Jeremy Paxman: The English, A Portrait of a people (Beginning of chapter 8)
On the eve of St George's Day 1993,
the then British Prime Minister, John Major, had a tricky speech to deliver. He
needed to convince his party they could trust him to defend the country when
negotiating with the European Union. Party discipline was already badly fraying,
as an increasingly voluble right-wing caucus refused to accept his assurances.
The issue of Britain's relations with the rest of Europe split the party from
the top of the cabinet to the humblest constituency association, with opinion
getting increasingly 'anti-Europe' the further you got towards the party's
grassroots. Within four years, the parliamentary party would be in more or less
open warfare on the subject, squabbling among themselves as the Conservative
government spiralled out of the sky to electoral oblivion in May 1997.
Major
could sense all this. His own attitude to Europe suffered by comparison with his
right-wing critics, with their easy and scary slogans, because it was
essentially pragmatic, with little clear ideology. His beliefs, in the
sovereignty of nation states and the importance of free trade, were no different
from those of most of his party. But he was not prepared to demonize the rest of
the European Union, most of whose leaders he knew and respected. What was he to
do? This most English of men was a decent chap who ought to have had an
instinctive understanding of the worries of 'his' people. But he had been
trapped in the narrow world of Westminster politics for years. And he had few
rhetorical skills; a reporter who had seen him mount his soapbox during the 1992
election campaign had described him as sounding, when he tried to declaim, like
some 'angry nerd in Woolworth's returning a faulty toaster'.
Much of the speech could write itself. There would be a recital of the government's achievements, the usual credit-taking that is the small change of political opportunism. There would be a lot of nonsense about the government's determination to be 'at the heart of Europe' when so much of its own behaviour made it seem less like a heart and more like an appendix. There would be claims that nothing in Britain's involvement in Europe endangered the country's sovereignty. There would be the blunt suggestion that, frankly, the country had no alternative. But he needed a peroration to end with and an image of Britain's security to leave with his audience. What emerged was an extraordinary word portrait. 'Fifty years from now,' he said, 'Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and - as George Orwell said — "old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist".'
Where
on earth did all this stuff come from? Which corner of England was the Prime
Minister talking about where life proceeded in this quaint, prelapsarian way?
The last time we heard a Prime Minister wax lyrical about an England of smiling
milkmaids and warm beer was in the 1920s. Stanley Baldwin claimed to speak 'not
as a man in the street, but as a man in the field-path, a much simpler person
steeped in tradition and impervious to new ideas'. (At the time he was chosen to
lead the Conservative party in 1923 Baldwin claimed to have been preparing to
return home to Worcestershire where he said he would 'lead a decent life and
keep pigs'.) Despite having a Scottish grandfather and a Welsh grandmother,
Baldwin presented himself as a thoroughbred Englishman. With what metropolitan
snobs considered to be a studied sub-urbanity of cherrywood pipe and tweed suit,
his appeal to the people was that of a stolid, God-fearing yeoman (another
sleight of hand: he was a third-generation ironmaster who never owned more than
a handful of acres within sight of the family forge).
To
me, England is the country, and the country is England [Baldwin said in a
characteristic speech], And when I ask myself what I mean by England, when I
think of England when I am abroad, England comes to me through my various
senses - through the ear, through the eye and through certain imperishable
scents . . . The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the
country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against
the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill,
the sight that has been England since England was a land . . . the one eternal
sight of England.
It
was pure fantasy. There was absolutely nothing eternal about any of these sights
or sounds. The scythe was already being replaced by harvesting machines, and as
the internal combustion engine moved in, the blacksmith was reduced to making
shoes for the ponies of the children of the businessmen who were buying up the
cottages of farmworkers driven from the land. By the time of this speech,
England had been a predominantly urban society for seventy years. The vast
majority could no more have recognized the rerrk-rerrk call of a
corncrake than they could have parsed Sanskrit. By the time John Major stood up
to deliver his Baldwinesque speech seventy years later, the corncrake appeared
in England only as an occasional summer visitor — its breeding habitat had
been destroyed by intensive farming. Major had modified the idyll a little, to
draw in suburbs as well as countryside. But they are 'green suburbs', the
comfortable places which exist as a refuge from the city.
The
speech was manna from heaven for the satirists, who seized with metropolitan
disdain on the antediluvian imagery as another sign of the Prime Minister's
fading hold on reality. When I asked John Major why on earth he had chosen these
sub-Baldwin metaphors, the memory was clearly still painful three years later.
He felt he had been misunderstood (characteristically he added, 'my fault,
perhaps'). As he saw it, he had 'quoted some poetry' about 'warm beer and
English maids cycling to communion', 'to illustrate that the essential
characteristics of our country would never be lost by a deepening relationship
with the European Union. The intended message was, to put it bluntly: the French
and Germans will not take over, as so many people fear!'
The
fiction must be maintained that political leaders write their own speeches (although
Major's belief that he had 'quoted some poetry' gives the game away). But the
truth is that, for all the lampooning, it worked. John Major's audience did recognize
the picture of England he painted. Why?
Something
remarkable has happened to the English perception of the land in which they
live. Major was like the man at the top of a well lowering a bucket to snatch up
water. In the collective unconscious from which John Major drew his pictures,
there exists another England. It is not the country in which the English
actually live, but the place they imagine they are living in. It touches
the reality they see around them at various points, but it is something ideal,
like the 'other country' of Spring-Rice's patriotic hymn: 'her ways are ways of
gentleness and all her paths are peace'. What has happened is that the English
have become exiles from their own country. Their relationship with this arcadia
is that of some emotional remittance-man.
The
picture of England that the English carry in their collective mind is so
astonishingly powerful because it is a sort of haven. The critic Raymond
Williams once wrote that romantic ruralism was connected with imperial exile, a
refuge conjured up in the longing for home of a chap stuck deep in the bush,
serving his queen:
Its
green peace contrasted with the tropical or arid places of actual work; its
sense of belonging, of community, idealized by contrast with the tensions of
colonial rule and the isolated alien settlement. The birds and trees and rivers
of England; the natives speaking, more or less, one's own language: these were
the terms of many imagined and actual settlements. The country, now, was a place
to retire to.
By
the time of John Major's Speech, the same idea could be applied not merely to
the overseas victims of the English Tourist Board's propaganda, but to millions
of native English people living their lives in the suburbs and dreaming of a
return one day to the Land of Lost Content.
The
idea becomes strongest when times are most stressful. In World War One, soldiers
were despatched to the Front by the trainload from industrial cities and towns
around Britain. Their loved ones sent them postcards showing churches, fields
and gardens, above all, villages. 'This', the unstated message went, 'is what
you are fighting for.' The protection of this arcadian 'home' was invested with
a greater nobility than any amount of flag-waving. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch,
whose immensely popular anthology The Oxford Book of English Verse was in
many a kitbag on the Western Front, claimed that English patriotism drew on the
spirit of Merrie England. It was not, he said, the English way, to throw back 'Rule
Britannia' at 'Deutschland über alles'. Blithely ignoring the fact that, for
most Englishmen, the countryside was a place from which their ancestors had
escaped and of which they had only the haziest knowledge, 'Q' claimed that the
private soldier in the trenches looked to 'a green nook of his youth in
Yorkshire or Derbyshire, Shropshire or Kent or Devon; where the folk are slow,
but there is seed time and harvest'. There was more in a similar vein from the
editor of the 1917 YMCA anthology produced for soldiers, The Old Country: A
Book of Love and Praise of England (how characteristic that it is England,
not Britain), who believed that from his trench the soldier, 'in imagination,
can see his village home'……..[to
be continued, W.E.P.]
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