There’s a well-worn Church of England joke that goes …
On Ash Wednesday, the Vicar has stayed after the service for
private prayer. Kneeling in front of the
altar, with a profound sense of his unworthiness before God, he murmurs, ‘O
Lord, have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner.’
The churchwarden, tiptoeing up to the rail and kneeling down
by the Vicar’s side, follows his example and repeats, ‘O Lord, have mercy upon
me, a miserable sinner.’
Now Albert Brown, a slightly tipsy and shabby member of the
congregation, overhears these holy men praying and is moved to follow their example:
he falls on his knees saying, ‘O Lord, have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner.’
Whereupon the Vicar rolls his eyes and murmurs to the
churchwarden, ‘Look who thinks he can afford to be a miserable sinner!’
This joke also circulates as a Jewish joke; I’m not sure
which version is the original. But the
fact that it is so readily transferable shows that it tells a general truth
about human nature. Self-abasement can
be another form of self-aggrandizement: as long as a tender conscience is
valued, anyone who claims to think badly of himself can expect to be thought
rather well of by others. An admission
of guilt, in fact, is a not-so-subtle claim to privilege.
I found it a possibly reassuring route to understanding the
way that all good, educated, left-wing or centre-left people seem to feel they
have to talk about Britain these days, especially in the run-up to and in the
aftermath of the EU referendum. I knew
that definitely leftist people tend to blame the USA, and Britain as its
satellite, for most of the world’s problems – the problems with Russia, the
Middle East, the financial crisis, increasing inequality, climate change, you
name it. But the referendum multiplied
the phenomenon enormously. Suddenly
every good person in Britain seemed to be agreed that ours is a thoroughly
horrid little country: its national identity a vulgar fake, its history a sorry
tale of violence and imperialism, its economy a mess, its culture third-rate
and its food and weather a joke. The IRA
and ISIL terrorists were morally preferable to the British state – certainly
when Tories were in power. For ‘Great
Britain’ to be finally dismembered by means of Scottish independence, or merged
in the cleansing sea of a federal Europe, or, preferably, both: these were
consummations devoutly to be wished for by all right-thinking people.
As I read more and more newspaper columns in this general
vein, I became despondent. Why do these
people all hate their country so much? But
then the vicar and Albert Brown came to my rescue. A few of them perhaps really do hate it, I
thought, but for most of them – even if they don’t quite realize it themselves
– it’s just a sort of terribly British inverted self-regard. Other countries may feel they have to be
prickly, self-interested and boastful, but we should be above that. And if we’re not, then we can afford to be
miserable sinners.
This feeling that the behaviour that is good enough for
other countries is not good enough for us maybe rests on nothing more than the
twenty miles of water between us and the nearest potential invader, and the concomitant
fact that England/Britain hasn’t lost a major war for nearly a thousand
years. That is why, perhaps uniquely in
the world, comfortable, educated Britons refuse to be nationalist. In every European country it is possible,
indeed expected, to be both left-wing and patriotic: not in Britain. When your country has been through an
existential crisis within living memory – invaded, defeated, partitioned – then
you keep a certain jumpiness about your survival, a visceral feeling that the
national unit must be prioritized. When
it hasn’t, you can get complacent.
It explains a certain amount about British government policy
over the last few decades, both on the Left and the Right. Conservative governments embraced first
privatisation, then globalisation, without reflexively putting British
requirements first. Free-market dogma
meant we sold our utilities, previously state monopolies, to introduce the
competition and efficiency of private enterprise – and seemed surprised and
pained to find that they were quickly bought up by other countries’ state
monopolies. Governments of both
persuasions signed away our fishing rights to Europe in a flourish of high
principle. Green-leaning governments
committed us to the costliest carbon-reduction targets in the world: we could
afford to be ‘miserable sinners’, and it was up to us to lead the way in
repentance. Perhaps in no field has the
triumph of high principle over national pragmatism been more complete than in
education. Those countries that have
felt the tramp of jackboots, however socialist and humanitarian their
principles may be, will still use education as an instrument of national
strength. They will sit their pupils in
rigid rows and din literacy and numeracy into them as if their lives depended
on it – because they do. If the country
needs engineers, engineers it will have.
Nor will anyone be allowed to forget about its canon of great thought,
literature and art. But not
Britain! Our schools are
‘child-centred’. Not for us schools that
churn out dutiful citizens, or factory fodder.
It’s about individual fulfilment on the one hand, and social justice on
the other.
This leads to the most ironic consequences of all. Since the 1960s, when the grandparents of
today’s pupils were at school, through all the zigzags of government policy the
Left has effectively dominated the teaching profession (have you ever met a
right-wing teacher?) And yet the results
seem not to be to its liking. Since the
EU referendum took place, we have heard a great deal about under-achieving,
lazy, entitled Britons who won’t do low-paid and arduous jobs – fruit-picking,
building, nursing – at a realistic rate of pay, so that the country is ‘forced’
to import migrant workers to do them instead.
These ‘ill-educated’, ‘information-poor’ working-class voters then
wonder why the migrants get all the jobs, and fall victim to the appeal of
‘populist’, right-wing politicians who play on their xenophobia. The irony is rich here. The willing Eastern European migrants who are
now so lionized by the bien-pensant
Europhile Left are the products of patriarchal families of the sort that the
Left has worked hard to phase out in this country, and of old-fashioned
authoritarian educational methods that they would never for one moment
countenance being used on British children.
What lefty, now bewailing the perfidy of the Leavers of Lincolnshire,
would have gone into a state school at any time in the last forty years and
told the pupils, ‘Now smarten up and learn to be punctual, polite and cheerful
while working a twelve-hour day digging up spuds for a fiver an hour, paid next
week, because that is what lies ahead for most of you!’ Yet that is the message the leftists now
seems to think they should have got.
The home-grown working class, encouraged to stand on its rights, work to
rule, have no truck with authority, was supposed to be the vanguard of the
revolution, back in the 1960s to 1970s. Margaret
Thatcher came along and put a stop to that. The middle-class leftists still hung on to
their professional jobs. The workers
were not so lucky. Their one-time
patrons now disown them.
After all, the patrons are not those nasty things, nationalists. They are citizens of the world – no
narrow-minded, ‘Little Englander’ attachments for them. They are perpetually apologising on the
international stage for the failings of their country. Subconsciously feeling, perhaps, all the
while, that Britain must be held to higher standards than the others; that only
foreigners, lesser breeds without the law, do anything so common as defend
their national interests, or react to provocation.
As Flanders and Swann put it,
‘They argue with umpires, they cheer when they’ve won,
And they practise beforehand, which ruins the fun!’
These inverted patriots simply don’t seem to realize that
they are creating an ever-widening disconnect between themselves and the
sections of the population who can’t afford
to be miserable sinners. The Daily Mail
and Sun readers maybe just want their professional and political classes to be
a bit less sanctimonious and a bit more down and dirty like other countries’
leaders; to bend abstract principle for the sake of national advantage and use
their elbows on their behalf every now and then. After all, in the end, while the
professionals and politicos enjoy the moral luxury of being miserable sinners,
it is the Mail and Sun readers, and the non-readers, who mainly pay for
it.
