We live in a state of emergency: and we are getting angrier

Britain has lost its identity and its sense of nation, says David Selbourne. The citizen is treated as a mere ‘consumer’, liberty reduced to the ‘freedom to choose’, politicians held in contempt and hostile forces such as Islamism appeased. The stakes could scarcely be higher.

The ills of Western democracies are afflicting the most liberal societies known to history. Among other things, Britain suffers from growing inequality, housing shortage, a falling quality of health provision, rising rates of many types of crime, a failing pedagogy, agricultural impoverishment and a huge scale of ‘consumer debt’. Yet, for many, we are not free enough, being allegedly threatened by encroachments upon our personal liberties, coddled by a ‘nanny state’ and menaced by Orwellian surveillance.

This country is not yet in a ‘bleeding, nay almost dying condition’, as Cromwell described it to the House of Commons in December 1644. But his ‘finding’ that ‘the People [are] dissatisfied in every corner of the Nation’ is as true now as it was in his time; the scale of the exodus from Britain is a measure of it, one of many.

Notwithstanding the best efforts of the complacent to minimise or deny it, Britain is also in poor shape politically. Its parliament is increasingly discredited in public eyes, the independence of its Civil Service has been compromised, its honours system abused, its welfare system exploited, its once-proud system of municipal government reduced to a shadow of its former self, its armed forces weakened and underfunded, and large swathes of its public domain dispersed by privatisation.

A lot of this is owed to ‘Blairism’ and its corruptions of the body politic; much, too, to the previous Conservative period in office. The main parties, reduced in organisation and membership and with their inherited principles in dissolution, have themselves paid a high price in public recoil for what they have done to the country.