The England I Knew Is Gone

Leslie Poles Hartley famously dubbed the past “a foreign country.” This summer, for the first time, I sensed that the present can be one too. My annual visit to the land of my childhood and youth exposed me to a culture very different from the one that nurtured me. Growing up as a grammar schoolboy in 1970s and ’80s England, I absorbed the importance of personal restraint; emotional self-control in public; privacy; acting with honesty and fairness, even to one’s own hurt; and respecting others regardless of their social status or opinions. At the level of society, such personal values promoted freedoms—of speech, of religion, of expression. All of that is gone, at least from the class that presumes to define the country’s mores and morals.

In retrospect, I see that I grew up at a breaking point in English culture. I was (perhaps symbolically) the last person at my school to study Latin and the last not to take computer science. The ancient disciplines were already on life support, and the technocrats were waiting in the wings. My copy of Lewis and Short, the classic Latin dictionary, is an ever-present symbol of this; it was the school’s copy, given to me when I left as it was of no further use to the institution.  

Earlier this year, I had a strange premonition of how different England has become. A young Dutch politician, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, was barred from entering the U.K. One of my sisters had never heard of her and therefore did an AI Google search to find out what had made her so dangerous. To her surprise, the chatbot told her that this politician was known, among other things, to refer to my work in public lectures, and that we were both outspoken opponents of transgenderism. The same government, of course, has allowed thousands of anonymous young men to enter the country, providing them with accommodation while only last week finding it necessary to advise them of some quaint aspects of British culture, such as the fact that women are allowed to work, that “if you have sex with someone without their consent, this is called rape,” and that if you indulge in such behavior, “it will affect your asylum claim.” Dutch conservatives who think that women cannot have penises are not welcome, while men from countries that consider rape something of a gray area are entering in droves. Well, I suppose the situation could be worse: They could be fans of J. K. Rowling or retweet posts by Graham Linehan.