the English are moral, the English are good, and clever and modest and misunderstood

[freckles_and_doubt]

I have a visa for my English trip, hooray. It arrives all neatly sealed into a silver plastic envelope, festooned with snippy interdictions about breaking the seal unless you're absolutely and positively the person it's intended for. It was an extremely efficient process, done in only a couple of weeks, and automated every step of the way. Collecting the passport must have taken all of a minute and a half. Inside the envelope, however, is not only the passport and the documentation I submitted, but a neat little A5 booklet in red, white and blue, with the title "PLAYING BY THE RULES IN THE UK."

This title is is causing me almost physical nausea, which is disproportionate because the contents of the booklet are fairly straightforward rules for visitors: don't misuse your visa or bring in banned foods and please tattle on human traffickers at these easy numbers. But the positioning of the title gets to me. It's sanctimonious, paternalistic, smug and self-satisfied: it says "We're all part of a police state, isn't it lovely, you will be too." It also has an air of unspecified and inherent menace: you will be good, won't you? or else. The tone is that of a particularly saccharine kindergarten teacher: we're all just do as we're told here, don't we? Or mummy will smack.

I do not like your current Great Britain, it strikes me as neither great nor British. Whatever happened to the great British virtues of bloody-mindedness, eccentricity and up yours? Or is my preferred reading too firmly back in the early 20th century?

In other news, I have written two pages of densely-compacted notes for this vampire/fairy tale paper, only to discover that I'm really only making introductory motions. Hmmm. This topic may be larger than it appears in the rear-view mirror. Also, tonight I embark on STNG Season 3, suggesting I'm rocketing through them with becoming fangirly fervour. The scriptwriters, praise the cosmic wossnames, found a clue somewhere in the middle of Season 2. There is yet hope. And I still rather like Wesley Crusher, possibly on the same general principles as my growing fondness for peaty whisky: sheer bloody-mindedness. There's clearly a lot of early, classic British in my family tree.

Comments

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's paternalistic, New Labour Britain. As for change of direction, it's too soon to tell.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I dunno, is a new order really going to relinquish all that lovely control now that it's in their claws? I shall watch developments with interest, and not with a great deal of hope.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

The new order is a coalition - neither half trusts the other with power.

[pinkthulhu.livejournal.com]

They're looking at repealing the RIP Act (the anti-terrorism legislation which local councils abused to spy on people putting out their rubbish), which is at least a token good sign:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/15/ripa_review/