“England, with all thy faults, I love thee still.”
—William Cowper, The Task, II

For the last 300 years, “England” and “Britain” have been largely synonymous. When Glasgow-born General Sir John Moore lay dying at Corunna, his last words were “I hope the people of England will be satisfied. I hope my country will do me justice.” Meanwhile, Nelson’s “England Expects. . .” signal is supposed to have been hoisted by a Scottish signaller.

But the specifically English component of the British body politic was bound eventually to obtrude itself into the public eye as governmental policies weakened the links between the constituent parts of Britain. Devolution has given Scottish and Welsh MPs the right to vote on matters concerning England, but not the other way around. The blatant injustice of this “West Lothian Question” understandably annoys many English people. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland is also being edged out of the United Kingdom, thanks to the postcolonial expedient of turning insurrectionists into government ministers. The 200th anniversary of the Act of Union passed in January 2001 without any government recognition.

Other factors are increasing English self-awareness. The government is steadily giving greater powers to its beloved E.U. bureaucrats, who envisage dividing England into nine regions, while leaving Scotland and Wales as single entities. Between 150,000 and 175,000 non-E.U. immigrants (virtually all of whom will end up in English cities) are expected to enter Britain every year until 2005. The empire has evaporated. All British institutions are now officially “institutionally racist,” and the government-commissioned Parekh Report states that British history needs to be “jettisoned.” On top of these specific problems, such universal tendencies as globalization and advances in communications potentially endanger all identities and cultures. Small wonder that some English people are beginning to worry about their communal future.

This concern has not vet manifested itself politically, perhaps because of our electoral system. But an ever-greater number of newspaper articles, television programs, and academic texts are concerned with the nature and future of the country Emerson called “Mother of nations, mother of heroes.”

For different reasons, both left and right want to keep a lid on intestinal Englishness. Leftists say that, if England exists at all, it should be suppressed in the interests of “anti-racism,” while rightwingers attempt to discourage English consciousness in the interests of presenting British unity. But a sense of English uniqueness and embattlement has already become more widespread. This was demonstrated forcibly during the last European Cup, when even middle-class people felt empathy toward the English football team. Today, Londoners see hundreds of St. George’s Cross bumper stickers on London’s black cabs. As Jeremy Paxman says in The English: “Something is stirring out there.”

Jeremy Paxman’s and Roger Scruton’s books are important and entertaining contributions to this swelling debate. Each is an excellent example of one of the two main schools of comment about England—the demystifying and the remystifying, respectively.

Paxman is a waspish BBC television presenter who has hosted such flagship programs as Newsnight and University Challenge. Famous for his acerbity with politicians, he now wields his cynical talent against the English, whom he admires for their tolerance, individualism, sense of fair play, and “cussedness,” but whose illusions he seeks to examine and undermine.

His tone is part supercilious, part affectionate. Like his television persona, The English is often dismissive of Englishness to the point of rudeness, but there is no real malice in this; Parts of Paxman’s book may be written more for effect than because the author means it. In one memorable passage, Paxman dismisses Morris dancing as “a clumsy pub sport practiced by men in beards and shinybottomed trousers.” But, then, all folk dances are naive, the “clumsy pub sports” of perhaps unsophisticated but decent people who dance for fun and to make an innocent statement about their identity. Would he have been so cutting about an African folk dance?

There are also little bursts of incongruous enthusiasm, such as his belief that one of the good things about England is “a higher overall standard of television than anywhere else in the world.” But his championing of such dismal fare could be an expression of cynical self-interest, too. On immigration, Paxman waxes girlish: “The arrival of substantial numbers of immigrants from other cultures has forced the English to break out of their complacency, to re-examine themselves, and to recognize and exult in diversity.” Such exultation, however, does not abound in England’s inner cities.

Paxman nonetheless writes easily and amusingly, and makes many astute observations. He sums up well the advance of the service economy by saying that Britain is now less Napoleon’s “une nation de boutiquiers” than “a nation of checkout-operators.” His contrast between the exemplary marriage of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and those of their children and in-laws is telling. In some respects, Paxman’s criticisms echo those of such conservatives as Roger Scruton and Peter Hitchens. And he is quite right to say that it is difficult to define Englishness.

But ultimately, Paxman is not on the side of the Angles. His mission is to pour scorn upon any notion that the English might have a common future, although he is vague about what might succeed it—presumably some form of civic society based on reason and faux good manners governed by political correctness. The mere fact, however, that English people may not have all that much in common does not necessarily mean that they will not think and act together. Patriotism depends not on logic or consistency but on irrational affinities based on myths. Paxman does not seem to comprehend this; believing himself rational, he acts as if all human beings are—or should be—rational. He admits that, during England’s last patriotic flowering (World War II), relatively few of those who sang “There’ll always be an England, / While there’s a country lane, / Wherever there’s a cottage small / Beside a field of grain” as they marched to war would have lived in such cottages. Yet slum dwellers from Preston, train guards from Swindon, and ne’er-do-wells from Stepney were united by their dream of Englishness.

Rather lovely, we might think, but to Paxman “the idea that England is a garden” is “not so much like a perennial flower as some peculiarly invasive weed.” To him, the cardinal sin is “hypocrisy” and all relationships should be based on individual choice, so such fond delusions must be extirpated with intellectual weedkiller. But in an often sordid world, why should such pleasant delusions not be allowed to persist? They may anyway, despite the attentions of the nil admirari brigade. In spite of their famed national stolidity, as portrayed in such films as In Which We Serve or Brief Encounter, the English are as prone to magic as any other people.

The essentially magical quality of England is recognized by Roger Scruton, who—unlike Paxman—is a romantic. Where Paxman demystifies, Scruton seeks to remystify. This is a more difficult—and socially beneficial—task. In the circumstances, a little overstatement is acceptable.

Words like “enchantment,” “mystery,” and “magic” recur often in England—An Elegy, in such lines as “The English Crown—the mysterious corporation sole which is also the supreme fiction in this fairy tale” and “The disquiet over immigration was the result, it seems to me, not of racism, but of the disruption of an old experience of home, and a loss of the enchantment which made home a place of safety and consolation.” (The latter sentiment attracted the epithet “offensive” from a hypersensitive Daily Telegraph reviewer.) Such words might seem a means of avoiding precision, but the author knows that he is dealing with human beings, not machines.

Secondhand bookshops are full of the dusty—but fragrant—tomes of such patriotic writers as H.J. Massingham, H.V, Morton, and D.H. Lawrence (and imprints like Batsford and the Homeland Association), but today, Roger Scruton is virtually unique in praising England. For that reason alone, he deserves unstinting support. Still, reading England—An Elegy is not a duty but an unmitigated pleasure.

Like Paxman, Scruton examines England’s binding myths —but positively, with a view to comprehending what is being lost. He knows that “Often it seems that we kill things by examining them.” Other critics examine such intangibles to establish that it was all a “construct” and that they are intellectually superior to the benighted proles who believe in such things.

Scruton admits the difficulties of describing the English polity: “The English enjoyed the strange privilege of knowing exactly who they were, but not what they were,” Aided by Providence, which considerately placed a moat around England and so helped avert invasion, the island, he says, came to be regarded simply as “home”—a place of retreat and repose, where at least some Englishmen could indulge their chosen eccentricities, free from interference. Later, the English began to think of themselves as members of a nation, but such abstractions were modified by Romanesque notions of the primacy of the homeland (rather than of the race), love of local landscapes, and a fondness for homegrown customs and institutions. These were generally not examined too critically, because “Things at home don’t need an explanation. They are there because they are there.”

Even the radicals who sought to overthrow England were part of a domestic continuum,

a chafing away from inside which created the comfortable impression that England itself was impregnable, since its quarrels were purely internal. . . however furious these quarrels, the prevailing belief was that a solution could always be found to them, since common sense and compromise were the norms of English politics.

He may be overstating the case: If the Puritans did not do as much damage as they might have done, it was not for want of trying.

But such sallies are made consciously; Scruton is perfectly aware of the chasm between principle and practice. For example, even in the midst of rhapsodizing about Anglicanism —”robed choir boys sang in procession, leading the Rev Vaughan-Wilkes to the altar in his flowing chasuble like cherubs drawing some airborne god”—he acknowledges that, as early as 1851, only half of English people regularly attended Anglican services, declining to 25 percent in some urban districts.

Perhaps most important among England’s customs and institutions is the common law, which, Scruton says, was “understood from the beginning to be the law of the land. That is, it belonged to England, and not to any resident.” He believes it was the real or perceived protection offered by the common law that allowed individualism, one of the salient English characteristics, to flourish. He also identifies the central importance of clubs and societies to the English, and the relative unimportance of the state until very recent times—a useful reminder of the essentially revolutionary nature of the welfare state and of state education. With unremitting enthusiasm, he goes on to deal with every possible aspect of England—religion, government, class, schools, the countryside, the weather, the “Square Mile,” imperial measurements, money, country houses, and so on, in a panoply of poetically expressed and philosophically comprehended English images. But his book is also an autobiography, since Scruton believes that his generation (he was born in 1944) was the last to know the real England. Within his autobiography, there is an unforgettable portrait of his father, an old socialist whose outlook was less that of Tony Blair than of such patriotic communalists as William Cobbett, William Morris, or Richard Jefferies, who believed that patriotism was best expressed by taking care of the common people—a viewpoint eminently English in its combination of romance and pragmatism.

England—An Elegy needs to be read by everyone who wishes to understand England. But it has one serious failing: As the book’s title makes plain, it is a lament for the dead, while the English really need a call to arms. Scruton claims that he wants “to praise the dead and to cheer the survivors”; I believe that he succeeds superlatively in the first objective, but fails in the second. Like too many conservatives, he revels in pessimism and an overweening love of lost causes—the more lost, the more strongly cleaved to. His poignant exposition may have the unfortunate effect of demoralizing some who share his aspirations but have not yet given up. Frankly, even if England is finished, conservative-minded people ought to act as if it were not. Standing and dying around a revered corpse is fine and noble, but how much more sensible and English to fight to preserve a living thing!

Yet perhaps, as Scruton says in his preface, “understanding is a way to keep what we value, when all other means have vanished.” Perhaps his wistful evocation may actually encourage less articulate patriots to fight more assiduously, because they will have a clearer idea of what they are fighting for.

 

[The English: A Portrait of a People, by Jeremy Paxman (London: Penguin) 309 pp., £7.99]

[England—An Elegy, by Roger Scruton (London: Chatto & Windus) 270 pp., £16.99]