The Big Man Syndrome

The big hit in Britain is “Big Man,” a video (taken on a cell phone) in which a large, fed-up passenger ejects a teen-age fare-dodger, who has been cursing at the ticket-taker, from a ScotRail train travelling between Edinburgh and Perth. The deterioration of the national identity—and its attendant standards and mores—is a potent narrative in Britain. (See another infamous video, of the “Tram Lady” spewing racial abuse at the people she thinks have ruined “my England.”) As I wrote in a story about the English Defence League, an organization that has attracted thousands of men to combat what it sees as “radical Islam’s encroachment into the lives of non-Muslims,” declinism is often accompanied by vigilantism. Yesterday, the second-most popular comment on the Daily Mail’s story about the video, with 2540 endorsements, read:

Showing complete support for the ticket collector should be encouraged by the rail company, seems they are coming up with the usual rehearsed rubbish we get from them…. People wished to be getting on, the big man sorted it, and the law-abiding got on with their business. Just like the old days of the late 40s when the men had returned from the war, they stood no nonsense from any boy. —Jack, Westmorland

The most popular comment, with more than three thousands “likes”:

That’s how matters are settle, in Scotland! Good on ye Big man!

(As the video made the rounds, the fare-dodger—Sam Main, nineteen, from Falkirk—came forward to say that he had been out celebrating and had merely fallen asleep. “‘He’d had a drink and swore at the old man, but he’s no ned or fare dodger,” his uncle told the Daily Mail. “He paid for a ticket but was sold the wrong one.”)

David Cameron is also flexing his muscles. In the wake of his rejection of the E.U. treaty, there has been much triumphalist talk about the resurrection of the “bulldog spirit.” The headline in the Sun was “WHO DO YOU THINK E.U. ARE?” (Meanwhile, as the Mail on Sunday reported, an M.P. named Aidan Burley was attending a Nazi-themed bachelor party at a pub called the Frog & Rosbif.) Cameron is having his own Big Man moment—except that, in sticking it to the French and the Germans, he may have thrown his own country under the train.