Freed From Behind the Paywall: My Failed Love Affair
How I Have Tried Hard to Love My Country - Unsuccessfully.
This post was first published in October 2022
The recent slapstick developments in British politics with what seemed to be a new Prime Minister every few weeks has led me to examine closely, and not for the first time, my personal relationship with this strange and ancient nation.
When I was trying to find a visual symbol of England to illustrate this essay, I couldn’t find one that I wanted. The St George’s Cross? Too nationalistic. The English Rose? Too anique and rural. The England Football Team logo ( three lions on a shirt)? Too macho. In the end I almost settled for St George, because I always thought he was kind of cool and because he was from a multicultural background, was persecuted for his religion and wasn’t even born here. And because I always liked this painting:
But in the end I went for the legendary Full English, not to be found in any other country ( except of course where there are a lot of English expats).
Readers may wonder why I chose a plate of food to illustrate Englishness. I’ll come to that. But in the meantime, I expect many of my American and even European readers will be a bit vague about the difference between ‘British’ and ‘English’.
For their benefit, England is by far the largest part of Britain, running from the English Channel in the South, to Hadrians Wall in the North to the Brecon Beacons in the West and the the North Sea to the East. It represents 85 per cent of Britain in population terms.
Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland - Southern Ireland is a completely different country, politically and economically - are tiny in comparison, at least in terms of population and the size of their respective economies.
But here, we don’t really like to talk about England. Not in polite circles anyway. If you are minority ethnic you are ‘Black British’ or ‘ British Indian’. Most of the immigrants that have come here over the last 70 years have identified with Britain rather than England, even though the overwhelming majority of them live in England (96 per cent of Scotland is White. 95 per cent of Wales is white. 15 per cent of England, on the other hand, comprises ethnic minorities., and in some big cities, like London, ethnic ‘minorities’ are in the majority. )
The concept of‘Englishness’ tends to rest in the unlovely hands of Tommy Robinson the English Defence League or other shards of the far right ( even the oleagenous Nigel Farage, rabble rouser and Friend of Trump, talks of Britain more than he does England).
But my England - the England of my imagination at least - isn’t right wing at all. It lays beyond politics - questing, reflective, very weird, open, imaginative, thoughtful, poetic and stretching far back into history, far further than the relatively recent concoctions of the United Kingdom ( 1922) or Great Britain ( 1707).
( if you want to know more about it’s historic weirdness, track down the film ‘Arcadia’)
England, in my mind, is eternal. But in actuality, it became a unified state a mere thousand years ago, in the 10th century.
I chose a plate of food to illustrate England because it feels neutral and uncontroversial.
Because patriotism is controversial, in this country and is usually confused with populism, nativism or nationalism.
I confess - have always wanted to be a patriot, in the true, non-jingoistic sense, largely because like many people of my background (suburban, poor-ish, disenfranchised, without a strong sense of place or community) I yearned for some sort of collective identity to cling to that I could be proud of that wasn’t aggressive nationalism, royalism or fetishism for England’s past, which as it turns out, wasn’t nearly as glorious as I was taught when I was growing up. Slavery and the dark side of empire were tarnishes swept under the carpet until mass immigration meant pressure from below meant they could be concealed no longer. I saw the pride countries like France, Italy and Ireland took in themselves, and wanted to feel the same as a citizen of England.
Born in the 1950s and coming of age in the 1980’s under Margaret Thatcher, as I was, it was very hard to feel any love for my country, since I hated the Tories and they were running the show. Thatcher’s view of Englishness, rooted in the small minded conservatism of the 1950s, was anathema to me.
Things finally got better when Tony Blair came to power in 1997, and right through to the Olympics in 2008 I felt stirrings of national pride for the first time in my life . We were modern, enterprising, tolerant, inclusive, social democratic, leaders in culture and the arts, theatre, even cuisine. Joining in the EU seeemed only to enhance our national status. Our entry into the Gulf War in 2005 was a huge crack in national self esteem, but it took a few years to become clear what a disaster it was, and the financial crisis of 2008 marked the beginning of the end, since it ushered in the Tories and the end of what had been generous and continued investment in public services - schools, the NHS, social care - it had all been improving dramatically.
But in that brief interregnum my dream of England briefly came true. For that golden decade, I felt proud to be English, the years of ‘Cool Britannia’ , Brit Pop, YBA and the Olympic Games ( all of these in truth far more English than British).
How short that time was, though it felt it would last forever. Then came David Cameron and Nigel Farage and Brexit and Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Now I feel just what I felt in the 1970s, when we were shattered by strikes and inflation. That being English was just a worn out joke.
I should emphasise that when I am talking about my country, I mean England, not ‘Great Britain’. Because I don’t feel Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish any more than those countries, where national pride is more respectable, feel ‘British’ so much as they feel - or so I imagine - Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish ( although to complicate matters further, Northern Ireland protestants are fiercely patriotic about Great Britain).
What do I mean by feeling English then?
I don’t know.
I do know that it’s become faintly disreputable, even grubby, conjuring up images of Jacob Rees-Mogg, skinheads with St George’s Cross Tattoos and colonial triumphalism ( although of course that was a British thing rather than an English one. The Scots pretty much ran the Empire.)
But that’s not the England I have in my imagination.
My imagined England has something to do with the landscape. Gentle rolling hills, vast Northern moors, the English seaside, verdant valleys, cottages, oast houses in Kent, churches and monuments. And it has something to do with history - though in a rather vague way. I don’t feel much affection for our kings and queens and the whole ‘Island Story’ thing, but I do enjoy visiting our great collection of National Trust houses and monuments and I love simply the fact that we have existed so long as a nation.
I am never happier than when at the English seaside ( I am about to move to the seaside town of Whitstable in England). I love the smell of the sea, the ice cream and cream teas, the amusement arcades and funfairs. Never do I feel rooted and content than when I go to the holidays I take on the Dorset coast every year.
Yet I find myself tangled up in contradictions wherever I look. Whitstable and Dorset are almost entirely monocultural - white, that is to say - and yet I have chosen to spend my life in the heart of multicultural London, and loved it. But I have never felt English here - only a proud Londoner, a generation or two away from his cockney roots.
Is the Englishness I feel something to do with race then? In fact, is ‘Englishness’ essentially racist in nature? I don’t think so - though doubtless many ethnic minority groups might disagree. When I go to Northern towns like Bradford, which are now heavily Muslim/Pakistani/Bangladeshi in make up, the simple fact of the Yorkshire accent alone, quickly acquired by the second and third generation of the incomers is enough to clearly mark for me that population as ‘English’ in some historical and cultural sense. And I have met more than a few black and Asian cockneys. So Englishness to do with the way we talk? Possibly. After all the main way you spot a Scotsman, Irishman or Welshman is not by the way they look, but the way they talk.
As for history - I don’t thrill to the thought of Sir Francis Drake or the Duke of Wellington. Our imperial, military history leaves me pretty cold, although I do think that standing up against the Nazis in WW2 ( admittedly with the help of the USA and subjugated groups of the Empire ) was pretty heroic, which is why it still bonds together so much of the ageing, shrinking population who still remember it.
No, to me ‘Englishness’ is vaguer than that, but still powerful.
My parents, both socialists, were deep patriots in the way the working class ( my father was a greengrocer) often were in those days - again, not out of any love of royalty, but out of an inherited pride in just being who we were. It was linked in with working class identity - unions, miners, factory workers, co-operative societies and so on.
‘Who we were’ made sense in the 1950’s when I was born. England was a very particular place then, as particular as Italy or France, with its own idioms ( cockney, Yorkshire, Scouse, West Country) , food ( not very good, largly boiled or fried), a gentle, vulgar sense of humour ( think ‘Carry On’ films) and many peculiar customs, from flat caps to cheese rolling ( not all that widespread, I must admit) and warm beer.
This uniformity was a disaster for any sense of vibrancy or excitement. 1950s England was deeply dull. Then change upon change piled up. Mass migration, free market economics, the echo chambers of the Internet, cheap air travel, rampant American cultural imperialism. Over the next 50 years , for good or ill, not much was left of the England I grew up with.
I was pleased about this. I still am. Give me modern, multicultural England any day over the marinating in dullness of monocultural England of mid 20th century.
And yet I can’t help but feel that I also want to feel English, in some special way. And I suppose I do feel English, at a low level. There’s no denying it, however globalised and cosmopolitan I think I am. Things that still connect me to England include double decker buses, red post poxes, fish and chips, cups of tea, cricket and football ( although I don’t like cricket and the English football team - at least the men - are losers). There’s the newspapers , althought they are far more British than English, and of course the BBC, likewise. And snooker. And of course, music, from Cliff Richard to the Sex Pistols to Blur to Stormzy to Fairport Convention. Love of England still lurks latent in my heart - when the women’s English football team beat Germany to win the European Cup this year, I felt fit to burst with pride and happiness - as did many dyed in the wool left-wing liberals who normally eschewed patriotism as a malign and corrosive force.
My sense of Englishness is hard to define - even for me. In fact it probably doesn’t exist, but I like to think it does - perhaps as a set of ideals rather than an actually reality.
One can make lists to try and define some kind of unified Englishness in a cultural way - only the list would be too long. There are so many quintessentially English writers, playwrights, actors, artists, fashion designers and poets it would be absurd to try to even begin to chronicle them. But whether they we are talking about Edward Elgar, William Blake, Paul Nash, Dora Carrington, David Bowie, Philip Larkin, Vivienne Westwood - as I say the list is endless - is it possible to bond them all together somehow?
Perhaps. There is our sense of English melancholy, our love of the sea and landscape, our sense of the absurd, our embrace of globalism, our anarchic streak, our passionate individualism. But I wonder if all these things are disappearing under, as it were, the weight of our own history, in particular our colonial history.
Now we are on sticky territory. Am I saying that Afro Caribbeans, Chinese, Indians and Pakistani’s can’t be ‘truly’ English? Only in the sense that no-one can be truly English any more - perhaps in the same way a Jamaican who has lived in England for 50 years can no longer be said to be ‘truly’ Jamaican. Since the mid 20th century, cultures within England have been blending and mixing and fertilising one another. ‘England’ now is no now more than a dream - or a nightmare as some of those with ancestors transported on British slave ships might have it.
Once this ‘English dream’ would have been passed down hrough the culture via education, but now curriculums are increasingly ‘decolonised’, democratised, and variegated and modernised, this historic semi-mythical England is perhaps sinking under the weight of the diverse, globalised and vital present.
I sometimes think my generation will be the last to whom the word ‘English’ really means anything significant. We will be global, european, and at best, ‘British’ - whatever that means - but not ‘English’. Englishness is a fading myth.
Perhaps that it is not a bad thing. But it is, I think, a sad thing - at least to me.
For me, Englishness is best exemplified by three writers - William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and George Orwell, all of whom I idolise. ( one could also include Jane Austen, but she has never grabbed my imagination to quite the same degree).
Not only are they full of deep wisdom, they are always prepared to see all sides of things, to not be harnessed to any ideology of fixed set of ideas. This open-mindedness is something I see as quintessentially English ( and it is also under threat as the certainties of the new puritans of the Left and Right wings gets grip on this side of the Atlantic). Their minds are as wide of as the sky, and as full of beauty and weather and clouds. There is nothing of the zealot in any of them, only compassion. This lack of zealotry I think of - or used to think of - as a fundamental English quality.
Then there is our humour. We have long been famed for our wit - the fact that ‘Two Gentleman of Verona’ can still make me laugh out loud repeatedly more than 400 years after it was penned is testament to this durability. I won’t rehearse all the great comics and comedy writers and actors that have come since - there are too many of them - but suffice to say I don’t think any other European country could come even remotely close, Only America, particularly Americans of Jewish heritage ( Jews are the world geniuses of humour) comes close.
What else makes me English?
We played by the rules. We followed the laws. We were stable and predicable.
Once upon a time.
Then came Farage and Boris Johnson and the short lived but devastatingly cavalier Liz Truss.
Now my country feels like an international joke, with a new Prime Minister every week and a chaotic administration, brimming with hateful anti-foreigner sentiment ( despite the fact we have a Hindu Prime Minister and a Home Secretary of Indian Heritage). Theirs is a lack of compassion that fills me with shame, not pride. Once one of the most charitable countries, we are falling down the lists in terms of the money we give to the less fortunate here and abroad and our foreign aid budgets are constantly under pressure.
Perhaps one day England will enjoy a rebirth - one day. But at the moment, our close neighbours, Scotland Wales and Ireland ( including Norther Ireland) all seem to dislike us, as does most of Europe (apart from Ukraine of course) and the USA.
And I dislike us too.
But somewhere I still love the English, whoever they are - loving and liking being two very different things. And somehow we have to, as a country, hold onto that love. Or we will become just as small minded and as hateful as our government, full of supposed ‘patriotic’ sentiment ( oh how politicians love the Union Jack) but close minded, narrow and suspicious.
At Ease!
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A lot of this resonates with me as does Maggie Holland’s excellent song “A Place called England”