Great Bedlam

Great Bedlam                        (formerly known as Britain, a land where things once worked.)

Great Bedlam is the sixth largest economy in the world. Its history is one of conquest, naval supremacy, sound money, an established democracy, the Mother of Parliaments, outstanding schools and universities and a remarkable roll-call of artistic and cultural achievements from architecture to music, from poetry to palaces. Its police force was once the envy of the world.

That was then (c 1500 to 1950). In the 20th and 21st centurieswhat wasonceBritain suffered the most precipitous decline ever witnessed. The Fall of Rome in 476 AD seems a model of clarity, reason and piety in comparison.

Despite having a GDP of £2.2 Trillion and the appearance of being a 1st world country, Great Bedlam is in fact bankrupt in every way it can be. GB is a member of the UN Security Council, the G7, the G20, gee whiz and Cop the Lot.

Alas, GB owes £2,365 Billion to mysterious foreign investors who bizarrely seem to think us a good investment. I may not know much about economics and high finance but I know asset-stripping when I smell it in the wind. If you go to the pawn-broker and pledge away everything, come pay-back time you’re left busted. Thus Great Bedlam plc.

This level of national debt requires the government to borrow a further £137 B pa to keep the welfare state going. The NHS, for example, costs us £190 B pa but we don’t really pay that: we borrow as much as £90 B pa to get by. Clearly this is unsustainable. How will we know when the House of GB starts falling down?

Look around you: it already has.

‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ wrote Shelley in ‘A Defence of Poetry’, 1821. We shall see.

  1. for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

             From ‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold, 1867

  • I have met them at close of day   

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey   

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head   

Or polite meaningless words,   

Or have lingered awhile and said   

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done   

Of a mocking tale or a gibe   

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,   

Being certain that they and I   

But lived where motley is worn:   

All changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

            From ‘Easter 1916’ by W B Yeats

  • Because the barbarians are coming today

      and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people’s faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

      Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.

      And some of our men just in from the border say

      there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

From ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ by C P Cavafy, 1898

So, what think’st thou? I cannot tell you what you think or what to think. All I know is that these poems show me the true Great Bedlam through a mirror darkly. Are things so bad?

The Pillars of Society and Civilisation

  1. Legitimate and effective parliamentary democracy?                No
  2. A serious, legitimate and beneficial education and university system?                                                                                               No
  3. A well-organised, cost-effective health service which treats all patients equally, fairly and effectively?                                        No
  4. A Criminal Justice system which serves the citizen and victim rapidly and convincingly and not the criminal?                       No
  5. A Police Service dedicated solely to protecting the public, deterring or detecting criminals and then charging and bringing them to court promptly?                                                                               No
  6. With rapid and vigorous agencies to investigate miscarriages of justice to ensure the innocent are not penalised and the guilty (whether in the police or on the bench) are exposed and punished?  No
  7. In all aspects and at all levels of public service, dereliction of duty, incompetence, dishonesty, corruption and self-serving greed are rooted out and met with instant dismissal without pension?  No        
  8.  These strictures to apply throughout local government?       No
  9. A strong, diligent and effective Border Security service, military in character, training and dedication to protecting our borders?    No
  10. A fully equipped and resourced military with rigorous evaluation and recruitment processes focusing unflinchingly on national security and dismissing ‘woke’ gobbledegook out of hand? No 

I could go on but you get the point. I see no remedy or alternative to this mass decline in the principles, convictions, confidence and courage of the myriad groups on which the Pillars of Civilisation stand.

Decline is followed by Fall, just as the apple drops from the tree. And lands. And rots.

Are we waiting for the barbarians, as Cavafy wrote?

No, they’re already here. Prepare for the ruins.

Oh, they’re around us already.

David Kelly                                                                                             29/08/23

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