Gove wants to criminalise what Brits do best: talking down our nation

There’s no point denying it. I’m worried. And I don’t mean about the fate of the Caramac, which always was an abomination spawned from confectionary hell. No, it’s the government’s plans to shackle/outlaw/debag anybody who would “put down the country” that have raised the alarm, especially among those of us who take a certain pride in our ability to put down the country.

Not that “putting down the country” means the same thing to all people. I’m sure we could argue with Michael Gove long into the night about each of those words, not least “country” which descends quickly into mythologies ancient and modern. According to reports, the government wants to tackle what they call “non-violent extremism” and that begins with a blanket descriptor which states that “Extremism is the promotion or advancement of any ideology which aims to overturn or undermine the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy, its institutions and values”.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? One person’s non-violent extremist is another person’s David Walliams… or Holly Willoughby… or that Hairy Biker who has started to wear cravats. 

Where will these lines be drawn? With a day of clapping for Greg Wallace? Buttering up an Archbishop? Cheering the UK’s entry to the next Eurovision? Not to disrespect our king but will we atheists be forced to ask God to save him? Isn’t it time somebody asked Adrian Chiles to write a column about it? We need answers, ideally in a loosely argued 300-word “column” for The Guardian.

Not that any of this has been explicitly announced. For the moment, it exists in the Vale of Rumours, in the Shadow of What-Might-Yet-Be, the Brownfield Site of Idle Speculation. The government response to the report was to simply say “we keep our approach to tackling extremism under review to ensure it meets the evolving challenge it poses.”

And yet…

And yet there’s always an “and yet”.

The “and yet” amounts to a gnawing sense of the inevitable. The direction of travel has been clear for some time. Satire – the very stuff of talking down the government and, they would like us to believe, the country – might not be dead, but a concerned crowd stands over its prostrate body as we try to force some oxygen into its failing lungs.

Breathe damn you! I won’t let you go out like this!

Where does fair criticism end and “undermining the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy, its institutions and values” begin? We can’t even agree on the big issues like what democracy and free speech look like. We can’t even agree about poppies.

Private Eye was widely condemned this past month for a cover which some saw as a suitably satirical response to the ongoing situation in Israel. Others were outraged and thought it unconscionable. Around the same time, The Guardian sacked its cartoonist, Steve Bell, for what seemed like his dozenth offence. This time he’d portrayed the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, cutting the shape of Israel into his chest using scalpel and whilst wearing boxing gloves. Bell explained it was a reference to a classic cartoon by David Levine in which President Lyndon Johnson is seen showing off a scar in the shape of Vietnam. As Bell describes it, he’d sent the cartoon to the paper and then “four hours later… I received an ominous phone call from the desk with the strangely cryptic message ‘pound of flesh’…” 

The cartoon had reminded somebody of The Merchant of Venice and that tenuous logic was enough to make Bell guilty of antisemitism. By the same measure, one can suppose he was also guilty of making jokes about black culture, rape, and people with facial tattoos since the boxing gloves were clearly a reference to Mike Tyson…

And the left glove did look like my Uncle Wilfred without his teeth in, which on a personal level I found deeply offensive…

The climate is censorious, but it might well be worse than that. The party that once mocked Tony Blair’s nanny statism has itself become deeply prescriptive and even more proscriptive. Mere disagreements are escalated, rival opinions deemed heresy. Nobody is supposed to expect the Spanish Inquisition but these days it’s a daily occurrence. It suits the government who clearly believe the next election will be won (or partially saved) by demonising its critics for daring to believe in – wait for it – “something else”.

This is new to our politics. It’s unwelcome. It also feels so… unpatriotic. 

After all, what defines us better than our ability to talk down our nation? Isn’t it what we’re good at? It’s a defining British characteristic. Anybody taking the citizenship test should be tested not on their knowledge on which king ran which flag up which flagpole but on their ability to sound jaded about the size of eggs, the weather, the BBC, the strange bit of fuzz on Gary Lineker’s chin, the restoration of the Palace of Westminster, the diminished quality of hedgerows, the arrogance of farmers blocking footpaths, the pestilence of bagged dogsh*t hanging from trees, cyclists, cycle lanes, the lack of cycle lanes, Marmite, the quality of chocolate (no, I won’t take back what I said about Caramac), and any manner of mild irritants (cough, Jeremy Vine). If you can’t complain about LadBaby and the dire Christmas Number One, then you shouldn’t hold a passport. 

Give us your poor befuddled masses, especially if they have a snarky side…

Our government needs to remember what fuels a big part of this nation and it’s not bouncing through Hampshire meadows and deploying heroic couplets about Fiona Bruce. I write this sitting in Manchester, a great city (and let’s agree it’s the real capital of the UK given the cultural vibes and lower cost of living), where every street corner looks like the cover of a Smiths album, and every guttural vowel sounds like a single by The Fall. In fact, I was reading about Gove’s plans this morning while listening to The Fall and it felt like one was throwing heavy shade on the other. It made me wonder how many of our great bands and artists would survive a crazy political stunt designed to put a scarlet letter on those who badmouth the country.

Listening to Mark E. Smith’s version of Jerusalem made me doubt if The Fall would pass that test.

I became a semi-autistic type person
And I didn’t have a pen, and I didn’t have a condom
It was the fault of the government
I think I’ll emigrate to Sweden or Poland
And get looked after properly by a government

How’s that for a bit of “undermining”? But even Blake’s Jerusalem as popularised by Edward Elgar’s music is different things to different people: sung at Labour Party conferences, a favourite at The Last Night of the Proms, as well as being one of those tunes often cited by English politicians as being the embodiment of patriotic zeal. It is all those things whilst being none of those things.

What this government calls “undermining” might also be a healthy cynicism towards government, conventions, and the status quo. Mike E. Gove would be better served to put down his Edward Thomas and listen to some Mark E. Smith for a more grounded sense of the people and places he is meant to be levelling up.

O’er grassy dale, and lowland scene
Come see, come hear, the English Scheme
The lower-class, want brass, bad chests, scrounge fags
The clever ones tend to emigrate

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@DavidWaywell