Dr. David McGrogan, Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School, has given a personal account of how the world that he grew with has changed, forever. It may be of interest as a read, not so much for the specific facts but to trigger our own memories. For me, mass immigration has completely eliminated not only the old tramping grounds that I used to haunt as a kid, but largely the people as well. The landscape of the past, which was a human environment, has been washed away by development, so called.
While this is all very sad to see things go without a trace, this is happening to our entire culture, if not race, so in the scheme of things, personal melancholy is minor. Even Shakespeare, if alive today, would have trouble depicting all of this.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/02/what-we-have-lost/
"I hope I will not be misunderstood when I say that the cause of British decline, painfully evident to everybody in the country, is more spiritual and moral than it is political or economic. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest for a moment that we do not have severe, long-running, structural problems in our politics or economy – don't get me wrong. But the more pressing concern is the pervading sense of malaise that has spread itself across the country like a miasma. A country that is confident in its own skin and which is animated by a shared sense of belonging can solve most practical problems in the medium to long term. But we're not that sort of country; we are more or less its exact opposite. This does not bode well. There may be trouble ahead – and not, I'm afraid, a great deal of moonlight, or music, or love, or romance.
On an extended cross-country tour this summer, taking in swathes of the north of England, I found myself reflecting at length on our predicament. And I was struck, again and again, by the sense that this is a country which has a strong, if unstated, awareness that at some point in the recent past it lost something important – but that it does not really have the words to describe what that thing was, let alone the wherewithal to find it. If I could reach for inadequate and inaccurate metaphor, it is as though the country is plagued by the feeling that one gets when one has stood up and walked into a room in the house and forgotten why one did it or what one was intending to do there; or, alternatively, the sense that one gets when one finds oneself wandering around a supermarket with a vague notion that one is forgetting some item or other that one intended to buy but did not put on the shopping list. There was something 'there' once. But whatever it was has gone.
Where a problem is spiritual, as ours is, it must be confronted in spiritual terms. And it is important, then, that we reach for spiritual tools. We have to identify, and then properly mourn for, that which we have lost – and embrace the despair that arises from knowing that it will not return. This is because, as Kierkegaard teaches us, it is, paradoxically, only in acknowledging despair that we are able to hope. By knowing despair – by knowing that good things come to an end – we are reminded that we long for the eternal. In confronting contingency we are given the opportunity to reflect on that which does not change, or disappear, or finish. For Kierkegaard, this meant God, but it of course could be something more diffuse than the divine as such – that which is simply and unchangeably good, and true, and just, and right.
Kierkegaard was no critical theorist, and he sought to convey no political message. Despair allows us to acknowledge that there are things in the universe that are simply and unchangeably good, and true, and just, and right, but this acts as no call to arms or manifesto to revolution. The dead cannot be brought back to life and that which has vanished into the past cannot be recovered. But we can at least, through our despair, gain a clearer understanding of where we really are. And this in itself can help us to orient ourselves properly in responding to our predicament. The aim here is not to get 'back on track', if we were ever on the right one to begin with. It is rather to confront matters squarely, and honestly, so that we can reconcile ourselves to what has happened, and thereby reconnect with what it might mean to trust to hope once more.
In that spirit, then, bear with me while I indulge in a bit of mourning of my own.
The photo that appears above was taken in the early 1980s by a photographer called Martin Parr, in my hometown of Wallasey. Wallasey lies at the end of the Wirral peninsula and faces Liverpool across the Mersey, and Ireland across the Irish Sea. I was raised in the area known as New Brighton – a seaside resort of faded elegance which, at that time, was at a very low ebb. At one point in history it was a place where working-class people from across the North of England would have flocked to spend their holidays. But by the early 80s it had become a place where people from the surrounding area would go for a day out in summer to play on arcade games, eat ice cream and fish and chips (not necessarily in that order), and sunbathe. You can think of it as the epitome of what Morrissey was singing about in the song 'Every Day is Like Sunday': "the seaside town they forgot to bomb" could have been New Brighton's motto – or epitaph.
I would perhaps have been slightly too young to have been the boy in that photograph – I was born in 1981 and I think the picture was taken around 1983 – but I do remember the world that was depicted in it, albeit perceived in a dim light and through a foggy ambience that has to be squinted past.
It was by no means a privileged world. I do not mean to exaggerate this: growing up in the New Brighton of the early 1980s was certainly not like growing up in a favela in São Paulo or a township in Johannesburg, nor even like growing up in a poverty-stricken exurb of Liverpool. And parts of Wallasey were, and are, quite posh. But my neighbourhood was a relatively humble one. People made do. We couldn't afford foreign holidays or dinners out; my family couldn't even afford a VHS player until we were given a hand-me-down by somebody or other when I was an adolescent. We ate crinkle-cut chips and corned beef followed by a slice of Vienetta at my Nana's house in Tuebrook once a week on Sunday and thought it luxury. We didn't have grand ambitions or career aspirations. We didn't know people who went to university. Things changed over the course of the decades, but this is the context in which I spent my early childhood."