11 September

Victorian England. Massive building programs, creation of the sewers, the railways, roads. The time of empire. Do we stop to think about what made all of that possible? Today we flog all this stuff off, to give away in tax cuts to buy imported flat screen TVs. In a pandemic the dominant thing we hear is complaint at people being inconvenienced. We've lost the strong, unifying beliefs at the heart of our societies. Only that could drive people to take on such enormous challenges. Awkwardly for atheists and republicans, the core of those unifying beliefs was God and Queen.