pastorals

The Good Shepherd. 

Reflections on good government and the good life.

It is fair to say that a people who, from Bede in the 700s to Churchill in the 1900s, have identified themselves by their shared language, and who named the land they settled in after it, yet today no longer know if they are a people who happen to live in a country with that name, or a country that is home to many peoples, themselves among them, to be governed as a mini "empire"; that a people who brought Romano-Christian civilization to the unromanized barbarians of northern Europe in the 700s and saved that same Europe from the predations of the same barbarians in the 1900s at great personal cost yet today find themselves cast out as un-European, have lost their way.

It is  true to say that a people who produced Florence Nightingale yet  have for decades resorted to importing nurses from abroad; a people who have manufactured nothing for already two generations except mental illness; a people who pride themselves on driving on the left yet are utterly ignorant of the one basic rule of all driving anywhere, namely to drive on the left unless overtaking, and then go on to borrow billions to try resolve the congestion they have created by building more lanes; a people who no longer have the schools to teach technical skills yet pay more people six-figure salaries than anywhere else in the world to fill positions whose only requisite skill is the ability to talk, and then wonder why they have more inflation than anyone else, can be said to have lost their way.

It is no exaggeration to say that a people who believe that governing means making promises, like parents to children, and that promises can be realised by borrowing from the children not yet born, according to a calculus whose variables have never been independently verified; who worship only one idol,  ‘economy’ , one that like Baal, requires regular human sacrifice, if only to feed its high priests; a people who are no longer even capable of making the distinction between proper ‘economic’ management of dwindling natural resources and the desired creation of new wealth that has never in human history not been the result of work, of manufacture and trade; a people whose only political choice is to watch the mudslinging of public schoolboy politics or the grim-faced moral posturing of student politics, whose unadulterated and risible hypocrisy is as unconscious as it all-pervasive, have lost their way.

It is more than likely that a people who are forced into a position in which their last remaining assets, namely a relatively unspoilt landscape, a deep-rooted christian educational tradition embodied in well-known institutions, and a passion for sports they invented such as football, are all being sold off to the highest bidders, ones who in all these cases is anyone but a ‘native’,  just to keep the lights on, is a people headed for perpetual darkness, for oblivion.

In the pages to follow the question will be what the preconditions might be that could promise a better fate for both a people and the only country they can call home.