Young people will not fight to save a country they’ve been taught to hate.
The collapse in pride in our history will have serious consequences.
SIMON HEFFER8 September 2024 • 2:00pm
The British Social Attitudes Survey has reported that we are less proud to be British than we were a decade ago. In one or two respects, the decline is alarmingly steep, with only 64 per cent of respondents being proud of our history now compared with 86 per cent a decade ago.
Sir John Curtice, the renowned psephologist who is also connected to the Survey, said with his customary air of infallibility on the BBC last Tuesday that this was because we are now more aware of slavery. Perhaps we also ought to be more aware that we abolished it some time before other great nations, and that one struggles to find any Briton who wants to bring it back.
Sadly, a combination of some of our more politically motivated universities and the BBC, which talks of little else, appears to have left the public thinking that we have the most loathsome past imaginable. It is a shame that no-one is left who fought on the Somme, and hardly anyone who saw Belsen at first hand when we liberated it, to put them right on what our past and its values really were like.
That, too, raises a serious question. We must all hope that we are not called upon again to fight a total war against a vicious enemy posing an existentialist threat to us and our way of life. But when one notes the malevolence and proximity of Vladimir Putin, the interference of Iran across the Middle East, the opportunism of China in imposing its values on much of the world, and our signal inability to prepare for it by increasing our defence budget to a sensible level, who would like to put money on our people not being called upon again, as twice in the 20th century, to save our country?
And what is the chance of their willingly doing that if they have been brought up to despise it?
