HOW TO BE BRITISH

Charles Moore diagnoses a national sense

of inadequacy, and prescribes a traditional pick-me-up

AT THE ROOT of most people's thought about politics in this country lies a sense not very often spoken but constantly, painfully felt. This is that Britain is a great country, but a country that has seen better days.

I believe that this feeling is shared by most people who are worthy of respect in all parties. As Geoffrey Mulgan wrote in The Spectator last week (Patriotism is not enough'), this subject is the new political battleground. The reactions to the feeling are various. Some are pessimistic, some nostalgic, some resilient, some resigned. But this is the animating feeling of our political culture, one which makes it quite different from that, say, of Germany, where the underlying feeling is still one of atonement and renewal, or of Russia, where it is a difficult mixture of pride and a sense of inferiority. This sense of one's country's difficulties and of its greatness is far more important in our politics than any all-embracing ideology. It is impossible, if one lives in Britain and keeps one's eyes open, not to see a contrast between past achievements and present condition. I am not thinking so much of imperial glory, which was a late- flowering and in many respects unappeal- ing growth, but of the sheer vigour commercial, linguistic, political, scientific, religious, sporting — of this nation for 300 or 400 years. In the part of London in which I live I see this contrast physically embodied most days of my life. On one side of the Midland Road is St Pancras sta- tion — fantastic, vigorous, aspiring, the home to the great new technology of the 1860s, drawing imaginatively on the past in order to welcome the future. On the other side I see the new British Library — wildly over-budget, wildly late, designed with no outward expression of the learned purpose for which it is erected, replacing a great Victorian reading-room with a sub-indust- rial lump. In Victorian Britain, people rose to the occasion. In modern Britain, it too often seems that the occasion itself has gone.

For anyone who loves his country, it is obvious that the first duty of its politics is to try to put this right, rather than to try to advance some abstract theory about the best of all possible worlds. The British resemble a family who have inherited a large and beautiful house. They love it dearly, but they find it hard to know how best to adapt it to modern use, and they have a terrible struggle to keep the roof on. Theirs is a hard task, but for a conservative it is a congenial one. All conservatives should surely agree that this — and not a project for international government, or for perfect free markets, or for state planning or for geopolitical mastery — is the task. ► To understand how to address this task one might start by looking more closely at the words 'British' and 'Britain'. Most of the more sentimental or personal or emo- tional evocations of our country do not use that word. They tend to refer to England: Stanley Baldwin, just before he became prime minister in 1923, gave a famous evo- cation of his idea of England:

The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in Eng- land since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England.

It is a fine passage, but it is also, when you think about it, piffle. Most of the sights and sounds Baldwin describes were not unique to England, and most of them, far from enduring, have largely disap- peared.

Or George Orwell, beginning dramati- cally, in 1941, with the words, 'As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me', evokes a dis- tinct English character, one on which the present Prime Minister has drawn: 'the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning'. Again, the description strikes home and receives friendly recogni- tion in the mind of the reader, but it is no more than an impression, and one which is extremely subject to alteration. Today all Orwell's scenes have either changed or vanished altogether, but it does not follow that England has disappeared. The word `England', then, is an immensely powerful and poetic one, but one that resists clear definition.

The word 'Britain' has different over- tones. It is more official, less likely to be used in conversation, more likely to be used in documents. This is because it is fundamentally a political word. The word `Britain' denotes a set of political arrange- ments, the Union between the component parts of the nation and the government which administers that Union. The word `Britain' does not evoke so much a series of pleasing sensory images, like well-mown lawns or warm beer or whatever your par- ticular fancy may be, but rather a way of running things, an intricate network of institutions.

It follows that the study of how best to be British, how to understand our nation so that we may sustain and improve it, should arise from the study of that net- work.

Until the end of the 19th century, the overwhelming impression of Britain was that she was modern. This expressed itself in the variety of scientific invention, in the quality of manufactures, in the aggressive- ness of trade. It appeared in a certain adaptable informality which allowed a world-wide insurance business to develop out of a coffee-house, or a mass sporting entertainment to arise from the boys' game of kicking a bladder about the street, or a great public school to form from a series of small lodging houses.

British politics was vigorously, publicly conducted, and it succeeded in gradually extending its scope to the larger con- stituency which the industrial revolution produced. In the 19th century the word `reform' meant specifically reform of the franchise. What is sometimes described as the 'political nation' was expanded in an orderly manner and it was characteristic of the genius of British Conservatism that what was supposed to be the more reac- tionary of the two parties survived this expansion and profited from it. Who would have imagined that the party which opposed the Great Reform Bill of 1832 would receive, 160 years later, the largest number of votes ever cast for one party in Britain?

But for the past 50 years we have suf- fered from two damaging views of politics which have been strong among our rulers. The first was eloquently expressed and sub- scribed to by Orwell himself, again in the essay, 'The Lion and the Unicorn', which I quoted earlier. 'What this war has demon- strated,' he wrote, 'is that private capitalism — that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit — does not work.' In a Socialist economy,' he added, the problems of con- sumption and production `do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them.' That a humane and patriotic man like Orwell could have believed this even for ten minutes shows what an addling effect the experience of war had upon British freedom. The idea that the working life of a free people could and should be planned by government is something from which this country has only begun to recov- er in the past 16 years.

The other view among our rulers which has damaged our political culture since the war is harder to identify and to counter because it is not driven by a clear ideology. It is a view of politics almost exclusively confined to politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats. It is the view which is always fretting about Britain's 'role' and 'influ- ence', and which uses the language of 'seats at the top table', 'places on the bus' and so on. If you believe that these things are what matter most for a country, you will, in mod- ern British conditions, be pessimistic, even defeatist. The loss of empire, the rise of the United States and changes in the world economy will lead you to realise that Britain can only, in the foreseeable future, be a second-rank power, and so to con- clude that Britain is 'finished', and can only exert power through some new international association, of which, of course, the European Community is now the most obvious.

In its most pernicious form, this preoc- cupation with power and influence leads our politicians to abandon whatever is strongest and most distinctive in our politi- cal culture and barter it for the appearance of international respectability — selling our birthright not so much for a mess of pottage as for a succession of quite out- standingly agreeable meals in Strasbourg, Brussels and wherever else two or three or 15 are gathered together in the name of the European Union. One of the most objectionable features of the EC as at pre- sent constituted is that decisions which will eventually have the force of law in all member states are arrived at almost solely through private negotiations. These are meat and drink to the influence-peddlers, but poison to the principles of representa- tive government upon which Britain's political self-respect depends.

I believe that only the Conservative Party can lead this recovery of self-respect. But when one says so, one meets at once a barrage of criticism, not only from the Left, but from many conservative-minded people who are outraged by what they see as 16 years of demolition of what is often called the social fabric. They believe that this period, particularly the 11 years when Lady Thatcher was prime minister, attacked British institutions. They think that our country has been strapped to the Procrustean bed of a callous free-market theory. They say that local government and the health service and the BBC and the universities and the regiments and the professions and a great deal more have been sacrificed in the name of a rigid ide- ology. They identify in modern Conser- vatism a utilitarian and anti-historical spirit which is as bad as socialism. They accuse it of combining two apparently opposite things in a deadly mixture — of increasing central state power and of throwing our people on the mercies of uncontrolled market competition. Many of them discern in the pleasant noises which emanate from Mr Tony Blair a reaction against this, and some even conclude that the best thing for a true Conservative to do is to vote Labour. Extreme forms of this delusion have recently been visible in the region of Stratford-upon-Avon.

The accusations are not 100 per cent untrue. Some modern Conservatives have been crude in applying business models to institutions that do not have business pur- poses. It is simply inappropriate, for exam- ple, to speak of universities as organisations which 'produce' certain human commodities or clear economic benefits, as if they were factories. Similar- ly, I find it shocking that the Tomlinson report on the future of London hospitals makes no reference whatever to the his- torical achievements and expert traditions of institutions like St Bartholomew's Hos- pital and talks instead of things called `isochrones'. Again, the strand of Sunday Times-style Conservatism which sees the monarchy as justified only by some calcu- lation about cost-effectiveness and tourist revenue seems to me stupid and disgust- ing. But I would maintain that these are aberrations, and not the essence of the Conservative beliefs which revived under Margaret Thatcher and have won the Tories every election since 1979. British free-market Conservatism is not a Utopian ideology. It is an attempt to revive those past British qualities of an active and enterprising spirit and adapt them to modern conditions. It gets much of its vigour from the sense of frustration at a great country brought low. It sees the legacy of the Labour victory in 1945 as something which has made Britain weaker and less free.

There is an understanding in free-mar- ket Conservatism, though it is not often well expressed, that markets are not mere- ly mechanisms. They are themselves insti- tutions, and they are political and cultural as well as economic phenomena. They depend upon traditions of trust, fair deal- ing, business experience, family ties, habits of work, forms of education and the framework of law. The famous grocer's shop in Grantham did good business not on the basis of some abstract economic principle, but on the basis of respect in the community, knowledge of the market town, and the ethical traditions of Methodism. When people watch the Lon- don foreign exchange markets on televi- sion they often profess horror at the sight of young men with lavatory brush haircuts, too many telephones and estuary accents deciding the value of the world's curren- cies. I feel quite the opposite. It seems to me an admirable expression of the British empirical tradition that people of quite modest backgrounds and small formal education can successfully turn over $464 billion a day where their counterparts in New York manage a mere $244 billion and in Frankfurt a paltry $76 billion. I feel that Britain is much safer with these Essex men than with the gentlemen of White- hall, let alone of Brussels.

Almost everywhere that the Conserva- tives have extended markets in Britain they have brought not only greater pros- perity but a more civilised society. People have now forgotten the boredom, frustra- tion and sometimes corruption involved in getting a telephone put into your house before the mid-1980s, or the extraordinary imposition which forbade you to take more than £50 when you went abroad, or the shows of hands in British Leyland carparks which brought an entire industry to its knees. There is no better study of human ingratitude than all those hundreds of liberal journalists who attack the years of Tory rule without acknowledging that their far greater freedom, personal wealth, technological flexibility and harmony at the work-place are chiefly due to the Tory reform of the trade unions which, for the most part, they fiercely resisted.

Yet it is now a commonplace of left and liberal thinking that the British constitution is rotten at its heart. Even the exceedingly cautious Mr Blair, who hates committing himself to anything, was happily explicit on the subject at Brighton. He reiterated that Labour would introduce a Scottish Parlia- ment, a Welsh Assembly and a Bill of Rights, and would abolish the rights of hereditary peers to sit in the House of Lords. Other suggestions from similar quarters include the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights into English law, the further development of judicial review, proportional representa- tion, and the replacement of the monarchy, though Mr Blair himself avoids these last two.

Not all the criticisms are beside the point. We do have an overmighty execu- tive. It is absurd that minute decisions about life in far-flung areas of the kingdom are taken by central bureaucrats rather than locally elected people, and it is true that although Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland get lots of public money — far more than is good for them as a matter of fact — they are in practice excluded from many decisions which affect them by a political culture too heavily cen- tred in London.

But if we are to address any of these things we must consider, as the reformers do not, where the essence of the liberty which we all say we value actually lies, And I would maintain that it lies in the geo- graphical entity and political community known as Britain and in the national forum of that community — the British Parliament.

To justify my claim precisely, I would need to enter into a historical analysis for which there is no space here. But anyway I do not think that I am compelled to justify it. It is a good conservative position that when change is proposed the burden of proof must be on those who advocate change. To return to the simile of a beauti- ful old house which I used earlier: it is the person who wishes to knock it down who must explain himself, not the occupant who wishes to keep it standing. And what is very observable about those who wish to begin the demolition is that they see every- thing in terms of more law and more gov- ernment.

In his new book Ruling Britannia, Andrew Marr, who favours constitutional reform, says: 'Some of these issues — the Union, devolution, a Bill of Rights, power- sharing, proportional representation, ref- erendums — have been gingerly placed on the national agenda by the Conservatives in their search for a settlement in Ulster.' This, he implies, is a good thing. Yet what is really striking about most of the reforms is what a mess they have made in Northern Ireland. The province is a cautionary les- son against devolution and constitutional experiment. The one policy that has not been tried — the full integration of North- ern Ireland into the rest of the United Kingdom — is the policy that keeps the peace in all its other constituent parts.

It is hard to see the virtue of what you have always taken for granted, but this is what Conservatives ought to specialise in. Any clever commentator can find faults in the structure of the Union and its Parlia- ment. He can point out that the design of the constitutional building does not accord with all modern specifications, and some- times his anxieties will be right. But he needs to be reminded very firmly that peo- ple have lived under the same roof for a very long time, a fact which itself suggests at least a measure of harmony, and that he will not have the luxury of building any replacement on a green-field site.

It is part of the defeatist tendency in modern British elites, the tendency which I mentioned earlier to see everything purely in terms of seeking power and influence, to accept the reformers' analysis, though without the reformers' zeal. The one thing, for example, that our administrative class will not accept about Northern Ireland is that it should be unambiguously British. Not many of them want it to be unambigu- ously Irish either, but most see its salva- tion in the perpetuation, indeed the institutionalisation, of uncertainty over its constitutional status. They wish to blur the lines of authority, not seeing that by refus- ing to decide the issue of Britishness they throw it open to ever more dispute.

It is this attitude and this elite which persuaded Mrs Thatcher into signing the Single European Act which extended the regulatory power of the Brussels bureau- cracy and removed from large areas the right of veto for member states. What the Single European Act and the work of M. Delors, what our membership of the ERM and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty all made absolutely plain was that the pre- vailing project of the European Communi- ty was not to improve the trade, political co-operation and friendly communication of the member states, but to build a new form of government and a new entity to be governed. The plan for the European Union, of which, through Maastricht, we all find ourselves citizens, is what the name implies — that we should all be one in Europe, as we are, or have been, all one in Britain.

In analysing why this plan is something which we should do everything possible to resist, Conservatives make a mistake, I think, when they make a universal argu- ment in favour of nation states against other forms of government. It seems to me that there is nothing sacred about the nation state in general. Some are artificial, some are too weak or too poor or too divided. You have only to look at the fate of numerous nations created by the Treaty of Versailles or by African decolonisation or in the former Yugoslavia to see what I mean.

Which takes me back to my title, 'How to be British'. My observation of our histo- ry is that the British nation state is a coherent, working entity which has not been seriously disputed for nearly 300 years except in relation to Ireland. Our capacity to be British, our idea of our- selves and our sense of worth are built round this history. And it follows that our Parliament is crucial to our sense of worth as the Bundestag is not for the Germans or the Assemblee Nationale for the French. If you break up a coherent, working entity some trouble is certain and any benefit is very uncertain. Such a break-up would occur if the economic and monetary union provided for in Maastricht, or the political union aimed for in it, did take place. So anyone who is interested in being British should oppose both these things.

I do believe that part of being British today is to promote a sort of political export drive, not in order to conquer any- body, not to win the world to any body of doctrine, but to show people that our empirical, practical way of approaching the business of government can be useful for everyone. I am conscious of what we should be learning from Germany's finan- cial probity, France's cultural pride and America's love of freedom. But we should be more aware of our strengths and less hesitant in arguing from them. Take the structure of the European Community. How could it be that anyone with a British experience of parliamentary democracy could countenance a European Central Bank with the power, untrammelled by electorates, to impose slump upon a whole continent? Yet this is what is proposed. How could it be that rule from Brussels should be conducted by a commission of bureaucrats which initiates its own laws and is controlled by no parliament? Yet this is what already happens. How could it be that the Council of Ministers decides many aspects of our lives without any public record of its deliberations? Yet it is so. How could it be, above all, that the leaders of such a vast area feel so confident that they can reshape so much history so fast? Britain is culturally better equipped than any other nation to prevent it.

And here I return to what I said about Britain's former reputation for being mod- ern. Eurosceptics are often attacked for being vaingloriously nostalgic about their country's greatness. Yet the opposite is the case. The empirical, flexible, British approach is the most modern. How else to adapt to a world of precipitate social, tech- nological and economic change? One of the strongest objections to the project of the European Union is that it attempts to impose an outdated bureaucratic order upon a continent in flux. Just as London has adapted to the modern conditions in which money is traded better than Paris or Frankfurt, so British practicality about what Europe can and cannot do puts us ahead of France or Germany as they strug- gle to rescue a grand, but inappropriate design. On the future stage of Europe, it is they, and not we, who are behind the times.

This article is based on the Centre for Policy Studies lecture given at the Conservative Conference in Blackpool last week