From: BADGER@KLKLK.CO.UK   
      
   Orwell can tell us what Englishness is   
   By Danny Kruger   
   (Filed: 28/07/2005)   
   George Orwell shared with the rest of us an acute difficulty about what to   
   call ourselves. "We call our islands by no fewer than six different names,   
   England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and,   
   in very exalted moments, Albion". He preferred the first: England.   
   During the Second World War Orwell wrote a series of essays that he   
   dismissed at the time as "propaganda for the British Council". Yet England   
   Your England, The English People and My Country Right or Left capture, as in   
   a snapshot, the qualities of the country in the 1940s. The English, he   
   found, shared "an unconscious patriotism and an inability to think   
   logically".   
   We were "inefficient but with sound instincts", chief among which were   
   "gentleness" and "respect for constitutionalism and legality". We had an   
   intense sensitivity to class ("I was born into what you might call the   
   lower-upper-middle class"). Our patriotism was thick-headed - the bulldog is   
   "an animal noted for its obstinacy, ugliness and stupidity" - and proudly   
   insular: "nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it   
   effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly".   
   Tories love Orwell for his trepidations about modernity. He regretted the   
   growing sexual laxity of his day, thought the tax system should support   
   marriage and stay-at-home mothers, and objected to centralisation,   
   comprehensive secondary education and all the other emanations of Whitehall.   
   He hated slums, but he hated "ruthless and soulless" new developments more:   
   "In destroying the slum you destroy other things as well." In a peculiar   
   little essay, The Decline of the English Murder, he lamented the replacement   
   of genteel poisoners by brutal killers inspired by Hollywood.   
   For all this, Orwell's Englishness was not nostalgic: the snapshot was not   
   in sepia. Perhaps his most famous phrase contained a modern colloquialism -   
   "old maids biking to Holy Communion . . ." - which 50 years later John Major   
   unconsciously archaised to "cycling".   
   In the 1920s Stanley Baldwin had evoked "the sight of a plough team coming   
   over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since   
   England was a land". In the 1940s Orwell said: "The horse plough will give   
   way to the tractor. . . but England will still be England". His patriotism   
   was rooted not in scenery or even institutions but in enduring values and   
   attitudes.   
   Key to the English character was anti-militarism. The goose-step "is not   
   used [here] because the people in the street would laugh". We celebrate   
   defeats and retreats, like Corunna, Gallipoli and Dunkirk. "The most   
   stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged   
   in the wrong direction."   
   As this suggests, Orwell detested the arrogant assertion of British   
   greatness. He was nauseated by "all the boasting and flag-waving, the 'Rule   
   Britannia' stuff", and reserved a special contempt for the "the   
   aitch-pronouncing class": "the people in the country houses" who were   
   "simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog."   
   But if he disliked the Blimps, he was just as hostile to the "Europeanised   
   intelligentsia" who devoted their energies to "chipping away at English   
   morale". The chief characteristic of intellectuals, who would rather steal   
   from a poor box than stand to attention for God Save the King, was "their   
   severance from the common culture of the country". They were also weird: "If   
   only. . . every vegetarian, teetotaller and creeping Jesus [could be] sent   
   home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!"   
   Nor did he share with his fellow travellers a romanticised affection for the   
   poor. "This business of class-breaking is a bugger," he wrote to a friend.   
   Sheffield he found inhabited by "a population of troglodytes". He got into   
   trouble with the leader of the British Communist Party for suggesting, in   
   The Road to Wigan Pier, that the working classes smelt ("it is queer how   
   seldom this is admitted").   
   In all this bile - the rich are parasites, the Left are traitors, the poor   
   smell - we see the distinctive, fastidious Britishness of Orwell: he loved   
   his neighbours best at a distance. This was expressed in his very English   
   brand of socialism. In My Country Right or Left he aimed a single shot at   
   both the Blimp and the socialist, asserting that "patriotism has nothing to   
   do with conservatism".   
   This was itself a reflection of what some might call a conservative   
   mentality, but which Orwell would presumably just call English: the   
   conviction that politics doesn't matter much. He noted "the addiction to   
   hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life ... All   
   the culture that is most truly native centres around things which even when   
   they are communal are not official - the pub, the football match, the back   
   garden, the fireside and the 'nice cup of tea'."   
   In a book review Orwell praised the communist author for being "too decent a   
   human being to be 'ideologically' sound". And that word - decent - summed up   
   his politics, and is perhaps his definition of Englishness.   
   How much of all this is true today? Many of Orwell's fears have been   
   realised: the state is enormous and the nation seems shrunken. Decency and   
   gentleness are in drastic decline, and the English murder has declined   
   horrifically further. Orwell wrote: "The outstanding quality of the English   
   is their habit of not killing one another." Also, "armed police do not prowl   
   the streets". Hmm.   
   Nor is England ethnically coherent any more. In the 1940s, Orwell saw "the   
   crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces [and] bad teeth";   
   today we see a kaleidoscope of different races; large numbers of us   
   pronounce foreign words correctly because we are foreign.   
   Yet Orwell's photograph is still recognisable as England. And the immigrants   
   whom, with an exaggerated but not wholly misplaced justice, we fear, are   
   themselves attracted to the qualities that bind us together: "privateness",   
   respect for the law, and that relaxed blend of old and new which made Orwell   
   write "biking" not "cycling".   
   The trick is to revive national confidence without retreating into   
   blimpishness - and we may just find that the present danger gives us the   
   chance to do so.   
   "Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again," wrote   
   Orwell. "It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind   
   of war, that may make this possible."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)