Beveridge’s “abolition of want” starts with the abolition of stigma. Once you’ve done that, it’s very hard to go back even if you want to—and there’s no indication Britain’s millions of non-working households do. The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people. Tony Blair’s ministry discovered it was politically helpful to reclassify a chunk of the unemployed as “disabled.” A fit, able-bodied 40-year-old who has been on disability allowance for a decade understands somewhere at the back of his mind that he is living a lie, and that not just the government but his family and his friends are colluding in that lie. Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically.
England is a sad case study because it managed to spare itself all the most obviously toxic infections of the age, beginning with Fascism and Communism. But, after Big Government, after global retreat, after the loss of liberty there is only pitiless civic disintegration. The statistics speak for themselves. The number of indictable offenses per thousand people was 2.4 in 1900, climbed gradually to 9.7 in 1954, and then rocketed to 109.4 by 1992.45 And that official increase understates the reality: many crimes have been decriminalized, and most crime goes unreported, and most reported crime goes uninvestigated, and most investigated crime goes unsolved, and almost all solved crime merits derisory punishment.
Yet the law-breaking is merely a symptom of a larger rupture. In Anthony Burgess’ famous novel
Burgess published his book in 1962, when, on drab streets of cramped row houses, working-class men kept pigeons and tended vegetable allot-ments. The notion that the old and not so old would surrender some of the most peaceable thoroughfares in the world to young thugs was the stuff of lurid fantasy. Yet it happened in little more than a generation.
“We time-shift,” a very prominent Englishman told me a few years ago.
“Pardon me?” I said.
“We time-shift,” he repeated. At certain hours, the lanes of the leafy and expensive village where he lives are almost as pleasant as they look in the realtors’ brochures. But then the yobs come to from the previous night’s revelries and swagger forth for another bout of “nightlife”—drinking, swearing, shagging, vomiting, stabbing. “So we time our walks for before they wake up,” my friend told me. “It’s so peaceful and beautiful at six in the morning.” This is some of the most valuable real estate in the world, and yet wealthy families live under curfews imposed by England’s violent, feral youth—just as Alex’s parents do in Burgess’ novel, a work as prophetic as Orwell’s or Huxley’s.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” But viewed from 2010, England the day before yesterday is an alternative universe—or a lost civilization. In 2009, the “Secretary of State for Children” (an office both Orwellian and Huxleyite) announced that 20,000 “problem families” would be put under 24-hour CCTV supervision in their homes.
As the
Montesquieu’s prediction that “the last sigh of liberty will be heaved by an Englishman” seemed self-evident after the totalitarian enthusiasms of the Continent in the mid-twentieth century. Today? The last sigh will be heaved by England’s progeny, in the United States. Is its heaving inevitable?
Must there be a “last sigh of liberty”? A progressivist would scoff at the utter codswallop of such a fancy. Why, modern man would not tolerate for a moment the encroachments his forebears took for granted! And so we assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?
