by Ian Buruma
I can remember the moment I realized enough was enough. Rajiv Gandhi had just been killed by a suicide bomber in southern India. We had a meeting in Dominic’s office to discuss the forthcoming issue. Naturally we had to do something on India. I was sitting on a comfortable sofa. Next to me was Simon Heffer, the deputy editor, a pale, carrot-haired young man whose girth showed a fondness for English puddings. To say that he sat would be inaccurate. He was sprawled in a pose of exaggerated ease, with his head denting a thick cushion, his heavy legs stretched out, and a large pasty stomach straining the buttons of his stripey shirt.
As foreign editor I was asked how to cover the Indian events. I mentioned a few well-known journalists in Delhi who might contribute. I suggested that a piece on the Gandhi dynasty by an Indian writer might not go amiss. Suddenly I felt the figure on my left stir. “Enoch!” he bellowed. “Enoch’s always frightfully good on India!” Now there were no doubt occasions when Enoch Powell’s love of the British Raj could be given an airing, but I did not feel this was one of them. Not that this was a reason to resign. It was of no great consequence. In fact, Enoch never wrote the piece, and I carried on at the Speccie for a while longer. But I knew that a change of scene was in order.
“BLACKPOOL,” SAID THE mayor in full regalia, “is my kind of town.” The large silver chain around his neck glinted in the television lights. There was a pungent smell of sweat in the crowded hall. “I’m sure,” the mayor resumed, after the initial burst of applause had died down, “as loyal Conservatives, it’s your kind of town too.” During the week I attended the Tory Party Conference in the autumn of 1995, I never quite understood what he had meant by that. Blackpool, with its floats of fairy-lit cartoon characters gliding up and down the seafront, with its clubs and Ferris wheels, its leering comedians and amateur striptease nights, its knobbly knees and “naughty” fun, its bed and breakfasts and booming discos, is unashamedly vulgar. The Conservative party tries to disguise any vulgarity under a coat of gentility, or so I thought.
As I listened to speaker after speaker in the main hall, mostly young men in loud suits and crude haircuts, telling us why Britain was great and Europe a tyranny, I thought of other places. I thought of Bavaria, in particular. Of beer halls filled with large people in funny green hats and leather shorts. Bavarians wear these ludicrous costumes, known as Tracht, as though their ancestors had always worn them. Tracht is a badge of belonging, of identity, like the Highland kilt. And like the kilt, Bavarian dress is largely a nineteenth-century invention, to give Bavarians something native to hang on to while its political institutions were being swallowed up by a greater Germany ruled from Berlin. To wear a funny green hat and leather shorts was a kind of compensation for the loss of sovereignty. There seems to be a rule of thumb: when political identities weaken, native costumes get louder.
The Tracht at the gathering of Tories was stripes and polka dots, on navy blue or gray. Polka-dotted dresses, polka-dotted ties, striped suits, and striped shirts. The Tory rank and file looked like an expanse of Regency wallpaper come alive, with the occasional tuft of bucolic tweed. No doubt these clothes reflected the conventional tastes of middle England. But they were also worn, I think, with a grim determination to show the badge of national identity, as uniforms of Englishness. For more than a hundred years, following the theatrical imagination of Benjamin Disraeli, the Tory party had marketed itself as the national party. This time, the fear of losing the next election, but above all of losing national sovereignty to the “faceless bureaucrats” in Brussels, had made the party faithful testy. There was a defensive air of aggression about.
“S.A.S.,” said the defense minister, Michael Portillo, grinning fiercely as he milked the applause by invoking the reputation of crack British commandos, “three letters that spell fear in our enemies: ‘Don’t mess with Britain!’ ” The enemies, in the defense minister’s speech, were not the Soviets, for they no longer existed, but the faceless foreigners in Brussels, or “Europe.”
At a fringe meeting in the back room of a saloon bar, reeking of stale cigarettes, a member of Parliament named Tony Marlow spoke in a grotesque imitation of Winston Churchill’s dramatic flourishes and pauses about “the Battle against Europe.” Except that he sounded defeatist, and a bit mad. “We’ve lost it!” he shrieked. “We’ve lost control!” I felt embarrassed for him. It was an undignified spectacle: a middle-aged Englishman in a banker’s suit wobbling on the edge of hysteria. He reeled off various political Dunkirks. “Metrification,” he cried, “a mere skirmish in historical terms, but a hilltop to be regained.” But there was still hope, he said, suddenly beaming in the happy anticipation of a well-rehearsed line: “The Euro-skeptic tanks are landing in Europe!”
A young speaker in the main hall, with spiky blond hair and a florid face, was working himself into a lather of rage. He was impatient, he said, with our “European partners.” He spat the last word out with a sneer: “P-a-r-t-n-e-r-s.” He was impatient with them because they “forget the sacrifices we made in the war. I resent it when they say we are not working for a free and peaceful Europe, forgetting that without us there would be no free and peaceful Europe!” The audience cheered. One gray-haired lady in a blue dress, a dear old thing who probably organized tea parties at her local Conservative Club, was bouncing up and down on her plastic seat in an almost erotic frenzy.
The rhetoric, the people, the noise: it suddenly became too much. I needed a breather and made for the shops outside the main hall. But it was impossible to get away from the action. You were followed around by television monitors, which never let up. From the corner of my eye I saw the next speaker, another pink-faced young man in a loud suit: “Let the British lion awake!” he shouted. I scanned the books on sale. Biographies of General Montgomery, the duke of Edinburgh, Winston Churchill, and Michael Portillo. Novels by Jeffrey Archer. Books about cricket and fishing. And David Attenborough’s The Private Life of Plants. For those who prefer videos to books, there was one entitled No! No! No! about Mrs. Thatcher’s battle against Europe. There was more shouting in the hall. The speaker was beginning to sound unhinged: “Brussels,” he bellowed, was “taking away our history.”
I tried to make sense of this British “identity” that was under such threat. What exactly was it? What did those pin-striped suits really stand for? Order, I suppose. But also for a particular idea of class. If British socialists often used to be toffs dressed up as proles, the Tory Party Conference was full of ex-proles dressed up as toffs. The most ferocious speeches in defense of “British values” came not in the ripe vowels of Tory grandees but in the glottal stops of southern suburbs. This is what “empowerment” meant under Mrs. Thatcher—and has meant for a century or more. These boys wanted their bit of the cake too. And cake, in Britain, means class, or at least its trappings, even if they come off the peg.
The constant references to World War II were mostly made by young men who were born long after the event. It was as though they felt a lack of heroism in their lives, compared to their fathers’ or grandfathers’, and tried to make up for it by mimicking Churchill. This sense of inadequacy was echoed by a feeling of national impotence in a bewildering world, where old enemies seemed to be dominant. Talking about tanks landing in Europe, and hills to be regained, and battles for Britain was a way of putting the clock back, to more heroic times. What was it Nicholas Ridley had said to Dominic Lawson? That he would almost prefer to fight Germany from the bomb shelters than to be “simply taken over by … economics.”
But order, heroism, and class aside, it was the word “freedom” that haunted me in Blackpool. The speaker with the spiky blond hair was wrong when he said that “foreigners” had “always admired us for our history, our monarchy, our traditions, our courage, our strength.” Or at least partly wrong. British strength has often inspired hatred too. What Anglophiles admired about Britain, more than its monarchy or its traditions, was its liberty. Underneath all the flummery and Churchilliana of the Tory conference was the messag
e that “Europe” threatened British traditions and thus British freedom, as though the two were always the same. A European federation had to be, by definition, tyrannical. Britain was by its very nature free. It was as if the Tories at Blackpool had pushed an Anglophile caricature to extremes. “Europe” had become a mythical place where Britons go only to wage wars of freedom. And Britain’s current constitutional arrangements, hallowed by tradition and monarchic superstition, were sacred, and to be defended at all costs.
I was haunted by the idea of freedom at Blackpool, because I felt torn by what I saw and heard. I, too, had grown up with the Anglophile myths, and there was enough truth under the layers of anxious nostalgia for it to be disturbing. It was easy to feel superior to the young men in their pin-striped suits, roaring about the awakening British lion, or the mediocre politicians invoking the beaches of Normandy. These were very unpleasant people, with some very unpleasant ideas. But it was as if a much-admired phantom had come to life as a monster. The Englishman fighting for his freedom had turned into a spitting xenophobe. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that the monster may be right, or was at least asking the right questions.
National sovereignty in modern British history has been based on the idea of government by consent. The British electoral system may not be the fairest or most democratic in Europe. Its judicial system may be flawed. The clubbiness of its institutions may be archaic and in urgent need of reform. But people know whom to criticize, and whom to vote for. The British version of capitalism may be harsher than the French or the German, and the gap between rich and poor more pronounced. But if this means less official interference, most people are prepared to put up with it. “Europe” has not been driven so far by ideas of democracy, individual freedom, or liberalism, but by economic efficiency, old European dreams of Continental unity, and an older generation’s fear of war.
The United Kingdom might well go the way of Bavaria, once a liberal and enlightened monarchy. The slow demise of the nation-state, if it is to happen, would be a melancholy spectacle, especially in Britain, for of all European countries, Britain has most to lose. The idea of Britain, after all, is a political one. The United Kingdom is not defined by a race, a culture, or a religion, but by laws and institutions, which have worked reasonably well to safeguard individual liberties. The idea of the French Republic is political too. But it is a Jacobin idea, stressing the will of the people, expressed by a strong state. Inevitably, as time passes, political institutions are encrusted with popular feeling. Loyalty to the nation is not a wholly rational thing. By any rational yardstick, much is wrong with British institutions, but transferring too much of their political authority to pan-European councils and commissions is to take the politics out of the British identity. And then you are left with nothing but bruised popular feelings. At best, this ends in displays of loud, pin-striped suits or camp, Speccie-style nostalgia. At worst it will explode in angry chauvinism. Both were in evidence at Blackpool.
The battle against Europe contains a nasty edge of nativism. I picked up a pamphlet in which one Professor Marsland explained that democracy, tolerance, and honesty were “specifically British values” under attack from Hampstead intellectuals and The Guardian newspaper. I thought once again of Voltaire and his coconut seeds. Once people talk of political freedoms as purely native fruits, you know that freedom is no longer the point. Voltaire and Montesquieu recognized that liberties were protected by laws, not values. That is why they admired Britain. The idea that society should be ruled by specific national values was in fact the mark of Continental tyrannies, not of British liberalism.
Among the pamphlets I received advertising fringe meetings was one that announced a celebration of the Britishness of British fish. This sounded intriguing. I didn’t know fish had nationalities. One advantage of being a fish, you would have thought, was the freedom to cross borders.
The celebration was held in an airless reception room in one of the seafront hotels. The room was packed with people, some of whom were drunk and clearly distressed. Fishermen, like the miners before them, were losing jobs. Modern technology and improved efficiency had reduced the need for large numbers of them. And fish stocks were running dangerously low. The European Union tried to tackle the problem by establishing fishing quotas for each country. One of the ways around these quotas is for fishermen to buy foreign boats and thus the right to fish in foreign waters. British fishermen, for example, have made considerable sums of money by selling their boats to Spaniards. This made it easy for demagogues to blame the plight of local fishermen on those foreigners who catch British cod by flying the Union Jack.
In the crowded room, a middle-aged gentleman in a tweed suit was trying to calm down the noisy fisherfolk, dressed in leather jackets and jeans. Even as he did so, the speakers were doing their best to work those same people into a frenzy. There was a large banner at the back of the room celebrating Nelson’s victory over the French in 1805. It was illustrated by a picture of the Spanish Armada. “Beat both of them once more,” it read. “Let history repeat itself.” Various speakers were sitting behind a table: Sir Teddy Taylor; Chris Gill, MP; and others, all dressed in immaculate suits.
The speakers made it clear who the enemies were: “Their fleets come as armadas into our waters!” said one. “Foreigners can catch British fish,” said another. “We British,” said a third, “have a historical, cultural, and economic right to our fish.” Sir Teddy Taylor, once again, remembered the war: “I remember how the fishermen were the greatest patriots of all. It makes me weep to think what is being done to them.” A fisherman with a swollen red face, who had been steadily drinking gin straight from the bottle, struggled to his feet and shouted in a Scottish accent: “Why should we throw out our families from our own houses to make room for our neighbors? We have been betrayed by the politicians!” This was greeted with grins behind the table, but when the hollering from the crowd refused to die down, the grins began to freeze over. The gentleman in the tweed suit looked jumpy. The Scottish fisherman gazed round the room with a look of triumph before being pulled to his chair by his wife.
The crowd calmed down a little. But the fisherman’s intervention had changed the mood. The animosity toward foreigners began to turn toward another target, with greater venom: British traitors in Parliament, those who were lacking in British pride, who had sold out their own people to “Europe.” This provided easy pickings for the men behind the table. “There’s no use in talking to the Europeans,” said one of them. “We must get rid of every MP who betrayed you!” His eyes swiveled around the room. The crowd was getting restless again. A thin man in glasses got up to speak. He had a look of extreme belligerence. The gentleman in the tweed suit asked him to sit down. Several people in the crowd shouted: “Let him speak!” The politicians smirked. The man worked his jaws in silence, waiting for the crowd to be quiet. Then he said: “Treaties don’t bind Parliament to Europe. What binds Parliament is the will of the British people. Parliament is to blame for giving in to Europe. We must take back what Parliament surrendered!”
There was wild applause. A woman standing in front of me was shivering with excitement. The fisherman who had spoken up before took another swig from his bottle and shouted: “I’m not a European fisherman, I’m a British fisherman, and I’m proud of it. I wish some of our politicians were as proud!” After that, the crowd exploded. They yelled and they hooted. Men swore and women shrieked. But this was not happy excitement. These were people in the mood for violence. I felt sorry for the Spanish official standing next to me. He was slowly shaking his head. The politicians behind the table were gloating and whispering. One wetted his lips with a flick of his tongue. The gentleman in the tweed suit was now visibly agitated. He tried to usher the drunken fisherman out of the room, with no effect. “Now look here,” he said, “don’t try and spoil it all.”
It was a bad scene. Not just because these fishermen were being exploited by demagogues; that was unpleasant enough. But what I found
most disturbing was how words like “freedom,” “sovereignty,” and “democracy” were being used to work up mob hysteria by men who looked too much like the kind of people Britain had done so much, twice in this century, to defeat.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
THE LAST
ENGLISHMAN
RARELY, IF EVER, HAD SO MANY BRITISH GRANDEES GATHERED under the domed roof of the Hampstead Synagogue as on the occasion of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s memorial service on a blustery morning in January 1998. The grandees were mostly of a liberal, secular kind, as was Berlin himself. But this was an Orthodox synagogue. The men were seated separately from the women. There was Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, and there Lord Annan, looking faintly Russian in a black astrakhan coat, and there Lord Carrington, and Lord Gowrie, whose splendid hair resembled a powdered wig, and, as a touch of peculiar grandeur, Sir Yehudi Menuhin as “representative of Her Majesty the Queen.” There they all were, the great and the good, in electric blue yarmulkes, Garrick Club ties, and trilby hats, standing up as the kaddish was read for a man born in Riga who had always insisted that he was not an Englishman but an Anglophile Jew.
The service was Sir Isaiah’s posthumous way of asserting tradition, of paying ceremonial deference to faith and continuity, without which he believed liberalism could not be sustained. Reason is reason, faith is faith, and in Berlin’s mind, it made no sense to reconcile the two in some wishy-washy attempt at religious reform. My great-grandfather had worshiped at this synagogue. But it was too late for me to feel unself-conscious there. Whatever sense of ancestral continuity I might have felt, it didn’t run through the synagogue, let alone an Orthodox synagogue. On this Anglo-Jewish occasion, I felt neither Anglo nor Jewish.