| RATING: | 100% |
| FORMAT: | Book |
More a realist’s guide than a cynic’s, this is an exceptionally funny book about the state of modern Britain, which is not all that different from what it has always been. Although partly subjective, this is a highly-accurate rendering of affairs, comparable to The Welfare State We’re In.
Britain was always a tawdry place obsessed with spectacle and pomp rather than any genuine cultural, moral or political content. Marred by generations of sexual hypocrites; Europhobes; closet homosexuals; social, racial and sexual snobs; the emotional repressed and the White obsession with an Empire that makes them feel simultaneously guilty & ashamed and yet not-so-secretly superior. Successive political (Danes, Saxons, Romans, Normans, Dutch) and religious (Christianity) invasions destroyed any indigenous culture (Druids) and left us unsure of whom we are; hence, the impossibility of defining “Britishness”. The latter is a purely-White obsession - a desire to define it exclusively as "White" while not wanting to be thought racist. Such a definition is a BNP-like attempt to get others to conform to a vague standard from which only Whites can ever benefit.
The British national myth is just that - a myth. Patriotism is shown up for what it is: An excuse for immoral behavior toward foreigners - whose wealth is stolen - and the poor - who are used as cannon-fodder to further enrich the rich. Unsurprisingly, the British Empire is convincingly-equated with the Third Reich as nationalism becomes a love affair with ones geographic circumstance and ones accident of birth, so that the dark-skinned can be labeled unpatriotic - in perpetuity.
Britain is a culture without a culture, living off the still-burning embers of Empire without any real direction, like a sometimes-lucid Alzheimer’s patient whining-on about Auld Lang Syne. The would-be creation of “British Values”, that cannot possibly exist because values have no nationality, leads to the realization that this is a phrase designed to conceal core “British Obsessions”: Shopping and drinking. Moreover, a give-and-take culture unable to share with others because it has so little to share. The strangest aspect of the idea of Britain’s greatness is that those saying so do not actually like most Britishers and would rather starve than treat a lower- or a middle-class person as an individual.
No easy answers are offered here, but at least we can all go down laughing as the ship of states sinks slowly into the west and the sun finally sets on Britannia. Even better than the earlier Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? by the same authors.
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