Squanderers and Vandals

Quentin Letts, 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain (Constable, 2010), 288 pages, $15.95




Quentin Letts is an angry British journalist with a good deal to be angry about. Take David Blunkett’s bright idea—Community Police Support Officers rather than regular police on the beat. When three girls attacked and robbed a fifty-five-year-old man, a couple of these new auxiliary policemen hid behind a tree until a fifty-nine-year-old woman came to the victim’s aid. When the woman in question complained, she received a reply from Commander Chris Bourlet: “It is clear … that the role performed by the CPSO’s … did not meet your expectations.” Letts comments: “It was the language of a sweet manufacturer responding to complaints about the quality of a bar of milk chocolate.”



Two other CPSOs, not the heroes mentioned above, allowed a ten-year-old boy, Jordon Lyons, to drown in shallow water while trying to rescue his stepsister because, as the novelist Frederick Forsyth put it, “They had not been trained to wade.”

Recently there have been similar reports, for example the failure to help a man who had an epileptic seizure while feeding birds in a public park and drowned in a pond three feet deep while rescue-workers contemplated the scene. If this is not a picture of a decadent society I do not know what is. (In H.G. Wells’s Victorian novel The Time Machine, the decadence of the Eloi, the aristocracy of the distant future, is revealed to the time-traveller when they fail to help a swimmer in difficulties.)



Letts appears to be arguing that Britain’s strange, multi-sided social malaise springs from the fact that it has been run by the tenth-rate in all manner of political, administrative, and one might add artistic, positions. 



Edward Heath figures prominently. When Enoch Powell made an admittedly crude and racist speech attacking unrestricted immigration, Heath, instead of rebuking or cautioning him, sacked him from the shadow cabinet instantly, thereby ensuring that this important matter would never be touched by a mainstream politician again, with the result that Britain has the laxest immigration laws in the world, with 300,000 immigrants pouring in each year, and with large and growing areas of London and other cities becoming Muslim enclaves under the control of extremists where the writ of British law hardly runs and non-Muslims—in particular Jews—are being systematically driven out. Heath himself is described as going on to prolonged failure: 

He resented the success of Margaret Thatcher for the last thirty years of his life. It ate away at him, turning him into a squat stewpot of boiling hatred. To see him slumped in his seat below the House of Commons gangway could leave one feeling spiritually dirty, soiled by his unhappiness. How could any human soul sustain such misery over such a long time?


In another key, there is the disgusting Paul Burrell, endlessly cashing in on the memory of the deceased Princess Diana, and Diana herself, trading on the Royal Family while attempting to destroy them, and elevating self-pity and egomania into something like national virtues: 

Diana was dim. A long line of herbal-cure fraudsters, psychobabbling self-esteem preachers and emotional intelligence shysters beat a path to her palace door. She fell for them as readily as did the Prime Minister’s wife, Cherie Blair. Whereas Cherie was laughed at, and rightly so, for being a nincompoop and a dingbat, Diana was feathered by sighs of sympathy, indulged simply because she looked pretty and helped sell newspapers and magazines. 

Further back in the past, we have Dr Beeching, who closed Britain’s network of branch-line railways in the name of efficiency, driving countless numbers of people onto the roads. I am not qualified to say whether or not the Beeching Plan was justified, but Letts has no doubt: 

Seaside resorts were grievously hit by the cuts. Rail freight was ruined for thousands of small companies. Commuters in the Midlands had their trains almost wiped out. “Let them drive,” argued Beeching … This menace, this foolish, insistent slasher-and-burner seemed to revel in becoming, as he did in near record time, public enemy number one. Awash in his own public-pay gravy, he was determined to deny it to others.

It was as though he took a perverse pleasure in his pessimistic forecasts and their ill-judged consequences. Beeching damaged our transport network so badly that it suffers to this day from his malign meddling. He died in 1985, aged seventy-one, too early to see the late twentieth century’s huge rise in numbers of rail users, too early to witness the gridlock which has come to England’s roads. He never looked much of a man for saying “sorry”, but he also died too early to utter an apology for the monumental error which cost us thousands of our rustic halts and wrecked the reach of the truly national rail system.  

Alistair Campbell is perhaps let off too lightly as a “steaming pile of partisan malevolence”.

Harold Wilson is blamed for initiating an explosion of “special advisers”, to by-pass the processes of democracy, which I would have thought among the least of his manifold sins. How about his perfect timing in scrapping Britain’s successful and economical rocket and satellite program just as the boom in communications satellites was beginning? Or his despicable and murderous role in the starvation of Biafra?

My main complaint about this feast of uncharitable malice is that it is far too short. What of the caprine Archbishop Rowan Williams, obsessed with homosexuality in the Anglican Church while Christians are being persecuted in their millions throughout the Muslim world and ancient and beautiful British church buildings fall into ruin? 
What of the unspeakable David Cameron, Lord Snooty from the Beano come to life, wreaking havoc on the Royal Navy such as Doenitz never dreamed of? What of Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and the rest of the ghastly crew whose nihilistic and hideous creations pollute the Tate Modern and play their part in wrecking a culture of civilised values? There is plenty of material for a second volume, and a third.