Whither Britain?

     The courageous Mayah Sommers, who has been called “The Young Queen of Scots:”

This brave young lady was chasing off Muslim attackers from her sister.

Her name is: Mayah Sommers "Queen of Scotts"

Share it and let the world know. pic.twitter.com/0jh1jkbmAF

— Cynthia Holt (@Ghostofcynthia) August 26, 2025

     ...is still very much in the news. Mike Hendrix has some thoughts about the matter. So does el gato malo. Both are worth reading. And of course there are these irrelevancies immediately below.

     My thoughts this morning run in another direction: How did Britain fall this low? It’s worth a lot of thought, though I doubt it will get even a fraction of the thought it deserves.

     From anyone else, that is.

***

     Let’s have a little music before we proceed to the analytics – no, wait; I think the thoughts expressed below deserve to be part of the analytics:

Another suburban family morning
Grandmother screaming at the walls
We have to shout above the din of our Rice Crispies
We can't hear anything at all
Mother chants her litany of boredom and frustration
But we know all the suicides are fake
Daddy only stares into the distance
There's only so much more that he can take

     Many miles away
     Something crawls from the slime
     At the bottom of a dark Scottish lake

Another industrial ugly morning
The factory belches filth into the sky
He walks unhindered through the picket lines today
He doesn't think to wonder why
The secretaries pout and preen like cheap tarts in a red light street
But all he ever thinks to do is watch
And every single meeting with his so-called superior
Is a humiliating kick in the crotch

     Many miles away
     Something crawls to the surface
     Of a dark Scottish loch

Another working day has ended Only the rush hour hell to face
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
Contestants in a suicidal race
Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance
He knows that something somewhere has to break
He sees the family home now looming in the headlights
The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache

     Many miles away
     There's a shadow on the door
     Of a cottage on the shore
     Of a dark Scottish lake
     Many miles away...many miles away...many miles away...

(Sting, “Synchronicity II,” 1983)

     Yes, I’ve used it before. It’s potent. It’s penetrating. It asks the same question I posed above: How did Britain fall this low? And it asked it forty-two years ago.

     Forty-two years before Synchronicity was released would be 1941: the year of The Battle of London. Britain was still in decent shape before the Nazi bombing campaign. It wasn’t as well off as the United States, but its economy wasn’t yet dismissible and its men included a fair number of actual men. The American-British alliance that won World War II’s Western European Front was powerful. It suggested that British men were still masculine, a force to be respected.

     But appearances can deceive. Britain was already sinking into the Slough of Despond. In part, that was because its economy hadn’t progressed as far as the American and German economies. In another part, it was because of the deaths of so many British men in World War I, up to then called “The Great War.” And in a third part, it was because of the sense that the ineptitude of His Majesty George VI’s government was responsible for Britain’s involvement in the new war that was devastating their homeland.

     The sense of having been battered by events and bad governance was already at work on the minds of the British. Popular will had begun to wane. When socialist Clement Attlee took the reins from the Churchill government, it received further “humiliating kicks in the crotch:”

     Attlee led the construction of the first Labour majority government, which aimed to maintain full employment, a mixed economy and a greatly enlarged system of social services provided by the state. To this end, it undertook the nationalisation of public utilities and major industries, and implemented wide-ranging social reforms, including the passing of the National Insurance Act 1946 and National Assistance Act 1948, the formation of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, and the enlargement of public subsidies for council house building. His government also reformed trade union legislation, working practices and children's services; it created the National Parks system, passed the New Towns Act 1946 and established the town and country planning system.

     There was no disguising the direction of Attlee’s program. He aimed to make Great Britain – soon to be renamed United Kingdom – into a socialist state.

     Nothing enervates a people as swiftly, or as thoroughly, as socialism.

***

     Other things must be sketched in for a complete picture: the rise of the trade unions and the accompanying violence; the deterioration of Britain’s “public services,” especially the NHS, from the administrative bloat and underperformance characteristic of a socialized system; the flowering of the various “rebel” movements: “punks,” “skinheads,” “rude boys,” and the like; the decline in marriage and fertility; the retreat from Christianity; the “brain drain;” the opening of Britain to unlimited immigration from the Third World; and so forth. Many causal threads are intertwined there. Suffice it to say that none of the trends that emerged after World War II favored the development of a masculine, self-reliant British man. He was being transformed into a villein.

     Villeins seldom rebel against their masters. They depend on those masters for far too much.

     Today, Britain’s “law enforcement” targets Britons who dare to resist the forces of depredation and degradation. Mayah Sommers was arrested for her courage. As for the multitudes of rapists and despoilers The State has allowed into the Sceptered Isle, they’re under official protection. Their numbers are still increasing, despite Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s declaration that immigration be slowed. The Muslims among them have become arrogant, publicly assertive, and impossible to discipline.

     Popular will is supposedly being expressed by Operation Raise the Colours. Yet those flags are being ripped down as fast as they’re put up. Who stands against that counter-movement? Who will stand against it? One might surmise that the flag-raisers waiting for Mayah Sommers to do it.

     Talk is not enough to save Britain. Neither are flags.

     It’s been suggested, by Larry Correia among others, that American arms makers go to emergency production levels, and their output be airdropped over Britain. Yet British hoplophobia is so advanced that it’s likely that the airdropped weapons would remain untouched until “trained firearms officers” should arrive to “safe” them.

     A recent email from my dear friend Margaret Ball contained this gem:

     I've been reading a lot of British mysteries lately. The cultural differences are sometimes amusing. Recently, for instance, I read one which started with 3 chapters of the cops agonizing because they've learned that in a certain house in Leeds there may exist...
     A GUN!
     Leads me to suspect that if a bunch of British cops were suddenly transported to the US they'd have a collective nervous breakdown.

     Britain needs men. Have any survived Britain’s century-plus of degeneration? Or are they waiting for Mayah Sommers to lead her sisters and her neighbors’ daughters to save them?

     Your Curmudgeon reports; you decide.