Last week the Conservative MP and sometime vice-chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, defected to a new party called Reform—basically a revised version of the Brexit party. In a much quoted statement, Anderson said that ‘I, like millions of people up and down the country, want my country back’.
In a way, I understand Anderson’s sentiment—only in the opposite sense. One of my recurrent feelings since the Brexit vote has been precisely the feeling that ‘they’ have taken away my country, the country I thought I belonged to, leaving me not legally but emotionally stateless. I had thought that I belonged to a country that had embraced a multicultural and European path, a country in which the next generation would feel as at home in Rome, Berlin, or Paris as in London or Leeds. A different set of horizons had opened up and they were inviting. Of course, living in Scotland complicated matters, since it was essentially England and Wales that chose the Brexit path and England alone that found anything to admire in Brexit’s chief campaigners (when Nigel Farage visited Edinburgh, no taxi driver could be found willing to take him to the airport, I won’t even name the former Prime Minister). But though I have ever more strongly identified with my own Scottish heritage in these last few years, I too have known the sense that there are deeply good and deeply distinctive qualities of Englishness. Older than Anderson, Farage, and the ex-Prime Minister, I actually remember the England that they fantasize about, the cricket matches on the village green, the warm beer, the steam trains—oh, and unlike many of the new nationalists I actually committed to ‘the faith of the fathers’ by serving in the national Church. I cherish passages of Shakespeare, Herbert, Wordsworth, Blake, Ruskin and others that give ‘England’ a moral weight, seen also in the paintings of Constable, Turner, Spencer, and Nash, and enacted in the great social movement of the 20th century. And I have known men and women of all classes who truly embodied the best of the values that England claimed for itself. All of that. I don’t despise ‘England’, then,—but ‘they’ have taken England from me, precisely because their rather narrow vision of England has appropriated England’s name in a way that seems scarcely to be contested in the public domain. Like Putin has appropriated ‘Russia’ and Trump ‘America’. I don’t want England ‘back’, because history doesn’t work like that. Something very valuable has been broken and even if, after the next election, the fragments are glued back together, the cracks will always show. The trust has gone—at least for my generation. Maybe—there’s a good chance—that the new generation will find a new path, if only they have the time to do it in.
Confessions of a devout European 