Within living memory, Britain was an imperial power, its empire so vast that the sun never set on it.

The sun has set, however, not only on Britain’s greatness but on its common-sense.

Here are two illustration of the country’s deplorable decay, told by Melanie Phillips:

Zenna Atkins [chairman of the Office for Standards in Education] said … “If every primary school has one pretty naff [bad] teacher, this helps kids realise that even if you know the quality of authority is not good, you have to learn how to play it…. If kids can manage to cope with one bad teacher that’ll be a good learning lesson for them in life – it is not necessarily an absolute disaster.” …

Can this woman think at all? What, indeed, were her qualifications for this post? … Illiterate at the age of 11, expelled from school and to have failed English O level – totally flunked it, with an unclassified ‘U’. Three times. Ms Atkins’s academic career is marvellously inglorious – she left school with an O level in biology – for the woman now in charge of the nation’s educational standards.

Next:

The Chief Inspector of Probation, Andrew Bridges [said]: “Murders and other serious crimes committed by prisoners released early from jail may have to be ‘accepted’ by the public as part of attempts to keep down the cost of the criminal justice system.” …

Some reoffending — even if it involved “serious” new crimes — could be the price that society had to pay for trying to cut down on the huge cost of the country’s rising prison population, said Mr Bridges …  While acknowledging that prison reduced crime, he described it as a ‘rather drastic form of crime prevention’ and said it was time to consider dealing with more offenders in the community.

He claimed that the public could never be perfectly protected and that the cost of a ‘small amount’ of reoffending could be outweighed by the ‘benefit’ of financial savings to the public purse …

Melanie Phillips concludes:

So Britain has an education regulator who believes that every pupil needs a useless teacher, and a probation regulator who believes the public will just have to get used to being murdered, attacked or burgled.

British  governments, no matter what political party is in power, do not care much for fulfilling their primary duty of protecting the citizenry: they much prefer to use the public purse to provide luxurious living for non-working immigrant Somalians  – see our post below, Where beggars can be choosers.