What is Britain for?

An awful lot of democratic states seem to be facing crises of legitimacy at the moment.

Greece is the extreme example with Italy close behind – the EU and global finance deemed their democratically-elected governments unfit to manage the task of paying back their debts, and so economists were installed in their stead.  

A risky move, you might think, in countries where democratic roots are so shallow (Greece only got rid of its military government in 1974, just seven years before it joined that bastion of democracy-on-paper, the EU).

At the same time, the year-old Arab Spring and every-growing protests in Russia show that it’s not just democratic governments that have a problem. Dictators are having a hard time of it as well.

Then look at the USA, where Obama can’t get anything done at all thanks to an increasingly bonkers opposition who appear to think he’s a communist (showing just how far in the world they must have travelled). Each side is delegitimising their political system by – in essence – talking so much shite about the other.

Even here in the UK, we have a few issues beyond the usual matters of no-one giving enough of a toss to vote or take part in the political process themselves.

First of all, after the massive bender that was the post-war socioeconomic settlement, we’re facing a hangover of epic proportions in which real sacrifices are going to be demanded of the citizenry.

Secondly, that is coinciding with Scotland staging a referendum on independence, in a bid to become the new Slovakia.

Both of these seriously threaten to upset the ideas that our way of life, place in the world and sense of who (or whatever) are written in stone, god-given gifts which could never be changed, no matter what the silly foreigners may get up to.

The idea of a permanent retreat of the welfare state and Scottish nationalism both challenge whatever it is that holds this society together, and start to beg the question “what is Britain for”?

I can see how the idea of a “nation state” helps you to get round that problem by giving a specious rationale to the idea that these people, here, somehow ought to have a common state and a common government.

But isn’t that all rather quaint 18^th century coffee-house chitchat which – when people started taking it a bit too seriously – ended up reaching its logical bloody conclusion in the first half of the 20^th century?

Although he’s leading an ostensibly “nationalist” party, I think it’s a fair bet that Alex Salmond is not envisaging a “Blut und Boden” idea of Scottishness. Boden maybe, Blut no thanks.

Like most sane politicians, Salmond recognises that national identity today can’t be a question of shared ethnicity – real or imaginary. When you acknowledge the reality of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity that exist in almost every country in Europe, ultimately I don’t think it is possible to avoid the idea of that the nation state (in this sense) must distill down into some kind of racism. I hope it’s unnecessary, dear readers, to add the final term of that argument – that racism is BAD.

The SNP can avoid getting too far into the mire of what “Scottish” means by defining their national struggle as one of liberation from the Westminster government – and playing on all the historic hostilities that arouses. And that’s fair enough. It is, of course, much easier to stir people up on the basis of what you’re against than to spell out exactly what you are for. And you’ll only get the chance to show what you’re for – and to work it out for yourself – by stirring the people up enough to take power.

Neither Scotland nor whatever the post-independence UK might turn out to be called (if they keep the Queen, maybe we can call it the Disunited Kingdom or DK?) can – in my humble opinion – rely on an exclusive idea of national identity to legitimate itself.

Not just because it is ultimately incompatible with democratic values in a multicultural age, but because pretty much every example in history of multiethnic states that tried to enforce the hegemony of one group – or pretend that their values were everyone’s values – failed dismally, and more often than not bloodily.

Whether it’s Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia or the Roman goddam Empire they ended up the same. And that’s why I find “developments” like this so depressing. Presumably, all those other historical exemplars failed because they were whacky, barbaric foreigners who get far too excited about things.

So the government is going to make immigrants speak proper English, learn British history and take pride in British values is it? One might suggest that it should perhaps take a look at the native population and ask itself whether its priorities are right.

Oh, it would be all too easy to go off on a rant about the ghastly poor and thick people we - the favoured - have to share our island with.

But what I am wondering today is rather what exactly the British values “we” are supposed to be teaching “them” are.

Hold that thought, and let me turn to what’s left of the economy.

Let me suggest unto you, dear readers, that up until the end of the Second World War – the last time we realised that we had no money left at all – the UK could command a degree of loyalty from its subjects on the basis of its self-appointed mission to civilise the world through the values of rapacious capitalist exploitation, tempered with slightly more Christian-infused pity for the victims than most other colonial powers. It was great to be British because it meant you were better than everyone else, and Britain had a purpose which was to share its awesomeness with everyone else, no matter how reluctant they might be about it. And we were winning, so we must have been right – right?

Since then and since decolonisation, that mission is obviously gone. And what has taken its place? I suggest that all it is, is the idea of guaranteed, state-underwritten rising living standards. Losing an empire was compensated for by fridges, TVs and cars for everyone. Economic growth gradually took the place of civilisation as the “British mission”. And while we were winning, we were still right.

Now what though?

If you and your family getting steadily richer and more comfortable was the only reason you acquiesced in the social, political and economic shenanigans of the last 70 years – and finally, I get to my point - why the hell would anyone be prepared to accept the long-term sacrifices now demanded for the sake of governments and their credit ratings?

Why would the Greeks beggar themselves, their children and their grandchildren to rescue something that fucked up so badly the one thing (in their eyes) it had to do?

“Because they only benefited for so long on credit, and now they have to pay it back?” you may say. That argument might work if one accepts that I can owe something for bad decisions someone else took, that “we are all in this together”, or that my suffering doesn’t matter so long as my country recovers its former glory.

Who thinks like that today? Not many people, in my opinion – and most of them, I suspect, are no longer paying tax.

While I don’t feel it myself, I can understand the nationalist answer to that question. If you are part of a “tribe” or a family, you naturally feel like to you owe that group something at a visceral, pre-rational level. And so “national pride” or a “national idea” can sustain a society through adversity.

But our societies are not “nations” and our states are not “nation states” any more, and there’s no point wishing that they were.

I just read a book called The New Society by Walther Rathenau - painted here by Edvard Munch. The Scream guy. Rathenau was the foreign minister of Germany shortly after the First World War, when that country had lost everything – not only total economic collapse but also a collapse of faith in what it was for. A few years after writing that book, he was murdered by proto-Nazis, who had a pretty clear idea of what they thought Germany was for and didn’t like his alternative.

Rathenau recognised that narrow economic interest wasn’t enough to hold a society together, but while he was a nationalist he hated the chauvinism that he held responsible for Germany’s collapse. He then went off into some romantic idea of a spiritual mission, which I must confess to not really understanding.

But I reckon he was onto something. It’s only with a sense of common identity and common values that we can accept our individual subordination to the interests of the group. And private gain and indifference to one another is not enough to secure that. Without knowing what it’s for, the British won’t tolerate the economic demands that Britain’s future (apparently) requires.

I just hope that a new, inclusive sense of identity and shared values can be found – not the sterile multiculturalism of the last 20 years but something that has the power to unite diverse people substantively – before the age-old answer of retreat into narrow nationalistic paranoia rears its ugly head again with a new, respectable mask.

Because right now, there are no British values to teach that are worth the trouble.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m out of touch. If you think so, tell me below. Just don’t think it couldn’t ever happen here.

T-303, by the way.