Cover Story

The Left’s war on Britishness

23 July 2005

In their hatred of this country, says Anthony Browne, the terrorists were in one sense very British: self-loathing is the national disease

Britain’s scientists have done more to unravel the mysteries of nature than any others. Of the four main forces of nature, Brits unravelled the mysteries of two — Newton with gravity and James Clerk Maxwell with electromagnetic radiation. Darwin discovered evolution by natural selection, while Watson and Crick unpicked DNA. Of the three planets unknown to the ancients, two were discovered by the British. Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, while in 1841 the Cambridge maths undergraduate John Adams, using orbit calculations, discovered Neptune (beating a French rival by a few months). Britain is second only to the US in the number of Nobel prizes it has won — twice as many as France and seven times as many as Italy and Japan.

Britain didn’t just give the world industrialisation, but the belief in economic and political liberty, in free markets and democracy, leading to the modern world’s unprecedented affluence and freedom. Adam Smith, John Locke and John Stuart Mill won the arguments, and Britain’s global influence spread them. Britain didn’t invent democracy, but matured it over centuries and ensured that it became dominant.

Britain’s greatest creations are the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all stable, affluent, successful liberal democracies which have for more than a century been a magnet to the rest of the world. No other European country ever managed such an achievement. All stayed free of the tyrannies of fascism, communism and military dictatorship that benighted almost everywhere else. In the dark days of the second world war, Britain and its former colonies were just about the only democracies in existence; now democracy embraces much of humanity. Of the G8 countries, all but Russia (and arguably even she) owe their current status as free-market democracies to Britain and its former colonies. The English-speaking economies amount to more than a third of world GDP.