The venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (“FAZ“) has just launched an intriguing intra-European debate in its Culture pages. Under the headline “Britishness Is Over: The British Are No Longer British,” it presented an essay that suggested that Britain has abandoned its good past.
No longer resolute?
At long last, the author argued, the country has finally succumbed to the fascism virus, thus ending its glorious history of resolutely standing up for democracy, respect and human rights.
The argument was presented by Eva Lapido, 51, a German, who did her DPhil in Cambridge and now lives in London writing as a novelist and journalist.
UK ethnonationalist populism on the rise
Now, she says, Britain’s special role or path (“Sonderweg” in German) as a nation of tolerance, parliamentary debate and democracy was ending: “British democracy is almost of ancient heritage. It is widely considered to be fabulously stable and immune to irrational emotions. That is no longer the case.”
As evidence, she cites the demonstration in London organized by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a criminal thug, who calls himself Tommy Robinson.
He is the fill-the-streets organizer promoting an all-white England — the rough trade end of the new ethnonationalist populism promoted by Nigel Farage.
What united Göbbels and Robinson
Josef Göbbels’ famous dictum “Wer die Straße erobern kann, kann auch einmal den Staat erobern” (He who conquers the street can conquer the state) thus flickered into life on London’s streets.
110,000 flag-waving supporters marched on Parliament in Westminster, hailing their support of a nostalgic idea of a Britain without mosques or different skin-colored citizens, a country that would no longer have anything to do with the European Union or a European Court of Human Rights.
Or with “woke” ideas about equal rights for women and gays, respect for ecology and the environment.
The Robinson crowd also heard an appeal from Elon Musk to rise up and overthrow the government elected in 2024 and the claim by Eric Zemmour, a French racist and man of the extreme right that a Muslim invasion and occupation was subordinating the white population of France and England.
Oh, good old England
For Ms. Lapido, this hard right-wing mobilization stands in stark contrast to the notion of holding out good old England as a tolerant, liberal polite community of a profoundly democratic people.
Her perspective reminds me a bit of the style of “Dear Doozie,” a book by the exiled Berlin Jewish writer Werner Lansburgh. Written half in German and half in English (published 1978), it explains German thinking and habits to an English girl.
Lansburgh was also one to romanticize England as a haven of quaint customs and habits based on politeness and mutual respect for old traditions. He contrasted those qualities to the rigidities of continental Europe that gave rise to a politics of violence and repression that were unimaginable in liberal, fair-play England.
Sorry, Ms. Lapido
Truth be told, any history that portends that British democracy has always been stable and against emotional, irrational politics is wrong.
The powerful Daily Mail tabloid which has 10 times the readership of FAZ was violently anti-Jewish in the 1930s. This century, the Daily Mail is anti-Muslim and busies itself with publishing hate headlines against Polish migrant workers in the run-up to the populist Brexit plebiscite in 2016.
How geography matters
If anything, rather than somehow having an antidote gene that protected it against fascist leanings, Britain over centuries was saved by its geography.
As Martin Walker, the distinguished former Guardian foreign correspondent who was the paper’s Europe editor notes:
“The UK is an island and so could afford to dispense with large standing armies as long as we had a decent navy. And we were better off than the Dutch since we had the prevailing winds on our side. We were self-supporting in agriculture, on an island built on coal and surrounded by fish. History and geography dealt us a very generous hand.”
To which I would add that, once England had disconnected from France eight centuries ago, it never sought to rule nations in Europe — though England remained hostile to Jews in legislation and literature into the 20th century.
Despotism at home: Just ask the Irish
However, being an island nation did not keep the English state from doing very bad things to its citizens — provided, of course, it was not done in England.
Irish history is larded with massacres of innocent Catholics by Protestant Supremacists upholding English rule over the Irish. In 1649, Oliver Cromwell whose statue stands outside the House of Commons massacred 2,000 Irishmen and women in Drogheda, a city on the East Ireland coast north of Dublin.
British soldiers opened fire at a Gaelic football match in 1921, killing 20 including children to “punish” the Irish nationalists seeking independence from English rule.
Churchill’s transgressions
Lest we forget, Churchill let three million Indians starve to death in the Second World War. He wrote on a cabinet paper “Has Ghandi died yet?”
Unsurprisingly, when Ghandi was once asked by a reporter what he “thought of British civilization?” he replied, “Ah, that would be a nice idea.”
(Coincidentally, on the issue of “Churchill and the Germans,” another German journalist, Dietmar Pieper, has just published a very nuanced and insightful account. It makes for important reading in these autocracy-laden times, although it is currently only available in German).
Slavery
Imperial wealth can be regarded as a material protection layer that guards against fascist feelings, which are often driven by status envy.
And, no doubt, a vast part of Britain’s wealth in the 18th and 19th century was based in large part on enslaving men and women with black or brown skins or treating them as forced labor once slavery was abolished in the British Empire by an Act of Parliament in 1833. In that sense, the fascist impulse was simply “offshored.”
Other European citizens have more rights
True, after slavery was formally abolished, this allowed the development of a more liberal political culture in England than in central and Eastern Europe which Britain enjoyed well into the 20th century.
And yet, French, Dutch and other citizens in Europe enjoyed stronger rights than Britain. After all, British political leaders always rejected a written constitution guaranteeing civic freedom.
Racism
Racism was an integral part of British politics as Britain opened its borders to workers from Pakistan, India, Africa and the Caribbean after 1945.
But it is changing. The last prime minister before Sir Keir Starmer was an Indian. And the current leader of the Conservative party is Kemi Badenoch, who is of Nigerian heritage.
Speaking to her party conference in October she told them: “What Britain needs is national unity. I am black. I am a woman. I am British. My children are British. And I will not allow anyone on the right to tell them they do not belong in their own country.”
The FAZ is correct in pointing out that England is now flirting with the far right as is Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and other Europeans countries.
However, England’s history has as many cruelties, racism and bad treatment of its own citizens as any nation on the European continent.
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