Who Speaks for Britain?

This blog-post is one of two which discusses the process of national identity formation in the wake of recent events such as Brexit and the American Presidential election. Here I consider a recent Rod Liddle article for the Sunday Times entitled ‘How liberal elite are you?’. Instead of trading insults like ‘fascist’ or ‘snowflake liberal elite’, it would be more productive to draw attention to the methods by which national identity is formed.

Discussion of national identity and the process of its formation is particularly in vogue among academics at present. The apparent failure of ‘liberalism’ and an accompanying turn to the right, in the UK, the United States, and visible in continental European ‘nationalist’ movements, is claimed as the ‘voice of the people’. Everywhere is the cry, that nation-states must reclaim their heritage, and the people their identity as patriotic citizens. A small number of globalised elites have sacrificed the real needs of real people, in exchange for a brand of political correctness which panders to a patronising liberalism which only the rich elite can afford. A multi-cultural free-for-all sounds attractive to an exclusive chardonnay-sipping metropolitan network of prestige and patronage, but the experience of those who have to deal with the realities of shrinking local resources in overcrowded northern towns is very different.

Similarly, a bewildering array of languages, dress, and custom has transformed the cultural landscape of much of Britain. The rise of the mosque and the temple risk over-shadowing the traditional Christian religious and architectural sky-lines of this sceptre’d isle, and David Cameron’s ‘swarms’ of migrants are an unstoppable wave of potentially radicalised terrorists. To express concern for this state of affairs or to attempt to discuss the issues in a reasonable way, is to be branded a ‘racist’.

The issues are not simply ones of practicality either, they are social and cultural and go to the heart of what it means to be British. The campaigns of Donald Trump, UKIP, Marie le Pen and others are more than political manifestos; they are bids to redefine national identity. As someone recently explained to me, ‘I might not believe in God, but I still consider myself to be a Christian!’. For many, despite not attending church or professing much faith, Christianity is a part of Britishness. Nigel Farage illustrates that ‘clothes maketh the Briton’ when he asks why ‘they’ cannot ‘dress like us’.

Farage demanded, ‘I want my country back!’, and here lies my point of entry into this debate. Whose country exactly? Who decides what ‘our’ country looks like and on what authority? Who are ‘we’ and who are ‘they’? In a system of ‘civic nationalism’, is it not enough to hold citizenship to affirm one’s Britishness? When parts of the United Kingdom such as Northern Ireland and Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU, is it ‘Britishness’ we should be discussing, or are we really witnessing traditional English hegemony over the United Kingdom? What kind of identity is being proposed for Britain and how is it being asserted? Is national identity anything more than invention?

Claims to represent ‘the people’ by either side of recent events and debates clearly lack statistical support. The recent EU referendum in this country, and the election of Donald Trump, although accompanied by triumphal claims that the ‘will of the people’ had been clearly and overwhelmingly expressed, were very close-run affairs. Opinions on what it means to be British, or to be American, appear to be divided very much down the middle. This is not to deny the democratic mandate implied by such results, but the voting statistics must challenge the logic that the outcomes have the authority to define ‘Britishness’ and concepts of national identity in America. Any definition of national identity is presumably the view of at least a large majority of citizens. If not, then logically it is not ‘national’ identity in the sense that such concepts are usually expressed, as some kind of collective socio-cultural agreement between most of ‘us’. Given that nationalist arguments are largely predicated on the idea that there is a demonstrable large-majority collective will, on which nationalists are acting, where does it leave them when there is clearly not?

Reminiscing about the day of the EU referendum, Nigel Farage recently commented in a Sunday Times article, ‘it was raining. We kept willing it to rain even harder to keep the ‘remainiacs’ at home.’ There is something ironic, strangely in keeping with concepts of Britishness, that the authority to define national identity should come down to the vagaries of the weather.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-interview-nigel-farage-former-ukip-leader-turned-shock-jock-5qpj8jjhv.

Given these problematic issues, it is perhaps unsurprising that much energy has been devoted by the winners of the EU referendum and the American election, to continually re-emphasis and re-affirm their victories and their consequent democratic mandate. There has been an equal effort to quash any suggestion that these voting outcomes do not actually represent the unequivocal collective ‘will of the people.’ Such efforts have thrown up some troubling ambivalences. Although the EU referendum was run on the basis that British courts and British parliament should have primacy over British decision-making, many Leave campaigners and Leave-supporting media outlets heavily criticised any suggestion that the same bastions of British independence should have a say on the subject post-referendum. Indeed, nationalists seemed to challenge the very foundations of their own argument by declaring that courts expressing their legal judgement were ‘enemies of the people’.

Which brings me to a recent article in the Sunday Times magazine, by Rod Liddle. ‘How liberal elite are you?’, Liddle asks. In a classic strategy of exclusion, Liddle attempts to marginalise anyone who disagrees with his view, that the recent referendum result and the election of Donald Trump, were ‘truly uplifting’ events. Objectors, for Liddle, are ‘our famous liberal elite’, although Liddle admits that he ‘bangs on about it perhaps too much without defining quite what I mean.’ Well quite Rod. Liddle links this ‘elite’, without evidence, to a similar American group, identified by sociologist Charles Murray, who suggests that America’s top 5% (in financial terms) have become ‘effectively estranged from the rest of the country’. Murray designed a set of questions for participants to determine ‘if they were part of this corrosive and aloof 5%’. Apparently, elitists ‘anxious to prove that they were’, rushed to take the test.

Liddle designed his own set of questions and challenges the reader to consider how much they ‘yearn’ to be an ‘overeducated elitist snob’. An objective start then. Liddle asks questions such as ‘do you smoke?’. If you do not, you are more likely to be a snob. Equally, if you do not know who won the last X Factor or have never worked in a factory, you are perilously close to being ‘corrosive and aloof’. Personally, I have no idea who won X Factor, but I do know who won the last several series of Strictly. Perhaps my commitment to the BBC rather than ITV marks me out as a snob, although I have worked in a factory. If one knows how to pronounce ‘quinoa’, one is likely to be an ‘elite’, although Liddle uses the word ‘paean’, which I suggest few people would ever use in a dozen lifetimes.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/are-you-an-over-educated-elitist-

snob-5cj3628rx.

Liddle’s anger is directed at an apparently tiny percentage of the population for ‘spewing out insults’ such as ‘bigots, racists, xenophobes…against the rest of us’. Liddle sees no irony in his own use of insults such as ‘overeducated elitist snobs’, nor thinks it relevant that the apparently small ‘liberal elite’ group isolated from society, are actually very nearly half of the voters in both Britain and American. Indeed, in the latter country, the ‘liberal’ side won the popular vote. It was the mechanics of the American voting system which delivered Trump to the White House, and persistent drizzle which may have removed Britain from the EU.

Liddle as much as admits he is making little sense. He concedes that he is ‘not entirely convinced’ by Murray’s thesis, accurately suggesting that ‘class and inherited wealth’ have far more to do with the isolation of the nation’s richest 5% than some brand of ‘liberalism’. Indeed! There is little doubt that the richest 5% of any society are isolated from the other 95%, but to conflate that 5% with the nearly-half of the population who mostly disagree with Liddle, is intellectually fraudulent. Liddle suggests that the rich can afford to be liberal and elite, whereas the ‘rest of us’ suffer under the realities of life. Yet the relatively well-off over-55s, politically and socially conservative rather than liberal (whatever ‘liberal’ means), made up a substantial part of the Leave vote. The idea that the ‘rest of us’ are a large and relatively poor majority in opposition to a small rich elite which voted to Remain, or voted against Trump, is wilful distortion.

Strong support for Brexit and for Trump also came from those sections of society who are suffering most from austerity economics and the continuing impact of the 2007 financial crisis. Prior to the last British General Election, EU membership was not one of the top ten concerns for voters, although immigration has always been a point of electoral contention. David Camron’s failure to restrict immigration to the promised ‘tens of thousands’ was seized on by Leave campaigners, who were very effective in suggesting that the EU policy of free movement, immigrants, and foreign influence generally were major factors behind austerity and sluggish economic growth. If only the country could be unfettered from the chains of foreign influence, we could be ‘Great’ once more.

The most extreme irony is that the architects of recent nascent nationalism, the political beneficiaries such as Farage, worth £2.4 million in 2016, UKIP’s super-rich backer Aaron Banks, the Daily Mail’s editor and Scottish estate-owning Paul Dacre, and The Donald himself, are ‘elite’, and representative of those who benefitted from the economic problems they lay at the feet of the ‘foreigner’. The rich have become much richer since the great financial crisis. Equally, it was those who argued against the run-away greed of bankers and conservative economics, who Liddle et al now calls ‘liberal elites’ standing in the way of progress and the will of the people. Liddle does not attempt to define ‘liberalism’, a much-disputed term; nor, as he admits, is it clear what constitutes an ‘elite’. Such labels are simply applied to those who disagree with Liddle. Liberalism is turned into an insult and a straw-man argument: liberalism is bad; anyone disagreeing with Liddle is a liberal; therefore, anyone disagreeing with Liddle is bad…and elite.

One observation, perhaps a disturbing one, is that national identity is less about what one is, than what one is not. Identity is largely a question of creating and celebrating difference. Although rarely considered, this is quite an obvious point. Identity requires a group to share characteristics that others do not share. If everybody was ‘British’, then British identity would have little meaning. Yet, for example, it is nigh-on impossible to rally people around the common values of being American, when America was built around diversity. It is, however, much easier to suggest that Islam, mosques, or the hijab are not part of ‘traditional’ Western culture. It is equally easy to claim that criminals, rapists, and drug dealers are in opposition to American values, and then suggest that illegal Mexican immigrants embody such degradations. Similarly, although UKIP concede that it is hard to list ‘British’ values, they are clear that the EU, Islam, and immigrants generally represent something non-British, something ‘foreign’, even when such ‘foreignness’ is often embodied by full legal British citizens. If American and European nationalists are not quite sure what they are, they are very clear on what they are not, and they rally support around those differences.

Today, we see the vilification of the Muslim community, or Mexicans in America, as terrorists, rapists, drug dealers and so forth. The EU are portrayed as a bureaucratic and undemocratic ‘elite’, fundamentally at odds with ‘British’ values. In Germany, immigrants were falsely accused as being behind sexual attacks on women. Trump’s administration claims that terrorist attacks took place in Sweden, or at Bowling Green, when they simply did not. In the Stoke by-election, UKIP’s immigration spokesman, John Bickley, recently appropriated a slogan used in the 1964 Smethwick by-election. ‘If you want a jihadi for a neighbour, vote Labour’ tweeted Bickley. The original 1964 slogan used the word ‘n****r’ instead of ‘jihadi’. Bickley denied he was aware of the connection, indeed the almost identical choice of words. Support is rallied around the difference created by such rhetoric. Rarely is there anything remotely close to reasoned debate on any of the issues we face.

Make no mistake, Liddle’s article is part of a concerted campaign to re-define Britishness, by deliberately creating dissent and difference between sections of our community. Objectors are labelled as ‘white liberal elite snobs’, as ‘aloof and corrosive’, to be marginalised and excluded from the debate. In his early days as a member of the Socialist Workers Party, Rod Liddle, a man whose relatively ‘elite’ and well paid occupation is unlikely to engender bigger problems than carpel tunnel syndrome, would probably have agreed with a Marxist observation that the world is regularly reinvented for the benefit of those who have, at the expense of those who have not. Having trod the evangelical path from hard left to hard right, Liddle now asks anyone concerned with the re-emergence of strong nationalism, ’just how badly do you yearn to be an overeducated elitist snob’?

If there is a real ‘liberal elite’, it is perhaps that which reproduces itself as the ‘governing class’ from Oxford University.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain.

‘It is overwhelmingly from Oxford that the governing elite has reproduced itself, generation after generation’, claims a recent Guardian article which notes the astonishing extent to which reading PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) at Oxford provides entry into the corridors of power. These are the people who presided over the failure of our banking system and continuing social and economic inequality. To conflate such people with the nearly-half of the population who voted to Remain in the EU is a fraud. Rod Liddle, Nigel Farage, and Donald Trump are not of course, part of that establishment ‘club’. And can we not tell?

Trading insults, responding to claims of snobby liberal elitism with counter-claims of racism and xenophobia, plays into the hands of nationalists like Rod Liddle. More importantly, it does no justice to the debate. Instead, a better understanding of the mechanics of identity formation would do more to give voice to the nearly half of the voters who did not consider the EU referendum result or the election of Donald Trump as ‘uplifting events’. Debate might also ask important questions, such as how a strong sense of nationalism is going to re-open factories in the American Rust Belt, foster international co-operation against radical religious terrorism, or recruit teachers for British schools. Ultimately, nationalism is a ‘thin ideology’; all the singing of ‘Jerusalem’ in the world will not solve the real problems of real people. Such debate might clarify the real reasons for the economic realities of 2017…and even demonstrate the value of much-maligned academics and students of the humanities.