davidsberry

The Centre Cannot Hold

A haughty British indifference to the world outside the Empire applied as much to Lancashire mill workers as to victims of the Irish potato famine in Connemara. As long as mastery of global wealth and of a rigid social hierarchy applied, Britain could continue to be run by the same, small, English elite through their aura of permanent, unruffled sang froid.  The institutions that underpinned this—the Etons & Harrows; Oxbridge Bullingdon-esque and St James gentlemen’s clubs; the shooting estates—continue to the present day. One needed neither masonic handshake, nor membership for identification by fellow nomenklatura: your accent and your attitude were passport enough.

Though still extant, effortless superiority suffered erosion from financial earthquakes of both world wars and voter emancipation giving political powers to workers. Stripped of an accepted social certainty, they found themselves forced to operate out of the tabloid reach of the public eye, to whom they appeared a shadow of their former selves—much like Great Britain itself.

Formerly reserved careers were whittled away—RAF pilots were swamped by massed bomber crews in WW2; cavalry regiments degraded by rude mechanicals; pin-stripe management by business school upstarts. Even the douce “Something in the City” patrons of the Waterloo & City line found themselves jostled by loud Loadsamoneys in bright braces after 1987’s “Big Bang”. Post-Thatcher society in the South (meaning south of the Cambridge and East of the Cotswolds) modernised, finding affluence and social flexibility still exploited by the few, but now in a less obvious, if no less important, way.

But outside the South, elsewhere in England was drifting. Devon and Cornwall were growing ever more resentful of depopulation by holiday home. Eastern village farm worker cottages filled with retirees and commuters. The once-industrial Midlands and North drifted through denial that their great cities had lost their purpose and drive.

What areas of England did share was a wistfulness at their triple loss: empire; industry; influence. Since the 1970s, Britain had been chided as “The Sick Man of Europe”. So, it is unsurprising what came from UKIP—that greatness could be had if we only repelled an invasion of foreigners and threw off shackles forged by the bureaucrats of Brussels. This cheap slogan is as old as politics: garner support by creating a foreign enemy you will deal with. This ploy scared the bejasus out of the Conservatives, whose base in the South was especially vulnerable to such positioning.

So the Tories saw no choice but to out-xenophobe the UKIP xenophobes. It mattered not that the rest of Britain did not share the panic. Not only did Brexit become the obvious counter to outflank UKIP before being outflanked, but the money salted away behind front companies in various tax havens were about to be revealed through EU legislation against such convenient anonymity. An added bonus of northern job losses stirring up resentment to “blame the foreigners” carried Brexit over the line. In turn, this led to the 2019 crumbling of the Red Wall, with Boris Johnson trying to look like  John Bull glaring defiantly out over the beetling cliffs of Dover.

It might have looked like unity, but not as we know it. Outside a mile radius from London’s Pall Mall and a few outliers in places like Farnham, Cheltenham and Great Walsingham, it would be hard to gather significant numbers of English people who agreed on what their country wanted to do upon leaving the EU, much less a clear future ambition for itself, or what role in the world. Purposeful Victorian clarity of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” it is not.

Though many couch it in terms of “Britain”, it is, in fact, an English dilemma.  What’s more regional cultures that make up England don’t share the same dilemma, ever since ever since the Nazis disintegrated and the Empire went the same way.  Though far from achieving the relaxed sense of identity found in Denmark or Norway, the Scots, Welsh and (aside from a dying anachronism called unionism in Ulster) the Irish are all growing comfortable in their own skins. None of them have much interest in this on-going elite-driven Southern English throwback delusion of global greatness. Nor are they likely to hang around to see what happens when realpolitik presents the truth to their benighted English cousins who share these pleasant, but (let’s face it) geographically marginal islands.

Until the elite stop thinking it self-evident that they are and the South stops encouraging them, the decline of the last century will continue, the Celts will adopt the more modest, socially cohesive Scandinavian model. Outlying English regions may get lucky and—for once—London will leave them to forge their own future.

—END—

The English in British Clothing

The Georgian cultural package was British, not English. The gentry, lairds and clan chiefs of “North Britain” were no longer dragooned by Cromwellian English populism, but invited to partake in a multilingual, classically branded culture which, being natural to nobody, could be adopted without loss of pride by anybody. This found a common outlet in the growing British Empire. An aggressive stance and scant respect towards the rest of the globe had been established by Drake, Hawkins and the other English privateers. This led to growing affluence from trade and a leading role in the industrial revolution that drive it. Once parliaments were conjoined and rebellions in the Celtic fringe faded into history, even the lowliest strata of society across the British Isles derived a pride in its global dominance and could improve their lot in burgeoning cities and factories or seek far-flung adventure in the colonies, navy or army.

This artificial construct of “Great Britain” served brilliantly—so long as nobody asked the common peoples. At the general election of 1885, they were given their say, and promptly voted along lines established for centuries:  Southern England as a douce Conservative tribal fortress; Northern England with the bolshier Celts. As long as there was a world out there to conquer and plunder, nobody worried whether John Bull suffered schizophrenia, as long as he brought home the bacon. Matelots from Portsmouth to Portsoy, squaddies from Sligo to Slough happily shouldered the white man’s burden and shared pride in a pink-painted globe.

This appeared to simplify politics for the modern age. From 1885 until 2015, it was dominated by a polarised conflict: the Party of Southern England (aka the Conservative Party, with an outlier in unionist Ulster) versus a ever-changing federation of Outer England and Celtic Britain (embodied variously in the Liberal Party, Parnell’s IPP, the Labour Party and the SNP).

By the 21^st century, this Tweedledum and Tweedledee arrangement, while suiting  politicians and the media reporting on them, had long lost its way. Wile there was a case for social and cultural cohesion in the Celtic fringe because of their modest populations, the 50 million English were fragmenting on even more complex dimensions than in the Middle Ages.  On top of existing cultural distance between north and south or town and country evolved blue-collar vs. white-collar; new-money industrialists vs. old-money aristocrats; music hall vs. opera; artisan vs. artiste.

Though all this caused social strain, throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the multilingual, classically branded culture mentioned above dominated society through a self-regenerating elite, based on public schools, Oxbridge and shrewd exploitation of the many financial opportunities available to that inner circle. They were none too precious about how their power was maintained over the less docile fringes of the home islands. In 1886, Randolph Churchill first played what he called “the Orange card,” happily countenancing violence in Ireland. Conservative leader Bonar Law all but openly succoured armed sedition in Ireland in 1913-14. Not to be outdone by him or his own father, Winston Churchill growled back at him in March 1914 that “there are worse things than bloodshed, even on an extended scale.”

To that elite, “England” wasn’t any real nation but a vision of Imperial HQ. Yet, after 1885, their power depended on the loyalty of southern English voters and a nationalism that they had to keep safely contained. Hence the deliberate confusion between the flags of “England” and of “the UK/Empire.” The English—above all, the southern English—had to understand themselves, implicitly, as the most-favoured nation.

(to be continued)

Is it English to Be Nationalist?

 “Welsh, Irish and Scots nationalisms could all be catered for, but English nationalism, however, cannot”.

—Winston Churchill, Westminster Gazette 1912

           For the last millennium, English nationalism appears to have suffered from a kind of political Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle—the more you try to establish its geographic scope, the less in defined its policies and attributes become. In England, post Norman Conquest—and apparently uniquely in Western Europe—the grand process of High Medieval nation-building was run by a colonial elite with an entirely different language from the peasantry they ruled. They were also distracted from connecting with them by the need to keep half an eye on their swollen French possessions of the Angevin Empire.

They needed foot soldiers for each stage of their colonial ambitions in both France and the archipelago, so they created an English nationalism in its earliest form to make the conquered natives feel like the most-favoured subject people, having been over-run by the very best. As an example, the anti-Welsh and anti-Scots vituperation that opens the official record of Edward I’s 1294 campaign against them:

“May Wales be cursed by God and Saint Simon! For it has always been full of treason. May Scotland be cursed by the mother of God!”

Not the broadest, not most inclusive foundation upon which to build a union. However, the French-speaking elite were kept busy plastering over cracks in England itself, until their own cultural unity began to fray. In deposing Richard II in 1399, Henry IV secured populist covering fire for this act by becoming the first king since Harold to accept the crown by taking the coronation oath in English.

But almost immediately, English unity was again in question. In 1405, the Percys, mighty in the North, and the Mortimers, who considered themselves Richard II’s rightful heirs, agreed the “Tripartite Indenture” with Owain Glyndwr. This proposed splitting England into northern and southern realms, with Cheshire, Shropshire and Herefordshire being incorporated into a revived Wales. Fifty years later, the Percy and Mortimer families were at it again as pivotal powers in the Wars of the Roses—in practice, another series of north/south fights. English histories decorously avoid referring to these serial fracas as “civil wars” to avoid the impression that England was as partial to internecine brutality as their continental counterparts.

This fratricidal slaughter only ended when a part-Welsh dynasty, the Tudors, took charge. They brought a cultural, if not dynastic, stability. For the next 400 years, anybody who was anyone in England was expected to master Greek, Latin and French. So the former Medieval French-speaking elite culture was thus replaced by a classically-educated elite culture.

Key powerbases of this new Tudor elite—the courtiers, parliament, Oxbridge, the Inns of Court, the Church of England—were all in the South. The real driver of the Reformation was a determination of state-builders to brook no regional or supra-national loyalties. National unity was forced by external threats, especially from Catholic Spain. But for all the unity at home and exploration abroad under Elizabeth just a year after her death, the pronouncement was made::

“wherefore We have thought good to discontinue the divided names of England and Scotland… and do intend and resolve to take and assume unto Us… the Name and Style of King of Great Brittaine.”

—King James I and VI

This is what one of his courtiers, perhaps channelling the much later Sir Humphrey, might have called “a courageous decision”.  James may have seen the union as one happy arrangement between equals, but the English were having none of it. Their Parliament would have nothing to do with “Great Brittaine”. Arrogant monarchs, religious schisms and puritan intransigence destabilised society that, by 1688 one faction could think of no way to avoid further civil war, except asking the Dutch to invade and loan them a king.

Having stared into the abyss, the elite of the early 18th century tried to abolish England and replace it with Great Britain. Though technically becoming the Parliament of the United Kingdom, it was in all aspects continuation of the English Parliament, with only 45 of 558 members coming from Scotland. This was the birth of our modern politics. For the next 85 years, this parliament fought to impose itself on a peripheral cultural patchwork of northern English, Scots, Gaels, Cornish, Welsh and Irish.

This did not go smoothly.

(to be continued)

Fragmentary Foundations

 “What do they know of England who only England know?” —Rudyard Kipling

Brexit and its aftermath have brought a renewed focus on what it means to be British. Cabinet Ministers giving endless Covid briefings in front of union flags; devolved governments being reminded of Westminster largess; the stubborn refusal re entertain work permits for foreigners to ease staffing crises in haulage and hospitality. But, unlike Victoria’s jubilee or post-Dunkirk, it is not being embraced to the same extent or with as much enthusiasm.

Certainly, there are those who unreservedly apply the description to themselves, among them ex-servicemen, Ulster Unionists; Gibraltarians; Lanarkshire Orangemen; Scottish and Welsh mainly-Conservative unionists. But there, it starts to thin. It is now no longer news that the majority of people in the United Kingdom outside England no longer regard themselves as primarily British. The surprising development is: neither do the English.

It’s true that the English are happy to be described as “British on their passports and other official documents. They do not rankle at this the way many Scots now do. But deeper investigation reveals a preponderance of using “English” to describe their culture, interest, etc. Ever since the Scots 300 years ago and the Irish 200 years ago were folded into a union with the more populous England, there has been a casual conflation in that country of the terms “British” and “English” as, effectively, equivalent. Foreign powers, having dealt with the more dominant England, seldom adjusted to the new arrangement and the terms “Angleterre”, “Inglaterra”, etc. continued in common use.

While the Empire was mighty and the Scots, Irish and Welsh happy to shelter un der and exploit that might, nothing worse than the occasional ruffling of provincial feathers occurred. Joining the EU hot on the heels of the dismantling of that empire gave smaller members of the UK union the sense that a newer, wider family of nations was showing them horizons beyond those dominated by England.

It was at this point that the construct that was England started to fragment. The clearly dominant element of the UK that interposed “English” and “British” as it pleased, found itself not even primus inter pares but just one of four big economies, often outvoted by a swarm of small economies. Understandably, this did not sit well with the pride of a “top dog” nation, even if its bark and bite had both become muted.

The English are not used to thinking of themselves as fragmented and troublesome. Such things were repressed while the minor nations of the UK were supine and holding sway over a quarter of humanity boosted the collective ego. But even partial subservience to the EU brought this to the fore.

(to be continued)