Englishness and
the fragile future of the union
This
article in the Financial Times got my attention and, as it is blocked by a Pay
Wall, I reproduce it here.
The FT often seems like the UK media's epicenter of Anti-Patriotic and of Globalist opinion, so it is perhaps not too
surprising to see the tone of the article's attitudes towards England and English
Nationalism, but it is still worth reading for all that:-
“Englishness and the fragile future of the union by Ferdinand Mount of the FT on
three books that examine the legacies of empire and the forces unleashed by
Brexit.
Looking around his Cambridge common room, Robert Tombs found himself
surrounded by disdainful Remainers. The only arguments for Leave they ever
heard came from their gardeners or their cleaners.
Professor
Tombs himself had voted Remain in 1975 and was thinking of voting the same way
40 years later. He changed his mind only when one friend told him that there
might not be a second chance to get out, and another, the Nobel Prize-winning
economist Kenneth Arrow, reassured him that leaving the EU would not be an economic
disaster.
These
might seem slender foundations on which to take a decision that might alter the
role and direction of the UK for decades to come.
The very
existence of the union no longer seems guaranteed, imperilled in part by the
forces unleashed by the Brexit referendum.
Yet Tombs
not only vowed there and then to vote Leave, but quickly became a passionate
campaigner for the cause, founding a tiny band of Brexit-inclined dons.
He
abandoned his plan to write a history of monotheism (which I would love to
read, for Tombs is a historian of rare elegance and puckish wit), and instead
spent his lockdown on this little history of Brexit. In its own way, it is a
short history of another monotheism, written by a true, if late convert.
This Sovereign
Isle is a light and spritzig essay, never less than readable, not least because
it never dwells too long on any knotty problem.
Tombs
describes the book as “a history: not neutral, but I trust rational and I hope
fair”. Rational, yes. But fair? I’m not so sure. As he gathers momentum, the
scales lurch alarmingly to one side. All the Leavers seem to be
salt-of-the-earth democrats who believe in Magna Carta — “decent populists” in
David Goodhart’s phrase — while the Remainers are either hysterical elitists or
snotty business types who no longer understand the meaning of patriotism.
The
islanders, Tombs tells us, have never, since the 1550s, pursued or accepted a
permanent organic Continental link The least tendentious part is the opening
chapter, “Set in a Silver Sea”, which sketches Britain’s relations with the
continent since Julius Caesar, mostly a matter of interminable wars and attempted
(or successful) invasions.
Tombs
tells us that “it is tempting to say that the pattern is an absence of
pattern”, but he does not succumb to this temptation, rather concluding — in a
formulation familiar from our schoolbooks — that Britain’s prime concern has
always been to preserve the balance of power on the continent, and that “the
islanders have never, since the 1550s, pursued or accepted a permanent organic
Continental link”.
There is
little sense here of any historical development in relations between nations.
Hugo Grotius and the invention of international law pass unsung. Castlereagh is
name-checked as “perhaps our greatest foreign secretary”, but the
post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe, which he engineered and which kept the peace
for decades after his death, slides by. The League of Nations and the UN are
dismissed as of interest only to idealists. The nation state remains the only
game in town, as absolute in its claims today as on the day the Treaty of
Westphalia was signed in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years’ War.
And when
Britain finally tiptoes into Europe, it is derided as a desperate tactic, born
of weakness and lack of national self-confidence. De Gaulle was quite right to
dismiss us as essentially an ocean-going nation.
In any
case, Tombs tells us, we went in on a false premise. We were never the sick man
of Europe: “Since 1944 (to the present day, in fact) British per capita GDP
growth rates have kept in step with those of America.” But isn’t this statistic
something of an own goal? All through the latter two-thirds of that period we
were members of the EEC/EU, so we can’t have done too badly out of being “at
the heart of Europe”.
The only
graph in the book (which is light on figures) shows Britain’s real gross
domestic product forging ahead of France, Germany and the eurozone generally
between 1998 and 2021.
If the EU
is a failure, as Tombs keeps repeating, the same, on his own evidence, can
scarcely be said of the UK’s membership.
Can we
really dismiss as illusory the benefits of free trade and foreign investment
flooding into Britain because of its access to the EU? The author mocks
Nissan’s threat to withdraw from Britain, yet does not pause to consider why
the Japanese carmaker came to Sunderland in the first place.
Like
other writers on Brexit, Tombs devotes a few sentences to the issue of
sovereignty, which he sees as the heart of the question. He notes, quite
rightly, that certain powers “may be delegated for a time to others, but
sovereignty, the ultimate right to decide, can exist only within a political
community: it can be given up, but not shared.” When the sovereign chooses to
delegate or share any of its powers, it is exercising, not diluting sovereignty,
just as it is exercising, not reclaiming sovereignty, if it chooses to take
back those powers. It is much the same with all human engagements: getting
married, joining a regiment, church, or corporation. On entering of your own
free will, you agree to abide by the rules which you may, or more usually may
not, have had a hand in devising; if you choose to disengage, you are again
exercising your sovereignty, not reclaiming it.
As Esler
sees it, the unruly, destructive force of English nationalism now threatens to
break the United Kingdom The case of the EU is no different. The UK has
exercised its sovereignty by deploying Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty; and we
are out. The right to disengage was implicit even before Lisbon, which is why
making it explicit was a relatively simple matter. Yet, in a breathtaking
assertion, Tombs goes on to claim that some EU member states where popular
votes have been ignored “have given up their sovereignty. Perhaps, indeed, they
all have.” Like many of his allies, Tombs appears to think that the EU is both
fatally glued together and perilously fragile.
Yet, in
practice he has to admit that Brexit “has sharply increased acceptance of
membership among its citizens”.
How does
this strange confusion arise? One key, I think, is the persistent tendency on
both sides to exaggerate the scope of the EU’s activities. The fact remains
that for years the EU budget has stuck at no more than one per cent of its
members’ net national income, or two per cent of their public expenditure. Vast
areas of social and economic policy are closed to Brussels — health, education,
social security, criminal justice, family and sexual law, taxation (except for
a nibble on VAT rates), budgetary policy (for those outside the eurozone), and so
on. The wildest ambitions of the fédérastes and the worst fears of the
Europhobes have never taken account of the political reality: that no
government is going to yield power over the things that really shift votes.
The
notion that democracy has been extinguished, or is about to be extinguished, in
the patries of the EU is frankly baloney.
I agree
with Tombs that we seem to be heading back towards something like the European
Free Trade Association, which is where we came in 60 years ago. Who knows, by
2030 we might have reached the condition of Norway, still conforming, as an
entirely independent country, to the vast corpus of EU law and practice.
It’s a
matter of taste whether you choose to call this a state of informal vassalage.
In our present dazed state, all this may seem rather counter-intuitive. It’s
natural to think that, in as fierce a fight as this, there can be only one
winner. But as the smoke clears, both sides may have their consolations.
No UK
government in the foreseeable future will try to rejoin a formal legal European
union or accept the authority of the European Court of Justice.
On the
other hand, no foreseeable British government is likely to risk moving out of a
free-trade area with all its attendant obligations, an enduring structure in
which the worst frictions of economic rivalry can be managed. The warnings of
“Project Fear” may, after all, have hit home. Is the whole game, after all,
going to turn out looking more like a score draw which leaves both sides
dissatisfied?
This
Sovereign Isle has an attractively blithe tone, and one of the things it is
blithest about is the condition of the nation. Tombs leaves us with the
impression that there is nothing much wrong with the UK that getting out of the
EU won’t liberate us to put right.
What a
different picture we get on turning to Gavin Esler’s How Britain Ends. The two
books might be describing two different countries. Esler is a Scot, descended
from German Protestant refugees from the Thirty Years’ War, but he has strong
ties with Northern Ireland — a dozen members of his family signed the Ulster
Covenant in 1912.
A former
BBC journalist, he has travelled round the UK as intensively as anyone, and he
is deeply worried about what he sees as the collapse of the British idea and
the emergence of English nationalism.
As Esler
sees it, the unruly, destructive force of English nationalism now threatens to
break the United Kingdom, heralding, as his subtitle has it, the “rebirth of
four nations”. Brexit over Union: the Lord Ashcroft poll One of his starting
points is the notorious Lord Ashcroft poll of 2019, which found that more than
three-quarters of Conservative Leavers put Brexit before the survival of the
Union, even if it meant a united Ireland.
Increasingly,
you find Tory-inclined writers grumbling that Northern Ireland has been a
millstone round our neck for years, or that we would really be better off
without the Scots.
Voters in
surveys and censuses increasingly describe themselves as English rather than
British. Meanwhile, the belief in the exceptionalism of our island history is
preserved through ignorance of everyone else’s. Esler’s ripest example is the
threat by Priti Patel, UK home secretary, in 2019 to use food supplies as a
weapon to bring Ireland to heel during the Brexit negotiations. English
exceptionalism assumes a blessing of Providence denied to lesser breeds.
The
acerbic David Frost, Britain’s chief negotiator in the final stages of the
tussle, remarked in a speech in Brussels, much admired by Brexiters, that “it
was always going to feel a bit unnatural to a lot of people to be governed by
an organisation whose institutions seemed created by design more than by
evolution”.
Here
Esler explodes. All the great events in our history — the Union of Crowns, the
Union of Parliaments, the Revolution Settlement, the 1832 Reform Act, the
partition of Ireland — did not “just evolve”. “They were the product of crises,
in some cases of riots and bloodshed, or an attempt to forestall crises, riots
and bloodshed,” he writes. Every one of these massive changes “was ‘created by
design’ by humans working together to build or maintain some kind of union
based on shared values”.
This is
not a new critique. Mary Wollstonecraft exploded in similar fashion when Edmund
Burke claimed that the constitution of our Church and state was formed “under
the auspices and is confirmed by the sanctions of religion and piety”.
Nonsense, she said. The constitution “owes its sightly appearance to bold
rebellion and insidious innovation”. And much of this was driven by “the
pressing needs” of a monarch desperate to finance wars and ambitious projects.
It was a struggle and often a violent one to achieve our present liberties.
Recommended
Life & Arts From Suez to Brexit and back again: Britain’s long search for a
role Esler’s remedy is not new either. He wants a revival of “Home Rule All Round”
— first approved by the House of Commons as far back as 1895.
Instead
of the present federalism by stealth, he would like to see a written
constitution that would revive representative institutions in
England-outside-London — a return, if you like, of the Anglo-Saxon “Heptarchy”
of petty kingdoms, a vision once fancied by Winston Churchill among others.
Esler
says that we can no longer rely on what Peter Hennessy calls “the good chap”
theory of government, in which we depend on the decency and discretion of
politicians and civil servants rather than hard-and-fast rules. With that
informal system gone, we need a constitutional convention to give us a fresh
start.
Any such
fresh start seems unlikely to form part of Johnson’s “levelling-up” agenda, which
so far has been a top-down exercise, designed to develop rather than restrain
the prime minister’s powers of patronage, accompanied by menacing attacks on
the judges and judicial review, on the BBC and the Electoral Commission.
Johnson
has always been a clencher. As he sees it, power is best concentrated in his
own fist. The present government has no zest for genuine reinvention, because
it refuses to recognise that there is anything much to worry about. And as
Esler insists, recognition is the necessary first step to reform. Here again he
presents a picture of a fretful, divided and resentful nation, totally at odds
with Tombs’s rather sunny sketch. In particular, Tombs shrugs off any idea that
the Brexit project is infected by any hankering for empire. On the contrary, he
gives air time to the view of Richard Tuck, a fellow Cambridge historian, that
“it was the EU that was underpinned by ‘imperial nostalgia’, as an ‘alternative
stage upon which these old imperial ruling classes could regain something of
the role they had lost.’ ”
We got
rid of our empire with little bloodshed or recrimination, so the story goes. We
were not demoralised or torn apart like Spain and France after their colonial
disasters. In fact, we are led to believe that the experience of empire left
scarcely a mark upon our souls.
This is
not a nonchalance that can survive a reading of Empireland, the scorching
polemic on the afterburn of empire by Sathnam Sanghera, the Times columnist and
novelist. As a Punjabi Sikh from Wolverhampton, Sanghera is incapable of
forgetting the British empire. He was brought up in the backwash of Enoch
Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. When he goes back to the subcontinent
with his mother, they visit the Golden Temple at Amritsar and picnic in the
Jallianwala Bagh where Brigadier Dyer massacred hundreds of people in 1919.
(Sanghera omits to mention that although disgraced by the official inquiry,
Dyer remained a hero among the more conservative, pro-imperialist elements of British
society and eventually received a hero’s funeral in London.)
For
Sanghera, the traces of empire are visible everywhere: in the loot (a Hindi
word, of course) piled up in our museums, precious relics of other cultures; in
the country houses built on plantation money (or more bluntly, on slavery); in
the continued prominence of the City of London deriving from its role as the
banker of empire; above all, in the presence in the UK of millions of
immigrants and descendants of immigrants from the former colonies: “we are here
because you were there”. These intertwinings remain at the heart of Britain’s
past and present: thousands of Sikhs fought for Britain in the Great Mutiny and
in both world wars, often with scant recognition.
Today we
cannot help seeing how much our hospitals (and other public services) owe to
their Bame staff, when we look at their terrible death rates from Covid-19.
Yet, as Sanghera points out, imperial history is scarcely taught in schools,
and when institutions such as the National Trust do some research, there are
groans of “woke” from those who prefer to go on sleeping. What about the
railways? Well, there’s no danger of forgetting them, since they are just about
the only vestiges of empire that ever make it on to TV, usually omitting the
fact that a prime purpose in building them was to ferry troops quicker to
suppress disturbances and to carry British goods to the backwoods at the
expense of native industry.
Sanghera
certainly does not underplay the genuine achievements of empire. Personally, he
is grateful for everything that Britain has given him. But he cannot abide the
vainglorious, barely qualified praise of empire from rightwing politicians and
historians, nor their bleaching of our “Island Story”.
In his
closing pages, Tombs himself offers a future which has more than a tinge of
imperial pink. We should turn towards “a very obvious alternative, the
so-called ‘Anglosphere’”. He applauds Johnson’s decisions to deploy frigates
and minesweepers East of Suez and to dispatch the new aircraft carrier to the
Far East. He welcomes the weaponising of foreign aid for the projection of
British power. And he ends with a little paean to the “soft power” of Queen and
Commonwealth. If these are not imperial hankerings, I don’t know what is.
Nor am I
much more reassured by Prof Tombs’s predictions for the longer term in British
politics: “One plausible future would see a hegemonic one-nation Conservative
Party appealing to national identity and espousing more interventionist
economics.” As in Hungary perhaps, or Turkey, or Brazil? These days we describe
this kind of hegemony as “a strongman regime”. In the 1930s, we gave it a
darker name. Whatever you call it, I can’t say I like the sound of it.”
Here is a link to the original
article>>> https://www.ft.com/content/f0107296-566b-4ca3-aff6-0971f2cc49f0
