Saturday 8 November 2014

Little Britons

Douglas Carswell grew up spending half the year at a major public school and the other half on some white settler station in Africa. Set that in the context of the fact that he was not born until 1971.

Daniel Hannan's home in the holidays was not even in the former British Empire or an English-speaking country. He is a product of the Irish Diaspora in South America. He would be entitled to at least three passports, and he probably holds them all.

Having close family ties abroad is not the issue here. Look at the Queen. The issue is the increasing tendency of the British Right not to be culturally British at all: to have grown up abroad when not at Hogwarts, or to have gone to either or both of school and university outside this country, generally in the United States.

It is one thing to have won an Ivy League scholarship from Oxbridge, or indeed anywhere else; in the last fortnight, I have found myself wondering quite what the world was coming to, when the great East Coast Law Schools and the great Californian Film Schools apparently required references from little old David Lindsay before they would consider admitting certain applicants.

But it is quite another to have gone to a British university, if at all, then purely in order to get into an American university. Yet that is increasingly the pattern of the nominally British Right.

Its commitment to the overlapping forces of global capital, American hegemony, Israel First, Gulf (and certain types of Russian) plutocracy, and Rupert Murdoch define its hostility to everything that has instead been achieved by the national and parliamentary sovereignty of the United Kingdom, the greatest force for social democracy that the world has ever seen.

Those achievements are the proudest boasts of culturally British people. But the Right is less and less made up of culturally British people.

It demands an alternative, pseudo-British and pseudo-English culture and "history" that are unrecognisable to anyone who grew up here, or at least who did so beyond certain extremely eccentric institutions that cater very largely for overseas markets.

They know that the real Britain and the real England exist. They hate the real Britain and the real England. They hate anyone who identifies with them.

Such identification gets in the way of their fantasy, in which this is the birthplace and the heartland of a kooky libertarian Right which, it is true, does have the odd historical root here, but which has never constituted anything remotely approaching mainstream opinion.

That is also the basis of their "Anglosphere" nonsense, four of the five supposed pillars of which are defined as much by their shared socialised medicine and other welfare provisions as by their shared monarchy. Defined, that is, against the other one.

But more broadly, Australia, in particular, now positively prides herself on having an essentially West Coast American culture, identifying very strongly with California against the old line about being "an island halfway between England and Ireland."

It is not a coincidence that rampant capitalism has taken such a hold there as identification with Britain has, perhaps inevitably, weakened.

That would have come as no surprise to Tories. Back when there were any.

5 comments:

  1. What a load of cobblers.

    Britain is defined by a system of administering healthcare created after we'd lost our finest generation, lost our Empire and entered perpetual decline?

    The poor non-patriots who have turned a hospital bed into a symbol of the nation are so laughable as to be pitiable.( Well, I guess it's a fitting symbol of a has-been nation). Our ancestors would laugh.

    The "real Britain" is of course the settlement produced by Habeas Corpus, common law, Magna Carta (the first time that power was made subject to law) and the 1689 Bill of Rights that gave birth to liberty here and everywhere else it has flowered.

    A post-decline system of administering healthcare and a shameful benefits free-for-all that has destroyed the family (and that the Mayor of Calais says is the main reason immigrants flood the town trying to get here) most certainly is not.

    You're obviously joking.

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    1. All very Hannan. Of whom it was said to me today that, "He comes from Darkest Peru like Paddington, and he has the accent to prove it." The sheer non-Britishness of the Right is now very striking indeed.

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  2. Why would anyone be impressed with a reference from you?

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  3. Mr Lindsay is a lot more respected than you will ever be, anon.

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