David Cameron may lament Britain’s “slow motion moral collapse” that led to England’s worst rioting in decades. He may talk about “broken Britain” in his speeches and refer to a “culture in which people and parents increasingly don’t take responsibility for their actions”. He may discuss how the “fear of stigmatizing people” stands in the way of preventing future riots. He might even conclude that in the “risk-free ground of moral neutrality there are no bad choices, just different lifestyles. Live and let live become do what you please.”

But what is clear to me is that we’re not talking about Churchill’s Britain anymore. No one could have pictured Winston Churchill in a photo op hugging a “hoodie” as Cameron did in 2006. Churchill would just as soon have been caught hugging a Nazi. The stern moral leader of Britain during World War II who stayed at 10 Downing Street during the Blitz as the Queen Mum stayed at the Palace and visited the ruins on tours would not have understood what was going on today. The Britons of the 1940’s who exhibited the “stiff upper lip” and fought back against the Wehrmacht are not the Britons of today.

But then Churchill was born in the 1870’s during the height of Britain’s golden age, the Victorian period, when Queen Victoria ruled the British Isles. He and the generation of young men born before the end of the nineteenth century who were blooded on the battlefields of the First World War like Gallipoli and then came back to fight again one generation later in what Churchill called Britain’s “finest hour” seem like legendary ancestors now.

But then Britain doesn’t have the position in the world today that it did then. In Churchill’s day Britain was still first among nations. It led the Allied policy during the Second World War, though America was funding it. Now it has passed along everything, including that old stern morality, to the Americans. Apparently Cameron wanted to hire an American, Bratton, to be head of Scotland Yard. Can you imagine what Queen Victoria or Churchill would have thought of this? I rest my case.