Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  By using the phrase Ancient Britons in my title, I am suggesting that we live in an archaic political society. Its myth of origin is in many ways as fraudulent as the myth of an Ancient Britain served by all-wise Druids. It is the painful contradiction between this unreformed political structure and the rapid transformation of our social environment which is responsible for much of that ‘anxiety and ill-feeling’, and which lies at the root of economic dysfunction, mass unemployment and the growing antagonisms between society and the repressive power of the State. Perhaps it seems strange to write of the present Government as archaic, or an instrument of archaism. Mrs Thatcher is a moderniser, in her own terms, and her Government is anti-historical in at least two ways. She has severely cut State support for culture in all its aspects, from education as a whole through the British Council to the maintenance and development of the past through archaeology or conservation. Moreover, she has declared war on a number of institutions which she accuses of wishing to turn Britain into a museum, most prominently traditional trade unionism.

  But in fact this leader’s call to modernity rests heavily upon appeals – often spurious – to the values of the past. Patrick Wright, in his book ‘On Living in an Old Country’,2 remarks: ‘The Falklands adventure made a new combination possible: this small war enabled Thatcher to draw up the legitimising traditions of the ‘nation’ around a completely unameliorated ‘modernising’ monetarist programme. This new and charismatic style of legitimisation fused a valorisation of national tradition and identity with a policy and programme which is fundamentally destructive of the customary ways and values to which it appeals’.

  Critical of some aspects of the past, Mrs Thatcher is all the more uncritical about the political heritage – above all, about the nature of the British State. Note the November 1985 Queen’s Speech, with its emphasis on the enforcement of public order and even more reduction of those few liberties still left to local government. There is a queer dialectic between the relaxation of economic controls and the dismantling of the Welfare State on one hand, and a striking increase in the repressive and centralising power of the State on the other, a dialectic which this Conservative Government has dramatised rather than initiated, for it was also beginning to operate under the 1970s Labour governments. It was this Prime Minister who articulated the pseudo-historical slogan of ‘Victorian values’. But harping on the theme of ‘national unity’ (supposed to be an essential Victorian feature) is a nervous twanging practised in our times by all the main political parties. I would oppose to this a remark made recently in Le Monde by the sociologist Alain Touraine, who asked: ‘Should we not recognise the inevitable and even desirable existence of conflicts between the strategy of the State and the demands of public opinion? Instead of subjugating society to the State or the State to society, let us admit that it’s the nature of the western world to experience an ever growing separation between the State and civil society’. He goes on to deplore the absence in France of a demanding public opinion willing or capable to argue for this separation in the face of the State. We are not much better off in Britain.

  I believe that the British State is to be categorised as an ancien régime. It is closer in spirit to the monarchy overthrown in 1789 than to the republican constitutions which followed in France and elsewhere in Europe. It is true that French Jacobin republicanism introduced – or perhaps reinforced – a rigid centralisaton of State power which has some parallels in the extreme overcentralism of modern Britain. But it also established the doctrine of popular sovereignty, based on the notion of the rights of man, expressed in a constitution of supreme authority to which the citizen could – in theory – appeal over the heads even of the National Assembly. I am arguing here for a British version of republicanism, and it is my view that while Jacobin centralism is exceptional among republican projects, the principle of popular sovereignty and a written constitution is an almost universal element of definition.

  We all know about the penalty Britain has paid for its economic priority – for being the first nation to experience an industrial revolution. We understand much less well the penalties incurred by Britain’s – more properly, England’s – priority in political development, by the fact that England underwent in the seventeenth century the first modern revolution. The English Revolution, to put it crudely, simply transferred absolutism from the king to Parliament. One may talk about the doctrine of the Crown-in-Parliament: the reality is that the House of Commons still possesses an absolute, undivided sovereignty which no Republic, unie et indivisible, can match. In effect, no higher institution can overrule what the Commons may decide by the majority of one vote. There is no doctrine of popular sovereignty – the half-formed Scottish version of that doctrine vanished with the Union of Parliaments in 1707. There is no written constitution, as the supreme authority to which the subject can appeal. There is no way in which Parliament can share its absolute power, except by lending it as a loan revocable at any moment – a lesson we in Scotland learned during the devolution debates. Federation is unthinkable. It would entrench rights in a part of the United Kingdom which Parliament alone could not overrule. For the Druids of Westminster, charged with weeding the sacred grove, such an impious violation of the sovereignty of Parliament would bring the oak trees crashing to the ground – no doubt leading to crop failure, plague and Roman invasion as well.

  Under this Ancient British regime, the subject is almost helpless before the huge extension of State power that has taken place since 1945 and which is still taking place. The idea that the subject has an effective recourse against the executive through his MP has long been a joke, which the introduction of various ombudsmen has only made richer. A proliferation of isolated tribunals only makes the absence of a coherent code of administrative law more glaring (another institution which would require a written constitution and falls under the Druid ban). The principle of official secrecy still renders the defence of civil rights (which strictly we do not enjoy, as they are not embodied in positive law) about as easy as the work of a jeweller under a 15-watt bulb.

  How often these complaints have been lodged – by John Mackintosh, in particular! And yet the ancien régime persists, the weight of its inefficiency more crushing every year, almost untouched by Republican principle. In what sense is it ‘ours’? In Poland, Lech Walesa is one of many who have referred to the nation as a ‘house’. The image suggests a tenement, overcrowded and dilapidated no doubt, whose inhabitants none the less recognise a duty to hold together; not to quarrel irrevocably, but to co-operate in repairing the fabric. That is a usable metaphor for the value of national unity. But Britain as ‘nation’ seems to me to present itself less as a house than as a temple – that sacred grove, indeed. We do not live inside this grove, but outside it; we approach it, perhaps tiptoe across its turf on suitably escorted occasions; we pay it reverence but we do not own it, we, the living. For this nation-grove belongs to the nation of myth which includes the dead ancestors. ‘They’ are the major component of ‘we’.

  We are dealing here with a concept of almost biological continuity which blatantly derives from the central principle of sanctified monarchy – the principle of hereditary succession. Applied to a whole society, it is a collectivism which submits the appeal of the individual in the present to a constitutional court of ghosts and skeletons – to the judgment of the past. It is no bad definition of the republican spirit to say that a Republic keeps the dead firmly in their place – not necessarily a dishonourable one, but certainly not a place of authority.

  It is an irony that a government so dedicated to laissez-faire and to private enterprise presides over a State regime whose ethos is so collectivist. Its creed of economic individualism has, in this sense, no effective institutional foundations. The historian Larry Siedentop has observed3 that ‘the liberalism of the British constitution has been an essentially pre-individualist liberalism’. Britain was scarcely touched by the great social-political conflicts of continental Europe, betwee
n monarch and people, between empire and nation, between the lay State and the universal Church, out of which emerged republics based on the codified rights of the individual.

  And yet we often describe Britain as a middle-class democracy, and is not militant individualism the defining characteristic of a middle class? Well, often and in most places – and I would include Scotland among most places, here as in so many other areas closer to the model of a small, normal European nation. But in England this generalisation runs into severe difficulties. In the 1960s the group around the New Left Review drew attention to the limited social and political results of the seventeenth-century upheaval and suggested that England had not experienced a bourgeois revolution. This absence would go a long way to explain, within the Marxist schema, the inner weakness of the British Left and the peculiar difficulties of approaching the threshold of a proletarian revolution. Another way of attacking the problem is to note the extent to which the English middle class, especially the later industrial bourgeoisie, adopted aristocratic values which hindered the development of that confidence and dynamism thought proper to their class.

  In a remarkable article published eight years ago in the Spectator4 Siedentop asked why the British middle classes had ceased to be the carriers of an individual concept of society. Tocqueville had warned of the plight of a society which had lost the advantages of the aristocratic condition without gaining the advantages of the democratic condition. Siedentop wrote: ‘The very openness of British society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led… to the middle classes assuming quasi-aristocratic attitudes and accepting a more corporate conception of society… There followed a partial collapse or failure of middle-class values and ideology which is basic to an understanding of the condition of Britain today. It is the chief reason why the individualist movement here has been contained, if not reversed’.

  He remarked that ‘the weakness of the individualist drive -what Marxists would call bourgeois ideology – is costing Britain dear. For that is the reason why Britain has not developed the impulse which might be expected from the wider spread of education, income and opportunity’.

  It is another of those contradictions in which Thatcherism seems so rich that the individualist drive is being frantically signalled forward with whistles and green lights precisely at the moment when that ‘wider spread’ of education, opportunity and income has been stopped dead in its tracks and even induced to move some way backwards. So far, I do not see much response to green lights in the manufacturing sector, although the City of London is very appreciative. Travelling as a journalist, I frequently meet British salesmen and businessmen abroad. Their appetite for commerce and competition is still curiously weak. I look for contrast to – for example – West German businessmen I know, who show every sign of actually enjoying buying and selling. The activity which brings them profit also brings them pleasure. They admit this quite shamelessly. But captains of British industry suggest that they carry out their thankless duty of manufacture and commerce for the sake of the nation, a sort of defensive self-identification as public servants in private clothing! The corporate spirit of aristocracy again. The capitalist tiger prefers to register himself as the regimental mascot-sheep.

  The point is this. The historic weakness of the English middle class proceeds from exactly that seventeenth-century compromise from which the British constitution proceeds. The middle class identifies with the ancien régime and is unable to see the advantages of overthrowing it and advancing to a condition of politically-guaranteed individualism. In return, however, the archaic nature of our State arrangements and the corporate ethic which they encourage repress bourgeois initiative at every turn. A recent poll in the Mail on Sunday reported that 48 per cent of the sample considered themselves not to be ambitious. I would not go as far as an American psychology textbook I picked up many years ago, which stated in its first chapter: ‘Absence of the competitive instinct must be considered the primary neurosis.’ All the same, such a degree of resignation in a western capitalist society in the 1980s is very startling indeed.

  Let me sum this topic up with a statement which is already becoming worn by use – or perhaps by my own over-use of it in the past few years. It is commonly and comfortingly said that there is nothing basically wrong with British institutions – ‘the finest in the world’ – but that they are not working well at present because the economy is in such a bad state. The reverse is true. The reason that the British economy does not work is that British institutions are in terminal decay.

  The Druids are determined that we shall not perceive this. I have spoken of the cult of the Ancient British grove, in which the dead are not ‘they’ but part of ‘we’. What has come down to the present is defined as ‘heritage’, imposing duties as well as conferring privileges, an essential component of national and personal identity. It was the sharp ear of Patrick Wright which picked up the television commentator at the raising of the Mary Rose as he celebrated ‘the first time we have seen her in 437 years’.

  Here is the notion of a historical continuum. Now, I do not deny that a cult of history, a sense of continuum, can be invigorating. I know Poland too well to deny it. Polish nationalism and radicalism have always been restorative. In 1863, the Russian exile Alexander Herzen tried in vain to bring into a common front the Russian and the Polish enemies of the Tsar. He concluded: ‘The ideal of the Poles was behind them; they strove towards their past from which they had been cut off by violence and which was the only starting-point from which they could advance again. They had masses of holy relics, while we had empty cradles’.

  Within the sealed time-capsule of Polish experience, mere linear time becomes distorted. The poetic dramas of the early nineteenth century have a utility and relevance as direct as that of a telephone directory, for Poland’s plight has not changed its essential shape since then, and the cast of characters spawned by that plight change only in the way that the names of actors change as they succeed to a part. Events which are important appear to have happened more recently than less significant ones. Some events which ruptured the sealed continuum are agreed not to have taken place at all. For over forty years after the Nazis destroyed it, the Royal Castle at Warsaw remained a hole in the ground. Now, however, the guide who takes you round the minutely-reproduced Castle will point across a courtyard and draw your attention to ‘the only Renaissance window which survived the Baroque reconstruction’. The window has been there all the time, the Castle has been there all the time, but some malign disturbance of the ether made it for a while impossible to perceive.

  Conservatism, in the literal sense, can go no further than this. This is not to say that Polish political aims are reactionary, but that – as with Solidarity – they wish to restore relics that are familiar: independence, social justice, civil liberty, the limiting of State power. The Russian cradle, filled in 1917, is empty again. But if another child is ever laid there, its face will be entirely new.

  English manipulation of history is quite different. Here, time is linear to a perfectly oppressive degree. We are gazing from the terrace of a country house down carefully-landscaped perspectives of barbered lawns and positioned trees. The eye is masterfully led down a vista of elements (this battle, that cabinet) chosen to combine with one another into a single artistic experience. You could say: ‘Prune back that Reform bush and make the Tolpuddlia bed twice as big’. But you would feel a bit of a vandal.

  I’m exaggerating, of course. There is vigorous argument among English gardeners, and items of history are being repositioned all the time. But there is still an assumption that ‘our’ (in quotes) history can only have one focal point, one perspective. In France, by contrast, it is thought evident that French history as perceived by a Communist, by a middle-of-the-road Republican and by a Catholic monarchist will be a matter of three quite different gardens. This is emphatically not Druidic thinking. But there is another contrast to English historical landscaping, and that is the Scottish awareness
of Scottish history. It isn’t an insult to the enormous pioneering work of historians here in the last 40 years to suggest that the public perception of history in Scotland remains chaotic. Time is not generally used to enforce perspective, and instead there is a scrapbook of highly coloured, often bloody scenes or tableaux whose sequence or relation to one another is obscure. But there is a source of energy in this dislocation. As in Poland, what is more intense appears to be in some way nearer: its impact is not diminished by informed distancing. I take for example the tableau of the murder of Archbishop Sharp on Magus Muir which has so powerfully seized the imagination of Scottish writers. Innocent of context, stripped of explanation, this murder takes place always now, in our Scotland. The contorted face of Hackston who has bungled the killing and is now urging his horse to stamp on Sharp’s head is your face and my face; when the screaming is over and they open Sharp’s little snuffbox to find his familiar, we all hear distinctly in the silence the sound of the bumble-bee escaping from the box and spiralling away across the heather. Walter Scott tried to play the Druid, to organise scenes like these into a mere heritage and say that they were over. But he did not really succeed, and the ferocity latent – occasionally patent – in Scottish society shows they are not over.

  I have tried to outline some of the ways in which a particularly English historiography and concept of the continuous nation has been used to legitimise the ancien régime – the unreformed British State – and to discourage republican ideas. But of course the question is not just how to describe this but how to change it, and here we come up against a great curiosity. Why is it that the idea of radical constitutional reform appeals only to the centre of British politics? (It’s no mystery why it appeals to nationalist movements in Scotland or Wales.) The Social Democrats have proposed sweeping changes; the Liberals have for many years supported proportional representation and constutional reform, including federalism. Both parties in the Alliance have published versions of that formula which attribute economic failure to the decay of institutions. The curiosity is that the Labour Party remain, in their overwhelming majority, hostile to this approach. We ought to remember, once again, John Mackintosh’s lonely struggle to persuade his Party to think, in the wider sense, politically. But the orthodoxy of Labour, transmitted down the Tribunite line from Bevan to Foot, has remained a sort of debased economic Jacobinism. One day, the unreformed electoral system will deliver another huge Labour majority in Parliament, which will use centralised State power to redistribute wealth. This remains the dream. It would be unfair not to mention some recent, if marginal changes of emphasis, like Labour’s new regional policy which would transfer some responsibility for economic growth to local initiative. But Labour are not a republican party. Labour still believe that they can achieve their ends through the existing State, through existing institutions.