Most of us, not just minorities, have lost our sense of being meaningfully British
Another day, another argument about British identity. This one was sparked by a GB News interview with a black man in South London. Quizzed about whether he was proud to be British, and having answered in the enthusiastic affirmative, he was then asked what about Britain he was proud of. He then failed to recognise a series of historical figures and just said he was happy to be born here. Right wing anons proceeded to pontificate about how this proved the impossibility of foreigners integrating into our native Anglo-Saxon stock. His total failure to produce an undergraduate essay on Alfred the Great was a clear sign of the failure of the multicultural project — mass deportations now, case closed.
The more these flashpoints over identity flare up, the more I’m struck by how we’re encountering the same basic problem from different angles. The narrative of many on the populist Right is that British identity and culture are under threat from mass migration, and that our elites have betrayed us in the name of alien populations. Whilst there are elements of truth to this story, it reverses cause and effect. Britain lost its identity and culture and in the process lacked the strength and coherence to say no to mass migration, or to train an elite steeped in national loyalty and belonging. The Britain of the 1960s and 70s decisively rejected mass migration at a popular level, and the Labour government of the time, facing the prospect of a political tornado, brought in legislation to ensure that Britain would not open its gates to a rising tide of Commonwealth migration. According to accounts of cabinet meetings declassified in the 90s, Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan “arrived with the air of a man whose mind was made up. He wasn’t going to tolerate any of this bloody liberalism”. Despite the Attorney General raising the prospect of a breach of the ECHR, the Cabinet pushed ahead with the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill.
Callaghan’s cabinet showed a realism and a forcefulness that 21st century governments clearly lacked, yet that difference is not a coincidence. The Britain of 1968 was on the cusp of coming apart in crucial ways, but was still a country that knew what it was, and whose history and culture were keenly felt and understood. Nearly 60 years on, and that is no longer the case.
The thing that stood out to me in the GB News video, apart from the unfairness of singling out this apparently decent man, is just where he is supposed to have acquired a knowledge of British history and culture from? As his answers clearly showed, he is evidently someone who fundamentally likes and respects the country into which he has been born. Is he supposed to have learnt about our history in the schools where it isn’t taught, or drawn it from the popular culture in which it is ignored? Perhaps he should have picked it up from our political leaders who don’t reference it, or the civic culture which we’ve hollowed out?
If we are failing to integrate people, it is no small part because we are failing to integrate ourselves into British culture. British political elites have rarely been less literate or more fantastically obsessed with sub-par pop culture and celebrity. High culture continues in elite institutions, but it is increasingly seen as something that must be popularised, dumbed down, or simply pushed aside in the name of more commercial art forms. Areas like defence and manufacturing, vital to both physically sustaining our culture and to building a sense of collective pride, are the most marginalised and neglected in our service and public sector focused economy. Perhaps most fundamentally of all, Britain has secularised, losing the spiritual bonds that join past and future, and the shared vocabulary and reference points that illuminated our literary culture. In this latter area, as in my South London parish church, it is often black families keeping British culture and history going.
Our capacity to act collectively depends on our having things in common. If we want the ability to restrict migration, and to integrate immigrants into our society, we have to be able to articulate a national culture whose integrity can be defended, and to which new migrants can conform themselves.
Some on the nationalist right think that you can have nationalism without a nation, resting on a definition of British exceptionalism scarcely different from the anemic official British values of “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs”, but with a healthy sprinkling of contentless ethno-nationalism. Many on the emerging British Right are obsessed with the thesis that we are “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and that Britain has always been uniquely “individualist”. Along with its 90s nostalgia, this reflects a strain of British populism that hasn’t grappled with the reality of the failures of liberalism any more than the centrist establishment.
If we want to revive our country, we must relearn who we are. The old rhythms of reverence and duty, loyalty and love, must be relearnt
Technocratic habits of mind are hard to break, and the philosophical premises of liberalism are even harder to shake off. For this reason, many continue to ape the failed models of yesterday, even in the areas of political debate that are supposedly most radical and most anti-establishment. Even after the horrors of off-shoring and the open borders experiment, why do so many populists think that “creative destruction” and deregulation will fix our stagnant economy? Why, after the dull misery of liberal relativism, are so many desperate to cling on to “classical liberalism”? Why are we cheering on individuals like Birbalsingh, whose solution to multiculturalism in education appears to be the same as the National Secular Society?
If we want to revive our country, we must relearn who we are. The old rhythms of reverence and duty, loyalty and love, must be relearnt, and directed not just towards abstractions, but between one another, and into our unloved institutions: public services, politics, law, and religious hierarchies. We will have to be far more fearless in fighting for the necessarily contested, but real and authentic values of our nation, and far more patient in winning people over and finding common ground. Forget Iraq and Afghanistan — here in Britain today, we are all engaged in the difficult and dirty business of nation building, and it’s a duty none of us can long avoid.
