Long before the debt ridden bubble economy burst I had written of an impending period of national crisis. The London writer and mediocre "lad-lit" novelist Dave Hill who writes for the Guardian rattled off an article "Why Big Up Britishness ?" ( Tuesday 31 July 2007 ) stating the following,"Thinking about your nationality, to what extent do you feel British?
The answers showed that 28% of young (South) Asians felt "completely" British, 31% "a lot" British, 27% "a little" British and 11% "not at all". This compared with 48%, 25%, 19% and 7% for "whites" in the same young adult age group. While the difference deserves note, the key term the question trades in means such different things to different people it's hard to know what to make of their replies.
For some young Asian Britons to "feel British" might refer to having been born in Britain or holding a British passport. To others it might be shorthand for certain long-standing customs practised in Britain, such as eating roast beef on Sundays or drinking a lot of beer - things plenty of them don't go in for. As for the white people questioned, simply being white would have been enough for many to answer "completely".
What it means to "feel British" is a notion so abstract and triggering such subjective interpretations that it defies the efforts of most people in Britain to pin it down, whatever their roots or ethnicity. Responses to the ICM question surely varied accordingly. Like Britishness itself, such exercises are mired in confusion by and of definition.
My response was caustic but, I still think, justified. Britishness was once a coherent project and a serious ideal that depended on a belief in Parliamentary democracy, local government run by those who belonged to a place and not bureaucrats from elsewhere, an impartial civil service civic corporatism and good transport networks and civic institutions and clubs.
All have decayed.
Today all this abstract debate about 'identity' is becoming evermore meaningless. For a start, how many people go around thinking 'wow, I'm feeling really British today' and obsess about the various ways in which they are British ? Such feelings have a tendency only to come out in period of uncertainly or national crisis. Confident people instinctive know who they are.
So put people on the spot in some daft survey and they might well just say that it doesn't really mean much to them. The survey also did not take into account that 'Britishness' is a declining concept anyway with the revival of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon nationalism. Moreover, being British surely does not mean that you are not English or Scottish at the same time.
Given that the Union doesn't really have the importance it once had, it isn't surprising that many Asians said they don't really feel British. Gordon Brown is flogging this dead horse because he believes it can act as a US style form of nationalism that can 'embrace' the 'diversity' of Britain's global role both past and present.
Naturally, it was a foolish Atlanticist delusion that appeals to Brown's messianic neoliberal visions of Britain as a cleverer and more culturally forceful agent of Benevolent Change. Only the bien piensants who sell that cultural soft power via the British Council can believe that tripe.
All this identity nonsense is also so contrived because it's an attempt to resurrect something that has been mercilessly killed off not so much by idiotic forms of multiculturalism but by consumerism and the meaningless drift of British life into casual hedonism and a 'shopping and sex culture'.
Patriotism depends on long term attachments and loyalty to institutions but few feel attached to anything in Britain other their individual lives and the sum total of pleasures they feel entitled to receive from life which ends with their own personal extinction. This narcissism is neither conducive to civic patriotism on which functioning societies exhibit and depend on.
In the face of such relentless social atomisation, it is hardly surprising that the only forms of patriotism left are commercialised and emotive kitsch varieties that try to fake genuine enthusiasm.
That becomes clear from reading an absurd book like Patriots by Richard Weight ( who worked for the British Council ). Patriots starts off with a good overview of post-war popular culture but descends into a paean to Blair's Britain with a washed out pop culture trying to resurrect mere memories of the 60's and desperately manufacturing the 'feel good factor'.
Examples of this are Cool Britannia, Britpop, or supporting the English football team at the local pub where hordes of moronic city workers get wrecked on chemically horrid bews and scream and yell at large plasma screens, another stage in the killing off of the public house as a place of conversation and solace in large cities and a hub of village life.
Either that of in 1997 blubbing over the death of a third rate aristocratic bint Princess Diana whose televisual presence was a fragile link back to a fairytale past that arrests the subject-citizen from this cultural oblivion and gives a sense of how great it was 'being there' when it all happened in 1981.
Sensing the void, British citizens try to simulate some oceanic feeling of belonging through the vague egoistic identification with pop culture and pop icons who act as symbols of their own aspirations and through whose lives they live their own sterile and vacuous fantasies. The popularity of the X Factor and whining gin sodden women warbling at Kareoke 'Nites'.
The "leftist" variety of patriotic kitsch can be explained by reference to philosophy outlined by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Nationalist kitsch of the Rule Britannia kind, Henry Newbolt, and so on is merely laughable because crusty and old fashioned. Yet the new "leftist" kitsch is idiotic no less.
Think of the form of tribal identity that comes from all that 'we-ing' about during anti-war demos which become like pop concerts and carnivals that become quickly integrated into the 'entertainment economy' because so many are too shallow to really bother thinking about the real and painful dilemmas of world politics and Iraq.
The 2009 G 20 "Anti-Globalisation" protests demonstrated that no less than the halfwits on the anti-war march clutching "Make T Not War" placards. Cocooned in a society of affluence, this was "feel good" rebellion. One reason Tony Blair could ignore it with the benevolent eye of the retrospective kitschy memory that "they'll grow out of it as I did".
For despite New Left critiques of "the system", most students during the 1968 student rebellions at places like the LSE were never serious. What they ended up doing was rejecting the working class and embracing "cultural politics" instead, a stable of New Labour which treated "the proles" as children, too stupid to understand their betters.
The bitterness of having been out of power from 1979 to 1997 also led to a belief that the white proles needed to be countered by upgrading all into ethnically diverse race and faith cantons, though, ironically, that was the result of Margaret Thatcher's doling out of money to "ethnic minorities" after the Scarman Report into the inner city riots in 1981 black riots in London.
Having realised that it doesn't mean anything to be British and that Britain is a whacked out and potty old whore is liberating to an extent but it leaves one in a void. Exploring that void an the nihilism should be the job of novelists and writers and journalists but most have failed to confront the facts head on. Except J G Ballard.
The greatness of Ballard that he satirised Britain as it slowly spiralled off into the oceanic oblivion of manufactured memory, televisual consciousness, emotional correctness, and self sustaining upbeat media boosterism that convinces its pitiful citizens that they actually count for something in the world
The obvious truth was obviously they don't and won't even more when Brown's gimcrack and debt ridden bubble economy bursts. At least, that might have the effect of forcing people to sober up and might have a beneficial impact on what is left of its culture without the waffle and afflatus the British Council, Lord Bragg, Billy Bragg, Blair and Brown.
Naturally, staring plain facts in the face in not something gilded and privileged "leftists" are prepared to do. The very word "leftist" indictates an inclination towards what was clearly once defined as socialism or liberal social democracy. In 2010 it means little more than a smug progressive orthodoxy as represented by Tristram Hunt,
In the Observer on Sunday, 15 November 2009, Hunt rhapsodised about the New Labour regime that has brought Britain to the brink of financial collapse, as well as affecting a cringeworthy veneration for pop culture just be be seen to be with it and "positive".
What a difference to 1997. Of course, there was an awful lot wrong with the "Cool Britannia" moment that presaged the first Blair government. But at least there was then some energy about the meaning of Britain: Britart; Britpop; Britain as a "young country" repositioned the UK as part of a modern, social-democratic Europe no longer solely defined by empire and royalty.
Face facts. Real history means nothing anymore to most people ( forget the 'ought' it just doesn't) other than as a cosy set of cliched images and banal celebrationism, a trite set of secular rituals that appeal on Sunday.Which is presumably why Hunt squirted out this little paean in the Observer.
Rather like the earnest attempt of the Jamie Olivers of cookong, Hunt is a tedious poseur who sets out with annoying contrived televisual preening zeal and to try and get 'really radical' and and 'right on' and make history 'relevant'
Again face facts. The Conservative mythology is no longer of any meaning any more than the idea people are going to be enthused by the Diggers or non-conformist dissenting traditions. Both the conservative traditions of Anglicanism, Royalty and Empire are as dead as the dissenting tradition.
Of course, these subteranean forces are still there but consumerism and globalism soon converts them into kitsch. Think of the doltish Ian Bone and Class War anarchists who now hold mock 'fayres', recreating of the Battle of Orgreave in the Miners Strike of 1984 as a "battle re-enactment" and the feeble G 20 protests, a fun day out for "progressives".
The reaction to enforced new progressive orthodoxies, like those attempted by Richard Weight's Patriots, is that they feign a new sense of confidence about Britain's 'identity' that reflect the very insecurity they wish to dispel.For a real vision of a bored, deracinated and atomised Britain read J G Ballard or the historian Tony Judt's Ill Fares The Land ( 2010).
The most likely result of the destruction of Britain's old vision of its destiny will not be the one Hunt pines for: the future will hold with the current neoliberal orthodoxy in place agreater ethnic divisions, racism, and all sorts of evils encouraged by idiot progressivism, multicult poses and 'identity politics'.
Written on a piece started on Tuesday July 31 2007 and later added too
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