The ghastly New York Times takes a snobby pot-shot at Brexit Britain
This was going to be about grotty Westminster and the meltdown of the Conservative party, but after consuming the Sunday papers I cannot face reading, or writing, more of it for now. I suspect there is among readers widespread crisis fatigue too, but I could be wrong. Either way, British politics being what it is right now, I’m sure we’ll be back on Reaction in the next few days with more about people resigning over serious abuses of power, alongside other men and women (innocent) being dragged in via an anonymous dirty laundry list straight out of Arthur Miller’s Crucible.
We are also bound to hear more about the strange business of people getting themselves promoted to UK Defence Secretary in unusual circumstances. It is all murkier and more mysterious than the plot of Designated Survivor, the US Netflix series in which the entire political class is wiped out in a disaster and only one person is left standing to become President. Incidentally, just asking, who is Britain’s designated survivor?
At Westminster the rumours fly that new Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson thinks the designated survivor is… him. Is it true, incidentally, that ousted Number 10 chief of staff Nick Timothy – who speaks to May regularly and still advises her a lot – pushed Williamson forward to May, seeing him as the socially mobile vanguard of the next Tory generation? If so, how did he miss that Williamson is so deeply untrusted by so many of his colleagues of all backgrounds?
Or is the counter rumour I’ve heard true? That May and some of her small team had rumbled Williamson recently, working out that he was really in it for Gavin Williamson rather than for Theresa May. Moving him to a difficult job, in which defence cuts are now about to get much more attention from Tory MPs, gets him out of the chilling atmosphere of the whips office and into hot water. But then Williamson’s able friend Julian Smith has taken over at the whip’s office, suggesting the strengthening of Williamson’s leadership operation, which now runs up against a great many Tory MPs and ministers sworn to stop him.
It is so darn complicated. Who to trust? Not the New York Times, which is why today instead I offer a short essay inspired by that ghastly outlet and its latest attack on the UK.
You can usually rely on the New York Times to get its reading of Britain wrong. While the newspaper has among its columnists the great David Brooks – a liberal conservative who travels here, listens and makes so much sense – the news coverage of the UK in the NYT has so often been underpinned by an obvious contempt for supposedly imperialist Britain and all its works. This will not come as a surprise to many NYT-sceptics in America, who have long understood that the paper’s over-cooked reputation (which persists in Europe, somehow, usually among people who never read it) that it is always straight down the line is a hilariously laughable myth. It is an ultra-liberal paper that projects its prejudices, constantly, in its reporting coverage, far more than the Guardian.
Britain is lost. No-one knows what it is, says Steven Erlanger, with a new Brussels by-line. Indeed, the piece features so many insights from “fluffers” for the EU that I kept expecting to see Jean Claude-Juncker, that giant of Luxembourg politics, pop up quoted saying that Britain is rubbish/tiny/silly.
The serious problems with Erlanger’s piece begin in the first two words, which is quite an achievement.
“Many Britons see their country as a brave galleon, banners waving, cannons firing, trumpets blaring. That is how the country’s voluble foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, likes to describe it.”
Hold on. “Many Britons”? Many Britons see their country as a brave galleon? Who are these people? I’m sure you could find several thousand distressed and confused Ukippers who think it is still 1912, and the empire is intact, but that’s not many in a nation of more than 63m.
The main evidence for the assertion that we see ourselves as a brave galleon seems to be the worst bits of speeches made by the Foreign Secretary. Boris Johnson speeches on this subject – invoking Churchill and roaring lions – may be entertaining, but they are pure hokum and regarded as such, even by his friends. They’re rhetorical devices, that have lost their charm. Look at the universal media mockery when the Daily Telegraph splashed its front page on Boris roaring like a lion recently.
Even at the height of the Boris thing – 2012, the brilliantly successful London Olympics that showed naysayers like me good and proper – no-one actually believed all the Boris baloney, or not much anyway. People know the routine, and grasp that it was a shrewd operator exaggerating for effect. The Brits have a honed sense of irony. They were sometimes amused and warmed by the sub-Churchill routine, but they do not see themselves as passengers abroad a brave galleon because Boris makes a speech at the Tory conference. Really.
Certainly not when the disaster of the Iraq War and the misery of the Afghanistan mess are so fresh in the memory. And not after the profound shock of the financial crisis, which hit Britain hardest of all the major economies, because of the size of our banking sector relative to the rest of the economy.
That being the case, in the pubs of Britain people are not sitting around saying “now, Reg, I essentially see Britain as a brave galleon, with banners waving… yes, another pint of Stella, yes, I’ll have some crisps too, cheese and onion please… anyway… I see us very much as this brave galleon with our cannons firing and our trumpets blaring… that’s us.”
In search of a metaphor, Erlanger then commits to print the defining, classic, ultra-liberal, American misreading of Britain.
“Britain is now but a modest-size ship on the global ocean. Having voted to leave the European Union, it is unmoored, heading to nowhere.”
The historian Robert Tombs nailed this myth in his essential history of the English. Only a handful of loonies think Britain is a superpower or could be. Britain was briefly – in the historical scheme of things – a leading power, but mostly it has been medium-sized and pretty agile with a decent sense of itself. Since 1945, after a second war that almost bankrupted the country and cemented American economic dominance, the British have adjusted. The process, while contested and hardly smooth, has nonetheless cumulatively been moderately impressive. The version Erlanger and others retail of faded imperial delusion is so simplistic as to be useless other than as crude anti-British propaganda.
“The divisions in the society — over Brexit, over politics — are both a function and a result of Britain’s confusion about its identity and global importance,” he writes.
“The 19th-century myth of Britain as the “workshop of the world,” a doughty Protestant nation surrounded by Catholics with an empire on which the sun never set, confronted a post-World War II reality, when a lot of these tales stopped being true, suggests Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.”
Let’s unpack – as liberal American academics might say – that mess of historical conflations and simplifications. A 19th and 20th century Britain surrounded by Catholic Germany or Tsarist and then Soviet Russia? What does that even mean? Little Britain was clearly worried in the 16th, 17th, 18th and early 19th century about being surrounded by and invaded by much larger and richer Catholic states, France and Spain, for the very good reason that they did at various points try to take over or invade. Funnily enough, this was for the most part unpopular in Britain and a defining feature that shaped discourse.
Yes, Britain then became hugely successful in the 19th century for a whole slew of reasons, partly by design but mainly as a result of luck, larceny and constitutional development. The notion Britis somehow miss the “empire on which the sun never sets” is a slur, overlooking how the British retreat from empire was – with notable disasters – largely peacefully done.
Then Erlanger gets to what he seems to see as the roots of modern Britain’s malaise.
“Britain became a service economy, the empire disappeared and people stopped identifying with the Church of England. Then Margaret Thatcher arrived, and with her, Mr. Leonard said, “there was a last gasp of this old identity — an ethnic, exclusively white and backward-looking version of Englishness.”
This excluded a large number of Britons — black, Asian and Muslim — who felt disenfranchised from the national story, he says, until Tony Blair came along and opened the UK up to Europe. Those who didn’t like this then had their revenge with Brexit, apparently.
There’s so much pseudo-academic junk in this argument that it is hard to know where to start. Thatcher was in favour of EU membership in 1975 during the first referendum and via Lord Cockfield she was a key architect of the Single Market in 1986. Her turning against the EU and its surging ambitions in the 1990s after she left office chimed with the British voters – who told pollsters this over and over again for several decades, but were never given a say or a chance to object – for the reason that the British wanted to trade and be friends with our neighbours but also be self-governing and not in an integrationist bloc. That’s the root of Brexit, and it has been coming since Maastricht in the early 1990s. Britain is in Europe, but does not want to be in the EU because of what the EU has become.
And on race? Advances were made on this under Blair, yes of course. Britain’s record is still not good enough, although it is far better than that of the United States or, indeed, of France.
Where the NYT analysis is in some ways correct, is that as a result of Brexit Britain is now going through one of its rethinks and readjustments. This is messy, but how it could it not be when the core analysis of the bulk of the governing class – the UK in the EU trying to shape it, against ever more evidence that the thing is going where we don’t want to go – has been smashed to smithereens?
This event has exposed everyone and helps explain the sense of meltdown and decay at Westminster. Ultra-remainers trying to stop it are revealed as snobs who think their countrymen are racists or gullible fools. Brexit hardliners are exposed as relying on tired old lines that got them through Tory fringe meetings for three decades, with old mantras that are now hopeless when it comes to understanding the complexities of trade or of crafting a new relationship with the EU and the rest of the world. Moderate Brexiteers, like me, despairing of the hardliners, have been hopeless. We have failed to properly make common cause with moderate Remainers who accept the result but want a positive relationship, as moderate Brexiteers do, with the EU.
But this messy argument is what countries do when they regenerate and rethink. Britain has quite a lot of experience of this, having avoided the 20th century revolutions that did so much harm elsewhere, opting instead for reform, and then having to dismantle an empire and remake its economy, painfully. A difficult process of devolution was also begun and a civil war in Ulster eventually brought to a close. Now the UK has bio-tech, huge strengths in retail and digital trade (miles ahead of Germany), along with a City that has for centuries been a place to make money out of money, a City usually at its best when doing what cannot be done elsewhere. Britain’s position is that of a medium-sized power that sometimes, by dint of historical experience, operates above its ranking, usually in an emergency.
The question of national self-perception and its relation to historical memory is highly complex, and interesting. Reducing it to a New York Times caricature does no-one any good, other than Mr Erlanger, who must have suffered some kind of terrible service sector or cultural experience in Britain for which I can only apologise. Was it a rude train conductor? Over-exposure to British light entertainment or unfunny comedy on BBC Radio 4? An excess of good food, what with Britain now being so much better at food than the US? Writing too often about Julian Assange’s exile in a London cupboard? Being forced to listen to too many boring speeches at Chatham House in the mistaken belief that it is possible find out anything truly useful about modern Britain there?
I stress again, I can only apologise for whatever it is that we are supposed to have done to make the man from the NYT’s stay in Britain so terrible. As for Britain, it will be fine and possibly much better, but it will take regeneration, renewal and new leadership to do it.