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Comrade,

In some ways the thought of a proper disintegration excites me, as it probably does you. All the eyewash and wallpaper of the last 20-odd years suddenly melting and the truth of our situation being brought home. However, we'd be the some of the first people to be killed in a Mad Max world of chavs, rude boys and Islamists. I did advise you some years ago to keep your great uncle's webley service revolver well oiled (if you had one) for when our third world permanent visitors start fighting out their religious wars here and/or punishing us kuffirs for simply existing. I don't back down on that. But I think slow national decline is far more likely than a sudden breakdown. As Professor Scruton points out ad nauseum a civilisation cannot last when pluralism is the ruling ethos and kitsch and sarcasm is the only high culture left. What is left, as Larkin asks, when disbelief has gone? Other cultures move in on it and destroy it as it begins to evaporate. This is what is happening. But it happens slowly, like the way you one day turn around and notice that nobody drinks light and bitter anymore and jukeboxes have vanished (the first juke box was installed in a bar in San Fran in 1889, FACT-UH).

The Times, travesty of what it once was, is still a useful guide to the national suicide note simply because it is the notice board of the well-heeled centre-left baby-boomer political and civil establishment. Witness its foreign editor, Beeston, today in The Agenda ’09 supplement, saying that:

a) It is generally thought that Iran will have enough fissile material to make one nuclear warhead this year, the 30th anniversary of the revolution.

b) …but let’s hope Israel doesn’t bomb their nuclear programme, because. . .

c) …Iran might get a moderate leader because its economy has gone pop under Ahmadinejad…

d) . . .and, OF COURSE, Barack Obama must surely be able to talk the Iranians out of any rash nuclear strikes on Israel.

So there you have it. Rather a fool’s paradise. But these people were the people who have allowed Blair, warmonger, millionaire twelve times over and chief protagonist in the creation of the Human Rights legal industry and the financing and creation of the chav/migrant, horrendously overpopulated welfare state, not to mention his sidekick’s debt bubble politics, to enjoy a fairly healthy reputation, instead of waking up and recognising the man was a worse prime minister than Thatcher. Have you noticed how the tv/media/comedian/arts classes have FUCK ALL to say about Blair? Remember how they went on and on and on about Thatcher? How Thatcher was lampooned morning, noon and night everywhere except the telegraph and mail? How every bit of policy was minutely picked apart, every ministerial hypocrisy, every piece of behaviour that ran counter to policy, every payoff, every executive directorship? With New Labour, not so much, even though their snouts have been in the trough just as long now. Witness Patsy Hewitt (remember her?) getting fat executive positions within the sector she used to be minister for. How the lefties shrieked when arseholes like Norman Lamont used to do it. Now? Tumbleweeds.

Witness the education reforms and schools as ‘places of learning’. You know full well these will be battery farms where ‘racism, climate change and homophobia’ will be taught by rote by teachers with cockamamie degrees and forehead piercings. All very fashionable, man, but I can’t help feeling the end of it will be a population too ignorant to understand when its individual and collective freedoms, liberties and democracy are taken away on some non-negotiable pretext or other the establishment of the day demands. In fact I’d bet on it. Tebbit predicts that the mullahs will go legit – suits, quangoes, easy-to-read booklets – now Whitehall is so full of E heads with their Foucault and their Jeff Buckley records. They know how easy it’s going to be to turn this shop over. Ladbrokes are giving 5/2 on Labour winning the next election. It’s kind of like when Danny in Withnail & I says: ‘they’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man, it’s over’.

It might not happen and Old England muddles through. But, uncle, what would you put your dinner money on?