Self-destructive madness is never nice to witness, but when it is your own country that seems desperate to rip off its clothes, shout obscenities at passers-by and throw itself off a cliff it is almost unbearable. Rarely has a country ever self-destructed so thoroughly and so quickly. It would be fascinating, if it was happening in France or Uganda or anywhere except this greenish land of cricket, the Sinclair C5 and driving on the wrong side of the road. Every day you check the news in trepidation, wondering what awful direction the insanity has managed to take us. The great argument that the Elgin Marbles are safer in the British Museum than in Greece because Greece is far more unstable is looking less and less true with every passing news announcement.
The country is subsumed in a collective lunacy, bouncing from simple mayhem to complete chaos. It must be hilarious for other nations, as though a country has had a big meeting and decided to put on a comedy show for the benefit of the rest of the world. Suddenly the idea of civil war is not as oh-don’t-be-ridiculous as it has been for three hundred years. Every great nation comes to an end.
It has looked for sixty years that the UK would just follow a steady decline, but it seems that some sort of complete disintegration and public collapse is occurring. One of the few hopes may be that events that are happening here are just the convulsions of a new global political age. Britain might be going through it first, but all those countries looking on and laughing won’t find it so funny when the contagion spreads to their capitals. But it’s little consolation when the consolation is cheer up, this madness might spread around the globe.
We’re not all doomed, but it feels like it.
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