The true conservative nature of the English

 conservative bias, England, English, political parties, UKIP, unclassifiable  No Responses »
May 142013
 

I read recently, though can’t now pinpoint where, that no single political party representing the English has ever properly understood their true conservative nature.  This tweet which has just come my way reminds of this observation:

Farage: a pint, a fag, no control of his party, bigotry galore, and people vote for him? We need a change in electorate as well as govt.

And returning to the original observation, I realise now how mistaken it is.  It’s not that no single political party has ever properly understood their true conservative nature but rather, quite differently, that such parties have understood it all too well.  And as a result, they have – to a greater or lesser degree – chosen to ignore it.

As I argued some time ago in relation to the destructive swings of excluding politics:

The desire for vengeance, the impulse to recover so much lost time, the blind hatred of the other’s ideas … all this leads to an awful environment akin to a pressure-cooker of prejudice, where time postpones the ability to impose what inevitably become one’s tragic instincts.

Nevertheless, as the pendulum swings back, eventually power does return to the vengeful right – or, indeed, the vengeful left.  And so all those suppressed and supposedly politically incorrect opinions find their voice, their bullying courage and their aggressive channels of communication all over again.

Yet pressure-cookers are only good for cooking food.  Opinion is surely best let out on a regular basis.  As the Spanish would say, only by speaking can we understand people.  And if we choose, on either side, to suppress the right for political movements to participate in democratic process, each time the pendulum swings evermore violently back we can only expect further violence in return.

Perhaps what uniquely distinguishes UKIP’s verbal discourse, then (as opposed to the managerialist and toff-nosed leaders who peddle its wares), is that it looks not to avoid such possibilities of violence.  It looks, in fact, not to approach the electorate from the point of view of those educated political souls who understand the dangers of giving the public what it actually believes in but, instead, to engage the same by giving public voice to all its prejudices.  Whilst traditional right- and left-wing parties have both managed to contain such English conservatism, this doesn’t mean the latter has gone away.  And although in the presence of an economy which at least offered hope it has been happy to simply bubble under the surface, generally out of sight of all those social networks and media as its prejudices are shared across multiple garden-fenced and pint-inscribed conversations, when crisis hits home the fracturing nature of English conservatism has finally found in Farage’s foraging in the undergrowth of our beliefs that pressure-cooker valve I refer to above.

The danger is, of course, that what starts out as a release valve of pent-up pressure converts itself into a political party with its hands on the levers of power.

Perhaps, after all, we do need a new electorate.  But that will only really happen when the real powers in this world stop wilfully destroying environments of support, empowerment and societal liberation.

A big ask indeed.

On the other hand, if your aim is actually to engineer brutish societies of lowest-common-denominator capitalism, those are surely the kind of voters you’ll end up getting.

So conservatively focussed on Ye Olde Merrie England, even our dearly beloved Mr Gove wouldn’t feel out of place.

Talk about one forward gear and five reverse.  In their love of ancient comfort zones, political cowards without exception surely.

#IDS and his expiration nation: not the survival of the fittest but of the richest

 aspirational socialism, England, English, Iain Duncan Smith, in a hole, leadership  1 Response »
Apr 022013
 

Yesterday, I posted on how Mr Iain Duncan Smith’s biggest crimes against England didn’t involve engendering a poverty he wasn’t himself prepared to share but, rather, showing no surprise that someone in England, today and in the 21st century, should be living off £53 a week after regular bills were paid.  I compared this amount to that of Tonga, the 118th richest country in the world – which also just so happens to share the honour of being the sixth most corrupt.

I was then engaged in a Twitter conversation with Mark, who always gives as good as he gets and is about the most coherent and knowledgeable of people I chat online with.  I don’t always share his views, and he does sometimes choose to rather wind me up (not difficult to do in the event), but the debate is always correct and content-focussed and rarely trips headlong into a personalisation of the subjects under discussion.

Last night, as a result of this change.org petition, he made it clear he would not be signing it.  He suggested IDS would even be prepared to do what the petition requested – and thus make everyone look as stupid as hell.

I’m not sure he will, to be honest – but then, as I’ve already pointed out, I don’t criticise the man for not wanting to live in such relative poverty.  No.  I criticise him for not wanting to fight with every sinew of his body to ensure other Englanders can expect more of their futures.

For Iain Duncan Smith, England is not an aspiration nation but an expiration nation.  The perfect storm against the poor is coming perfectly together.  From political parties, left and right, which represent the interests of only the top six percent, to the winding down of Legal Aid, the privatisation of the NHS and the disqualification of those who teach our children about the past, present and future, the poor are now in the crosshairs of all Darwinian capitalists everywhere.

On the subject of an aspiration nation and bettering oneself, I finished my conversation with Mark last night with these two tweets:

@HoboCastro Agreed. So let’s talk about how bettering yourself doesn’t = trampling over others. And then we can have a conversation. #NotIDS

@HoboCastro Bettering yourself is fine. But not if it involves exploiting your power over others. That’s not bettering. That’s bullying.

For this is precisely the issue to hand.  Iain Duncan Smith is no leader; no inspirer of hearts and souls; no implementer of profound change capable of taking his people along with him.  He has, instead, identified an enemy, and that enemy consists of those who are poorer than him: Mark suggested at one point that the market trader who earned the paltry sum of money IDS claimed he could live on was simply a bad businessman, and kind of implied it would reasonably be his lot.  This assumes, however, as IDS clearly believes, that he who finds himself in a position of privilege and wealth is, by virtue of his position, deserving of such privilege.

Darwinian capitalism was always thus: not the survival of the fittest but the survival of the richest.

And that is the nub of this horrible issue: whilst corporate capitalism of the sort which brought Mr Iain Duncan Smith to power is gaming the system from within (more here), they tell us that these poverty-stricken market traders either are a) responsible – through their own inefficacy – for the situation in which they find themselves, in which case they are blameworthy; or are b) essentially choosing to live such a life of poverty, in which case they are blameworthy.

If truth be told, and as I said some time ago:

[...] But when David Cameron says we must “sink or swim”, his fervent belief in the values and behaviours of hierarchical capitalism means he doesn’t really mean “sink or swim” – he means “sink and swim”.  There is no way we can all realistically aspire to being on the top; to spreading the privilege around a bit; to sitting at the top table with our leaders.

In a deeply hierarchical society such as ours, in order for some to swim, some must sink.

And that is what David Cameron refuses to publicly acknowledge when he tries so desperately to sell us his version of hierarchical capitalism and democracy.

Where Mark and I diverge most strongly, therefore, is in this belief many people have in a capitalism that plays by common rules.  For every Amstrad, there are millions who cannot be so.  Imagine if it were the case: everyone wishing to be capitalist producers; no one wishing to be materialistic consumers.  It simply wouldn’t work.  The system doesn’t contemplate such a spreading around of wealth and privilege.

No.  If Mark and I, and you perhaps, are to ever reach any agreement on what an aspiration nation must really look like, then we have to accept that it is our responsibility to help the needy, hungry, homeless, infirm, frightened, sickly and defenceless before we configure our political actions for absolutely everyone else.

And if such radical change is to be implemented at all, it must be done on the basis of true leadership.

Something IDS currently appears to know absolutely nothing about.

But I suppose we should really not be surprised.  After all, for those who conceptualise politics as abuse (more here), such behaviours must come pretty naturally.

On Iain Duncan Smith’s real crimes against England

 England, English, Iain Duncan Smith, psychiatry, psychology, Scotland, unclassifiable  2 Responses »
Apr 012013
 

Iain Duncan Smith, the very English manifestation of a Stalinist inquisition, claims he could live on £53 a week.  That he currently lives on £225 a day, after tax, is neither here nor there I suppose.  Anyhow, in gentle, and yet again very English – possibly even tea-laden – protest, you might want to sign this change.org petition which asks him to live on the aforementioned wage for no less than a whole year:

This petition calls for Iain Duncan Smith, the current Work and Pensions Secretary, to prove his claim of being able to live on £7.57 a day, or £53 a week.

On this morning’s Today Programme David Bennett, a market trader, said that after his housing benefit had been cut, he lives on £53 per week. The next interviewee was Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, who was defending the changes. The interviewer then asked him if he could live on this amount. He replied: “If I had to, I would.”

This petition calls on Iain Duncan Smith to live on this budget for at least one year. This would help realise the conservative party`s current mantra that “We are all in this together”.

This would mean a 97% reduction in his current income, which is £1,581.02 a week or £225 a day after tax*.

Please join me.

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9964767/Iain-Duncan-Smith-I-could-live-on-53-per-week.html

To:
Iain Duncan Smith, Department for Work and Pensions
I call on Iain Duncan Smith to prove his claim to be able to live on £7.57 a day, or £53 a week, by doing so for one year.
Sincerely,
[Your name]

I’ve signed it, anyhow.  I even feel it could give certain wings to my famous Point-Of-View Machine.  It might, after all, be an example others would care to follow.  Get a real fly-on-the-wall feel for how the other ninety-nine percent are living their lives.

What interests me most about this story, however, is not so much the great lengths an intelligent and supposedly political man is prepared to go to be insensitive but, rather, that he shouldn’t have first reacted by saying: “How unredeemably disgraceful it is in 21st century England that a man should have to live on less than three thousand pounds a year.”

Now there is some debate which is circulating around this case which seems to indicate the man in question might be earning a little more.  So, for the purposes of this post, let’s err on the generous side.  Let’s say our typical IDS-man of unfortunate means lives on as much as £3000 a year.

At current rates, if my Google friends are right, this just about equals $4700 (the US sort of course).  And if judged to be something we should not throw up our hands in horror about, this sort of sets the scene for the next few very English years.  At the time of writing this post, it would appear that Mr Iain Duncan Smith is suggesting that, if necessary, being at number 118 of the world’s gross national income per capita list is something we could – and presumably should – be getting used to.  So let’s play a little game, shall we?  Here is Tonga, rewritten as an imaginary England some six years in the future (four, that is, after the next British general election):

England’s economy is characterised by a large non-monetary sector and a heavy dependence on remittances from the half of the country’s population who live abroad (chiefly in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States). The royal family and the nobles dominate and largely own the monetary sector of the economy – particularly the telecommunications and satellite services. England was named the sixth most corrupt country in the world by Fibs magazine in 2019.

England was ranked the 165th safest investment destination in the world in the March 2017 Eurobollocks Country Risk rankings.

The manufacturing sector consists of handicrafts and a few other very small scale industries, which contribute only about 3% of GDP. Commercial business activities also are inconspicuous and, to a large extent, are dominated by the same large trading companies found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. In September 1774, the country’s first commercial trading bank, the Bank of Banksters, opened. There are patently no coherent financial-services sector laws in England.

Rural Englanders rely on plantation and subsistence agriculture. Plants grown for both market cash crops and home use include potatoes, wheat, rape seed, runner beans, and root crops such as horseradish and ginger. The processing of potatoes into crisps and chips was once the only significant industry but deteriorating prices on the world market has brought this once vibrant industry, as everywhere throughout the island nations of the Northern Hemisphere, to a complete standstill. In addition, the feudal land ownership system means that farmers have no incentive to invest in planting long-term tree crops on land they do not own. Pigs and poultry are the major types of livestock. Horses are kept for draft purposes, primarily by farmers working their allotments (a plot of urban land). More cattle are being raised, and beef imports are declining. The export of orange squash to Japan once brought relief to a struggling economy but recently local farmers are increasingly wary of this market due to price fluctuations, not to mention the huge financial risks involved.

I could go on, but you get the idea.  Once you take onboard the idea that number 118 in the world’s list of richest countries is something we all should consider viable – a national duty even – you will get all the shit that comes with being 118th.

Corruption; economic inefficiencies; political and business graft.  A land, that is to say, of under-employment which bodes well for very few people at all.

For IDS’s real crime lies not in his insensitivity in answering as he did.  Neither is it in the fact that none of us – least of all him – believe that he would ever take up the challenge of living on such low wages.

It’s not even in the fact that living on such wages is not the most difficult thing about the situation: in truth, what’s really hard about £53 a week is doing it month after month; never knowing when it will end or whether it will get worse; and always fearing that, one day, unusual payments (boiler breakdown; washing-machine death; illness at the hands of a fragmenting health service) will signal a final nail in the coffin of survival.

But no.  IDS’s real crime is not in all of the above.  IDS’s real crime is in his tacit acceptance that Tonga, as a goal, with everything that such poor standards of living bring, is something we should contemplate coping with – even looking to emulate.

He’s not a bad man for not wanting to live it himself.

He’s a bad man – and I mean really, unconscionably, bad – precisely because he’s happy to contemplate it as something we should all begin to contemplate.  His lack of ambition; his throwing in the towel for his country; his failure to fight his corner for his people; his inability to take on the complex elements of modern governance; his general cowardice; his utter lack of moral fibre … all of this, and much much more, serve to constitute the totality of IDS’s real crimes.

He doesn’t love England at all, now does he?  Or, at least, he doesn’t love the country enough to fight fiercely on all its people’s behalf.

In accepting he’d be prepared to live in and rule over a country which rewarded its citizens with a spending power of £53 a week, and in so doing finding himself able to tolerate the situation, he shows us exactly how much he expects of old Blighty.

Lie down and think of England, for England will no longer think of thee.

That’s going to be about as much love as you can expect from IDS’s England.

And just about the sum of the love IDS is capable of giving it back.

But maybe, after all, there is more of a psychodrama to all of this than we could reasonably acknowledge – or, indeed, at first, be inclined to accept.

He was, after all, born in Scotland.

A country which has firmly turned its back on all things Tory.

How out of place he must feel when he returns to his glorious city of birth.  And how curious an impact that must have on his soul.

Are the English political cowards?

 a con, cowardice, England, English, Labour, NHS, NHS cuts, politicians, politics, poverty  No Responses »
Feb 102013
 

This piece just published by Seema Chandwani on Labour Left describes all too clearly what’s happening to the NHS at the moment:

Across the country, the NHS is being dismantled, downgraded and closed down. These decisions are reckless and defies commonsense considering the  growing population. Regardless of the rhetoric from Cameron, the systematic collapse of the NHS is at the heart of Tory ideology as recently exposed by the release of government documents from the Thatcher era. What we are seeing now is an attack on the NHS to fulfil Thatcher’s once defeated plans.

And whilst the Twittersphere I find myself in appears to be vociferous enough, no hugely physical manifestations in the real world seem to be taking place.  The government is proceeding apace with its plans, it would seem.  Nothing too contrary prevents it.

Seema has this to say on the subject (the bold is mine):

The biggest weapon the Tories (and their Lib Dem friends) have to fulfil their vision is public apathy and naivety. The media’s coverage of what this government is doing to the NHS has been intentionally weak and we are being drip fed myths of desired improvements by a manipulating Tory regime. As I have a diabetic brother and my younger sister is being treated for suspected MS, being apathetic, naive and manipulated cannot be an option for me, I am sure that each one of you have similar reasons or experiences why the NHS is important to you.

Actually, I would wager that the vast majority of English people have very direct reasons or experiences to value the NHS.  If not at a personal level, then almost certainly at a familial.  So this – this personal experience, or lack of it – cannot be the reason the English are not now dramatically out on the streets, defending their future wellbeing and health.

Perhaps, then, the explanation lies elsewhere: are the English, in fact, political cowards?

I don’t mean everyone.  I don’t mean the activists.  I don’t mean those of us who love and hate politics in equal measure.  I mean ordinary people: people living their lives; people the politicians are supposed to serve and represent; people who only have the time to survive, work and occasionally live.

Does a certain level of poverty – or its horizontal threat – make of us all little cowards in some way or another?  When you still have a little to lose, do you prefer not to make waves?  Is the fear of losing everything a matter which leads us to kow-tow to those who are hurting us?  And is that precisely the place where we find ourselves now – as a people, as a community and as a nation?

The Tories don’t really have us by the balls, do they?  They simply have us by our cowardice.

Is it time to get serious about free speech here in England?

 England, English, Facebook, free speech, in a hole, libel law, social media, social networks, Twitter, USA  1 Response »
Nov 192012
 

I finished a recent post on the subject of social media with the following realisation:

Given that the above-mentioned corporations are all nominally American in approach, mentality and ways of thinking, if nothing else this all goes to show us how difficult and challenging it can be to transplant at a global and online level behaviours which other legal jurisdictions take for granted.

I always thought when we spoke of oppressing freedom of speech that we were talking about developing countries in the Third World.

I now realise that there is a reason people call the United States the “Land of the Free”.  In many freedoms, they do clearly fall down on what their people deserve.  But in speaking their minds, they clearly do not.

We here in England have a lot to learn.

Too much for us to properly learn it in my lifetime, I fear.

Now in that piece I chart my sudden awareness that the figure of free speech in my homeland is highly limited by English law on defamation, where the onus in any case is on the defendant not the plaintiff to prove the truth or otherwise of any statement.  The most recent example whereby free speech is clearly not contemplated in such an environment is obviously in relation to the Lord McAlpine case, where it would appear his lawyers are operating entirely within legal structures many of us simply did not realise existed.  An overview of one aspect of what is being pursued here can be found at this interesting post, which examines the technicalities of – in this case – Twitter retweets: the forwarding on, and implied (or otherwise) intentionality behind such a forwarding, of other people’s remarks to your followers.  It would appear that Lord McAlpine’s legal team are looking to argue that retweeting implies acceptance of and agreement with the content so communicated.  The frame which is presumably being used is that of newspaper publishing – with all that such a frame implies from a legal point of view – but I am inclined to believe this is wrong for several reasons:

  1. Twitter is in many cases the online version of that gossipy office or neighbourhood grapevine – only globalised somewhat.  That the offline world generally tolerates without recourse to due legal process such gossip should make us think twice about making the virtual equivalent tougher than its progenitor.
  2. Twitter is – more and more – also a vast debating chamber of hugely beneficial democratic input.  That ministers and governments various across the world are finding it resistible should make us think twice about limiting its freedoms.
  3. Twitter does not earn, for its users and generators of content, very much – if any – tangible income.  Yes, it’s great for networking, which – arguably – leads onto tangential money-making opportunities.  But unlike the newspaper model so many online lawyers will at the moment be eager to allude to, the vast majority of tweeters who might amateurly fall foul of English defamation legislation will not be making a living out of doing so – nor will they earn anything directly from their continued stream of tweets.

But more important to a wider constituency than the McAlpine case mentioned above is surely the fact that these recent events – as well as those to come – show us that speech in England is anything but free.  And I wonder, as a result, whether we shouldn’t ask the following question: is it time to get serious about free speech here in England?

Will future libel and defamation cases on Twitter, Facebook and other social media need a two-pronged defence of erstwhile and clearly ignored freedoms here in England?

Firstly, that the onus and burden of proof about the incorrectness of a statement should fall on the plaintiff and not remain the responsibility of the defendant.  That is to say, we should be innocent until proven guilty – not guilty until proven innocent.

Here we need, then, to change the law.

Secondly, that those companies which have turned the erstwhile client (that’s you and me, I mean!) into product – product which generates income for the former on the back of the latter’s freely created tweets and input, produced in those environments such companies deliberately enable – should also face a certain kind of music when it comes to legal action, given that their business models rely on interesting and even scandalous information being continually generated by their product.

Without such software, nothing – of course – could be republished.  Without such algorithms or ways of connecting people, directly engineered by such corporations, nothing would become visible.

Here we need, then, to change the focus of our legal action.

And with a degree of substantial urgency, I think.

*

Alternatively, of course, we could simply decide to follow the US tradition of almost incontinently free speech.  The downsides are clearly manifest, of course, but in the light of recent revelations in England, and our creeping understanding of how many rights we don’t actually have, I think I’d rather follow the Americans down their route of incontinence than continue with this very English constipation of public discourse.

What say you?  A wholesale re-examination of what free speech should mean – rather than what it has, wearily, come to mean?

Culture Shock (or how a certain kind of immigration is invading our shores)

 cultural dissonance, cultural DNA, cultural rub, England, English, ideas, immigration, neoliberalism, shock and awe, Spain, Spanish, unclassifiable, USA  No Responses »
Sep 132012
 

My two youngest children, seventeen and fourteen now, are becoming more and more Spanish as they get older.  They miss the ways and wherefores of social integration: the ways people address you and assume your reality.  I had believed life in Britain would’ve become easier as time passed.  But this has most definitely not been the case.

Without wishing to sound too dramatic, they are verging on a state of walking wounded.  They do laugh and enjoy their lives, of course.  I’m not saying they do not.  But Britain – perhaps that’s just England – is such a repetitively insistent society.  Variety is the spice of life – but not in the England we know.

I wonder if this state of walking wounded I speak of isn’t being shared more widely by those who would consider themselves natives.  In the past, we lived our lives in a relatively comfortable environment: our leaders were like us more or less; we were like them; people didn’t fake too much; prejudices were shared.

Now, we find ourselves attacked on two sides simultaneously.

Firstly, from within, and since phonehacking, the Leveson inquiry and now the day-old Hillsborough revelations, it is clear that in what we thought was a representative democracy, the only people truly represented have been the already rich and wealthy.  The police have been found guilty of using their tools against innocent citizens; the tabloids, in particular those belonging to Murdoch’s empire, seem clearly in the thrall of making money over uncovering the truth; and the judiciary and establishment in general have allowed themselves to be distracted by power and status to such an extent that digging deeper was clearer not a goal.  As this by-the-by sign-off from one of the Guardian pieces linked to above indicates, and in relation to Thatcher’s own reign and preoccupations around the terrible events of Hillsborough:

While there was no direct evidence that Thatcher or the cabinet was complicit in a cover-up, it is revealed that the primary concern of the government at the time was the impact of the disaster on its proposed football spectators bills.

The second disorientation I can see, an external one this time, and which is also creating a legion of confused and shocked citizens, comes from the US – a country whose cultural content has to date, quite rightly, entranced and engaged us.  Here, we find that foreign ideas, mostly foreign to our own special form of English socialism, are beginning to take over and invade our very sense of Englishness.  This disorientation leads to feelings of shame and guilt; of anger and fear; of all kinds of uncertainties around not change as such – but bad change as per Cameron and his ideologues.

Is it possible, then, that just as my daughter and son become evermore Spanish in their instincts, growing up as they are into adulthood, and even as they find themselves in permanent and intimate contact with English society, so native-born English people – whatever their ethnicity – are discovering that the invasion of immigrants from distant and different countries which is most affecting their sense of wellbeing happens to be an immigration of ideas more than people?

That is to say, is it only that my children are growing towards their Spanishness and away from their perception of Englishness – or is Englishness for everyone in general growing away from what we might argue it has every right to remain?

And if the latter, is this a case where we can all agree that immigration is undeniably wrong?  An imposition by the already globally powerful with the aim of organising a society which clearly does not belong to them.

Ways of organisation which manifestly benefit them even as such ideas serve to prejudice the rest of us poor souls.

Yes.  Perhaps this is the final stage of globalisation.  Where ideas underpin the future of money over the future of flesh-and-blood human beings.

Familiarity breeds understanding, perhaps?

 England, English, London, on a high, racism, Wales  No Responses »
Jun 082012
 

Here are a couple of interesting graphs a Twitter friend of mine – John Murray – has just produced.  The first maps BNP membership in England and Wales according to postcode as per leaked information a while back.

The second maps ethnicity, using the same scale as the first.

As you can see, especially in London, there is an inverse correlation between BNP membership and ethnicity.  A case of familiarity breeding understanding perhaps?

And whilst there are regional variations (the triangle around Bradford, Preston and Leeds for example) which muddy the waters a little, John does point out that when you drill down into the figures the “strongest correlated variables are unemployment and index of multiple deprivation”.

For those who might believe that ethnicity leads to racial turmoil, this is an intriguing set of statistics and deserves to be followed up.  It must also lead us to consider the possibility that London is leading the field in ethnic understanding – and that perhaps the rest of us, certainly in England and Wales anyway, have something to learn from that experience.

On the perils and opportunities of being English

 English, Hope not Hate, Nick Lowles, on a high, Peter Curran, Scottish independence, Sunder Katwala, www.BestOfTheRest.org  6 Responses »
Feb 032012
 

Two interesting pieces worth your time on the subject of being – or feeling – English.  First, from Nick Lowles over at the Hope not hate blog.  This, for example:

* 17% of people identify themselves as English and not British. A further 23% consider themselves more English than British. Only 16% consider themselves to be British over English or more British than English.

Whilst the following dense paragraph conveys a vastly pertinent landscape of realities:

That the politicisation of Englishness is growing without any formal political mobilisation and so many do not believe that there is a political party standing up for the English should be a major cause for concern. Added to this is the fact that the one group who overwhelmingly do not feel English are black and minority ethnic people. As Englishness grows there is a real danger of a chasm opening up in many of our towns and cities along racial lines. This can only be made worse by the findings of our own Fear & HOPE report which found that many of those who identified with England rather than Britain saw exclusivity within it. These people were more hostile to immigration and multiculturalism while also viewing religions other than Christianity as hostile.

My immediate reaction to the dangers described so eloquently is to suggest that the concept of Englishness be developed and popularised with a degree of anticipation and foresight.  I’ve suggested on these pages before that what the UK in general needs, and England far more than any other nation in the Union, is a crossover public space able to inform what ordinary people are thinking and beginning to write.

If truth be told, and as I have pointed out on other occasions, it’s not even that nationalism isn’t already being used by traditional politics: for the major national parties are always referring to Britishness in one sense or another (“New Labour, New Britain”; “One-Nation Conservatives”).  It’s just that it’s such a diffuse concept of national identity that anyone who finds exclusivity excluding is bound to prefer such Britishness to the potentially rather more pointed – and conceivably threatening – idea of Englishness.  But in a perfect world, and quite outside the other nations in the UK, I’m sure that given the choice even Britishness as a cultural layer would be resistible for many people.

Identities are so much very more complex these days than such labelling can generally allow.

The second piece I lay before you today comes from Sunder over at openDemocracy.  This is a far more complex post and I don’t intend to do more than quote one paragraph which caught my eye, as he asks the following salient question:

The English conversation is now happening.  Yet, still, there remains some tangible anxiety about engaging in it. The most commonly voiced fear is that the English voice will be angry and atavistic, primarily a form of “them and us” grievance politics. Recent surveys on identity have consistently found ethnic minority respondents expressing the strongest sense of British pride and belonging of anybody, but that they have a weaker attachment to English identity. Must the rise of Englishness, then, mark a retreat from a British identity that is civic, inclusive and plural towards a ‘blood and soil’ politics of belonging? 

Whilst begging to disagree with his definition of British as necessarily and inevitably “civic, inclusive and plural” (Peter reminds us, for example, that what’s good enough for the Falklanders has been less permissible closer to home), I can clearly see what he’s getting at.

Just as I also do – personally – see the advantage for us all in an independent Scotland.  That is to say, a Scotland which would find itself freed of the bubble that is Westminster.  Why?  Well, simply because it would be bound to introduce unstoppable dynamics towards a similar relationship between the English regions and the current navel-gazing hub that is London-centric politics. 

And – in an analogous way – any kind of force which allowed for more people at grassroots levels to weave and cloak themselves in a sustainable tapestry of regional power would surely, in the end, lead to a better governance across all the nations which make up the geography of these British Isles.

On how the English language has created a race of healthily idiosyncratic pedants

 civic nationalism, English, English language, nationalism, pedantry, sorted, unclassifiable  No Responses »
Nov 262011
 

I suggested the other day that Twitter was as good a mental exercise and prophylactic against the dementia of old age in our latterday times as crosswords were for those addicts of word games in worlds gone by.

Then yesterday, over at Tom’s place, I came up with a curiously engaging concept (the bold is mine today):

I haven’t read the Kingsley Amis book, but it’s likely to be idiosyncratically pedantic (if there’s such a thing) – surely a good thing as far as language is concerned …

Which all leads me to believe that, as English has developed its marvellously patchwork profile, it has served – in its many complicated and variable structures and concepts (contradictory spelling patterns; multiple words with similar meanings; many users with a wide variety of mother tongues; decentralised control of usage and dialect) – to provide us with precisely that opportunity I talk of to be healthily idiosyncratic pedants.

And this has lead to a gloriously ongoing tussle between forcedly eccentric thinkers, who often fail to agree – not out of rank pigheadedness but, rather, because they fiercely maintain different – and equally valid – starting-points.

Equally valid?  Well, yes.  Because the English language doesn’t strive to be all-encompassingly coherent.  Not like other languages out there.  Not like other cultures which prefer to impose.

In its systemic incoherence and its acceptance of its linguistic history, English is far more human than other systems of communication – and, therefore, far more humane.

As we begin the long road to constructing a civic nationalism for those who would identify themselves as English, we would do well to remember this legacy.

For if the character of the English is to be found in any consistent repository, it is in the inconsistency of the tool we all use on a daily basis to communicate our trains of thought.

And with that I think I can finally feel comfortable.  Can’t you?

The English language in just ten minutes – only it’s actually eleven minutes thirty

 civic nationalism, cultural dissonance, cultural DNA, cultural rub, EDL, English, English language, exclusion, nationalism, on a high  2 Responses »
Nov 252011
 

So do the extra ninety seconds refer us entirely to the impact the Internet has lately had on our beloved beast?

Anyhow, the brilliant video below – which came my way via Paul – tells it just as it is.  And if – before I saw this today – I felt I was a figurative mongrel without constant identity, you can imagine exactly how I felt afterwards.  Any EDL supporters out there looking to create an excluding English nationalism?  Well, please make the time to watch what’s coming up now – and then try and buck the undeniable facts!  England, at least historically, at least linguistically, even if not now politically, means the richness of cultural rub; the richness of cultural dissonance; the richness of cultural DNA.  And there’s absolutely nothing you can do to get away from it.  Absolutely nothing at all.

Quite fortunately, I should add.  Just in case I wasn’t making myself very clear.


http://youtu.be/gSYwPTUKvdw