An updated Britishness must retain the past | Dan Mikhaylov
Respectful of their nation’s substantial cultural legacy, Britons are among those who give plentiful store by tradition. Many are enamoured with their forebears' idiosyncratic sport – cricket – and the dynamic pub culture continues to characterise the local experience, even though 13,000 pubs have vanished from the face of the United Kingdom since 2000. This serves as a sadly apt metaphor as British culture and identity mediates an estranged position of being deeply valued by the public, yet simultaneously seeing its ever-antiquated customs fading. What does this spell for the future?
For all we know, our inability to down a few pints with the lads during the pandemic could stoke this pastime’s popularity and reverse this lamentable trend over a long period of time, once the status-quo-ante is restored. The chippy is also yet to depart into the world of social history books: crusty potatoes, mushy peas, and battered haddock are still attracting customers today. This likewise holds true for the Victoria sponges sold in Greggs as well as for the mouth-watering Sunday roast and arguably not so mouth-watering cottage pie. The literary works of Dickens and Conan Doyle have long outlived their contemporaries, with Ebenezer Scrooge and Sherlock Holmes sounding familiar even to those who have never read a book from cover to cover. Despite stiff competition, these classics remain in high demand and account for the majority of the country’s bestsellers.
However, much of what we cherish is far from a recent invention, and this senility is beginning to show. The magnificent mosaic of British culture has both crumbled, gradually fragmenting into the tiny shards we detect in our daily lives, and have been internalised to the extent that many take such things as the Double Decker bus for granted and divorce them of their insular origins. The former process has been especially ostensible: as more individuals revert to greasy kebabs or insipid sushi as their go-to choice of takeaway, the purveyors of our beloved fish and chips find themselves driven out of business. Praised by Winston Churchill for its savoury dyad of ingredients, this distinctly British dish celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2003 with fewer than 10,000 shops surviving to see the occasion. In fact, it would hardly be surprising to come across someone on the streets of London who has not been to such an establishment at all.
Cricket, rugby, and football alike have been commercialised. Neglectful of club loyalties and financially distanced from the fans, the players resemble medieval mercenaries, fiercely denounced by Machiavelli for their treachery and materialistic outlook in The Prince. In turn, supporters have grown disappointed with this depersonification of our sporting industry, irreflective of the communities it used to represent.
The concept of Britishness is seemingly losing touch with the twenty-first century. In his address to The Royal Society of Saint George, Stanley Baldwin proudly spoke of Englishness. He professed admiration for it and associated it with “the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy” and performing various other tasks characteristic of living in the countryside. They, he purported, “may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished”. It turns out that rural areas, supposedly the mainstay of traditions, appear hardly impervious to change. The 2008 report by the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) states, “large parts of England’s countryside are changing” due to immigration, increases in living costs to the locals’ detriment, and people deserting villages as permanent residences. This demographic turnaround has increased the United Kingdom’s urban population to 83%, which is expected to rise further to 92% by 2030.
Understandably, a culture so rooted in rural practices and lifestyles inevitably struggles to adapt to its urbanisation and nurture any new manifestations when trammelled within the multiculturalist city jungle we encounter nationwide. Its instruments, replaced, cannot play Elgar’s Nimrod without coming across as cacophonous, unworthy of attention or even outright lugubrious. In turn, this failure to evolve spruces the concept of Britishness up with a nice seasoning of tradition, yet it exposes the agglutination of social behaviours and mores we customarily call the British culture to the undesirable prospect of solitude. As things stand, by sticking to the past for inspiration, our cultural palette will not produce a vignette of prosperous, united modern Britain.
A nation without roots cannot foster or sustain a culture and our society should not seek to abandon our predecessors’ wisdoms and practices altogether as we modernise Britain. To many, life would lose some of its purpose without their partaking in a summer cricket fixture or agonisingly selecting an afternoon tea snack from a box of jammie dodgers and bourbon cream biscuits. Without alluding to a novel written by some famous British author or intoning the Churchillian “We will fight them on the beaches” in your speech or in your writing, you might very well feel incomplete. Even if your exposure ends at pouring vinegar on chips, you should nonetheless strive to preserve this habit. For our Welsh readers, this could mean celebrating another rugby victory over the English, for instance.
No matter how one interacts with Britishness today, the majority of the traditions one follows, and their distinctions and peculiarities- which collectively compose the social fabric and impact what the Russian conservative thinker Nikolay Karamzin interpreted as “national fraternity”- they do not themselves intrinsically contradict or oppose the forces of modernisation. Accordingly, it would be improper to dispense with them, much like Tsar Alexander I tried to assail traditional Russian institutions in the 1800s and received consequent criticisms from Karamzin in his influential Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia. Instead, it befits us to embrace these remnants of past Britishness, promote them as outlines of the concept’s more modern version, and use them to maximise our national fraternity at a time when multiculturalism has produced gated communities, religious tensions, and domestic extremism.
A country, whose cultural phenomena are founded exclusively on previous achievements, risks having a bleak, directionless future ahead of it. In Britain’s case, some common ground is all the more necessary to bring the disparate parts of a diverse society into a coherent, lasting structure. Merely reciting the word “diversity” akin to a peculiar religious mantra and virtue-signalling on social media simply do not cut it, when it comes to fostering unity.
Conservatives are almost certainly not alone in dreaming of a place where solidarity and patriotism are essential and interwoven virtues rather than empty words. After all, cricket lovers, pub aficionados, and custodians of tradition do not necessarily have to vote for Boris Johnson or endorse Brexit to prize these values and desire to uphold them. Loving Britain, its most salient features, strangest idiosyncrasies, and its traditional smells, tastes, and sights comes before political colours. To them, our message is that we ought not to castigate modernity for its evident affront on our historical way of life; doing this is frankly fruitless. Rather, we should strive to propose the outlines of modern Britain, simultaneously more suited than its predecessors to the social dynamics of today and united by something greater than the English language alone. This concept will offer a methodical alternative to the internationalist slogan “Diversity is our strength”.
Herein, we propose to start with the following principle: Britain exists on the streets, and not on paper.
What this means is that Britain should be felt not only when you apply to renew your UK passport, but throughout the day. When you wake up, treat yourself to a nice Full English Breakfast and recall that it is unique to the island, on which you happen to reside. When you commute to work, feel proud of taking either the tube, whose implementation was pioneered on British soil. When you empty the bin, recognise that you are not disposing of the American trash, but of the familiar, beloved rubbish. Even if your day is ruined by heavy rainfall, appreciate it, seeing that Britain is notorious for bad weather.
Any forays into resuscitating the country’s culture, which are arguably vital to preserving the already decadent national unity and then bringing different Britons together, predicate on reversing the public attitude towards being British, and this has to start somewhere.
If we continue to see British customs as historically conditioned, they will remain antiquated, alien to many UK citizens. With this in mind, we risk witnessing cultural stagnation, bound to relegate the most ostensible elements of British culture to the country’s museums and dying villages, as multiculturalism asserts full dominion over our lives.
Deprived of the basis for social assimilation and resultantly fragmented even further than we currently are, we shall be forced to dedicate more time to internal struggles than to creativity or to the pursuit of nationwide improvement. This portrait of modern Britain may seem far-fetched, but will it be so in the future, provided that the public continues to connive at the rotting and disintegration of the local customs and lifestyles? So that this scenario remains purely theoretical, we implore you to reconsider your view of the British culture, appreciating what makes it exceptional and sharing its elements with others.
What distinguishes Britons is arguably what defines them as such. If we forget these definitions, how may we proceed to master anything even remotely more complex?
