The Spectator's Notes

19 April 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

When informed that this was to be The Spectator’s English Special Issue, I happened to be reading a novel by John Buchan called Midwinter. It concerns an unsuccessful attempt by a young Highland laird, Alastair Maclean, to raise English Jacobites for Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. Like most Buchan novels, it has a rather weak plot which requires exciting, brilliantly described journeys up and down the country. In Buchan’s favourite Oxfordshire, the hero is rescued by Midwinter, a gentleman-outlaw who leads the mysterious Spoonbills. Maclean asks him who he is. ‘I am a dweller in Old England,’ says Midwinter. ‘That explains little,’ says Maclean. ‘Nay, it explains all. There is an Old England which has outlived Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman and will outlast the Hanoverians. It is the land on the edge of moorlands and the rims of forests and the twilight before dawn, and strange knowledge still dwells in it.’ This sort of thing is historical rubbish (who were these Old English people who were here even before the Angles arrived to bring the word ‘England’ to our shores?), but I must admit that, from childhood, I have had a certain weakness for it. If you live in an old country, you like the fancy that it has some ineradicable essence. Elsewhere in the novel, Maclean muses on ‘this strange thing, England, which was like a spell on sober minds’. But it does not do to push ideas of Englishness too far. Englishness is perverted if it is turned into a political message. Unfortunately, the loosening of the Union encourages identity politics. If we are moving into an era of bulldogs and St George’s crosses and denunciations of our non-English neighbours, we shall end up like Serbia.

John Buchan, himself a Scot, understood this. His career (Governor-General of Canada, among other things) showed a belief in Englishness and Scottishness combined, though not effaced, in Britishness. In the dedication to Midwinter, he is ‘I, who love with equal mind/ The southern sun, the northern wind,/ The lilied lowland water-mead/ And the grey hills that cradle Tweed’. The tale ‘haply tries/ To intertwine our loyalties’. Various forces — devolution, the decline of Protestantism and history teaching, the power of the European Union — have begun to prise those loyalties apart. The most prominent victim of this is one of its authors, Gordon Brown. A natural unionist, Mr Brown has always made Britain, not Scotland, the canvas for his ambitions. But his party’s policy of devolution with the bills paid by the English has made Mr Brown’s Scottishness an issue as it would not have been in the last century. He and his Scottish associates now seem to many English voters like minority colonisers. If Labour wins the next election without a majority in England, this impression will be fatally confirmed. Mr Brown may be confronted with another piece of poetic imagination — Kipling’s Saxon: ‘When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen eyes set on your own,/ And grumbles “This isn’t fair dealing,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.’ (The man giving that advice is another minority coloniser, a Norman.)

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