I think the reason that you see a lack of militancy in Britain is that the people have never experienced what virtually every country in mainland Europe has. It's never been occupied, and never experienced fascism or totalitarianism. Of course, we know that the establishment has been rotten to the core from day one, but many people, probably most people, have very warm and fuzzy feelings about the establishment that are somehow conjured from a series of associations with the flag, the Queen, the BBC, etc. Fundamentally, people in Britain still believe that their institutions are 'good', or if not good at least not fundamentally corrupt. And they don't have any recent historical examples to suggest otherwise. And, in particular, I think the BBC has a monumental influence over people's impression of what's going on. And as people generally hold the BBC in high esteem, this has a big impact on how they perceive things.
Whereas in Europe, Spain was fascist until quite recently - many Spaniards still get misty eyed about Franco - Germany and Italy were infamously so, and of course Germany had the Berlin wall until just over twenty years ago, Portugal had a revolution in the late 1960s, their constitution was completely rewritten in the late 1970s, France was occupied by Germany and the French revolution is a fundamental part of their culture, the Dutch were occupied by Germany, ditto Belgium in two World Wars, all of the Eastern bloc countries have experienced incredible authoritarianism and state corruption, Greece and Turkey have had a very complex and tempestuous recent history. There's only really Switzerland and Monaco that have managed to stay out of all this, and that's because they have served obvious purposes for the establishment.
Whereas Britain has never been occupied within living memory, and the establishment has incredibly skillfully created a shared history for us which is extremely nostalgic and which makes our political system and leaders look exemplary. My family are almost unbearably nostalgic about the past, it drives me up the fucking wall, but they're only really responding in the way that they've been trained to do. So I think the average person doesn't have these reference points of social upheaval. I can imagine in the Czech Republic or East Germany, families get together and reminisce about the times that they were separated by the Berlin Wall or when they thought military police were going to cart them all off somewhere, but we don't have anything similar, our cultural reference points are the coronation and Dad's Army. It's no wonder that you end up with a pretty insipid culture.
