This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
One good turn deserves another. Fair’s fair. Share and share alike. Let bygones be bygones. It’ll all come out in the wash. Let sleeping dogs lie. High walls make good neighbours. Still waters run deep. Boys will be boys.
Least said, soonest mended. Be careful what you wish for: you might get it. Actions speak louder than words. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Fine words butter no parsnips. Honesty is the best policy. Truth will out.
If it isn’t broken, don’t mend it. A stitch in time saves nine. There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip. Don’t throw good money after bad. Penny wise and pound foolish. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. You can’t have your cake and eat it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Make hay whilst the sun shines. Forewarned is forearmed. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. It never rains but it pours. It’s the luck of the draw. A friend in need is a friend indeed. Beggars can’t be choosers. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Where there’s muck there’s brass. A bad workman blames his tools. More haste, less speed. An Englishman’s home is his castle. It’s a free country.
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To people of a certain age these are so, so familiar. Some of the phrases can be traced back centuries, occasionally but not often echoing a line from some later-famous author (even then because the authors seem to have echoed already-common usage). Considered one by one, these aphorisms or proverbs appear to matter little. Taken alone, none of them is decisive.
Put them together, and the wider pattern stands out. They are parts of a real popular morality, the accidental but candid disclosures of what people actually learned from their daily experience and what ideals they drew from their lives. They amounted to a system — not a fully consistent one, true, but largely coherent and more powerful because so understated, and more effective by being summed up so concisely: brevity excluded doubt.
They used to be familiar, but not now. Social change in recent decades reveals something discouraging. Put these aphorisms together, and they share a second common feature: they seem to speak from a recent past that many people only just recall, but that is now largely gone. They come from the world of shared adversity, quiet stoicism, collective loyalties, rationing, national service, and mill workers taking their holidays in Blackpool, some reading the Manchester Guardian.
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Those of a certain age will remember these phrases still used in daily discourse, but today one hardly hears them. They used to be memorable abridgements of a popular moral code, widely shared but never imposed. Here was no forced deference to the authority of squire and parson, let alone peer and bishop. It was a morality that displayed quiet stoicism in the face of poverty, unemployment, insecurity and bereavement, but little thanks to any church.
These sayings seldom contained direct applications of Christianity, certainly not of its key doctrines (the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Atonement). “God helps those who help themselves” left little for the Almighty to do, just like one rare but clearly Scriptural echo: “Do as you would be done by.” This was a culture echoing reciprocal respect more than divine command.
Today, if there is a popular morality, it is often closer to the opposite of these adages
Instead, these sayings were popular or, as the commentariat (being enlightened) now say, populist. Today, if there is a popular morality, it is often closer to the opposite of these adages. And so is society at large. Blackpool is now a place where asylum seekers, forbidden to work, can be cheaply housed far from Guardian readers. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
What of the rest of that old morality? A good turn isn’t what we want; we deserve an entitlement. Even if someone does a good turn, it is now accepted as of right. We want our rights. You share; I take. Don’t ask, don’t get. Take and take alike. Fair’s unfair, since everyone’s idea of fairness is equally valid.
“Sleeping dogs” stood for society’s generally being able to take care of itself; this assumption is increasingly supplanted by expectations of detailed state intervention. Your neighbour’s rap music blasts through your walls, however high. Still waters are evidence of mental handicap, which more and more students claim. Boys will be girls.
Most said is soonest mandated: victimhood is proved by repetition. Words are the most hurtful actions in the information economy; the police prefer to pursue those who utter hate speech (easy) rather than those who wield sticks and stones (dangerous). We’re now worried about our cholesterol levels; so we use imported olive oil on our parsnips (fair words) rather than home-made butter (plain English). Truth is more often outed by scandal occasionally uncovered than by honesty pursued as policy. Handsome is the ambition of influencers who don’t actually do anything; “handsome” is not an attribute of their conduct but merely describes their good looks on the screen.
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Society is broken; but like any possession of its members, don’t even try mending it. Throw it away and buy a new one (made in China): it’s cheaper than a repair. Government policies never slip twixt cup and lip, thanks to planning. Good money must always be thrown after other well-planned money, to justify planners’ insistence that they were Right All Along. What are pennies, anyway (we have given up using cash)?
Modern accounting makes all eggs already count as chickens. Money does indeed now grow on the Magic Money Tree, so that at last you can have your cake and eat it. Don’t just accept a bird in the hand! Rather, chase those two birds in the bush (a life peerage, a government contract). A free lunch is just what quangocrats, or media personalities, qualify for. We no longer eat puddings: they remind us of nursery food rather than the cuisine we appreciate at our place in Tuscany.
Make Channel crossings whilst the sun shines. Forewarned refugees are forearmed by their traffickers, and prove the iniquity of the system. Beggars too must be choosers to prove their escape from their status as victims; the social services will soon turn them into model citizens: silk purses, every one. Rain (like drought, indeed like climate change itself) is now the fault of the exploitative capitalist, rather than the shared consequence for everyone of chance ill winds blowing nobody good.
There’s no muck in our white-painted offices and studios! The brassy egos of the wokeing class largely abolished dirty manufacturing industry (or, at least, moved it to a part of the world where it won’t count against our emissions limits). We don’t blame our tools (we don’t have any now) — just our electors, when they give the wrong answers. Since we’re mostly employed by the state or its agencies, neither haste nor speed will count against our targets for virtue.
Castles? Break up farming estates by inheritance taxes and they can be taken from their owners, given to the National Trust, and turned into fun palaces with notices linking them to the slave trade. A free country? Never more free, to do the things on our agenda.
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Such is the reality of a newly dominant discourse; but it is not completely unchallenged. Memories remain. So Keir Starmer’s image of “an island of strangers” caught the attention of the public in a way that nothing else in his disappointingly drab discourse had ever done. Perhaps accidentally, he nevertheless touched a nerve. Immigration is normally discussed by the political elite in terms of numbers (and even then, of net and never of gross numbers). Present-day Gradgrinds continue to perform their dry accounting exercises: do immigrants contribute more in taxation than they receive in benefits? But the host population can seldom form an overview on such flows of income and expenditure.
What else is involved? People’s implicit goal is always the continuity and stability of everything that they assume makes up a national culture. How can its changes be discerned?
One yardstick might be the extent to which a popular and commonplace morality is shared, or changes. If so, one measure of this sharing might well be language in everyday use: the aphorisms, the proverbs, the sayings. If that usage now proves to be increasingly radical-individualist, inclusive only of diversity (once a contradiction in terms), and proves to have steadily replaced a usage instinctively and mutually respectful and co-operative, something has changed.
But social psychologists seem not to be looking in this direction: the Southport riots came as a real surprise for the elite, just as they used to insist that the Troubles in Northern Ireland were about housing, or policing, or anything rather than religion; and just as foreign policy experts now discount what Iranian Shia openly say about the total destruction of the Jews. Somewheres draw on custom; anywheres have any values.
A stranger in this island might well be a person who does not return my good turn, or does not know the meaning of fair’s fair. If so, a decline of trust is arguably a matter not open to reform by legislation. What proves today to have been the most prophetic adage of them all? “I’m all right, Jack.”
