I suppose that having been so accustomed to national decline ever since my birth (I do not think the two phenomena were causally related) that I am by habit resistant to good news....
Yet how much of the growth we are supposed now to enjoy, at least by comparison with our European neighbours if not with the rest of the world, is the economic equivalent of muscular strength rather than of swelling caused by oedema? I think there are good and rational reasons for pessimism, the most potent being that Britain is the only country known to me where there are substantial numbers of people who are not only unskilled, but what one might call antiskilled: that is to say they not only fail to possess any qualities that make them desirable as employees, they possess qualities that make them undesirable as such. Though their condition as unemployed is far from enviable, indeed wretched both economically and psychologically, yet they are uncompromising in their refusal to change or improve themselves. Such aspirations as they have lead them to daydream rather than to ambition and, persuaded of the equality of everything by the doctrine multiculturalism, are uncritical of and unreflective about their own way of life, which is that of distraction, or attempted distraction, any interruption of which is felt as an unwarranted and even unjust intrusion upon the real business of life.
It is a matter of opinion how many such antiskilled people there are in Britain and why they have become as they are; but they lack even such simple attainments as the ability to answer the telephone properly. They do not know how to address strangers with reasonable grace and would feel any attempt to teach them as an assault on their personal identity. That is why, when we have millions of people unemployed, practically all hotel receptionists have to be foreigners, even in areas where the unemployment rate is exceptionally high. They are more mannerly and speak better English than the millions of indigenous people who theoretically could fill the posts. This phenomenon of antiskill does not exist anywhere else in Europe, at any rate to the same extent as in Britain. It is a tremendous burden for any economy to bear.
