Why the Left hates families. By Melanie Phillips. Daily Mail, May 3, 2013.
A Lefitie who saw the light. By Melanie Phillips. Daily Mail, May 5, 2013.
My immigrant family were proud to assimilate. By Melanie Phillips. Daily Mail, May 7, 2013.
An elegy for England. By Melanie Phillips. MelaniePhillips.com, April 17, 2013.
Phillips, elegy:
What
was so moving, in the end, was that Baroness Thatcher was buried as a simple
Christian. Borne on a gun-carriage to St Paul’s cathedral as a great warrior
statesman, Margaret Hilda went as a humble human soul to meet her ultimate
fate, as must we all. But what a faith she had, blazing out in those
magnificent, soaring hymns and readings that she had apparently so carefully
chosen.
The
funeral ceremonial was pitch-perfect, solemn but beautiful and uplifting, and
choreographed and staged with flawless precision. This after all is what
Britain still does so well. So much so that some foolish folk have allowed
themselves to get carried away and claim that this shows Britain essentially
still remains the same great country it always was.
What a
short attention span such individuals must have. Sure, the protests that had
been threatened for the funeral, by people whose gross disrespect for the dead
suggests an equivalent and alarming contempt for the living, were kept at bay
or drowned out by the many who made a point of standing up for elementary
decency along the route.
But
Britain is now a country where behaviour that was once unthinkable is now
routine. Where the mob is unleashed every minute on social media to make vile
remarks, to bully and intimidate. Where reasoned argument has been
substantially replaced by vilification and insult. Where so many have been
moronically parroting the conformist whine of the day, that Mrs T had been a
divisive figure -- as if any true leader does not create argument and
controversy.
Where
young people are so devoid of compassion or respect for another human being, so
convulsed by hatred as a result of their narcissistic incredulity that there
can be any viewpoint other than their own, that they actually gloated and
danced in the streets over the death of a frail 87 year-old who had lost her
mind. And then they and those who shared their point of view of Lady Thatcher
actually accused her of making Britain selfish and uncaring!
It is indeed
becoming a selfish, brutalised, uncaring society. But this is the result of
fundamental social and cultural changes – like the fragmentation of the family,
the refusal to transmit a common culture through education, the balkanisation
of Britain through multiculturalism, the victim culture which gives a free pass
to certain privileged groups for their bad behaviour.
All
these changes flowed from the tremendous onslaught by the left upon the
Judeo-Christian values of the west, and the replacement of the bonds of duty
which keep a society together by a rampant hyper-individualism and group rights
which break it apart on the rocks of selfishness.
Margaret
Thatcher’s flaw was to view everything through the narrow prism of economics,
and thus fail altogether to appreciate the need to shore up those bonds of
tradition, custom and informal obligation which could not be fitted into the
model of the free-market. She left the battleground of the culture war all but
undefended. Those politicians who came
after her took a culture that was already beginning to smash against the rocks
of individualism and delivered, in many different ways and under different
political banners, the coup de grace.
What
has also been gradually eroded in this tragic process are virtues associated
specifically with England – not with Britain, but with England or Englishness,
the dominant culture within Britain: those knightly qualities of gentleness and
tolerance, lion-hearted decency, stoicism and emotional self-restraint, innate fairness
and a passion for order.
Does
Dan Hodges, who apparently finds this argument so ludicrous, really think we
shall ever have another leader prepared to defend the Britain that embodied
those values? Our leaders have spent years not defending but wilfully
destroying the bedrock characteristics of British national identity, based on
that dominant English culture, in order to replace it with something entirely
different.
Yes, we
still do these great events incomparably well. Yes, there are still the decent
British who turn out in great number to demonstrate their attachment to what
Britain once represented. But they are
being replaced by younger generations who in their uneducated ignorance don’t
even know what has been lost, let alone care, and who can no longer even think
for themselves to go against the deadening consensus.
That’s
why I felt it wasn’t just Lady Thatcher being buried in London today.
