This is England

This is England, not Europe and not even Britain. This is where we live now. So, if we’re not European and only tenuously British, we must be English. And we all know what that means. Don’t we?


How do we usually answer this perennial question of identity: we’re tolerant? Fair minded? Play to the rules of the game? Something like that. 


Maybe. 


It is safe to say one of the most obvious characteristics of the English is, of course, moaning. We love to moan. We moan about the weather, the transport system, the government; anything, in fact, which is, safely, beyond our control. For 40 years we have moaned about the EU and now its gone we can moan about those who have taken us out of the EU. 


Although a convenient means of introducing polite conversation, breaking the ice between the insular and reticent individuals of our island, moaning also serves another, less attractive purpose, providing a comfortable and collective habit of avoiding responsibility for our own lives.


A natural extension of moaning is blaming and there must always be someone to blame, usually some superior power-broker: the infamous They. Who ‘they’ are seems to shapeshift from one cliche to another, depending on the irritation; from devious, conspiratorial world movements (foreigners) to hapless, ‘establishment’ organisations (the government) so inept they fail to organise piss-ups in breweries or manage railways as well as failed dictators. It is, however, always someone else.


Sometimes, however, the ‘They’ are us.


There is some serious blaming going on now, a blood sport so serious it has broken free of its usual Twitter confines, spilling out into wider social life where the ‘They’ this time seems to be very clearly defined: they are, of course, the evil, opportunistic leaders and the miserable fools who followed them in taking us out of Europe. The Who here is unquestionably clear, we can see them exposed on Google, in the bright blue swathes covering the BBC map of betrayal.


We can even explain and analyse the ‘logic’, the lies and the emotion with which they were lead to the point of no return: who would have thought the simple act of placing a cross on a ballot paper to have contained such seismic power? When has it ever felt so sexy, so dangerous? ‘Not like real politics, is it?’


So, on the regretful morning after, the data of a not so secret ballot located the culprits with some precision and the blaming could begin, as somehow, what the democratic majority should have considered a win felt like a loss. With industrial strength spite, the young could blame the old (‘Why don’t they just hurry up and die?’), the privately educated, the graduates of the local sink comp (‘See what happens when you let them vote?’), the cosmopolitan, liberal, PC London ‘elite’, the parochial, racist North, East and West (‘That remote no-go zone of Benefit land’). The blame victims, of course, could turn on the unscrupulous ‘House of Cards’ politicians, which the media could eagerly package and present as players in a tabloid Shakespearian tragedy. The leaders, in turn, could turn on each other.


In this way we all have someone to blame and happily absolve ourselves of all responsibility: ‘It was them what did it.’ 


However, beneath it all, lies the anxiety of a shock of far greater significance then whether an island remains attached to its extended land mass. It’s a shocking awareness of how far this island is barely attached to itself.


Let’s pause from blaming for a moment to think.


Had the young turned out in force, the decision might well have swung in their favour. Taking responsibility and blaming themselves, however, is hardly on the agenda; it has to be the fault of someone else. Perhaps it is. Can we blame them for their political apathy when they, for the whole of their lives, have been cosseted by over-protective parents in a child-centred culture where everything is provided to ease their passage: protected from failure in school, shielded from ‘offensive’ speakers in university. Guarded from the threat of any real challenge, risk or danger, the debate carried on outside the bland soundtrack to their lives until, emerging from the soporific daydream of Adele and Coldplay, they awoke drowsily in the mud of the sanitised, corporate ‘adventure’ of Glastonbury to the shock of a another decision made on their behalf when it was too late to do anything about it So, what did they do? Blame their ‘selfish’ parents. Or their grandparents (many of whom in their own youth had energised a failing country through inventive and entrepreneurial enterprise, not only powering ‘Swinging’ England into the centre of the cultural world but doing so without the need for European assistance). 


Had the Etonian/Islington ‘intelligensia’ ever bothered to venture outside their comfortable London bubble to see their neighbours at close quarters rather than through the corrupt filter of Jeremy Kyle, they would have known what was in store when you offered ‘these proles’ not more call-centres and zero-hour contracts but the power of genuine democracy; had the South been less concerned with political correctness and more understanding of the conditions of those ‘racists’, those who actually live in the deprivation of migrant choked towns in that distant country called England, they might have seen the starkly obvious. Well, they’ve seen it now.


Had the leadership acquired greater experience, greater life skills, greater knowledge of the people it was supposed to lead; had the whole debate been clarified by articulate adult speakers devoid of self-interest, so the public could be made fully aware of the arguments, unclouded by deceit, knowing exactly what their small cross would mean...we would probably be living in another country. This, however, is England.


The time for excited debate has passed, the time of quiet moaning is nearly upon us. There should, however, be no time for dark pessimism. There’s no need for suicide. No need for murder. The economic fallout is less than the predicted Biblical destruction and the gain might be self definition. We may have left the heart of a genuine family of nations. We may have escaped the subtle imposition of a Soviet-style totalitarianism. Whatever. So what? It’s done. Time to move on and begin the real work of creating a new Jerusalem rather than remain wallowing in the Babylon this whole sorry business has exposed: a country more shambolic than its football team. If we are to avoid descending into self destruction we need a vision of who we are and how we move forward. We now have a fresh start, a new England and, like the opportunity offered to the first pioneers arriving on the shores of a new world, we should be thinking about what we can do rather than what has already been done. Its time to take responsibility.


A new country requires a new leadership; one with compassion, strength and purpose, an Edgar calming the chaos of Lear in that original Game of Thrones; leadership with a vision naturally derived from greater life experience than career politics, which sees a world wider than Westminster and whose strategic planning involves more thought than the most acceptable PR move to gloss over a crisis until next Monday.


‘England’ could be a vision we saw in the collective spirit of Iceland in that other Euro conflict: players who know who they are and who they represent, working for each other with a controlled passion to systematically brush aside a rudderless England of lost and frozen souls, before passionately bonding with their support, as if that bonding was the whole point of the enterprise. There, you might have said, is Iceland; now, where is England? 
​

​DG