One of my father’s most vivid memories of living through the Blitz was of Londoners in the air-raid shelters singing “There’ll Always Be An England.”
The question before our generation is: “Will there?”
I have written previously about the dire state of Britain the mutual alienation felt between the rulers and ruled, and the comprehensive failure of the channels of cultural transmission that has produced a population estranged from its native folkways. My perspective, which I suspect is shared by most of this essay’s natural audience, is that we should struggle to preserve our national traditions because they are beautiful, because they are good, and because they are ours.
We must understand where we are and recognise that the people who run the state do not feel as we do. The technocrats, the managers, the Sensibles, the Blobbers, the Centrist Dads — call them what you will — are unaffected by the sentimental, romantic nationalism which inspires the citizens of the country they govern. Rather than try and waste time trying to convince them of the merits of Milton and Morris Dancing we must appeal to them on their own terms: Centrist Dads should embrace the nation as a matter of good policy.
We are so inured to these numbers and these ambitions that we have lost sight of their historical eccentricity
The modern British state is a colossal enterprise. This year the government is projected to raise £1,148.7 billion in taxes, to distribute £1,276.2 billion in spending, and to run a deficit of £127.5 billion to make up the shortfall. The total national debt is now £2.8 trillion or £99,000 per person. The total size of the British state is now over 40 per cent of GDP and rising. The tax burden is almost as high as it was in 1950. Despite a decade of austerity, spending on core areas such as health and social services continues to rise. Running a public health service is a mammoth task which could absorb the full attention of the state. But Britain’s ambitions are far greater than simply providing healthcare to its citizens. We want to lead a green revolution, resist Russia in Ukraine, become a pioneer in A.I., fight the spread of extremism in the Middle East and Central Asia, end racism and gender discrimination at home, bring prosperity to the developing world, and, according to an official government report, “ eradicate poverty, reduce inequalities, combat catastrophic climate change, and protect our natural environment.”
We are so inured to these numbers and these ambitions that we have lost sight of their historical eccentricity. In the eighteenth century there were regular riots against the introduction of fairly meagre taxes. In 1763 there was widespread resistance to a new excise on cider which toppled the Bute ministry. When the American colonists revolted over small taxes on molasses, paper, glass, lead, and tea, they enjoyed the support of many Britons and of grandees like Edmund Burke, Pitt the Elder, and John Wilkes. In the nineteenth century, the Corn Laws were opposed on the grounds that they were essentially a tax on the poor and William Gladstone, a raving libertarian by contemporary standards, was a hero to the urban working classes. The state was small, its ambitions moderate. As late as 1914, as A.J.P. Taylor famously put it, “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman … the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.”
The twenty-first century British state wants to paint on a grander canvas. Very well. But is it attempting to mobilise the population in a manner commensurate with its ambitions? Is it balancing out its demands for higher taxes with an appeal to a higher purpose? It is telling that when the Jacobins swept away Catholicism they immediately replaced it with a Cult of Reason which held feasts in Notre Dame. The Bolsheviks did much the same — creating new rituals, symbols, and feast days so enduring that they have produced lasting nostalgia for a failed regime. Even dull modern Social Democracies like Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands promote and uphold a more robust sense of national identity.
This is all normal. Whether running an accountancy firm or a volleyball team, all leaders know that to draw the best from individuals they must appeal to something greater than narrow self-interest. Perhaps the most radical aspect of the modern British state is that it has totally unmoored itself from any pretence of operating within a national community and believes it can extract ever more from the citizenry with coercion and without persuasion.
This has no historical precedent because it has never been tried. It has never been tried because it has never worked.
The absurdity of this attitude was exposed last year when a flurry of frontline politicians came forward to promote the prospect of national mobilisation to defend against Russian aggression. The disjuncture was palpable. Who would die in a trench in Donetsk for Boris Johnson and Naz Shah? Who would send their children to risk life and limb for Liz Truss and Ed Davey? Not many Britons, if recent polling is to be believed. If the British state in its current condition ever tried to introduce mandatory military service, the result would be draft riots that would make Burke, Pitt, and Wilkes smile in their graves.
Clausewitz wrote that the difference between theory and practice is the difference between a swimming teacher who performs a stroke on dry land and their pupils who do the same in water. The first operates in an abstraction; the second encounters the friction of reality. Much the same could be said of how the state operates in society. The government can organise initiatives in Westminster, but the success or failure of those initiatives will be determined by their encounter with the population. The state can try to nudge, fine, bribe, and threaten its way to compliance; surely it could more readily achieve its goals with the willing and cheerful collaboration of the citizenry. This is actually the technocratic function of nationalism. It provides a motivating impulse to engage positively with the state’s edicts. The nation enchants the state: it fills its schemes with purpose and meaning.
Can this kind of large-scale cultural project be done in twenty-first century Britain? One already has been. Over the last three decades the state has nurtured the development of a new culture in British life with its own rituals (Drag Queen Story Hour), its own symbols (the Pride flag), and its own feast days (Black History Month). This was achieved through a mixture of legislation, public relations, financial support for related cultural endeavours, and tax relief to activist organisations. This new culture has not been effective at uniting the country (in the main because most of its elements have been imported from elsewhere) but it has demonstrated that the British state can lead the national culture rather than slouch after it.
The British state’s legitimacy is facing an extinction event
The plain truth is that Britain is probably better placed than many other countries to harness the power of nationalism in pursuit of the state’s aims. We have a centralised top–down state, an established religion, a national broadcaster, a glittering system of gongs and honours, some of the best IP on the planet, a host of existing popular national institutions, a wealth of sports teams, cultural associations, and natural treasures, and a population enamoured of National Trust buildings, the Royal Shakespeare Company, football, rugby, and cricket. We also have a group of well-paid hostages known as the royal family who we could deploy on nation-building exercises. Britain should have the most coherent and confident national identity in Europe, if not the world. Squandering this dormant well of national feeling is worse than a crime — it is a mistake.
The British state’s legitimacy is facing an extinction event. If the state insists on swimming against the nation rather than with it, it will find itself swimming in treacle rather than water. Without the compliance and the goodwill of the population, accomplishing the core functions of the state will become difficult and achieving the more ambitious goals of the state will become impossible. It doesn’t have to be this way.
It would be too dramatic, perhaps, to ask the technocrats to let the nation save the state. Rather let us speak in their language and say: let the nation optimise the state.