Peas in a pod?

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“Tone deaf” doesn’t begin to describe the message which Boris Johnson sent to the Edinburgh International Culture Summit yesterday. It was apparently intended, primarily, as a defence of Ukraine and a condemnation of Putin and Russia, and it started promisingly enough, with the words, “Throughout history, we’ve seen what happens when aggressors try to oppress and to eliminate culture. We saw it with the Nazis in the Second World War, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Taliban in Afghanistan”. There’s little there with which one could disagree, but the problem is with what it misses out. The list of miscreants over the last century or so is a reasonable starting point, but using the phrase “throughout history” surely invites, or even requires, a rather more comprehensive assessment of cultural genocide. And to a lot of people, in many countries of the world, there will be one obvious, glaring omission from the list of rogues. There is one state which, in its various previous guises, has invaded more of the world than anyone else, ever, and has committed extensive cultural genocide in the process. Systematic looting of cultural treasures and imposition of its own language was the norm for the empire in question, and still colours the attitudes of those (such as, er, Boris Johnson) who want to insist that English should be the first language of everyone in the UK. From the point of view of an English exceptionalist like the PM, there is of course, a huge difference. Whilst replacement of Ukrainian by Russian is an act of cultural vandalism, in the case of the British Empire, the English language was a ‘gift’ for which those who previously used other languages should be grateful, and not an imposition at all.

There was a second sentence in his address which also jumped out at me, when he referred to Putin’s “vile assertion that Ukraine is somehow not a real country”. It rang a very recent bell, because just a few days ago, Lord Frost made the 'vile assertion' that Wales and Scotland aren’t nations either. One can argue about the semantics of ‘country’ vs ‘nation’, but the message is essentially the same and the clear equivalence is that, in both cases, people are being told that they have no right to a different culture or a separate existence. Perhaps Johnson is judging people against a very special scale of vileness, where Putin scores highly because, well, because he’s not English, whereas Frost scores nul points precisely because he is. That’s just the way exceptionalism works – ‘we’ are always right and ‘they’ are always wrong. If you start from the utter certainty that your own language and culture are inherently superior to all others, alternative views are never going to count for much. Putin and Johnson aren’t really so different at all.

Employing the definite article

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Given his lawyerly background, and his careful use of language in his increasingly pointless weekly attempts to ask questions of a PM who deliberately avoids answering any of them, it is reasonable to suppose that when Keir Starmer chooses a particular word or phrase, he does so with care and thought. So, when his speech to the Labour Party’s conference was widely billed as him wrapping himself in the flag, it’s reasonable to suppose that the use of the definite article before the word flag is entirely deliberate. It’s also revealing.

‘The’ flag to which he refers and which was prominently displayed behind him as he spoke is, of course, the union flag, but it’s a flag whose power to unite is far from universal. In Northern Ireland, it’s deeply divisive. Revered as a totemic symbol by the half of the population which will never support Labour, and hated by the half more likely to vote for Labour’s partner party, the SDLP, wrapping himself in it seems hardly likely to attract much support there. But then, Northern Ireland’s voters are unimportant to Labour which chooses not to stand there. The situation in Scotland is rapidly heading in the same direction; the die-hard unionists unlikely ever to vote Labour may applaud his ‘patriotism’, but for the rest of the population – including, according to some polls, many traditional Labour supporters – it seems unlikely to do more than confirm Labour’s downward slide. But then, Scotland’s voters are increasingly a lost cause for Labour; perhaps they’ve been written off too. In Wales, the situation is more complex. There are some firm unionists, of course – but they’re more likely to vote Tory than Labour. And there are some of us who regard Y Ddraig Goch as the only flag of Wales, but we are still in a minority. My own assessment (and I’ll admit this is based on experience and anecdote rather than hard numbers, but I’m pretty confident in its accuracy) is that the majority here are more ambivalent, regarding both flags as having some salience as an expression of their nationality. If that's so, then demanding loyalty to only one of those doesn’t immediately strike me as the best way to enhance Labour’s standing in Wales. Perhaps they are simply taking Wales for granted – as usual. But all this means that it is, effectively, only in England where there is anything approaching unanimity over the question of whether the union flag represents them, and even there, there is a growing movement towards using the cross of St George. In essence, therefore, Labour’s appeal is pitched predominantly at English, or Anglo-British, nationalist feeling, without really taking account of the consequences elsewhere. It’s strangely at odds with his stated aim that, “we must once again be the party of the whole United Kingdom. The party of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland” (a statement which, in itself, skates over the fact that the party has never even attempted to represent Northern Ireland). It’s English exceptionalism and superiority at its best. Or worst, depending on your viewpoint.

It wasn’t the only use of the definite article which struck me, though. He also said that he wanted the UK to be “the best country to grow up in and the best country to grow old in”. Note again the use of the definite article. For any country to be ‘the’ best necessarily requires that every other country be worse. Socialism, this is not. Internationalists not only want their own country to do well, they want to help others to reach the same level. It’s only a nationalist who want his or her own country to be regarded as ‘the’ best. He may not have gone quite as far in his jingoism as the current PM, who demands that everyone agrees that the UK actually is ‘the best’ when it patently is not, but the difference between someone who wants to make it so and someone who merely wants everyone to believe that it is so is one of detail and delivery, not of political philosophy. What Starmer has shown us is that the difference between Labour and Tory, when it comes to English nationalism and exceptionalism, is minor. Perhaps we should be grateful for that demonstration.

I won’t lay this next one directly on Starmer himself; it’s not something which his speech actually referred to, but it’s of a piece with his message. In response to the speech Baroness Chakrabati suggested that, amongst the things in which British patriots should take pride was the English language. It is again an Anglo-centric view of the world (and in this case, even of the UK itself). It’s true, of course, that English has become the lingua franca of the world, but taking pride in that fact without recognising the reality of how it happened displays a certain blindness to history. The language wasn’t something generously shared with the world community, it reached its dominance through a process of imposition and dominance; it involved cultural genocide enforced by waves of colonialism and at the point of a gun. The clock cannot be turned back, and the cultural dominance of one language is certainly beneficial to those of us able to speak it fluently, but pride in the process of imperialism which achieved that position doesn’t seem wholly appropriate to me. It is, though, the position to which ‘patriotism’ of the not-nationalist-at-all Anglo-British variety so often leads.