CoffeeHouse is taking a look at the British Council whose denizens, Daniel Korski suspects, are quaking at the prospect of a new boss in the mould of Dame Pauline Neville-Jones.
Seriously? Well, let's break out the Widow. It's about bloody time.
Korski fears the Tories may abandon the current 'liberal democratic values' in culture and education which, he says, the British Council exists to promote. Well, he's partly right. They are estimable 'values' and it does exist to promote them. The problem is, it doesn't. It has lost its way under the likes of Kinnock who, like all Labour aristos, is neither liberal nor democratic but anti-culture. For the peasants, that is. The masses are trained to accept a grotesquely false definition of what culture is while the nomenklatura enjoy pleb-free concert halls, art galleries, opera houses and literary festivals. But I digress.
Britain is - or was - synonymous with liberal and democratic 'values' but they are no longer taught. They are unacceptable. The Gramscians have excised them from our state school curricula and replaced them with their own canon of moral and cultural relativism, a thought-system of which only a nihilist like Pol Pot (a Socialist) could approve.
A bit more ‘Pauline realist' thinking from the British government about culture and education would be welcome, never mind from the British Council whose overseas staff lurve hanging around the British embassy but spend most of their time snuggling up to the local bigwigs and writing group-think reports for the Righteous back at head office in terms likely to win them a posting to a more congenial country in the next round.
The British Council is this country’s cultural ambassador from whom the majority of the British people would welcome a bit of trumpet-blowing on the world stage about Britain’s painfully-won political and cultural achievements (the two are inseparable) and the values which the British were once allowed to cherish as their patrimony. Incidentally, some of that at home wouldn’t hurt.
The BC should cut the warble-gloaming brainwashing projectsand the marxoid world-values mongering which occupy it at present. It should concentrate on promoting awareness and understanding of Britain's national, idiosyncratic, un-Napoleonic political and philosophical culture. (And what goes for the BC goes for the BBC, too.)
The chief priority of the British Council should be to advertise Britain’s settled belief in the inherent liberty of the individual, our tradition of stable representative democracy and apolitical civil service, our common law with independent judges and jury courts, our high culture and the history, philosophy and language which underpin all the above.
Sustained representation of this precious inheritance would increase our national self-confidence. It would boost the confidence of those representing us abroad in both diplomacy and business. It would re-establish, validate and emphasise Britain’s moral weight in an increasingly chaotic world. It would be helpful in trade, in political negotiation, peace-making and peace-keeping.
Oh - wait. I forgot. Labour has dismantled much of our political and constitutional settlement and worked assiduously to ensure that almost no-one emerging from Britain’s state 'education system' knows anything about British history or culture, so who on earth would staff a reformed British Council with a brief along the lines I suggest? God knows. No, actually, I know.
The public schools. It is no wonder that those occupying the highest echelons of British life are increasingly either privately educated or from families with origins in Asia where education is striven-for at great cost and where one’s own culture is esteemed, cherished and taught to one’s children.
By contrast, ignorance and ‘street’ patois are acceptable in state schools in the name of those evil deities, Diversity and Equality. The average school-leaver and graduate is incapable of speaking or writing in his or her own language about their own culture and history or indeed anything much.
For the most part, one can distinguish in an instant whether a young man or woman is state educated or privately educated. The difference in articulacy and knowledge is vast and increasing annually. What an indictment of Labour’s and the left establishment’s failure.
But the Righteous know they are right so they respond by sticking their fingers in their ears, averting their eyes from the evidence screaming at them from all sides and shooting the many heralds of the bleeding obvious. They complain and excoriate and make hate-filled speeches and redouble their efforts to force those schools which they do not control to be inadequate as those which they do, and brainwashing children into becoming climate change obsessives with an unwarranted self-belief which, when (inevitably) they fall below the standards of the real world, all too soon becomes in-yer-face aggression.
As for the British Council, a short reflection reminds one that it is indeed representing us as we have become. International Socialists like Kinnock are appropriate for its governance.
The fact remains that the British Council, like the nation itself, is overdue for life-saving surgery. It will not happen, of course, because it would be the opposite of relativist and we are no longer capable of asserting our positive belief in anything. Pride is illegal. It is 'imperialist'.
Britain's national stance has become the cringe. We hide it with apparently assertive shouting when there are cameras about, but we have in fact accepted that we have no right to national pride. What on earth does Britain have to promote to people in other cultures?
Wow! I like that! I am proud of being English, I revel in our history and I refuse to apologise for building hospitals and schools across the empire (the french built bakeries by the way!) Or for willingly giving up our empire at the insistence of the Americans.
ReplyDeleteIf our ex empire inhabitants dislike us so intensely just why do so many of them want to come to live here. Beats me.
Another fine piece Mr Prod.
ReplyDeleteOnce the BC is saying it to Johnny Foreigner we can but hope that our state schools and tax-funded institutions will say it at home.
Recognising that we have got an awful lot of things right in the past does not mean either: (i) we got everything right or (ii) we cannot improve by learning from other countries / cultures.
Let each country say "this is what we have done and what we value". Let it all be out in the open so we can choose what we want to adopt from elsewhere to improve life for the people living here, and so everyone else can choose to adopt British practices in certain fields if they think they will be beneficial.
Every country has plenty of murk in its history, we must know about that too so that others don't make the same mistakes.
The "one size fits all" and "we are all wise and know what's best" approaches of the EU are a guarantee that things can only get worse.