Why should we want to save British culture?
and what would we even be saving...
I spent two days last week at the Civic Future conference, where this was the discussion of the day. Orwell was quoted, to the effect that it is only intellectuals who have trouble loving their country. This quotation echoed through a session I chaired with Ian Leslie and Ayishat Akanbi about British culture. There was some feeling that the three of us had denied the idea of a British culture, but the only alternative offered (after quoting Orwell) lacked definition itself, or fell back on institutions.
There is a deep Britishness to Parliament, the King, the common law, and the Church. But the question is whether we have—or can sustain—a national culture beyond our institutions? And should we? As I discuss this, I will largely talk about England, though many aspects of this culture are derived from the whole British Isles, I believe it is fundamentally English, for better or for worse.
I have no trouble loving my country and its history. But this question brings out a strain of patriotism that feels affected to me. This fake culture is well known to us all: brightly-coloured bunting, “British eccentricity”, the wearing of straw hats with colorful ribbon-bands inside, Paddington, phone boxes and Buckingham Palace guards. This is the froth upon the wave and can be more accounted for by its absence from most everyday lives than anything else.
To me, this all has the feel of picking the window display. I flew back from the US with Virgin Atlantic, who make a point of serving a British afternoon tea, with clotted cream and jam. British enough, no doubt, but not really British in the way it would be if my wife had made the scones one afternoon when the wheat was golden and the sun was lengthening along the fields. You cannot create a culture out of bits and bobs: it must be lived, in the minds and habits of the people.
There are tea rooms in the Cotswolds that are made out of knick-knacks bought online, full of cute signs and make-believe tea-pots with elaborate modern patterns. These are not real traditional tea-rooms, not like Teapots in Olney, a market town in Buckinghamshire, where the tea-cakes are just like your grandmother remembers and the windows steam up when it rains. They are not real like the small bakery on Lichfield market square that serves jacket potatoes and eccles cakes. They are a tourist’s idea of a tea-room (often an English tourist). That is precisely the sort of culture I wish to avoid.
The difference between real culture and fake culture cannot be found in the forms. It is not a question of getting the right tablecloth. It comes out of the life of the people, their norms and values, ideas and beliefs.
The deep roots of British culture are the norms and moral commitments of individualism. The English have long been more likely than other cultures to live in separate nuclear families that feel only weak obligations to their extended families. This is not just a feature of modern commercial bourgeoise life, but a centuries-old aspect of English living, like bacon and eggs, broad-leaved forests, and the King.
The class system is not known by the way middle-class people say sitting room or the way upper class people don’t carry cash. That is transient fashion. Instead, the class system is known in the way it adapts to new social and economic conditions. If a modern middle-class person could meet their equivalent in the 1920s or the 1820s they would feel the differences quite sharply. The nascent individualism of the British class system is what makes it distinctive. In the ability of a father to disinherit a son, a hard-worker to raise to a new class, or a failed person to descend the scales, the British class system was always more flexible and individual.
This individualism discussed in the work of historians like Alan Macfarlane and anthropologists like Joseph Henrich, is the culture that gave rise to the English reformation, the industrial revolution, and the institutions of the modern liberal democratic state. It is also the culture that has struggled to re-emerge for much of the last century. A combination of declining status and investment thanks to war, technological changes, and the policy of the governments of Lloyd George, Clement Attlee, and Harold Wilson reinforced a non-individualistic element to British culture. An archetypal instance of this is queueing, which became much more normal during the Second World War, thanks to rationing. Combined with the English tendency towards introversion—keeping one’s feelings to oneself, deferring to one another; it is still considered slightly vulgar or shocking to speak one’s mind in Britain—this became a new form of social order. The public space began to change.
The twentieth century broke many traditions. Things imperiled thanks to V2 rockets, high taxes, new technology, and the legislative programme of 1945 included village life, the quiet domestic style of British architecture, the ability to build new houses and roads, country houses, the hierarchies of the class system, the private practice of medicine. This continues today, as VAT has been added to private school fees, most country houses are museums, no new reservoirs have been built in England in my lifetime, and many new public buildings have nothing to do with the traditions of English architecture while the houses are, by regulatory insistence, cramped, with small windows, and squeeze into the allowed plots of approved developments.
This shows us the essential contradiction of what it means to be British. It is impossible now to think of building in London the way the Victorians did, who demolished old coaching inns, cut Queen Victoria Street right through the middle of the City (leaving small oddly shaped building plots in its wake), and who threw up miles and miles of large terraced housing all over south London. It is impossible to think of the English drinking their beer in anything other than pints just as it is impossible to think of them without the NHS, both established by statute. The difference is that English inns and pubs evolved historically, whereas the NHS was imposed by government. It has become unthinkable to remove the NHS, of course, as it has now evolved to be part of Britain. It is that evolution, I believe, more than any particular part of it, which is being mourned when the question of British culture is raised.
But perhaps the contradiction is what makes British culture quintessentially British.
England is easy to characterise in terms that feel comfortable to modern conservatives—the church-going, suit-wearing people, who wish to preserve some of the traditions of an old way of life. We might think of the English as an insular, Anglican, history-loving people, who took a great deal of pride in their nation; but we can also think of them as the people who created free speech, Parliament, and the freedoms established by the common law.
It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land, where girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent:
What could be more English than the fact that we restrained and removed our king by force and then reinstated his son? What could be more English than the fact that we broke with Rome to establish a national church under the monarch and then enabled the cultural and technical innovations of dissenters from that church? The puritans had to leave England to establish America, but it was in England where they arose. These conflicts are more English than any of our shared national points of identity.
The idea of Englishness embodied in a common canon, a common love of an institution, of a commonality of any sort of cultural convention puts me in mind of J.S. Mill, who saw in that sort of custom restraint, control, and, in the case of the way men treated women, despotism. Instead, I love the England that gave us Mary Wollstonecraft, The Subjection of Women, and Mrs. Pankhurst. That is the English culture of individualism, along with the Quakers, Margaret Thatcher, and the Beatles. I love the common English inheritance of our system of law and government and of our manners of restraint, but I love more the ability to contradict, to strike out, to refuse. These, too, are essential to the historic idea of Englishness.
We must accept the fact that we have both Saxon and Norman roots: we are both rugged individuals and organized bureaucrats, earthy folk and overbearing elites. In the cultural debate that wishes to prioritise one above the other, to romanticise us into the nation of Agincourt and the Book of Common Prayer, we can miss the importance of this yoking together of disparate elements, this contradiction at the heart of our nation. We are Gladstone and Disraeli, slaver and abolitionist, Cavalier and Roundhead.
And in the flight to romanticise the nation into a tradition, in the refusal of the contradiction, we risk diminishing the great inheritance of liberal individualism. This is the country of both Magna Carta and the Gordon Riots, and we should perhaps wish to leave behind one part of that inheritance. It is insufficient to claim history and institutions and to leave behind abstract ideas. Institutions embody tacit knowledge, but they are changed and guided in order to implement particular ideas. Most of Britain’s major institutions underwent major changes in the last fifty years when ideas clashed with organic development.
In Louise Perry’s column last week, an illuminating discussion of the British obsession with America, she refers to an exchange between Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell, about the role of abstract values in British identity.
The longstanding tension over the status of the U.S. in the British political imagination was best embodied by two titans of the 20th century British right: Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell. In one telling exchange, Thatcher, who was then prime minister, suggested to Powell that the nuclear deterrent was a means of defending British “values.” He rejected her premise:
No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government . . . values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.
I would fight for this country never to have a communist government. I would fight for it never to succumb to such destructive forces. A communist England might, in the recesses of the people’s hearts and minds, still be English; but communism cannot be English; England cannot be communist; that would be a revolution in the idea of England, a revolution in both the ordinary, daily, history of English life and a revolution in the norms and values that have animated our history for centuries. It would be a greater revolution than the Reformation. My fight would not be based only on the evolved inheritance, but on abstract ideals.
For a long time, to be English was to be free. Not for all the English. Not as much freedom as we might wish for today. But that was a great idea, an abstract value, a transcendental ideal, sometimes understood more obliquely and implicitly, sometimes theorized by great philosophers, sometimes an explicit political programme. That freedom has meant many things: restraints on the king versus the aristocracy, the ending of serfdom, the rise of commerciality, free speech as we knew it from Milton to Mill, the freedom of the ordinary Englishman against continental fascism.
It is the freedom of families to form themselves, against the wishes of their parents. It is the freedom of religion, of association, of speech. It is the freedom of the scientist and the artist. We have a long tradition of the courts enforcing the law against the executive because freedom is assumed when no statute removes it. It is an ideal we have been developing for longer than any other nation. It is an ideal we bequeathed to many other countries, not least the USA.
Today, as England debates her future, some people wish to trade some of that ideal away—such as putting restrictions on free speech to deal with Islamic extremism. Sometimes I worry that in our rush to be British, to preserve our suits and scones, we might start to give up on the high ideals and deep norms that have developed over centuries, and which once gave the free world the whole idea of freedom. We are living with a set of contradictions in British culture—between freedom and unfreedom. With Putin making war on the continent, the economy stagnant for two decades, the USA demanding that we become more self-reliant, and a technological revolution underway that most of the country seems inclined to ignore, what Britain risks now is not losing its culture, but keeping the half that will make it less prosperous, less secure, and less free.