A Devilish People

I was recently asked to identify the various historical elements that led to the creation of Victorian Britain, the high-water mark of our national story, a time of innovation, of self-reliance and self-assurance, things that now seem a distant memory in our present state of senesce.  It comes really at an opportune time, right in the middle of my Trollope period, a novelist who did much to identity some of the significant political and intellectual trends in nineteenth century English life.  I also have a particularly close acquaintance with the work of Charles Dickens, another great chronicler of the day. 

The transformation that characterised the times, particularly in the Industrial Revolution, is the stuff of a thousand school essays!  The obvious things can be marched out with ease – the improvements in agriculture, in communication, in transport, in technology; innovations of all sorts.  Much of the mechanical improvement was directly related to the ever increasing demand for coal, a power source significant as far back as the Middle Ages.  But the mines go even deeper here, deep into our history.

On the eve of the Victorian period feudalism was a distant memory, effectively killed off as early as the fourteenth century.  In contrast it was a living reality on the Continent, in France, in Prussia and in Russia.  In the case of the latter it was to be a living reality as late as the early 1860s, with shadows long thereafter.  It is England not France that is the true home of liberty.  In France Liberty came late, trailing clouds of terror and bringing streams of blood. 

In England freedom was far more than a word.  From the myth of Robin Hood to the reality of Magna Carta, the first great break on royal power, it was a living reality.  I find it difficult to define this properly but I know a poet who can;

It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which to the open Sea
Of the world's praise from dark antiquity
Hath flowed, "with pomp of waters, unwithstood,"
Road by which all might come and go that would,
And bear out freights of worth to foreign lands;
That this most famous Stream in Bogs and Sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever. In our Halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible Knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

We recently dug up the remains of Richard III, a reminder of the great fifteenth century dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses.  But that event was far more significant than a simple game of thrones.  It decimated the hereditary nobility that had effectively ruled the country since the Norman Conquest.  In its place came a new nobility, made up quite often of the middling sort.  Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, the two most powerful political figures during the reign of Henry VIII, were respectively the son of a butcher and the son of a blacksmith.  I can think of no other country at the time that where such a rapid ascent would have been possible.

Then there is Parliament, a uniquely assertive body in English history, present from the thirteenth century onwards.  It was to be an effective scrutiniser over time of national finances, granting fresh supply only after various grievances had been addressed.  It may have started on a Continental model of an assembly of estates but it became so much more, the best firm of accountants that the nation has ever had. 

So, if the Wars of the Roses saw the beginning of the end of aristocratic power, the political struggles of the seventeenth century saw the absolute end of royal absolutism.  It is not to be thought that the Restoration of the monarch in 1660, after a republican interlude, marked the victory of Crown over Parliament.  Charles II was to have almost as much trouble from his loyal assembles as his father did from his rebellious ones.  The Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw the overthrow of James II, sent all pretence of divine right monarchy to the grave.

The long Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an important precursor here, freeing people from more traditional forms of thought and religious practice.  The process was also fairly uniform throughout mainland Britain, uniting people in a common Protestant ideology.  Where there is religious liberty and freedom of thought political liberty follows.  In France such religious liberty was the gift of the state, ended in a stroke of royal absolutism.  As England wakened to freedom France sunk deeper into the sleep of absolutism. 

If any one man supplied the ideological impetus for the Glorious Revolution, and the subsequent Bill of Rights, then it surely has to be John Locke.  For me Locke serves as an avatar of the English intellect, far more precise and empirical than the cloudy abstraction of so much Continental thought.  English itself is a precise language which, if used properly, is concerned with meanings and ends.  It is a language that does not readily lend itself to obscurity.  When it does it simply looks ridiculous.  A free language given to free expression, that is of crucial importance in understanding who we are, in understating our values and our dow-to-earth sense of what is right and what is wrong.  We must indeed be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake.  The corruption of our spoken and written language is among our greatest contemporary dangers.

Our political struggles did not end with the Glorious Revolution, merely took on a different form.  The early Victorian period saw a new and bloodless civil war, fought between the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832, which expanded middle-class representation in Parliament, and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which saw the final victory of the industrial over the landed interest.  Through this period, though passions were often heightened, problems were solved by pragmatic compromise rather than violence, another characteristic of the English.

Take the career of Benjamin Disraeli, for example, another kind of avatar.  He first made his mark in Parliament by a ruthless assault on Sir Robert Peel, his own party leader and the Prime Minister responsible for the repeal of the Corn Laws.  At the time Disraeli spoke for the landed interest.  But when he became Prime Minister himself later in the century there was no return to the past.  For him laissez-faire capitalism and free trade, defined by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, was the wealth of the nation.

Britain was fortunate in being the first industrial nation among a world of primary producers.  But while free trade opened the agricultural sector to foreign competition in did not entail terminal decline.  Instead the nation’s farms and farmers became more proficient, as proficient as their manufacturing counterparts in adopting new methods and techniques.  Farms became pure commercial enterprises with little of the inefficient and underproductive peasant agriculture that continues to be a defining feature of the French system.

The country was also fortunate in not having a standing army on the Continental model, a drain on national resources.  Instead there was the navy, based on the need to defend ever lengthening trade routes.  Naval officers were generally of a far higher level of ability than those in the army, many of whom bought their commissions.  An idiot could command a regiment; an idiot could not sail a ship.  The defeat of France in the Seven Years War established Britain as the leading sea power in the world, something that was to continue right into the twentieth century.  Secure trade meant growing wealth; growing wealth meant an ever greater flow of capital; more capital meant more investment, and onwards and upwards.

The English don’t do revolution by doing it so well!  The changes are outwardly subtle, so subtle than they can scarcely be seen to have happened.  Consider the difference between the England of Richard III and that of Queen Victoria.  In institutional terms little has changed.  They are all in place, the monarchy, the aristocracy and Parliament, both Lords and Commons.  But the balance between them has changed dramatically and continued to change.  The monarchy is now the decorative part of the constitution, something that would have caused Richard a new winter of discontent! 

If I take Disraeli as one avatar of the Victorian age the other has to be Charles Dickens, at once the least and most political writer we have ever had.  His work is in so many respects another human comedy along the lines of Dante, but he never lost sight of the various social, politic and institutional abuses of his time.  He is really the great giant of mid-Victorian liberalism, best caught in Charles Dickens, George Orwell’s brilliant pen portrait, which concludes thus;

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

I don’t think there is any better description of the free English intellect.  It’s an insightful portrait of Dickens just as it’s an insightful portrait of Orwell himself. 

The English have never been hung on a cross of theory.  The Victorian age provides plenty of examples of this, of people reaching for practical solutions to practical problems. Karl Marx would have crucified us.  Though he spent many years in exile in London, he never understood the people among whom he lived.   Always expecting great things from the English proletariat, the most advanced in Europe, by the lights of his theory, he came to see that England was the one country in Europe with a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois working class as well as a bourgeois bourgeois! His last recorded words were “To the Devil with the British.”

To be cast to the Devil by Karl, is there any better compliment, I wonder? 

Death by Diversity

Observers of the last general election will surely remember the encounter between Gordon Brown and a woman by the name of Gillian Duffy, a voter from some Lancashire constituency or other, a person of no importance at all; just an ordinary individual.  Still, she had her fifteen minutes of fame.  She spoke some unwelcome truths to the then Prime Minister.  She raised concerns over mass immigration, for which she was later dismissed as an ‘awful woman’ and a ‘bigot’ by Brown when he thought only his toadies were listening. 

Gillian Duffy became for a brief time everywoman, or everyperson,  a representative of thousands and thousands of ordinary voters who have effectively been disenfranchised, vote or not, by the political machine, by the social democratic oligarchy that dominates debate and dismisses each and every concern over immigration as ‘bigotry’ and ‘racism.’  The real issue is nothing of the kind; the real issue is numbers.  But it’s become a truth that dare not speak its name, or if it does speak its name – bang! bang!, you are dead. 

Douglas Murray is one of the few journalists for whom I have a particularly high regard.  He says what he thinks, a dangerous pastime in our liberally illiberal culture.  He said what he thinks about mass immigration in the latest issue of Standpoint (“A census that revealed our troubling future”).  His focus is the 2011 census, which does indeed show that we have a troubling future.  The census, and the comment that has followed its publication, shows something else I think: it shows that England, as a nation, is being systematically eroded, worn away, deliberately so, by the politicians, bureaucrats and pundits who govern our lives and dominate our media.

I often use the term England – wrongly, I’m occasionally reminded – to refer to the United Kingdom as a whole.  But here I really do mean England.  Wales, which I do not know that well, and Scotland, which I know very well indeed, have magnified their own distinct identities, just as England’s vanishes by degrees.  The arrogance of the liberal intelligentsia, you know, the Islington set, is quite stunning, the contempt for our past and our traditions palpable.  Murray mentions two of the usual suspects, liberal rent-a-mouths wheeled out on television discussion shows – Bonnie Greer and Will Self, the former who appeared on Newsnight, the latter on Question Time. 

So, Greer speaks – “There is always this failsafe, spoken or unspoken, that there is a British identity.  That’s always interesting to me.  I think it one of the geniuses of the British – of being British – is that there isn’t this sort of rock-solid definition of identity that an American has.”

She obviously is referring to the English, as I think few will dispute that the Scots, Welsh and Irish have a fairly rock-solid definition of identity.  The argument that the English allegedly do not is a justification for mass immigration, the more the merrier, all in the name of multiculturalism and diversity.  One of the most alarming facts from the census is that native English people are now in a minority in London, the nation’s capital.  Boris Johnson, the mayor, says that we need to “stop moaning about the dam burst.”  Yes, that’s right; let’s just drown.  In 23 out of the 33 London Boroughs ‘white Britons’ are now in a minority.  A spokesman for the National Statistics Office apparently hailed this as a victory for ‘diversity.’  As Murray rightly asks, what exactly are the limits of diversity?  When there are no white Londoners at all? 

Then there is that self-satisfied prig Will Self, the grand ayatollah of soft soap leftism, mouthing away shop-soiled clichés on Newsnight.  The audience was packed with the usual debating fodder (does the BBC keep these people in permanent reserve?), that ‘cross section’ of the English public who clap at every right on remark, sorry, left on remark.  In the wake of the census he said “Up to the Suez crisis...most people’s conception of what being British involved was basically going overseas and subjugating black and brown people and taking their stuff and the fruits of their labours.  That was the core part of British identity, was the British empire. [sic]. Now the various members of the political class have tried to revive the idea quite recently without much success?” 

Do you have any idea what he is on about because, quite frankly, I don’t?  Anyway, his view is in complete contrast to that of George Orwell, who had far more direct experience of Empire than Self will ever have.  Most English people ignored the Empire, Orwell wrote more than once; it wasn’t something that impacted directly on their lives.  The Self argument is essentially that England must be punished for its past ‘crimes’.  The Empire, you see, strikes back in mass immigration.  The Newsnight audience went in to orgasmic hysteria over his platitudes – “The people who line up on the opposition to the immigration line of the argument are usually racists...with an antipathy to people, particularly with black and brown skins.” 

Back we go to Gillian Duffy and her kind, the people who simply don’t matter, the people who are not ‘representative’ enough ever to be included in a Newsnight audience, the people who can be scorned and ignored as their nation is literally swept from under them by the dam burst.  These are the people that Self and the other metropolitan literati can disregard; these are the people who can be damned as racist with the usual self-satisfied smugness of those who know that they are always right. 

I value the tolerance of the English people, one of the defining characteristics of an identity that we are not supposed to have.  But tolerance can be too tolerant.  Is there any other nation in the world that would allow itself to be treated like this, to be told that mass immigration is a necessary corrective for past wrongs?  The implication is that the end of England should be celebrated in the name of diversity. 

We are not and never have been a nation of migrants, another lie perpetrated by the likes of Greer and Self.  Until fairly recently in history our identity as a people was solid and unremarkable.  The mass migration of the French Huguenots in the late seventeenth century, for example, was a fraction of a fraction compared with today’s figures.  Orwell could write about the English in a wholly uncontroversial way.  He couldn’t now; few could.  Perhaps we should call, before it is too late, for our country to wake up.  Either that or face death by diversity.  

In Praise of Tolkien

  

Once again I’ve been back to Middle Earth.  What a delight it was to arrive in The Shire in times BLR - before Lord of the Rings; what a delight it was to see Bilbo in his youth in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. 

This is not a movie review.  All I will say is that The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien’s slender prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has itself been padded out into a trilogy, of which An Unexpected Journey is the first part.  Bilbo’s journey is thus considerably longer than expected.  The yarn has been spun out, unnecessarily so, some might conclude.    

No, it’s not a movie review.  I want to talk about something else altogether: I want to talk about old J. R. R. as a cultural colossus.  Germaine Greer, that 60s feminist fossil, once wrote that it was her nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the ‘most influential’ writer of the twentieth century.  What she meant, in her snooty and condescending way, was that he would turn out to be the most popular. 

Tolkien’s popularity might very well be said to be the nightmare of all the Marxist and sub-Marxist literati, forever perplexed by the obduracy of the Masses, who consistently refused to be impressed by such groundbreaking works as The Intellectual Eunuch or Revolutionary Thought for Infants.  Edmund Wilson, that political fraud and fellow traveller, once dismissed The Lord of the Rings as “balderdash” and “juvenile trash.”  By the end of the last century that selfsame “balderdash” and “juvenile trash” was crowned in a survey by English readers as “the greatest book of the twentieth century.”  I expect it was all just a massive case of false consciousness.

Now I do not want you to think I’m a Tolkien groupie, one of the army who believe that the Master is beyond all criticism; I’m most assuredly not.  I do not think that The Lord of the Rings is ‘the greatest book’ of the twentieth century; far from it.  For me it’s too much of a boy’s own world, a muscular masculine mythology created by a retiring Oxford don.  But I can understand the enthusiasm for Middle Earth, for hobbits, elves, dwarfs, wizards, trolls and orcs.  I can understand, above all, the enthusiasm for The Shire, really an idealised England, Merry England, if you like, of a mythical and pre-industrial age. 

The thing is, you see, while Tolkien may not the most influential writer of the last or any other century, he has a good claim to be the most influential conservative writer, and the emphasis really does have to be placed on conservative.  He is the most influential simply because he is the most reassuring, speaking directly to the sub-political conservatism of ordinary people.

George Orwell would have understood this.  In the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier, a journey into England’s industrial north in the 1930s, he discusses the problem of socialism.  In his view socialism, as a cure for the ills of the time, was a jolly good thing.  Even so, he was objective enough to understand that, as a political philosophy, it was deeply repellent to ‘spiritually sensitive’ people.  Why?  Simply because socialism, as he puts it, is essentially an urban creed.  It’s also a creed bound up a theory of endless mechanisation, in the worship of machines.  It must lead to some form of collectivisation; it demands things that are “not compatible with a primitive way of life.”

Middle Earth is a ‘primitive way of life’; life in The Shire is harmonious and primitive, Arcadia at its most benign.  Tolkien spins a moral fable not just of good and evil, but one in which evil is represented as the antithesis of nature.  The orcs are not born; they are tortured into existence, manufactured, if you like.  They serve as the helots of industry.  Who can forget that scene in The Two Towers, the second part of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, where Saruman, the evil wizard, muses on the future of Middle Earth?  As his orcs are busy destroying Fangorn Forest, the trees to be used as fuel in subterranean manufactories, he sees a new world arising, a joyless world where all are subject to the machine.

In a recent article in the political journal Standpoint (Why do precious leftists loathe Tolkien’s Shire?), David Platt drew my attention to A. N. Wilson’s Age of Elizabeth II.  This opens with a tribute to Tolkien, whom the author regarded as the “towering English literary genius of the Queen’s reign.”  For him Tolkien, in his gloomier mood, presaged the post-war destruction of English life, the dismantling of our cohesive social conventions.  The Shire is the yeoman republic, faced with the onward march of industry, urbanisation and deforestation.

Tolkien’s political message is clear enough.  Those familiar with the novels will be aware that Jackson left out an important postscript in his adaptation of The Return of the King.  The Ring of Power has been destroyed.  Their quest completed, Frodo and the other hobbits return to the Shire, hoping to recapture a home that history has passed by.  But it has not.  Saruman has come.  As Platt says in his article, a collectivist and totalitarian regime has been imposed on the Shire folk, one that is subsequently overthrown in a popular coup.  The attack on post-war socialism could not be more direct. 

Tolkien!, thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.  Just imagine what he would have made of the Shire now; just imagine what this professor of Anglo-Saxon and advocate of Beowulf would have made of our yeoman republic in its senescence.  How he would have loathed our world of political correctness, regulation and shabby acronyms, a world where political labels like Conservative, Liberal and Socialist have become practically meaningless as one movement melds into another, as England merges more and more into a ghastly Continental Mordor, watched over by the Great Eye of Brussels. 

So, yes, Tolkien speaks to the conservative in all of us, regardless of our particular politics.  He speaks to all those who reverence the past, all those who despise theory, anything contrived and artificial.  In a deeper sense he speaks to all those who have a love of England and its ancient folkways.  OK, I confess to a personal lack of realism here, nostalgia for things that perhaps never were, for an England of wolves, of fens and of myths, an England where Grendel still broods in the marsh. But I prefer that to Greer and all her howling eunuchs.  

Unhappy Breed

I’ve been trying to enlighten American users on Blog Catalogue on the exact meaning of ‘human rights’ when it comes to their practical application here in Europe. It’s difficult swimming against the tide - something I’m rather used to - when people are still dewy-eyed over the principle. How can anyone be opposed to human rights? It’s a jolly good thing; surely we can all agree?

Well, if you are American, imagine this: imagine a court in, say, Mexico City or La Paz laying down the law for the people of the United States. Imagine judges from afar undermining the authority of Congress, the authority of the President, the authority of the Supreme Court; imagine a foreign tribunal undermining the Constitution itself. Can you make this leap of imagination? No, it’s doubtless next to impossible. But this is how we now live in England.

I wrote recently about the notorious example of Abu Qatada (Independence for England, 23 January), a hate preacher and inspirer of terrorists, himself an alleged terrorist, wanted for his part in a bombing campaign in his native Jordan. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg blocked his extradition on the supposition (I really have to stress supposition) that he would not get a ‘fair trial’, this in the face of all assurances to the contrary. He is now at large while the government appeals the ruling.

Ahead of Qatada’s release, Prime Minister David Cameron made his feelings known before the Council of Europe, the feelings, I have little doubt, of the vast majority of the British people;

…the problem today is that you can end up with someone who has no right to live in your country, who you are convinced – and have good reason to be convinced – means to do your country harm. And yet there are circumstances in which you cannot try them, you cannot detain them and you cannot deport them.

Big and small they come, as we are slowly strangled by an alien noose. The small includes the case of Milnd Sande, a male nurse who served twelve months in jail for sexually assaulting a pregnant patient. As an Indian national he should have been deported on release, the normal practice hitherto with all foreign criminals. But he can’t be deported because the Court, under Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights, ruled that he had a ‘right to a family life.’ The irony is that his wife and children are not even here. They are somewhere in India on an ‘extended holiday.’

This is not a unique example. Approximately some four hundred foreign criminals a year are using this loophole to stay in the country, including a Nigerian who raped a thirteen-year-old girl, a man who has no wife, children or long-term partner in this country. This comes on top of thousands of others, illegal immigrants who have used the same provision to be allowed to stay, all in defiance of government policy on controlling mass migration.

There is another ruling by the ECHR I have in mind, one with potentially explosive political consequences. Last year it decreed that denying the franchise to convicted prisoners was a breach of their human rights. But these jail birds can only vote if Parliament changes British law. This was a step too far, a surrender too cowardly. By a huge margin the House of Commons voted against any such move, a shock to the government, which supinely had intended to give way. Instead it had to appeal against the verdict.

Despite his veto over the European Treaty amendments last December I have no real confidence in David Cameron’s ability to stand up to the diktats of the ECHR. He, I suspect, will prove to be an appeaser of deeper dye than Neville Chamberlain. Oh, there is lots of manoeuvring and political posturing, attitudes being struck designed to appeal to an increasingly exasperated Tory back-bench, exasperated by Europe, exasperated by the abuse of human rights and exasperated with the laughable Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General, who effectively sabotaged any attempt to pull out of the jurisdiction of Strasbourg as part of Conservative Party policy.

What price freedom, what price sovereignty, what price England? Ah, yes, England; now John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II comes to mind;

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England..

The fortress is gone, the wall breached, the moat bridged; the enemy is within the gates. The happy breed gets less happy by the day.

England Made Me

I now write for the English Standard (www.englishstandard.co), a new online paper designed to advance English views on English subjects, on the subject of England itself, a country that for too long dare not speak its name, though its Celtic neighbours more or less bawled theirs. To date I’ve contributed two articles, one on the poet Rupert Brooke and another on Sir Edward Hawke, the admiral who fought the Battle of Quiberon Bay during the Seven Year’s War, a naval victory over France that led to the ascent of Empire.

Here I am, spreading myself around: Ana the Imp, BrooWaha, My Telegraph (formerly), Boadicea’s Chariot (occasionally) and now the English Standard! It’s all good fun, no hardship at all. I love to write, to express my thoughts, my uniquely individual point of view, over any number of subjects, anything that attracts my eye, the ridiculous, the sublime and all points in between.

Anyway, ES is a fine venture, one that I’m happy to be associated with, flattered that I was invited to contribute. The editorial statement makes it clear that it’s about reclaiming English identity, too long submerged in collective notions of Britishness. It is, I suppose, anti-Union in purpose, in that the Union has served the interests of the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish Loyalists far more than it has served those of the English.

This is a subject I begin to think about more and more, though personally speaking I still retain some Unionist sympathies. I have a slight concern that if the United Kingdom dissolves into its constituent parts that we will be more vulnerable to the monstrous importunities of the European Union, an organisation that I have come to loath. Still the issue of identity politics presses on us ever harder, issues brought more sharply into focus by the last Labour government, conceivably the most treasonable in all of our history.

Three years ago I wrote an essay, again by invitation, to a site dedicated to a single question – what England means to me. In this I made the following points;

Britishness? Ah, yes, now there is a problem. I grew up believing simply that Britishness and Englishness were more or less the same thing though I was very well aware that the Celtic nations had a separate and somewhat prickly identity. It’s been their assertiveness, their determination to be ‘themselves’, to govern themselves, that resulted in our present botched constitutional settlement, one that has really forced me to focus more specifically on simple Englishness. I no longer use British to identify myself other than to say that I have a British passport.

Yes, our present constitutional settlement is botched, badly thought-out and unfinished. It has raised more questions than it has answered, the question over England’s political sovereignty above all, our right to manage our own domestic affairs without outside interference, interference by those who are not English. Where does England fit in the devolved United Kingdom? I simply don’t know. There is, so far as I can tell, no great desire for a separate English parliament, but things cannot go on as they are indefinitely. It’s a house of cards which will fall, I believe, if we ever again have a Labour administration only kept in place by MPs from Scotland and Wales.

Britain is indeed a house of cards, though it gives me no pleasure to say so. People here are increasingly frustrated by the unanswered West Lothian Question, namely how long will we tolerate politicians coming from out-with England being able to interfere with our political affairs when we are unable to interfere with theirs?

This, like the Human Rights Act, mass immigration, the abandonment of ever more sovereignty to the European Union, the after effects of one ruinously expensive foreign war after another, is the legacy of the wholly vile Tony Blair. It’s rather ironic that this man, who seems to have no specific nationality at all, a cosmopolitan free-floater, has been indirectly responsible for a new English assertiveness. England made me; it’s an axiom that I no longer have any interest in denying. God bless the ES and all who sail in her!

Independence for England!

In 1290, following the death of Margaret the Maid of Norway, the Scottish throne fell vacant. With no generally acceptable candidate the Scots nobility turned to Edward I as an arbiter. Edward arbitrated alright, but at a cost. Scotland got its king, John Balliol, only to lose its freedom. As part of the deal Edward insisted that all appeals against the judgements of Scottish royal courts be reserved to his person, undermining the very thing that defines a sovereign state – the right to determine its own legal affairs.

England now finds itself in the same position; the country has lost the right over its legal affairs; the country has effectively lost its sovereignty and its independence. Last week the European Court of Human Rights decreed that the government cannot deport Abu Quatada, a notorious terrorist and hate preacher, a man once described as Osama Bin Laden’s ambassador in Europe, to his native Jordan, where he is wanted for conspiring to carry out bombings. The suspicion is, you see, that he will not get a ‘fair trial.’

So we have the trial instead, the threat of this appalling individual living free in our midst. At present he is being held in Long Lartin, a high security jail, but, if the judgement is allowed to stand, he could be released in three months, to join his wife and five children, all supported at the expense of the tax payer, and that expense so far has amounted to more than a million pounds.

These foreign judges, people with an outlook wholly alien to our traditions, accept assurances that Qatada will not be ill-treated in Jordan. But that’s not enough, oh, no; for some of the evidence to be used against him may, I say, may, have come from torture. This after the Law Lords in our own High Court of Parliament ruled that there was no proof that any of the evidence against Qatada had been obtained by torture.

So, on a supposition, we are left with the reality, a perpetual threat, one who will have to be monitored continuously at yet more astronomic expense. Can things, I ask myself, get any crazier? Yes, with these foreigners undermining our government, our parliament and the highest court in the land they can and they will.

In 1296, the Scots, having had enough of Edward’s legalistic tyranny, threw off the shackles and began a prolonged struggle for national independence, this with a fraction of the provocation we have suffered at the hands of Europe. It’s time England had its own war of independence, to begin with a referendum on membership of the European Union, an organisation and a tyranny of which I, for one, am heartily sick.

Iron in the Soul

I have one major failing: I simply can’t abide fools. It’s not a question of a person having a different viewpoint from me; that’s a part of life. I can deeply disagree with people while still respecting what they have to say. What angers me is ignorance and the wilful misinterpretation of words. Let me show you what I mean.

I took part in a discussion recently on patriotism, on the meaning of patriotism, specifically directed to one’s own personal feelings on the matter. My answer was simple enough: I said it meant exactly the same thing to me as it did to Rupert Brooke, that golden boy of long-gone golden summer;

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
that is forever England. There shall be
in that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
a dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
a body of England's breathing English air,
washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
a pulse in the eternal mind, no less
gives back somewhere the thoughts by England given;
her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
and laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
in hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

It’s a poem by a soldier in the midst of war, a soldier writing from one of the theatres of war, but it’s not about war, not about hatred, not about enmity, not about vainglory; no, it’s simply about home, what home means, what love of home means, the words and sentiments of a patriot. The difference between this and nationalism could not be greater. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, a patriot is a person who loves their country; a nationalist a person who hates everyone else’s country.

In another essay posted last October (England, my England) I defined precisely what England means to me, what it is that defines me specifically as English, in all my uniqueness and eccentricity;

Yes, I’m not British; I’m English. I cycle from my rooms to college most days. I go riding just about every Sunday along old bridal paths. I like gymkhanas and country pursuits in general. I go hunting in season. I have a passion for the history of my country, particularly for the England of the seventeenth century, which has done so much to confirm my belief in the importance of monarchy in our constitution. I enjoy such food as roast beef - though I have a preference for venison -, fresh salmon, scones with high tea and stodgy puddings. I like to be taken punting on the Cam on warm spring days. I like May balls and daffodils. I like strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. I love the plays of William Shakespeare, the poetry of John Donne and the novels of Charles Dickens. I like Tudor and Stuart dance music and the orchestral work of Frederick Delius, particularly Brigg Fair and In a Summer Garden. I like old churches and ruined castles. I have a tremendous affection for the Church of England and an even greater affection for old English folkways. I like Christmas carols, the more traditional the better. I distrust alien ideologies, like socialism, communism and scientology, any form of fanaticism, really, in politics or religion. I distrust political enthusiasm and hero worship. Or if I do like heroes it's historic fatties like Sir John Falstaff or Horace Rumpole! I dislike American spellings of English English words. I like to go to Henley for the regatta and I far prefer tea, English Breakfast, to be precise, to cappuccino!

I am what I am; a single-minded English girl, whose simple love of home entails no harm and does no harm. But then, oh then, came the stupidity, those who could not tell the difference between introspective patriotism and aggressive nationalism, those who persisted in seeing patriotism as a form of wilful ignorance, as a mood of superiority, as a rejection of other nations and other loyalties; that one somehow perceived these as ‘inferior.’ I let rip in my inimitable way, doling out in full measure the kind of response this deserved.

There are some people, sad to say, not just of limited wit but almost completely lacking in basic comprehension. I have no hesitation at all in making a fool look like a fool, condemned not so much by what I say as their own choice of words. I’m neither going to mention the context of this discussion or the people in question. There are those, as Plato says, who only have iron in the soul.

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.

England’s Democrats

I was recently asked if I would look over the manifesto of the English Democrats Party (EDP). Well, now I have, a version that I downloaded from their webpage. I assume there is nothing later, though the document is clearly more than a year out of date, insofar as it makes reference to a Labour government dominated by Scots. Still I imagine little has changed in the way of the party’s fundamental aims.

I have to say that while I was certainly aware of this party’s existence I knew very little about it, other than it was a sort of English version of the Scottish National Party. The manifesto certainly confirms that, a central aim being the creation of a Parliament for England in the fashion of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly.

It seems to me that the EDP exists thanks to two things: the as yet unanswered West Lothian Question, namely why are Scottish MPs allowed to interfere in English affairs when English MPs have no equivalent right, and Tony Blair’s botched constitutional settlement, which left England in a kind of political limbo. To use the jargon, the party was born of a perceived democratic and constitutional deficit. It’s the English Parliament party; it will always be the English Parliament party. The problem is that this would seem to be a basis too narrow to allow it ever to make a serious political breakthrough.

The manifesto is about so much more, of course. There is a broad range of policies, much of which I can agree with without reservation, particularly on withdrawal from the European Union and the ending of mass immigration. There is also a highly commendable critique of political correctness and multi-culturalism, both of which I despise with a passion. I particularly liked the passage dealing with the background of the ghastly European Union, or the Franco-German Union, some simple facts that people need to be more aware of;

European integration, as conceived by the Frenchman Jean Monnet, had the aim of tying Germany into a network of political and economic links with France and other European states so that it would be impossible for Germany to go to war with them. That was by no means the only motivation for seeking ever-closer political and economic union. The interests of Germany and France came together in the peculiar circumstances following World War II. Advantage could be gained for both by combining a post-war German economic revival with French political and agricultural dominance. Germany gained a secure market for its manufacturing industry and France gained a protected market and financial support for its agriculture. In addition, France obtained privileged access to the European market for its colonial produce, and took the lead in building European institutions on the French model – centralised and bureaucratic. The aim from the beginning was to enmesh the states of Europe in an economic, political and military union from which they could not break free. That goal was, and still is, considered more important than the democratic nicety of explaining the goal to the electorate and seeking its approval.


For me this is the key; this bureaucratic tyranny is a far greater danger to our liberty, our sovereignty and our identity as a nation than the absence of a dedicated English parliament. But of course the EDP can’t make too much of this particular platform, for the United Kingdom Independence Party more or less has the ground fully occupied.

There are aspects of the manifesto that I am not convinced by. I do not want ‘reform’ of the House of Lords; I do not want an elected second chamber, the Liberal Democrat agenda. There are the usual bland nostrums about the National Health Service, the sacred cow of our national life, long overdue for an appointment in the abattoir! There is a rather vague nod towards policies on green energy, something else I’m deeply sceptical about, as I made clear in Whistle down the Wind. The EDP wants referenda as a feature of our national life on the Swiss model, something else I reject, something that would inevitably lead to voter fatigue and the domination of tireless and self-interested minorities.

Overall it was an interesting and unobjectionable read but it’s a policy for fragmentation which might very well suit the aims of the Euro-rats in Brussels (I wrote Eurocrats. I gave way to my spell checker for this more apt description!). I confess I feel far more English than British; I feel that if the Scots and the Welsh want to go their separate ways then so be it; but I do have a residual attachment to the Union, so much greater than the sum of its parts.

The Scots, I am convinced, will never vote for complete independence. The English, I am equally convinced, will never vote for yet another layer of government. Westminster is our Parliament; it has been for centuries. I agree, however, that it’s not working as well as it might, that something has to be done to ensure that English laws are made by English legislators and only English legislators.

Carry on Upstairs Downstairs

Last September ITV, the commercial television company in England, began airing Downton Abbey, a new costume drama set in Edwardian England. It was successful enough to warrant a second series, which will be aired later this year.

I so wanted to see it, not just because I love historical dramas but also because the script was written by Julian Fellowes, the English actor, novelist and screen-writer responsible for Gosford Park, a wonderful movie that, amongst other things, explores class relations in the England of the 1930s in a splendidly comic light. Unfortunately I don’t have a telly in my rooms at college, so I missed the debut series. To make good I was given the DVD as a Christmas present.

Now, at last, I’ve seen it…and I rather wish I had not! What a disappointment it is, how ridiculous the script, how absurdly modern the view of Edwardian people and times. I could have excused it if it had the same comic overtones as Gosford Park, but it does not. Oh, sorry, that’s not quite true, because it worked for me on a level of pastiche, so much so that, at first reflection, I thought Fellowes might have written in an intentionally sardonic mood, laughing at those who take this kind of tosh seriously. Oh, yes, it’s tosh alright, a sort of Carry on Upstairs Downstairs

I’m not sure where to begin, so the butler might be the best place. Charles Carson (Jim Carter), the said butler, has a shady past: well, not really - he was once part of a music-hall double act, the Cheerful Charlies; that’s all. Butlers, of course, are the ultimate word in being a gentleman’s gentleman; so when Charles Griggs (Nicky Henson), the other Charlie, turns up he decides to be a right Charlie by attempting a spot of extortion, just to show that Charlie the Butler is no better than he ought to be. He finally enters the grand house, admitted by the front door (really?), wearing a crown derby hat, the sure sign of a cad (it helps to be able to read the signs!) Enter Robert Crawley, earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), and lord of this absurd manor, who promptly pays off this Dick Dastardly! Why not just tell him to fuck off? I would not have been surprised if he had; it would have been quite in keeping with the tone being set!

Lord Grantham has daughters, three of them - Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) and Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown-Finlay). Unfortunately his male heir died in the sinking of the Titanic, an event with which Downton is ushered in, and as the girls can’t inherit the estate in their own right the best thing is to marry the eldest off to some wealthy husband. The duke of Crowborough (Charlie Cox) is a possibility, so he is invited to trot along as a house guest. The problem is he is a bit of an Oscar Wilde in sexual preference, not only that but he immediately tries to seduce Thomas (William Mason), a footman. So, it’s bye, bye your gay grace!

Next one Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) is found, a distant cousin who turns out to be a frightful middle-class prig, with his even more frightful do-gooding mother (Penelope Wilton), who clashes dreadfully with the old dowager countess (Maggie Smith). Not really the county set, don't ye know.

Poor Lady Mary, faced with the prospect of being married to this tiresome and earnest bore, has a bit of a fling when Kemal Pamuk (Theo James), a lusty Turkish diplomat, turns up in the house, and almost as promptly turns up in her bedroom. There, in the course of the night, the tupping Turk, obviously exhausted by his sexual exertions, shuffles off his mortal coil. Oh, I forgot to mention that he was helped to find the bedroom by a gay servant, one the duke obviously missed, who made the mistake of trying his chances.

Oh, what to do, what to do? Think of the scandal – a naked Turk, a naked dead Turk in her ladyship’s bed! Mummy (Elizabeth McGovern), an unflappable old brick, immediately comes to the rescue, and with the aid of Daisy (Sophie McShera), the scullery maid (the scullery maid!!), carries the said dead naked Turk back to his own bed. All are sworn to secrecy but, alas, Daisy later confides in Lady Edith, the jealous younger sister (what, no Turk?), who promptly writes to the Turkish ambassador, revealing all the facts, the sort of thing that Edwardian sisters did. Don’t worry; Mary gets her own back, putting the kibosh on Edith’s marriage prospects!

I could go on like this, go on about this risible commune, where the upstairs people are equally at home in downstairs worlds, but I’m getting bored with the whole silly farrago. Hugh Bonneville, whose performance is unbelievably wooden, was interviewed recently, saying that people enjoy the series because it reminds them of the simple values of ‘dignity’ and ‘mutual respect’ that used to exist in this country. Oh, not I, Hugh, you dear old thing; it reminds me of something else altogether, like slapstick and farce! No matter; seemingly American folk are also lapping it up, this tale of Never Never Land. :-)

Beaten by Eton

I was amused to discover that Rudolf von Ribbentrop, the son of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi diplomat, went to Westminster School when his father was ambassador to Great Britain in the 1930s. Ribbentrop junior, now in his late eighties, recently published a memoir detailing his time at one of England’s most prestigious public schools. When I say public I mean private, and when I say private I mean the fees are somewhere up in the stratosphere, which means that he would be in the company of boys from some of the best connected families in the land, the heart of the old establishment.

The thing is about the Nazis that, while they paraded themselves as the ‘master race’, they had a distinct inferiority complex when it came to the English upper classes. One only has to read Mein Kampf to understand just how enamoured Hitler was with the British way of doing things, particularly when it came to imperial matters. His favourite movie was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which he watched time and again, telling his court that it was Germany’s destiny to rule Russia in the way that the British ruled India.

So, it was quite a coup to have a Ribbentrop at Westminster, ready to pass back intelligence to the Fatherland, information on the thinking of the only people the Germans believed mattered. The problem was that neither he nor his father had a clue about English cultural attitudes or public school mores. When junior was asked if he wanted to join the school’s Officer Training Corps (OTC), one of the steady institutions of all the best schools, he passed the information back to his father, who immediately reported to Berlin that the English were preparing their public schoolboys for war, not pausing to think that, if they were, they would hardly invite the participation of a German!

On another occasion there was a debate on whether the German colonies, lost at the end of the First World War, should be returned. When the motion was carried (these things are always won or lost on debating points and skill, not on matters of principle) the information was also passed back to Germany, a sign that the British were willing to make concessions. When an MP visited the school to praise the League of Nations and criticise Hitler, junior rose to contradict him and was immediately slapped down by the master in attendance, saying that while questions were welcome speeches were not, again a fairly standard, and continuing, put down. The other boys, true to their nature and a collective sense of grievance, stood up and walked out, a gesture also misread by Hitler’s Bismarck, who interpreted this as a sign that British sympathy for German policies ran deep!

The poor old Germans; they tried so hard to understand without even getting close. Hitler as well as enjoying movies about the British also adopted what he took to be English style, reading the Tatler and insisting on full afternoon tea, drunk from the best bone china, when he was relaxing at the Berghof, his mountain retreat in Bavaria. Himmler shared his master’s enthusiasm for English manners and attitudes, placing cricket among the compulsory sports played at the SS officer’s school in Brunswick. In anticipation of victory in 1940 Walter Schellenberg, an SS intelligence expert, prepared a handbook which, amongst other things, praises public schools, particularly Eton, the best of them all, but warning his fellow officers not to put their sons names down, because it “is sold out until 1949.” Even the Nazis, as it says in the Times, had absorbed enough of the English spirit to understand that queue jumping for Britain’s best school was simply not the thing, old boy.

So, the Germans, having conquered Poland and France, anticipating conquering Britain beyond, realised that there were clear limits even to their power: they were prepared to be beaten by Eton!

England, my England

I’ve been thinking quite closely about issues of national identity, issues that arose from my recent blog (This England). I recall a documentary some years ago made by one Darcus Howe, a black writer and broadcaster (his colour is relevant, as you will see), in which he explored this very question. It was called The White Tribe, a kind of cultural safari in search of England, of what it meant to be English. A great many of the people he asked, people mostly from white working class communities, could not answer his basic questions. One respondent, struggling to come up with something, eventually alighted on line dancing!

In the course of his journey he also managed to have a brief exchange with Lord Tebbit, who admitted that concepts of English identity were indeed problematic. He went on to say that his ancestors were migrants from the Low Countries, and he was glad that they had moved, otherwise he would have been born a Belgian! Then their discussion moved on to Englishness and Britishness. Howe was told that he was not ‘ethnically English’. “Do you mean because of the colour of my skin?”, he asked. “No”, Tebbit replied, seemingly forgetting that he had already defined himself as not ‘ethnically English, “you are not English, but we are both British.”

So, the question clearly has to be, what happens to Darcus and all of his kindred if Britain disappears, as it may very well do anytime within the next fifty years? I’m going to hold off on giving an answer here for a bit, though you might already have arrived at your own.

To a large extent Howe was in pursuit of a chimera, something that even he did not fully understand, something he had not really attempted to define. For example, he thought that a ploughman’s lunch- which he could not track down amidst the curries and burgers- was an example of ‘traditional English fare’, whereas in truth it’s a pure marketing invention, traceable back only to the 1950s. But what about his assertion that England was full of people who don’t want to be English anymore, that we have turned into the cappuccino race, rootless and impossibly cosmopolitan? The short answer is that it’s rubbish.

The thing is the English, the English race, if you prefer, though that’s that seems to me to be an expression devoid of all meaning, has been made up of successive waves of migrants, ancient and modern. My own ancestors are Norman French, though I’m English through and through, ancestry being no more than a distant echo. Yes, there is a vagueness about our national identity, certainly in contrast with more recent migrants, who still carry an attachment to foreign places. But I’m going to go so far as to say that to be vague is to be quintessentially English, to be vague and to be slightly eccentric, beyond the comprehension of outsiders.

I have no idea at all what it means to be British; I know exactly what it is to be English, to belong to my England. Here is a passage from an essay I wrote dedicated to the question what England means to me;

Britishness? Ah, yes, now there is a problem. I grew up believing simply that Britishness and Englishness were more or less the same thing though I was very well aware that the Celtic nations had a separate and somewhat prickly identity. It’s been their assertiveness, their determination to be ‘themselves’, to govern themselves, that resulted in our present botched constitutional settlement, one that has really forced me to focus more specifically on simple Englishness. I no longer use British to identify myself other than to say that I have a British passport.

Yes, I’m not British; I’m English. I cycle from my rooms to college most days. I go riding just about every Sunday along old bridal paths. I like gymkhanas and country pursuits in general. I go hunting in season. I have a passion for the history of my country, particularly for the England of the seventeenth century, which has done so much to confirm my belief in the importance of monarchy in our constitution. I enjoy such food as roast beef - though I have a preference for venison -, fresh salmon, scones with high tea and stodgy puddings. I like to be taken punting on the Cam on warm spring days. I like May balls and daffodils. I like strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. I love the plays of William Shakespeare, the poetry of John Donne and the novels of Charles Dickens. I like Tudor and Stuart dance music and the orchestral work of Frederick Delius, particularly Brigg Fair and In a Summer Garden. I like old churches and ruined castles. I have a tremendous affection for the Church of England and an even greater affection for old English folkways. I like Christmas carols, the more traditional the better. I distrust alien ideologies, like socialism, communism and scientology, any form of fanaticism, really, in politics or religion. I distrust political enthusiasm and hero worship. Or if I do like heroes it's historic fatties like Sir John Falstaff or Horace Rumpole! I dislike American spellings of English English words. I like to go to Henley for the regatta and I far prefer tea, English Breakfast, to be precise, to cappuccino!

So, this is my England, this is my nation. It may not be yours but we all have our own vision and our own sense of place, where even things like line dancing will be welcome! For that’s the best thing of all about being English – our power to adapt, to turn foreign influences to our own ends.

There will always be an England, even if Britain goes, an England where the descendents of Darcus Howe will be welcome, because Norman Tebbit is wrong: it’s not about ethnicity, or colour, or race, or class, or state – it’s an attitude of mind.

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.

This England

The October issue of Prospect has a review by Maurice Glasman of Michael Wood’s new book The Story of England. The publication ties in with a new six-part documentary on BBC 4, purporting to unravel English history in microcosm, looking at it through the prism of a single village, Kibworth in Leicestershire. Wood is good as a telly historian, always tackling his subject with simple clarity and school-boyish enthusiasm; so the new venture looks quite promising.

I’ve not read the book so I can offer no direct comment here. However, Glasman, in his own analysis, has raised some general issues with which I am in absolute agreement. He begins with a stark observation: “There is a political void where England should be.” It’s perfectly true: England no longer governs itself. The people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have devolved parliaments or assemblies. But what about England the country that created Parliament in the first place? Westminster, the seat of an ancient assembly, represents the union, not the nation. As Glasman puts it, England, as a political nation, has no body and it cannot speak.

Wood writes in his book “For a small country on the far shore of the Eurasian landmass, its influence on the world of literature, language, politics, law and ideas of freedom has been out of all proportion to its size. Why this should have been so is an interesting question in itself.” It certainly is. An even more pressing question is why has England been diminished and marginalised? The Scottish question, the Welsh question and even the Northern Ireland question, at least to a degree, have been answered, but not the question of England, now the most pressing part of the last government’s catastrophically bad constitutional ‘settlement’ that settled nothing.

England has been betrayed. Wood’s book is about the ordinary people of England, the labouring poor, as they were once described, the people who have been subject to particular treachery by those who pretend to represent them in the modern world. Glasman takes the example of mass immigration, which affected England more than any other country of the union- “Yet there was no political body that could speak for England, that could express and embody the political life of the nation.” The dispossession of the English, it might be said, has been almost as thorough as the dispossession of the Anglo-Saxons in the wake of the Norman Conquest.

It’s almost as if some conspiracy has been at work to submerge England, to submerge the story of England. The disconnection between the English and the Labour Party, as Glasman reminds us, has been particularly profound. Where once was talk of native radicalism there is now a huge vacuum, a measure of the intellectual bankruptcy and shallow cosmopolitanism of the Labour movement in this country;

When Gordon Brown gave his most memorable speech of the election campaign on 3rd May at Methodist Central hall he did not speak of the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Levellers or of the London dock strike and the foundation of the health service, but of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama, of civil rights and liberation. It was as if the struggles of people thousands of miles away were of more relevance than those of the country he wished to lead.

Glasman, a senior lecturer in political theory at London Metropolitan University, has political sympathies quite different from my own. He believes that Labour will need to rediscover a radical history rooted in a native tradition if it is ever again to “speak for the nation.” I would rather David Miliband, or whoever the next leader of the Party may be, waffled on interminably about Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, knowing very well that, beyond the hotbeds of Islington, there are precious few who care anything at all about these fashionable and wholly irrelevant international icons, avatars of a bankrupt mood.

Glasman concludes his essay by saying that the English question is silent in our politics and remains so; that it will take a very different book from Wood’s to begin to give it voice. How much longer can this be delayed, I wonder? The English people are remarkably tolerant, so tolerant that I suspect that most have no real sense over the extent to which their interests have been compromised or why they are so little heard. Their tolerance has been taken for granted, perhaps even as a sign of apathy or indifference, a sign that politicians can get away with anything, can hand out freedom to the fringes while denying it to the centre. For me the Union increasingly resembles a corpse tied to a vital body. If it has to be cast away for us to rediscover our identity, for the English question to be answered at last, then so be it.

Good Luck, England

My boyfriend is in South Africa just at the present with the rest of the barmy army. We’ve had some lengthy conversations recently, dominated, I have to say, by his growing sense of frustration and disappointment over the team’s performance. I much prefer tennis, so I was just ever so slightly bored!

No, I don’t care that much for soccer; I don’t understand the passions and the tribal mentality it induces. It seems to me to go against all of the principles of sportsmanship, or at least how I understand sportsmanship. It’s the one enthusiasm that he and I do not share. But I do care for my country, and deeply so, just as I care for him. He called after the Slovenia match in an incredibly upbeat mood. His enthusiasm, his optimism, was infectious.

Now the big battle is ahead, that with the ‘ancient’ enemy. I will be with him in spirit. I won’t watch because I simply can’t bear the tension. It may come to nothing; my sense of realism tells me that it’s likely to come to nothing. Still, like the rest of the nation, like all of us who are not there, my positive good wishes, all my best hopes, are with the team. Good luck, England; good luck, my country.

Appealing for an English Parliament on Saint George’s Day

Today, the national day of England, Power 2010, a Rowntree-backed campaign group aiming at the reform of our political system and a fairer democracy, has released figures indicating that seven out of ten people now back a Parliament for England. The findings came as last night the movement staged a huge guerrilla-like projection of the Saint George’s Flag with the words ‘Home Rule’ on to the Palace of Westminster.

The poll, carried out by ICM, shows that 68% of voters in England believe that the country should have its own Parliament with similar powers to that of Scotland. In addition 70% of respondents said that English laws should be decided only by MPs representing English constituencies.

It’s worth stressing that this is about a perceived lack of fairness and democratic balance among ordinary voters, rather than Englishness as such. The poll of 1033 people across the country showed that almost half of the respondents feel “equally British or English.”

Pam Giddy, the Director of Power 2010, has rightly highlighted the fact England has not figured at all in the leaders’ debates, or in the campaign, though most people clearly want a fairer way of making decisions that affect their homeland. In a press release issued in the early hours of the morning she said;

It suddenly feels like we are on the cusp of seismic change to the way our politics is done. But so long as the unfair system we have at the moment persists it can only play into the hands of undemocratic voices like the BNP. With all the talk of reform in the air politicians should not duck the English question, but use the opportunity of Saint George’s Day to say where they stand.

For me there continues to be a certain degree of ambivalence here: on the one hand I do think that the Union has been greater than the sum of its parts, while on the other I toy more often with the idea of complete English independence. But what I am in no doubt about at all is that our present system is grossly unfair to the majority of the people who live in this kingdom, a point I made recently in England, it’s Time to Waken Up.

That piece also touched on the fact that the Conservative Party has committed itself to answering the West Lothian Question, and to that degree is in tune with and even one step ahead of the Power 2010 campaign. Still, I do not think that part of the Tory Manifesto is emphasised merely as much as it should be, especially as it would meet with such a receptive audience, given the evidence of this poll.

My Country

I Vow to Thee, My Country is arguably one of the greatest patriotic songs ever written, and would be my personal choice for an anthem for England. The words come from a poem by Sir Cecil Spring-Rice set to the music of Gustav Holst and published just after the First World War.

Nominally it’s a hymn, and is sung in church as such, but it’s really a paean to the great national sacrifice made during the War, an offering on the alter of the God of Battles, Mars himself. It’s for this reason that the second verse is now omitted. It’s even been called ‘heretical.’ But I would have it, and have it in all of its glory.

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

I heard my country calling, away across the sea,
Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me.
Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,
And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.
I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns,
I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.