Who are the ENGLISH?

This sum­mer while we on the con­ti­nent of Eu­rope are en­joy­ing doing what­ever we can af­ford to do under the Mediter­ranean sun, we should all spare a thought for the Eng­lish and their other Brit cousins.

They will be liv­ing through the con­tin­u­ing eco­nomic and so­cial dis­as­ter cre­ated by Brexit and other ag­o­nies that are cer­tain to mul­ti­ply and crowd around like flies at a July bar­be­cue.

A large slice of the pain of mod­ern Eng­land comes from its iden­tity and Brexit is only one symp­tom of this dis­ease. I re­cently read an ex­cep­tional book ti­tled ‘God is an Eng­lish­man’ pub­lished ex­actly 50 years ago, and all the way through it the Aus­tralian au­thor Don­ald Horne, (who also wrote the well-known book ‘The Lucky Coun­try’ about his own home­land) shows as much pen­e­trat­ing in­sight into who ex­actly the Eng­lish are as any­one else I know of.

Using his book as a mea­sur­ing stick against the past, it’s re­mark­able how lit­tle Eng­land seems to have changed (es­pe­cially for the bet­ter) in that half a cen­tury that I have now lived through.

Fac­ing up to the com­ing in­sta­bil­ity of the 1970s, Horne found that Britain’s his­tory meant that it too de­served to be called a for­tu­nate coun­try. As he saw it though, “what gets on British peo­ple’s nerves is that they no longer know who they are.” (Loud echoes of today’s Brexit con­fu­sion?)

He saw a cul­ture where peo­ple “find re­al­ity in ex­cite­ments of..fash­ion and the en­ter­tain­ment busi­nesses.” This led to an empti­ness and gen­eral dis­sat­is­fac­tion with their lot. For him, it meant too that al­most half of young British peo­ple alive then were fan­ta­siz­ing about em­i­grat­ing. Of course, many did or al­ready had (in­clud­ing my fa­ther.)

Some of Horne’s other best ob­ser­va­tions come from his clear un­der­stand­ing of the so­cial class sys­tem that still op­er­ates deeply all through life there. He recog­nised that all Brits es­sen­tially op­er­ate to serve the com­fort and ease of the “Upper Eng­lish” but that a vis­i­tor who stayed for years might not no­tice that Eng­land is gen­uinely one of the world’s most work­ing class na­tions.

Here, the au­thor, who did in fact marry an Eng­lish­woman and live for five years on a farm in Corn­wall, west Eng­land, re­lates a truth that few Brits would have liked to admit, even in the un­likely event that they knew it. Twice as many man­ual work­ers as white-col­lar work­ers went out to their jobs in this “an­tique econ­omy”; one that di­rectly made it pos­si­ble for the queen to stay happy in her cas­tle.

The av­er­age Brit was in fact a rel­a­tive of a peas­ant who had been tossed by need into the provin­cial towns or Lon­don, just like so many ’in­ter­nal im­mi­grants’ who ar­rived in Cat­alo­nia from (other) parts of rural Spain in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Soon after the time that Horne was writ­ing though, it was es­ti­mated that at least half of Eng­land’s land was en­tirely un­reg­is­tered: a hotch­potch of in­her­ited wealth. Today we now know that this half a na­tion is owned by just 1% of its pop­u­la­tion: 25,000 landown­ers – typ­i­cally mem­bers of the aris­toc­racy and cor­po­ra­tions.

These cru­cial num­bers of course ig­nore the ironic title of the book. It refers to the 16th cen­tury monarch Eliz­a­beth’s bishop of Lon­don who specif­i­cally claimed that “God is Eng­lish” and “His na­tion was to be the New Jerusalem” of the British Isles.

The very Eng­lish ge­nius George Or­well warned against the “habit of as­sum­ing that human be­ings can be clas­si­fied like in­sects” but if we think about today’s Eng­lish peo­ple I’d com­pare them to that lit­tle desert lizard who hops from foot to foot to avoid get­ting its feet burnt on the hot sand. Here I mean the po­lit­i­cal and so­cial tem­per­a­ture, not that from the sun.