Marmite nation: is the idea of Britishness broken beyond repair?
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Version 0 of 1. Here’s one for the conspiracy theorists: “fundamental British values” that teachers are supposed to impart to our children bear an uncanny resemblance to Article 1(a) of the Lisbon treaty. Government guidance, published last year in response to reports that radical Islamist ideas had infiltrated Birmingham schools, calls for the promotion of “democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs”. The 2007 agreement on deeper European integration that David Cameron denounced in opposition but refused to repeal in office, identifies the EU’s founding principles as being “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities”. Spooky, huh? Admittedly, the education department’s version is pithier, dispensing with human rights and equality. But that needn’t stop the committed paranoiac from suspecting Cameron of a “Trojan horse” plot to smuggle Brussels dogma on to the curriculum. Of course, the real explanation is that the pool of enlightened abstractions available for use by vague moralising European politicians is limited. They must share. Like Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme discovering that he has been speaking prose all his life, Cameron and his cabinet may be surprised to learn that what they have been calling fundamental British values are in fact European. They will not be grateful for the revelation. National virtues lose the gleam of specialness when every continental from Calais to Kraków has a claim to them. National virtues lose the gleam of specialness when every continental from Calais to Kraków has a claim to them But to refine the definition of national identity any further risks straying into awkward historical and ethnographic terrain. Any meaningful account of the genesis of Britishness has to recognise the centrality of church and empire. Yet no modern political doctrine of Britishness would insist on Christian faith and overseas dominion as shibboleths. One method for avoiding controversy when talking about identity is the canonisation of harmless idiosyncrasy: moaning about the weather, queuing, ambivalence towards Marmite. But those are cultural mascots not immutable values. In 2007 Michael Gove named veneration of the Ealing comedies as one mark of what it means to be British. He didn’t then insist on school screenings of The Lavender Hill Mob to inoculate angry Muslim youths against the lure of jihad. The most efficient way to pinpoint a national identity is to describe what the nation is not – or rather, who it is not. So Scottish nationalism, for all its sophisticated recruitment of “civic” and “progressive” idioms, is still a club whose door policy excludes being English. Likewise, the government’s plan to change parliamentary procedure so that MPs representing England cannot be outvoted by MPs from other parts of the UK is a retaliatory gesture of English nationalism that no amount of waffling about constitutional anomalies and West Lothian questions can camouflage. Those anomalies do exist as the legacy of devolution: Scottish MPs vote on bills that affect English (and Welsh) schools and hospitals, while English MPs have no equivalent reach into Holyrood. That asymmetry can also be cast as symbolic of a deeper grievance – the perceived northward flow of subsidy and political favour to appease petulant Scots. But faced with such resentment, simmering but not yet roiling, the Tories had a choice. They could frame their response in terms of solidarity within the union. They could put the problem in its proper perspective – a constitutional wrinkle, not an affront to long-suffering Albion – and find a collaborative solution. Or they could ramp it up for party political advantage. It was clear, the morning after Scotland’s independence referendum, which path Cameron was going to take: English votes for English laws (Evel) was on the agenda before breakfast. Fear of subordination to the Scots went on to enjoy a central and highly effective role in the Tories’ general election campaign. Cameron is not an English nationalist in any coherent ideological sense. He would recoil from the very suggestion, restating his dedication to the union and his distaste for ideas that end in “ism”. That is a social aversion as much as a political one. Ideologies, in the prime minister’s view, are for sweaty zealots who work themselves up into frightful lathers over footling points of doctrine. He looks down on them like Gulliver watching Lilliputians and Blefuscuns at war over the right way to crack open an egg. Cameron belongs to a long tradition of regarding healthy disdain for codified national doctrines as the unique and ennobling trait of Englishness. This idea dates back at least as far as David Hume, who wrote that “the English, of any people in the universe, have the least of a national character; unless this very singularity may pass for such”. And Hume was Scottish, or maybe British, with a dash of European: a citizen of the Enlightenment. Related: Beware the siren calls of nationalism | Nick Cohen It is easy to forget how modern the notion of nationality really is. As a myth of indigenous and discrete folk history that fires a mass political movement, it is largely a construct of 19th-century continental revolutions. Disraeli viewed it with suspicion as a “modern new-fangled sentimental principle”. But it was soon viewed, like electricity, as an irreducible force not invented but discovered. It went on to defeat Marxist efforts to elevate class consciousness as a higher organising principle for borderless solidarity between peoples. If the crisis in the eurozone evolves into a wider contest between aggrieved nations craving self-determination against arrogant supranational elites, there is no doubt which side will win. Britain has historically avoided the more deranged excesses of nationalist fervour, but it is not immune to the concept. And Britishness itself is looking ever more like a cracked and brittle vessel – a receptacle for vague platitudes about rights, democracy and the rule of law that are neither exclusive to the UK nor emotionally resonant as the animating component of identity. Is it beyond repair? Scottish separatism simmers within it while bitter English reaction is stirred in. The cocktail is about to be held over the Bunsen flame of an EU referendum. It sounds dangerous, but perhaps it is just a catalytic process from which some new stable compound identity will emerge. It would be easier to have confidence under a prime minister who seemed more attentive to the volatile nature of his experiments. |