Great Uncle Allen used to take my sister mousing in our local church. After checking and rebaiting the traps they would sit in the church porch, beneath the Saxon carved beasthead and eat Cadbury’s Creme Eggs; he kept one in each pocket of his threadbare tweed jacket. I happened upon this spot recently. Where once the porch walls were adorned only with whorls of mustard yellow lichen, there is now affixed a plasticated red, white and black NO SMOKING sign. It made me sad beyond measure. I was reminded there was a time before July 2007 when public indoor spaces were not besmirched with NO SMOKING signs, and that there are people alive today who have never lived in this world. Sure, everyone is grateful for smoke free pubs, but could this have been achieved without millions of bossy stickers? Were these signs ever necessary? Are they necessary now? Dare we dream we might ever get rid of them and the NO VAPING / DO NOT ASSAULT OUR STAFF / SMILE YOU ARE ON CCTV signs that make for the authoritarian graffiti of our times?
Just as Luther’s hammering of the 95 Theses to the church door marked a new epoch, perhaps our Era of National Demoralisation began in July 2007 when all of these NO SMOKING signs, millions of them, appeared everywhere. But as these things go, once I began trying to pin down a specific date when the National Demoralisation truly set in, I found other possible markers:
- 1994 when the police stopped looking smart. Previously dressed in dark blue tunics with polished silver buttons, police officers’ uniforms changed to include capacious fluorescent yellow reflective jackets. I am unconvinced that the change is not the direct cause of increased crime.
- October 16th 2000 when the BBC Nine O’clock News moved to 10 o’clock and the nation became unnecessarily tired and grumpy, in preparation perhaps for today’s rolling news and our concurrent fever pitch of exhausted fury.
- 2019-2020 introduction of VAR. The menfolk tell me it marked the moment that humans irrevocably had to defer to the computer. There’s no point worrying about AI, the paradigm shift has already happened.
- 2013 launch of 111. Seemingly another layer of bureaucracy to keep people away from healthcare, rather like a GP’s receptionist on a national scale telling distressed patients: “No we can’t help now, but a doctor will (may) call you in 17 hours.” There was a time within living memory (mine) when a doctor would come to your house – with antibiotics – to see a small girl with earache (me) very late on a stormy Saturday night.
- 2010s+ all manner of self-service checkouts / check-in machines now fully fitted out with CCTV to remind us we are nothing more than potential criminals. It hasn’t always been like this, my friend’s mum used to work in M&S in the 1980s and M&S would pay for the staff to have their hair and nails done ‘to make the customer feel special’. Imagine such a wonderful thing happening today.
- Introduction of ‘Passing the Peace’ in CofE churches. I remember the moment vividly in the early 1990s when a new vicar insisted that the small village congregation would ‘pass the peace’. The men cleared their throats and gruffly nodded to each other, the ladies attempted small waves across the pews. The Church of England and the country has never fully recovered.
However, we must not despair but instead remember the M4 bus lane: a stretch of prime motorway that lay empty save the occasional National Express coach (a grim foreshadowing of LTNs and ULEZ). Installed by John Prescott in 1999, it became a hated symbol of New Labour: an unnecessary expensive ideological failure. And yet the M4 bus lane is no longer. The motorway reverted to three full traffic lanes in 2010 – one of the only Labour foul-ups the Tories bothered to reverse. Let us remember this small triumph; things don’t have to be this way.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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1945 General Election
Clement Atlee ensured that we lost the peace, despite winning the war.
From that point onward we became a command economy. From that point on many promising projects were cancelled or interfered with and this has continued all the way up to Cameron and the cancellation of Nimrod and then Johnson allowing the sale of ARM to a foreign buyer. There is a consistency that indicates deliberate intent something that incompetence could not achieve.
They get our support by backing stuff which we need and then they quietly drop the project once our attention is elsewhere. How many promises on curbing immigration have we had over the last couple of decades?
Squandering of Marshall Plan aid by Attlee’s government and that government’s socialist high tax approach that got them thrown out, too late.
Indeed. Spent on the welfare State so the NIC supposedly to fund it could be spent on re-arming the depleted post-war military. The Yanks would have gone into spin and rinse if they thought their money was being used to re-arm a colonial power.
Manufacturing military equipment does not generate wealth in the economy it reduces it. But the happy hoards just saw the jobs in the associated industries and “good money”.
Abd the alleged Conservatives when they got back into mower, just carried on with the Socialist plan for Britain.
And here we are with a vile, Marxist-Socialist Government, the end-run on the path to destruction started in 1945.
Happy hordes… not hoards.
Heath.
Yes, but pretty much every PM who came before the traitor Heath post-1945 because the Attlee government was when the socialism virus became established.
If you allow the blackboard monitors and prefects power they grow up to be jobsworths certain that a sign pinned to a notice board is holy writ and will be observed by all those seeking assistance.
Which perhaps explains why (for example) the NHS struggles with delivering health care yet is full of full notice boards carrying out of date information.
Not only out of date but often dangerously incorrect information.
Hitchens would argue it was WW1.
Atlee and socialism is a good shout.
More recently, the Race Relations Act 1965 and all its successors, when it became accepted that the state can decide to try and change people’s views on things if they disapprove of those views.
The Race Relations Act was passed to stop the Working Class and Unions reacting to the inrush of immigrants to provide cheap labour in the nationalised industries and NHS, once the loons in Government realised that State-run enterprises can only be capitalised out of taxation and burrowing (same thing in the end) being cut of from private capital, and so they couldn’t afford the payroll expense.
The cheap labour displaced British workers and pulled down wage rates. We’ve never looked back. Now we have a booming, diverse, inclusive economy with zillions of green jobs in the pipeline.
The claim that British workers wouldn’t do the jobs is, as usual, disingenuous. They didn’t want them because the pay was too low.
Ww1 is also a good call.
When? 1945with the Marxist-Socialist Labour Government and gradual transfer of dependency from the individual to the State and the concomitant loss of self-respect and ability to look after ourselves.
“when a doctor would come to your house – with antibiotics – to see a small girl with earache (me) very late on a stormy Saturday night.”
I remember being seen by the village Doctor as a kid too, some years later around 19 we had a bump driving down a country road. I remember being offended when he asked if I was insured.
As recently as 40 years ago a local GO left a prescription for children’s antibiotics on his front step at Christmas based on a phone call.
For a week now I have been trying to get a repeat prescription using an online system. I have failed to get through by phone twice. They have not contacted me and now I have run out of the medication.
Try to ensure you have a good back supply. Order more than you immediately need.
Has anyone else noticed how large corporations/organisations are eradicating phone contact in lieu of chatbots or suggestion boxes? And how they don’t use emails for contacts anymore? No sense of responsibility or accountability.
When the country turned its back on God.
I think that is at the heart of the West’s decline. Whether or not you believe in the Christian God, the highly embedded Christian principles and traditions of this country have long ensured that society functions normally and successfully. Once all that is (very deliberately) stripped away, the ensuing vacuum of belief and tradition is filled by chaos and misery as people start to believe in everything and nothing. Catholic and Church of England schools tend to do better than secular schools due to corresponding pastoral approaches and parental input. Outcomes are generally better when people live lives based on Christianity. And that of course, is what our dear leaders cannot bear.
I reckon it began with Hitler. The extreme backlash across the west, against his worldview ensured that everything became increasingly anti-fascist. Everyone trying to prove that they were ‘not Hitler’ – to ludicrous and damaging extremes (Germany being the worst, of course as Hitlerism began there). Aided and abetted by the rise of consumerism and sloth leading to luxury unrealistic beliefs and the desire to see the world as a glossy advert rather than as it really is. Bizarre really: how the politics of nearly a century ago is affecting the politics of today. The self-appointed elites of today (they take many forms) are stuck basically, in the mindset of yesteryear. Ironic really, considering how they think of themselves as being ‘progressive’. Their perspective does not match the modern world which is why wokism is incoherent, divisive and hypocritical in its many manifestation. It can not apply to reality and people as they really are – it is proving to be a destructive anachronistic force. Wokism is not fit for purpose in our modern world; and neither are the self-appointeds. Wokusts are proving to be walking talking cobwebs and we should take a big fat power-wash to them.
When they banned leaded petrol.
Lead is claimed to be a neurotoxin and particularly harmful to children, whose brains are still developing. I can’t remember exactly when leaded petrol was no longer widely available but people of my generation spent at least the first 10-15 years of our lives breathing in the fumes from cars running on leaded petrol. Where is the evidence that our brains are less well developed than those of younger people who were born after the ban?
The leaded petrol ban is a good starting point for the beginning of national demoralisation as it was probably the first thing to be banned due to alledgedly bad for our health or the environment. Once TPTB found they could get away with banning one thing they had to find other things to ban e.g. CFCs then things that use to much energy e.g. incandescent light bulbs or coal fired power stations.
A lot of these bans originated in Brussels so when we joined the EEC (as it was back then) and were then dragged into the EU would be a good start date.
“Where is the evidence that our brains are less well developed than those of younger people who were born after the ban?”
Mountains of peer-reviewed scientific evidence showing lead in petrol made kids thick in the 1960/70s – and they grew in to adults with correspondingly lowered IQs.
A good friend of mine did research involving measuring lead in extracted milk teeth from kids at the time. If you could find elevated lead levels in teeth, you can postulate similar harmful levels in juvenile brain tissue too.
I am for seat-belts but remember how they had Jimmy Savile promoting the safety of children in the ads? Akin to making a rat the Minister for Hygiene.
And insisted in putting fluoride in toothpaste….
The Profumo business of 1963 – Christine Keeler had an unsettling infuence on 12-year-old lad, as I was at the time.
The 1999 Macpherson Report report that criticized the Metropolitan Police for institutional racism in the investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s murder in 1993. The report recommended changes to police practices and attitudes, and to public accountability.
When holders England lost 3-2 to West Germany in the QF of the 1970 World Cup, after being 2-0 up with 20 minutes of normal time left.
All down to Banksy going down with food poisoning the night before the match.
The age of demoralisation started in the 1960s. But it was pernicious and it took us a long time to realise. The essential problem was a gradual increase in inflammation caused by an increasingly sterile diet. A product of affluence and hygiene.
Between the 1920s and 1960s the UK population drank over a pint of milk a day. This supplied the lactose fermenting bacteria which are essential to maintain an optimal microbiome and prevent inflammation. Those born at this time, the ones who avoided smoking, are doing well in terms of health and longevity. But starting in the 1960s we started to regard milk and dairy in general as unhealthy. Milk consumption fell, inflammation rose and we became gradually more anxious, more depressed in mood and less optimistic.
In the 1980s the supermarkets started to sell milk and needed a long shelf life. So as well as pasteurisation they filtered the milk to remove bacteria. The result is the majority of milk consumed is virtually bacteria free. We need to re-introduce daily deliveries of milk in glass bottles (pasteurised but not sterile). In addition we all need to consume yoghurt on a daily basis.
Lactose fermenting bacteria reduce the carriage of pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus which grow in the tissues (in the body not on the surface) and cause inflammation. Inflammation lowers mood.
Being young in the 1960s was good but it appears the young of today are depressed and anxious.
Reduction of inflammation leads to secretion of oxytocin by the brain (the love hormone). It courses through our veins and makes us feel good – the opposite of demoralisation.
Currently the climate warriors are trying to get us to consume less meat and dairy because of the production of methane when grass is digested in the cow’s stomach. But we have herded cows and drunk milk for thousands of years – whatever is causing global warming it isn’t methane from cows.But it is part of the motivation for inheritance tax on farmers to put them out of business. It must be resisted.
Those who are interested in reading further on this subject would do well to start with the reference below:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379311083_The_Microbiome_and_the_Entropy_Paradox_An_Evolutionary_Perspective_Food_Nutrition_Journal
The loosening of licencing laws, so Toby and Jemima could get a Chardonnay after 2pm on a Sunday. Created a high cost for publicans, and a drink when you like, drink till you’re done culture shift.
Also the proles could buy discount booze from supermarkets. A second blow to the pub, and ensuring that peoples alcohol problems are behind closed doors, not within a social framework.
The ‘do not assault our staff’ sign always makes my heart sink. Not because it’s a reflection of how violent the general public has become, but because it always means the service will be appalling with little to no consideration for the customer/client.
It was very depressing to see a ‘do not assault our staff’ sign for the entire city being displayed on one of those roadside laser scoreboards by our city council, it made me realise the state we were in.