Narratives of Encroachment

Like most people, these days, my attention tends to wander…my eye will soon catch something else. It’s not often that an article is able to hold my attention but “Turning Inward; Brexit, Encroachment Narrative and the English as a “secret people” achieved that amazing feat…

I almost missed it since it had been lurking as one of hundreds of hyperlinks which I store in a file but rarely activate.

And my attention was held because the author – one Prof Patrick Wright - had cunningly embedded in the article a video of his presentation which made even more interesting points than the article itself. But the sound-level was so low that I had to strain my ears to identify the embellishments he was making to the text.

Truly the sort of cunning technique one would expect from a Professor of “Literature and Visual and Material Culture”!! He is also the author of On living in an old country – national past in contemporary Britain, published in 1985.

The basic argument of his paper is that English society has been portrayed over the ages by certain writers with particular themes and symbols eg rustic meadows, the sound of a cricket ball and warm beer. The gallery of writers includes William Cobbett, GK Chesterton, JB Priestley and George Orwell….each of whom, admittedly in very varying degrees, paints pictures of “sturdy yeomen” under threat…

 While the Brexit campaigns have rightly been condemned for its appeals to xenophobia, and for the lies, misrepresentations and sheer opportunism of its leaders, there is more to be said than that. To the considerable extent that this resurgence of English identity has been engineered by partisan politicians, campaigners and journalists, it has also been activated by the deployment of allegorical narratives that work by simplification and polarisation.

In these encroachment narratives, the traditional nation and its way of life is typically squared off against a vividly imagined and probably advancing threat — be it immigrants, bureaucrats, Europe, ‘experts’ etc. Where the reality addressed is likely to be complex and full of nuance, encroachment narratives of this kind press that reality into a brutally simplified and prejudged opposition between good and evil. They often defend a traditional idea of community against modern forms of society and political organisation. They tend to favour common sense and instinct over long words, abstract knowledge and expertise. They make a virtue, particularly in the English context, of insularity and shrinkage. They champion the small, the grounded and the localised, as opposed to the large and mobile sweep of internationalisation and cosmopolitanism. They are highly resistant to any possibility of compromise or synthesis between their opposed terms.

 ……….Encroachment narratives abound in the writings of William Cobbett (1763–1835), the campaigning journalist and furious defender of the beleaguered Georgian countryside, whom Raymond Williams would place among the founders of a characteristically English idea of culture, and whose name now appears as a proto-Brexiteer in blog posts. He conducted his ‘rural rides’ as the agrarian revolution proceeded in the 1820s, producing a fulminating account of England as he saw it at this moment of transition…..
As G.D.H. Cole would assert much later, Cobbett lived before it became apparent that the urbanisation and industrialisation, which Cobbett saw as entirely hellish, would eventually open new possibilities of working class politics. As it was, Cobbett raged against everything he could blame for the destruction of the traditional rural community: the Reformation, the national debt, tea drinking, decadent MPs sitting for rotten boroughs, the genteel fashion for mahogany furniture, sofas and picturesque views in which the countryside was dissociated from utility, the abolitionists (accused of being more ‘concerned’ about distant slaves than about native English labourers) and, as some of Cobbett’s admirers still struggle to accept, Jews. The list is long, varied and disconcerting, even after Cobbett has bundled up everything on it to produce the overwhelming biblical monster he named ‘the thing. 

Polarised allegories also feature strongly in the writings of G.K. Chesterton, who may well appeal to the Brexiteers not just as the author of ‘The Secret People,’ but as the man who turned being a ‘Little Englander’ into a positive virtue.

The presentation was made at a British Academy symposium and can be read with others on the British Academy website in the report European Union and Disunion – reflections on European Identity (2017) which I had downloaded some time ago without noticing the Wright contribution. But it encouraged me to activate google search and discover a Demos pamphlet from 1995 The Battle over Britain which clearly laid the basis for the subsequent Cool Britannia theme. A decade later, Gordon Brown tried in vain to get the notion of British identity taken seriously but was faced down by a wave of criticisms including the redoubtable Tom Nairn who called him The Bard of Britishness  

This is the latest of what has become quite a series of musings about what the 23 June 2016 Referendum might tell us about the sort of people the Brits are… When I then went on to ask whether novelists don’t perhaps have better insights than specialist academics, I had forgotten the debate of the mid 1990s and the later one sparked off by poor Gordon Brown. 
But it's ironic that what has tuned out so far to be the most insightful of the bunch, should have been penned by an academic - if of a rather unusual sort !

Resources for English identity

- England’s Discontents – political cultures and national identities; Mike Wayne (2018) - explores the various strands which have created the english weave over the centuries - looks very strong on theory

- The Lure of Greatness – England’s Brexit, America’s Trump; Anthony Barnett (2017) – probably the best analysis of the issue, written in Barnett’s special style which bursts with insights and references and therefore comes in at 370 pages. . Each of its 34 chapters has an almost self-explanatory title. It is one of these rare books that you realise half-way through that you need to go back and read more closely and make notes about….I received the book only in September and will devote a special post to it in the autumn

- The party politics of Englishness 2014 – a typical exploration by a political science academic of the question

- The debate on Englishness can no longer be avoided; 2012 short article

- British identity and political discourse – analysis of New Labour’s search for identity; a useful little piece from an outsider from 2010

- Priestley’s England – JB Priestley and English culture (2007) a biography of the man which looks at the society in which he became such a famous name.

- BBC Postscripts; a lovely tribute to the 1941 radio talks Priestley did in which you can hear excerpts

- Priestley’s Finest Hour; Commentary from one of the librarians of the University collection of Priestley’s works

- English Journey; JB Priestley (1936) Gives a sense of the sort of people he met as he travelled around by bus

- The secret people; GK Chesterton. The poem which was apparently used by a lot of Brexiteers

- Rural Rides; William Cobbitt (1830) an early example of a political travelogue by a great radical