A Nation of Haters

 
I've mentioned this before -but it is so striking and it hits you so hard, it's worth mentioning again. In Britain, everybody hates everybody else. Board a bus (maybe not in London, as there they're permanently overcrowded and you can't even make out people, just smelly armpits and mouldy rucksacks) and you will feel the antagonism in the air. The obese woman will glower at somebody of normal size, the pensioner will glare at the woman with a pram (oh not for long, they're all to cowardly to make a fuss), the whole charabanc will collectively hate the one non-white person daring to sit down. The bus driver could murder every single one of them, you can see the hatred in his eyes when you get on.

It is the only country where car drivers actively try to run over pedestrians crossing the road. They speed up, instead of slowing down, it's a collective sport there (I am not making this up, I experienced it many many times in Edinburgh and elsewhere.)  Road rage is a daily occurrence (only recently one woman died because she asked another one to move her car out of the way.) There are millions of other permutations in that country where one group of society actively, aggressively and openly hates another one.

Why is this, you might ask? Not being a sociologist, or prison psychologist - just somebody who's lived there far too long, my take is that the country is so run-down, so impoverished, crumbling and decaying that a great big greed/envy bubble has built up. Everybody feels entitled to something that either has been taken away or is under threat of being cut. So they figure, (rather primitively it might be said but hey ho)  if it weren't for the immigrants, the white-trash English family could carry on enjoying their benefits. If it wasn't for all those pensioners, the NHS benefits would be just like they used to be in 1962. If it weren't for the attractive size 10 women, all the ugly obese ones wouldn't be reminded that they might have to give up eating five mega-buckets of chips per day. If it weren't for them toffs, we could share the spoils of their fortune. It's a sort of low-intellect socialism mixed with an animal instinct of "I want that".

So you can imagine, how powerful and apoplecticly incandescent their collective hatred of Germany is. The country that they (because they live in a rference system which is forever 1945) conquered. The country which unfortunately then didn't squander its Marshall Aid money (for the record: Britain got even more money than Germany from the US) on overseas colonialism, an insane idea of world power via the 'Commonwealth', and a socialist wet dream of spectacles and dentures for all. But instead got on with it, rebuilt its manufacturing base, rebuilt the towns that had been lain to ashes in the process of sulphur-bombing civilians.

A country which is now prosperous, affluent, happy, generous, benign, and can afford to overlook the nasty, dirty griping, the slanderous accusations of Nazism - and of course the resentful foaming at the mouth that "oneself" lives in a derelict hovel of a country where high streets are decaying and empty premises are filled with charity shops, gambling dens and tabel-top bars, where the infrastructure has completely and utterly broken down, where families with a startling number of kids live in tiny, shabby 1940s houses, a population that is the most morbidly obese in Europe, women who dress like Bulgarian prostitutes on a flat-rate contract, and an alcoholism rate which is all the more understandable as living in that run-down hate-filled environment really is a punishment which ought only to be metered out to people who are happy to live in it.

What I Would Do If I Was Still Living in Britain

I was inspired to write this post by an article I read today where a "neighbourhood hit squad" (I'm not keen on the nomenclature!) got so fed up with the fly-tipping and general mess in areas of Leeds which have "poor environmental quality" that they got a skip, moved all the rubbish and rubble, and cleaned the place up.

Perfect - and a classic example of civic pride. Civic pride means: Being concerned about what goes on in your area. It means caring about the fact that the place might be looking like a tip. It means not allowing yobs and drunkards to take over the area and intimidate people. It means making sure a park is a park, and not a haven for drug users. Civic pride does not mean joining your local history society and sitting at home cowering, hoping yobs might leave you in peace. It does not mean being proud of what your community did or did not do in 1942 - whilst being afraid of going out on a Friday night.

Civic pride that translates into direct action is sorely lacking in today's Britain. When I lived in Edinburgh 2 years ago, there was a very icy period in December. Pavements and roads became ice rinks. I was shocked to see that nobody in our neighbourhood (right in the middle of town and an extremely well-to-do do area!) gritted or de-iced the pavement even directly outside their houses, or put salt on their own icy porch. They all preferred to slip on the extremely hazardous ways, rather than do anything at all. "The council should do it" was the consensus. But the council did nothing at all - official reason: It was too dangerous, as the roads were icy (!!!) That was probably when I realized that attitudes really really had to change in the UK.

The lemming-like default muttering of "What d'you want to do about it" is responsible for accepting everything and doing nothing. In other words let the whole shebang deteriorate ever further.Civic pride anyone?

Whenever I'm in England, I have this vision of a huge bottle of Domestos and giving everything a right old scrubbing. For every surface there is grimy, grubby, sticky, dusty, mouldy, greasy, claggy, or just plain dirty. So this is what I would do nowadays if I still lived there: I'd start cleaning. See huge amounts of dirt somewhere? Get a few people together ( a "neighbourhood hit squad") and clean the living daylight out of the place!

The other thing I cannot stand in the UK (and which will probably prevent me from living there again) is the sordidness of the "Friday night culture". Tarts, yobs, vomit, drunkenness, vile behaviour etc etc., we all know the drill. I still remember only too well being too scared and disgusted of ever going out on Friday evening. But why should one cower in one's home and let mob rule take the place over? So this is what  would do: I'd get people together who are similarly fed up with the situation and simply sit in those Friday night hotspots. Normally dressed, and normally behaved - but out in force. See how the yobs and tarts would like that!

Re-claim those town centres! Tidy up rubbish and litter when it fouls up your area! Don't wait for "the council", the "government" etc.  - do something. Do it yourself! Show that you care! Show some civic pride! And don't always go on about patriotism - that won't clear the streets of rubbish, won't tell yobs what's what. But civic pride will.

It's Not Just the Daily Mail - Hatred and Aggression in Britain

The Daily Mail has today utterly discredited itself with a grotesque story about Nick Clegg and some confused Nazi allusions- the sort of thing one normally gets to hear from very old people suffering from mental failure. The paper is quite clearly beyond contempt, vicious, and intellectually bankrupt.

Now, there is of course a long history of Daily Mail-baiting in this country. I've always thought that if you just wanted to make a few easy friends in the pub, all you need to do is spout something how terrible the Daily Fail is and everybody will nod sagely and buy you a pint. (Well, a half-pint.) I really think it is the ticket to prove that you're quite the intellectual in this country. But that doesn't mean much, does it?

Nick Clegg has recently become popular and therefore had to be slammed down. Hard. Makes sense, innit. But it isn't just Nick Clegg, it isn't just the Daily Mail. This country is awash with hatred and aggression.

I've never heard such frequent wishes of death or grave illness onto somebody who has a different (mostly political) viewpoint. On twitter, you get little old ladies blithely re-tweeting thuggish sentiments about what a shame it is the egg didn't actually hit David Cameron in his smug face. You get women wearing a T-shirt with huge anti-Tory lettering "Step outside, Posh Boy"- just to make a point and really sock it to them. But why in this brutalised, violent way? And the aforementioned old lady? Her frustrated sense of entitlement makes her hate, and I mean hate anybody who's got it better, who has more money, who is "posh".

It's a sociological fact that the more deprived a society is, the more brutal it gets - and that's precisely what's happened to Britain. With its breath-taking level of poverty and deprivation (I've seen quite a few European countries but have never ever come across such levels of abject poverty and decay) there is plenty of scope for class hatred, envy, resentment and bitterness. The callous stupidity of the Thatcher-years together with ten years of Labour mismanagement have seen to it. Now chippyness, inverted snobbery ("I'm from the North, all the best people are", "I'm a university-of lifer, got a problem wiffat you over-educated twit"?) and pride in being bottom are forming a dangerous alliance with pure, unadulterated hatred. Violence is so near, you can smell it.

This is a country where G.Brown's (or J.Prescott's) thuggish and intimidating macho behaviour is preferred to other politicians' - because, well, at least they're not posh, eh? Honest, salt-of-the-earth people like us. Thock. Smack. Hit.

Where mens' fashion ideal is a shaven head, combat trousers and a camouflage top. Nice. Where women's style icon is Katie Price (Source:Press Association, 31 March 2010) And indeed, where a sexually aggressive, ultra-obscene way of dressing (just look around you on the streets of any British town) is deemed accceptable and desirable. There are many forms of aggression, this is one of them. Again, I can assure you that, no - you don't find this everywhere - this is uniquely British.

Another form is the aggressive way people drive, hunched over the wheel of their souped-up cars, they drive straight at pedestrians - why? Because their cars, often cheap, clapped-out ones, make them feel superior and in command. The car as weapon. The "Get-out-of my-way" culture pervades everything. It is in the supermarkets where deprived and frustrated pensioners deliberately ram their trolleys into your thigh, it's in buses where drivers shout at people for the slightest reason, it's everywhere.

Poverty breeds aggression, and it also breeds a grotesque hierarchy. The pathetic driver of a crappy car, the deprived pensioner, the under-paid, irate bus-driver - they are not actually in command, they just use the brief moment of power to let out all their frustrations, hatred,and aggression onto the person who at this moment in time is in the weaker position.

These are not "facts of modern life" - these are the results of an impoverished, deprived society where everybody resents everybody else. Covered by a thin veneer of wry humour and lashings of alcohol (another source of aggression of course).

This is not a country at ease with itself, this is a social war-zone. Dog-eat-dog, and everybody hates everybody else. The clenched fist in the pocket.

2 Addenda:
1. No, this is not "a rant"- the easy label slapped on every uncomfortable truth in this country. These are my considered opinions which I will (in a more linguistically elaborate form) publish elsewhere.
2. Just because I've lived abroad (oooh!) and my name is not spelt M-a-r-g-a-r-e-t, doesn't mean I'm a foreigner - so easily dismissed and patronized.