Making a crisis out of identity

Today’s Guardian Review features the winning entry in this year’s Ben Pimlott Prize for Political Writing, which asked people with too much time on their hands to write 3,000 words or so under the title: “Who do you think you are: Can history help us define British identity today, or is it part of the problem?”. The winning entry is, by virtue of being judged worthy by the funless Fabians, dreary toss and won because it went on about 7/7. So I suggest you read my exquisite failure instead…

As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying around, trying to standardise my national identity.

They do not bear me any malice, nor I them, and they act, as far as can be observed, with at least partly honourable intentions.  And although I have never met these people, I have little doubt that they are upstanding men and women, merely trying to do a very difficult job.

They are trying, for a variety of reasons – some of which are surprisingly commendable – to define what it means to be British.

The question of what it means to be British has been asked plenty of times over the years, drifting in and out of the public conscience in rather predictable response to a large number of apparently appropriate situations.  Its current renascence was sparked by the Osama-inspired actions that kicked off the War on Terror and the subsequent rise in cultural tension that always accompanies an increase in national fear.

Only arguably less terrifying, the previous movement for a cataloguing of quite how fun, and indeed ‘cool’, it was to be British, was the clarion call to herald the Brave New World of Tony Blair’s reign.  He told us he wanted to “rebrand Britain”.  But despite the best efforts of the advertising and marketing men, and an impressive array of celebrity chums, it was doomed to an ephemeral existence.  One can’t help but think that the call from Blair’s successor-elect, the chancellor Gordon Brown, for a more “explicit patriotism”, which, along with a demand for more flag-waving and some selective history about the ideal of liberty (oddly omitting some significant recent developments), formed the basis of a recent speech delivered to the Fabian Society, is destined for a similarly short life.  National identities are, apparently, harder to dictate than Sun editorials.

Regardless of whichever call for a British identity is in fashion at the moment, it makes sense to wonder why, given the manifest troubles associated with the debate, we actually need to define a concept that is so inherently airy.

Just as there are those whose lives seem to suck worth from wielding the British branding iron in the face of everyone they meet, there are others to whom the whole suggestion is more than a little silly, and, what is worse, terribly unBritish.  Identity implies imposition, and if an Englishman’s home is his castle, it is not for anyone else to suggest what colour the walls should be.

It is, however, too easy and too foolish to dismiss the idea of a British identity out of hand, particularly if the construct of such a thing can have some gratifying effects, whether the edifice is all-compassing or not.

At the simplest level, there is a nice kind of nationalism that a greater sense of Britishness could inspire.  It is a way to bring people together with arms open rather than arms raised.  It also shouldn’t be too hard.  Everyone, more or less, wants to be part of something: sharing an identity with others, especially a lot of others, makes people happy, their lives somehow more justified and less bereft of meaning.  In the context of human relations, a realisable enshrinement of why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along feeling is undoubtedly a Good Thing.  Having a clear sense of “what Britishness means in a post-imperial world” is also, according to Brown, “essential if we are to forge the best relationships with the developing world and in particular with Africa.”  Unfortunately, he didn’t explain exactly why this was.  Perhaps one should ask Bono.

Taken on its own, however, the idea of simply bringing people together should not be overplayed; it is but a means to an end.  The most effective way to unionise a diverse bunch of people, one that automatically eliminates all class, ethnic and gender boundaries, is to infect everyone in a given group with bubonic plague.  Sometimes, the costs can be quite high.

Another point in favour of establishing a less ethereal notion of Britishness is to have something concrete and positive to portray to the rest of the world.  And preferably something that doesn’t involve Morris Dancing.  However, this shouldn’t be exaggerated either.  The rest of the world is quite capable of making its own mind up about the qualities or otherwise of the wet and windy rock off the coast of France.  Trying to tell them what we’re about is as likely to be met with derision as delectation.

Whatever its merits, the decision to impress a British identity onto our green and pleasant lands has been made.  But where does one start to look for it?  What is it to be modelled on?  It’s time for a quick history lesson.

Britain acquired its name from the Romans, who christened the province at the northwest tip of their empire Britannia.  However, the concept of Britain, in a legal sense, was not seen until the Act of Union in 1707, which united the Isles under Protestantism and an institutionalised hatred of France.  If we cast our net a bit further, the United Kingdom wasn’t born until 1801 and didn’t take on its current shape until the 1920s.

Distrust of the French, (and now the Germans and occasionally the Argentines too) still has a powerful commingling effect, but it’s hardly something to base a national identity on, at least not outside of a world cup.

Speaking of football, the idea of national football unity, where fans, who only the week before were happily singing of kicking each other’s heads in, can come together in harmony to sing about kicking some foreign heads in instead is a beautiful thing, so we’re told.  It is held up as an example, however questionable, to show how differences can be buried, so long as there’s something grander, something overarching, that can supersede pettier quarrels.

However, there is no British football team, and the very idea is anathema to just about every football fan save the late master of the wisecrack and Lord of Britain’s animals, Tony Banks.  Any attempt to unite the nations in this way will likely be mocked, ignored or lead to someone getting hurt.

This is my identity, tell me yours

English, Welsh, Scottish and (Northern) Irish feeling is undeniably stronger than its British equivalent.  As Sir Bernard Crick, who was a top adviser on the new British citizenship ceremony, said, “Britain is the crown, laws and Parliament: it’s political and legal”.  Feeling belongs to the nations.  And following Scottish and Welsh devolution, politics is increasingly fragmentary too.

The demarcation between what is British, as opposed to merely English is a blurry line indeed.  To some commentators, mostly foreign ones, there is simply no difference.  To find such thoughts originating in these shores, we have to go for the satirical.  Enter Daniel Defoe, specifically his poem The True-Born Englishman:

No Roman now, no Britain does remain;
Wales strove to separate, but strove in Vain:
The silent Nations undistinguish’d fall,
And Englishman‘s the common Name for all.
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
What e’er they were they’re True-Born English now.

If only.  Defoe’s poem was written to mock (in his words) “the Vanity of those who talk of their Antiquity, and value themselves upon their Pedigree, their Ancient Families, and being True-Born”.  As he explains, ” ’tis impossible we shou’d be True-Born; and if we could, shou’d have lost by the Bargain.”

Without wanting to get caught up in more regional concepts, where exactly are we to look for the source of a true British national identity?

An alien with no prior knowledge of the situation might think it wise to seek an answer from the British National Party.  Pity the poor alien.

Despite claims made in the report of a Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, published in 2000 by the Runnymede Trust, a think-tank, that “Britishness… has systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations”, the idea that Britishness is all about Whiteness belongs in the same intellectual sty as Intelligent Design and the works of David Irving.

Immigration, you see, has done as much, if not more, to shape whatever British identity there may be, as the suet puddings and red pillar boxes that George Orwell (from whom I shamelessly ripped off the opening for this essay) claimed were etched into the soul of every Briton, whether they liked it or not.

From audacious authoritarian Austrians with a penchant for world domination to halo-haired celebrity MPs, immigration is not a barrier to assimilation.  Being a bit foreign may make one more likely to be unnecessarily hassled by the police, but it doesn’t make one unable to reach the heights of patriotism.

Boris Johnson, he of the lively locks and Turkish descent (like St. George in that respect) and as stereotypically British (or is it English?) as they come, is, by virtue of a forthcoming book on the subject, something of an expert on ‘Being British’.

He is also another who, as much as he admires Britishness, believes it is intrinsically intangible, and not something that one can play politics with.  In a lecture given to the Centre for Policy Studies in 2004 under the title of ‘Being British’ (PDF), Mr Johnson made a point of running off (or perhaps bumbling out) a string of examples of bastions of Britishness who happened to be of foreign extraction.

Even then, however, what does it take for an immigrant to ‘join the ranks’?  Generations?  Supporting England at cricket (as Norman Tebbit theorised)?  Or passing a rather idiosyncratic little test that inquires as to the right thing to do if you happen to spill someone’s pint in a pub?

The aforementioned adviser on the citizenship exam, Sir Bernard Crick, explains how hard it is to tie-down a sense of Britishness, which consists mostly, he says, of living in Britain.

This perceived lack of patriotic certainties is a popular position.  “The English, of any people in the universe,” said David Hume, “have the least of a national character”.  More recently, historian David Starkey claimed that “England, like Rome, is dead… it has become a place of the mind”.

Even those that do try to define it leave us scarcely more enlightened.  Take Chinese philosopher, Lin Yutang, for example.  In his legendary guide to The Art of Living, he deduced that an Englishman was made up of “3 grains of Realism, 2 grains of Dreams, 2 grains of Humour and 1 grain of Sensitivity.”  Righty.

Others have been slightly more forthcoming.  ‘Martin’, in Voltaire’s classic Candide, described the English as having a “most serious and gloomy temperament”.  How much of this perception was shaped by the fact that he entered the country at Portsmouth, however, isn’t clear.  A similar point of view was aired by American writer Henry Miller, who in a book primarily about Greeks, The Colossus of Maroussi, found the time to describe the average Englishman as “lymphatic, made for the arm-chair, the fireside, the dingy tavern, the didactic tread-mill.”  Miller was, therefore at least in some agreement with Orwell, who saw that “All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’.”

These examples, taken as a whole, obviously do not offer much as to the nature of British identity, and, in readily referencing the English rather than the British (a dominant trait wherever one looks), show just how confused the whole thing is.

As Will Self put it, in an article for the Guardian in 1994, ” ‘English culture’ prompts more bathetic lines, from more disparate individuals, than anything else I have ever hit on.” In trying to settle on an answer himself, the closest Self came was in theorising that “it could reasonably be argued that English culture is entirely constituted by self-loathing.”

The idea of what it is to be British is clearly different for everyone that cares to think about it, and that is surely part of its charm.  For Boris it is “the heroic British habit of taking off your trunks under a towel on a crowded beach, and falling over in the attempt.”  For John Major it is “long shadows on county cricket grounds” and “old maids cycling to communion through the morning mist.”  Chances are these images are somewhat less evocative for plenty of others, but that doesn’t make them any less valid as a measure of our identity.  Okay, perhaps in some circumstances it does; Monty Python has to outrank pedal-powered old maids.

History, in this context, is most useful in viewing things as a process.  Orwell thought suet puddings would be eternally engraved onto English souls, yet even the craziest disciples of the erstwhile Eric Blair would surely not still subscribe to this view.

Things change, and with this in mind, it would seem rather inconvenient, and even inexpedient, to settle on an ‘identity’, a list of things that define what it is to be British, when really it’s more likely to be a definition of what it is to be British for the next decade or so, which doesn’t sound nearly so grand and subsequently will have a harder time improving intra-nation relationships.

Moreover, it’s not like it’s possible to simply hark back to a golden age when England was an Eden and thus permanently ground Britishness in the graves of Evelyn Waugh and W.G. Grace.  An age may once have existed, “when it was accepted as a kind of scientific fact that one Englishman was the equal of three foreigners”, as Orwell put it; when the right accent was as good as a passport when one fancied a spot of globetrotting and when being born British, as Cecil Rhodes asserted, was “to have won first prize in the lottery of life”; but only the congenitally delusional believe that such an age can be reconstructed and used to usher in the millennium.

Nowadays, as research continually shows, barely half of all Britons see being British as an important part of their identity.  Those who do tend to be male, under-educated and getting fitted for their eternal wooden overcoats.  When this generation dies out, will the concept of Britishness fade away with them?

I doubt it.  Orwell again: “It needs some very great disaster, such as subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture.”  Whatever our national culture or identity might be, whatever it may encompass along its evolutionary way, history and common sense tell us that it will always exist in some form, it will have benefits, it will have drawbacks, and it will have a fear of making a fuss.

The end of history?

History is part of the problem, because it’s part of the question, and the question is fundamentally problematic.  The varying ways in which people try to define British identity are generally based on some form of history, from fighting the French to the importing of tea to whatever crazy set of circumstances created the British sense of humour.  Yet the most important lesson is that we simply can’t ‘define’ it in any appropriately timeless sense.

If a British identity is to have any weight, to be strong enough that it can unite, however loosely, people whose personal ways and interests span everything from ballet to biting the heads off bats, it needs to be immutable.  British history could help with this: after all, history is written by the winners, and Britain’s had its fair share of success.  There’s definitely something to build on.  But how far does one go?  Who’s to say that the Briton of tomorrow will be emotionally roused by a Churchillian call to arms, that they won’t be able to go on holiday without getting comedically sunburnt, or that they’ll unquestionably start salivating over a perfectly-timed cover drive?

Once you extract something and plant it somewhere for show, it has a tendency to wilt and die.  A grand national concordance is like the Holy Grail: fun to think about, occasionally inspirational, draped in myths and legends but ultimately completely unattainable.

That should be all we know, and all we need to know;
And in the interests of poetry,
I’ll leave the last words to Daniel Defoe:

What is’t to us, what Ancestors we had?
If Good, what better? Or what worse, if Bad?