“Lord Nelson! Lord Beaverbrook! Sir Winston Churchill! Sir Anthony Eden! Clement Attlee! Henry Cooper! Lady Diana! Maggie Thatcher – can you hear me, Maggie Thatcher! Your boys took one hell of a beating! Your boys took one hell of a beating!”
When Norway beat England in a World Cup qualifier in September 1981 the incontinent euphoria of Norwegian TV commentator Bjorge Lillelien caused hilarity rather than outrage. We recognised Lillelien’s list of luminaries as an enjoyably ludicrous take on our national identity.
But we are often prone to take symbols and personifications of Englishness and Britishness rather seriously. And sometimes, sadly, we use them as a stick with which to beat our fellow citizens if they stray from a model of virtue defined by tax dodging corporations, tabloid hacks, and self-serving politicians.
For example, (former) Education Secretary Michael Gove, demands ‘fundamental British values’ be taught in schools. The breadth and inclusiveness of Gove’s Britishness is evident in his GCSE English Literature curriculum, which insists students read a play by Shakespeare, Romantic poetry and a pre-twentieth century novel. And that’s it. There’s some great work in those categories but, to mangle a phrase from the bard himself, there are more things in British culture, Gove, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. By implication there will be less emphasis on more accessible texts that capture a wider range of human experience – To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and The Crucible. God forbid children should engage with books that reflect on racism, poverty and social coercion.
Gove prefers young people to read George Eliot’s Middlemarch – a tale of provincial middle class life set in the early 1830s. The Gove canon, one ‘more based on tradition’, disregards the concerns and experiences of people in the twenty-first century. It’s unengaging. To paraphrase the poet Adrian Mitchell, most people ignore literature that ignores most people. It’s not the prescription of timeworn classics that worries me, there’s plenty of provocative work by long dead writers offering insights into contemporary issues. I’m simply depressed by Gove’s prescription of work that confirms rather than challenges. It’s not surprising there is nothing radical or oppositional, Blake’s poem ‘London’ and Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and MacInnes’ London Trilogy were never going to make the list. But no living writers are mentioned – where are John Cooper Clarke and Tony Harrison?
And I notice there are no narratives by or about Britons from Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe. He hasn’t, for example, included anything by one of the most compelling and morally engaged writers in English, Joseph Conrad. Or Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, as he was known before becoming a British national in 1886.
From Gove’s perspective, this is a canon of classics for the PLO (People Like Oneself). A canon that overlooks people from other places, people with different traditions, people with non-mainstream views, and less fortunate people. A canon to nurture a generation who know their place, reject new ideas, and are deeply suspicious of people nurtured in a different way.
David Cameron has embarked on a campaign against those who are “bashful about Britishness”. We need, says the PM, a “more muscular” challenge to the “message of tolerance towards non-British values”. At the heart of this is his big idea of lessons on Magna Carta, the document which, according to Cameron, gave King John’s subjects rights as citizens and provided the foundation for all our laws and liberties. It did no such thing of course: Magna Carta is concerned only with the rights of the wealthy landowning class. It has nothing to say about the lives, liberties and conditions of the biggest part of society at the time, the serfs and workers.
Alarmingly, the ConDem PM cited as his source for his this notion his “favourite book”, H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905) I have a copy too. As a child I relished its vivid colour plates, its crisp and accessible prose, its narrative drive and, I’m afraid, its massive oversimplifications. Frankly, I’d be less concerned if Cameron was basing social and educational policy on the 1966 edition of the Rupert Bear Annual.
The reality is, of course, that any rights and freedoms we gained were won through the efforts of people at the bottom of the class system—the protesters at St Peter’s Field in Manchester in 1819, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, Annie Besant and the London ‘match girl’ strikers. The real island story is one Cameron would rather we didn’t celebrate in case we learned its obvious lessons and made a direct challenge to the dominant but failing culture of unregulated capitalism.
The recent drum banging about ‘Britishness’ by Gove and Cameron begs some obvious questions. What do we mean by ‘Britishness’, ‘we’ and ‘our values’? And why are the ConDem cabinet and their cheerleaders in the rightwing press so determined to craft and promote ideas of ‘us’, ‘them’, and ‘our culture’?
In The Corrosion of Character (1998), Richard Sennett wrote about the use of a dangerous pronoun:
That usage of ‘we’ has become an act of self-protection, the desire for community is defensive, often expressed as a rejection of immigrants or other outsiders.
(Page 138, The Corrosion of Character, Norton, 1998)
And a century ago, Robert Tressell noted that deteriorations in our own conditions led to attacks on outsiders. Here’s an insight into working class conservatism from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 1914:
The country was in a hell of a state; poverty, hunger, and misery in a hundred forms had already invaded thousands of homes and stood upon the threshold of thousands more. How came these things to be? It was the bloody foreigner! Therefore, down with foreigners and all their work.
(Page 23, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Grafton, 1986)
For Sennett and Tressell, the defensive ‘we’ is a charm against the vagaries and depredations of globalisation and the flexible workforce. ‘We’ is an apotropaic to ward off the evils of modern Klepto-capitalism: corporate plunder, geographical dislocation, a crumbling sense of personal identity, financial insecurity, poverty, plummeting rates of pay, disparities in power, and the death of community.
But how dangerous can ‘we’ really be?
I’ve led a chequered existence. I’ve lived in a country fearful of ‘the other’, a country in which those lacking the resource to control their own destiny are dismissed as “scroungers”. And I’ve spent time in a kinder country, one tolerant of difference and, in general, one that trusted its people. The Brutish Isles and the British Isles: I’ve lived in both. And there are times when I’ve felt a massive sense of disconnection with the mainstream culture – when I’ve been ‘one of them’ rather than ‘one of us’:
For example, in June 1977, the Callaghan Government, aided and abetted by the right wing press, used celebrations of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee to concoct a ghastly media jamboree that portrayed Britain as a white middle-class monoculture. A couple of months later there were clashes between the far right National Front, enjoying considerable electoral success at the time, and antifascist protesters in Lewisham High Street. The TV schedules were brimmed with racist comedians in bowties, and Hughie Green, the highest paid TV personality of the day, released a ‘song’ on 7” Vinyl expressing nostalgia for a Britain in which “managers manage and the workers don’t go on strike”. But 1978 saw a countercultural backlash, exemplified by the release of two singles celebrating resistance to the rise of the right – Up Against the Wall by The Tom Robinson Band and (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais by The Clash. I’m not daft enough to believe music changes anything, but it can remind us that there is more than one version of British culture and that Britishness includes a range of identities.
Five years later, the Thatcher government led Britain into the Falklands War against a background of soaring unemployment and rising social unrest. The Sun newspaper wrote of ‘traitors in our midst’ and whipped up a storm of xenophobia, blood lust and cynical triumphalism. For those too young to know, the war brought a resurgence of support for the Tories, and they were swept back to power with a massive majority in 1983. A grim time, but this was also the era of powerful TV dramas such as Boys from the Blackstuff, Alan Bleasedale’s powerful elegy for working class solidarity, and Oi for England, Trevor Griffiths’ searing analysis of Thatcherite economics and extreme nationalism. Reminders that beneath the bellicose posturing of the right-wing mainstream lay another Britain.
And in 2014, I’m experiencing another sharp drift to the right, orchestrated by a government desperate to cling to power and a corporately controlled media determined to stifle dissent by targeting scapegoats. We’re suddenly living in an unkind country again – one which ignores the massive contribution to our economic, social, and cultural well-being by the people portrayed by the press as ‘the others’. It’s the sort of mindset that has led to the cutting of translation services; the parallel threat to cut benefits for those who struggle with English; and a decline in the provision of English as a second language (ESOL) courses that would help migrants seeking work and those in low-paid care and hospitality sector jobs.
There’s cause for optimism. Sustainable group identities are based on hard won shared values forged through shared experience – problems solved, setbacks overcome, and improvements achieved to the common benefit. They aren’t easily manufactured in lessons based on Edwardian history primers, through literature curricula limited to a handful of safely dead authors; or by finger pointing editorials in the Sun, Express, Mail, and Torygraph.
Reflecting on British history and British culture is a bit like being Colin Trafford, the protagonist of John Wyndham’s ‘Random Quest’, who is flipped between parallel universes. My Britishness isn’t Cameron’s, Johnson’s, Sunak’s, Starmer’s, Gove’s, Paul Dacre’s or the BBC’s. For the final word on the idiosyncratic, subjective, and multi-layered nature of national identity let’s hear from Billy Bragg:
Theirs is a land with a wall around it, and mine is a faith in my fellow man.
Theirs is a land of hope and glory; mine is the green field and the factory floor.
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers, and mine is the peace we knew between the wars.
Billy Bragg, Between the Wars, 1985.
Andy Hedgecock
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