Who killed Britain? A new book reveals that the land Queen Elizabeth II once ruled no longer exists



She succeeded her father, George VI, on February 6, 1952, and may ultimately rival Queen Victoria - our monarch for 63 years - in longevity.

Already, however, the reign of Elizabeth II has encompassed so much change that the Queen seems almost like a time-traveller, spanning not just the decades since she came to the throne but whole centuries.

The Britain of the early 1950s is so utterly different from the Britain of 2008 that it is bizarre to think that we have the same Head of State we did when rationing was still in force and Winston Churchill was Prime Minister.

Queen Elizabeth II's 63-year reign has encompassed massive change



But was this Queen's reign, like that of Victoria, a time of British success, or of failure? Will this, the second Elizabethan age, compare favourably with her great-great grandmother's or not?

The Age of Victoria was one in which Britain became the greatest world power, unrivalled in invention and industrial productivity. For half a century, no country on earth could match its wealth-producing capacity.



At the same time, thanks to a combination of commercial enterprise, and a genuine desire to help the peoples of Asia and Africa, the British Empire came into being.

Nearly all these riches and political power had evaporated by the time Elizabeth II was crowned.



The war against Hitler had ruined Britain financially.



We were falling catastrophically behind our international competitors, thanks to the nationalisation of the coal and steel industries by the post-war Labour government.

There were fuel shortages and a housing crisis - with many people living in slums, and others housed in 'prefabs' that look to the eyes of hindsight like huts in Toy Town.



A quarter of British homes had inadequate sanitary arrangements, outdoor lavatories and bathrooms shared with neighbours.



Britain in 1952 was not a very happy place. Indeed, it is doubtful whether even the most conservative of today's inhabitants would truly rejoice if transported back there.



The standard of living of the average family would seem harsh today even to Romanians or the poorest of the East Germans.

Few families could afford to drink alcohol except on special occasions. Wine was unheard of, except on Christmas Day, and was so bad it turned your teeth black.



The food on offer in restaurants and hotels - assuming you could afford it - was unpalatable, and olive oil was sold in tiny phials at the chemist.

Foreign holidays were for the few, and even they were restricted by the amount of money that could be taken out of the country, so that it was all but impossible to travel abroad for more than ten days without running out of cash.

Over half the adult population over the age of 30 had false teeth - it was received wisdom among dentists that it was better for your health to have dentures.

The unhappily married stayed unhappy unless they wished to go through the considerable expense and humiliation of a divorce, in which there always had to be a guilty party, and farcical scenes had to be enacted in hotel rooms with retired prostitutes, witnessed by private detectives, in order to provide the evidence of adultery.

Homosexuals were treated as diseased beings, and two men over the age of 21 were in breach of the law if they shared a bed in complete privacy.



The Brixton Riots in July 1981



The Lord Chamberlain still exercised censorship over the stage, and, until the Lady Chatterley ruling of 1960, no legal distinction was made between literature and pornography.

It was perfectly permissible for employers to pay women markedly less for doing the same jobs as men, and there were many jobs to which only very privileged women could aspire.



Before the advent of the Pill, many women felt enslaved by marriage and family life.

When we look back at such things, it would be perverse not to celebrate that times have changed.



And though our overburdened health service is badly run, and there are newspaper stories every week of dirty, inefficient hospitals, this should not blind us to the extraordinary advances in medical science and standards of medical care.

Many cancer patients can now be cured. Life-saving heart surgery is offered that was undreamt of in the Fifties. The ageing population is fitted with replacement hips and knee joints at the taxpayers' expense.

The second Elizabethan Age is a period in which the majority of the British have basked in comfort and security.



And if, from time to time, security is threatened - by IRA bombs, by the Brixton riots or by Islamist terror - what is this compared with the wars which previous generations endured, with the British cities being nightly bombarded in the Blitz?

The dome of St Paul's Cathedral has been dwarfed by American-style blocks



All in all, when one compares the cold, the poverty, the sheer misery of 1952 Britain with the Britain of today, the improvement is as amazing as anything the Victorians achieved.

And yet, it would be a bold person who stood up and said that the past half-century had been Britain's most glorious period.



For the reign of Elizabeth is the one in which Britain effectively stopped being British.

The chief reason for this is mass immigration on a scale that has utterly transformed our nation.



Governments needed cheap labour, and the first immigrants from the West Indies helped the expanding health service, the improved transport system and burgeoning industry.



Not everyone was welcoming.



At the end of 1952, shortly after he was re-elected as Prime Minister, the old war hero Winston Churchill wanted to know the number of coloured people - as they were called in those days - who had entered Britain and where they lived.

In Cabinet he asked whether the Post Office was employing any, pointing out that 'there was some risk that difficult social problems would be created' if this was so.



Then he set up an inquiry to see how further immigration could be prevented and 'coloured' people kept out of the Civil Service.

The generation of old men who had grown up with a British Empire, and who were still occupying senior office until the Seventies, saw the question of immigration entirely in terms of colour.



Horrified by this, the next generation built up a race relations industry in which discrimination on grounds of skin pigmentation became illegal.

Meanwhile, for fear of being thought racist, successive governments allowed in thousands more immigrants and their innumerable dependants, most of whom, far from bringing necessary skills, were a drain on the welfare system or took jobs that could have been done by those already living here.

Though some of these newcomers undoubtedly helped Britain prosper, it is equally inescapable that they have changed the character and composition of whole areas of Britain - and not always for the better.

Eager to be tolerant, governments did not insist that they learn the language or integrate properly. Because many primary schools were Church of England, it seemed only fair - didn't it? - to have Muslim schools, too.

This folly ignored the fact that Church of England did not mean narrowly Christian but schools-for-all that historically just happened to be run by the church.

By creating Muslim schools, however, governments have allowed the growth of a disaffected, 'radicalised' young Islamist population, many of whom are intent on destroying Britain itself.



When terrorists strike from this quarter, the indigenous population can feel justifiable anger at a political class that allowed the situation to come about in which such suicide-bombing fanatics could exist.

In the past decade, immigration has been on a scale unprecedented in our nation's history.



The Labour Government's figure of new settlers is 1.1 million; other estimates are half a million higher.

But we just don't know. For all its love of statistics and minding the business of the law-abiding and tax-paying population, the Government could not keep tabs on the migrants it let in.

And no wonder, since, quite apart from asylum seekers and immigrants from the rest of the world, Britain signed up to the enlargement of the European Union.

All the biggest countries in Europe - France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain - saw the dangers of allowing unlimited movement of workers from Eastern Europe, the chaos it would create in the labour market and the intolerable burden it would put on hospitals, public transport and housing.

In a move that was little short of insanity, Britain allowed open entry. Around 420,000 Eastern Europeans piled in here, many willing to work for less than their British equivalents.

Strange as it was for a Labour Party - even a New Labour one - to be so blatant about importing cheap labour, it was also embarrassing to see how much harder working and more skilful were the workers trained under communist regimes than under 50 years of 'consensus' politics.

Polish plumbers and Czech bricklayers with their willingness to work 50-hour weeks mending the lavatories and building the kitchens of the British middle classes, made the indigenous poor of this country seem all the more pathetic.

But it is not just immigration that has changed Britain. Its very essence and nature have been radically undermined in many other ways.

National sovereignty has been sacrificed to Europe. The constitution has been tinkered with by the mutilation of the House of Lords. The Church of England nears dissolution.

All these things are symptoms of a simple, palpable fact: that the Britain of February 6, 1952, is not merely different from the Britain of today. It has ceased to exist.

Above all, we have lost any sense of what it means to be together as a nation.



Once, a shared sense of identity and purpose united us. It was part of the national myth that during the heroic summer of 1940 Britain stood alone against the rest of the world. But it was a myth that happened to be true.

At the time, Britain had an Empire, a vast industrial base at home, an unwrecked landscape, unspoilt townscapes, a rail network, a national Church, a class system.



But within a decade of the end of the war, almost all of these faded or were forcibly removed.

Social experiments proved disastrous and divisive.



Comprehensive education was meant to destroy the class system; instead it deepened class division by making anyone who could afford to - and many who could not - educate their children privately.

The fact that so many parents choose to subsidise state schools through tax and then spend a large amount of their taxed income on private education is an indictment of the gross incompetence of generations of politicians.

In 1944, when drafting his Education Act for post-war Britain, the reforming Conservative minister, R.A. Butler, recognised that there was a strong case for abolishing private education.

Had he done so, then it might have resulted in a more cohesive society.

Some old optimists still think this can happen, that the iniquity of division can be abolished.



The playwright Alan Bennett recently called for private schools to be brought to an end.

'It is the fact that you can buy advantages for your children over and above their abilities that seems to me to be wrong,' he wrote.



'It's a fissure that runs right through English society. If the state schools were the best, if you had to compete to get into them and their education was better than what was on offer privately, then the whole nature of education would be transformed.'

Such a viewpoint pre-supposes that the same educational values exist in 2008 as when Bennett enjoyed the benefits of an old-fashioned grammar school education in the 1940s.

But when Antony Crosland, Education Secretary in Harold Wilson's Labour Government, expressed the wish to abolish 'every f***ing grammar school in England', he ushered in a mob of theorists who questioned the very standards of excellence that enabled schoolchildren, regardless of income bracket, to prosper.

Bennett's notion of clever children <cite>competing with one another to get into the 'best' schools was anathema to the egalitarians of the Seventies.



Had Crosland and his successor, Shirley Williams, made the state schools better than the private sector then there would have been no problem.

Today, the good intentions of the educational theorists have ended in disaster, with a higher proportion than ever of privately educated children being admitted to the better universities, and landing the better jobs.

Meanwhile, the children born into the underclass - the lumpenproletariat, as Karl Marx called it - stand less chance than their British working-class equivalents in 1952 of rising through education and shaking off the constraints of their upbringing.

Constant television, computer games and overcrowded inner-city schools are unlikely to train them in the gifts of concentration that would make such a life change possible.

The Britain of Elizabeth II's accession, then, and the Britain that will see her funeral are in reality two different, equally awful, places.

We have gained much in terms of physical well-being, of medical care, of opportunities for travel and cultural enrichment. But at some stage along the journey we ceased to be a society.

Much of our common culture has been destroyed.



Take the so-called Big Bang, which in 1986 opened up the financial markets of the City of London to traders from all over the world.



Almost overnight, an institution that had been central to Britain as a nation since the 17th century was no longer in British hands.

Electronic dealing ended the arcane rituals of the stock market floor, men in top hats, bells ringing and so on.



The old Forsyte Saga-style banking and stockbroking families retreated before the invasion of American and European firms.

In their place appeared a class of super-rich City slickers, yuppies, Porsche drivers, second and third home-owners, crankers-up of the housing market, draughtsmen and women of a new social map in which previous levels of income and standards of living seemed puny.

Geographically, the Square Mile was still in the same place. The Thames still ran softly, but the song was no longer sung in English.

The dome of St Paul's, that great emblem of national solidity in the face of destructive threats from outside, as it had been in 1940 when it survived the Blitz, was soon dwarfed by huge American-style blocks and slabs that soared above the City's skyline.

Within its walls, the cathedral church of London had become the chief meeting place of a sect rather than the seat of a national Church.



The liturgy of 1662, part of the inner music of English heads and English ears for three centuries, was discarded in the late Sixties, as was any claim by the Church to utter the Common Prayer of the nation.

No longer answerable to Parliament, the Church had an assembly of its own, the General Synod, in which it conducts divisive discussions from which there appears to be no retreat.

Gay bishops? Women priests? In these Lilliputian squabbles the Church has never looked more like breaking up. Disestablishment seems inevitable.



And with that will come a further weakening of any bond that might hold the nation in an imaginative and cultural knot.

The union between Scotland and England is under threat, too.



It had been the beginning of the story of British Imperial greatness.



Despite occasional dramatic spats, the two nations achieved remarkable feats of statecraft, of philosophy, of engineering, of empire-building.



But, like a married pair who wonder whether they ever liked each other, they have drifted almost heedlessly towards separation, via a series of devolutionary measures few of the electorate actually asked for, and probably even fewer actively desire.

The result of all these changes, in so many different areas of our national life, is plain. Britain is less British today than it was half a century ago.

During World War II, and in the times of economic austerity immediately after, we were - yes, it made sense to use the first person plural - we were an entity.

Young men, of whatever social class, did National Service together. Rich and poor received identical rations and, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, Britain had a fair distribution of food.

The middle classes howled about powdered eggs, but the working classes had the new experience of protein and vitamins in their diet.

With the coming of prosperity - which almost everyone must surely have welcomed - the problems began.



The inhabitants of the British archipelago became a collection of classes and races and individuals, living side by side and for the most part trying to ignore one another.

For a while, we had the optimistic idea of multi-culturalism. In the wake of massive immigration, governments woke up to the realisation that behind the statistics were human beings with religious beliefs and political attitudes that might not sit easily with modern British secularism.

Multi-culturalism, it was argued, would enable everyone to feel at home in their own language, religion, dress codes and eating habits.

This idea is in the process of being abandoned because it is now seen to 'encourage separateness between communities', as Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, has put it.

On a day when British Muslims were burning the Union flag outside Regent's Park mosque in London, Phillips said: 'What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society in which people are equal under the law and where there are some common values.'

Against the 'extremist' ideas of radical Islamists, he proposed an urgent need to 'assert a core of Britishness' by which everyone, including Muslims, 'work by the rules of British people - and that excludes terrorism'.

But how do you impose 'a core of Britishness' upon people who are only British in the sense of possessing a passport, and who perhaps do not want someone else's so-called values thrust upon them?

Britishness, anyway, is apparently not so desirable a quality that all Britons want to share in it, as the numbers of Scots pressing to leave the Union are witness to.

What are these values, in any case? 'Democracy and the rule of law', is the answer some would give.



Yes, but the history of the past 200 years shows Britain was only ever a partial democracy.

A general election is an opportunity for the electorate to express preferences, and to change the make-up of Parliament, but only established or 'acceptable' political viewpoints are offered at the ballot box.

Those who wish to be governed by greens, by communists, by fascists, by Islamic fundamentalists or others - and this represents a substantial part of the electorate if added together - have no chance whatsoever of seeing a candidate with their viewpoint elected to Parliament.



And anyway an election leaves the civil service, the police and the judiciary untouched.

Britain has remained a country governed by those who think they knew best.



In the 19th century this was a coalition of aristocrats and the professional classes. In our times, the aristocracy was slowly replaced by a different Establishment, of university graduates and career politicians, who were no less adamant that they did not need advice from the headstrong populace.

The populace might think it wanted capital punishment, for example, or an escape from the bureaucracy of Europe, but the governing classes always knew better.

This New Establishment, confronted with the spectre of Irish terrorism, contorted itself into any number of positions until Tony Blair played the brilliant trick of giving the 'extremists' in Northern Ireland what they actually claimed to want: namely, power.



He made them share it, a Dantean joke that worked.

It would be less easy to do the same with Islamic terrorists, since it is not in the power of the New Establishment to reinvent the Caliphate, even if it wanted to.



Which is why it has resorted to this rather lame belief that it must assert Britishness - at the very period in history when it is harder than ever to define what so vague a concept might mean.

Gordon Brown has spoken with eloquent lack of meaning or substance about 'Britishness' and 'core vahlews', but what he actually thinks about Britain was revealed in a symbolic action he performed before he became prime minister.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, he approved a new set of British coins. For the first time since the reign of Charles II, the figure of Britannia had been removed from them.

As our common culture disappears, the only thing, in fact, that the indigenous population still has in common with all their fellow aliens on this strange little archipelago in the North Sea is the Queen herself.

And one suspects, as she continues to go about the land meeting her subjects and shaking their hands, that she has come to feel a stranger here, too.



• Abridged extract from OUR TIMES: THE AGE OF ELIZABETH II by A.N. Wilson, published by Hutchinson on September 18 at £25. ° A.N. Wilson 2008. To order a copy at £22.50 (p&p free),please call 0845 155 0720.

On Monday: Enter Maggie, the punk princess of politics

