I will wager that every visitor to London gazes in awe and wonder at our great buildings.
Tourists slow in the streets to take photographs and queue to visit the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Abbey, our other palaces, churches and cathedrals and – for the especially discerning visitor – Legal London and Temple Church.
The façades of these buildings are stunning and their beauty is of intrinsic importance. The façade of a building is its ‘face’, and therefore a mirror image of the best hopes of those who build it. The British people desired to see imagination, magnificence, beauty, strength and the divine in the buildings they devoted to God, law and those who held the highest offices in the land.
Some of these buildings are hundreds of years old, some nearly one thousand. Remarkably, parts of the Tudor walls of Legal London are constructed with wattle and daub. The very idea of legal justice must be the invisible mortar glueing together the fragile centuries-old horsehair and mud; all of it standing for our unwritten constitution.
Some buildings are not faring well. Parliament is in a particular state of disrepair. According to one report, officials are spending £2 million a week patching up crumbling masonry and leaky roofs. MPs are apparently unable to decide how to protect the building.
The decrepitude is even more obvious ‘backstage’. If you go for a meeting in Parliament it is not what you might expect. It can involve picking your way past puddles, weaving through scaffolding and yellow cones and dodging drips. You would welcome a hard hat – not for the political volleys, but for potential debris you might fear coming at you from a height.
The deterioration of Parliament serves as the perfect metaphor for the decay of the democracy it houses. British values are just about holding up with scaffolding, just like our buildings.
We are struggling to maintain the literal façade of democracy while we know it leaks, festers and rots within. The outer and the inner are inseparable. As Roger Scruton said: “There is a deep human need for beauty, and if you ignore that need in architecture, your buildings will not last, since people will never feel at home in them.”
The dismal disarray mirrors the way we as a society have ceased to value the ideas and institutions that the buildings house. These buildings are not just visitor attractions, or places to do the business of politics, they are extensions of the nation’s soul. We have not been good caretakers of our values. Too late, we realise the house is falling around our ears. Liberty moulders in the basement.
MPs do not know whether to move into new buildings while the repairs are conducted. The procrastination and confusion are unsurprising. Dame Meg Hillier, the Labour MP and chairwoman of the committee responsible for the restoration works, described the project as one of repair to an “iconic world heritage site” (my emphasis). This project should be as much about the construction of our future as it is about the restoration of our heritage. We have forgotten how to dream for our descendants. The present course of action would be clearer if there was a path to the future.
And nothing could be more fearsome than the thought of the current set of officials planning the important buildings of the future. Modernity has so far resulted in skyscrapers emerging like dark teeth out of the London landscape and the wind whistling through glazed corridors which mirror the emptiness back and forth.
The problem is not confined to London and Great Britain. Scruton described Venice as “a lasting work of the religious imagination, a vision of eternity rising like Venus from the sea”. Well, Venice is not rising, it is, in fact, sinking. ‘La Serenissima’ was the envy of the world for a thousand years, but is now a theme park to nostalgia, weighed down by millions of tourist footsteps, the streets ringing with American, English, Chinese voices, any language except Italian. In 2009 local protestors held a mock funeral in despair at the dramatic decline of the Venetian population.
The Houses of Parliament needs fixing, but you cannot successfully fix the façade or the function of the building until you are clear about its foundations. Standing and marvelling at carvings, windows and doors is pointless if you do not marvel at the aspirations that resulted in them.
Don’t underestimate the vastness of the renovation needed in our moral and philosophical foundations. The work may not be finished in our lifetimes. Some of the most ambitious plans were drawn by architects who knew they would never see their buildings finished. We must muster the dedication to dream for descendants.
Whatever we repair, design and build must have strong foundations, constructed from democracy, liberty, prosperity, morality and beauty, as much as stone and earth. Then the buildings will be beautiful and they will last. We must all be architects and custodians.
Laura Dodsworth is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller A State of Fear: how the U.K. Government weaponised fear during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article first appeared on her Substack page, which you can subscribe to here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The British political class should vacate the Palace of Westminster immediately.
They are not fit to occupy such splendid buildings, which should be turned into a museum, as so many old palaces are in Vienna.
Where should our politicians go?
I doubt very much whether anyone cares. The country would run much better without them.
Coventry, perhaps?
Outer Mongolia?
Kangbashi would be close enough. It is a ghost city in Inner Mogolia built for complex political reasons and has never been inhabited or made useful as a city. Netzero construction and Zerocovid are based on the same politics. South Korean airports have a similar problem.
It needn’t be that far. A little upstream is an area in Kew Gardens, “Creepers and Climbers” which sounds suitable.
Scotland has a custom-built ignoble Parliamentary building which makes it quite befitting for the Scottish Government.
I would keep and restore the significant historical bits , ie current chambers , central lobby and Big Ben to be used for State opening of Parliament .All the rest of the building if its in such a state demolish or keep the facades then build new parliament which is 21st century within.Bundestag style perhaps .
Then tear up all the historical baggage and function like a 21st century operation .
No division lobbies etc etc . Oh and get rid of all the free stuff , bars retaurants etc so they have to work like the rest of us do.
The issue then will be to elect real local representatives not WEF/ WHO/ Reset clones ..
Or Demolish it and leave the rubble with a big sign –
Don’t Build Another One.
Democracy is dead (
) but as long as we have comedy then all is not lost. 
Speaking of which, if you haven’t managed to catch all 4mins 30secs of this skit it is ace because he nails it.
https://twitter.com/HarrisonHSmith/status/1633585851375419392
Thanks for the link. Nicely summarises the whole thing
There’s a bid in from G. Fawkes Enterprises. It seems reasonable.
If you have 28 minutes…
https://youtu.be/lc0684V2ej8
Thank you for the link.. its stuff I already knew, but nonetheless its reassuring to hear it put so eloquently. We are on a precipice in the West and its imperative we take stock and fully realise what’s happening..
Thank you. A very good link, the sort of thing that the DS seems unwilling to flag up (I have flagged up the conference with them). As your link was a pig in the poke, the content is James Lindsay very interestingy explaining before MEPs why Woke is a cultural form of Marxism.
The parallel between the physical and the spiritual is striking, making this a great piece of journalism. The decay is, however, irreversible, precisely because it is spiritual. The closing note of optimism is therefore a delusion. In the context of our civilisation, and of reality itself, spiritual decay means the decay of Christianity, of belief in God and in Jesus Christ, belief in the transcendent, the understanding that reality is more than atoms. Our civilisation is rotten to the core, and the decay of politics is just one symptom of that. Because God exists, one can say with complete confidence that he will not stand by. He will knock down the civilisation that has spurned his offer of forgiveness of sins and his testimony in creation, that has made out that justice, truth, compassion, morality, beauty are all just figments of atoms mindlessly following their own ineluctable laws. The crumbling Houses of Parliament will fall, just as every towering monument of human blindness and folly will fall.
Justice truth compassion morality & especially beauty (true beauty, not debased) will be re-born.
They are all that there is, that endures.
Michelangelo wrote a poem on this theme. He must have been aware of the decadence of power setting in, even then, in his time.
I think there will have to be some sort of diaspora this century. It’s what used to happen when a large number of people couldn’t live with another large number of people, after all.
The Democrats in the USA, for example, think Europe and the EU are wonderful. The conservatives and libertarians in the US take the view that their ancestors left Europe because it was a corrupt stinkhole. So the commonsense thing is for ‘liberal’ left wing Americans to move to Europe (including the UK) and the libertarians and conservatives in Europe to move to the USA.
I can’t see how things can continue the way they are. In woke Oregon, people in 60 per cent of the state’s territory want to secede and join a neighbouring conservative state to escape the baleful influence of Portland!! Conservative states are actively discussing secession from the USA. I think things will have to change soon.
As Yeats wrote…
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Pretty much describes the present. Then, he goes full on apocalyptic, of course!!
Yes, the beast slouching towards Bethlehem. The poem was written in 1919, soon after the Great War, which unbeknown to Yeats, or anyone else for that matter, the Apocalypse prefigured in the second horseman of Rev 6:4. So I would also go ‘full apocalyptic’. Fire from the Sun will be thrown on the earth later this year.
Yes, Putin bombing London (and likely the dockyard near where I live) because Sunak and his WEF/NATO chums overstep the mark!!
I love England, or what England was, but I’d seriously consider starting again in a US without most of the loony Dems (and without the illegal immigrants).
The same. I go with Roger Scruton’s description of having loyalty to ‘The Land’ in his wonderful book ‘England: An Elegy’ which is tragically prescient!! I’d start fresh in the USA in a nice conservative state. Hell, I’m getting to the point where I’d join the Amish as long as I could get access to some Hard Case Crime paperbacks on the side!!
The Uni-Party resides in Westminster with one accepted view on major policy areas. Yet, strangely, GB News manages to find many Conservative back-benchers who actually say conservative things including Jacob R-M.
An excellent piece of writing
Take away the Victorians + Georgians contribution and what are we left with?
Not much
’Britain’ but not Great Britain
We could spin this on a penny yet
With the right people in charge
But as Orwell identified we Farm Yard Animals ain’t very good at organising
Whereas the Progressive Nut Jobs are
It’s a great article. It does feel like the end times in a way. I feel like I can see Western civilisation physically crumbling like our buildings of state. I wish I could find an island somewhere take all the treasures and books and films and TV shows considered ‘bad’ by the modern cultural Marxists and put them in some sort of museum deep beneath the ground so that in 1,000 years when the ruins of the human race starts to pull itself back together, all our ancient texts will be there in their original form.
I feel worst for people like my Dad. He was almost three when WWII started and the bombs started dropping in his home town. He grew up into his teens believing things were getting better. At 86, he’s seen our society collapse into something not far off the one the aggressors who bombed the streets he lived on wanted to create. When he watched Johnson, Hancock, the freak Whitty and Vallance, he was horrified and terrified at what he was hearing. It was like watching Soviet Politburo types dictating to the people. It’s unlikely this unholy mess will be sorted in his lifetime. He’s lived to a great age only to see Western society destroyed from within and fears for my future and my Mum’s when he’s gone.
Our so-called democracy has been deliberately wrecked by 50 years of MPs and incumbents of the House of Frauds who transferred power to an unaccountable foreign mega-bureaucracy and then, when instructed to retrieve it, refused to do so.
I for one, rather like the fact that as our democracy has been deliberately destroyed by those who should have protected it, the building that houses the charade is also falling apart.
It’s rather like the Picture of Dorian Grey – with the abuser’s actions displayed on his face.
I certainly don’t support taxpayers being forced to fund any repairs unless and until genuine democracy is restored.
When Churchill said “Democracy is the worst form of government………..apart from all the rest” He was speaking about Parliamentary Democracy where the people in the country voted for their government and if they didn’t like them they voted them out. ——–Who votes out the EU? Who votes out the UN? Who votes out the WEF? Who votes out the IPCC? Who votes out the WHO? etc etc etc etc etc. ———-No one. ———-This is not democracy, and our politicians now pander to these bloated unaccountable bureaucracies rather than to the people who actually vote for them.
Agreed….but even the ‘voting’ has become part of the problem, because we can NEVER vote out a party..as they ALL support the people you mention…they are ALL the same party now..they just have different names….we are thoroughly captured…
(…..and then extrapolate that around the entire world…!)