I originally typed that title back in January 2004 when your humble correspondent was but a baby blogger who barely troubled the sitemeter. These days, older, fatter & more jaundiced than ever, rather than post something new, in the finest traditions of a movies re-releases I thought that I would digitally re-master the original, but update it for 2007. Think of it as a form of electronic recycling. Anyway, now armed with a further gentleman’s measure of finest Islay lets sally forth into the fetid cesspool that once Great Britain has become with Dr Faustus’s closing words it is finished (hence the title of this post) ringing in our ears.

I have been keeping this shabby little corner of the intrawebthing-a-me running for nearly four years now & on my own bandwidth continually rambled like some incontinent old Major about the decline of dear Blighty, the emasculation of Her Majesty’s subjects & the seemingly irrevocable slide of society into a morass of mejaar mandated mediocrity. Indeed, to continue the military metaphor to at least the end of this paragraph, it was George MacDonald Fraser’s brilliant character, Brigadier General Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC, KCB KCIE, who once lamented that the days had long passed when if anyone dared lay a finger on a stout bulldog, the (British) lion roared once, then pounced. From political correctness & the all pervasive nanny state, through multiculturalism to Euro-emasculation, once Great Britain now staggers on like a mortally wounded old bull elephant.

The British are a bastard race & therein was their strength. Since Erik the Semi-literate first stated recording our history on sun dried pigs bladder parchment, it has been the our ability to assimilate other peoples & customs, either through conquest or through trade, which has given this country its greatness. How else would a rather small wet & unpromising island in the North Atlantic amass an empire that covered a quarter of the world’s landmass, some ten million square miles & comprised at its peak, some 400 million people? As a grand old dame once recounted to me over tea one afternoon,

We civilised a fair proportion of this earth; the remainder has yet to be civilised.

My how we laughed as we helped over selves to more lemon drizzle cake before setting off to subjugate further native lands through lethal combination of Martini Henry rifles carried at the high port, the King James Bible & well whitened pith helmets.

Great Britain has been & still is a conservative nation (please note the small ‘c’). Even the educationally sub-normal want nothing to do with Spliffy Cameron & that particular brand of Conservatism that is currently being so shamelessly peddled by Zak Goldsmith. Traditionally the British path is one a tolerance unless of course, if you put the milk in before the tea, then all hell breaks loose & there are demands in the House for gunboats to be dispatched – least there would be if we had any gunboats left … sorry Admiral, we spent your entire budget for the year on the new reception centers for Somali refugees.

To understand these Islands, you have to understand cricket for only we could come up with a game that lasts 5 days; also a sport in which it is perfectly legitimate to attempt to give a batsman irreversible brain damage by bowling short of a length, but the bowlers arm must remain straight, old boy. The bulldog understands rules & moderation, as the same vein he understands the generation of violence. Read Sir Henry Newbolt’s classic poem Vita Lampada –learn & inwardly digest.

Another Sir Henry, Vivien Stansell’s character, Sir Henry Rawlinson when ordering breakfast demands meat burnt like St. Joan, served with Calvin’s horseradish & mustards to pierce the tongue like Cardigan’s lances. These days, the British Medical Association strongly advises that the day be started with a wholesome & nutritious combination on yoghurt & calcium enriched cereal served with a weak cup of herbal tea - hardly a warrior’s breakfast on which to face the Dervishes or suppress the odd sepoy uprising. Frankly a bowl of muesli doesn’t even set you up for a hard days trading on the FX markets. Even contemplate lighting a cigarette and the health Nazis will have you incarcerated quicker than you can say restriction of personal freedom.

Because of this once merry Albion’s understanding of moderation & liberalism (note the small ‘l’) the UK has never required a formal & written constitution. Under the Magna Carter granted by King John in 1215 & signed on Runneymede Green, liberties are guaranteed. The original document was tweaked a few times (typos, grammatical errors & the like) but V3.0 was in its final form by 1225. Like all well drafted documents, it hasn’t required revision. Two other key documents in the evolution of Great Britain - The Petition of Right (1628) & the Habeas Corpus Act (1679) looked directly back to the 39th clause of the original charter of 1215. This clause states that

no free man shall be . . . imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed] . . . except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
As we enter the 21st century, trail by jury has been curtailed. A subject can be extradited to European countries without full judicial review or appeal. Indeed, in certain circumstances a British citizen can be imprisoned without trial. Notwithstanding these draconian powers, rather than concentrating on the incarceration of criminals, the constabulary & judiciary spend their time & the taxpayers’ money on the persecution of motorists, all in the interests of further revenue generation.

Get into a car & you immediately metamorphose into an object of hatred. It is now a £100 fine under the new Traffic Management Bill for parking more than 19 1/2" from the curb; this country now has 4,000 speed cameras (a.k.a. piggy banks). Not bad for a landmass about the size of the average Canadian ranch.

Hounded from the roads, the rest of the population live under the burden created by litigators - wholesome folk who make their living suing fast food companies on behalf of their clinically obese clientele; too fat & stupid to tear themselves away from 150 channels of rubbish on sat-a-lout television & do some exercise. The courts are flooded with a tsunami of spurious litigation while in the criminal justice system, self confessed felons walk free - yet in response to prison overcrowding, government reports suggest not locking people up. What exactly is wrong with building more prisons? I’ll tell you - rising prison populations make for bad headlines – hells teeth, they aren’t even sending down kiddy fiddlers anymore – Justice Numpty thought that it was much more appropriate to make the pervert that stood accused in front of him serve his sentence in the community & to think that at times I worry about my grasp of reality.

Aside from soap operas, the airwaves are filled endless programmes on reformed drug addicts wanting our approbation & applause for stopping doing something that was a bloody stupid idea in the first place. If it isn’t that, it will be some current affairs programme on which aging troubadours & minstrels lecture us on foreign policy. Since when was Bono an expert on anything?

While an increasingly intrusive government seeks to control every aspect of our lives & has commenced cataloguing our children, we ask how can this be? As cousin Bird Dog pointed out in John O'Sullivan’s comments upon recent return to Britain

It didn't happen overnight. Breaking down a strong culture of civic self-control takes time and several social acids … for all the “revolution’s” intent of fostering freedom, all they have made for themselves is precisely the opposite: a nanny state with neither the social ease of a safe street, or the confidence that one can freely air your views.