If Welsh pride is fine, why not English?
In Wales it looks as if being anti-English has gone mainstream. The Labour-led assembly discriminates against second-home owners; a Welsh village blocked a housing estate lest English-speakers move in and become a “degenerate influence”’; and Bridgend County Borough council has ended free transport for certain pupils unless they attend a Welsh language or faith school.
Every story has a nuance. The bus decision is not about rank prejudice but the logic of promoting Welsh, which falls under statutory duty. If in an imaginary region there are, say, six English schools and one Welsh, people who want the Welsh one will have to travel further and, QED, extra support is required to make it viable.
The SNP has encouraged Gaelic education in Scotland, prompting similar rows about accessibility – and I’m all for it. Real conservatives love local tradition. It was Margaret Thatcher, threatened by a hunger strike, who launched the Welsh TV channel and promoted the language in schools; John Major, in 1993, put Welsh on an equal footing with English in public business and justice. After centuries of oppression, the English have co-sponsored the revival of Welsh culture – and the migration of thousands of Englishmen to the valleys is a further sign of our affection.
Britain works because it is not a narrow-minded nation state but a cosmopolitan kingdom. The heart warms to read that Cornish, a language that until recently was classed as extinct, is now being taught in 40 primary schools. When the King and Queen visited Guernsey in July, they were addressed in Guernésiais, a dialect of Norman French.
I’m afraid to say it is devolution, the attempt to translate culture into administrative politics, that has bred sectionalism and thrown up artificial barriers between us – most dramatically during lockdown, when Wales banned visitors from English hotspots and some nutty Scots Nats unfurled banners on the A1 suggesting we stay home to “Keep Scotland Covid Free”.
Left-wing parties claim they’ve invented a nationalism that is free of ethnicity. This turns out to be impossible. Viewers of The Way – a delightfully mad three-part drama on BBC iPlayer – watched as workers at a Welsh steel mill were bought out by foreigners, subjected to martial law, fled across the border, only to be locked up in cages by plummy Englishmen wearing our national costume of the Barbour jacket (aided, I kid you not, by the Welsh Catcher).
The show ended with refuge in France and tossing an ancient sword into the sea, foxing all reviewers except those who’d read The Mabinogion and The Owl Service – as I did at my Kentish grammar – and who know that however hard nationalists try to dress up their Welshness as anti-Tory class struggle, it remains an historic identity shrouded in mythology. Just like Englishness.
The key difference is that we English are no longer invited to express ourselves in such sentimental terms, let alone on the licence fee. The equivalent would be a thriller about Ukip activists rescuing us from the metric system by beating Drake’s Drum.
English academics don’t even believe that they themselves exist, the phrase Anglo-Saxon now being expunged from the university syllabus, and one cannot promote an identity that is a figment of the Right-wing imagination. A Tory policy was mooted to give council house preference to long-term residents. Labour has dumped it.
Were residents in the Midlands to say that Swahili speakers are unwelcome, they’d likely face a police investigation – for it would be discriminatory and immoral. What’s irksome is the hypocrisy of people who think one kind of cultural pride, for Wales or Scotland, is dandy, but the other, Englishness, is pure evil – the relic of an empire that was “far worse than the Nazis” (to quote superstar historian Kehinde Andrews).
The real victim here is Britishness. Of the three UK regions, in Scotland it is sidelined; in Ulster, controversial to say the least; in Wales, a 2020 poll found 39 per cent of Labour voters favoured independence. Britishness suffers from conflation with Englishness, with Boris and Brexit. It also lost its ideological purpose with the end of empire, and is now reduced to a litany of values – politeness, privacy, clean politics – that often no longer apply and can be claimed the world over.
Unless there is a concerted project to redefine and sell Britishness, along with the Union, this empty shell will give way to the ancient appeals of language, religion or skin tone. The recent riots suggest it’s already happening.