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Does Britain Spend Too Much Time Looking to The Past?
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Do you think Britiain as a country spends too much time looking to the past - for instance looking at this article it appears that some £2 Billion pounds a year of lottery money is spent restoring old buildings, etc.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3161181.stm
Would you rather see the money going on building new things like community centres, etc or restoring old things from the past?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3161181.stm
Would you rather see the money going on building new things like community centres, etc or restoring old things from the past?
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A member of the aristocracy was recently given millions to stop him selling a painting to an American gallery by the lottery, personally I would rather see more hospitals or schools provided for than a private painting I will never see.
At the end of the day we have the National Trust and English Heritage in place for old bulidings and deteriorating welfare state.
In my old school two of our buildings were listed, one was hideous, lacking in proper catering facilities, had unstable external concrete steps to get to the top floor and had a toilet that was shut most of the time due to the bad smell from the poor sanitation - in all honesty it should be torn down and replaced by a modern building which the school would love to do but because it's a listed building they can't do anything to it and what they can do is really expensive.
The second building was nice enough to look at but it was originally a family house and so was only converted to a school with some difficulty, it didn't even have a set floor level as in you couldn't say what was the ground floor and first floor because everything was on split levels. To be honest that should have been gutted and had the single glazed windows and poor fittings replaced.
I never once in seven years there saw someone come and look at these buildings so what's the point of them being listed? That's the kind of negative clinging onto history I dislike, the ironic thing is although as a nation we seek to return to the Victorian ages, the Victorians were actually very forward thinking people.
All it did was to subjugate parts of the world. Is that too PC a statement? I don't believe so.
Some old buildings are important, a lot aren't, I don't think much money should be spent on painting and art when their are more important things like hospitals.
If the UK is ever a colonial possession of another nation, people who mourn the 'loss' of Empire cannot complain. It would be hypocritical for them to do so.
No, that was done way before Blair; look at the loan given to the UK at the height of WW2 by the US. That effectively handed over the infrastructure of the crumbling British Empire to the Americans.
Sorry i didnt specify that.
Britain has always been screwed by the Americans because of a stupid right wing belief that there is a "special relationship" between us and the Americans.
The US did not, contrary to right wing belief get involved in WWI and WWII to save Britain, in World War One they got involved because of German U-boats sinking the Liusitania (sp?) and in World War Two because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour.
They then screwed us over with expensive loan agreements at our most desperate time which made us economically destitute well into the 1950s while giving our competitors in Japan and Germany assistance to build new factories and other economic help which meant that even today Japan and Germany are ahead of us economically.
Until Thatcher got in we didn't have anything like the close relationship we did before - Wilson didn't, thank God, send British troops to Vietnam because the Americans asked us to. But since Thatcher took office we've been little more than an American aircraft carrier off France, they refused to help us in the Falklands Conflict but we let them attack Libya in 1986 using us as a base. That kind of "relationship" has only built until you have the British government lying to their own people through dodgy dossiers to get support for a war that their American masters want despite the opposition of the people who put them in power.
Another example of how the special relationship only runs in one direction (perhaps why it's so "special"?). No I wasn't getting at you Clan, just pointing out that the special relationship does indeed mean further subjugation to Washington.
Funny really, if it was a European country exterting that pressure on British government policy the Murdoch media would be in uproar but because it's the Americans it's okay. Funny how The Sun rants and raves about the EU taking over our country when they're wilfully ignoring the fact that our foreign policy is decided in Washington.
Depends, it ruled itself. However, the Queen was its head of state and it had a Governor-General from Britain acting as the Queen's representative, effectively head of state. Also it was a member of the Commonwealth.
I agree. We do tend to look back at the Victorian age and think "wasn't Britain great back then". But today Britain isn't nearly as great as it was. Where are the Brunels and the Watts of today? Britain should stop being so complacent and so backward-looking. We need to live in the here-and-now. We need to try and get back to where we were in real terms, not simply reminisce and dream about it. I don't mean we should annexe India, but we should certainly try to get back the manufacturing and economic clout we had back then.