Introducing a tub-thumping op-ed in the Mail yesterday, Robert Jenrick quoted Orwell: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’ Mr Jenrick’s thesis is a familiar one. It is that ‘England’s political and media elite’ (he didn’t get ‘metropolitan establishment’ in the text but it was supplied in the headline) ‘seem to actively disapprove’ of their nationality, and that this will not do. ‘I can’t stomach such lofty arrogance,’ he declared, calling instead for a willingness to ‘confront complex issues of identity’ while at the same time being unreservedly ‘proud to be British.’
In support of his call for complexity he reeled off a Ladybird History list of national achievements (invented parliamentary democracy; had the Industrial Revolution; ended the slave trade; ‘stood alone against Hitler in Europe’s darkest hour’) of the sort that elites can be supposed to disapprove. He acknowledged, admittedly, that almost everyone in the UK has an additional identity. But Scottishness or Welshness, he said, are ‘identities that predate our Britishness but also bolster it’. For someone making a selling point of appreciating complexity, that seems a bit categorical. Not all Scots and Welsh people feel such a snug fit between their Scottishness or Welshness and their Britishness, and some will wonder why Mr Jenrick made no mention of how unfailingly Irishness bolsters its people’s enthusiasm for the Union.
Proud of an accident of birth? Proud of forebears you never met who fought off the Nazis?
As well as all the good things that Mr Jenrick mentions, England’s cultural inheritance also includes dissidence, nonconformism, pluralism, and the assimilation of generations of immigrants; but also the occasional decision to expel them en masse or set fire to them if we didn’t endorse their choice of prayer book. Are we to be proud of the Diggers and the Levellers, as well as the great wealth creators who turbocharged the economy by turfing peasants out of their homes to replace them with sheep?
We could spend a happy afternoon arguing about which of those things counts as distinctively English or British, and which of those things deserves our enthusiasm – either on its own terms or as a merit badge on our national school blazer. We can wonder whether it really is the job of historians, or even media elites, to sort history Sellar-and-Yeatman style into Good Things and Bad Things in support of a heartwarming national myth.
But let’s pull focus. Behind the argument over what we should be proud of is the notion of national pride itself. Why this totemic word ‘pride’? To ape Jenrick – a figure on the right appropriating George Orwell – allow me as a thoroughgoing non-believer to invoke Christian tradition: there is a reason that pride is numbered among the deadly sins.
And even in its most benign forms, pride is personal. To be proud as most of us understand it is to take satisfaction in one’s achievements. You can be proud of winning an Olympic medal, of raising children who show the signs of being decent human beings, of having conquered an addiction, or any number of other things in which your actions have had positive consequences. But it’s vainglorious and intellectually baseless to pomp yourself on achievements you had nothing to do with. This applies to the left as well as to the right. It may have originated in a refusal to be shamed, but ‘pride’ in who you happen to be attracted to sexually doesn’t make much sense either.
There is no reason on earth anyone should be ‘proud’ to be British – unless, which doesn’t seem to be what Mr Jenrick is driving at, they are recent immigrants whose journey and settling here required ingenuity and courage. Be proud of an accident of birth? Be proud of forebears you never met who fought off the Nazis, established parliamentary democracy, brought an end to the slave trade, strongarmed the King into Magna Carta or turned the globe pink? That is what’s sometimes called stolen valour – and it’s babyish first and dangerous second.
I don’t, in saying this, set out to ‘talk Britain down’. This country has an extraordinary range of institutions and historical achievements from which every citizen benefits. Nor should any of us be ashamed of the less glorious aspects of our country’s past. They weren’t our doing either. But the appropriate response to these great institutions – our peaceful and democratic transitions of power, our independent judiciary, our traditions of free speech and all the rest of it – is not pride but something more humble: gratitude. Shared gratitude is an emotion that can bind a community no less powerfully than pride, and it is far less prone to slipping down the ethnonationalist rabbit-hole.
If we were to see things that way, ego would be removed from the equation. We wouldn’t see historians soberly reevaluating the country’s past, or the National Trust using margarine instead of butter to make scones, as attacks on the core of our identity to which we should respond with rage.
The divisions and difficulties our country faces, Mr Jenrick thinks, are rooted in these elites with their pesky refusal to celebrate British greatness. ‘We can’t possibly form a united country around an identity we aren’t proud of,’ he writes. Indeed, he argues that our country being ‘not at ease with itself’ had its issue in this summer’s rioting.
Here, you see, is where my view of things diverges most profoundly from his. I don’t think that it was the metropolitan media elites who kicked off those riots: it looked an awful lot to me like a bunch of drunk blokes waving Union Flags. And it’s the sort of stuff spouted by Mr Jenrick that will tend to encourage them.
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