Clapping has become a curious British addiction
‘If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands’ is a hideously repetitive nursery song many of us were brainwashed with as children – which perhaps explains the spontaneous applause when Speaker Bercow resigned in the Commons this week.
Ultimately, it is a mass behaviour. Watching Bercow’s resignation at home, I almost found myself rising up to join in. Not because I felt he deserved any tribute but because whenever I hear anyone else clapping I can’t help but start clapping, too. Like yawning, it’s irresistibly contagious.
As a nation, though, I fear that we’ve officially lost the plot. We used to clap as a mark of respect at the start of toasts and the end of speeches. Take that brilliant banquet scene in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, when Lord Copper makes a 38-minute speech and notes with approval that “even the waiters… were diligently clapping”. Bercow has been boring on for a whole 10 years, so perhaps we might attribute some of the clapping to sheer relief?
More likely, they were genuinely cheering his performance as Speaker. It’s hard to imagine anybody wanting to do that, especially given the deeply worrying allegations of bullying. But sometimes you don’t have to do a particularly good job to be applauded these days. A pilot only has to land a plane for everyone on board to start clapping. Why? For not crashing? That’s the bare minimum we ought to expect.
Worse, applause is now commonplace in cinemas when a film’s over; in concerts during the gaps between movements in classical music, when it really ought not to intrude; and even at memorial services after orations for the dearly departed.
We ought to be on our guard. Otherwise, I fear it
could go the same way as kissing people on the cheek – a cosmopolitan urge that, allowed to run rampant by the dinner-party classes, has overwhelmed the natural instincts of the British to suppress as much emotion as is humanly possible.
When I was young, people who didn’t know each other used to shake hands. Kissing them was something foreigners did. (I witnessed a lot of it during a French exchange, aged 14.)
It’s possible rural Hills are particularly repressed (I’ve never seen my parents kiss and they’ve been married for nearly 40 years), but back in the Nineties my mother used to treat anyone pecking her cheek as if they’d attempted an outrage. Nowadays – as with clapping at funerals – she does not approve, but has learnt to submit to it out of politeness.
And yet the more I think about the extraordinary scenes in Parliament yesterday, the more I am confused. The Labour Party is studious in maintaining its woke credentials. How can it square that with the act of clapping, criticised by the National Union of Students for “triggering anxiety”? Their advice is to use “jazz hands” instead. If Labour weren’t such fans of Bercow, could it be that MPS ignored their guidance because they were trying to frighten Bercow into naffing off faster than he’s promised?
Certainly, few things could be more anxietyinducing than when Labour MPS in the chamber burst into The Red Flag or the SNP struck up Scots Wha Hae and Flower of Scotland.
Clapping is bad enough, I think, but at least we’ve not reached the point where we’re all sporadically singing. Not yet, anyway.