Sam Kiley, Foreign Affairs Editor

Heads bowed, they stood in silent respect on the pavements of Wootton Bassett and tossed roses onto the hearses carrying soldiers who fell in Afghanistan.

This week, London was stilled and many moved to tears as the last post was played on a bugle over the casket of PC Keith Palmer.

After the attack on Westminster, in which he gave his life defending parliament against a knife-wielding lunatic, flags were at half-mast while mountains of flowers marked the spot where he and others died.

These are moments when the British agree, as a nation, to "Silence the pianos and with muffled drum" so that they can "Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come" as WH Auden put it in a poem that was given global fame in the achingly sentimental Four Weddings And A Funeral.


But why? Has the United Kingdom surrendered to a form of mawkish mass sentimentality? Has everyone become an actor in mass moments of theatrical reverence? That, in the end, signify nothing?

No.

It's worse than that.

Britain's problem is that the outside world is made of sterner stuff. In Mosul, people survived life under IS thugs. Syria's citizens are no less robust. Hundreds of thousands of Africans are living as refugees.

The country comes to a standstill to honour those who have been killed defending it because, these days, people of that type are so rare, so exceptional.

Britons are no longer made of the stuff that is written in granite on the memorials to two world wars on every single village in the country.

Indeed they're not even made of the stuff of those dead young men before they went to war. The ploughmen and labourers, and miners led by youth from the middle and upper classes tempered and toughened in the forges of public school.

The British are now too wet to work in agriculture. Those who do turn up, my East Anglian farmer friends tell me, are so lazy and feckless they're useful only to fill potholes - with their bodies.

If you want to get buildings built, potatoes picked, work done and taxes paid, get a Pole.

Public schools are overpriced country clubs for the buttery spawn of oligarchs. Gone are the days when playing for the 3rd XV involved fingers frozen to twigs and doing battle with a homicidal ape from Dulwich College with the IQ of a tadpole.

No one wants to see a return to the sexual abuse that Alex Renton has revealed in his masterful expose of private school perversion Stiff Upper Lip, but the olden day public schoolboy knew, or rather learned, what it was to get bashed then get up and play on.

Image: Sam Kiley thinks the solution is simple: national service

These days, the public schools can no more produce the sort of chap capable of running a large chunk of Africa at 21 with the assistance only of supernatural self-belief, and a passion for Ovid, than they can turn out a youngster capable of putting a kettle on without the supervision of a Filipina.

As for Millennials with their thin skins, wobbly chins, and sense of immediate entitlement to unearned greatness? They just need a good spanking - and not in a fun, kinky way.

Britain's problem is that the outside world is made of sterner stuff. In Mosul, people who survived life under IS thugs and coalition bombs are burying their dead and sweeping the streets one block from the combat zones.

Syria's citizens are no less robust. Hundreds of thousands of Africans living as refugees are marching across deserts to reach Europe.

These are resilient people. Tough people. People who don't curl up and suck their thumbs when the going gets tough. And they want what we have - someday they'll come and get it too.

The solution to soggy wet Britain? How will we make more of the brave few whom we now see almost as characters in fiction? National service.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Ed Conway - Are we losing our appetite for credit?