Author: Robin Aitken
Publisher: Biteback
Reviewer: Jenny James Taylor
THERE are four things wrong with the society Britain has become: the insistence on ever-increasing prosperity, radical feminism, multiculturalism and political correctness.
Unpacking each of these in turn is Robin Aitken’s task in this heroic invective against the cheerleader of all that’s wrong: his old company, the BBC.
These things are ‘the destroyers of the old morality’ says the man who spent 25 years as a BBC journalist – and he ought to know.
In an astonishingly robust apologia for the Christian culture he says we once were, he is neither hysterical, nor emotional nor incoherent; just savvy. He brings the panache of a top Today Programme reporter to bear on all the issues that perplex us and without bothering with footnotes, and often not even bothering to substantiate his critique, because it’s all so obvious, he provides us with a look back at what we’ve lost and posits an earthy faith in the power of Christianity to provide the only way out.
Dismissing PC culture as ‘a fashionable melange of modish prejudice’, he is convinced that what faces us is ‘a project doomed to fail’ that will never deliver true social harmony because, as Patrick Deneen says in The Failure of Liberalism, it is a culture eating its children. It is unhappy, divided and morally disgusting and people will wake up soon and revolt – unless Islam takes over first, as French novelist Houellebeq reckons.
It is a set of ideas which runs counter to human nature, serving a tiny elite whose spokesman is the BBC. Buy the book and recover your will to live.