King Charles III, in Kenya. (LUIS TATO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
In 1946, lorries and diggers rumbled into the grounds of Wentworth Woodhouse, then one of England’s grandest mansions. Its manicured lawns, gardens, and parkland stood on a coal seam that neared the surface, and the Labour Party’s Minister for Fuel and Power, Manny Shinwell, wanted to mine it. His aim was to address a national fuel crisis — and also, as historian Catherine Bailey shows, to strike a blow against the hereditary privilege Shinwell believed the mansion’s owner, the Earl Fitzwilliam, to represent.
Built in the 18th century near Rotherham, Wentworth Woodhouse’s 300 rooms and five miles of corridors hosted King George VI in 1912. But war, death duties, and the nationalisation of Britain’s coal mines battered the Fitzwilliam wealth, and by 1946 they were powerless to stop Shinwell’s diggers. Formal gardens, lawns, and ancient trees were uprooted for open-cast mining; the act was decried as “vandalism” in Parliament, while James Lees-Milne of the National Trust said the aftermath was worse than “French battlefields after D-day”.
Compared with digging up a Georgian formal garden to extract low-quality coal, smearing jam and porridge over a bust of Queen Victoria ranks fairly low in the vandalism stakes. But this latest attack on the symbols of class hierarchy has the same complicated relationship to fossil fuels — and to the wealth, power, and inequality these bring — as Shinwell’s 1946 assault on the Fitzwilliam family seat.
Both these stories shed light on a quieter but just as pervasive source of national uncertainty: how, in post-imperial Britain, should we relate to the threadbare living remnants of the royal dynasty that presided over its once-glittering elite?
Elizabeth II was the last monarch of the British Empire, and her reign’s defining characteristic was the studied serenity with which she presided over its dismantling. Since her death, the surviving Windsors have come to seem increasingly ailing and withdrawn, not to mention assailed by indiscreet relatives all too eager to exploit their proximity to the guttering flame of royalty. Today, the King faces cancer treatment, while the Sussexes continue in their usual fractious vein; now, as the Princess of Wales recovers from abdominal surgery, her uncle is going to appear on Celebrity Big Brother.
But this tawdry spectacle is unsurprising. For Britain’s period of 19th-century hegemony rested ultimately on a crucial energy source — coal — and a subsequent energy transition played a key role in ending it. Now, as the climate-anxious wage war on the remaining symbols of that era’s high culture, what’s left of its aristocracy is following in the footsteps of Manny Shinwell by strip-mining its own legacy, both literally and metaphorically.
The group that smeared Victoria’s marble face with jam and porridge last weekend was This Is Rigged. Condemning rising food insecurity, it declared: “We refuse to be dragged back to the Victorian era.” But while they are no doubt referring to the extremes of poverty suffered by some in Victoria’s day, Britain could only be said to be returning to her era now if we disregarded the other pole of economic inequality: wealth.
There is today no imminent prospect of returning to Victorian levels of British wealth and power. That position was inextricable from the imperial project, by then underway for centuries. But it was consolidated by “black diamonds”: Britain’s abundant stocks of coal.
The nation was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, exploiting these domestic energy resources to mercantile and expansionist ends. Coal drove the machines that manufactured British goods for overseas export, along with the ships and trains that distributed them, even as it sent British travellers, administrators, soldiers, and other overseas meddlers around the world. And coal enabled Britain to project power. By 1900, the penultimate year of Victoria’s reign, around 85% of globally traded coal came from the British Isles, while Britain governed a quarter of the earth’s surface. In return, unimaginable wealth flowed back to the homeland.
As Queen Victoria governed this immense, triumphal Britain as a kind of national mother, her consort, Prince Albert, gave royal imprimatur to the frenzy of scientific and cultural exploration enabled by imperial wealth: a bounty that coexisted with the kind of grinding poverty referenced by This Is Rigged. For the Victorian aristocracy and upper middle class, though, this world of squalid urban slums, workhouses, child labour, and food riots was an object for their philanthropy — even as the wealth was a gratifying reward for imperial conquest, and evidence of Britain’s racial and cultural superiority.
But even as, in Modern Egypt (1908), Lord Cromer expressed this view — describing Britain’s moral duty to “control and guide” alien races based on natural superiority — at home the end was nigh for the natural resource that underwrote it all. Clashes between labour and capital grew ever fiercer: the 1893 miners’ strike, then the largest ever, involved 300,000 workers, and a still greater national miners’ strike in 1912 saw over a million men down tools.
There was no sign of such fractures when Victoria’s grandson King George V visited Wentworth Woodhouse the following year. The visit concluded with an audience of 25,000 gathered in its still-pristine grounds for a concert that included a torchlight tattoo performed by local miners. But if labour issues threatened the established class hierarchy, the pivotal change that would eventually strip George V’s grandchild — Elizabeth II — of her empire came through innovation.
Two years after the 1893 miners’ strike, the first internal combustion car arrived in Britain. By 1930 there were a million such vehicles on Britain’s roads. And with them came the slow shift from coal to oil: a change that played a key role in ending the British Empire. England’s coal production peaked the year after King George visited Wentworth Woodhouse. The British Empire did, too, just a few years later. For if coal was Great Britain’s trump card, oil was America’s.
As energy demand began to tilt decisively away from coal, so too did the geopolitical balance. As historian James Barr shows, after 1945 America set about dismantling what remained of Britain’s imperial reach — with special focus on those overseas holdings and alliances that granted Britain control over the world’s ‘black gold’. The subsequent scramble for the Middle East has been much-discussed; suffice to say Britain lost, conclusively, during the reign of Elizabeth II.
The late Queen was thus the last monarch to preside over what was once the greatest empire the world had ever seen. So however ambivalent we are about our imperial legacy today, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if she also turns out to be the last British monarch to have trailed something of the grandeur that attended that empire. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my local community centre still hasn’t changed its large framed photo of Elizabeth II for one of our current King.
There is very little mileage left in that imperial legacy now. At Wentworth Woodhouse, two sets of death duties and the nationalisation of their coalfields threw the Fitzwilliams abruptly onto hard times: a large portion of the Wentworth Woodhouse contents were auctioned in 1948. And our leaders have, since the war, pursued a similar fire-sale strategy at the national scale.
You name it, if it’s British and seems a bit “posh”, someone’s trying to sell it overseas. Grand houses; Old Masters; classic brands; key firms in strategic industries (for example the chip designer Arm in 2020); London’s property market. In its place we have a financial services sector widely denounced as a front for international money laundering, in which grand old Mayfair townhouses once occupied by the old imperial aristocracy now shelter a new kind: hedge funds, traders, and family offices for the world’s oligarchs. Sometimes nothing remains but a Georgian or Victorian façade, behind which the bones of the building have been gutted and replaced by steel girders and suspended ceilings: the most eloquent imaginable metaphor for the hollowing-out that has taken place.
And in this brave new world, what are the descendants of Britain’s erstwhile caste of upper-class Victorian imperial administrators to do? Those who are bright enough go into finance; the rest leverage crisp vowels, social connections, and cultural know-how into careers as concierges and fixers to the genuine new plutocracy. And it’s in this light that we should understand the Sussexes, and perhaps also Gary Goldsmith: without the discretion or nous to thrive as butlers, they simply aim to squeeze what celebrity capital they can out of their royal connections.
Under Manny Shinwell, as declining energy dominance forced Britain to begin self-cannibalising in earnest, physical mining ripped up a pristine country-house garden. Today, Goldsmith and the Sussexes alike continue in the same vein, with their own metaphorical strip-mining of Britain’s remaining cultural wealth.
As for the rest of us, we can only hope we’re nearing rock bottom. With the recent “student visas” bombshell barely off the front page, this week a “cash for care” scandal revealed employment agencies are selling British visas under the guise of staffing British care homes. In other words: while our current crop of leaders hasn’t literally put granny up for auction yet, in a bid to keep the lights on a few more days, they’re not far off.
What would a less defeatist, more future-oriented Britain look like, on the other side of rock bottom? It’s hard to say, though I suspect somehow that Charles remembers the old world too keenly to be the man to represent it. Perhaps his son will drag us out of our doldrums, and set a new tone: it happened with Victoria, after all, after the chaos of the Georgian era.
It’s less clear today what kind of kingdom, if any, they would have. The declinist view is that maybe it doesn’t matter if care workers can’t speak English; we can just fling a few more quid at the emblems of Britain’s former grandeur, and live off leisure, tourism and the “creative industries”, as with the Levelling Up Fund grant now restoring Wentworth Woodhouse. I’m less sure. For while This Is Rigged seem to think we can both end oil extraction and still demand cheap (and oil-intensive) disposable nappies, between competing environmental concerns and new geopolitical tensions our energy future is ever more uncertain.
Meanwhile the industries of the future appear to be AI and biotech, all underwritten by a new “scramble for Africa” focused on the rare earth minerals required for the tech sector and the “green transition”. Thus far, though, Britain’s push to be at the forefront of all these efforts has appeared lukewarm: the £940m recently hailed in UK funding to support green innovation pales into insignificance beside America’s $1.25 trillion.
But even if (and, I hope, when) we find a way through, perhaps under a newly-ascendant William V, I doubt it’ll be to the future imagined by This Is Rigged: a world both free of fossil fuels and still somehow brimful of state welfare and cheap conveniences. The best we can hope for is that some more creative future leader will take us back to the Victorian era not just in a bad way, but also a good one. If we’re to have the poverty and inequality, at least let us also have the grand architecture, the moral seriousness, the scientific innovation, and the unifying leadership. Britain could still have this; we just need to muster the energy.
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Subscribe“we just need to muster the energy”
Which would immediately be labelled ‘toxic energy’ and severely denounced.
We’ve had our view of the past poisoned, we’ve had our view of the future poisoned. What’s the foundation for energetically going forward?
Never give up. Ever.
If history shows us anything, it’s that things (including mindsets) never stay the same. Those who’re able to adapt by recognising how and why things have changed can continue to influence the future.
This doesn’t mean a nostalgic return to the past, but the ability to promote a new and different set of values than those failing us today. For instance, a more honest recognition that all creeds are flawed, the products of an understandable search for certainty. We need to understand ourselves better.
Is a pause allowed? A little Voltaire-ish time in the garden?
No, I won’t be giving up – all my grandparents were born during Victoria’s reign! There’s a little of the adventurous heritage left in the veins.
But isn’t that also as a result of all available “new worlds” (at least terrestrial) having been conquered? The world that needs to be – if not conquered, then more closely understood – is within. There lies the future, and for those brave enough to embrace it, it really is the ultimate adventure.
Exactly.
Thank you so much for that first statement. There’s far too much fatalism amongst the UnHerd community. If we believe in Enightenment values and freedoms, let’s fight for them, to the death if necessary. The fearsome military of the Nazis was defeated by brave men and women, are we going to allow ourselves be beaten by vile, gutless, moronic and lazy Twitter addicts with pink hair? For f**k’s sake people, are we not men and women?
During a visit I made to the Wallace Collection in London some years ago, i was suddenly overcome by a feeling of awe toward the Victorian Era. I became acutely aware of how debased and regressive our civilization has become, and found myself feeling a profound sense of nostalgic loss for an era of history that I was never part of. At the same time I also realized that unless I had sufficient wealth I would most likely have ended up a desperately poor factory worker or simply died before my fifties. A remarkable age, but one steeped in many contradictions.
Everybody was poorer in the past. Living standards stagnated for hundreds of years. It was the Industrial Revolution that changed that.
Dividing a fixed cake into ever more pieces does not generally, in theory and in practice, make a country richer
I grieve for the 300-year-old, or more, trees that were cut down to mine coal that was here today and gone tomorrow.
That coal gave, and continues to give, the world its power to prosper. It fuels the industry we all rely on.
Cut a tree down, new ones grow.
Don’t trees ultimately become coal?
Only after they’re dead and gone.
I think that theory for the origin of oil has been debunked
Your comment in not based in fact. Most of Europe’s pre-Industrial forests are gone forever. Even a determined replanting effort cannot restore a real forest–a vibrant ecosystem with layers of abundant life–instead of a commodified orchard.
I’ve planted trees in British Columbia, in areas that were heavily logged (beginning in the late-Victorian era, if you will). The ruined soil in many clear-cut tracts can’t support most of the new seedlings. Some infamous cuts comprise millions of acres, like the one in the Bowron Valley, visible from space. And only one or two cash-crop species, usually pine or spruce, are re-planted anyway. A complete forest takes centuries of growth, unimpeded or a least not over-exploited by humans.
I don’t know why more self-identified conservatives don’t care more about conserving the Earth.
When the earth rids herself of human kind rather as a dog rids itself of fleas then the forests will return.
Until such time we shall just have to be patient.
Impressive, Mr. Stanhope. Nastier than usual*.
*pagan-loving anti-humanism?
I greatly enjoy your contradictions sir
Nowadays burning wood is called “green” and renewable energy. Drax power station emits 12 million tonnes of CO2 a year. Much of the wood comes from British Columbia and was even called by the BBC as “at risk and irreplaceable”. In Germany you get subsidised by the current government to install a “green” pellet burner…
If your point is that both governments and environmental activists can be foolish and fake, I agree.
If you cut down ten or twenty trees out of a hundred, the forest will probably indeed renew itself, in accordance with Ms. Barrows’ magic formula above. If you cut down 80 or 90 of a hundred, that patch of forest will probably be wrecked for so long that it is gone forever in any practical sense.
It is only somewhat latterly that we have begun to understand how to grow and nurture Pine forests; something which nature has known for ever. All pine forest start off as deciduous forests which gradually form a canopy for protection of the small pine seedlings and the fallen autumnal leaves feed them. Over a period of time the pine trees will break through the canopy and the deciduous trees will die off, leaving a Pine forest.
Interesting. I wasn’t aware of that. Maybe that’s part of why replanting a tract of forest– that has been clear-cut, scarified, or left with a few stands of less-lucrative poplar, etc.–with pine alone still results in what looks like a pretty tame and de-natured orchard decades later. In fact, when logging companies claim to have replanted the forest they have doing something closer to cash-crop farming. Better than paving the land for more subdivisions and strip malls, I admit.
Forest sections that are more judiciously “harvested” can come back within a human lifetime or two, I’d say.
Go a few km north, the taiga is still there. The good news is that climate change is changing the forests so new species will predominate and others will have they ranges shifted northward.
So in your framing climate change and loss of habitat provides some net benefit?
My understanding is that the increase of atmospheric C02 will encourage plant growth, including that of trees. C02 is plant food.
Can you outline or link to some evidence that would enable me to understand that claim?
Over past 30 years the earth appears to be 40%greener.
*My mistake
NASA, greening of the earth.
Ok, I went to NASA’s site and see that the phenomenon is valid. A pretty high- stakes gamble to celebrate though, yeah?
If temperatures and sea levels continue to rise as expected–largely due to the carbon-dioxide which drives the greening–many coastal cities and hotter areas of the globe will become inhabitable within a disastrously short span.
There must be a middle ground between hysterical panic and insistent denial–both of which are debilitating.
Nah, take a look at a globe. Lots of white areas in the northern hemisphere. Do you think Russia is worried about global warming? Embrace change.
Ludicrous. To the extent you’re even serious, tell it to someone else. Or start gleefully getting ready to move to Russia if they’ll have you.
We can’t control all that happens on the Earth and may not succeed in destroying it before its time. But we have stewardship. Embrace responsibility.
You should check out “Snowball Earth” to have an understanding of climate science.
Apparently, you haven’t experienced any effects of global warming like flooding, flash flooding, mudslides, fire, more frequent and intense hurricanes, and tornadoes so you can afford to be glib.
When does it rain frogs?
Uninhabitable, AJ and yes you’re right. People should read The Uninhabitable Earth – Life After Warming by David Wallace Wells. A well-researched, authoritative account of what will happen and where on the planet, as it warms. I read it five years ago and have sadly watched his predictions come to pass.
Well, we are now at 2060 temperatures. The earth hasn’t imploded.
That’s very cavalier. Can you look at a beautiful, centuries-old Lebanon Cedar and just see coal?
The Sinwell story stands as evidence that Labour is heart has always been destructive.
Arguably Shinwell was guilty of High Treason but somehow avoided prosecution.
At least he lived long enough to witness the destruction of the Miners in 1984.
How else would we have built the Royal Navy and ‘policed’ the world, without the majestic Oak?
Not to mention our victory at Agincourt (Yew longbow) or introduced cricket (Willow) across the world.
This. As an Irish American and Roman Catholic, I’ll say thank God for the British Empire.
For common law guarantees of liberty and due process, and the rule of law, not of men, for free market capitalism, rather than socialism or fascist corporatism, for birthing the modern middle class, so essential to real democracy, and for the belief that individuals are primary to collectives, tribes, or political parties, the world is in debt to Britain.
Or course imperial histories aren’t those of charitable organizations. And of course some populations were exploited and mistreated. But look at the rest of the world – theocracies, dictatorships, and slave states. Britain was in most instances a light of freedom by comparison – banning the slave trade, holding courts made up of jurists and juries, and toppling or controlling other empires and regimes that were far worse.
What other country can say they birthed capitalism and freedom? Or who helped bring modern civilization – clean drinking water, modern medicine, policing and courts, public works, public education – to a world that had none of those things?
Coal didn’t destroy Britain, nor did feckless aristocrats.
Two spectacularly destructive wars, and the siren of socialism, destroyed Britain and her Empire.
Socialism – the belief that political actors should control the economy as well as nearly every other aspect of life, and would divide us all into either oppressors to be punished or victims to be coddled – threatens America now, as well.
Excellent comment, and it, or the gist of it, should be required reading for all those who see nothing but evil in the British empire. I come from a land which is one of the four “Mother countries” of the empire, but only a fool would insist that the often complicated relationship between Ireland and England produced only negative results. “For common law guarantees of liberty and due process, and the rule of law, not of men… ” Ireland has its neighbour to thank.
But what was/is the Wallace Collection but a nostalgic Victorian celebration of a pre nineteenth century , pre -industrial past ! Suits of armour , lavish furniture from pre -revolutionary France and paintings of rococo bottoms of the mistresses of French Kings . And those Orientalist paintings so reviled by Edward Said which are more likely to cause islamophilia than Islamophobia , sadly for us .
Well dropping the climate nonsense would be a good start. “Green tech” is a subsidy farming and basically a scam.
What is the “climate nonsense”?
A handy catch all for the sceptics to latch on to while they circle jerk.
The climate has changed, as any nature documentary makes clear again and again. Just because politicians greenwash their track record doesn’t mean there isn’t an issue we should take very seriously. Your cynicism is misplaced.
The issue is that politicians have latched onto it as a wedge issue to extort labour from productive people and buy votes with it.
My down vote didn’t register.
Thanks Clare, I appreciate being on the appropriate side of history.
It’s perhaps indicative that Mary got through this entire essay without mentioning one crucial word: ambition.
And that is the crux of the problem in Britain. You have literally forgotten about the concept. This kind of allergy to excellence has been a problem for years, if not decades – and it has both locked you into decline and will keep you at rock bottom.
I would even say it is a part of the modern British mentality to seem unbothered, average. Part of the aversion to Sunak is undoubtedly because, to many people, he’s “too clever by half”…when really it’s clever people like him who have the capacity to pull you out of the morass.
So, apart from the question of how you change and adapt your economic model, get education producing people suited to the labour market, who you have as head of state and all the rest…there needs to be a sort of collective administering of a massive kick up the a****.
I don’t think this is exactly the only, or possibly the main, problem with Britain today. We have apparently still some of the best universities in the world and indeed much cutting edge research. However we also have mass immigration of almost 1 million unassimilable foreigners a year (most of who have nothing to do with the Commonwealth) – and including a scarily riding Muslim (at least soft Islamist) population, the increasing dominion of “woke” ideology, and hysterical self defeating Net Zero policies – mandated, unlike in the US – by law(!). These are disastrous for the coherence and effective running of the British state. The Uber wealthy simply buy themselves out of these problems.
However you are correct that the economic incentives aren’t right, it is true. There are far more people sitting idle, many suffering from “mental illness”. (The usual best cure – do something productive and get off your whining arse!). We certainly need to learn those lessons all over again.
What an extraordinary volte-face! Are you feeling alright Mr Fisher?
Just came back from my morning run and found myself thinking about Islam and its more problematic strains…and actually it reinforces my point. The reason why so many young people with little perspective in life gravitate towards the religion (with some getting caught up in the nastier forms) is because it gives them structure and form in their lives. The rituals demand a certain discipline to keep to and the way that gets you through the day stabilises your life. So we can also learn something from Muslims and their religion. Or, if that’s unpalatable, here’s Eliza Reed, a devout Christian, in Jane Eyre saying more or less the same thing:
“Take one day; share it into sections; to each section apportion its task: leave no stray unemployed quarters of an hour, ten minutes, five minutes, – include all; do each piece of business in its turn with method, with rigid regularity. The day will close almost before you are aware it has begun; and you are indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant moment: you have had to seek no one’s company, conversation, sympathy, forbearance; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought to do.“
I like the novel Jane Eyre a lot but I don’t think the character of Eliza Reed is meant by Bronte to be admirable, let alone a model. Day’s passed in “rigid regularity” with no seeking or care for human connection may work for the renunciate in conversation with Providence, or a rigidly-scheduled control freak like Reed, but it doesn’t offer a path to most of us, nor illuminate the truth of the human condition. We have a measure of independence, but we are inextricably linked to our fellow creatures.
That said, of course orthodoxy and ritual formalism can provide some benefit to their practitioners.
It was more Eliza’s Christian faith than her likeability that I was getting at. The point I was trying to make was that religions offer a structure and a framework for living your life and a moral universe in which to exist. Humans seem to yearn for such frameworks, thrive within them and find inner stability – something which Eliza’s silly sister Georgiana didn’t have.
Thank you for naming the chapter. Though I see your point, let’s remember Bronte’s own assessment (in the narrative voice of Jane):
In short: don’t be like either of these sisters!
Nor is every professed faith close to the heart of Jesus, as Emily Bronte notes of the character Joseph, a household servant, in Chapter 5 of Wuthering Heights:
Thank you for pointing me back to the enduring work of the Bronte sisters, and to their excellent prose–Charlotte’s hard, ungainly last word notwithstanding.
*[from the Penguin Classics edition of the novel…] deglutition: the act or power of swallowing.
Some humans, perhaps.
Thanks for that quotation Katharine, i was unaware of it, but it really rings true in many respects. The only rider i’d put to it is: leave a few minutes here and there for reflection, just as you did on your run!
It’s in chapter 21.
There has always been a personality type that needs an authority to follow. Cult like Religions can fill a void for those who don’t know what to do with their lives and need to be told what to do by an authority, so Islam may seem like an attractive answer. The military also provides a structure and has been the making of many a lost young man. But Islam also seems to provide something for young women who can’t relate to the freedom that feminism has brought.
Well said that man!
Based on the many articles I’ve read here and elsewhere ‘some of the best universities in the world’ seems to be a sadly out dated claim, as it is in the USA. ‘Soft Islamism’ is an absurd contradiction in terms. Maybe you don’t want to provoke any members of the suicide vest crowd, which if true serves to prove my point.
I really don’t think Sunak is seen as ‘too clever by half’. He is unpopular because he hasn’t been elected by the public and has achieved nothing in office. He is also seen as a representative of an out of touch global elite who care nothing for the people of Britain or the country’s problems.
Ambition to what purpose? What sort of excellence?
I don’t intend to dismiss your national diagnosis, but here in another part of the Anglosphere I observe an epidemic of (perceived) meaninglessness, a widespread lack of purpose. I see a real problem in the loss, for most, of traditional religion’s comfort and direction being too-often replaced with nothing–except hedonism or hyper-individualized self-amusement!
I don’t think most can recover the old time faith(s), but they’d better find something meaningful and worthwhile. Even the “commitment to Nothing” of the radical nihilist is a kind of path, or chosen pathlessness.
A thoughtful and carefully considered article as usual from Mary Harrington. However I thought that, whatever the faults of King Charles and the modern Royals maybe, referring to them as a “tawdry spectacle” is going a bit far – and indeed rather disrespectful.
If this country is ever going to be a proud confident and effective one ever again, this type of cynical sentiment wouldn’t seem to offer a very good foundation.
The truth may not be convenient to your view of the Royal Family, but it is indisputable they have presented a tawdr spectacle ever since our King cheated on his first wife over many years despite his young family.
As far as I can see the Royal Family in Britain have now become just another family of Royals in Europe. They used to stand for something now not so much.
William V won’t ascend the throne in a coronation ceremony of ancient and solemn majesty. One where the prosaic present gives place to the haunting past and its people throng around us in the great unknown. Perhaps to judge.
Rather than a coronation banquet of luxuries and hate with it, better, as the Good Book says, a dinner of herbs garnished with love. A pop star monarch dressed in slashed denim will endure, as have the rock aristocracy, while enjoying wealth and the adoration of the financially contrained masses.
The Victorian age is coming again in the form of the anarchist Proudhon. All property is theft, he declared. If goods in a supermarket do not belong to the owner, they can be taken by whoever finds them.
Proudhon, like Marx, wanted the withering of the state but by evolution. He thought of democracy as the state without limits. The 21st century state extends itself into ever more departments of life through its agencies, partnerships and regulatory authorities. At the same time it becomes ever more ineffective in whatever it attempts, whether at building railways or maintaining gardens in seaside towns.
The trust that even the poor, miserable in their rags and hovels, placed in the hierarchy of Victorian society is withering away in respect of today’s authorities, at the same time that more petitions are addressed to them than were ever addressed to any Tudor, Stuart or Hanoverian queen.
Centrism, a compilation of everything that was once radical, extreme and outside the mainstream, conceals its radical nature by categorising other entities as extreme. Can the centrists hold? Or is some rough beast already slouching towards Westminster to be born?
The architecture of the Palace of Westminster reflected conservatism and Christianity. Truth is beauty. The beauty of architecture needs truth before it can exist. Truth in moral seriousness and thoughtful religion. Truth in the modesty of beautiful clothes and decorous habits. Truth in speech, not speech codes that proscribe certain words while allowing the use of foul language that is de-moralised by being described as ‘strong’.
Interesting provocations, Citizen. You have quite the rhetorical flair. I wonder if the person behind your persona would categorise anything but centrism as extreme–or if all would be reduced into a nasty broth of competing extremities.
I’ve often thought of myself an “extreme moderate” or “radical centrist”, at times rather self-importantly I’m sure. There is such a thing as altruistic incrementalism, though it always meets natural shortcomings and sometime devolves into permanent “hesitationism”.
I see value in a kind of universal hope that tries its best to keep head, hand, and heart in a given place and time; aspirational longings that do not stop at the hand, or beg off every time the wallet or clock is threatened. The centre cannot hold all together–it never has. But the passionately intense don’t dwell at the polar fringes alone. Not every centrist lacks all conviction.
And who pray was ‘Manny Shinwell’? A few more details here on background and breeding etc wouldn’t have gone amiss.
“The greatest Empire the world has ever seen”, perhaps for a brief moment in size and population but nothing else, certainly not measured against Ancient Rome for example.
Additionally by 1912 much of the Empire was an economic basket case and hardly worth the effort. Most British overseas investment was quite correctly directed towards the USA, where one could at least get a decent return on capital.
Ultimately the hubris of Empire gave us delusions of grandeur well above our station, thus leading gung-ho ‘Liberal’ idiots such as Asquith, Grey and Churchill to lead us into the greatest disaster in British history bar none, the Great War.
On a personal note I very much enjoyed my time serving the Empire in its dying days, but always knew we just couldn’t afford to “pick up the white man’s burden” as we used to call. Not so much a case of ‘Sic Gloria Transit Mundi’ as of ‘Consummatum est.’*
(*So passes the glory of the World/ It is finished.)
Surprised you don’t know who Manny Shinwell was Charles !
Class warrior, environmental vandal, senior member of Attlee’s post-war cabinet.
On the other hand, it appears he supported unilateral British action against Egypt over Suez. So you might warm to him.
In true Labour “red prince” fashion, it was no great surprise to just discover that Luciana Berger is Shinwell’s great neice – just as Peter Mandleson is Herbert Morrison’s grandson.
Manny continued to serve in Parliament until age 101, a committed socialist he sadly bent the knee and became a Baron in the HofL
Charles: life is full of surprises, but you do have a position to uphold on this platform; so you need to do your homework.
I wondered if I would ‘get away’ with being a little disingenuous, and was fortunate enough to succeed on this occasion.
We don’t have “poverty”. Not in any objective sense. Travel round the world if you want to see actual poverty.
We are, however, making a sterling effort to import poverty into the UK.
And there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with “inequality”. Inequality is a sign that we’re generating wealth. Only a society with no wealth will ever be perfectly “equal”. You cannot have opportunity and economic growth without inequality.
The only problem we really have is that we are pursuing the wrong goals and investing so much wealth in value-destroying activities and impossible dreams. It’s so frustrating – it’s all so easily fixable.
It is frustrating. If only you (or me, or some better “third person”) were in charge of the town, nation, and globe–yeah?
Please start us off by separating the key value-destroying ideas from the constructive ones. Then make clear how we can “simply” shift the balance without coming up against key obstacles in human nature, such as: greed, folly, perversity, and self-destruction.
I agree it’s a shame that we’ve fallen so far and continue to fall so short. Since I doubt you’d advocate some rose-colored return to a glorious past, I wonder: What do you prescribe, beyond individual self-transformation?
I think you provided your own answer.
Yes, but the answer is thousands of years old. It can indeed save a few. Teaching the path of Jesus of Nazareth or even Marcus Aurelius might reach some ears–one might even argue it has done. That’s still well short of general adoption by the masses. “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”: Even for those of us who credit that teaching–what now?
I wonder if you agree that we’d see a powerful new shift if even ten percent of Christians made a renewed effort to follow the Earthly teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, above even striving for personal salvation, and above concern with supernatural or otherworldly claims?
As you know: Jesus preached individual virtue, bravery and responsibility, but with loving ministry to our interdependent world*.
*pardon me for leaving out forgiveness
Very well said, AJ. I hope the Christians hear you.
Sorry, something wrong with the site – couldn’t comment for the last 12 hours.
Value-destroying stuff:
Anything that prevents people hiring the best staff for a job.
Anything that needlessly increases the cost or effort of geting things done or needlessly adds complexity to things (examples: creating a “British ISA”, endless tinkering with the tax system rather than actually simplifying it).
I learnt a few days ago that my local council (South Cambs) created a “Transformation Department” staffed with 40 people with a target of £1.6m annual savings and proposing to increase the staffing to 100 as they aren’t meeting their target savings with 40. Note: loaded payroll cost of 40 staff is at least £1.6m !!!
etc.
I propose individual responsibility. And people saving money and doing things more efficiently as part of their own jobs. No more Transformation Departments !
The only “values” you defend here are material and selfish. Virtue and charity are optional but the Free Market has some sacred power with you, it seems.
Should there be individual responsibility, or duty to the neighbor and stranger? Yes. Both.
Do you think it’s impossible for your wealth or earning power to be taken away from you by disaster and misfortune? What would you do with in the literal and figurative rubble? Not continue to monetize and commodify what’s left, I hope.
By the way, I’m not wishing you a disastrous reversal but: Do you imagine that all your wealth and advantage was generated by your own personal merit and hard work? No luck, no help, no grace?
Now we have up/ down voting why didn’t my upvote register for AJ?
They’re still figuring out the switch. The tallies have been “zapped” down to zero a few time in recent days, and when than happens the moderator-bot claims “you’ve already voted”–though the vote has been erased.
I’m counting your vote though! Thanks.
You had me until the last five words. I think solutions can be readily observed (and there are multiple effective solutions to most of the problems) but almost all of them revert to the concept of political, social and personal self-discipline. They then run afoul of fundamental human nature not to mention greed and lust for power. Without some sort of broadly shared (to some effective critical mass) moral structure that has the mechanisms to control these characteristics of human nature we are left where we are today which is with a broken system of shared beliefs where any action, no matter how destructive, can be justified through relativistic ethics.
In a very broad sense, I agree that there is little one can do for others that they wouldn’t be willing to do for themselves. But self-discipline needn’t be self-important or self-centered.
A hand up, open ear, or well-timed kind word is often more than a minor thing. And we can understand the different struggles of individuals without descending into relativism. For example: Consider a poor single mother who had a terrible upbringing versus an independently wealthy estate holder who was well brought up, with at least one warm parent. We can refuse–on the one hand–to excuse the (hypothetical) bad actions of the mother, and–on the other hand–to have no heart to forgive the (hypothetical) bad actions of the estate holder.
A heart to understand is not the same as a bleeding heart. A hand-up needn’t be (or remain) unconditional, nor be soft-handed.
Giving a real damn about the whole community is a form of “enlightened self-interest” too.
Well said.
What about Scandinavian countries as examples of countries without extreme poverty or extreme wealth where people are content? (Or were content before Islamic immigrants arrived),
The black gold beneath our feet is there, but in the form of shale.
As we become more impoverished, hopefully a new govt will grasp the opportunity, and allow this black gold to be fracked.
As for the Monarchy, it is clearly in decline, and frankly a much diminished Royalty in our affairs would be a positive step forward.
Perhaps it would bring any pretensions that may still linger from our Empire to an end.
– First it start off as a movement.
– Then it turns into a business.
– And eventually, it devolves into a racket.
Bit of a simplification of a first principle cycle of death and renewal. It feels like we are very much in the “racket” stage. However, I fear that we must let it play itself out to its inevitable conclusion before we are able to start the whole process over again.
Interesting and mostly thoughtful polemic, with some elements of truth and others of tendentious prejudice.
At least the author doesn’t blame the NCB.
But on a point of detail, actually it was high quality coal, lower in sulphur than deep mined stuff. The NUM’s later hostility to opencast was self-defeating, as it was important to improve the blend that went to to power stations.
I wouldn’t, as a Catholic, pine for Victoria per se. Rather, I’d suggest a return of respect for a storied history, warts & all; a reverence for the culture; and therewith some forward economic thinking for the benefit of all.
All as it is without Scotland who has had 48 billion barrels of oil misappropriated from it
And while we are on this subject the plunder of $ 68 trillion from India
Along with India’s demands for reparations of £ 38 billion of their cultural artefacts emptying many a stately home and a Unnamed museum that’s completely inept in ensuring it is not Plundered itself
China are sitting in the wings picking it’s moment to mount similar demands
Among which one they consider priceless
Hand written scrolls by the hand of two
Emperor’s in the 5th & 6th century
A proud ancient peace loving Nation and people’s who consider their history and
Culture to be of the highest importance
The list of misdeeds and plunder could fill the British Library were it not for the Top secret civil servant gangs who Westminster dispatched to a colony that were on the cusp of Independence, all in order to destroy the records of such nefarious deeds
As for the obscene overuse of that Fairytale invented word ” British”
Well 86 % of Scot’s between 16 & and 32 yrs
Have no concept of what that word means far less consider themselves as British nor a Subject of King Charles
They are citizens of Scotland in mind and not of the UK
The English Empire have many a label
Stuck upon them deservedly so
Thieves, Liars , Cheats , Rapist’s, Murderer’s, Starvationists , Looters , Plunderers, Inventors of Concentration camps , Divisionists , Cowards who run away deliberately sowing the seeds of chaos , war ,religious divisions as they scurry away
The word Tory is derived from Irish Gaelic and means Robber a most fitting nomenclature
You really do need to improve both your syntax and grammar if you wish to be taken seriously.
Or are you in fact some sort of AI Bot?
This Chatbot demands you refute all I say fully backed up with evidence that all I speak irrespective of grammar is not factual
I care only for hard facts , truth , logic
And rational debate
As opposed to The delusional closed minds of Little Englander’s whose language was designed by Weasels and to be deployed by Weasels
Upto 80 % of the Worlds population don’t believe as a single word that your forked tongues wag upon
Truth is most awful matter for Weasels to confront
Away wi ye man and wave yet Butcher Apron which I do believe you refer to as the Union Jack
Recommend you do so in Kabul as your Weasel tones belt out Rule Britannia
Be careful cause a peasant 12 yr old Taliban will quickly deploy the sights of his British Army rifle captured from the Dead body of some poor
Working class boy during
Failed Victorian ventures into his predecessors Lands
This time the rifle has Dumb Dump hand made bullets in the chamber
It cost NATO over $ 10 million to kill one of the Little Taliban’s brother in arms
All whilst the Taliban can dispatch those who invade for less than $ 1
And the stupid little Weasels wonders as to why they had to run away not once ,not twice but thrice
As Einstein would tell you
To continue to repeat actions that always fail then indeed you are Mad
Now that little Englander awakes from his state of delusional
It appears that Madness fills the resultant void
And to finish with did you honestly believe you can defeat the 12 yr old peasant Taliban who In all probability has trekked over many a mountain wiping his posterior after defecating with a pebble that lies at hand and whose forebearers dispatched
The Greatest of all Warriors in the form of Alexander the Great whilst half way through in his attempts to conquer
Turned and fled homeeards
To think so is undoubtedly the pinnacle of crass Stupidity particularly so in the Department labeled WISDOM
If you to be taken seriously then reply with verifiable facts from trustworthy
Sources that counteract any or all I speak off
And none of reference to that weasel
Language you deploy
I will only comment once on your diatribe as I sense that you are not someone inclined to rational discussion. Similarly I will only take the time to mention 3 of your more egregious claims which don’t require any research.
The Chinese whom you call peace-loving have several claims to be the opposite. The bloodiest battle in history is thought to be the 1864 Third Battle of Nanking, with over 100,000 dead. That was a part of the Taiping Rebellion which left 30 million dead. The following century Mao killed at least 30 million more.
The leader of the looting expedition to China which you criticize was James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin. He was one of the disproportionately high number of Scots found in the commanders, soldiers, administrators, politicians, adventurers and plantation owners in the Empire. If any one of the countries of the United Kingdom can lay claim to the British Empire it is Scotland.
You also mention the oft-repeated claim that the British invented concentration camps, which most people understand to be Nazi-type camps with features such as forced labour, mass executions and medical experimentation. You are probably referring to the Boer War, where British camps had none of these features and should more correctly be called internment camps, which have been common in many conflicts and the best-known of which are probably the ones for Japanese Americans in World War Two.
QED.
Your responses are always arresting an provocative, that much can’t be denied.
Scotland is indeed an interesting model to think with. She herself is arguably as much of an ‘Empire’ as The United Kingdom or the British Empire. The Highland line is at least as significant a barrier in Scottish history as was the Tweed and the Debateable Lands were and are. Harlaw was more momentous a battle than Cullolden or even Bannockburn in the creation of a unified and independent Scotland. The Lowland, Scots speaking, colonisation of the Gaelic Highlands was set in motion. From then on, the attitude of the latterly Presbyterian Lowlanders to the Episcopalian and Catholic Highlanders and Islanders was in many ways the template adopted for the plantation of Ireland and from there the wider British Empire. I am thinking of the Gentleman Adventurers of Fife, the the Dress and Heritable Jurisdiction Acts and later the Clearances. These were done by Southron Scots, or the native aristocracy, to the Gael – not by the Saxon. The Scots were the keenest and most flinty servants of Empire. My own forebears included.
As to your other points, it seems to me that it was James I and VI, as true a son of Kenneth McAlpin as ever was, who foisted the idea of ‘Britain’ on an unacommodating English nation. Scotland was quite happy to sustain their part in the great undertaking of Empire – at least until they were undercut by the same eastern colonies they themselves had gamed for so long. Eventually the Bengalis realised they needn’t send their Jute to Dundee to be woven. And then, strangely enough, the Scots discovered Socialism all of a sudden. 50 years later they renamed the North Briton Hotel in Edinburgh the ‘Balmoral’.
Scottish history can be a dizzying and intoxicating subject, as the Drunk Man said as he Looked at the Thistle –
“I felt it turn, and syne I saw
John Knox and Clavers in my raw,
And Mary Queen o’ Scots ana’,”
Substantive reply as always, Mr. Amos. As a poetry student/ink-dipper of (part) Scots descent may I ask: In your opinion, is MacDiarmid’s “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle” to be read in its entirety? At a glance it looks worthwhile and entertaining, but I admit its 2,500-plus lines are daunting.
On the face of it I found it a very entertaining, rollicking piece as a sort of Hudibrastic semi-parody of the Waste Land. It should be read in the same way as the Waste Land should (and the Divine Comedy, for that matter), first through and then in parts. But it can only be really understood as a self referential whole.
It is also a very pertinent and timely poem for our own day. It deals with precisely what Ms Harrington approaches in this article – a ancient volksgeist in abeyance, eating through the cultural seed corn, loitering drunkenly at the moment of complete and irrecoverable dissipation and dissolution. For Macdiarmid it was the Scotland of Auld being adulterated into Harry Lauder and Cockney Burns Suppers and then sold back to a demoralised nation as a commodity.
Eliot’s vision of the cultural collapse was Biblical, sombre and terrifying, inflected with Dantean chiaroscuro. MacDiarmid’s vision (more terrifying still, perhaps) was that the collapse would be trivial, squalid and venal, the maudlin amnesia of a disappointed toper.
Intriguing and helpful comments. And Hudibrastic is a new adjective to this North American. Much obliged.
Wow! Two Irishmen commenting on the same page giving diametrically opposite opinions on British history, Irish-American and RC Andrew Vanbarner; Irish-Scot and RC Brian Doyle: two far ends of a spectrum. My comment is good luck to Andrew, and maybe Brian should return to the land of his ancestors which is now a grand place compared to Britain.
Mary Harrington puts herself out there and I am grateful. She’s yearning for excellence, morals, leadership, and noting Victorian Britain, before the fall of empire, had it in spades, as did the US in the post WWII era. We are now, in the age of biotech and AI, and we don’t get much for our money, except synthetic breast milk and shitty “vaccines”. We don’t get our cake, and we don’t get to eat it. I too pine for previous eras where ambitious excellence took precedence over “equity”. But don’t forget the lessons of Thomas Piketty’s two works from the last 10 years – we live in an age of wealth and income inequality only matched by one other period in history – the Gilded Age, or late stage Victorian. Nothing can work now because incomes are being stripped and shipped upwards as wealth of a very few. There will be no chance of resurrecting excellence and ambition and “serious” culture until middle and lower class incomes are balanced more equitably. It will take morals to shepherd income towards less inequitable distributions. Morals, not notions of diversity, equity, and inclusion. That’s gonna be a hard one – painful.
Inappropriate and reprehensible the opencast mining of the grounds of Wentworth Woodhouse was (even the local NUM were outraged and a placed a union ban on shot-firers carrying out blasting there, so the army had to be called in), the broader opencast coal mining industry in the UK had, in latter decades at least, a excellent record of quickly restoring mined agricultural land to a high standard, and even rehabilitating some existing polluted brownfield sites. This was in addition to internationally competitive efficiency.
Not quite intellectual enough for this article >< Just a simple note. Every family has skeletons and sickness. The royal family is no exception. Don’t think scrapping the monarchy will solve all of Britain’s economic woes. The monarchy has been an important vein of Britain, no matter what we think about it. Perhaps no leader or party will get us out of anything. It’s probably social dynamics and on the ground changes that will make a change. But truly don’t remember parts of history nor am I a politician or writer. X
Yes the left love to believe everyone but the corrupt rich are starving when the truth is the poor in the UK are much more likely to be obese . The fact checkers at the BBC never question the need for food banks myth , for some reason .
Meghan would not have been briefed about the upper class tradition whereby the first born gets everything .She would have expected parity with William in the kind of apartment she could live in at Kensington Palace . Being the kind of person she is I suspect the senior royals were happy to disillusion her .
Anyway funny and beautifully written article .
Obese from the wrong kind of food.
Not from too much of it?
What a wonderful article.
This is article is a serious drop in form for the author. Is it really being asserted that “Britain’s period of 19th-century hegemony rested ultimately on a crucial energy source — coal…”
Such a simplistic argument would merit a fail in a high school History exam (well when standards were still rigorous). Britain was climbing to the top before mass exploitation of coal and was in relative decline when coal was still the number one energy source.
The pre-eminence of GB was multi-sourced: Try the firmly established rule of law enabling inter alia, secure commerce; parliamentary representation that was able to evolve into full democracy without revolution; ideal geolocation connected to Europe but with easy access to the wider world; Evangelical Christian humanitarianism that drove anti-slavery, education locally and overseas, prison and factory reform, etc; a commitment to scientific inquiry that drove innovation and world exploration; a profound national self-confidence that drove expectations.
Too simplistic by half.