Britain was the first country to step bravely into the industrial age, and the first to benefit from the expansion of social, cultural and intellectual horizons that came with it. But Britain was also the first to encounter the many unpleasant surprises the new epoch ushered in: mass urban poverty and squalor, extremes of unwarranted wealth and privilege, the unpredictability of boom and slump, the radical ideologies and religious currents that swept up the dispossessed (and sometimes the merely caring) into social movements bent on justice. So great were the divisions that by the 1840s the novelist - and later Tory prime minister - Benjamin Disraeli was asking whether we were one nation or two, the haves and the have-nots.
Some would argue that social reform saw to it that British society got through the crisis, with the extension of civil rights before the law to everyone, followed by the political right to vote and stand for parliament and finally - with the welfare state and the NHS in the 1940s - the social right to a standard of life, education and wellbeing. Others point out there was more to it than that, that the subjective conditions of national cohesion included the popularization of high imperialism in India and Africa and orchestrated flag-waving for European wars. No doubt the winning formula was a combination of the two, but at all events Britain approached the end of the twentieth century not only as a powerful economy but also as a society which had absorbed major waves of immigrants from Ireland, Eastern Europe and its former colonies into the national community. There were tame nationalisms in Scotland and Wales, and only the IRA disturbed the national concert.
How is it, then, that all this is suddenly in tatters? Why has difference become discord and cultural variation not a strength but a threat? Perhaps it is in part that the social settlement of the postwar years was wrecked by Thatcherism and gross inequalities have emerged, perhaps also that the empire has evaporated and the opportunities for jingoism are so few, so overshadowed by the US superpower and so unsatisfyingly ambiguous - Iraq, Afghanistan - when they do arise. Perhaps too immigrants from Eastern Europe and refugees from an increasingly unstable developing world are arriving with no preconceived allegiance to the "mother country". Many of the latter also have raw wounds from the brutal realities of western domination of their home countries and economies.
So how do we set about re-establishing a sense of common belonging? The issues are complex, and require action at every level, at the UN, in the EU, nationally and locally. What seems less helpful is the hectoring discourse from government about a highly selective "Britishness". For example, according to the Ministry of Communities and Local Government, local authorities should be issuing leaflets to "new migrants" extolling such uniquely national virtues as obeying the law (tell that to BAE's bribery department); raising children properly (the 30% who live in households in poverty?), treating others with fairness and respect (unless they are seeking asylum); preserving the environment (such as by expanding Heathrow); and paying one's taxes (short of being a nondom or using offshore tax havens).
The ministry even wants new residents to be told to "behave morally and ethically", just as if no one outside this sceptr'd isle had ever thought of it, and as if "extraordinary rendition" had never entered our vocabulary.
Come off it. Apart from working multilaterally for an end to war as an instrument of policy, being realistic about our climate change obligations and campaigning at the UN to reverse rampant global inequality, there is one cardinal feature of "Britishness": we do not bang on about it. Would the government please set an example.
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