The Abolition of Britain by Peter Hitchens

Author:Peter Hitchens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.

—William Wordsworth, ‘National Independence and Liberty’

Breathes there the man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said. This is my own, my native land.

—Sir Walter Scott, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’

NINE

The Queen’s English

A people who spoke the tongue, and held the faith, of Shakespeare and Milton could never have submitted to the hamburger and soap opera culture which now has the British working class in its greasy grip, nor to the anti-British ‘Europeanism’ which has so beguiled much of the educated élite. Before these things could happen, the British people had to be separated from their roots. One of those roots was their history, but their literature was even more powerful, since it was constantly present in daily speech, as history was not.

To anyone brought up when English literature, scripture, liturgy, poetry and hymns were still taught and learned, it is astonishing to find out how little they have in common with those who were raised and educated in the post-revolutionary culture. The pre-revolutionary survivor can finish other people’s sentences, detect the rhythm in other people’s speeches, recognize a score of allusions in a page of print. There is hardly a word or phrase which does not awake a richer thought, or an echo of something hauntingly similar. Where others see a bare plain, those with the gift of verse can remember when it was a great forest. The memory is of course profoundly conservative, being about such things as landscape, chivalry, fortunes lost and restored, families preserved, evil deeds revenged, invaders repelled, foreign tyrants defied and God glorified. No wonder that progressive schoolmasters found it all something of an embarrassment.

But until recently, however progressive they were, they had to put up with it. In 1950, the syllabus for the Cambridge Higher School Certificate, the equivalent of today’s A level, covered these authors: Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, Milton, Bunyan, Pepys, Swift, Gibbon, Fielding, Defoe, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Lamb, Hardy, Browning and Shaw. As John Marenbon said in the Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet English, our English: ‘English specialists left school [my emphasis] with a knowledge of their literary heritage which would shame most graduates in English today.’

The end came swiftly, and it came hand in hand with a shocking decline in literacy itself, without which most of these works were completely inaccessible. By 1987, Marenbon complained, ‘even among candidates for admission to the best universities, who have specialised in English, only a minority can spell with consistent correctness, use punctuation properly and construct complex sentences grammatically.’

What is more surprising is that many university dons were neither shocked nor angered by this. They shared the attitudes of their colleagues in the schools that the imposition of rules of spelling, grammar and syntax was wrong in itself. On 11 June 1993, no fewer than 576 university teachers of English wrote to the Times Higher Education Supplement,

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