Think of England
James Hawes’s “England: the nation that never was” (Aug/Sept) blithely combines three elementary historical fallacies: determinism (the past dictates the future), presentism (the climax of history is us), and exceptionalism (we are different from everyone else). This permits bold predictions: the UK will fragment as soon as the pandemic is over, and England will follow shortly thereafter. This, Hawes reveals, is because England is not a nation at all—never has been, despite staggering on for 1,000 years or so.
One problem with exceptionalism is that it suggests that those expounding it don’t know much about anywhere else. England is no nation, says Hawes, because since the 11th century it has been ruled by foreigners; well, 12 of the 15 western European kingdoms (including Scotland) were ruled by descendants of the Franks. England didn’t have a culture because the educated used Latin and French: I wonder which languages Hawes thinks were used in other European countries (Hungary, to pick just one example, used Latin officially until the 1840s). England is doomed because it is being torn apart by geological, cultural and political differences. If we applied the Hawes formula generally, we would confidently predict the collapse not only of England, but of Scotland, Wales, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Canada, the United States, China and India for a start.
Ah, but there is a crucial difference, as becomes steadily clearer: this whole argument is really about Brexit. From King Cnut onwards, we were moving fatefully towards 2016, and an ancient Tory plot to break up the UK and govern forever. Boris Johnson is the heir to William the Conqueror, Elizabeth I, Robert Cecil, and those “populists” Henry IV and Oliver Cromwell. Historically illiterate Remainers must get dour satisfaction from this downbeat pastiche of 1066 and All That: England is Bottom Nation, and history comes to a.
Robert Tombs, Cambridge
Due care
Andrew Dilnot is, as ever, right on all counts (“How to fix elderly care,” Aug/Sept). The most bizarre thing about Boris Johnson’s pledge on becoming prime minister—“we will fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared”—is that he already has such a plan on the statute book. All he needs to do is implement the one Dilnot designed. It may not be the perfect answer to the question of how costs should be split between families and the state, because there is no perfect answer available. But the plan is as good as it gets.
Yet Dilnot is right, too, that the burden of costs is only one part of a multifaceted problem. Another is providing sufficiently high-quality care for the parts of the system that the taxpayer does fund, both for the elderly and those who are younger. That is about money, but not only about money.
The next question, about which Dilnot says less, is how this care should be delivered. The current aim of both local government and the NHS is for far better integration of social care with health, via the partnerships called Integrated Care Systems, but there is a fair way to go there. There is a further issue: how to pay for all of this? Tax rises will inevitably be part of the answer.
Nicholas Timmins, author of “The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State”
Stuck on the staircase
There is always a danger that people become a slave to their models rather than seeing the big picture—and Julian King’s review of Michel Barnier’s diaries suggests the former chief negotiator may be guilty of just that (“The Brexit illusions,” July).
The staircase was the famous exposition of the Brexit choices available to the UK. Rejecting Theresa May’s appeals for a bespoke relationship, tailored to the unusual circumstances of a powerful departing member state that is highly integrated into the European economy and has strong security links, Barnier insisted the UK had to choose a pre-established step to land on. Did it want economic integration without power, like Norway, or a rudimentary free-trade agreement crafted for a country over 3,000 miles away, like Canada?
Barnier has, as King brings out, fulfilled his short-term negotiating mandate in spades. He has delivered a deal that preserves the integrity of the single market, and which gives EU goods exporters tariff-free access to the UK while at the same time offering very little to British services exporters; the EU is well placed to grab back a slice of the UK’s market share here.
But Barnier’s short-run win has come at the cost of a more distant and fractious relationship. The compromises involved in the vexed Northern Ireland protocol showed that even the unbending EU could flex a bit. In the years to come, will Barnier regret not creating a special UK step on that staircase?
Jill Rutter, UK in a Changing Europe
King understates the respect that Barnier shows for the British negotiators. Barnier praises the British civil servants he met (with the exception of David Frost) as being “dignified, competent and lucid”—but he pitied them for having to work for a political class that refused point blank to accept responsibility for its decisions.
Funnily enough, the copy of the book that I ordered from a French bookseller had a customs declaration attached, which is now required for all EU purchases. However, this described the contents as “vintage copper pans, set of five”—so presumably the government’s post-Brexit “light-touch” customs regime is working well.
Ian Arnott, former HM Customs and Excise officer
War stories
Regarding the strategy of the Imperial War Museum (“The three worst words,” Aug/Sept), it is all too clear that as the years go by, ever-more diverse themes have to be included and displayed appropriately. But as space, however cleverly rearranged, is finite, items and themes must be archived to free space for the new—no doubt after much soul-searching.
A further challenge is the near-infinite availability of images and videos of artefacts and other information online. I expect that much thought is being given to how best to translate initial interest shown online into making the effort to see and learn more in the museum setting.
The art of “selling” the product must remain a key focus for the museum. But the fads and fashions of today, like their predecessors, should not be allowed to become the sole driver of what, and how, displays are presented. It is encouraging to learn that this is well appreciated. Covid and its restrictions must have made for a particularly testing time. I wish the museum, and all who work there, well.
David Craig, former chief of the defence staff
Ins and outs of folly
Helen Thompson’s perceptive essay on the interface between the constitutional issues raised by Britain’s EU membership and the post-Brexit consequences for the union of the United Kingdom (“Consent: the dynamite at the heart of the British constitution,” July) contains plenty of material to make us sit up and think.
Thompson does, however, skate over one consent issue right at the outset of our membership: the fact that the manifestos of all three main parties in the 1970 general election supported British accession. Indeed, the opening statement made by the Heath government when accession negotiations began a few weeks after the election was precisely the one that Labour would have made if re-elected.
Only a supreme act of prestidigitation by Harold Wilson, aimed (unsuccessfully) at preventing a split in the Labour Party, enabled him to argue that his subsequent objections were to the terms, not the principle, of membership.
But what is missing in the analysis is recognition of the most damaging piece of British exceptionalism: treating any referendum as an in/out choice. No other member state made that elision. France and the Netherlands did not do so when they voted against the Constitutional Treaty. Nor did Ireland and Denmark, when referendums rejected treaty changes on other occasions. Even French and Italian Eurosceptics are steering clear of full-blown objections to the euro out of an awareness of the risks of an either/or approach.
Unfortunately, David Cameron stepped straight into the trap. It is yet another example of the sloppy way that we take account of major constitutional choices—and of the difficulties we will now have handling the unintended consequences of Brexit.
David Hannay, House of Lords
Imperial crimes
Charlotte Higgins rightly observes that the image of Nero the monster derives largely from hostile sources promoting their own agenda, and highlights another side to the emperor (“In praise of lost causes,” Aug/Sept).
That said, he was no angel. Granted, the story that he kicked his second, pregnant, wife Poppaea to death is likely a fabrication; but he certainly murdered his mother Agrippina, and executed his aunt Domitia—who had raised him affectionately as an infant—to get her cash, and executed his first wife Octavia, essentially just to marry Poppaea.
Women were not his only problem. He brought about the deaths of several prominent Stoic philosophers, most notably the much-esteemed Seneca. If we wanted to be generous, we could describe Nero as a mixed bag: like the residents of Milk Wood, “not wholly bad or good.”
Anthony Barrett, Heidelberg
Local liberals
An economic history of Britain since 1800, in five pages, is bound to leave something out. But Duncan Weldon’s perceptive account (“Condemned to be liberal,” July) suffers from the same limited perspective that he rightly criticises in the Treasury; it is Whitehall-centred. He therefore entirely ignores the efforts of local government leaders—the paradigm case is Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham—to improve their areas through a whole range of initiatives that belie his stress on the prevailing liberal orthodoxy.
From the last decades of the 19th century, local councils borrowed money to improve sewage and water supplies, took over (through municipalisation) new enterprises such as gas and electricity and even the telephone system, and devoted billions (at modern values) to creating parks. Then came council housing.
What will be fascinating, in the next few years, is to see whether Andy Burnham and his fellow mayors, many of them Labour, can repeat the trick.
Roderick Floud, economic historian
Lust for life
The killer conclusion of Freya Johnston’s review of Frances Wilson’s Burning Man—that the failure of the biography’s “governing idea” to map onto life makes it “perversely unsatisfactory and entirely in keeping with its subject”—misses the nature of DH Lawrence’s greatness.
The ideologies voiced in Lawrence—whether by narrator, poet or characters—are always internally contradicted, passionate and experimental struggles into conscious being of which the failures are intrinsic to the successes. As professor Michael Bell has written, Lawrence’s genius “was primarily for life and being, flame-like values which are intrinsically fluctuating.” Therefore Wilson is right to urge the inseparability of Lawrence’s art and life: his love-making, arguing, horse-riding and writing were an unbroken continuum, out of which he was not trying to create eternally true art but (in the words of his preface to Pansies) “thoughts that are true while they are true,” “one eternal moment easily contradicting the next eternal moment.”
More than just believing “in the blood,” Lawrence had a constant sense of the marvel of being alive: “To have one’s pulse beating direct from the mystery, this was perfection.” TS Eliot rightly thought of him “neither as an artist, nor as a man who failed to be an artist,” but as a “researcher into religious emotion.”
Catherine Brown, New College of the Humanities
In fact
From 1994 to 2014, the number of swearwords used by Britons fell by 27 per cent, to 1,320 per million words. “Fuck” is the most popular swearword (542 instances per million).
“Text & Talk,” 2021
An organic cotton tote bag would need to be used 20,000 times—daily for 54 years—to offset the environmental impact of its production.
New York Times, 24th August 2021
Vincent van Gogh once worked as a supply teacher in Ramsgate.
@qikipedia, 14th August 2021
In the last 10 years, the number of Americans identifying only as white has declined for the first time since the census began in 1790, falling by 5.1m to 191.7m people.
Washington Post, 12th August 2021
In France, every 18-year-old was recently given €300 to spend on culture (music, classes, museums etc) via a smartphone app; over 75 per cent of all purchases were books; roughly two-thirds of those books were manga.
New York Times, 28th July 2021
A quarter of the UK’s homes sit above abandoned coal mines.
BBC Future, 7th July 2021
Out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of national evening news broadcast on the US networks CBS, ABC and NBC in 2020, five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan.
Responsible Statecraft, 20th August 2021
A poll of over 2,000 UK pet owners found that 46 per cent of those aged 18 to 34 regret getting a pet during lockdown. The most regretted pet was a rabbit.
Guardian, 11th July 2021
Four police officers who were at the US Capitol riot in January have now died by suicide.
CNN, 10th August 2021
Plaek Phibunsongkhram, who became prime minister of Thailand after a military coup, made pad Thai—then an obscure unnamed noodle dish—the national dish by fiat.
Atlas Obscura, 7th July 2021
