The Lowdown Ep 4/ The English crisis

Divided by class, region and education we're not ready for the 21st century

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What is my country? If you asked, I might reply that I came from England, an old country with roots going back to the Anglo-Saxons. But England as a separate land ceased to exist when its elite abolished it and formed a union with the Scottish elite to become Great Britain in 1707.

Great Britain, then? But that no longer exists either. It became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, when fears of revolution drove the elite to absorb the Irish in 1801. For the next 150 years, the ruling class of the British Isles was united by a common culture and was fantastically successful. It enriched itself by dispossessing the common people of their traditional lands and conquering a world empire.

The United Kingdom and the British Empire (named after a country that does not exist) began to disintegrate when what was to become the Irish Republic broke away in 1922. Indeed, the historian James Hawes argues that it began to disintegrate as soon as mass democracy began in the 1880s – not real democracy as all women and some working-class men did not have the vote – but a recognisable forerunner of today’s system. Given the chance, the common people voted on ancient regional and national lines. No one had ever asked them before if they were happy with the abolition of their identities, after all.

So my country has a name hardly anyone uses. It is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, for the time being at any rate. It isn’t an old country but an early 19^th century creation, violently modified in the 1920s, and under huge and perhaps terminal stress in the 2020s.

And to those of us who accepted the old order and thought it was permanent, that is a shocking thought. Hawes puts it like this in his Lowdown interview: traditionally educated men and women on these islands are brought up to believe that the United Kingdom is a time-hallowed land.  The coronation of King Charles III was awash with the symbolism of an ancient culture, as if the United Kingdom was somehow natural and had always been there, “which is,” he adds, “complete historical nonsense. There are houses in every English town which are far, far older than the United Kingdom.”