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Being English. (25. Jan '08)
The (more privileged) Victorians were wont to say that to be born English was to have drawn a winning ticket in the lottery of life.
I was born in London while Clem Atlee was Prime Minister. My generation grew up under the wing of the National Health Service and the 1944 Education Act. We were teenagers during the 1960's. I was in love during the Summer of Love. I was in France during the May 1968 Manifestations and I was at University during the most politically exciting time since the second war.
As a child, I assumed as children do that my world was the world.
As I grew up, I learned that not everything in England was perfect, but that on the whole things were a great deal better for the English than for a majority of people in the world. Our standard of living was improving hand over foot, and if we weren't up there with the Americans, we nevertheless enjoyed an extraordinary quality of life, both historically and compared to many other countries. To be poor in England was not the sentence of servitude or worse that it might be elsewhere. And I learned that all this was founded on the secure bed of a mature democracy hand in hand with a Rule of Law which, universally admired, guaranteed with the force of history and tradition our ancient rights and liberties.
We could see, every day, in the men and women wounded or damaged by two wars - and in the 50's and 60's there were many such, among our parents' friends, neighbours, and simply out and about - that against foreign tyrants our freedom and privilege had been defended at a great cost. The bomb sites in London, and the war memorials everywhere, hammered the lesson home to those youngsters with any sense of curiosity.
Question, Mr. Blair: we're of the same generation; did you not see the same things I saw, as you grew up? .
At school we learned about the struggles that have taken place in this country, against tyrannical and arbitrary government here, over the past 1,000 years.
And didn't you learn the same things in school? .
By my early twenties I knew, despite difficulties, setbacks and even hardships which I and some of my friends had encountered, that in being born in England I had fallen on my feet. I also understood some of the sacrifices that had been made, including by a few of my own forebears, so that I could be so privileged.
Let me be clear: I do not live with the illusion of a lost golden age. A few thoughts here as they happen to come to mind... A moment's reflection reminds me that that ghastly old fraud, Harold MacMillan, could teach our modern politicians a thing or two about deceit, spin and arrogance. In London, the physical environment was often shabby and dirty (a four foot crack in my bedroom wall was caused by a V2) and daily life was rather harder - though perhaps not as stressful. My own memories of childhood include food seeming expensive (and rather dull by today's standards) and sometimes there was not quite enough of it. Children wore school uniform during the holidays. No TV, car or fridge, etc. Nothing awful, in other words; life wasn't particularly better or worse then than now, just different. And Sunday afternoons were sooo boring.
The details are irrelevant, of course: it's the perceptions which matter. So; my perceptions were that:
1. My society was not perfect, but it was better than anything ever enjoyed by 90% of the human race;
2. More importantly: things were improvable and were improving. (I'd say that this was the point and
essence of the 60's)
However: even as early as at university I worked out for myself that our foundations were built in part on sand. The very first time I encountered the concept of the unwritten constitution, I decided that that unwrittenness was more dangerous than all the economic disparities and idiosyncratic laws that had been exercising me before. What a clever lad I was.
In 1970 I found myself in Central America - under the United Fruit Company and men with guns who wore dark glasses (even indoors) and who shot at me (that was the guerillas, not the CIA men who also had dark glasses and guns but were better fed) - and, (very briefly) in Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier and sinister men with guns who wore sharp black suits and dark glasses (indoors); in 1973 in Spain, under Franco and guns; in 1975 in Uganda, under President Doctor Idi Amin Papa and sinister men in sharp black suits who wore dark glasses (indoors) and who actively threatened me with their guns; in 1977 in the USSR under Russian occupation by fur-hatted people with guns who pointed them at me (albeit quite politely); in 1985 on Jordan's West Bank under Israeli occupation where a lot of men and women decided that I was a terrorist and pointed a lot of guns at me. (The Israelis and the Russians were actually the least scary because at least they seemed to know what they were doing - which, presumably, is why their occupation activities have been so long-lasting).
Rightly or wrongly, I felt that the rights and liberties enshrined in our constitution were what saved Britain from sinister men with their guns. I also came to distrust those who hid their souls, especially but not only behind dark glasses.
Unfortunately, I was at about the same time beginning to realise just how fragile our rights and liberties might be. At first, it seemed to be others rather than the English who were the targets - detention without trial in the Six Counties during the early seventies, for example. But somehow there seemed to be a sense of creep: the Sus laws (again, not aimed at me - yet); the increasing constraints on the unions in the 80s - which I felt went beyond what necessary, even in the early 80's after the Winter of Discontent, in finding a balance between union power, corporate power and the well-being of the public. And I did not like the politicising of the police during the miners' strike in the mid-80s.
I do not believe that the Blair government initiated this erosion. What I do believe is that he and it accelerated and widened the scope of what was already happening with unseemly determination and glee.
And while the best possible reason is given for each right constrained or reduced or removed for people speaking different languages, I believe that it is actually all about control.
What Blair, Blunkett, Reid et al. have been doing to us has been analogous to rape.
Regrettably, I know whereof I speak.
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