SOMETHING IS happening to Britain and the British. Or has happened. We are said to be passing through a transition, or a turning point, or even a transformation, nobody is quite sure which. Opinions in fact differ quite sharply as to what the "it" is that we are passing through.

Seasoned, even, dare I say, senior observers in the United States tend to identify what they see quite simply as decline. In the most obvious, palpable, undeniable sense, a decline in relative power must certainly play some part. This is not 1914, and Britain, though still one of the principal global trading powers and possessing the fourth- or fifth-largest economy in the world, is no longer Number 1. And it has to be admitted that a large part of what drew many foreign observers to this country was the thrill of reaching the center of affairs. For Norman Podhoretz, to visit or even to live in London was once to be in the modern Athens or Rome. Now, he tells us in a melancholy essay in Commentary--"The Last Time I Saw London" (January 2001)--that he no longer bothers to read British newspapers or keep up with the English literary world. To judge by the pop and rock stars and feminists whose images adorn the new wing of the National Portrait Gallery, he concludes, "the forces at work in the culture and polit ics of England in the second half of the 20th century had left a sorry--nay, tragic--wreckage behind."

Podhoretz summarizes the view of Britain held by Aleksa Djilas, a Belgrade commentator:

The country's culture has declined; its sense of itself and its purpose have descended from the heights they formerly occupied; it has pulled down the curtain on the demonstration it once put on of what a tiny island could accomplish by adhering religiously to a moral code of duty, honor, work, and national responsibility; and it looks not with pride but with shame at the power it once had.

An accusation of cultural decline from the former Yugoslavia--things must really be bad.

Nor apparently does the UK look much better when viewed from outside the metropolis. In a recent "Letter from Wales" in this journal (Fall 2000), Owen Harries (Welsh by birth and upbringing, Australian and American by residence) declares that, "Until quite recently, it used to be the case that Britain was a decent, civilized country with very good public services but an absolutely lousy economy.

Now it has changed to a country with a brilliant economy that is seriously and progressively sick in other respects." The country that was formerly a byword for lawfulness, civility and respect for property, he says, now leads the developed world in every crime except murder. Feckless habits have bred an underclass, the National Health Service is sadly decayed, the people are illiterate.

Such complaints are not limited to foreigners or expatriates. Homegrown laments, such as Peter Hitchens' The Abolition of Britain: From Lady Chatterley Lover to Tony Blair (1999), and Roger England: An Elegy (2000), also deplore the falling away in standards of civility, morality and manners. No longer do little old ladies cycle through the early morning mist to Holy Communion, as George Orwell (and following him John Major) had described when trying to catch the essence of England. These days, if little old ladies ventured forth at all, they would be scared stiff of being knocked off their bikes and assaulted by some drunken yobbo left over from the night before. And in any case, the church would probably have been closed down years ago.

Jeremiads of this sort come mostly from the Right. They differ from, and are a little difficult to reconcile with, the almost equally acerbic dismissal of Britain today that comes from another quarter--that of the leading generation of novelists now aged about fifty, notably Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. As I argued in the Times Literary Supplement last year, this group, Leftish if anything, follows earlier British writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell in finding Britain unbearably stodgy and unexciting.¹ Peter Hitchens' brother Christopher, long resident in the United States, speaks for them in seeing "America as the great subject, the great canvass." Amis regards England as a back-water, "a little Switzerland"--though without its efficiency, if Owen Harries is to be believed.

Now I SIMPLY find all these images of unrelieved decline to be unrecognizable. Leaving aside for a moment the revival of the British economy in the Blair-Thatcher years--which is quite a lot to leave aside--one still has to wonder why foreigners are flooding into Britain from all over Europe, Asia and Africa, why house prices are almost the highest in the world, why race relations are so much more relaxed than in America, why the arts--but I have no wish to engage in a counter-catalogue of things that are better done, or less badly done than elsewhere. There are, after all, plenty of genuine horror stories, and I have spent large parts of my life trying to draw attention to them. Marc Champion's picture in the Wall Street Journal of March 9 of decaying and understaffed British hospitals and schools is a perfectly accurate representation of what some of us have complained about for a quarter century and more.

But overall recent decline? No, I cannot see it, and I do not believe that any careful observer who set out to be objective would see it either. Let me simply quote here my old, much lamented friend, the satirist Auberon Waugh, not normally thought of as a Pollyanna, to put it mildly. Waugh introduced a 1994 collection of his columns, The Way of the World, with these words:

There are many horrible things happening in the country, but by no means everything that happens is horrible. I would guess, in fact, that we are living in the happiest, most prosperous and carefree society in the history of Britain. Various conspiracies exist to pretend otherwise, of which the most interesting comes from the displaced intelligentsia, ranting against the standards of the new mass entertainment culture in all its undeniable ugliness and nastiness, as it replaces the humane bourgeois liberal culture of the last 150 years.

What I find so bizarre is the claim that Britain is somehow a less interesting, less vivacious country than it used to be at some unspecified era in the twentieth century. On the contrary, when I travel today to Washington or New York, to Paris or Frankfurt or Rome, it is, to borrow Mrs. Patrick Campbell's phrase, like exchanging the hurly-burly of the chaise longue for the deep peace of the marriage bed. There is a sedateness, a formality, occasionally even a ponderousness which has all but disappeared from British life--also, in the United States at least, a religiosity that vanished over here after the Second World War, if not after the First. Well, so much the worse for Britain, you may say, though I have my doubts about non-believing conservatives who recommend religion as a civilizing medicine for other people while unwilling to swallow it themselves.

Podhoretz in his essay is kind about my own efforts and describes them as an "optimistic" sort of excursion. I do not exactly deny that, though I meant my conclusions perhaps to be more open-ended about the future, anti-declinist rather than dogmatically progressive.

To put it another way, I do not mean to be dogmatically cheerful about Britain's future, but I am dogmatic about Britain's past, by which I mean the thirty-odd years after the war. About that past I am pessimistic, if this is not too Irish or Yiddish a way of putting it (the primary dictionary definitions of both "optimist" and "pessimist" do not, in fact, refer specifically to the future but more generally to the view one takes of any set of circumstances). Perhaps there is an age element here. I guess I must be about ten years younger than Podhoretz and Harries, about ten years older than Martin Amis and the Hitchenses. For my age group, the years between 1945 and 1980 were the years that mattered--the years of our growing up and our twenties and thirties. And regardless of whether we were personally happy or not during that period, they are not years to look back on with much satisfaction, as far as our country goes. For our seniors, distanced perhaps by geography or other preoccupations, those years may have seemed much like a continuation of the Britain they had known and been fond of when young. They may have had no uncomfortable sensations of a nation sliding or hollowing out. Our juniors, for their part, grew up into a Britain that was already discontented with itself; they have known little but turmoil and reform. It was our generation, I think, that experienced the humiliations of going downhill most copiously and directly.

At the end of the Second World War, I was barely six years old. But curiously my recollections of those first years after the war seem to be exactly the same as those of adults of all classes and ages at the time: namely, an overwhelming sensation of exhaustion, poverty and restriction. Almost everyone seems to have felt like this, from the highest to the lowest. King George VI wrote to his brother, "I have been suffering from an awful reaction from the strain of the war I suppose, and have felt very tired." Everyone was talking about shortages of everything--food, fuel, clothing. If you were in the government, you were talking about shortage of dollars. Our overseas investments had been snapped up by the Americans or dwindled into insignificance. We were bankrupt and we were down at heel. The then Manchester Guardian wrote in a survey of postwar London: "Shabbiness has descended deeply upon us.

NOW, of course, these difficulties were trivial beside the suffering being endured on the Continent at the time. There, many cities were three-quarters in ruin, and there was a desperate shortage of basic commodities such as potatoes and flour. The atmosphere in Britain, if it could be remotely compared to anything in Germany, would be more like the genteel dispiritedness after the First World War described by Thomas Mann in Disorder and Early Sorrow than the more profound and threadbare exhaustion after the Second, chronicled so unforgettably by Heinrich Boll.

The ordeals of an exhausted victor do not make for a dramatic chronicle. Yet that exhaustion seeped in a quiet but remorseless way into our national spirit and was to continue to do damage to us for years to come. The nations of the Continent rebuilt their cities, their economies, their political institutions. They had to; there was no alternative.

We in Britain, by contrast, like the dispirited upper-class couple in Mann's novella, had a position to keep up. We had our war debts to repay, we had our overseas military responsibilities to discharge, our huge Empire first to administer and then bit by bit to dismantle. These tasks were formidable enough to demand all the energies of a vigorous and solvent nation. For a bankrupt and depleted people, they were a crushing burden.

So it was that my generation--Churchill's children--grew up knowing more about the intricacies of tribal disputes in Rhodesia or Nigeria than about the politics of Lancashire or Scotland. As for domestic reform--of the trade unions, of the City of London, of Parliament, of the all too hastily nationalized industries--it was the mark of the naive idealist or an encrusted reactionary to imagine that any such thing was possible. How serious in any case was the need to change? We had won the war, hadn't we? Those institutions we now lived under represented a kind of postwar settlement between the classes and the parties. We were not to tamper with them.

The travel restrictions of the postwar years also helped to conceal from us the dynamic process of rebuilding that was happening on the other side of the Channel. It was well into the 1950s before we woke up to the fact that, far from leading the economic recovery of the major European nations, we were beginning to wallow in their wake. Yet still nothing happened. We remained content to rest upon our now dusty laurels.

IN THE WINTER of 1962-63, by now in my mid-twenties, I was appointed assistant courier and general dogsbody to Selwyn Lloyd, until recently our Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had been sacked by Harold Macmillan in a desperate purge to regain popularity--the Night of the Long Knives, as it was called. To keep Selwyn quiet, he had been given, by way of consolation, the task of investigating the Conservative Party to find out what defects there might be in its political machine. Of course, the real defect at that time was the Prime Minister, but in politics party organization is always a convenient scapegoat.

For me the assignment was an unforgettable experience. We traveled the length and breadth of England and Wales. To a young man from the soft south of England who knew only the gentle undulations of Salisbury Plain and the antique serenity of Eton and Oxford, this odyssey was an education. In those narrow rain-swept valleys of Lancashire and Yorkshire, it seemed as though nothing much had happened since the first Industrial Revolution. We passed by miles of great sooty brick factories often with broken windows stuffed with rags, all apparently derelict. Yet you could sometimes still hear the hum of ancient machinery; and a dim light might be visible through the murky panes. The local Conservatives we met--Bradford wool merchants, Halifax fireworks manufacturers, South Wales steel men--seemed scarcely less antique, most of them well advanced into middle age, swathed in waistcoats and watch chains, robust and forthright, yet, I sensed, with an underlying feeling that the great days of their particular industrie s were over. As indeed, alas, in many cases they were. This odyssey was undertaken nearly twenty years after the war, but the sense of renewal was sadly absent.

Yet in the early 1960s the old businesses were at any rate mostly still in business, clinging onto their old markets, not yet wiped out by the new competition on the Continent, let alone in the Far East. By the time I undertook similar journeys in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the picture was far grimmer. The main railway line to the north now passed through great stretches of devastation--industrial wastelands with rows of roofless workshops (the roofs had been removed in order to avoid liability to local taxation). The strong pound sterling--a perverse consequence of the otherwise uncovenanted blessing of North Sea oil coming on stream at just about that time--was the immediate cause. But the long-term causes were the by now familiar ones: poor quality, late delivery, trade union restrictions, timid and defeatist management.

I emphasize here the physical sights, sounds and, indeed, smells of this decadence. The sensation of failure and national senility hung in the air. It was much the same as when one sees an elderly, much-loved relation, previously vigorous and sprightly, begin to lose it. At first one says, "Well, of course, at her age you must expect a little slowing down." You compliment her when she walks to the Post Office unaided, gently suggest that in fact she might take a little more regular exercise, progressively make greater allowances for her so that her decline becomes less painful, less perceptible to the outsider. You are reluctant to admit the truth to yourself. You are even more reluctant to admit it to outsiders.

AND SO it was with Britain and the outside world. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, our politicians made absurd efforts to minimize our decline and to exaggerate our present power and future potential. Harold Macmillan declared that Britain's role was now to play Greece to America's Rome. Harold Wilson asserted that Britain's frontier still lay on the Himalayas. Almost everyone who wanted Britain to join the Common Market prophesied that Britain's destiny was to "lead Europe." Those few observers who, often in the kindest possible way, attempted to nudge us toward some understanding of the realities were treated as mischievous troublemakers; Dean Acheson, for example, who was only stating the obvious when he argued that Britain had lost an empire and had not yet found a role, or Sir Nicholas Henderson, in his farewell dispatch as ambassador from Paris, which attempted to describe Britain as others saw her.

To most of us in our twenties, the pretensions of our leaders already seemed antiquated and fatuous. At the time, the productions of the young rebels--the plays of John Osborne, the novels of Kingsley Amis, the re-birth of British satire in print and on the screen--were more often analyzed as the rude intrusion of the "new classes" who had been emancipated from deference by state education. And so in part it was, but one scarcely needs to point out that many of the brightest sparks, from Amis to Peter Cook, were educated at leading public schools and Oxford or Cambridge. What they were also mocking was outmoded national pretension and the escapist rhetoric of the political elites. Take the most potent images of the time: the mockery of the Suez operation in Osborne's The Entertainer, or Peter Cook's immortal sketch of Harold Macmillan fumbling with a globe. The imperial game was up, and even those of us who called ourselves conservatives--and not very deep down many of the satirists were conservatives, if on ly with a small "c"--thought that our masters were living in a time warp.

What was clear--or is clear to me now, though it was not then--is that willingness to consider change is often considered as ipso facto defeatist. It was taken for granted that anyone who had real confidence in Britain ought to resist change stoutly. Take "going into Europe"--that extraordinary phrase, as though the British Isles had till then constituted a continent in itself. The proposal to join the European Economic Community was often presented, even by its supporters, as a second-best option, a pis-aller, made necessary by Britain's reduced standing in the world.

At first, of course, we had pretended that the project was a fanciful dream. For the crucial initial negotiations at Messina, Her Majesty's Government found itself able to spare only a not very high-ranking official from the Board of Trade, an undersecretary named Russell Bretherton, who sat and smoked his pipe, puffing indulgent clouds of smoke into the Sicilian air while those excitable foreigners spun their absurd fantasies of ever greater union. We might have come down in the world, but we had not come as far down as that. We were, in short, stuck with an imperial mindset, dating, I suppose, from the late nineteenth century, the days when Goschen, a British Chancellor of the Exchequer--who was, oddly enough, himself of German extraction--could speak fondly but quite unhistorically of our tradition of "glorious isolation."

Our earlier entanglements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began to be quite forgotten. That legendary headline--Fog in Channel, Continent cut off--became increasingly close to reality. We knew a good deal about American life, literature and politics, just as we knew a good deal about Africa, but about what was going on in France, Germany and Italy, despite the supposed miracles of modern communications, we knew less than we had for centuries. Even in the Middle Ages, those few people who were educated knew more of French and German art, literature, scholarship, theology and politics. At best, the average Englishman could name three or four German footballers and several varieties of sausage.

In literature and the arts, this process intensified, rather than the reverse, after Britain joined the European Community in 1973. When I first came to live in London in the 1960s, some people still thought it their duty to keep up with what was going on in the Left Bank in Paris. Sartre and Camus, Moravia and Silone, Brecht and Mann were acknowledged leaders of a shared culture. Peter Daubeny's wonderful theater seasons at the Aldwych brought companies from almost every city in Europe--from Madrid to Moscow. I saw my first Lorca, I saw Hamlet in Russian, and a good deal of Schlegel Shakespeare. But this sense of a European culture opening out to us if anything faded rather than blossomed, and a nervous, tetchy insecurity took hold.

THUS, IT SEEMED to me, we began to get the worst of both worlds. We lacked the self-confidence to modernize our own institutions, and when we joined the Community, we were indeed damaged by the worst aspects of its regulation: a Common Agriculture Policy quite unsuited to our needs, excessive harmonization where what we needed was diversity, and finicky regulation when we had not yet got rid of all the burdensome regulations dating back to the controlled economy of the war years.

And even well into the 1970s and later, the tangible legacy of those war years was with us still. Our parks and squares were still enclosed with the brutalist wire netting that had replaced the elegant Regency and Victorian railings taken away to be melted down for the war effort. London streets still had gaping bomb sites, with ragwort and buddleia bushes turning them into strange mini-paradises of wildlife. A whole stretch of the capital along the river, from the Tower of London down to the Essex mudflats, remained derelict, the largest urban wasteland in Europe, perhaps in the world.

This sensation of unfinished business remaining from the Second World War was, I think, re-inforced for us by our continued commitment to European security. That such a great part of our forces was still part of the British Army of the Rhine froze our mindset. Indeed, it was possible to sit listening on a Sunday morning to the radio program Family Favourites broadcasting old-fashioned numbers sung, say, by Vera Lynn and dedicated by their loved ones to soldiers serving in Paderborn or Bremen, to feel that nothing much had changed in the world since the 1940s.

Certainly little or nothing seemed to have changed at home. Edward Heath repeated Harold Wilson's efforts to tackle the trade unions, with no more success. Another attempt was made to reform the House of Lords--removing the hereditary element in order to restore its authority as a revising chamber. Reformers, including quite a few hereditary peers, had been agitating for this since the end of the nineteenth century, but every time the project was blocked, this time by a not uncharacteristic alliance of the romantic republicans led by Michael Foot and the romantic reactionaries led by Enoch Powell.

It is not as if the House of Commons appeared capable of replenishing the deficiencies of the House of Lords. On the contrary, if anything its procedures were more ossified still. Perhaps the most absurd example was the virtual refusal of the Procedure Committee to adjust the working practices of the House to accommodate the timetable of European legislation, so that for nearly two decades MPs could only feebly bleat as they were shepherded through the lobbies to vote into law a succession of faits accomplis. Meanwhile, in Brussels we took up a negotiating position permanently composed in equal parts of incompetence, suspicion and sloth, regardless of whether there was a Labour or a Conservative government in London. It was by now painfully clear that those suspicions were the consequence of our lack of self-confidence in dealing with the modern world.

THEN came 1979. I do not hero-worship Margaret Thatcher. For one thing, as Montaigne first observed, no man and no woman too is a hero to his or her valet, and I was her political valet for a couple of years. She could be petty vindictive, obtuse. Like almost all successful politicians, she never shrank from repeating herself. And she was a stranger to irony.

Yet far outweighing these minor weaknesses, she radiated a sense of possibility. She always believed that something could be done. And she was determined to see that it was done, if necessary--in fact, preferably--by herself alone if nobody else could be bothered to see it through to the end. Above all else, she possessed a glorious tenacity. And this can-do attitude, as the Americans call it, is perhaps her greatest legacy to us, a legacy that has lasted through the prime ministerships of her two successors and may have some life left in it yet.

It is not my purpose here to rehearse the social, political and economic changes in Britain over the past twenty years. But it does seem bizarre that so many of the intelligentsia should appear reluctant to take account of them. What can be the explanation--or perhaps explanations? I would hesitantly suggest here two lines of thought that may not have much to do with each other, except that, in a peculiar way, they both happen to apply to Britain.

The first is that, whatever they may say, intellectuals are no less vulnerable than "ordinary people" to the seductions of domination; perhaps they are more vulnerable. (I use "domination" rather than "power" in order to be more precise than I was at the beginning of this essay.) Intellectuals want to be the fleas on the top dog. Intermediate centers of power, however real and effective, are too boring to detain their attention. What intellectual has, for example, spent much time contemplating the splendors of English local government even in its heyday? (By intellectuals, I mean generally educated persons who like to take a stand in public affairs; I do not refer to professional historians or political scientists who may range quite impartially over any field, however dim and unglamorous.)

Thus Britain began to lose the attention of geo-intellectuals as soon as it began to shed its remaining pretensions to being one of the superpowers. Loss of Empire equals loss of interest, even for anti-imperialists. To be just out of the bronze medal position is to be an also ran--hence "another Switzerland."

That much may be obvious to the more thoughtful intellectuals, those who have some inkling of the herd instinct that drives their kind and of the miasma of power snobbery, a disease that moves through the air quicker than the foot-and-mouth virus. But perhaps they may be less aware of the potent conjunction of power and shabbiness. This may seem a peculiar quality to invoke. The simplest way to explain what I mean is to refer the puzzled reader to the works of Graham Greene and John le Carre, in which seedy surroundings and squalid behavior achieve a seductive resonance by being backed by power of a huge and sinister intensity. Behind the grimy facades of postwar London, beneath the lugubrious manners and fusty clothes of her inhabitants, there still lurked an imperial power--on the wane certainly, but still capable of acting in a heroic, underhand or brutal fashion to achieve its ends.

Now the buildings are more or less clean, the inhabitants wear designer clothes, and the country is a magnet for inward investment. But for Realpolitikers of the old school the glamour is departed. Of course, the National Health Service is short of money and the state schools are second-rate, but these services were far more dilapidated twenty or thirty years ago and foreign observers then took no notice, because declinism, whether directed toward ones own country or to other people's, is a notoriously erratic pastime (it would be absurd to call it a science). It was, after all, not so long ago that every wide awake publisher in the United States had a hot book on the stocks about how America was losing out to Japan on every technological frontier you could think of. Nor would it be smart to resort instead to a contrarian philosophy. You cannot rely even on futurologists to be wrong all the time.

I would only ask observers to report what they see rather than what fits their fancy. But then that is always a lot to ask.

1 See my "Farewell to Pudding Island", Times Literary Supplement, April 28, 2000.

Ferdinand Mount is editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Parts of this essay were delivered as a lecture to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and reprinted in the Center's series of Britannia lectures.