March 26, 2025 - 11:40am
British spectacles of public togetherness usually signal that an episode of collective psychosis is around the corner. Think of the death of Diana, or the cult of Captain Tom. But nothing has prepared us for Paddington Bear, the cuddly children’s toy that has somehow become a conduit for state anxiety about “kindness and integration” in the face of unprecedented mass migration, state failure and the collapse of the old organs of culture and media to reckon with contemporary Britain.
A decade ago, the elevation of a cuddly toy to a state-endorsed icon might have seemed a bit off. But the Britain of 2025 is a strange place. “A feel-good start to the week,” the BBC gushed this week as the UK’s Japanese ambassador smiled nervously next to the bear. Last summer, while the police struggled to contain a baying mob outside an asylum hotel, the bear popped up on social media to lend a hand: “Perhaps it’s time for a little more kindness.”
When two drunken RAF engineers felled a statue of Paddington in the Berkshire town of Newbury earlier this month, who knows what repressed urges were being unleashed. The sentencing magistrate certainly seemed suspicious yesterday: “He represents kindness, tolerance and promotes integration and acceptance in our society […] your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for.” Appalled witnesses lined up to testify, a Newbury Nuremberg for this very British atrocity. The remaining parts, said Trish from the council, had to be covered in a bin bag as “children would find it upsetting to see the statue completely destroyed.”
The genre is now well worn: Paddington Bear is twee, unbearable and infantile. But it’s also curiously sinister, part of a broader reactionary force by a preening, cynical establishment trying to find its feet in the ongoing upheaval of 21st-century Britain. The canonical essay on the subject is J’Accuse’s “The Posh Turn”, which documents the consolidation — and legitimation — of the post-1997 order, shored up with a raiding of Britain’s heritage, nostalgia, and the witticisms of Stephen Fry.
“Britishness” in the authentically spontaneous sense no longer seems to really exist in the public realm. Footy and fish and chips, the Royal Family, dogs in pubs: these are all the anaemic offerings to a desperate Starmerite nation-building project. Any collective memory or past icon is now foisted on the public by a pandering, secretive committee which is actually frightened of ordinary people. Observe Mike Tapp, Keir Starmer’s John Bull, who nervously teases out the views of his followers on social media with his jarringly worded polls. “What’s your favourite British activity for a Sunday?” he asked this month. The options were: “roast”, “walk”, “football/rugby” and “all of them”.
Compare this to another tribal force that has swept British social media: the popular coinage of the “Yookay” to describe the multicultural, garish, vulgar, surreal and increasingly dysfunctional Britain that has emerged this century. In some respects, it’s an aesthetic — a mood with which you can only really grapple when walking around streets and towns swollen by decay and mass immigration, and guided by an entirely separate sphere of social-media networks and subcultures. It is a world almost alien to the official Paddington nexus of “British values” within the media, sport and now the state.
But it’s also the triumph of an apparently reactionary “very online” vanguard to define — in the absence of any influential political and cultural commentariat — the terms of satire and understanding and even acknowledgement of this New Britain. This is a nation which exists beyond bland BBC 2 documentaries, Netflix dramas-cum-nagging PR stunts, and the pious waffle of magistrates and politicians.
Vast swathes of Britain’s public figures are no longer really interested in the country in which they live. See the recent Sunday Times “Best Places to Live”, which showcased a veritable flight of the upper and middle classes to the shires, a retrograde arcadia of Georgian terraces, muddy wellies and country blossom (yes, the intact statue popped up in the feature on Newbury).
In a Cummingsite turn, talk of “rewiring” the British state, reforming the blob and bringing the state into the 21st century has even reached Labour’s backbenchers. But the next challenge seems far harder: an overhaul of modern British mores, tastes and manners, an awakening from its whimsy and oblivion into a new and unavoidable nation.
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SubscribeGosh, is a judge really attributing saintlike characteristics to Paddington Bear? We are more lost than I realised.
We should parachute this judge in Alaska to face reall bears.
Great headline
Good article
I particularly liked “The genre is now well worn: Paddington Bear is twee, unbearable and infantile. But it’s also curiously sinister, part of a broader reactionary force by a preening, cynical establishment trying to find its feet in the ongoing upheaval of 21st-century Britain.”
Way over the top, like the article itself. I’m not saying your sentiment doesn’t have merit because Britain is in serious decline, but not really relevant for this story. PB has been a well- loved children’s story for decades. Even Winnie the Pooh has his statue at London Zoo. It’s not as if 2 soldiers are awaiting beheading in the tower.
True. As well as the quote above, the judge also said that the men shouldn’t be beheaded.
What is Britishness? This is something I have grappled with all my life. I have only ever lived in Scotland and so many things contributed the being British are alien to me. Maybe it is time to drop the pretense of everyone having to cleave to something that doesn’t really exist exceot in tbe minds of the fee abd politicians and acknowledge that each natiin has its own traditions and mores. Fish and chips, footie, dogs in pubs, the Royal family and Paddington Bear are not what make us “British” but what actually does apart from the fact we all stay on these many islands?
The book that encompassed it best for me was, strangely, “The Stripping of the Altars”. Written by an Irishman, about a time before empire, or protestantism, or pretty much any of the things usually referred to when people speak of national identity now. I think this is why people feel there was something, but can’t put it into words, and with the final loss of the remnants of it’s Christian roots, often can’t even find it in modern Britain anymore.
Infantilisation, just look at the adult/child relationships in the street, try and tell which is which. The giveaway is the one loudly braying and seeking agreement from the other that is abandoned to the care of strangers all week….
The child is abandoned to the care of strangers all week because young families can no longer afford to live on a single wage
Abandoned …. and a major contribution to family break up, confused youngsters whose craving for familial love and affection in early years is another corrosive factor in their development. All while promoted by the state with zeal in the name of equality. All well understood , documented and with evidence in abundance. Young lives, family life condemned to the fire of globalisation.
So what’s the alternative?
Either both parents work and the kid is in daycare, or only 1 does and they can’t afford to pay the mortgage.
Most young families will rightly decide daycare is the lesser of two evils
Trump should annex both Peru and the UK to save this benighted bear. Under the principle that it’s better to own both the source and the destination for aslyum, he can go on annex France to help the UK.
Spot on. The establishment is full of people cosplaying being British. My pet hate is journalists, copywriters and politicians who feel the need to use the words Great British as an adjective before anything they think will play with the plebs. It’s all a sign of unstoppable cultural decline.
I adamantly agree with you on The Great British … blah blah, but its been around for a long time, I’m afraid. I can remember when I was a child in the 1950’s it was used in newspaper headlines all the time. It always made me feel slightly humiliated for being British, and it still does.
For me it started when every politician had to be a football fan and support a team
For a time in Canada, we used “The Great Canadian (insert noun here)” as a wry, sarcastic description of something that was mundanely Canadian.
As for the lads ‘goin large a bit’ as Kipling wrote.
Then it’s Tommy this, an Tommy that, an Tommy ‘how’s yer soul?’
But it’s ‘Thin red line of eroes’ When the drums begin to roll.
I think the author is reading too much into the actions of a couple of sozzled blokes.
I think the Judge did that as well.
True. The judge’s remarks are embarrassing, does he or she not know Paddington is a fictional creature?
Makes you think law is fictional.
He is just a cog in the dumbed down apparatus that now rules this dumbed down country.
Ffs. It’s a kids story
Death to Paddington! And to that bloody road runner. Always hated that smug b*stard.
I always hated Jerry (the mouse)
The road runner is quintessentially American though, and thus has little to say about the malaise that currently afflicts Britain (which is probably just as well, as his entire verbal output is “beep beep”).
There’s a joke about Americans and our limited vocabulary in there somewhere. Probably another about our love of explosions. And then another about the overall level of violence. Come to think of it, the collected works of Chuck Jones don’t reflect particularly well on American culture, do they?
I always liked the fact that when the coyote was chasing the road runner, and ran off the edge of the cliff, he didn’t fall until he actually realised he had run off the edge of the cliff.
Oh I loved the cartoons myself as well. I’m just realizing they probably don’t reflect anything positive about the culture.
The Road Runner is one hell of a muscle car and the anthesis of “Britishness”. beep-beep
Not all bears are equal.
Thankfully, while Peruvian Paddington is no match for the Russian bear, there are plenty of Mr Currys raising the panic level from mild alarm to rampant hysteria.
Paddington is a psyop.
Xi Peng will not be pleased, as exhibited by the reticence of the Japanese ambassador to applaud lest he upset the Chinese.
The transformation – between the quirky and somewhat bloody minded Paddington I remember from the simplistic animations of childhood telly (the overflowing porridge saucepan was always my fave story) – to a mascot for smug libs adopting all the virtuous values to compensate for their middle class white guilt is remarkable. The end for me was the Brexit era film with the rabid foreigner hating neighbour, signalling that the correct attitude to Leavers for all right thinking people. Lazy smugness personified from their comfy ivory towers in BBC land.
My sympathy was with the soldiers from the start. OK so they shouldn’t have done it. But there are TWENTY-THREE of these twee (definitely), sentimental, childish, garish, cheaply made statues cluttering up towns all over the UK. Why? There should only be one, the attractive bronze one in Paddington Station. That at least belongs there, and has some claim to be a work of art.
My sympathy was with the soldiers from the start. OK so they shouldn’t have done it. But there are TWENTY-THREE of these twee (definitely), sentimental, childish, garish, cheaply made statues cluttering up towns all over the UK. Why? There should only be one, the attractive bronze one in Paddington Station. That at least belongs there, and has some claim to be a work of art.