Consider this, if you will. While the chattering classes in London were busy deconstructing the very notion of national identity, and while your average Guardian reader was fainting at the thought of a Union Jack on a biscuit tin, something quite remarkable happened. A mother and her newborn child were rescued from the wreckage of Venezuela, a nation that has, to use the technical term, gone completely to the devil. And at the forefront of this merciful intervention stood a British NGO. Not a grand government programme, not a UN resolution smothered in red tape. A few determined men and women, funded by private donations, doing what the British have always done best: rescuing people from the consequences of failed ideologies.
Let us not mince words. Venezuela is not a country that ‘fell on hard times’. It is a country that was deliberately, systematically, and joyfully destroyed by a political creed that has now become fashionable again in our own universities. The neo-Marxist experiment of Hugo Chávez and his blundering successor, Nicolás Maduro, has produced the largest peacetime economic collapse in modern history. Hyperinflation, famine, a healthcare system that has reverted to the 18th century. And yet, while our progressive betters were composing sonnets to the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, it was the old, unfashionable virtues of British civil society that stepped into the breach.
Think of the sheer implausibility of it. An infant, born into a country where basic medicines are a myth, where electricity is a lottery, where the very concept of public health has been replaced by the scramble for survival. A mother, terrified, exhausted, with nothing but hope. And into this darkness steps a team of British volunteers, funded by the quiet generosity of ordinary people who still believe that a life is a life, regardless of the passport it carries. They do not ask for a photo opportunity. They do not demand a seat at a diplomatic table. They simply do the work. This is the British character in its truest form: practical, stubborn, and utterly indifferent to ideological fashion.
Of course, the modern mind finds this terribly embarrassing. One can almost hear the academic seminars: ‘But is not rescue itself a form of neo-colonial paternalism? Should we not interrogate the power dynamics of saving a life?’ To which the only sane response is: while you were interrogating, the child was dying. This is the rot at the heart of the contemporary intellectual project. We have become so obsessed with the idea of virtue that we have forgotten virtue itself. We have built a world where we feel more comfortable criticising a rescue mission than celebrating it, because criticism is easy and rescue is hard.
This story should remind us that the idea of ‘Global Britain’ is not a phrase to be sneered at. It is a living thing, carried in the hearts and hands of those who still believe in duty, in service, in the simple obligation of those who have to help those who have not. The NGO in question, like many before it, operates on a shoestring. It does not have the resources of a state. It has something better: the will to act. And it has the support of a British public that, for all the noise of the culture wars, remains fundamentally decent.
We are told that the age of the nation state is past. We are told that patriotism is a dangerous anachronism. But when the state fails, the nation remains. And the nation, in this case, did not fail. It did not turn away. It did not ask for a risk assessment or a feasibility study. It sent a plane, or a boat, or a doctor, or simply a pair of hands. And another life was saved.
As Rome fell, the barbarians did not care for your philosophical arguments. They cared for the aqueducts and the roads and the rule of law. In the same way, the collapse of Venezuela cares nothing for your post-colonial guilt. It cares for the mother and the child. And thank God, there were still Britons willing to provide them.
So let us not be ashamed of this. Let us not apologise for it. Let us recognise that the same spirit that built the Royal Navy and abolished the slave trade and fought tyranny across the globe is not dead. It is alive, and it is working, and it is saving lives while the intellectuals debate the finer points of cultural appropriation. We should be proud. We should be very, very proud.
