The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Is England really a nation of losers?
Three books attack English self-mythologisation, but – bar a certain Green MP – they’re off the mark
The problem with England, grumble conservatives, is that it hardly exists. We’ve no parliament, no costume, no anthem; even our flag was recently transformed into a multicoloured migraine by the kids at Nike.
And yet the Left says that there’s too much of England; that rampant nationalism blots out reality and blocks our progress. Three new books broadly agree that Englishness, to quote Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears in England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight (ÌÌÌ), is coloured by “fairy tales, exaggerations, omissions or sometimes outright lies”. The Conservative Party manipulates half-truths – that we stood alone or ruled the waves – to persuade us to stick with the chinless wonders who have ruled us since year dot.
Baldwin and Stears travel the country pointing and laughing at the contradictions of Ye Old England™. At Runnymede, looking at the preposterous “democracy timeline”, which draws a family tree from Magna Carta to The Communist Manifesto, they find a café boasting Earl Grey, “normal tea”, warm sausage rolls and a “brightly lit picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to let everyone know it sells ice-cream”.
Seven Myths… is amusing and frequently enlightening, but it makes the classic tourist’s error of assuming the locals believe what’s printed in the brochure. Page after page is spent debunking the legends of Francis Drake and William Wilberforce as though their portraits hung above the fireplace of every patriotic Englishman. We are deep in the school of thought that says Brexit was mere nostalgia for empire, even though most Leavers voted not to invade the world, but to keep it at arm’s length.
Michael Peel, author of What Everyone Knows About Britain (Except the British) (ÌÌ), is one of those Remainers who takes every opportunity to explain how they do things better abroad. He should know – he’s a highly respected foreign correspondent – and some of his arguments certainly hit home. Why in the 1980s did we pour our North Sea energy windfall into tax cuts rather than, like Norway, a sovereign fund? Incompetence and greed, suggests Peel, dressed up as loyalty to Britain’s free-market tradition, now enjoy a second life in Rishi Sunak’s absurd claim that fresh drilling will grant us “energy independence”. Who do we think we are? Texas?
Peel identifies a “quiet presumptuousness across British life about the country’s rightful place in the world”: this stokes an arrogance that stops us learning from nations that, by accepting their reduced status, have put equality before grandeur. In short: Britain is crap, but if we shake off our pretensions to excellence, we might someday become mediocre.
Were a therapist to address a patient this way, they’d be struck off. Yet there has been a recent flood of books informing the English that their history is a fraud, their wealth is based on slavery, and that they’re a nation of losers who swagger like winners and are blinded by myths – myths I’d wager few readers take literally and which don’t actually require debunking. It’s as if a publishing industry had developed solely to prove that Father Christmas doesn’t exist. We know this, dear: we’d be a pretty sad case if we didn’t. But we play along with the make-believe because we can hang so many virtuous baubles from it, such as magic, innocence and the promotion of charity. Myth sustains and unites. Too much scrutiny risks making life unbearable.
To my surprise, the book that most grasps this is Another England (ÌÌÌÌ) by Green MP Caroline Lucas. She, too, has complaints. Just as Peel notes that England is an island that eats no fish, Lucas asks why a people who romanticise the countryside have done so little to preserve its natural landscape.
But rather than toss out the national story, Lucas reads a more radical one between the lines: a narrative of dispossession met by protest, of exploitation by conservation. She cooks up some fantasies of her own, lionising the 17th-century Digger movement that opposed the enclosure of land and favoured common ownership, failing to mention that they were the Khmer Rouge in embryo. The Diggers’ plan, if they took over England, was to impose the death penalty not only for rape and murder but for buying, selling and – I think we can agree with this one – employment as a lawyer.
Nevertheless, the romantic environmentalist is right to warn that even as the Left wins minds, it’ll
We don’t literally believe our national myths – we play along, because myth unites us
never win hearts so long as it rejects the poetry of collective identity. Writing as a PhD in Eng Lit, she cleverly deploys Elizabeth Gaskell, John Clare and Dickens to demonstrate that a culture can be diverse and coherent, innovative and rooted; many stories told in one
beautiful language. In blending art with political analysis, Lucas writes far more forcibly than those authors of Left and Right who think a nation is defined entirely by its constitutional order, or that if the party they happen to support isn’t in power, England is lost for good. These fashionable doomsters lose sight of what really matters, of what really shapes a tribe. I’ve read countless books about the historical precedence for Brexit and Boris Johnson, but none that convincingly explains why the English obsess about the weather, let their teeth go yellow or make love in the dark with their socks on. I care far less about Magna Carta or the strength of the Royal Navy than I do about our once-solid reputation for good manners – being eroded, alas, by iPhones and the invasion of American familarity.
A few weeks ago in Parliament, an old Sikh lady was attempting to descend the steps to Central Lobby when she realised she might be about to fall. She reached out and took my arm – without asking, without even looking in my direction, because helping distressed ladies is what gentlemen are supposed to do – and let me guide her down to the bottom. Once on terra firma, she finally turned and said, in a cut-glass accent: “Thank you very much.” I suspect the last refuge of English civility is to be found among British-Asian pensioners.