What is Britishness? Tories dream while Labour defines
Blair will today deliver a speech on an issue that most divides the parties
Hugo Young ,The Guardian, Tuesday 28 March 2000
For Conservatives, Britishness has the delicacy of a Fabergé egg or, better, a Wedgwood figurine. It's an infinitely precious thing, of which they are the only reliable custodians. They polish it, place it behind glass, check it daily for violations. As a party, they've lived off their unique stewardship of this display-piece for many decades: the party of crown, constitution, nation and Union Jack, ranged against the party of the people, the international and the Red Flag.
Though this always was a false antithesis, these are recognisable party silhouettes. From Attlee to Thatcher, that was how things were seen to be. But the obvious cliché contained a latent paradox, which has burst unanswerably to the surface in the time of William Hague. On the one hand, he says, the British are uniquely strong, their history especially to be admired, their political system a wonder of the world, their national character proof against the alien hordes. On the other hand, apparently, their national identity is so fragile that it faces imminent destruction at the hands of foreigners and Scotsmen, abetted by Tony Blair.
Today, Mr Blair knifes this charge, in a speech that has been prepared for weeks and leaked for days. Several colleagues are billed to follow, in an important pre-election campaign that's supposed to reclaim Britishness for Labour. It's another epic moment in Labour's long march through the centre ground of politics. What's most striking about it, however, is that the message has become irrefutable. The campaign is all but redundant. Mr Hague may have lost his last issue.
The Hague view of Britishness is dominated by enemies and nostalgia. He gave a speech about it a year ago, which was incorrigibly narrow and defensive, glorying above all in the need to resist every European advance. The sacred exhibit, national identity, could never be moved. Labour's entire constitutional programme was cracking the Wedgwood. The third way was not the British way. Devolution and Lords reform were violating the very heart of Britain. The country itself, set in the silver sea, could not be relied on to survive.
Mr Hague is not alone. Vapourings about the future of Britishness have produced speeches and books on a prodigious scale in the past few years. What has mostly characterised those from the right is not inquiry but anxiety. With the absorption of Indians and the separation of Scots, is Britain not already dead? Though Hague has moved on from the ideal of ethnic homogeneity, his version of Britishness is marked with the vulgar untruth espoused by Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher: that "Britain" lives only by the unchanging nature of its political arrangements.
When Mr Blair came to power, he didn't have a worked-out idea about "Britain". It's been a persistent argument against his constitutional programme that there was, in fact, no programme, merely a set of ill-connected initiatives answering different political demands. But what he has done so far is the opposite of a threat to Britain.
Take devolution. Yes, the early days of the Scottish and Welsh assemblies have been difficult. They challenge the pattern of politics we have come to know as British. Sometimes they've been quite a mess. The entire political formation of all concerned, the men in Downing Street as much as those outside, has received a nasty assault which few of them were ready for. The psychology as well as the politics of centralism takes a lot of shifting.
But to talk about this as the end of Britain is the hyperbolic nonsense of desperate minds. It's merely a new, confederal kind of Britain, stumbling towards a model that arises by popular regional demand, and provides the possibility of Britain reconciling the power of global economic forces with the desire to preserve identity. Devolved institutions, when they've had time to bed down and be understood as normal, will say that Britain flourishes as a land of multiple identities. While Hagueism stands for an inward exclusiveness, Blairism feels its way to the world of porous truths.
It has more to do, if Britain is not to wither. Britain can't survive if England remains the centralised and dominant sub-state. Whether English devolution is driven through via local government or regional government will be a serious debate. But the reactionaries who would destroy Britain had better prepare for a painful discussion. Likewise, that other Hagueite icon, the House of Lords. Whatever may or may not happen to the membership of the second chamber, the notion that "Britain" can exist only if the ranks and titles of lordship are sustained for another century would be the grossest trivialising of national identity.
In a Downing Street lecture not long ago, the historian Linda Colley proposed an end to these debates about identity. They had got us nowhere, she said. Instead, she advised her audience of the great and good to address what they could do something about: citizenship. Let people stop worrying about such neuralgic questions as losing British identity or buying into European identity. All these identities could co-exist: would, indeed, be largely dependent on the image of themselves that individual citizens preferred to have. What politicians could affect was how their citizenship was made real.
Professor Colley urged that we should know, whichever patch of the islands we came from, what defines us as a citizen and what our rights are. She wasn't in favour of a republic, but suggested a monarchy that swore a solemn oath of service to the people - rather than being either bound in anachronistic pomp or reduced to riding bicycles. As well as diffusion of power from the centre, a citizen's Britain would do more to engage its ethnic minorities as well and truly British - as being, indeed, the salient proof that, unlike Englishness, Welshness or Scottishness, Britishness is a concept "with no necessary ethnic or cultural overtones".
Finally, she suggested the British should know more history. If they did so, they would discover not only that Britain had much to be proud of that did not entail the brutalities of imperialism, but that it co-existed with social and political change. When India achieved independence there were many Tories who believed that Britain, having begun to surrender its empire, had undermined its own raison d' être. It should now be clear that they misread history in the same way the terrified anti-reformers of modern Conservatism, invoking their static view of what nation means, have elicited from Mr Blair the speech he is making today.
I hope he, in his turn, is not defensive. He has plenty to do to make the political mechanics of the new devolved and European Britain work better. But the reinventions he has begun have reversed the roles history once assigned to these two parties. Now it is Conservatism for dreams, Labour for reality.
