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.

England exemplifies the political shape a country takes when expressive individualism grips the imagination of its ruling class. It is impossible for any culture to allow everyone to be who they want to be, from transgender activists to traditional Christians. Somebody therefore has to bring order to the potential chaos, and as expressive individualism tends strongly toward the transgressive, with its core notion that personal authenticity lies in breaking with the herd (that is, the social expectations of the past), the culture-makers will typically favor those who want to demolish received ideas and traditions deemed stumbling blocks to self-realization. This turns morality on its head. Yesterday’s virtues have become today’s oppressive vices, as the moral register has shifted in a psychological direction—most notably in the trivialization of trauma, which in some cases has come to mean little more than “somebody somewhere said something hurtful about me.” Sadly, the Church has often proved little different.  

The aftermath of Jason Arday’s death is a fine example of this new morality in action. His apparent acts of fraud against his employer, his profession, and his students have been obliterated in an ocean of identity politics. There have been calls in the U.K. to eviscerate the free press for simply doing its job—uncovering the truth. These calls continue the legacy of Arday himself, who used police to shut down scrutiny of his claims.  

It is perhaps unsurprising that a Western cultural elite that enforced the fantasy of transgenderism finds it offensive that people object to academic fabulists holding prestigious posts in elite institutions. Had Arday posed as an oncologist or a brain surgeon, real lives could have been at stake, but I have little confidence that we would not have witnessed the same moral perversity from the Great and the Good. The values of the present ruling class would seem to demand such behavior.

And this is not an English monopoly. It is a Western malaise. The U.S. too shows signs of the same tendencies. When I was younger, politicians refused to use foul language in public. Senior members of both Biden and Trump administrations have been marked by their casual use of obscenities in public statements and interviews. A small thing that offends old-fashioned prudes? Perhaps. Or maybe a cloud the size of a man’s hand, warning us that the old costly values of self-control, modesty, and respect for others—what Englishmen of an older generation called “decency”—have died, leaving a void to be filled by the cheap and the nasty. The right can be marked by expressive individualism as much as the left, with all of the moral inversion that brings with it.

In the meantime, I will continue to keep both of my passports. I would hate to be refused entry to the land of my youth because I happen to believe that men cannot be women and that people, even academics, should be qualified for the jobs they are paid to do.