One Simple Trick
How to fix all our problems overnight...
The desperate state of modern Britain resembles a nebbish man forced to narrate each thrust of his expressive wife’s ‘open relationship.’ Our collective self-despair plays out on the news—a languorous suicide note recited in nightly instalments.
“This is fine—absolutely fine. This? Darling, it’s fine. No, no. You enjoy yourself, my dear—you’ve earned it! Everything is fine. Absolutely fine.”
Nothing here works. In modern Britain, you cannot count on a stopped clock to display the correct time twice daily. Our trains run late, if at all. Our dopamine-addled teenagers don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t knock each other up. We’ve outsourced our national identity to a left-wing, platitudinous bear named Paddington. Mill around this island and you’ll conclude that this is the world’s largest Airbnb, with a novelty nuclear submarine stowed away off the Scottish coast.
Parented By Fools: A Century of National Neglect
Why? A century of abusive parentage. Our guardians—Labour and the Conservatives—have left us, their 70 million orphaned children, mired in the soup. The British psychiatrist, Donald Winnicott, coined the term ‘good enough parenting,’ as in, one’s parents need not be perfect, but good enough. Get the basics of nurturing right and your children will prosper. Well, a century of our toxic parents trading places, scorching the earth as they steam out of the front door, has been nowhere near good enough. To this grubby, eternal divorce settlement, the rest of us are captive.
Yes, sooner or later, Nigel Farage will be Prime Minister. Thick, edifying mists of cigarette smoke will once again coat generously the pink lungs of pub patrons. Happy Hour will stretch from open to close. Once again will the British man of appetites will afford not only a family home in Hammersmith, but a one-bed flat in Penge for his mistress, solving both the fertility and loneliness crises in one swoop. With Farage at the helm, the sun shall never again set on a global map repainted Empire Pink.
But that happy and glorious Elysium remains at least three years whence. No doubt, any future parliament of whores will scramble for Proportional Representation, now their snouts no longer scrape the bottom of the trough.
As edifying a sight as that may be, my friends, time is a luxury which we do not have. We need a full cultural blood transfusion. We need a heart and brain transplant. The preferred donors? A comically superior civilisation imbued still with keen senses of shame, dignity, and virtue. A people steeped in good manners, hard work, and sake.
If enacted at cask strength, my modest proposal would solve all our problems—overnight. Let us import the entire population of Japan. Without quibble. Without question. All of them—the willing and the not-so-willing—today. If not today, then last week. There is no time to waste.
Let’s clarify this immanently sensible proposition. I’m not talking tourism. I’m not talking cultural exchange. I’m talking total transplantation of the Japanese to this withering rock between Ireland and continental Europe.
Why not? We invite the entire world to live here, regardless.
Why not invite those who work twelve hours, drink for ten, raise their polite, silent children for fifteen minutes, all before straightening their ties and clocking back into the office before our ‘remote’ workers finish their fourth coffee break in five minutes?
Wetherspoon Wisdom: A Tale of Two Countries
My local Wetherspoon pub is not what one would call salubrious. The patrons and myself—all good people, I must add—spend more time in their than the tables and chairs. And yet, Wetherspoon, that last vestige of British irreverence, attracts through its ceaselessly swinging doors all manner of gentleman and savage, lady and lout.
At 6.30. p.m. schools of impeccably suited Japanese salarymen stream through the doors for their mandated after-work ritual drinks. They down beer and wine and sake and whiskey. They laugh and joke and cheer and bow and declare kanpai. This glorious display of an intelligent, humane people culminates in bizarre spectacle. Without prompt, these impeccably sozzled gentlemen and women clear the scores of plates and glasses from their tables. They say goodnight. They go back to work.
Compare this spectacle to the modern Briton, whose four-hour workday drowses into pre-recorded chatter over a non-alcoholic beer.
These bloody Japanese immigrants. They come over here, work twelve hours a day, keep our boozers afloat, and decorate public life with their seamless good manners.
The Japanese are what we Brits like to think we once were, before we surrendered to teenaged notions of equality, moral relativism, and shirts without ties.
The Blair Kitsch Project
Those are the grotesque adornments Tony Blair left us—that eternal king whose herpetic reign weeps on the worn-out member of this once virile nation. He called it ‘New Britain.’
Well, that New Britain is on its pinguid, pox-ridden arse. Wheezing and languid, and coughing up Chernobyl-yellow globs of phlegm, New Britain is thankfully all-but-dead.
Desperate though it may appear, all is well that ends well.
By importing just 120 million Japanese to Great Britain, we will overnight slash our obesity rate by over half—from 28 percent to a happy 12 percent. This slimmer, sexier New Britain would dissolve crime, too. Our current forty crimes per 1,000 people plummeting to just 12 per one thousand. By embracing this modest proposal, New Britain would be the third richest nation overnight.
On this well-mannered, crime-free idyll, our renewed sense of shame would dissolve the catalogue of social pathologies which plague us at current. Littering would disappear. Pubs would evolve into temples of respectable intoxication. The silhouettes of sleeping salarymen would line the streets of central London, their Rolexes placed beside them unbothered and unmolested. Overnight, we would end the sartorial scourge of trainers with suits.
What have we got to lose? We once taught the world table manners. Now we utter the words ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ only after some hoodlum on a souped-up e-bike permits us our driver’s license from his newly acquired wallet. This is not surrender, but submission. A noble, long-overdue renewal of our national soul.
So, let the sun settle quietly on a long-gone Empire. And let it rise again—beautifully and punctually—over Kyoto-on-Thames.
I live near a reasonably pleasant enclave called West Acton, the home of the only fulltime Japanese school in London. I've taught several hundred of them English and they're delightful, intelligent, perceptive and as unlike what one has come to expect from Brits and the ubiquitous uninvited as Stilton is from fromage frais. In time no doubt they'll abandon all hope and return to Tokyo with a vast number of horrendous anecdotes to put their countrymen off the idea of even visiting let alone living here. If you can call it living....?
A Modest Proposal indeed! Thanks for getting me to laugh after yet another horrendous news week. I couldn't agree more with P. Morse in the brilliance of your opening few lines, and loved your weaving some yiddish into the prose.