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Old England is dying.
— The Waterboys, “Old England”

Looked at from the outside, even the cockney and the Yorkshireman have a strong family resemblance. — George Orwell, “England Your England”

Cultures change, and forms of their rituals and practices shift and mutate in their wake. Perhaps it’s the other way around, and the latter is upstream of the former, to mix aquatic metaphors. Either way the coin falls, the times they are a-changing, and in perpetuity. They always have been. I don’t imagine that the average Dutch manual worker still goes up to his windmill wearing clogs of a morning, just as I suspect that Japanese samurai are not today absolved from the law should they elect to test their new daisho by slicing a passing villager in half to check the keenness of the blade. And if the Aztecs (or whoever moved in after they left) still tear out the still-beating hearts of children to sizzle in the Sun before consumption as an offering to their fiery god, the local press makes no mention of it.

Now, England is better known for its cultural eccentricity than violent sacrifice and the witchy doings of many of our dour northern European neighbors, and so many of our outmoded cultural items are rather amusing. This is the nation of the quill pen, the Penny Farthing bicycle, and the Anti-Macassar. But those things have passed into dusty chambers in museums. Once, they were the finest products of their kind, but they were replaced by newer, better, faster things. There are several other items in the cabinet, and that exhibit beside them is another invention that has seen its day come and go: British values.

It is one of those phrases which seems to have been around forever but no one really notices, like a deaf old family retainer wheeled out at Christmas. Although with Christmas going out of fashion, she is now wheeled out whenever the media weathercock is pointing towards immigration. “British values” are what immigrants will integrate into once they hit the shores of the Promised Land. It is packaged by politicians and journalists as something that the immigrant gets as part of a welcome goodie-bag, along with a phone, a debit card, a home, and ultimately, quite possibly a passport. But, rummaging about in the bag as these new arrivals might, they never seem to find that table of values. What are these mysterious elements that can be postulated but not seen, like those odd little atoms that do much the same thing? “British values” are just assumed to be there, like rain and pavements and toast. And tea. We used to buy packs of tea with pictures of Indian ladies on them, happily carrying tea on their heads or laughing in the fields (while working). They had little cards inside — the packets of tea, not the Indian ladies — with information about India on the back and another picture on the front. They were actually educational, one of many reasons they are long gone.

British values are assumed to be just as easy to obtain as one of those packs of tea. Pick them up off the shelf. Get a taste of another culture. You still get a free card, too; it just entitles you to money from the white people around you. Centuries of cultural accretion that spread around the globe are reduced to a consumer item. Speaking of which, the media looks more and more like a consumer item by the month, and they still do the same deals at sale time. Which is every day for most media, as selling is what they are doing.

Okay, media in the United Kingdom of all stripes, because it’s not just the mainstream media who parrot this nebulous motto. What exactly, or even inexactly, are these British values of which you speak? I’ll take your first answer or it’s a mystery prize. Are they bright and shiny and new, like all good things in the technocratic age that spawned mass media, among other horrors? Or are they quill pens and Penny-Farthings, beautiful to look at and useful for your sense of history, but essentially useless now, having been superseded by better models? It is something that has been pulling on my coat, philosophically speaking and quite by the way. That is, the political Left’s broad-brush obsession with machinery and mechanics, as though society could be progressed and improved in the same way as the sewing machine or the diesel engine. But back to our values, the British ones.

We could go all Orwellian and nostalgic, as with his ladies cycling into the mists by the church, but that is more of an artistic rendering. Will it do for values? Orwell is perhaps near his best on the British when he is being semi-satirical about them, as on the subject of national characteristics in “England Your England”:

National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when pinned down they often turn out to be trivialities or seem to have no connection with one another. Spaniards are cruel to animals. Italians can do nothing without making a deafening noise. The Chinese are addicted to gambling. Obviously such things don’t matter in themselves. Nevertheless, nothing is causeless . . .

Well, then let’s try a comic-book version of British values. Anyone of my generation who read Commando war magazines will know all about that. The British have always been associated, particularly in their own minds, with fair play, stoicism under pressure (the “stiff upper lip”), manners, a dislike for the intellectually fanciful — Empiricism? By all means; just not anyone French – and honesty and honor. That last one’s important. The bloody Japanese might have their swords, but we, too, have a glass of fine Scotch whisky and a trusty service revolver to hand, if required.

Now we see the Penny-Farthing argument: delightful to look at in the quiet of the museum, but a great, rattling, unrideable monstrosity if you tried to even get on one today. None of that fine, upstanding, Sir Walter Scott stuff really flies now, at least not in the Britain we see through the distorting mirror of medias mainstream and otherwise. And perhaps that is why it is the more shocking to see the old country valueless and aimless, as if the myth of all-round decency the British have woven for themselves over the centuries, like a real-time Bayeux Tapestry, were true. That makes the old Empress even more like an ex-prizefighter who can now be found slumped over a bar table and talking about being a contender, back in the day.

Of course there will be people who are honorable and decent and fair-minded. Funnily enough, the British used to call them “liberals,” another example of semantic mutation in recent years. But they are not in charge. They don’t set the values; they have their values set for them, as most of us do. To dust out another wonderful old relic from Orwell — as much an archivist of England as anything else: “England is a family with the wrong members in control.”

With money as the ultimate barometer of success, what of the morality or value system or otherwise of today’s family patriarchs and matriarchs, the big bosses, the grandee tech giants and military-industrial moguls, the ones who apparently are in control? I only ask because, if a significant number of them are bad guys, then this must bode ill. Or has it always been that way? Has mankind struggled despite or because of the rotters?

Have we got anywhere near aboard our ship of British values? Not really, just waved goodbye to the old crew. What can we describe as fair play? If it could be measured, I would wager that there was more fairness displayed on a cricket green on a Sunday in England than runs through the entirety of the British political, judicial, media, academic, and public sectors on a good day. But that is a wholly false analogy.

Fairness is not some cosmic universal scales, and this is no time to go back to the Old Gods, whatever Heidegger might have to say on the matter. Fairness is a sense of natural quality which depends on who is pushing the buttons as to what “natural” means. Fairness is very exploitable. Like many powerful abstractions, fairness is all too susceptible. Is it fair that transgender “women” are predictably cleaning up in sports that should really be for the ladies only? No, for a percentage of people — vastly in the majority, I would imagine — it is not fair, but presumably those who have arranged the respective internal legislation to allow the situation do think it’s fair. That, as Shelley wisely said, is a tale for the long winter nights.

Frugality was a value the British always held in high esteem, having reached a point of making an egg go a long way thanks to the attentions of the Luftwaffe.  Neighborliness was respectfully observed. Debts were paid, gossip was permitted, milk and sugar were borrowed, and paper rounds were delivered. But I don’t suppose that sets Britain aside from other Western countries. It’s not really a British value if everyone’s got one.

It beats me as to what these poor, bewildered, and huddled masses are going to pull out of the package marked “British values.” It certainly won’t be a sense of humor; they’ve done away with all that sort of thing and gone semi-Maoist, now going on full Maoist. Mao, during his biggest gig, told the good people of the good republic that people who made jokes and spoke “weird words” should be denounced.

My father once told me a classic army joke that I suspect is known the world over in various uniforms. A sergeant is inspecting his troops on the parade ground, looking for unpolished buttons and uncut hair, of which he finds many examples and for which he issues minor but humiliating punishments. At the end of the rank is Private Jones, impeccable to the extent that not even Sarge can find fault.

Sergeant: You’re in trouble, Jones.

Private Jones: Sah! Why’s that, sah?

Sergeant: I haven’t decided yet.

That gag is a microcosm of England and Britain today, with the Sergeant Major as the globalist uniparty government, and Private Jones as the rest of us.

That is how the West feels at the moment. Western law famously features as a centrality the notion of presumptive innocence, but it seems as though the strange European Union model is gaining groundswell. Whereas in Britain everything is legal unless there is a law making it illegal, and there is a sense that the globalists and their various chapters would like to flip that right around so that everything was illegal unless there was a law making it legal. This gives us at least a glimpse into their value system and, by extension, British values. At least we know what’s in the package.