I’ve lived nearly three decades outside of the United Kingdom. It was a response to personal life events that brought me here to Finland but it was also a choice to reject the toxic politics of a country that was undergoing significant restructuring under Margaret Thatcher (poll tax anyone?).
I was recently back in England for the internment of my father in August and as an infrequent yearly visitor, I have the benefit of coming back to my home country as an outsider who still runs with the cultural codes and conventions but no longer participates in them.
I discovered a country under the existential threat of a no deal Brexit that with every news cycle, lurches deeper from farce into tragedy. A cynical clown for a Prime Minister runs a cabinet of bad actors intent on calling the EU’s bluff by threatening to drive the UK over the edge.
Across the Channel, eyes unblinking look to the white cliffs of Dover.
British pundits everywhere talk of a constitutional crisis, the likes of which have not been seen on their shores since the Second World War. In this new darkest hour, Boris Johnson likes to fashion himself on Churchill but in spirit and deed, he is closer to Benny Hill.
Clowns in power aside, I was drawn to the wisdom of that singularly English man of letters, George Orwell whose observations of Great Britain and its people at another moment of existential threat are so appositely enclosed in the line:
‘As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.’
But this is not 1941. This is, nevertheless, a battle for the soul of the country because the foundation stones of British culture are being shifted irrevocably as a nation divided and bewildered by forces difficult to grasp, struggles to make sense of it all.
Orwell says in his essay The lion and the unicorn: socialism and the English genius:
‘In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them.’
But this is not 1941.
National life is now largely characterized by anger, disillusionment and an understanding that irrespective of what happens on October 31st and thereafter, there can be no return to the old certainties that brought us to this point.
For a nation of shopkeepers, the high street is dead. British politics, that bastion of democracy has already fallen over the cliff.
In 1941, Orwell observed:
‘The English electoral system, for instance, is an all-but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery.’
The author of 1984 would undoubtedly be impressed by the corruptions of companies like Cambridge Analytica to sway elections in western democracies and destabilize societies without a single shot fired or bribe passing hands.
Our island dwarf politicians have found the perfect means of bypassing justice, liberty and objective truth to control the public mind.
I still believe, however, that those qualities which Orwell almost lovingly equates with the British character ‘gentleness, hypocrisy, thoughtlessness, reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms’ persist to this day and will persist — albeit in lesser degrees.
It’s a curious collection of qualities, almost at odds with itself but they are the last remnants of a culture that fought well above its weight and won because of them.
If there is any parallel to be drawn with the onset of a war, it is the fact that a post Brexit Britain, now openly suspicious of its old foes Germany and France, will turn increasingly for its survival to the United States. As was the case then, they came to our aid, but on terms well in their favour.
Despite the comparative complexities of the modern world, this scenario is playing out once again but the consequences, looking down the road seem far graver. With no insight to the outcome of the war, Orwell predicted in 41:
‘England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.’
Orwell would undoubtedly be hard pressed to recognize that everlasting animal today: the hypocrisy and the fraudulence of the political system most certainly but not the vassal state of America adrift off the coast of an indifferent continent it is soon to become.
