Ain’t dat de trut’? And ain’t it a shame (for me) that my new book – Britain’s Contested History. Lessons for Patriots: bang on the topic, as the subtitle hints – isn’t quite out yet to illustrate and amplify the point?
Not in print form, anyway, A correspondent tells me it might be published already as an e-book. I’ll check with the publishers.
Yes, Swedish TV did report the Jubilee celebrations the other night, cheering patriots and all; and with a reprise of the original coronation of seventy years ago – golden carriage, golden crown, golden everything. OK, so we Brits do this kind of overblown flummery well, if that’s what turns you on. I doubt whether any other nation can compete with us in this line; except perhaps the USA. I asked Kajsa how it compared with Carl XVI Gustav’s coronation in 1973. She couldn’t remember it. From what I gather, talking to other Swedes at a party last night, he simply swore an oath to his government in private, to be a good social-democratic boy, and then was given the keys to his castles. No pomp and circumstance at all – or none that Kajsa could recall.
If you’re going to have a monarchy – and the major drawback of a directly-elected President to my mind is that it might land us with someone like Trump, or a favourite comedian, or Boris Johnson for that matter – then this is the kind of monarchy you want. Keep the hereditary aspect, roughly: restricting your choice to Windsors; but sack all the marginal freeloaders – younger sons, daughters, cousins, uncles; make the other royal relatives do proper jobs; take away most of their palaces, their silly clothes, and all those medals they’ve never actually earned – and have them living as much like their ‘subjects’ as is possible. (OK, perhaps just a little better. We don’t want them resorting to foodbanks.) It might also be good to restrict your choice to people who don’t actually want to be king or queen, although that might prove difficult; and to have them dragged to their throne, like Speakers of the House of Commons are symbolically dragged to their chair. One other desideratum might be that they should have disabilities of some kind that could be seen to put them at least on a ‘level’ with their subjects, and so curb their royal arrogance. Carl Gustav is shy and dyslexic. George VI of Britain, of course, had a severe stammer, which was what always commended him to me – a serious stutterer in my youth. As it happens I’ve met – briefly – both Elizabeth II and the Swedish Crown Princess Victoria, and been impressed by their naturalness and lack of arrogance; and in Liz’s case by her intelligence (we talked about America), which surprised me in view of my prejudice at the time that all royals were brain-dead inbreds. Liz II has done a remarkable job over the past 70 years in seeming pretty ‘ordinary’, despite the luxury in which she lives, and despite her family problems – which are perhaps a sign of ‘ordinariness’ in themselves (there must be other families with ‘nonces’ in them) – and in giving offence to virtually no-one.
So although I shan’t be celebrating her jubilee – no street parties in Kantarellvägen – I shall be tolerating it. And hoping that whoever succeeds her – the poor bastard: it must be a rotten job – can maintain the tradition she has set, and perhaps succeed in downsizing the whole excessive, vulgar and tasteless institution.
I’m trying to interest newspapers in short articles to whet the appetite for my new book when it comes out next month. I’m told they should ideally be hooked on to news items of the day. So here’s one I’ve sent to the Indy. No reply yet!
A government push to boost the use imperial measurements after Brexit will bring British “culture” back into shops, a minister has claimed. (Independent 31 May.)
‘British culture’, eh? As if that can be measured in pounds and ounces. Or in acres, rods, poles, perches, gallons, pints, shillings, half-crowns and pence. Really the ‘culture wars’ have sunk pretty low, haven’t they, if that’s the best they can come up with? At most it appeals to a superficial sort of nostalgia, which has very little to do with the essentials of the national history the nostalgists [ed: is that a word?] clearly want to return to.
Such reactionary musings – which were a factor in the Brexit debate too – are scarcely surprising, considering the losses that people feel they have suffered over the last couple of decades or so. For some – those whom Jeremy Paxman has colourfully dubbed the ‘harrumphers’ – it was nostalgia for the days when Britain was supposed to have ‘ruled half the world’, and only comprised ‘white’ people. For others it was a longing for the security and promise of Labour’s welfare state, whose erosion since Thatcher’s time seemed to be leaving them at the mercy of cruel ‘market forces’.
But if they really want to return to the past, the nostalgists need to get their history right. At present it relies on selective and superficial memories of a past that was far more complex and contested than they make it seem. For example: Britain has always been multicultural, as well of course as multi-national; religiously divided; riven by class and gender; with both capitalist and socialist traditions, and even Fascist (certainly proto-fascist) elements in its politics; republican as well as royalist; deeply divided by wealth and education; imperial, of course – that ‘half the world’ boast: wrong, of course, and in any case a trait Britain shared with most other European countries – but also anti–imperial: an ideology that could even be said to have been invented by the British, as imperialism was not. And that’s not to mention the darker sides of Britain’s past, which the nostalgists might not want to revive (or would they?): like capital and corporal punishment, unnecessary wars, colonial atrocities, institutionalised racism and sexism, and dull English food.
And while they’re at it, nostalgists might like to take on board certain other values that were once thought to be essentially and exclusively ‘British’, but are less recognised or celebrated today. These include welcoming immigrants indiscriminately; the absolute right of asylum; probity and honesty in government; genuine press freedom; internationalism (all those ‘citizens of nowhere’ Theresa May was so dismissive of); and the absence of ‘continental’ methods of policing: especially espionage.
Blue (or blue-ish) passports and pounds and ounces, surely, are as nothing compared to these. Which is not to say that any of them should be privileged over any of the others, by those who want to take Britain ‘back’; but only that ‘British culture’, even rooted in its history, goes beyond pounds and ounces, and is more complex and contentious, and in some ways more modern, than nostalgists tend to assume.
I’m sorry, but as well as thoughts about little subjects like politics, architecture, spies, cricket and imperialism, I’m most of my time just now taken up with BIG thoughts; albeit with my tiny mind, which is why I don’t usually broadcast them. It all comes, I think, from my boyhood immersion in the Eagle’s ‘Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future’, and a sporadic diet of cerebral Science Fiction from then on: most recently the astonishing works of Cixin Liu. (Thanks, Ken, for introducing him to me.)
I sometimes think that any other concerns, problems, ambitions or loves that I or any of us may have pale into insignificance against our awareness of the vastness of the cosmos, and the thought that – for example – in just a few million years we shall all plunge into the sun. That’s why I actually – and uncharacteristically for a Leftie – applaud the efforts of capitalists like Elon Musk spending their ill-gotten millions venturing into space; if only to make the first steps towards saving the great achievements of human civilisation – music, poetry, art, the great cathedrals – in perpetuity, somewhere in the universe. I can’t stand the idea of Mozart’s not being for ever. If we have to go – humanity, that is – we must make sure that some at least of our best works, the things that in my view justify us as a species, have been hurled deeply enough into space to be picked up by aliens somewhere and at some time in the future, and so preserved. Otherwise why bother to paint, compose, build, sculpt, write novels and plays; or even, I suppose – though I don’t make great claims for these – history books. (So far as I’m concerned, the sun can have mine.)
Or will the internet do this for us? Will intelligent Proxima Centaurians be able to pick today’s Youtube up?…
(This post, incidentally, was stimulated by a scientific – not SF – piece I read on the internet this morning: https://bigthink.com/13-8/humans-universe/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB. But that is so off-topic by comparison with my usual posts that it probably won’t interest other subscribers to this blog. Sorry again.)
For people who live in the same country continuously, and never even read about ‘abroad’, the situation in their own country must appear normal. So it won’t occur to them that certain institutions they’ve grown up with are in fact highly ‘peculiar’ (to use the word sometimes applied to American slavery), and so not to be accepted unthinkingly. Britain currently has two institutions that fit that description, and which have, fortuitously or not, come together in the person of Boris Johnson.
Her first ‘peculiar institution’ is the (so-called) ‘Public’ school, with Eton college its most prominent example, and the trend-setter for the rest. Johnson of course is one of Eton’s alumni. The second peculiarity is the British popular press, which is widely regarded as one of the least ‘free’ in the world, and is ‘peculiar’ in the control exerted over it by right-wing millionaires, and its abandonment of objective news-reporting for blatant propaganda. Johnson, fresh out of Eton, was a journalist – of the ‘commenting’ kind, not an honest reporter – before he went into politics. So Britain’s two ‘peculiar institutions’ coalesce in him, quite uniquely. (Other Public school-educated Prime Ministers have done the occasional bit of journalism – Palmerston comes to mind – but not as their main professions.) Many people don’t fully realise how ‘peculiar’ – and peculiarly British – these institutions are.
The problem with the Public schools, of course, is that they distance their privileged products from the real world, and perpetuate values (Bullingdon?) which may be inimical to society generally. Popular journalism privileges style, controversy and sensation over substance, and actively encourages distortion and lying if they can be used to pursue propagandistic ends. ‘Exercising power without responsibility’, was how an earlier Conservative PM once put it; ‘the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’ In other words, it can influence people without being held accountable for that influence.
As it happens there are a number of newspaper columnists I read and admire, especially if I share their prejudices; but I wouldn’t trust any of them – even the ones I agree with – to rule over me. (Or even bloggers, like me.) Luckily, before Johnson none of them did. Now our current Old Etonian and ex-Telegraph journalist PM reveals the dangers implicit in giving over the reins of power to someone schooled in these two ways. He’s an acknowledged disaster. We like to blame him for it; but our ‘peculiar institutions’ must share much of that blame.
On the other hand, Johnson could also be said to mirror a particular kind of ‘Britishness’; with Eton and the tabloid press (plus the Telegraph) reflecting characteristically and almost exclusively British values, in ways that most other allegedly ‘patriotic’ institutions – Crown, Parliament, the Church of England, the Empire – do (or did) not. In this sense he could be said to be the most ‘British’ prime minister we’ve ever had. True ‘patriots’, take note.
Back in Sweden – and how good it is to be in a country where everything still works! My medical practice in Hull doesn’t. Taken over recently by a ‘Group’, with its phone centre in Wales or somewhere, I found it impossible to get even an internet appointment with a doctor. Over here I got one in a few minutes; and very helpful she was. Don’t let anyone tell you that Britain’s free NHS is the best in the world. It may have been once; and if it were properly funded now, allowed to take its pre-Brexit EU medical staff back, and not being subtly prepared for privatisation and profit, it might be again. Nowadays the Swedish healthcare system – almost cost-free for patients – outshines it glaringly.
It seems to be the same with everything. At Manchester Airport they closed all the restaurants and bars at 6 p.m. (my flight took off at 8), so I had to exist on a packet of crisps. Maybe the persistence of Covid was to blame for this – bar staff falling ill, etc. – but at Arlanda they were still working. Being here now is like returning to civilisation after living in a city bombed by the Russians. Well, not quite; and I’m aware that my complaints are pretty petty compared with what they’re suffering in Ukraine. (They would probably be grateful for a packet of crisps.) But the contrast really is striking. I feel I’m back to normality. Britain is anything but ‘normal’ just now.
Its politics, of course, is so abnormal as to make you wonder if it isn’t just being put on as a ‘show’. The government front bench is full of showmen (and women) whom BT Barnum would surely have immediately signed up if he had been around now. Boris the fat clown, Jacob the thin one, Priti the evil witch, Nigel the frog in the background…. it would go down a treat in a circus. And does, I have to admit, with me; I find myself watching ‘Parliament TV’ in fascination whenever something like ‘Partygate’ is programmed. It’s Kajsa, accustomed as she is to a soberer kind of politics, who has suggested to me that the whole thing might be intended as ‘entertainment’, rather than as serious debate. And her view of British politics appears – from the limited sample of my Swedish friends – to be fairly typical here, and probably in the EU as a whole.
Which brings me on to my final and more general point. Do Boris and his government care? They must be aware of the ridicule into which they have dragged the nation whose reputation in the world they profess to value. Most political leaders would like themselves and their countries to be ‘respected’ abroad: that is, either admired (Sweden) or feared (Putin’s Russia). Being ignored (most other countries) isn’t the worst of alternatives; but being portrayed as a pathetic joke of a place must surely be. Johnson counters this with meaningless airy boasts – ‘global’ Britain, excelling at just about everything – but he can’t believe much of it, and must know that no-one outside the country, and indeed his own constituency of voters, is fooled. Again: does this matter to him, as for a ‘patriot’ it surely should? Or is he prepared yet to take on the Millwall mantra: ‘everyone hates us and we don’t care’? There’s a certain element of pride, even dignity, about that. But are Boris – and the rest of us – ready for it?
A week or so ago a Tory MP asserted in Parliament that there would be no need for food banks if only the poor would learn to cook and shop for themselves. Their problem, he asserted, was that in this age of pre-prepared meals and takeaways most of them had never been taught to manage their money, or to cook nutritious meals from basic ingredients. He then went on – unwisely, as it turned out – to claim that one could prepare a complete meal in this way, without bothering the food banks, or rummaging around in rubbish bins, for 30 pence a go. 30 pence! Challenged on this, attempts were made to justify it by offering recipes for nutritious 30p. meals: the most convincing of which was thought to be baked beans on toast; until it was pointed out that the costing made no allowance for heating – so it would have had to be cold beans on soggy bread. But maybe that was all the poor deserved. Another MP claimed that the simple answer to poverty was for the working poor to stop complaining and ‘get better jobs’. Again, evidence of just how out of touch the Conservatives are, at this time of recession, price inflation, poor wages and the lowest state pensions in Europe.
But it was ever thus, in always deeply socially-divided Britain. Of course our ‘upper’ classes – especially the private-school educated ones – can have no idea of how it is to live on benefits or minimum wages. (Jacob Rees-Mogg recently admitted that he had never shopped for groceries or cooked a meal for himself in his life. He seemed to take pride in it.) Blaming the poor for their poverty – rather than governments, bankers, hedge-fund investors (like Rees-Mogg) and the like – is an attitude that goes back to the cruel Victorian Poor Laws, justifying condemning the ‘undeserving’ indigent to prisons (called ‘workhouses’: ‘arbeit macht frei’?) as their only alternative to starvation and death. Workhouses are no more, unless you count the actual prisons; but the attitude that lay behind their creation survives. Some argue it was actually part of the rationale behind George Osborne’s policy of deliberate – rather than necessary – ‘Austerity’: to put the blame for it on to the heads of the people who would suffer from it the most. ‘Get on your bikes!’ Remember that piece of 1980s Tebbitry? It’s still here (in Britain; not so much in Sweden, I think): and as fetid and rank-smelling as always.
So Sweden is joining NATO at last, after decades of studied refusal, and centuries of principled and proud neutrality; which makes the decision of her governing Social Democratic Party, to be confirmed by Parliament today (I think), a truly ‘historic’ one. I was never entirely happy with her traditional policy, believing that the effective maintenance of peace depends on mutual alliances, and knowing how imperfect and one-sided Sweden’s neutrality had been in World War II. But I respected it in principle, and because in any war situation it is valuable to have one or two neutral countries for refugees (in that case Jews) to flee to, and where diplomatists from both sides could meet. So I was never as critical as might have been expected from someone born in the middle of the great London Blitzkrieg (just a few miles from baby me in Hornchurch), when Britain could have done with all the help she could find in order to prevent Nazism from overrunning Europe; including – presumably – Sweden.
The change of mind in Sweden has been rapid, and huge. And of course it has been the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has brought it on. Sweden, remember, is very near to Russia, and Finland even closer, sharing an 800 km border with her. Both countries have been in direct confrontation with Russia in the past. In very recent years Russian military airplanes have been spotted violating Swedish and Finnish airspace, and Russian subs hiding in the Stockholm Archipelago (where Kajsa and I have our sommarhus). Military personnel and equipment are being shipped over to Gotland, the island between Sweden and the ex-Soviet and so under-threat Baltic States. People are being advised to stock up their cellars in preparation for an attack, and Kajsa has bought a wind-up radio in case the electricity fails. No-one really believes war will come, I think; but these preparations may explain why opinion here has turned towards NATO in recent weeks. Putin will take it as evidence that NATO has designs on Russia; but from Svartsö (our island) the main threat appears the other way.
Of course Putin’s paranoia has some basis to it, in the indications that NATO has given that it would like to expand further into Russia’s traditional ‘sphere of influence’, in ways that could be interpreted as aggressive and, indeed, ‘imperialistic’. One of the great problems with NATO is that it is so dependent on, and thus dominated by, the USA, whose grossly ‘imperialistic’ instincts in the recent past are plain for all to see.
Which may open up an opportunity for Sweden and Finland, when they do eventually become members of NATO, to pull the organisation back from the USA, and to re-establish it as the unambiguously defensive alliance it was originally intended to be. Indeed, that seems to me to be an ideal rôle for Sweden to take on, in view of her 200 years of neutrality and pacifism. It might be easier for her to do this from inside NATO, than from without. That is, if Putin – in ‘retaliation’ – doesn’t bomb Svartsö first.
I don’t know whether the following kind of parallel is at all significant or useful – probably not at all. But I’m often struck by the historical similarities between Britain, where I come from, and Scandinavia, my new home-region. (Part-time, that is.)
According to this comparison, Sweden is equivalent to England, with both of them being the dominant partners in what were essentially tri-national groupings. In Britain’s case the grouping was England, Scotland and Ireland. In the Nordic countries it was Sweden, Norway and Finland, with both of those two latter countries coming under the Swedish crown at different times. From an English point of view the parallels between Scotland and Norway look quite striking: mountains, rugged individualism, hydro-electricity, North Sea oil; and between Ireland and Finland too: English/Swedish colonisation, different cultures and languages, and the ways the dominant partners looked down (still do?) on Ireland’s and Finland’s ‘natives’.
But of course such comparisons are only superficial, as I’m aware from my familiarity with all these six nations; and in any case are not complete. For a start: where does Wales come into it? And Denmark? It would make the pattern tidier if they could be regarded as equivalents to each other; but I can’t see that. (Denmark doesn’t have hills, for a start.) Nor can I see how the sami ‘nation’ could fit in on the British side. So the thesis doesn’t really work. But it’s quite fun to play along with.
I’m sure we can all think of other similar parallels. Northern Ireland and the Donbas region of Ukraine, perhaps? But that hardly helps in the present situation. And anyhow, what do I know about Russia/Ukraine? That’s not my field of expertise.
‘The Book’ won’t be out until July, which means it will be pretty out of date by then. It was completed and delivered to the Publishers last August; with a plea to them to get it out soon. When they said they couldn’t, I contacted a couple more publishers, but they told me they couldn’t move any more quickly. I really don’t understand this: why publishers can’t speed up their processes such cases; especially when working from word-processed files which no longer have to be set up with fiddly little metal pieces of type, as my first book was. (And that, as I remember, took rather less time to go through the press, in 1969, than Britain’s Contested History will.) Anyhow, just as I warned them, things have happened in the world since last August; which might not negate my original arguments, but would have brought them up to date, and so made the book seem more ‘relevant’. Oh well.
I’m now preparing some publicity material to accompany the book’s publication; not summaries of the book, but articles linked to it. Here is a draft of one rather long one. It hasn’t found a stable yet; and if it’s published at all it probably won’t be in this form. But anyway…
Brexit, Patriotism and History.
OK, that ship has sailed now, so there’s no point in trying to tow it back. ‘You lost; get over it!’ Even if we British later change our national mind – assuming that is what the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum really did express – there would be little possibility of our re-joining the European Union soon, and on the favourable terms we had negotiated previously. In any case our European ex-partners might not want us back. And who could blame them? We’ve not exactly boosted our national reputation under our current Brexiter government. Most foreigners have given up on us. – So much for Brexit’s being a way to restore our pride and esteem as a ‘sovereign’ nation. But of course, these are early days
And they may give us an opportunity to pause and look back over our national history, in order to understand what its significance was in the context of Brexit. ‘History’ of course is only one element in that context; but it undoubtedly played an important role in the debate over whether or not Britain should leave the European Union, whose outcome – with some political tweaks – is the situation we find ourselves in today. Both sides in that debate used ‘historical’ arguments to bolster their positions, and especially over the question of whether Britain had always been a part of Europe, or not. The ‘Leave’ camp, however, was the one that made the most use of ‘history’, in its desire to establish a kind of British ‘exceptionalism’ so far as the rest of Europe was concerned, in order to justify her separation; and in its reference to events – and especially heroes – from Britain’s past.
For Brexit represented the ‘patriotic’ side of the argument, supposedly (but not necessarily, as we shall see); expressed most crudely in this exhortation by Lia Nici, Tory MP for Great Grimsby (Grimsby was one of the ‘red wall’ seats that turned from Labour to Conservative in 2019): ‘If people are not proud to be British, or of our flag or Queen, they do not have to live in the United Kingdom. Perhaps they should move to another country they prefer’. Flag and Queen, of course, and also – although Lia Nici may not have known it – ‘Britishness’, are all historical constructs; which is my reason for placing ‘history’ at – or at least near – the centre of the Brexit debate.
Remainers used it too, in order to emphasise Britain’s historical closeness to the European Continent from the time of ‘Doggerland’ – linking them geographically eight millenia ago – onwards, and emphasising the narrowness of the ‘Channel’ that came between them when a tsunami (probably) inundated Doggerland. Subsequent invasions and settlement by successive waves of Europeans – beaker folk, Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Iberians, Normans, Jews, Irish; followed in the last century by extra-Europeans: all (except probably the Romans) contributing to Britons’ present-day DNA – give some credence to the idea of Britain as a multi-ethnic country from the very start. It’s also hard to imagine British culture (at every social level) without its links with Europe: Shakespeare, for example, not venturing out of dull parochial Stratford into the extraordinarily diverse and international artistic milieu that was London in his time. (His troop of players visited Denmark. Hence ‘Elsinore’.) On a rather different level, even ‘fish and chips’, supposedly quintessentially English, originated abroad. In addition, most of Britain’s political and religious movements were ‘European’ essentially; as were many of her wars. But these historical precedents were too vague, impersonal and diffuse to catch the imagination of most people in 2016, by the side of those events that appealed to their more tribal instincts: Agincourt, the defeat of the Armada, the Empire, the Battle of Britain, the Falklands war, ‘two world wars and one world cup’ (as England’s football hooligans used to chant), and other stirrers of their British blood. How could Edward Heath – our leader out of Europe – possibly hope to measure up against the much mythologised Winston Churchill, or the truly mythical King Arthur, or Nelson, or Margaret Thatcher, as foci for retrospective national pride? (Ignore for the moment the fact that both Churchill’s and Thatcher’s attitudes towards European integration were ambivalent, to say the least.) The point is that people like to remember ‘great’ events, and to cluster around ‘heroes’. They don’t see many of those around today (now that Boris’s wannabe-Churchillian sheen has begun to fade); and so they delve back into the past for them instead. That is one of the roles that History has played.
Much of it, on both sides, is either simply wrong, or grossly misleading. That’s where we serious historians come in. Some have ventured into the debate already. The latest is Ian Morris, with his thought-provoking Geography is Destiny: Britain’s Place in the World, a 10,000 Year History – strongly recommended – published in May. My own Britain’s Contested History. Lessons for Patriots, covering a much shorter period, is due out in July. We’ll see what effect these books have on people’s perceptions of Britain’s relations with Europe: that is, if they have any effect at all. Academics’ views don’t usually register widely unless they can be taken or twisted to confirm people’s prejudices. One of those prejudices could be said to be the anti-intellectual one: ‘we’ve had too much of experts’, as Michael Gove once notoriously said, so setting all our hard-won expertise aside. But in any event, and if they were taken seriously, no historical ‘expert’ would be likely to come down unequivocally on either side of the Brexit debate. History simply doesn’t work in that way.
That is because the lessons we might want to draw from it are almost never straightforward. Even the ‘traditions’ that Lia Nici feels ought to cement our loyalty to Britain are more recent than she obviously realises – including royalty, the Union flag, and the very idea of ‘Britain’ as a nation – and were rivalled by other ‘traditions’, which were equally embedded in our British experience, and so just as ‘British’ as hers. There has always for example been an authoritarian and anti-democratic thread running through British history: overtly before the early 1900s, when the ‘mob’ and the monstrous regiment of women were finally granted the vote; and then more subtly, through propaganda, to tame their mobbishness. ‘Democracy’ certainly isn’t a characteristic British feature. Nor are any of the qualities that are usually associated with it. We have never been a corrupt country, claimed Boris Johnston recently. No, not true. Just look (again) at history. Britain was never as stable as she is often thought to have been, coming near to revolution on several occasions, and occasionally crossing over the line. She was never ‘splendidly isolated’, either, so if that is an effect of Brexit it will be something new. Even ‘Fascism’ – depending on how one defines it – has its place in our political culture; never more so – arguably – than today. As of course does her more celebrated anti-Fascism, representing the other side of a British ‘national identity’ that was always conflicted.
The conflict can also be seen in Britain’s relationship with ‘imperialism’. Of course her empire – another focus of retrospective patriotism: ‘we used to rule half the world’, as Ukip crowds used to chant – was an important feature of her identity from the 18th to the mid-20th centuries. But it was not something that particularly distinguished her from other European nations, many of which had overseas empires too, or else hankered after them; and secondly, was not nearly so dominant as ‘half the world’ implies. Within Britain opinion about the Empire was divided, with anti-imperialism being almost as powerful and effective a strand in the national discourse as its opposite, and imperial indifference trumping both. In fact it could be argued that ‘anti-imperialism’ was invented by the British, before it spread throughout the world. (Anti-imperialism on principle, that is; not merely opposition to the particular imperialism that is oppressing you.) As for the supposed effects and benefits of British imperialism, no historian today would claim that they were unalloyed – far from it; or that – despite its dreadful excesses – its results were uniformly ‘bad’. In particular, to address a charge often made by modern-day detractors, Britain’s South African ‘concentration camps’ were not the same Hitler’s; and it’s a gross distortion of history to assume – because of the name – that they were. But the main problem here – apart from that lazy semantic slip – is that both champions and critics of Britain’s colonial history ascribe too much agency to nations and governments, without taking account of the contexts in which these events occurred. Context, in fact, is the serious historian’s major contribution to anyone’s understanding of history; that is, of ‘anyone’ who is prepared to bother with ‘experts’.
The empire however no longer appears to be a major preoccupation today, even for what used to be called the ‘blimps’, or ‘harrumphers’, as Jeremy Paxman calls them. World War II is clearly the main historical focus for retrospective patriots now: the setting for innumerable post-war books and movies, and for their prize examples of typical British ‘heroism’. In this connection no-one today believes – do they? – that Britain really did win ‘two world wars’: on her own, that is. But her great hero Winston Churchill’s reputation, honed and burnished in wartime, still has some mileage in it (as I write this, Boris Johnson is digging up some of his wartime phrases to chivvy the Ukrainians up in their war against Russia: ‘your finest hour’); and this despite Churchill’s very many failings; for which we need to provide ‘context’, too. (Personally, as a child of the London blitz, I can forgive him his flaws, and retain my admiration and gratitude for his stirring words.) But in any case Churchill was untypical of the nation as a whole. Aside from him, we should recall that it was the Conservatives of the time who generally were the ‘appeasers’, not Labour; and the working classes who were the staunchest supporters of the war effort. You wouldn’t think that to hear some of today’s Tories. In this way is history twisted, subtly, into myth.
But in any case it’s questionable whether any of Britain’s achievements in the past can be attributed to individuals like Churchill; those whom Jacob Rees-Mogg – in a much panned history book he published recently – calls Britain’s ‘Titans’, whose ‘spunk’, he thinks, simply needs to be recovered in order to restore her ‘greatness’ again. That, it has to be said, betrays a very old-fashioned, or perhaps Etonian, view. (His school chum Boris Johnson shares it; exemplified in his biography of Churchill.) I believe Eton teaches mainly ancient Greek and Roman history, rather than modern. (I’ve written to the school to ask about its history syllabus, but received no reply.) Of course I may be wrong, both about Eton’s history teaching, and about the role of spunky leaders in public affairs. But the point is that even those leaders – Rees-Mogg’s ‘Titans’ – came surrounded by context; and a context which in Britain’s case was complex and often self-contradictory.
Hence the unwisdom of seeking to build a straightforward argument for almost anything at all on historical precedents, even if those precedents are researched and presented pretty accurately. There are so many of them, often in conflict with one another. Which of them we wish to choose to support our case for or against Brexit is up to us; but it will be just that – a choice – rather than a position founded on ‘history’.
Anyway: why should we want to bring ‘history’ into it at all? Britain is as she is, not what she was. Conditions – context – are different now. Doggerland is no more; so neither is the Empire (formally, at any rate); our anti-Fascist wars are over (unless we’re dragged into the Ukraine imbroglio); and we have other much greater problems to come to terms with: inequality, pandemics, recession, the power of an untamed propagandist press, late-stage global capitalism, Islamicist and Right-wing terrorism, the rise of China, the decline of America, a dangerously resentful Russia, immigration, anti-immigration (not at all backed up by Britain’s ‘history’), the power of the internet, corruption, world poverty and hunger, global warming; not all of them totally unprecedented or unanticipated, but all of them altering fundamentally the context in which we presently live, vote and – so far as our legislators are concerned – govern.
‘Patriots’ especially don’t need to be so fixated on the past. I’m one of those who literally took Lia Nici’s advice to heart – although before she had uttered it – and now mostly live in ‘another country I prefer’. One of my motives for that move – not the only one; I had a more personal one too – was the condition that I felt my country of birth had fallen into politically, especially with the Brexit vote and the arguments that were brought out to support it, and the character of the governments that Brexit, and other factors, had given rise to. I felt then, I hope wrongly, that all this had so fundamentally changed the country that I had formerly felt pretty patriotic towards, as to merit my exchanging Lia Rici’s sort of patriotism for the kind that wants to make one’s country better, rather than defending it as it is. That would involve ditching much of its ‘history’; not the more liberal threads in it that had attracted my original loyalty, but certainly the ‘queen and flag’ version that Lia Nici feels should define a patriot in the age of Brexit. As it happens, that is the sort of patriotism that is taught in Swedish schools (Sweden is my country of refuge): loyalty towards your country’s aspirations, rather than its past, which was pretty bloody in Sweden’s case. (Vide the Vikings, and her Stormaktstiden, when Sweden was a ‘great power’ in northern Europe.) It was also – to revert to British history – implicit in the attitudes of those who, after the last World War, voted to discard their patriotic hero Churchill in order to make Britain a better place than she had been before it. For patriots can want to build New Jerusalems, as well as to return to old ones. And that usually involves dumping large parts of their ‘history’; healthily, in my view.
Of course it is natural to be fond of the country we were born and live in, and to admire its citizens’ past achievements; but we surely shouldn’t be expected to feel pride in those achievements, if we had no part in them, as we obviously won’t have done for most of ‘history’. I’m entitled to feel neither pride nor shame for my country of birth’s imperial past, for example, simply because I happen to live on the same little patch of the earth as the imperialists did 100 years ago. I can possibly admire that past, or regret it, or even help make up for the damage done by it; but I can bear no responsibility for most of it. We can’t choose where we were born or brought up. Immigrants can take pride in the countries they migrated to – they after all did (we presume) choose them. But not the native-born; and not with regard to their country’s past history. ‘I’m sorry, officer. It had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t there.’
This is why Lia Nici’s implied insistence on blind allegiance to ‘flag and Queen’ is not something I can personally relate to. False or over-simplified history – which is what many of those in the current debate rely on – can be misleading. But so can factually accurate accounts, if they come without context. And surely our view of Britain’s relations with continental Europe need not depend on ‘history’ at all. There are other – and I would say much better – arguments both for Brexit and against it, leaving Britain’s past out of the equation entirely. ‘History’ should be handled gingerly and critically. And this advice comes from a professional historian; an ‘expert’, if you will.
Porter’s Pensées 