In view of the fact that in Through the Looking Glass the White Queen tells Alice that she can believe in six impossible things before breakfast it is clear that she would have no problem living in modern Britain, where we are expected to accept far many more impossible things all the time. Difficult as it is we might try picking out just six.
One
That our education system is much superior to that of the past and that we are producing better educated and more intelligent students than hitherto.
As anyone who speaks to long serving teachers in private will know this is arrant nonsense. The standard of A level questions now is the equivalent of O levels fifty years ago, the vast numbers of students now going to university cannot possibly be of the same quality as the limited numbers of the past and merely interviewing young job applicants reveals the yawning gaps in their knowledge. None of this is fault of the youngsters, who are being cruelly deceived and left with vast debts for useless degrees but is the result of the insane policies of the educational establishment.
Two
That the vast sums thrown at the NHS are providing a service that is the envy of the world.
Although large numbers of dedicated people do their best the NHS is infested with a managerial class which ensures that the money goes on them, not patient care, one level of management being often replaced by as many as seven. We see nurses obliged to wear vests stating that they are not to be addressed by patients, old people being left to die of dehydration in some wards and filthy conditions leading to deaths from hospital acquired infections.
Three
That the economy is run for the benefit of the ordinary people.
Where once we produced so many goods, dominating aircraft manufacture after the war, possessing viable ship building yards, railway engineering and car manufacturing we now see all these gone, not just to low cost third world countries but to Italy, France and Germany, while our people are expected to work in call centres or, worse, live on the dole.
Four
That it is necessary to distort our economy in order to fight man made global warming.
The very existence of global warming is open to question and, even were it to have any validity, that it is due to human activity, rather than natural forces, cannot be taken as certain. Nevertheless we are supposed to welcome useless wind turbines to reduce our CO2 emissions and wreck what remains of our manufacturing industry, regardless of the fact that China and India emit at a level that makes ours an irrelevance.
Five
That the political class are the servants of the people, doing what they do out of a sense of duty.
To say that a hollow laugh would be the right response is putting it mildly. The majority of these people are only concerned with their own personal benefit, being prepared to sacrifice the interests of the people of this country just so they themselves can ride the gravy train. Of course this brings us to number six, the biggest impossibility of all.
Six
That membership of the EU is good for the people of Britain.
This issue takes in numerous other impossibilities, such as that the single currency can survive without driving whole nations into penury, that the European parliament provides democratic control of the EU or that the sclerotic, declining, inward looking monstrosity centred in Brussels can compete in the modern world.
For the British people membership has seen, inter alia, the undermining of the democracy they have spent centuries evolving, the tide of mindless regulations produced by Eurocrats destroying their manufacturing base, the Common Fisheries Policy decimating their fishing industry, the Common Agricultural Policy greatly increasing the cost of food.
To anyone alive in Britain on VE day in 1945 perhaps the greatest impossibility of all would have been that a great country, victorious in a mighty war, could, within seventy years, have been reduced to a province of a European superstate, run by selfish spivs and wrecked by incompetents at every level. Only a few like Orwell foresaw the sort of nightmare which is now engulfing us.
We truly live the other side of the looking glass and, if we are to survive, must smash our way back through it to reality.