Farewell, England
The Abolition of Britain: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana
by Peter Hitchens
San Francisco, Encounter Books, 2001
(330 pages; $16.95, paper)
England: An Elegy
by Roger Scruton
London: Chatto & Windus, 2000
(280 pages; £16.99 [$23.65], cloth)
reviewed by Jack Wade Nowlin
Peter Hitchens is the younger brother of left-wing Clinton critic Christopher Hitchens and a conservative journalist—and former Trotskyite—who has spent more than 20 rousing, reactionary years on The Daily Express in London. His book, The Abolition of Britain, now out in a revised and expanded paperback, is a stirring lament for a Britain all but destroyed by the social, cultural, and legal revolutions of the last four decades.
Roger Scruton, one of the best philosophers writing in English today, is the editor of the quarterly Salisbury Review and author of over a dozen books in philosophy, social criticism, and fiction. Scruton’s latest work, England: An Elegy, is a mournful meditation on the meaning and passing of the idea of “England” as a national ideal and “imagined community” alive in the hearts and minds of Englishmen.
Both books are brilliantly perceptive and beautifully written, but neither one, alas, provides any reason to expect spiritual or cultural renewal in the land that produced Thomas More, John Henry Newman, C. S. Lewis, and Ronald Knox.
The story of recent Western cultural disruption and aphasia is a familiar one: An ugly rumbling undercurrent in the 1950s; striking eruptions of serious disorder in the 1960s; dispiriting decades of slow but steady decline in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including the passing away of older generations and their moral influence; the self-styled “counterculture” gradually moving into positions of authority and becoming a new Establishment; the increasing irrelevance of the dwindling, isolated, and besieged philosophic defenders of the old dispensation; and the ragged and diminishing holding actions and counterattacks of the disorganized remnants of moral traditionalism and settled practices, dominated most often by “populist” leaders who represent the cultural backwaters whose folkways remain intact.
Two Funerals
How have the British Isles been affected by this international pattern of cultural upheaval? Peter Hitchens provides an incisive, insightful, and deeply moving account of the British experience. In the polemical form that his faithful readers cherish, Hitchens traces the cultural changes in Britain as they manifest themselves across a range of issues, including social class, the Empire, religion, social satire, illegitimacy, feminism, pornography, and the constitutional changes involving the creation of regional parliaments and the shifting of national political power to the European Union. These changes amount, in Hitchens’s view, to the virtual abolition of the Britain of his youth, of his fathers and grandfathers, and of generations of Britons silently resting in the British soil.
Indeed, Hitchens observes that a “long and profound set of changes in the British way of life” since the 1960s has brought to power a “generation to whom the past [is] not just a foreign country, but a place of mystery,” one which the New Brit finds much “easier to mock than to understand.”
In a powerful chapter entitled “The Warrior and the Victim,” Hitchens brilliantly contrasts the popular reaction to the funeral in 1965 of Winston Churchill, the man whose grit and courage saved England from Nazi tyranny, to that in 1997 of Princess Diana, the suffering icon of the celebrity culture crowd. Hitchens beautifully dissects both events, comparing the maudlin chic of 1997 with the dignified stiff upper lip of 1965 and keenly illustrating, with this one striking example, the fundamental changes that have occurred in the British moral sensibility over the last 35 years.
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