Brexit and the British

Who Do We Think We Are?

Stephen Green

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781910376720
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Whatever the eventual outcome of Britain's negotiations to leave the European Union, the critical questions remain: what does the Referendum vote tell us about British society? As with the election of Donald Trump in the United States, why did so few people in Britain see the result coming? Why was there such a fundamental misunderstanding about divisions in society that had existed for years?
In this short but powerful book, Stephen Green argues that it is time to acknowledge that underlying all the sound and fury of the Brexit debate were fundamental questions—whether or not fully recognized—about British identity. Are the British different, special, and capable of finding their own way in the world? Who are they, those who call themselves British? Is it all too easy to blame Brexit on post-industrial decline in the traditional heartlands of the Labor Party, or scaremongering by a band of deluded "Little Englanders"? Or is British identity more complex, deep-rooted—and perhaps, in some sense, troubling—than those of other European nations?

The history that weighs on Britain

At the deepest level of human consciousness, identity is always moulded by the Other. At a societal level, defining the Other means – however inchoately – being able to define who is part of the community and who is not. At the national level, it means, not just controlling who can come in, but – again, however inchoately – identifying the international Other. A secure identity, whether for individual human beings or for communities or for nations, is a secure relationship with the Other. And this has to rest on three pillars: realism about context, about history, and about familial and/or cultural affinities.

Britain’s identity today is fragile because all three of its pillars are fragile. It would take too much space in this short essay to argue this point in full detail.^* But, as we have just seen, the British political class showed all too little realism about context when it mattered crucially in the years after the Second World War. Moreover, the history – including the deep history – that coloured British dreams then continues to weigh heavily on the present. We will come later to note how this in turn shapes British perceptions about the affinities that bind it together, and about what determines the difference between friends and strangers. But before doing so, we need to look more closely at the role of history in the British identity.

Questions about identity are always – and most surely in Britain’s case – caught up in a tangle of history. Not always fully understood or acknowledged, and therefore all the more subtly influential, history weighed heavily on the Brexit vote. Churchillian turns of phrase and references to the great traditions going back all the way to the Magna Carta (whose eight hundredth anniversary had been celebrated the previous year) filled the air. The shadows cast by history were everywhere. And it is clear that this was not new; this same history had weighed on the political class in the years after the war too.

Hence, there are questions that we must ask ourselves about that history. For if we were to focus just on the policies and practices of the British establishment over the last few decades, important though they undoubtedly were, then we would miss some of the most uncomfortable truths about ourselves. For we British have not been living wholly honestly with our past. It is crucial to recognise that this is not a case where one side in the debate was a prisoner of the past and the other free of it. Most of the Churchillian rhetoric came from the Leavers, who were certainly resonating with deeply rooted public attitudes and the pervasive sense of ‘otherness’ from Europe. But the fact that the Remainers argued almost entirely on the basis of economic calculus, and often as though the EU were Britain’s least worst option, shows in effect that they subscribed to the same basic view of Britain’s identity. Whether we feel we are members of the establishment or whether we feel alienated from it and mistrustful of it – in either case, too many of us have lived for too long with a general sense that we can be proud of our history and of the distinctive role Britain has played in European and in global history.

And indeed, there is much to be proud of: yes, we did stand alone against the evil of the Third Reich in May 1940. Yes, we did bring a halt to Napoleon’s vaulting ambition at Waterloo (albeit with the crucial help of the Prussians). Yes, it was Britons who led the campaign for abolition of the slave trade, and it was the Royal Navy that enforced it on the high seas. Yes, we have had a continuously adjusting constitution ever since the signing of the Magna Carta, which has given us the mother of parliaments and enough flexibility – at least since the English Civil War – to avoid the brittleness of French, German, Italian or Spanish political history. Yes, our common law, evolving over centuries and upheld by an independent judiciary is – in the words of W.S.Gilbert – the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent.^* Yes, we are the heirs of Shakespeare and our language has become the lingua franca of the planet. And yes, we are the heirs of a culture which values pragmatism more than doctrine, manifest, for example, in the Elizabethan Anglican settlement that became a veritable study in what both its admirers and detractors call compromise.^*

But the fact is that there are other things on the scales too. For this was also the country whose foreign policy from the nineteenth century onwards was conducted with what can only, from our present vantage point, be described as breathtaking arrogance. For a brief half-century or so, from Waterloo in 1815 to the unification of Germany in 1871, Britain was the most powerful nation on the planet. And no one represented that power more forcefully and eloquently than Lord Palmerston, variously Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister for twenty-four of those years. His high-handedness made him enemies in the British establishment, but he knew how to play to the gallery, as evidenced by the famous speech in parliament in 1848 that laid out his philosophy:

It is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England.^* We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.

This comes after a passage where Palmerston argues that:

England is a power sufficiently strong to steer her own course, and not to tie herself as an unnecessary appendage to the policy of any other government. I hold that the real policy of England – apart from questions which involve her own particular interests, political or commercial – is to be the champion of justice and right; pursuing that course with moderation and prudence, not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks that justice is, and wherever she thinks that wrong has been done.

This passage is telling: it reveals the capacity for double think that was so typical of the British in empire.^† To be the champion of justice and right: that was Britain’s role as the world’s superpower – but with the all-important exception of where her own particular interests are involved, whether political or commercial (and those were rarely far apart). This was not simply specious: Palmerston was a lifelong abolitionist, determined that the Royal Navy should police the seas and stop any vessel from any country, whether allied, neutral or hostile, suspected of carrying slaves. But it was a long way from unsullied virtue either: those particular interests for which Palmerston made exception had been in play just a few years earlier, for example, during the First Opium War.

As for the core philosophy – no eternal allies, only eternal and perpetual interests – not only was this wrong even in its own terms (Palmerston clearly defined the British presence in India as a permanent interest), but more generally, it reduces all international relationships to pure contracts. How much wiser (and, indeed, ironically appropriate in this context) were the famous words of John Donne over two centuries earlier: no man is an island entire of itself, but every man a piece of the continent.^* He meant this in the context of individual human relationships: that we are not just autonomous individuals, but that we are connected deeply, that we are ‘involved in mankind’. But as individuals we are members of communities, of societies, and – as matters stand, at least – citizens of nations. What he said applies not only to individuals but also to the communities, the societies, the nations we are part of. Identities do not exist, and cannot flourish, in isolation.

There is a still more basic question to be asked: where does the notion of Britain itself come from? For though the country is old, its identity as Britain is not. Britannia was the old Roman name for the island, of course, and the pre-Roman inhabitants were known as Britons. But the Britons were marginalised by waves of newcomers – Angles and Saxons, Gaelic Scots, and the Norse. It was the Anglo-Saxon settlers who gave their name to England, and the Scottish Gaels who gave their name to Scotland. The ancient Britons had their heirs in the Welsh, the Cornish and the Manx. But as the kingdoms of England and Scotland coalesced over the Middle Ages, no one called themselves British. All the way through to Tudor England and Stuart Scotland, they remained two proudly separate kingdoms. Their struggles with each other and their jockeying in their relationships with others, especially France and Spain, are the stuff of folklore. It is not until the union of the two crowns in the one person of James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England that Great Britain starts to take on a real identity. James wanted to be the king of Great Britain and proclaimed himself as such, even though he could not get parliamentary endorsement for the title. The seeds of a new identity had been sown; but the seventeenth century was a time of religious and constitutional turmoil that absorbed all the energy of England, whilst religious and political infighting bedevilled the elite of Edinburgh. So it was almost another century after James before the seeds of the new British identity began to sprout.

The ground was prepared by the catastrophic failure of a Scottish enterprise in the New World, which had consumed a significant proportion of the economic surplus of Scotland in a vain attempt to establish a trading colony in what is now Panama. The Scottish establishment had sou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• The shock and its aftermath
• The British in the mirror: what have we become?
• Brexit and Global Britain?
• The history that weighs on Britain
• Unforeseen consequences
• The ties that bind us
• The mirror crack’d?
• A mature identity for Global Britain?
• Also in the Series