Categories: Mark Steyn

Hell, Britannia, you’re just nasty

Licence to make crass sexual jokes on the BBC about the Queen is depravity, not liberty

by Mark Steyn on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 3:40pm - 111 Comments

Two years ago Martin Newland did a cover story for this magazine headlined “Why England Is Rotting.” He cited many statistics: Britain has the highest proportion of single mothers in Europe; the highest cocaine use; the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease; London has more violent crime than New York and Istanbul. From personal observation, an alarming number of the men on its streets seem to affect the appearance of the bad guys’ crew in Pirates of the Caribbean. At about 2 p.m. on a recent Wednesday afternoon, in order to enter a convenience store, I was obliged to step over a 13-year-old dressed like a trollop and collapsed in her own vomit. But don’t worry, the government is taking action: in order to facilitate safer binge drinking, police recently announced that they would be handing out free flip-flops outside nightclubs in order to help paralytic dolly birds stagger home without stumbling in their high heels and falling into the gutter. Every day Fleet Street generates a bewildering number of foot-of-page-37 news items that seem to belong to some vast ongoing dystopian satire: stabbings are so rampant in British schoolyards that a company that specializes in military body armour is now manufacturing school blazers lined with stab-resistant Kevlar.

It’s hardly surprising that a coarsened world produces a coarsened culture, or even that the fruits of heavy-handed feminism and political correctness should be a nation of 12-year- old booze-sodden tarts and middle-aged blokes jerking off at BBC licence-payer expense. I wrote a few weeks back that an increase in sexual liberty had provided a cover for the shrinking of all other kinds. Likewise, if you can make jokes about the Queen’s pussy, why surely you are freer than your forebears. And it’s true that, say, a North Korean stand-up would be ill-advised to proffer jests about Kim Jong-Il’s meat-and-two-veg. But licence is not the same as liberty. And the British nanny state’s rearing of a generation of snarling, brutish, eternally arrested adolescents slumped in Hogarthian depravity seems not an unfortunate side effect but an all too foreseeable consequence. The BBC’s motto is “Nation shall speak peace unto nation.” Not in prime time. As David Cameron might say, nation shall speak pissed unto nation.

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Tags: Britian, David Cameron, Ofcom, twat

More by Mark Steyn

http://intensedebate.com/people/Wakefield Wakefield Tolbert

Had David Letterman's cruel joke been about one of Barack Obama's daughters instead of Sarah Palin's, his career would be over

Agreed. There are massive double-standards and ideological hypocrisies that accompany all such discussions about what the "other guy" can or should "get away with" when it comes to the lowest common denominator of Vox Populi. The Vulgar means "the common people" from the Latin, and while in our time they have the right to speak, thusly spoken once is not always twice the nice.

Thus, for example, the Sarah Palin media circus is admittedly not helped by doofistani elite like Levi and his Johnson, but the constant exposes of people like Palin's third cousin's-once removed nephew's dope bust as being relentlessly pursued by the media, only to have Keith Olbermann's learned highbrow guests explain that Palin "brings it ALL on herself" is thusly made more over the top as far as explanations of this double-standard.
http://intensedebate.com/people/Wakefield Wakefield Tolbert

This is another kind of vulgarity that is to this reader far worse than vivid descriptions of female genitalia on parade in foul mouths; the use of media as a bludgeoning weapon–a blunt instrument–to smear (almost literal) crap about someone they don't like on the viewer in the style of some wretched inverse of the kind of blinkered adulation of celebrity worship one gets on the E Channel or Entertainment Tonight here in the States. Except it's not the supposed dregs and tabloids at the checkout lane–it's MSNBC and the big three non-cable outlets on the idiot box.

Worse than twats.

They're just ideological twits, as are the people who pay attention to them.
Janice

siamdave has a continual mantra: capitalism is the root of all evil and if you don´t agree you must have a very low IQ.
siamdave unsurprisingly cannot locate his dangly bits.
davidovich

When I was reading this I was scared to drink my coffee for fear I'd spit it up all over myself. Very crass – yet funny. What comes out of the mouths of babes these days is unbelievably shocking.
I'm having a bad day so it was nice to have a good hard laugh.
O. Wolfe

I have just tried, unsuccessfully, to post a comment which quotes Steyn's foul language from this article. The comments, using only Steyn's words were deleted. I was trying to say that his language here is offensive. Interesting that Steyn's own words are too foul to be permitted in the comment box. Free speech indeed.
Marushka

Stephen Harper has nipple rings? Cool!
Geoff Lane

Place the blame on the subliminal. It's how young people perceive the world based on their education – or lack of it. When you are unable to express yourself because of a limited vocabulary then only extreme exclamations come to mind, ones that are used regularly in everyday conversation. For the BBC to reflect this inadequacy in our national characteristics only compounds an existing problem. As one noted columnist put it, the way you speak indicates the way you think, and the way you think indicates the type of person you are.
Archie

Well, perhaps HM should speak out occasionally on such trivial matters as losing her job to the EU and the general vulgarization of life in the UK (largely at the instigation of the republican BBC and the equally republican Murdoch press), and then perhaps people might be ready to spring to her defence. Not that the CBC is any improvement over the BBC when it churns out such unbelievable dross as Little Mosque!
Nick

Maybe there would be less drunkenness if people felt better about their world and prospects and did not feel that all the powerful people in society were more interested in their own well being and their own profits than the well being of their fellow citizens and the rest of the world. The blame should start at the top with the wealthiest and most powerful in Britain, not the downtrodden poor. If the rich are going to create a social darwanistic economic philosophy, they should expect to be crudely mocked. At least they have a place to stay.

And sexual freedom is just as important as any other type of freedom. The Catholic Church certainly restricts freedom of sexuality and look at the wonderful results of that conservative tradition. Funnily enough, societies that are really open sexually like the Scandinavian societies have much less drunkenness. They are open and the people are more secure because of their more compassionate economic system. There area lot of successful private companies, but yet their care more about their fellow citizens than do the captains of industry in North America and the UK. If people were more secure and confident that would not engage in drunken behaviour or perverse comedy. The popularity of such lewdness reflects a deeper problem in society and not just a problem with a few individuals. And as always the social Darwinists like Mr. Steyn target the least powerful members of society.
Ganpat Ram

I left Britain a few years ago. But long before I left I stopped watching TV.

Steyn is silly to rage about the decline of decency in Britain.

It's old news.

The only real answer is: quit Britain.
Ganpat Ram

Bad weather, bad food, bad people with bad manners: that sums up Britain. I know the place a bit, left it and would not touch it again with a ship mast.

One of the greatest sighs of relief anyone can let out is when he or she has been able to leave Britain.

One has only to be in Britain a bit to understand WHY it built the largest empire ever: the Brits were just craving to LEAVE……….
Ganpat Ram

The sad truth is, many of us Commonwealth guys grew up outside Britain idealising it.

We read "Around the World in 80 Days" and thought the average Britisher must be like Phineas Fogg, the taciturn, infinitely gentlemanly hero. (You remember the guy, I hope? The one who had bet his fortune on a desperately tight schedule to go round the nineteenth century world in 80 days, and came across an Indian lady about to be cremated alive on her husband's funeral pyre……Well, says Fogg coldly, I have checked my schedule and find I do have four hours to devote to this tiresome affair……)

We then find that the average Brit is far from being gentlemanly, and has manners that are often WORSE than that of the rest of mankind.

We are shocked.

Hence Steyn's bitter reaction, and mine.
Ganpat Ram

I think it is unjust to blame Socialism for bad manners and foul language.

Socialism has many faults, but promoting indecency has never been one of them.

Let's be fair.
Red Star Falling

The British lefty is far more in tune with al Quida than the Democratic state of Israel. In fact the Guardian, a lefty rag read by most British teachers, listed all recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. But upon close examination of the list, the lefty paper let out the names of every Israeli who had won the award. Of course, after a few complaints the names were reinstated. Britain's lefties have turned their culture into a vulgarity of sorts. Perhaps Sharia for the Brit is not such a bad idea.

Ganpat Ram

Red Star Falling:

I am inclined to agree with you that in Britain's case – and Brtain's ONLY – a dose of sharia law could literally be a godsend.

Dick Richards

Give me depravity, or give me death!
Greg

Mark – I'm a huge fan but do you really have to go "toe to toe" with them and publish every ignorant and insulting word? Those of us that read your columns are more than happy to "read between the lines" a bit and not feel like we have to take a shower afterword. One would never have guessed that England is now by far the most "unchurched" nation in Europe by the way they carry themselves with such dignity and class.
Dick Richards

What Steyn seems to omit is that sexual liberties have always been the first liberties the far right tries to take away. There's a reason the 50's led to the 60's, that just the way the pendulum swings.
Rob (british)

This article is ridiculous, and those of you that believe the BS should know better, im 19 years old and have lived in the south of England my entire life, I don’t go out, get wasted and pass out in a pool of my own vomit, neither does anyone else I know. Britain on a whole is a very polite nation, full of good people with good manners, contrary to what Ganpat Ram thinks he knows about the country from the little time he spent here, (I think i would have a bit more knowledge on the subject, seeing as i’ve grown up in the supposed age of Britain’s decline). People like Steyn jump on the very worst aspects of Britain then use them to drag other people’s view on the country down to his ridiculously sensationalist opinion. The fact is Britain isn’t without it’s problems, but these problems stem from a small minority of idiots who live to drag everything around them down, (and Britain is definitely not the only country in the world that has people like this, every country has them). So please take it from me that Steyn’s distorted view on the country i was brought up in is complete and utter BS.
Ian

Mark Steyn is the best and funniest commentator alive, even though I do not always agree with him (I do here though, being a Canadian in London). I just wished he ended his intellectual love affair with Jonah Goldberg and Tucker Carlson, who are neither funny, nor smart, nor could ever write their way ouf of a paper bag and – by association – badly affect my infatuation with Steyn's writing.
FarewelltoAlbion

Here is a fascinating moment in the history of Brown's not-so-nice Britain.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=377_1255726583
Bob

One of the most depressing articles I've ever read. Modern Britain is like a debased version of the Garden of the Finzi-Continis. While superannuated adolescents play with each other's wee-wees, the Islamic conquest inexorably expands. When the conquerors are strong enough, they will simply rise up and crush the depraved children of the mother country. Britain is finished.