Cover Story

The Left’s war on Britishness

23 July 2005

In their hatred of this country, says Anthony Browne, the terrorists were in one sense very British: self-loathing is the national disease

With just 1 per cent of the world’s population, Britain has united the world with a truly global language, allowing people to speak unto people for the first time in history (French was little more than a language for elites). These islands make up less than a fifth of 1 per cent of the world’s land area, and yet their capital dictates to the rest of the world its time zones and degrees of east and west.

Britain’s cultural influence is far smaller that its scientific and political influence, but in the written word it is unrivalled. Molière and Goethe cannot challenge Shakespeare as the world’s most important writer. More recently, British musicians from The Beatles to Dido have a global audience unmatched by those of any country other than its former colony, the US. Our TV producers increasingly enjoy a similar status — is there any country that hasn’t yet suffered Big Brother or Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Our national story is the most extraordinary there is. The patriotic French are obsessed with ‘les Anglo-Saxons’ because they see our achievements far more clearly than we do ourselves. As Luigi Barzini asked in The Europeans, ‘How ...did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?’ Thomas Sowell, the leading African-American intellectual, wrote in his epic Conquests and Cultures, ‘Much of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social, cultural, and political aftermath of Britain’s cultural achievements, its industrial revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the world.’

The problem for Britain is not that it has too little to be proud of, but too much. Multiculturalists warn that history excludes newcomers, but Britain’s national story is a continuing one that anyone can join, just as immigrants have joined it in the past, and as newcomers to the US today get infected by its self-belief. Through the so-called voluntary assumption of history, when an immigrant starts thinking of his fellow countrymen as ‘we’ rather than ‘you’, he takes on his country’s history as his own.

After helping free Europe from fascism, Winston Churchill finally published his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a book with so little self-loathing that it is now utterly unfashionable. Churchill explained, ‘It is in the hope that the contemplation of the trials and tribulations of our forefathers may not only fortify the English-speaking peoples of today, but also play some small part in uniting the whole world, that I present this account.’ Today, the need for such a self-confident national story is as great as ever. We have tried the alternative, and seen its deadly consequences.

Anthony Browne is the Times’s Europe correspondent.