JEAN PAUL writes:

The Sackville Hotel on the strand in Hove was a great, old Edwardian pile. Faded glory, a nice old place to stay on our visits to the town on the English Channel where my mother was born and raised. She came to Canada as an 18-year-old war bride in 1944 and is 88 now, in her own house for 64 years. She still speaks of England as “home.”

The hotel fell on hard times, literally. Turned into a flophouse for “the homeless” by the town of Hove, it collapsed, literally. Fell down from rot and neglect, to the ground, last spring. It’s now a vacant lot.

It was not demolished, it just fell down. The present generation didn’t build it and could not even maintain what they inherited. They gave it over to welfare [recipients] and watched it all collapse. Socialism in action. It’s a perfect metaphor for what the pitiful, useless and degenerate English have done to England.

Probably better not to tell Ma.

Laura writes:

Sad, isn’t it?

But I’d say it’s more than socialism in action. It’s laissez-faire capitalism in action too and what Lawrence Auster called the “secular democratic consciousness,” which together created a brutally individualistic society with few economic protections for its people and institutions. An economy driven only by the accumulation of profit is ultimately as destructive as socialism.

— Comments —

Henry McCulloch writes:

As a former Londoner who has spent several pleasant days-out in Brighton and Hove — less than an hour in the train from Victoria Station, which was only a few blocks from our flat — I was saddened to read of the fate of the Sackville Hotel, a fine old pile redolent of a more self-confident England. The neglect and fecklessness that led to its simply collapsing is emblematic of a general defect in the modern Western character. We don’t love what we are and where we have come from enough to preserve these legacies from our collective past.

But things can always get worse. What is to become of the lot where the Sackville once stood? I should not be at all surprised to see it filled by a mosque or Moslem “Community Centre.” I pray it won’t, but if it does we may be sure it will be with the delighted approbation of “Dave” Cameron’s “Conservative” government. And Prince Charles would probably be there, wearing a funny Moslem hat, for the ribbon-cutting.

Please follow and like us: