Welcome, to an as-it-happens, first-person attempt to discuss what it is to be ‘English’ here and now. I would love to hear views from all quarters of how I have got it wrong and how I may have it right.
We Need to Talk About the English.
Last Saturday’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march turned the focus of the ever-revolving spotlight of inter-racial concern onto the main partner – the English. This blog is an Englishman’s attempt to understand what the spotlight is showing and how we might respond.
We, theEnglish.
We have lost our Christian faith.
‘The people who forgot their God’ were the rather unsympathetic words to me of the owner of a Christian bookshop in Sri Lanka. Whilst we English take such loss for granted, for other peoples it marks us out as impaired, disabled, lacking in a natural human function. It leads to a lack of cultural resilience, and so a damaging dependence on good fortune and a pleasant environment to maintain well-being. Thus creating a restless seeking for some other focus of cohesion, and the rise of a succession of ever more unworthy idols, facilitated by rapidly increasing technological competence in creating forms of diversion.
We have diminished national vitality.
People have fewer children, who are not seen in themselves as an intrinsic good by reflecting God’s goodness in creating and giving life, but rather as just one competing factor in our choices of lifestyle, made less restrictive by the ease of getting an abortion. So too work has lost its dignity as being a calling in what it means to live in a divine creation, but rather as a burden to be avoided as best as one can.
So, to maintain our pursuit of distraction idols the only way that we can maintain a comfortable lifestyle is to accept an ever-increasing national debt to be serviced by future generations, and for large scale migration both to fill unattractive employment options and to provide the necessary tax base for a declining indigenous population.
We didn’t respond well to the 2008 financial crash.
For as long as everyone got some share of increasing national wealth, as long as we could take for granted better living standards than our parents, then all was well. Once, after 2008, the national cake stopped growing then inevitably distrust, cynicism and anger started to grow, especially as new technology allowed small minorities to get a very much larger slices of the cake,
Covid led to further disruption, both adding further burdens to the national economy as well as disrupting working, educational, social and even emotional patterns to a degree that is still difficult to estimate.
The Immigration Factor.
Immigration in the 50s and 60s was mostly unskilled labour for a growing post-war economy. Combined with a national sense of white superiority, the resultant pressure on the low end of the housing market, and competition for manual labour (thus support for Enoch Powell amongst dockers and market workers) led to racial hostility and violence. However a growing economy, time and relational experience eased the tensions; facilitated and complexified by subsequent cohorts of migrants, often of higher social status or white- skinned.
By the early years of the new century Britain could congratulate itself on being a relatively harmonious multi-racial society. The riots of 2011 were only an ethnically mixed attempt to grab small pieces of the national cake, whereas the 2012 London Olympics seemed to reflect a society at ease with itself, especially the Opening Ceremony’s unexpectedly successful attempt to communicate a sense of what it means to be British. But already cracks were starting to appear, and the surprise victory of the Brexit vote in 2016 indicated unhappiness with the increasingly high rate of immigration – if statistically mainly from Eastern Europe, but also representing an increasingly brittle uncertainty about what it means to be ‘English’.
‘2012’ and ‘2016’, then, represent competing understandings, characterised (with continuing validity, I believe) by David Goodhart as ‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’ – those at home with a rootless, cosmopolitan identity contrasted with those desiring a rooted, local identity.
The consequence of this convoluted history is that on all the issues raised by recent immigration, Britain is caught between a rock and a hard place.
Numbers.
A major factor behind current concerns is simply the high volume of immigration over the past few years, especially as a vote for Brexit was thought to be a way of reducing it. Britain’s once static population is now increasing at a rate not known since the days of the industrial revolution. The result is an increase of the pressure put on public resources, notably housing and medical care. Whilst governments have consistently promised to substantially reduce the net inflow of immigrants, the need to fill vacancies, particularly in health and care, have worked against it. The problem of finding affordable private housing has led to growing dissatisfaction with the traditional political parties, especially among young adults, and an increasingly volatile political landscape.
Of all the problems raised by immigration the conflict between our labour and tax base needs for substantial immigration on the one hand and the pressures put on public resources on the other is, certainly in the short term the most intractable.
Justice.
The perceived injustice of costly provision for illegal migrants on the one hand set against people finding it hard to make ends meet on the other has been the immediate cause of protests about migration. Resentments seek causes, and flammable material was provided by the sexual advances of an asylum seeker to a teenage girl. This neatly fitted with a wider narrative of sexually abusive immigrants (albeit people who had been in this country for several decades). As often, irony had the final word when it was found that one of the discontent amplifiers was himself convicted of abusing a girl.
In ‘Whiteshift’ Eric Kaufmann argued that white people can turn to meretricious arguments when their genuine concerns are not met. In this respect the ‘Protect our Girls’ hysteria, fuelled by Robert Jenrick and others, was displacement for a less sensational but apparently disreputable debate that illegal entrants to the country were having an easier time than many indigenous people.
English identity.
For some people this is not a problem. Either they have a low level of desire for any sense of national belonging, or they have such a sense of security about it that it is in little need of protection, or they have identities (religious, political, or other special interest) besides which nationality loses its significance. But being in this happy state may well be a product of a benign overall life experience. For others the sense of worth and nourishment that comes from a sense of belonging in a wider group is of great importance; an importance increasingly seen as being devalued owing to the pre-eminence of the supra-national mentality in public life.
This has led to an ‘anywhere’ smugness that the need for cultural identity only belongs to ‘others’ – those who have migrated here. The inherent excellence of our own identity is in no need of assertion, promotion, or indeed of definition. It simply is: others have identities, we are the norm. The consequence is that affirming a specifically English identity come to be seen as retrograde and crass.
Thus our present situation: a section of the nation (how big??) marked by an uneasy amalgam of hostility to non-English people simply because they are not English, not ‘us’, intertwined with a feeling of deprivation than in an environment of increasing cultural diversity affirming my culture, my identity is somehow seen as unacceptable and unworthy. It seems like ‘lived experience’ has started playing for a different team.
What of the future?
1. Stop being coy about Englishness.
The teachers who made a 13 year old schoolgirl sit in isolation because it was ‘unacceptable’ that she wore a Union Jack dress at her school’s ‘culture day’ have rightly been castigated, and apologised. Whilst the plusses and minuses of England’s undoubtedly powerful impact on the world have been and will be debated, there is enough positive material to celebrate. All peoples have a right to publicly celebrate their identities, even if national maturity means we also recognise what needs chastening. Being ‘English’ is part of our ethnic diversity, not the opponent of it. It should be celebrated as much as Jamaica-ness, Polishness or Gujerati-ness.
2. The English are now and permanently racially diverse. How nice that in Tuesday’s morale-boosting 5-0 football victory over Serbia, three goals were scored by sons of African immigrants, plus one by a Jamaican background player, plus England’s first Moslem international, plus players with Italian and militantly Irish backgrounds. However angry the protests about asylum seeker hotels, however many six-figure demonstrations Tommy Robinson organises, however demented Elon Musk’s diatribes, this will be what ‘Englishness’ looks like from now on. If people are unhappy about it they simply have to get used to it.
3. Illegal immigration must be prevented. Firstly, because it is illegal, and law-breaking always generates more law-breaking. It is unfair to those who strive to come here legally. Heart-rending stories of mothers and babies should not obscure that we are very largely dealing with young men, and where the dividing line between being genuinely at risk of persecution and seeking economic betterment is not at all clear. Shabana Mahmood’s appointment is encouraging and she deserves support.
4. The overall volume of immigration should be decreased. We should not be so heavily dependent on imported labour, we are wrongly stripping countries of origin of their talent, we are over-loading our infrastructure, we are failing to develop home-grown capabilities. How the Government should deal with that, I leave to better informed minds than mine.
5. What the government must do is iron out the social injustices which unduly oppress those who are young and not living in the south-east. (I write this as a metropolitan pensioner). Finding how to redress such structural injustices is a major challenge for a Labour Government.
6. Nations need coherent identities. Considering our diversity, Britain has not done too badly at that. The generally critical ‘Racism and Ethnic Equality in a Time of Crisis’ Report concludes ‘A sense of belonging to British society is high among all groups’ (p 30), though ominously notes that tends to decline the longer that people have been here. Uniting the Kingdom is a proper aim, as long as that is understood to be affirming the presence of all ethnic groups and religions; and there is a corresponding responsibility for all such sectors to be working towards sustaining that sense of belonging. We are not simply a federation of ethnicities. As the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs commented we are to be a home not a hotel.
7. Where is Christianity in all this? There may be a big story preparing to break. Danny Kruger MP made a strongly affirming Christian speech in Parliament and then defected to Reform; James Orr, Professor of Philosophical Theology at Cambridge, supplies Reform’s theoretical armoury – both barbecued with the committed Roman Catholic Vice-President during his Cotswolds holiday. The late Charlie Kirk genuinely believed and promoted the Christian faith. Hymns and the Lord’s Prayer were part of last Saturday’s demonstration.
It is not sufficient here to dust off old polemics against ‘The Christian Right’ from several decades ago, or to make unexceptional comments about welcome and inclusion. This turn to Christianity is not a conservative hankering for the good old days. Intellectually it has been buttressed by serious histories which have stressed the unique, formative and overwhelmingly positive role of Christian faith in forming the West (Larry Seidentop: ‘Inventing the Individual’, Tom Holland: ‘Dominion’, and, more obliquely, Joseph Henrich: ‘The Weirdest People in the World’). It is a reaction to the increasingly perceived failure of secularism in government and culture to provide an energising understanding of life; typified, perhaps unfairly, by Sir Keir Starmer – intelligent and decent, but weak on principle and vision; leading a government that has promoted euthanasia and abortion without time limits.
And how does all this fit with the ‘quiet revival’? It is too soon to tell. Certainly, it seems strongest in dogmatically robust and morally conservative churches – Roman Catholic and Pentecostal. Were the people singing hymns in Parliament Square on Saturday expressing heartfelt, perhaps recently developed, devotion to Jesus; or just setting passive/aggressive boundary markers against Muslims, secularists and other traducers of ‘true English identity’? Those who would seek to see Christianity as just one aspect of ‘Englishness’ need to recognise that the Church of England would virtually disappear from large swathes of our cities if it wasn’t for the presence of non-English Anglicans. Indeed the capacity of faith-centred churches to draw together people of varied ethnicities is one source of hope for the unity of the Kingdom.
Certainly, something bigger is going on than simple outrage that an asylum seeker in Epping made inappropriate advances to a young girl. That outrage has symptomized not just the need for continuing debate about immigration but who we are as an ethnically mixed nation, and especially the identity of the white English native majority within that mix.
This is helpful and insightful, thanks John.