Theodore Dalrymple: The Queen's Decaying Throne

Theodore Dalrymple is a columnist for the Telegraph.

Only the advantages, not the depredations, of the 20th century are evident there: the food, for example, that would have been unutterably vile at the beginning of the reign has improved out of all recognition.

There are practically no modern buildings for miles around, constructed by those staggeringly brutal and incompetent British architects of the second half of the 20th century who have left little else in the country untouched, and touched nothing that they did not ruin.

In the 60 years of the Queen's reign they have sown nothing but ugliness through the land; and only in this benighted reign would it have occurred to anyone to demolish 18th-century Bath, as it occurred to the city's council, to replace it with Novosibirsk-on-Avon.

Fortunately, the council was stopped by public protest after "only" 4000 18th-century buildings had been pulled down.

The physical ugliness perpetrated almost everywhere has been fully matched by an ugliness of soul and society that is so obvious to visitors to our shores.

At the start of the reign whose 60th anniversary we "celebrate", Britain was one of the best-ordered societies in western Europe. Now, 60 years later, it is easily the most crime-ridden...