Why are the English so squeamish about patriotism?
WHO ARE WE NOW? STORIES OF MODERN ENGLAND by Jason Cowley
304 pages, Picador, £20, ebook £9.99
★★★★ ★
This is a book about patriotism, in particular why the English find the concept so hard to grasp or are prevented from doing so, either by their own reticence or the lofty disdain of so-called “progressives”. As George Orwell, who features prominently in this narrative, pointedly observed: “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.”
The question Who Are We Now? is a good one that has been asked countless times without any satisfactory answer and Jason Cowley does not pretend to have come up with one. Indeed, I am not sure anyone can.
Writers from William Shakespeare and John Milton onwards have sought to articulate what constitutes the essence of Englishness only to find it slipping away into a fog of disparate definitions.
To a great extent, this is a function of the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the efforts, begun by James I, to establish the notion of Britishness. Shakespeare almost overnight was required to stop talking about “This blessed plot, this Earth, this Realm, this England” and get in behind Project Britain. This he artfully managed in
in which the ageing monarch wrestles with what Britishness means, especially in relation to the longstanding national identities it superseded.
We are still trying to come to terms with it 400 years on. Cowley does so through a mix of personal memoir and vignettes of events that have taken place since New Labour came to power in 1997, which might be said to reflect the changing nature of Englishness.
They include the terrible tragedy of the Chinese cockle pickers drowned in Morecambe Bay by the inrushing tide; the manslaughter of a Polish settler in the aftermath of the Brexit vote wrongly – but widely – attributed to post-Brexit antagonism towards foreigners; the East End imam who stood up to a ghastly racist who came to kill Muslims at his mosque; the quiet dignity of the people of Wootton Bassett as they marked the repatriation of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Cowley sees in these a common thread that evinces a new patriotism; but while his choice of stories is interesting, and there is a certain Orwellian (in the best sense) curiosity and insightfulness, I was not persuaded that they knitted together into a coherent narrative of who we are now. He is also searching for an answer as to why Labour has failed so miserably to retain its old workingclass base as much as anything else, not least because Jeremy Corbyn was perceived to dislike his own country.
Cowley is the editor of the New Statesman, which he has revived into the most important voice on the political Left. For him and many other Blairites, coming to terms with Labour’s decline and the causes of Brexit is proving hard. He returns to his roots in Harlow, Essex, which relatives remember as being a beacon of Socialist welfare-state utopianism in the 1960s, but which has today lost the working-class community spirit that once held it together. That was itself a hangover from the old London East End, from where many residents of the new town originally came.
But the fundamental difference between then and now is the greater ethnic and cultural diversity of the population brought about by mass immigration. Cowley’s stories signal that he recognises that this has been the most important development of the past 50 years and one that began in 1997. Before Tony Blair, net immigration was about 50,000 a year; since the mid-2000s it has fluctuated between 150,000 and 300,000, by far the greatest in our history. This was bound to have a significant impact on what it is to be British, if not English, since many newcomers associate with the former though not the latter.
Moreover, even if their country has changed as a result, the English do not all live in areas that have been impacted by immigration. The “We” of the title also includes people in the Yorkshire Dales or a Dorset market town, as in Harlow or Rochdale.
Maybe if England had its own parliament and other political institutions – Cowley points out it is the largest country in Europe not to possess them – defining Englishness might be easier. It is a conundrum. As Orwell said, England “like all living things has the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same”.
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