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Social progress in Britain
Things are galloping along in Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia: More diverse, caring and single - the new face of Britain. According to recent census data, the minority ethnic population rose 50% in the past 10 years or so, while in the last 20 years the proportion of married-couple households fell from 64% to 45%. Over the same period one-person households rose to 30% of the total and single-parent and cohabiting-couple households to 10% each. (The figure for cohabiting couples is from another article.) So the “caring” in the title doesn’t have to do with social coherence or maintenance of ordinary human ties. Instead, it refers to
the increasing number of people looking after someone who’s sick or disabled. That rise seems connected with an aging
population: there are now more people over 65 in Britain than children under 16. All in all, it doesn’t look like the Brits have much of a future. I wonder why the Guardian didn’t spin it that way?
Comments
This article, which I happened to see linked in www.gnxp.com , http://www.parapundit.com/archives/000970.html#000970 , isn’t directly about the situation in the UK, but does intelligently address the root of the problem as the author see it, not only for the UK but for all countries which adopt liberalism. Though he seems to confuse “Classical Liberalism” of the John Stuart Mill type with modern left-liberalism, the piece is well thought out. Here in this passage, the author (despite seeming to confuse “Classical Liberalism” with modern left-liberalism) essentially echos the Kalbian insight that liberalism is an obligatory parasite which, through its policies, actually ends up destroying its own host: “Too many modern liberals (and I include leftist liberals, libertarian liberals and even some neoconservative liberals) have so internalized the need for everyone to accept the existence of everyone else that they have a hard time accepting the consequences of the fact that others do not share their beliefs. … The problem for classical liberalism today is that technological advances are making it easier [for liberal policies] to create conditions in Western societies that are outside the range of allowable conditions needed for a liberal society to survive.” Posted by: Unadorned on February 18, 2003 1:20 AM |