The Pitiful Death of John Bull

Englishmen are being arrested in their homes for posting "inaccurate" information on Facebook.

For most of my life I believed that England was the cradle of free speech and individual liberty. With its Magna Carta, Common Law, Parliament, and long tradition of free speech—and explicitly defending free speech—going back at least as early as John Milton’s pamphlet “Areopagitica,” published in 1644, England was long personified as a jolly, good-humored, plain speaking man named John Bull. While people who lived on the European Continent were subjected to royal absolutism, John Bull stood for “English liberty.”

In the following cartoon published in 1904 on the occasion of the Entente Cordiale between Britain an France, John Bull is depicted as turning his back on Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and walking off with Marianne (who is humorously portrayed as looking like a tart).

The following is a depiction of John Bull in 1803, announcing what he would do to Napoleon Bonaparte “if the Corsican Cut-throat” landed on the British Coast.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about John Bull—or more precisely, his pitiful death—as multiple friends have sent me videos of Englishmen being arrested in their homes for the crime of “posting inaccurate information on Facebook.”

It’s hard to understand how the pitiful death of John Bull came about. Was he spending too much time at the pub watching football matches to notice that he was getting old and would soon die? Or was he too depressed to resist the weirdo tyrants who have hijacked British culture and ruined the cradle of free speech and individual liberty?

I suppose it’s possible that this moment has been a long time in the making. I thought of Matthew Arnold’s famous poem “Dover Beach,” about a man having a crisis of faith, and was surprised to see that Arnold wrote the first draft in 1851. As he concluded in the final three lines.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The trouble with the British government is that it doesn’t believe in anything but power, the ruthless exercise of which it cloaks with benevolent-sounding platitudes about diversity, equity, and inclusion. The British public—most of which doesn’t believe in DEI humbug platitudes—has been conditioned to feel powerless and stuck on the hamster wheel of working all the time in order to keep up with inflation.

RIP, John Bull.