches and into inevitable death. "Watch ye, and learn!"

So I intend to pack up my culture in my old kit bag – and all that great legacy: Magna Carta, real ale, the well-planted garden, gallantry, beef-and-yorkshire-pudding, bridge and whist, fish-and-chips, Monopoly, sleepy bookshops, mist and sun and ice in the morning sky, cattle brooding under ancient oaks, well-made tea, Evensong, hot arguments, Nativity plays and carolling, Saint George, Robin Hood, Francis Drake, Nelson, Bess, Cromwell, Victoria and the Georges, boy’s own adventures, Elgar, the Royal Fireworks Music and all – and lug it Oz-wards. Or BC-wards. Or NH-wards. We shall see. For which shall escape the modern blight?

Now where did I leave my biometric-DNA-embedded-tech-chip-enabled-wifi-pseudo-ID-card-passport?