England's on the anvil

England's on the anvil

Dear Perry,

9th February 1996

It's not much fun being English these days. We lose to South Africans at cricket. We mislay the best football coach the country's had for 30 years. Brussels wants to harmonise us out of existence, and the snarling threat of secession by the north keeps Tory unionists awake at night. Even the tabloids whine about estuary English, and the pervasiveness of US popular culture. We shouldn't. Let the French worry about the preservation of their language. We Englishmen have more serious matters to worry about.

Our identity is under threat. The easy, confident swagger of the Englishman abroad has been replaced by the twittering self-effacement of Hugh Grant. Why? Because we aren't sure of who we are any more. You, like me, are attached to the English national identity. I know that to you it means church, monarchy, the Telegraphs and deference. The idea of a multi-ethnic, multicultural society makes you uneasy. I can't allay your fears. But I want you to explain why your paper isn't doing the smart thing in defence of England. I'll explain what that is in this letter.

The Telegraphs are quick to worry in public about the moral and economic decline of the nation. Its columns resound to a klaxon of outrage at the fecklessness of the underclass, the failure of parental authority and the prospect of unbridled immigration. This agenda stands in the way of reasserting the values which made England great.

It may seem odd that the son of Caribbean immigrants should be so worked up about this. The black community has acquired a reputation for being radical, alienated and increasingly separate from white English people. Actually this is nothing like the truth about us. In very many ways, most of us (blacks) are more "English" than you (whites). History has entwined us, genetically and culturally, with the people who populated the British isles for 1,000 years. Hardly anyone from slave stock could claim to be completely African; generations of miscegenation have ensured that I carry plenty of Anglo-Saxon blood. There's a Scottish sea captain not very far back in the Phillips line.

Culturally, West Indians are Edwardian. We grow up believing in order, discipline-enforced by violence if necessary-self-help, politeness and large families. Many of the traits people now associate with us-criminal, work-shy, sexually loose-we have picked up, like everyone else, as a consequence of the decline of England. When no less a figure than Linford Christie, himself a perfect example of the virtues of self denial and hard work, complains that black children in Britain lack the discipline seen in Jamaica, it's time to take note.

The fact is that if you want to defend the best of the English tradition, there could be few better ways than a large scale, well planned programme of immigration. Norman Tebbit's campaign against passports for the Hong Kong Chinese robbed England of an infusion of the entrepreneurial energy that painted the 19th century globe imperial pink. The cruel strictures on the reuniting of Asian families diverted a huge stream of the most successful small business people in the world to North America. And the rising tide of prejudice against Muslims may deprive us of a bulwark of a million people whose faith demands the sort of family life that eludes most Tory MPs. If you want to see monarchists of the most fundamental kind, look at any Hindu community. And attracting some more Africans and West Indians might even bring our sports teams back to winning ways.

Shouldn't you and your colleagues at the Telegraphs now be doing the right thing and calling for an influx of the sort of people who support your kind of England? You wouldn't be put off by the fact that so many of them wouldn't be white, would you? Such a prejudice would hardly be fair, pragmatic or, come to think of it, English.

Yours sincerely,

Trevor Phillips

Dear Trevor,

13th February 1996

How are we going to make a good ding-dong out of this when there is so much in your letter with which I agree?

I would not for a moment wish to deny that many West Indian families, at any rate among the older generation, have retained a greater attachment to what I still call Victorian (and you call Edwardian) values than have many contemporary white British families. Nor would I wish to deny that most Hong Kong Chinese are more likely to be good entrepreneurs than most native born British. And, as you say, most immigrants from the Indian sub-continent are more family-loving and God-fearing than their white British neighbours. In many ways you could be right in maintaining that the best way to restore family discipline, religious attendance and entrepreneurial dynamism to this country would be to open our doors to further large scale immigration.

Unfortunately this rather misses the point. For I don't think Englishness-that quality which many of the native born feel mass immigration, particularly coloured immigration, threatens-has much to do with family values, religious attendance or entrepreneurial skills. So while injections of West Indian, Indian and Hong Kong Chinese blood-why not, for good measure, Jewish blood too-might make this country more of all these good things, it would not make us more English; would not restore to the native born that precious sense of Englishness which many of my generation miss so much.

Here we get into deep waters, as John Major found when he tried to describe his idea of Englishness: cricket greens, warm beer and such like. One of his predecessors, Stanley Baldwin, was much better at that kind of thing, if only because his cousin, who coached him in the use of moving language, happened to be one of the greatest English poets, Rudyard Kipling. This is why I have never forgotten, as a young boy in the 1930s, witnessing Baldwin in the Albert Hall bringing tears to the eyes of a huge audience-made up mostly of people living in towns or suburbs-by rhapsodising about the glories of the English countryside. What he successfully appealed to (John Major tries but, alas, fails) was English romanticism: romanticism about an imaginary pastoral England.

Early in the second world war Tom Hopkinson, of Mass Observation, carried out a poll of the first fighters asking them what they were fighting for. Few replied in terms of king and country, church and state, freedom and democracy-and none at all, I feel sure, in terms of the Telegraphs or deference. Quite overwhelmingly they replied in terms of an idealised picture of timeless rural England: of the plough coming over the crest of a hill, of a rose-bowered country cottage, and so on. If the French, being an intellectual people, have a certain idea of France, the English have a picture-a picture from which much of the ugliness and squalor of modernity and industrialisation has been eliminated. If Englishness was an idea, or even a culture, you are right, Trevor, in supposing that at least the West Indians could assimilate with ease. But to assimilate with a picture, particularly an idealised picture, is more difficult.

An enormous amount of assimilation did take place in the postwar years. Much modernisation was unavoidable. That rural dreamland became ever more divorced from reality. But precisely because there was already so little of the idealised picture left, the absorption of large scale immigration was more threatening than it would have been in more settled times. It seemed the last straw. All this change, and mass immigration too. Kilburn, Southall, Leeds, Sheffield-where coloured immigration was densest-changed out of recognition. They were changed also by tower blocks and spaghetti junctions which were deeply resented too. Hence the vandalism and graffiti. But being made of flesh and blood, not concrete, the immigrants were a more satisfactory target for revenge.

This is now in the past, I am glad to say. To a large extent the postwar immigration has been assimilated. The black West Indian conductor is now as much a traditional part of the London bus as its red colour. And to a younger generation of whites, Enoch Powell, with his wild, staring eyes, and fanatically logical Germanic mind, seems a more alien, un-English figure than many blacks or browns. Then there is Trevor Macdonald, whose way of speaking, and demeanour, is more reminiscent of the old BBC announcer than his white colleagues.

But this has taken almost half a century, and such progress as has been made would certainly be put at risk by a new injection of mass immigration. The fact that this new influx might do wonders for the British economy is irrelevant. The case against immigration was never utilitarian, cultural or religious; nor even fundamentally racial. It would need a poet to do it justice, just as it needs a poet to put into words the meaning of Englishness.

Yours ever,

Perry Worsthorne

11th February 1996

I'm not a poet, so don't expect me to offer a definition of Englishness that rings with Blakean resonances. But I think that you are being uncharacteristically slippery in suggesting that Englishness rests in some indefinable romantic picture, and that therefore we shouldn't worry too much about it. Nor will it do to suggest that there is a mysterious process of assimilation which might, with time, help us to progress. And it is downright bizarre to claim that "the case against immigration was never utilitarian, cultural or religious; nor even fundamentally racial." Sorry-was I dreaming when I interviewed Lord Tebbit and he patiently explained the cultural incompatibility of the English and the Hong Kong Chinese? No, I don't think so-it's all on videotape.

Dear Perry,

Dear Trevor,

I am happy to hear that your father fared so well in the US. But you have not done at all badly here. So perhaps the Phillips family experiences just about cancel each other out. On the whole, however, I think Britain has little to learn at the present time from the US about how to solve racial problems. There they are getting dramatically worse; here they are getting gradually better.

Nor do I agree with you that the slight rise in anti-Semitism here discredits the gradualist approach to assimilation. For the rise has been from a uniquely low threshold and may well have been caused by the dramatically pro-Semitic attitudes of the Thatcher years, when Judaism almost replaced Christianity as this country's official religion-with the views of the Chief Rabbi carrying far more weight in Downing Street than the views of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The then prime minister's affirmative action policy towards the Jews-particularly in government-may have helped bring about the 1980s economic miracle by transforming the Tory party's attitude to capitalism from suspicion to ideological commitment. But this was bound to run the risk of giving anti-Semitism-and indeed anti-capitalism-a slight new lease of life when the economic miracle turned sour. In this respect Mrs T was no gradualist and today's rise in anti-Semitism should act as a warning against your idea of importing hundreds of thousands of new wealth creators from Hong Kong. Yes, they might indeed do wonders for the economy, and for themselves. But whether this would help to restore England's national pride is less certain.

You call for new thinking. I agree it is needed. But it is needed as much in the ethnic groups as in the host community; possibly more so. For many in the Asian community do not want to join. That is also true of many of the Chinese who have been here for generations. Whereas the West Indian community, for the most part, create goodwill by their pleasure in conforming, by being more British than the British.

I agree that the ethnic communities could play a big role in making Britain "Great" again. The European challenge, as you say, could be crucial in all this. For whether we go further into a European Union, or become ever more semi-detached, the need for national unity will once again become imperative-as it has not been since 1945. In neither case will we be able to rely much on the US; and in both cases, either at the heart of Europe or on the fringe, we will have to fight to keep our national end up.

This will have consequences. It will make any British government even more anxious to enlist the loyalty of the ethnic groups, because a country under challenge cannot afford alienation, either by race or class. But it will also give the ethnic minorities an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty. Successive European challenges, first from Spain, then from France and Germany-as you say-helped to create the British nation, and the new challenge from Brussels could help to give it new momentum-scarcely less if we are fighting it from outside. If Scotland defects, then the loyalty to England of the immigrants becomes even more crucial.

That the West Indians will prove "true Brits" at the moment of challenge I do not doubt. But not all the ethnic minorities will find it as easy to wear their patriotism with grace and conviction.

Yours ever,

Perry

15th February 1996

Dear Perry,

I don't want to introduce a sour note to what has been a stimulating correspondence. But are you really suggesting that anti-Semitism today is the result of Jewish success-in particular, the promotion of Jews by Mrs Thatcher? Having fought against anti-Semitic tyranny you should know better than I how this argument was deployed in the inter-war years: the notion of clever Jews bringing their fate upon themselves is a nasty one, and not worthy of your distinguished pen.

However, your assertion that the minorities themselves have some work to do is undeniable. Thanks for the kind remarks about West Indians. Yes, we are loyal, but we too have to mount a counter-assault on the moral decay that has infected our community, driven by unemployment, drugs and underachievement. We do face continuing discrimination and prejudice; but some of our fate is in our own hands.

I think you should meet some Asians. Young Asians' most popular icon, Apache Indian, is a rapper in the British style. He succeeds both here and in India because he has totally embraced urban British style; British youths like him because he is one of their own, Indians because he is different. Muslims- not all of whom are Asian-are a more difficult proposition. I don't say that because they don't want to be part of the community, but because we as a society have not yet learnt how to make space for new religions-a case made just as passionately by the Christian charismatics as by Muslims. Yet we have made Englishmen of those who live by the Book before-whether it is the Torah or the Bhagavad-Gita.

Perhaps the difference between us lies in this simple proposition. You believe that those who arrive in England must change to fit; understandable, given your own family's change of name from Koch de Gooreynd to Worsthorne. I believe that for the first time in centuries the boot is on the other foot, and if the great virtues of England are to survive, the English have to learn to change in small ways.

Perhaps we need to carry on the argument face to face. Lunch at the Bengal Lancer? My treat.

Warm regards,

Trevor

16th February 1996

Dear Trevor,

A multicultural society must mean change for all ethnic groups, new and old. About that we both agree. But you do not do justice to the extent that the host community has changed, from the top downwards. Was it not the heir to the throne himself who suggested we should celebrate the millennium by building more mosques? And are not steel bands to be heard in Anglican churches up and down the land? I even heard one recently at a fox hunting meet in Gloucestershire. More striking still, Asian and West Indian food has in many areas largely driven out the roast beef of old England! As for the BBC and other broadcasters, they have bent over backwards to turn out programmes "user-friendly" to the immigrant communities, while libraries have removed racially sensitive literature from the shelves. Young whites of all classes adopt West Indian ways of talking, and sometimes even Rastafarian dreadlocks (although I have persuaded my nephew to cut his off).

So we are learning to change, and not only in small ways. When I recall my own youthful assumptions of racial superiority, and my father's, which were even more extreme, I am astonished by these changes. Perhaps we should do more. But I am a bit discouraged when someone as well informed as you is so reluctant to notice what has been done.

Yes, let's lunch-why not at the Beefsteak, where we have just elected our first black member?

Best regards,

Perry