I am in England. It is a fact-finding tour, you might say — an ongoing investigation into the Britons’ inability to make a proper hamburger. They can’t. There’s a chain in London named after a gloomy club-legged poet who died after catching a cold, and they get close to the American model, but everywhere else it’s like eating a sponge that was soaked in bouillon and allowed to dry. Why? Are American cows brought up listening to Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and British cows serenaded with Elgar and Walton?

There are larger issues at stake here, of course. Some Americans are terribly worried about England, because we read the news about London getting awfully stabby. Well, I’m here to tell you that the England where I am now is peaceable, sensible, well ordered, and with everyone speaking freely. Of course, it’s a hotel restaurant right by the airport, so it may not be representative, but I just attacked my beef divot with a knife and no bobbies sprang out to make ineffectual noises about getting Serious About Crime.

Still, I found signs that not all is well on the sceptered isle, just in one week’s visit.

(1) You may have heard of people being braced for the cops because they tweeted something mean. It’s going to get worse. Pub bosses may be forced to become “banter cops” as new workers’-rights laws produce crackdowns on offensive conversation or japes about a protected group. You wonder what you could get away with.

“A Catholic priest, a rabbi, a transgender Episcopalian minister, and a duck enter a pub. The bartender says, ‘You’re all certainly welcome to express your philosophical diversity in a respectful manner.’”

“That’s hardly a joke, Toby.”

“Then he says, ‘If you can’t be nice, you can get the duck out of here.’”

Whereupon a server might report to the boss that “there’s an implication of gender-based violence in that joke” and the pub gets a fine for not interceding the moment the jape was begun. Or the server might report it to the police, who would instantly stop their investigation into a triple murder (a priest, a rabbi, and a minister, as it happens, all stabbed by a gender-studies lecturer) and go to the pub to talk to Old Toby, who’s been sitting in the same corner since 1958 and once told a joke so filthy it turned the wallpaper black.

The people behind the legislation sniff that this does indeed stifle bad talk, because it should be stifled, and if anyone wants to be hateful they can stay home and whisper their naughty thoughts into a damp towel in a closet.

(2) The line judges at Wimbledon are being replaced by an electronic line-calling system, thus ending a long tradition of arguing futilely with humans and inaugurating a new tradition of arguing futilely with robots.

(3) There’s a security line at the National Gallery now, because of the pampered preening idiots who throw soup and paint at great works of art to protest fossil fuels. The people with whom I spoke were heartened by the jail terms handed to some of these insufferable vandals but lamented the line. They hoped it would go away eventually rather than become a permanent imposition. I didn’t have the heart to tell them about the Shoe Bomber.

(4) Keir Starmer, the prime minister, removed several pictures from 10 Downing Street because of their historical ties to slavery. Minor figures, such as Sir Walter Raleigh and some dame named “Elizabeth the First.” He removed a picture of Margaret Thatcher because he didn’t “like pictures of people staring down.” Fair enough, since you could put the picture on the floor and Thatcher would still look down on him.

The latest removal was of a portrait of Shakespeare. Perhaps someone tweeted out the “slings and arrows” and they’ve taken the portrait down to the station for questioning.

Or perhaps it was just more Year Zeroism. Leftists are always impatient with the culture that preceded them and wish all memory of it would perish. You can’t always Pol Pot them out of the picture, but if you diminish their icons they might get the message.

These things were lamented over dinners at the quiet Suffolk village where I stayed — a place that seems untouched by everything we read over here about England’s decline. The gray sea still growls as it has for millennia, and life on the isle feels beleaguered but quietly proud. I do love it so. Awful burgers, though.