Labour hates Britain. So it is abolishing what makes us who we are
Removing Churchill from banknotes, curbing jury trials and unseating
hereditary peers are all acts that chip away at our national identity
Britain is governed by people who dislike it. There is no other explanation for the way they trash our constitution, surrender our independence, shrink our territory and traduce our past. Obviously they would not verbalise it like that, even to themselves.
No doubt, in their own minds, our intellectual and political elites see their work as modernising the country, sweeping away its anachronisms, making its minorities feel welcome.
It amounts, though, to much the same thing. A nation is not an amalgam of feel-good intentions. It is a product of its institutions, its structures, its history – all the things that our present rulers disdain.
The removal of Churchill and other historical figures from our banknotes, and their replacement by images of wildlife, is presented by its advocates as the kind of trivial change that only racists get worked up about. It is an old trick: you take away something that people like, and then accuse them of starting a culture war when they complain.
In fact, what our money looks like is far from a trivial issue. When Jesus drew the border between spiritual and temporal authority, he did so by pointing to Caesar’s face on a coin and asking the Pharisees: “Whose is this image and superscription?” There was no more resounding symbol of state power than the coinage.
Many of us have experienced the pain of watching friends or family lose their memories and, as they do so, their full sense of who they are. Countries are no different. A people who lack a common past are simply a random collection of individuals who happen to share a space. Unmoored from their predecessors, they become disconnected from each other and, in the end, indifferent to their posterity.
Half a century ago, Britain had a clear sense of who its heroes were: Shakespeare, Wellington, Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren and (rather splendidly) Adam Smith. Our banknotes celebrated the best of us, allowing a smidgen of patriotic pride to rub off on our fingers whenever we paid for milk or stamps.
The idea that the people depicted on tenners should in some way be demographically representative is very new. No one saw the inclusion of Florence Nightingale in the 1975 banknote series, or of Elizabeth Fry in 2002, in feminist terms. Jane Austen in 2017 was the first historical figure to be included in the name of diversity – rather to the annoyance of Janeites, who wanted their heroine recognised as a writer rather than as a woman.
Since then, diversity has become the ruling doctrine of our standing apparat, however cold it leaves the country at large. Victoria Cleland, chief cashier at the Bank of England, explained that “gender, ethnicity and disability could be taken into account when planning the designs” because “banknotes serve as a symbolic representation of our collective national identity”.
The trouble is that the dictates of diversity, at least in its Labour/Guardian/BBC sense of “people who look different but think the same”, are incompatible with a shared national story. British heroes until around 60 years ago were disproportionately male and almost exclusively white, an inescapable consequence of our social structures, educational system and demographics.
The essence of a successful nation is that all its citizens, wherever their grandparents were born, should celebrate its past heroes as their fellow countrymen. Few of us were born in palaces or interned as prisoners of war, and few of us begin each day with a glass of sherry, but these things don’t stop us admiring Churchill. We are proud of him, not because he was white or male, but because he won a great victory for our country.
A nation that cannot agree on who its heroes are is no nation at all. The euro banknotes show imaginary bridges in non-specific landscapes, because the EU lacks a demos. Northern Ireland, which for different reasons has a limited sense of shared national identity, tends also to depict bridges and landscapes on its banknotes, though one series did honour the province’s industrial pioneers.
Is this Britain’s future? To be a collection of separate tribes whose ranges happen to overlap? A multi-culti state that buys loyalty with public money, compelling obedience in the name of law because it cannot ask in the name of patriotism?
If it were only the banknotes, you might reasonably argue that I was over-reacting. But the reason that the reaction has been as it has is that the announcement comes after a series of reforms from Labour, all of which suggest a fundamental discomfort with our national identity.
Consider the other changes that the Starmer government is pushing through. Ministers are restricting jury trials, discarding not just a great part of our heritage but a gift that we gave the world. Juries are a guarantee that the criminal justice system will remain the property of the people and not become an instrument of state control.
Labour is also turning out the last hereditary peers, coldly breaking the deal that it made with them in 1998, and thereby snapping the 800-year-old thread that connects us to Magna Carta.
And it is subordinating our country before the EU, seeking to join policies and initiatives which we rejected even when we were members. Again, this is sold as pragmatic, but it is really about distaste for Brexit and the people who voted for it, a collective institutional shudder at the flag-waving that accompanied Vote Leave.
For example, when Britain signed up to the Erasmus deal, a scheme whereby member states fund EU students who come to their universities, it was junking the obviously better Turing scheme, which paid for British students to study all over the world. We are joining a one-sided arrangement where Britain will put in billions more than it gets out. There was nothing practical about the decision; it was entirely vibes-driven, a kind of governmental apology to Brussels for the outrage of 2016.
That penitent attitude goes well beyond Erasmus. The Growth Commission calculates that Britain will be £15bn worse off as a result of Labour’s determination to sign up to Brussels rules, even in areas where we are big net importers or where our trade with the rest of the world is worth more than that with the EU. Again, the policy is not informed by any cost-benefit analysis; the starting point, rather, is that British sovereignty, resting on patriotic attachment, is discreditable.
We glimpse the same attitude in the determination to hand away the British Indian Ocean Territory, and to sweeten the deal by raising taxes here so that Mauritius can cut taxes with the proceeds. This is not about British interests, still less about the interests of the indigenous Chagossians, who know that Mauritian sovereignty would mean the end of their dream of returning. No, this is about a masochistic elevation of foreign tribunals over British interests. It is the same spirit, in fact, that drives our obsessive decarbonisation at a time when the non-participation of most other countries has removed its chief rationale.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Most British people see our national identity as being bound up in our institutions, from county cricket teams to army regiments. But the Government regards these things as somehow racist or, at the very least, “insufficiently reflective of modern Britain”. It does not want immigrants – who, after all, admired this country enough to choose to come here – to assimilate, to adopt old traditions, enjoy old buildings, sing old songs. It prefers to use their presence as an argument against what should be our shared patrimony.
Result? We have become perhaps the only country where flying the national flag is seen as a subversive act: Union flags and St George’s crosses have been going up around the country, prompting councils to rush to remove them. Flying the national flag in a spirit of defiance is usually a sign of a country under occupation. That, to some, is how it is starting to feel.
If you complain about Churchill being removed from banknotes, you're wasting time that should be spent on more important issues and should be ashamed of yourself and are dishonestly trying to turn this into a wedge issue. But of course, those who remove Churchill from banknotes are brave and stunning.
We're still told that left wingers don't hate their countries.
