Britain’s Final Decline
As a primary-school lad in Australia, one of the great dominions of the British Commonwealth and Empire, I can well remember the impact which King George vi’s death had around the world in 1952. That was seven years after the defeat of the German-led Axis powers in World War ii. We were still sending food parcels across the seas to Britain and lending special support to our pen friend, young Jean Irwin, of the bomb-blasted city of Bristol. When the day of the king’s funeral arrived, we children went to school wearing black and purple ribbons—the black signifying sympathy for the royal family’s grieving, the purple being the color of royalty. Our whole school stood in silence for two minutes together with the entire nation at the appointed time, paying tribute to the king. The pedestrian traffic came to a halt on the sidewalks and in shops across the country as police doffed their helmets and stood in reverent silence for the required period.
The whole nation mourned with a genuine sense of the loss of a king who had called the British nation to prayer on more than one occasion to either implore God for merciful intervention to save it in battle, or in thanks to God for giving it the victory. Multiple millions the world over, from Canada to India, from New Zealand to South Africa and throughout the whole vast British Commonwealth and empire, followed suit. For a brief moment in time the silence was profound, as the mightiest empire that ever was remembered its king. It was a time when the British crown still enjoyed almost universal respect.
Then, in 1965, once again, Great Britain and its commonwealth of nations, no longer an empire, were bound for that moment of silence in memory of a singularly great man of the empire. Worldwide television and radio broadcast the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill. As a young man courting my future wife, I remember those black-and-white images of the funeral cortege as it wove along the route to deliver this old warrior’s remains to the boat that would convey them to their final resting place. The feeling in my country, in the midst of that decade of great social upheaval in the West, was as of an era brought to a close.
“The final days of imperial Britain are bracketed—appropriately enough—by the funerals of an old man and of a beautiful young woman. The first, of Sir Winston Churchill, reached into a past of grandeur and certainty, while the second, of Diana, princess of Wales, foreshadowed a future of doubt and decline” (Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain, p. 1).
A well-known British journalist sees an overarching connection between Churchill’s funeral and that of another eminent Briton. Watching that other funeral, the great media-managed display surrounding the death of Princess Diana, one of my generation surely had to be struck by the vast difference in the public image of a Britain mourning for its last king and its greatest prime minister, and that of this divorced wife of the prince of Wales. The old traditions had crumbled; old taboos were lauded. A homosexual performed a song in the great cathedral of Westminster, a song originally devoted to a former actress of loose reputation who died in questionable circumstances. Far from honoring the dead in silence, the assembled mourners applauded the performance. Such a queer mood gripped liberal Britain and rippled around its polyglot commonwealth on this occasion that it could only be described as a mania. Indeed, the strange and unprecedented Dianamania that gripped Britain at this time was but symptomatic of a deeper illness.
“Among young people unprecedented rates of suicide, drug-addiction and crime are plain signals of distress and fear. The Dianamania is another indication of those anxieties and disorders at large in society” (Hal Colbatch, Blair’s Britain, p. 140).
End of the Imperial Age
Thus it was that, as Peter Hitchens mused on Churchill’s funeral procession of 35 years ago, the uniformed men of the three services who comprised the funeral escort “all knew or suspected that their great imperial age was over. In less than two years, a pitiless series of spending cuts would abolish or merge ancient regiments, condemn dozens of ships to the scrap yard and close a string of hard-won (and recently recaptured) bases east of Suez” (op. cit., p. 18).
That great reversal of Britain’s national blessings was forecast in the prophecy of Isaiah 17.
The imperial age of Great Britain had been founded upon the institution of royalty. This is what gave Britain and its far-flung possessions a vision of continuity, which many understood, up to the time of and including Queen Victoria, attested to a regal genealogy which stretched back 3,000 years to the ancient royal throne of King David of Israel. (Request your own free copy of our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy for the exciting exposé of this startling truth.)
It was George Orwell who wrote in his 1941 play, The Lion and the Unicorn, that it would take more than World War ii to change the deeply set character of the British. Perhaps the great trauma of that war laid the groundwork to destabilize this one great nation, even in the midst of that which Churchill termed Britain’s “finest hour.” However, post-war Britain up to 1965 had changed little, culturally, over the previous 30 years. At the time of Churchill’s death, 93 percent of British marriages lasted to the grave. Apart from a small liberal-socialist “elite,” such as the infamous Bloomsbury set, the sexual revolution had not begun!
Divorce was still anathema, illegitimacy a rarity and homosexual acts illegal. “Loitering with intent” (a euphemism for hanging around, waiting to commit a felony) and offensive language were criminal acts. The concept of worshiping a singular providence, God, still underpinned British society up to the mid-1960s. The queen was honored, the national anthem sung with gusto, and the beloved old Union Jack, under which the empire had fought and gained the victory in two great wars, was saluted with solemnity.
Birth of the Ugly New Britain
Thirty years on from Churchill’s death, a sea change had emerged in Britain which had shaken its culture apart. Peter Hitchens encapsulates that change brilliantly: “In 1965, the people of Britain may have been poorer, smaller, shabbier, dirtier, colder, narrower, more set in their ways, ignorant of olive oil, polenta and—even—lager. But they knew what united them, they shared a complicated web of beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, loyalties and dislikes. By 1997 they were unsure and at sea. Those over 40 no longer felt they were living in the country where they had grown up…. Those under 40, for the most part, had only the sketchiest notion of who they were and of how or when their surroundings had come to be as they were…and despised much of what the previous generation had admired” (ibid., pp. 23-24; emphasis mine here and throughout).
Britain is at grave risk of losing all concept and memory of its rich and glorious God-given heritage. As Mr. Hitchens opines, “A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation” (ibid., p. 35).
Last June, Britons were treated to a shocking demonstration of this loss of the nation’s history to its current generation. It was the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Old airmen who fought in dogfights against Herman Göring’s Luftwaffe visited a British primary school. They were aghast at observing that schoolchildren had never heard of the Battle of Britain! One old serviceman approached a teacher and asked her if the history of the Battle of Britain would be taught as a component of the children’s education curriculum. To his astonishment the old spitfire pilot received the response, “The battle of what?” Less than three generations from the British victory in the 1940 battle which turned the tide of war for that country, the knowledge of its heroes, the quality of the nation’s valor, the loyalty and devotion to the crown that bound the nation together amid great sacrifice and hardship, have largely disappeared from the nation’s schools!
How did this happen? Author Hal Colebatch declares, “There is something very strange about the attempt to forcibly destroy a country’s past traditions and institutions when that country has been one of the most stable and advanced of major nations” (op. cit., p. 140).
Perhaps the course was set for the eradication of true history from British education curricula during the 1960s. But the deathblow has followed since 1997. In that year, when the queen was observed to shed a tear at the paying off of the Royal Yacht, a symbol of a greater imperial age (towed to rest by a German tugboat), the funeral of a princess gauged the extent of the fever that heated the brow of a culturally abased, morally sick Britain, and a new British administration took over the reins of government to steer the nation into a moral and cultural abyss.
Revealing a frightening parallel to the process that Professor Alan Bloom described in his 1987 best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, a process that has degraded the collective American mind over past decades, Mr. Colebatch declares that the present British administration “shows an affinity with the rock-music culture celebrating drug-taking, law-breaking and physical violence and aggression, as well as occasional suggestions of a kind of commercial satanism.” Colebatch, referring to the British government’s use of pop music as a model for “New Britain,” then quotes the Daily Telegraph: “But what educational worth is there in an activity that thrives on abusing core values?” (ibid., p. 18).
The New Government
Yet the most insidious aspect of the deliberate destruction of the heart of all that was regarded as quintessentially British for centuries has been the stage-managed nature of the present British government’s enforcements of its new order. Witness the snide crowd management at 10 Downing Street, when special passes were issued to Labor Party employees and British flags handed to them to wave in a show of sham crowd support playing to the camera upon the election of the present leader of the British government. Then there was the deliberate flouting of convention by the prime minister and his wife walking out to meet the cameras and the crowds during a state opening of Parliament (deliberately stealing the spotlight from the queen). The present British leadership has cynically used a powerful media cabal to control, in Goebbellesque fashion, the filtering of news to the public. Peter Hitchens states that the carefully choreographed arrival of the prime minister and his wife at 10 Downing Street upon his election to office “was the first example in British history of a fake spontaneous demonstration” (op. cit., p. 333).
Since then, the spin doctors of the liberal-socialist left (dressed, as that segment of British politics is, in its present centrist clothes) have carefully managed the communication of the party line to the public on such things as the drive to lower the age of consent for homosexual acts to 16 years, the destruction of the House of Lords (Britain’s parliamentary Upper House), the denigration of Parliament as an institution, the mockery of British culture in the form of the infamous Millennium Dome, the release of murdering, unrepentant killers from Irish jails, the managed destruction of the British farm economy, and the promotion of subculture to replace traditional high culture. This unprecedented radicalism presently extant in British government is most in evidence in its bearing on basic constitutional and institutional change.
In all of this the media moguls of Britain are complicit. “We should not neglect the active role of opinion-formers and the media in encouraging us to repudiate the culture that made us” (Salisbury Review, Summer 2000, p. 3).
What is quite profound is the congruency which exists in the year 2000 between the ways of the current U.S. administration and that of Britain. Both are led by men who embrace a “third alternative,” a Third Way, in politics. Both actively attack traditional institutions. Both administrations have powerful friends in the mass media. Even as American commercial TV news is sanitized to the extent where only one politically correct point of view is expressed and the U.S. appears as the center of the world, the British leadership’s close liaison with a media multimillionaire who espouses an intense dislike of the institution of royalty has largely contributed to shaping public opinion in Britain against its most regal institution, sucking the nation into the vortex of Europeanization.
Modernism and ethics are the catchwords of the current British administration. “There is some vague idea that change itself is good and that long-established institutions such as the hereditary principle [respecting the House of Lords and the monarchy] or the countryside are unacceptable” (ibid., p. 10).
The cult of the modern envelops this administration. As Digby Anderson, writing for the Salisbury Review, states, “The promotion of sodomy is definitely modern.” Here is a direct link with the philosophy which drives the present U.S. administration. “Traditional smacking of naughty children is not modern.” Another link across the Atlantic. Then there is “New Britain’s” situation ethics.
Having worked like the devil to destroy the traditional value base of Britain, the old Ten Commandments, British political leadership gropes in the resultant vacuum to establish a coherent national value system while at the same time perpetually reminding the nation that today’s Britain is a multicultural society where different groups within the nation have different values. This fragmentation of British society into a mess of differing communities with different languages, religions, cultural practices and traditions is profoundly exacerbated by the diminution of the importance of the “mother of all parliaments” resulting from the Blair government’s creation of separate parliamentary bodies for Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland.
Mr. Anderson, director of the Social Affairs Unit in Britain, declares that “both government and culture have no place for God in their ethical blunderings. Yet they nowhere identify a new authority for their moral imperatives” (ibid., p. 11).
Britain’s present leadership is a government for the times. The time is ripe for the changing of the nation’s mind, and mass media, in particular television, is the prime medium through which this national mind change is being effected. It is a time when “over 90 percent of the population does not care to meet God, on a regular basis at any rate; they’d rather watch TV” (ibid., p. 11). Mr. Anderson poses the intriguing question, “Could it not be that the trivia and filth of the media do not so much corrupt culture as feed an already corrupted culture?” (ibid., p. 11).
Commenting on the media-managed, politically motivated onslaught on the foundations of British culture, Hitchens observes, “This was how the modern men, the men who had grown up with color TV and the Beatles, stormed Britain’s gates” (op. cit., p. xviii).
No More Artisans—No More Orators
The prophet Isaiah forecast a time when Britain would see its rich stock of leaders in every major field diminished. “For, behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread, and the whole stay of water, the mighty man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the ancient, the captain of fifty, and the honourable man, and the counseller, and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator” (Isa. 3:1-3).
Compare Isaiah’s prophecy with Mr. Colbatch’s turn-of-the-millennium observation: “The old right [traditional conservative bastion of moral certitude in Britain] has seen the apparent great weakening of such social and moral certainties as monarchism, patriotism, and military and civil values like honor, pride, dignity and tradition…” (op. cit., p. 11).
Both authors of the recently published books quoted in this article, Hitchens and Colebatch, agree that 1997 saw something much more than a change of government in Britain. It was Emperor Constantine who noted in the vanguard of the imploding cultural collapse of Rome that the empire had reached a point where the stone-carvers had lost the talent to carve impressions of reality and had to resort to copying earlier works. Britain may have momentarily revived the art of the stonemason and the carver through the post-1970s effort to restore some of its finest old buildings and monuments. Yet it is the artisans of words, the great orators, the prudent judges, the wise administrators (once unmatched in the world) that have disappeared from its cultural scene, as Isaiah prophesied. With their loss has gone the sense of honor, duty, fidelity, courage, self-sacrifice and personal responsibility which underpinned the reputations of its greatest leaders.
The contrast between the Profumo and Cooke affairs makes this great loss powerfully evident. In 1962, British government minister John Profumo’s affair with call girl Christine Keeler led to his voluntary resignation and an inquiry chaired by a high-court judge, and brought down the conservative government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Forty years later, the current British minister for foreign affairs, Robin Cook, consorting with a civil servant, adopting her as his mistress and housing her in swank Carlton Gardens raises hardly a ripple from the nation, and the country’s present leader turns a blind eye to this shoddy affair.
The Europeanization of Britain
Perhaps the most insidious part of the government’s covert agenda for massive cultural and institutional change in Britain is its underground drive to divorce the United Kingdom from its sovereignty and independence as a nation and merge it into the hybrid mix of the European Union.
The British people were sold a lie by conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath in the 1970s, when he told them that no federal ambitions lay behind those who ruled the European common market. The British were then sold down the drain acquiring membership of the EU (then the European Economic Community) under his government in 1973. The move wrecked the most successful agrarian economy in the world, sacrificing it to mountains of inefficiency in the farm-destroying market of the European Union.
With the collapse of the Soviet political economy, the way was cleared for an emerging European phenomenon, described by Peter Hitchens as “a new battle against German domination of Europe, advancing behind the smoke screen of European Union, and armed with the weapons of supranational statism”(op. cit., p. xvii).
Then the Europhiles set about to Europeanize the minds of the British people. Lately this has culminated in the most insidious and seditious project of brainwashing imposed by the EU and willingly cultivated by Britain’s current administration: “Euroquest.” The Euroquest venture is a blatant effort by Eurocrats and Third Way British politicians to inject into the minds of the nation’s schoolchildren acceptance of the grand Eurodream.
British political economist Rodney Atkinson, in his pamphlet “European Union Propaganda in British Schools,” states, “‘Euroquest’ is their latest venture into the ‘education’ of our children about the obvious advantages of sacrificing our nation, Parliament and democracy on the altar of the European Union.”
Atkinson explains that such propaganda goes directly against Britain’s Education Act, which specifically forbids, in the words of section 406, “the promotion of partisan political views in the teaching of any subject in schools.”
A curious thing is happening in Britain. On the one hand we have a pop-culture government espousing a “cool Britannia,” promising a repackaged national identity founded upon the cult of the young, the modern and the “ethics” of political correctness. On the other it appears that the whole of British heritage is finished—sovereignty, national identity, history, the general conventions, systems, institutions and standards that made Britain world leader for over 200 years.
When seen in the context of European Union, it seems that “the government is trying to reshape the national identity and consciousness not in spite of the coming European Union but because of it. A Britain whose historic culture has been destroyed may not find the loss of sovereignty such a great matter” (Colebatch, op. cit., p. 59).
Choose Now
The present British political establishment has hastened the regression of that country which, in the words of Aldous Huxley, once exuded a “prestige, which the other people would like to deny but can’t” (Luigi Barzini, The Europeans, p. 36). Today’s Britain is but a poor reflection of those halcyon days when “the adoption of English ways…was in the end so widespread as to go practically unnoticed and unquestioned. People automatically chose the best and the best was British” (ibid., p. 38).
The Philadelphia Church of God is doing its utmost to explain to the British and American peoples the reason for their moral and cultural collapse, a portent of coming socio-economic implosion on a far greater scale than the collapse of the Soviet system.
The best of the commentators on the state of “New Britain” knowingly declare that its present cultural and moral collapse is without precedent. Warning bells are sounding.
“I ask the Left to begin to reconsider its own record, especially in damaging the family, ruining the schools and making Britain a land fit for pornographers. If the decay of obligation, duty and morality continues, danger and misery will soon be hammering at the front doors of all of us, Left and Right alike” (Hitchens, op. cit., p. 350).
The threat of that “danger and misery” is a lot closer than most Britons realize. When the threat becomes a reality, the shock will overwhelm the British people.
“Like an avalanche, cultural or systemic collapses can have consequences far in excess of their apparent causes. And when an avalanche—or a guillotine—falls, it falls very fast” (Colebatch, op. cit., pp. 141-142).
This comment is reminiscent of God’s end-time prophecy for Britain, the land of biblical Ephraim, contained in Hosea 5:4-5. “They will not frame their doings to turn unto their God: for the spirit of whoredoms is in the midst of them, and they have not known the Lord. And the pride of Israel doth testify to his face: therefore shall Israel and Ephraim fall in their iniquity; Judah also shall fall with them.”
The book of Hosea mentions Ephraim 37 times. For proof that biblical Ephraim is the Britain of today, write for The United States and Britain in Prophecy. Much of Hosea’s message is a revelation of the massive correction facing Britain if that nation does not repent and turn back to worship the God who originally endowed it with the greatest empire in man’s history. The prospect of this once-great nation’s national repentance before receiving that correction looks very bleak indeed.
“The people do not question their own actions. ‘The spirit of whoredoms’ has thoroughly perverted their minds. People like to act religious, but they have no desire to truly know God. The people are growing worse and worse. So Ephraim is going to ‘fall’ hard and fast ‘in their iniquity.’ And the nation of Judah, or the modern-day nation called Israel, and Manasseh (America) are going to fall with them” (Hosea and God’s Adulterous Wife, p. 22; write for a free copy).
Our warning to those nations must become even more powerful, urgent and insistent. There are powers working against this, seeking to block and stifle this message. They will not succeed! God prophesies that Britain and America will be warned. And when that warning of powerful national correction for their massive national sins comes, all face a choice to either heed and respond to that message or to reject it. This will affect your future whether or not you like it—whether or not you believe it. Which course will you choose?