Have I Got Ruins For You (VI. Destruction & Wisdom)

(Note: this is the final instalment of a multi-part essay.)

The title of this series alludes to “ruins”. The idea, sincerely held by me, is that programmes like Have I Got News For You facilitate the ruination of Britain. Of course HIGNFY is not solely responsible. In fact, it plays a relatively small and specific role in the decline. But it has played that role consistently, and continues to do so.

In 1990, the British were still regarded as a people, however damaged and rudderless. In 2023, we are mere consumers, interchangeable with consumers from anywhere else, and we are being replaced by those others at a record pace. Meantime, our culture and economy make it difficult for us to have families of our own, and our media explicitly discourages us from creating new British people.

But why would we create “new British people”, when we don’t even know what that means any more, and have been trained to cringe at the very notion? Our existence as a people has been relentlessly attacked and is now casually denied, more and more frequently.

Our sense of ourselves has been undermined. Our heritage has been shamed, distorted, marginalised and erased. We have no identity, no culture, even no history to call our own, not even a phenotype to know ourselves by. All of those things have been warped by mass immigration, made impossible by multiculturalism, or demonised by Cultural Marxism.

In contrast to 1990, we are a country that doesn’t know itself any more, and doesn’t even know if there is anything to know. (What is “a country”, after all…? Does anyone even know?!)

Today, Britain is an economic zone and a rule-based society in which no-one belongs but everyone is equal. Tradition is routinely mocked yet we are told to have faith in institutions, yet almost all of our institutions are corrupt - many of them no longer even fit for purpose. Moreover, there is crooked collaboration between institutions that should be independent of each other. We are told to love democracy, yet our wishes have been democratically ignored, time after time, for decades. We are told that “the wealth trickles down”, yet we have less spending power and less chance of ever owning a home than our parents and grandparents.

All of these trends have been defended, in every way and at any given hour on any given day, by our intelligentsia.

The standing wave of that intelligentsia’s opinion, the regular summary of things, the weekly commentary on current events, remains the BBC prime-time quiz show Have I Got News For You. There are shows, such as the 6 o’clock news, that are watched by far more of the population, but HIGNFY specifically targets the opinion-forming, letter-writing, fashion-following, moral-enforcing, petition-starting, campaign-launching people: the educated middle-class. If any one show could be blamed for the state of that class, and thereby for the state of the nation, it would be HIGNFY.

Of course, TV personalities, like intellectuals, usually claim they couldn’t possibly be responsible for such things because they have “no power”. But if they really believed they have no power, I think they would be a damned sight less smug and self-assured. They behave like people who have power but also the luxury of never being held to account, and that is exactly what they are.