News From Nowhere Revisited

Nowhere you would call SHANGRI-LA IN THE UK anyway.

GRAHAM CUNNINGHAM

It’s been all quiet on the Slouching Towards Bethlehem front these past few weeks and there was no post last month. Sorry about that….just a case of life’s rich bleedin’ tapestry getting in the way. Also it’s not been helped by living in the UK. All sorts of stimulating/exciting/scary (tick as required) shape-shifting things have been going on in the USA (and, to a degree, in continental Europe too). But here in Britain the mood is a kind of weary sigh…..“Whatever!” Economically and socially, politics in Britain is just the same old, same old clown show of lefty lawyers, bloated HR departments, heinous thought crimes, positive discrimination in favour of whatever latest chattering class fad is doing the rounds in SW1; of working from home and being chronically off-sick with some kind of acronym.

[My title is taken from the famous novel by 19th c. idealist William Morris depicting the Marxist heaven he dreamed of. So I guess we should give thanks that at least things didn’t turn out that bad!….only kidding.]

In this Britain, one must perhaps for now just embrace a philosophical political stoicism…best to change the subject and think about something else….the spring birds tweeting in the trees…or the weather maybe. (Also to give thanks that, where I am fortunate to reside anyway, this land remains – landscape-wise – as green and pleasant as it ever was.) So in this month’s post, I’m giving a second outing to one of my first ever Substack essays: Englishness as a Brand.

First though, a very short briefing on the current political big picture in the Britain of 2025:

• Most of the underlying big problems rarely get to be front page stories in its clown show mainstream media which remains as fixated as ever on the stale preoccupations of what someone recently dubbed its establishment “know-all classes”.
• Contrary to that know-all class’ party political pycho-drama endlessly fed to the British public, real political agency in Britain – whichever political party is supposedly ‘in power’ – is massively and disproportionately in the hands of its huge high caste of lefty lawyers. In the mental universe they inhabit, being all ‘social justicey’ and cleverly subverting the seemingly atavistic concerns of rightist politicians and van-driving, non-graduate types is viewed as a rather fun (and highly lucrative) intellectual chess game. When you – from the vantage point of your multi-million pound dwelling place – are personally insulated from the adverse consequences of those social justicey ‘causes’ you champion, it may indeed seem all very professionally satisfying. And this lawfare game now goes on not just within government and ‘independent’ judiciary circles but pretty much everywhere else too.
• Non-productivity, in all its forms, has become the British way of life. No institution in Britain exemplifies this non-productivity better than its bad-joke of a police force…. but enough already.

A recent piece in The Times by James Marriott gives the flavour of this non-productivity:

Britain seems peculiarly vulnerable to characters [like] former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells….. Many in Britain’s elite have spent their careers at several removes from real life and real consequences, in industries such as public relations or consultancy. It surely matters that where once our leaders were imperial administrators, soldiers and industrialists, we now draw our overclass from professions oversupplied with what the anthropologist David Graeber famously called “bullshit jobs”.

The bias towards bullshit extends deep in British life, from hospitals that are run by managers not doctors, to universities that employ vast bureaucracies staffed by administrators who are better paid than actual academics. Modern universities are also dispiritingly happy to supply the talentless with inflated credentials that are no longer much proof of intellectual distinction.

And the professional environment is only growing more propitious for such characters. As Pamela Dow of the think tank Civic Future observes, Britain is an “international outlier” in the size of its human resources sector — since 2011 our HR industry has grown at four times the rate of the rest of the workforce and is now the second largest in the world relative to population.

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The essay that follows was originally posted at the start of STB two years ago and so – although a personal favorite of mine – got far fewer ‘views’ than my more recent ones. It’s a gentle piece…the wry and partly tongue-in-cheek musings of a British boomer on the evolving ‘national character’ of his homeland. Gentle though it is, it does nevertheless illustrate something that is, in my view, a big part of what differentiates Britain – and most especially England – from the rest of the West….. that, as a nation, it has long been way out in front in terms of a Western phenomenon that I would term Middle-class Fashionable Anti-patriotism.

A majority of my subscribers are non Brits and so I will be interested to learn – in the comments – what you make of the national portrait I painted in this essay. And how it differs from your own.

OK….. now without further ado:

Englishness as a Brand

“England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality” George Orwell

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England and the English: how best to characterise them? Well: theirs is a land of poets and dreamers; a land of fiercely independent gritty people who know how to take their drink and dance a jig. And you just can’t help but love to hear them sing. Then there’s the food of course – the marvellous food. And so sexy; with that famous dress sense, such gorgeous specimens of masculinity and femininity the English are overall.

If all – or any – of the above was passed through some AI software it would grunt out “Does not compute, does not compute!” Why is this so? If the English are pricked, do they not bleed? When they party do they not dance and sing…and cook great meals? Do they not compete on reciprocally equal terms with Irish, Italians, French and Americans in the international romantic bonding market? Why, in short, has Englishness failed to garner its own version of the self-flattering national mythology of so many other nations? The answers are, like most conundrums, probably many and various.

self-deprecation is a gambit all too likely to backfire. It’s the sort of thing foreigners might associate with the boy or girl they used to bully at school

Part of the answer may be a certain naivety, in earlier times, about nation-scale PR. Did this arise from a low national self-esteem count or, contrariwise, an aristocratic disdain for self display? Perhaps both. Either way, self-deprecation is a gambit all too likely to backfire. It’s the sort of thing foreigners might associate with the boy or girl they used to bully at school. And as every shy teenager comes to ruefully note, a bit of bravado gets you places that self-effacement doesn’t. Then there’s the faintly annoying do-gooder undertones of support for the underdog. None of it is the stuff of which Mel Gibson movies are made.

Another part of the answer: has the proximity on these small crowded islands of Scotland, Ireland and Wales – each with a romantic David-versus-Goliath story – been to the detriment of the image of England? Whilst the three nations have, in many ways, rubbed along pretty well with their big over-fed neighbour, historic grievances have been distilled and aged to a fine brew that when imbibed can arouse bile towards those English with their infuriating obliviousness to the rigors of life on its Celtic fringes. English as an ethnicity is of course awash with Welsh, Scots and Irish genes (much more so than in the reverse direction) but the Englishness part of Britishness has remained but a blank canvass splashed with vivid graffiti of Celtic myth. And in our time of course victimhood walks on stilts.

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