Who Are We Now? review – a sentimental reflection of England and Englishness

Who Are We Now? Stories of Modern England by Jason Cowley (Pan Macmillan, £16.59).

Who Are We Now? is a more romantic and nostalgic book than might have been expected from the editor-in-chief of the New Statesman. Whilst it shows all the writerly and analytical skills of Jason Cowley the journalist, it is as much about the town of Harlow as it is about England and the experience of growing up in a post-war “New Town”.

For Cowley’s parents and other relatives moving out of the East End of London in the post-war years, Harlow was a route to new-found prosperity and comfort in a modern house in a young community with open countryside nearby. Maybe Harlow wasn’t exactly the “New Jerusalem” envisaged by Attlee’s Labour government, but its freshly-laid streets, new council homes, free medical care, and universal education offered a new beginning and a renewed sense of community.

Looking back, Cowley sees a certain kind of England and Englishness that is now long gone, but it was an England that was still secure in itself, and it is that reflection that haunts this book.

Cowley uses a series of episodes framed as stories from England’s recent history to show how England and Englishness have changed. It is a liberal and humane analysis informed by quiet patriotism. He doesn’t try to define what England “is” or represents but searches instead for its emotional and cultural underpinnings, the bits George Orwell thought were always present deep down.

He sees England at a crossing-point and quotes Charles Masterman, who, when writing his celebrated book The Condition of England in 1909, said of his own time: “It is an age in passing. What is coming to replace it? Who knows.” Cowley is similarly uncertain about what lies ahead for his England.

He offers no political programme or thesis. His book is ruminative and reflective, informed by observation and without polemics. He resists revisiting debates around Brexit. But he cannot avoid the impact of migration and industrial and economic dislocation on political attitudes and resentments, which in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis coalesced around the 2016 referendum. Many, perhaps most, of the episodes Cowley relates will be familiar to his readers; but he uses them deftly to illustrate larger changes and themes.

We meet the exploited Chinese migrants cockle-picking on the sands of Morecambe Bay, some of whom tragically drowned there in 2004. In the years thereafter, migration flows grew at unprecedented and unexpected volumes. Cowley notes that, unlike many other Member States, Britain chose not to impose transitional controls on new members until Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007.

No effort was made to limit migration from outside the EU, and the scale of EU migration continued to rise sharply. Cowley notes how public trust in government promises to restrict numbers of migrants was damaged. The consequences for public sentiment towards the EU were increasingly apparent.

An especially moving chapter describes in searing detail the death of a young soldier attempting to clear enemy mines in Afghanistan in 2009. We hear Corporal Marlton-Thomas’ voice through those of a very badly wounded member of his own unit and in the recollections of his own family.

Cowley then widens the focus to tell how the small market town of Wootton Bassett became a transit point for the repatriation of service personnel who had lost their lives in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The loss of hundreds of young lives and the widespread opposition to the war in Iraq is effectively contrasted with the dignified local response to every repatriation as bodies passed through the streets of Wooton Bassett en route to their final resting places.

What Cowley goes on to show is the lasting impact of the Iraq war on both public trust in the word of political leaders and on the country’s foreign policy ambitions as a result of military overreach.

The issue of trust also featured in a much-reported encounter between the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy, a Labour Party supporter, on the streets of Rochdale in 2010. Cowley revisits this episode and uses it to show how for most voters, what matters is not a high flown national policy narrative (something which came readily to Brown) but what government initiatives actually do to improve local lives, whether in terms of the economy, the NHS, schooling and employment.

Brown was frustrated and nonplussed by Duffy’s insistently sceptical questioning of what his government was doing for her community. The encounter with Mrs Duffy should have rung alarm bells for a metropolitan elite heavily preoccupied with the supposed transformative benefits of globalisation. This seeming disconnect between the local and the national was another signal that given a chance voters would show their discontent when the opportunity arose, as it did in the summer of 2016.

Most effectively of all, Cowley uses his encounters with the Imam of Finsbury Park mosque, Mohammed Mahmoud, to suggest that not only are there potentially dangerous divisions among the Moslem community in Britain but how mainstream Moslems can often feel ostracised by the wider non-Moslem population.

Cowley draws on Mahmoud’s action in stopping prospective violence against the English nationalist who had driven his van into a crowd outside the Finsbury mosque in 2017, a year scarred by a number of Islamic terrorist atrocities. In a number of conversations with Mahmoud, Cowley discovered a man with deep affection and loyalty towards Britain who worries that ordinary law-abiding Moslems are being ostracised as a result of Islamist terrorism that is nothing to do with them.

Cowley elsewhere encounters self-identifying Black British citizens demonstrating a wider sense of what being British can mean. He argues effectively that there can be a larger national “tent”, a more inclusive sense of Britishness.

Most plaintively, if occasionally rather sentimentally, he portrays how sport was a unifying national force during the Olympics and in the Euro 2020 football series. His portrait of the England team manager Gareth Southgate is rightly generous as are his portraits of Marcus Rashford and Raheem Sterling, Black British players whose influence has spread well beyond the football pitch.

Cowley sees, through the varied achievements of Southgate and his young football players, Olympic sports personalities and their attainments and in the loyal affection for Britain of Mahmoud, the possibility of a more capacious and generous community in the making, what he calls a “stretching of the flag.”

Here, though, is the rub: the flag being stretched is that of St George. This is a book about England and Englishness, and the view from Harlow is an English view, even though that much-expanded town is now more diverse and less of a monoculture than was the case when the young Jason Cowley was growing up.

There is a constant tension in Who Are We Now? between England and Britain. For many, not least many migrants and minority groups, Britain is a more generous and inclusive political and cultural unit than England. Furthermore, as Cowley rightly highlights, the Blair government’s establishment of devolved administrations morphed into an accelerating sense of separateness, reflected in the increasingly frequent use of the word “nation” as a descriptor of the countries and cultures which comprise the UK. Of course, therein lies another tension that Cowley does not address, namely the place of Northern Ireland in the UK.

With this omission, it might be thought that Cowley — at least implicitly — views the maintenance of Northern Ireland and with it the UK as the overall constitutional unit, as a lost cause and a united Ireland as an inevitable development. On Scotland’s future, Cowley seems ambivalent oscillating between an expectation of eventual independence and a hoped-for role in a more inclusive Britain.

Only Wales is allowed to appear comparatively comfortable within Britain and the UK. The chapter on Britain and the UK is revealingly entitled the “Untied Kingdom”. The problem in Cowley’s view is England, not the other nations within the UK. Making up 84 per cent of the UK population, England is, as Cowley puts it, “the largest country in Europe not to have its own political institutions”, but the deeper question he addresses is one of identity. Put more directly the question may become what is to be England’s self-identity and objectives for itself if the UK fractures?

Here too is a dimension Cowley has little to say about, namely the effects of Brexit on the future of England. He touches frequently on attitudes that contributed to the vote in favour of the UK’s departure from the EU but he doesn’t give much attention to the prospective impact, domestically and internationally, of the outcome.

Despite his many encounters and the stories which feature in Who Are We Now? and the opportunities he thinks the Covid pandemic gave for national reflection, Cowley doesn’t address what England risks becoming, which, it might be hazarded, is not so much an isolated nation as a nation alone.

A fracturing UK still inside the EU might have allowed England to channel changes over the past thirty years into a new sense of itself in the EU. But outside the EU, an England separated from the other constituent “nations” of the UK would have to find a new sense of itself at home and abroad. In such circumstances, the rallying cry of “Global Britain” would no longer be so serviceable.

So what is to become of England? Cowley has no settled conclusion or expectation. From his haunted personal story and his reflections from the stories on which he has built his book, he sees grounds for believing Britain, rather more than England, can be re-imagined as a new kind of diverse and cohesive country. He recognises there is much uncertainty, including key constitutional uncertainties.

Cowley appears to see as many grounds for anxiety as hope and, despite his optimism, no easy ways out of the conundrums that the past thirty years have generated for England, for Britain and for the UK.