Wednesday 11 September 2013

Small Island Talk


SMALL ISLAND TALK: How to be British When the Russians Can't Even Remember David Cameron's Name


As I speak, various members of the UN Security Council are engaged in a seriously complicated geopolitical dance, all in their various ways trying to reconcile their divergent interests while all the time watching out of the corner of their eye as missile after missile is being dropped on the civilians in Syria. With all that tragedy and outrage filling the headlines, talking about anything else seems a bit of a cop out. But let’s be honest – my knowledge of the Middle East is limited to BBC reporting, newspaper editorials and an intimate acquaintance with imam biyaldi. I have a gut opinion about military intervention, and could pour my bleeding Western heart out about the state of the humanitarian situation as I see it from my nice cosy living-room, but it would really just be crass and arrogant.

All this silence, however, starts to feel a bit uncomfortable, and so I’m going to take a punt and post about something related, but hopefully more at my level, which I don’t feel quite so much like ignorant, undergraduate foreign-policy-by-platitudinous-numbers. I’m opting for identity-politics-by-platitudinous-numbers instead, because with grim inevitability this whole, messy affair has thrown the jingoists and the post-Blair-pacifists into a bit of a tizzwozz (technical geopolitical term, that one) about ‘Britain’s role in the twenty-first century global community.’


Not that this is anything new, of course. We British seem to spend so much time gazing at our own national navels that I’m surprised we can find our way to the right room for the UN Security Council, let alone look beyond our shores enough to quibble over whether interventionism makes us the good guys, or just the guys with good intentions. Do we even really have a ‘direction’ as a country? Can we have one when we spend so much of the time glorifying or apologising for all the destruction and/or brilliance we’ve done on our way to where we already are? Sometimes, Britain reminds me rather of a tired, world-weary husband at the end of a long family shopping trip. He got his shopping done a while ago, and now he’s lumbering around, nonplussed, loaded up with bags, trailing the rest of the family. Generally, he follows his young teenage upstart country, America, because she’s got the loudest voice and if one wants a quiet life it’s generally good to keep her happy. It’s nice to have her round, because she drags you into the cool, young shops where you get treated like you’re important, and which you’d never get in to normally, because you’re too old and wrinkly and haven’t spent enough on your shoes. Occasionally, our sensible European wife (usually German, occasionally Scandinavian) overrules the teenager and shows us that there is a much more grown-up, cheaper way of doing things, and then we suddenly remember that, actually, yes, we don’t have to do what the teenager wants, and we sit the next expensive shop out, and let the daughter go off and flash her cash (read: helicopters) in another shop, showing how young, cool and infinitely generous (read: powerful and influential) she is by dropping a lot of money on some big present for someone else (bombs and liberation are presents, right?). A lot of the time, I think Britain could do with bowing out and settling down for a cup of tea – the world would probably do well enough without us, after all, and we’re probably not cut out for it anymore.

Except, of course, that the lacklustre shopping Dad usually ends up slumped in a chair at the entrance to Marks and Spencer’s changing room, looking thoroughly beaten and only opening his mouth to yawn or assure the wife that either the black or the blue is good. (Sorry for the heavy stereotyping, but go to your nearest M&S on a Saturday afternoon and you’ll see I have grounds.) Britain, meanwhile, has steadfastly refused even a pretence of defeat. Even with the contortions of neck it requires to both look back wistfully and navel-gaze at the same time, we’ve still got a hand spare to wave a Union Jack.

We’re a patriotic bunch, us Brits. Not in the USA-way, obviously – with all their flags and their pledges of allegiance, they’re just a bit nouveau and happy-clappy. Ours is a very stealth-wealth, C of E style patriotism – the blue, red and white stuff, the Great British [fill in here] is either slightly tongue-in-cheek or basically just naff. Most people realise that the EDL and BNP are basically just racist idiots – nationalism is just a bit tasteless, on the whole, a bit brash, a bit impolite. We are Proud To Be British, obviously, but I think part of the reason why we’re so ridiculously vanilla about it is because we exist in a weird patriotic void. Ask anybody what ‘Britishness’ is and they’ll usually do one of two things. Option one is taking the politician’s favoured route and spouting out the same stuff about tolerance, community, grit and fair play, presumably in contrast to all those twenty-first century functioning democracies who are so proud of their intolerance, cowardice and willingness to celebrate life’s cheaters. The other way to go is to splutter a bit, and then finally list a few, ultimately unimportant things like queuing, understating everything and always complaining about the weather, possibly with passing mention to the ‘British eccentric’ and Shakespeare or The Beatles. The first of these two options is, if I’m honest, well-meaning guff. The second seems a bit lame, but personally I think it’s spot on. The fact is, that we have largely lost our geo-political role in the world, and as a faded player in terms of real power, we fall back onto the softer stuff, and look to what is, ultimately, our role in the world – to keep churning out what we’re good at: Britishness. The reason why we’re good at this is because we are somehow programmed to be it, despite having no idea what ‘it’ is. Handily, this means that the rest of the world haven’t got a hope in hell of replicating it, and we can continue to accidentally churn out cool pop bands and slightly off-the-wall big thinkers, while ploughing the furrow in terms of producing good tweed, . Meanwhile, the rest of the world get to send their products, students and whatever else here, and allow us to sit in the corner of the security council, looking nominally important in the same way an old man with a lot of medals does, even though he got them forty years ago and has now plum forgot how to drive a tank/keep calm and carry on/defeat fascism. We’re an easy target with the whole ‘yeah, but you were big bad colonials’, and yet also a handy ally when you’re looking for . But short of that, we make enough noise culturally to remind everybody we’re still here, and that keeps us as a player.

Looking back on all that, I’m tempted to say that we should all stop worrying about what our ‘role’ is in the world is, and just get on with doing what we’re best at, which is carrying on as usual and just ‘being ourselves’. But that would kind of defeat the object, because worrying about who we are as a nation is who we are as a nation. So worry on Britain – it’s what makes us Great.

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