{"id":1014,"date":"2008-11-24T16:39:07","date_gmt":"2008-11-24T20:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anglicansamizdat.wordpress.com\/?p=1014"},"modified":"2008-11-24T16:39:07","modified_gmt":"2008-11-24T20:39:07","slug":"keep-the-aspidistra-flying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/keep-the-aspidistra-flying\/","title":{"rendered":"Keep the Aspidistra Flying"},"content":{"rendered":"

No longer, it seems: it has withered under the glare of leftist lunacy. The corrosive influence of the Welfare State, from Here:<\/a><\/p>\n

Overall, I think in general the bigger evil effects of welfare have been enormously underestimated, even by commentators who regard themselves as more pro-capitalist in their sympathies. Welfare is the basic cause of the deleterious cultural changes we have witnessed in the West over the past 60 years.<\/p>\n

The Welfare State, pioneered in Britain of course, has corrupted this country to its core. It has transformed the country caricatured by Noel Coward and others \u2013 essentially pretty decent, self-reliant, and plucky \u2013 into a country which is thuggish, selfish, mindless, dispirited and lost. Gone is the British stiff upper lip. Modern Britons are moaning, self-pitying inadequates. The welfare state has bred a generation of obnoxious, drug-addled criminals and ne\u2019er-do-wells. It has also, incidentally, burdened what was once the world\u2019s biggest, most dynamic economy with the dead weight of an obstructive and vastly expensive state machine.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry to sound cross about this, but I don\u2019t think people fully realise what\u2019s happened. Britain has, I think, the highest crime rate of any industrialised country in the world. It is twice as high as the <\/em>US<\/em>.<\/em> The violent crime rate is higher in London than New York. Britain has the highest rate of drug abuse, the highest teenage pregnancy rate and the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease in the modern industrial world. What the hell happened?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No longer, it seems: it has withered under the glare of leftist lunacy. The corrosive influence of the Welfare State, from Here: Overall, I think in general the bigger evil effects of welfare have been enormously underestimated, even by commentators … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":3,"footnotes":""},"categories":[256,307],"tags":[2267],"class_list":["post-1014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-the-fall-of-the-west","tag-the-fall-of-the-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1014\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}