What Went Wrong with Britain? A Lenten Reflection
The following link to an attack on the current British Prime Minister
in an interview with a prominent and well-respected Roman Catholic layman
is not reproduced here with any party political intention. To illustrate this,
we need do no more than compare Mr Blair with his best-known predecessor,
Mrs Thatcher.
In a week when a statue of Mrs Thatcher has been unveiled inside the House of Commons in London, we are reminded that outside the same Parliament there stands another statue - that of Mrs Thatcher's hero - the bloodied tyrant and regicide Oliver Cromwell. Unlike in Moscow, where there are now serious efforts to remove the corpse of the Soviet Cromwell, 'Lenin', in London, sadly, there are no efforts to remove the statue of Cromwell.
True, the Thatcher era was a remarkably successful one for the British economy, after the Soviet-style decadence of Labour rule before it. However, it was also a very sad one in terms of spiritual, and therefore moral, and therefore social, decline. In this respect we can only say that Mr Blair has been the one true successor and disciple of Mrs Thatcher. For neither of them did anything to deal with the real problems of British society, which came to the fore in the 1960s and which are spiritual and moral. Thus both were mere politicians and not statesmen.
Thus the 1960s rejected the Ten Commandments, the one thing salvaged from Roman Catholic medieval religion by the Reformation. It was on them that moralistic Protestant British society had been based for four hundred years up until the early 1960s. Their rejection led immediately to the abortion holocaust, alcoholism, drug abuse, family breakdown, and the 'single-parent family'. The rejection of moralism led to anti-moralism, when 'Thou Shalt Not' was put into reverse by the apostasy of the 1960s, symbolized by its several Anglican bishops and clergy who publicly announced that they had completely lost their faith and their way.
Since the 1960s everything has been permitted and no-one has been responsible. Despite her sense of economic responsibility, Mrs Thatcher lacked any spiritual dimension and her religion was that of 'the greatest sin is inflation'. Under her, anti-moralism was symbolized by the appearance of AIDS. In recent years it has been symbolized by Mr Blair's overseas wars, his overflowing prisons, his encouragement of drunken yob culture and gambling, and, in the last two weeks, the series of youths gunned down in London. Mr Blair, you cannot be 'tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime' without moral values, and these are totally absent from your 'New Britain', the very antithesis of 'Old England'.
The blistering criticism below from a devout Roman Catholic comes as a surprise, given the fact that, until ten years ago, Tony Blair regularly communed as a Roman Catholic. Given the widely-circulated rumours that he is receiving catechism from a Roman Catholic priest and is about to join his wife's denomination, John Smeaton's concept that salvation lies with Rome seem to be undermined. However, everything depends on what one means by 'Rome' and 'Catholic'. For example, to the Russian Orthodox mind, 'Rome' means the Third Rome of Moscow and 'Catholic' means the catholicity of the Orthodox Church.
At the present time, sixteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, shortly before the foundation of the European Union through the Maastricht Treaty, our impression is the following. Contemporary Russia and contemporary Western Europe, of which the UK is part, can be likened to two trains which have just passed one another, going in opposite directions. The Russian train is slowly but steadily returning to its roots. The Western European train is speeding almost as fast as possibly away from its roots.
A few years ago, after the collapse of satanic Communism, the West arrogantly sent 'missionaries' to Russia to bribe an ignorant population into accepting Protestant sectarianism. They had little success there, indeed some have been converted from their heresies to the Orthodox Church and Faith. Today, as the demons who inspired satanic but fallen Communism cross into the comfort of the West, inspiring the ever more open satanism of modern Western values, perhaps the only hope for the West is that Russia might send its missionaries here. Sadly, only a West that has been humbled will be ready to hear their voices, 'crying in the wilderness', for the minds of the proud are not ready to receive Christ. But let John Smeaton express his, and our, views.
Tony Blair's Bioethical Legacy
An Interview With John Smeaton of SPUC [Zenit.org]
