Image: Sleeping Beauty Castle, Disneyland (Disneyland Britain is due to open in 2020). Wikipedia.
British democracy used to be presented as the envy of the world. We had the Whig version of history, the rule of law – and, above all, a sense of continuity which supposedly differentiated the UK from its European neighbours.
Such a view permeated British elites, institutions and public life - but also informed many left-wing radicals and dissenters. American writer Edward Shils, visiting the UK in 1953, was stunned to hear ‘an eminent man of the left, say, in utter seriousness … that the British constitution was “as nearly perfect as any human institution could be.”’ And Shils was even more surprised to find that ‘No one even thought it amusing.’
