Ukania Undone

State of the UnNation

Using the late, great Tom Nairn as a jumping-off point, the following considers what went wrong, why it was always wrong, and how British radicalism isn’t radical enough.

Political and social criticism has been impoverished by the passing of Tom Nairn (1923–2023). Both alone and alongside comrades such as Perry Anderson, Nairn provided a sturdy theoretical scaffolding for discussions of British decline. Or should that be of the United Kingdom of Great Britain — plus Northern Ireland? No one knows exactly what to call the distinctly imaginary community which occupies all these islands but one off the coast of mainland Europe. And what can you expect, when a state’s establishment precedes a nation’s?

Nairn offered up “Ukania,” which benefits from being pithy and absurdly Ruritanian. The circus of the Commons might lead one to think the British (shorthand for subjects of the House of Windsor) constitutionally averse to compromise, but that is precisely what Ukania is: England and Scotland, democratic and monarchist, liberal and traditional, overtly capitalist but peculiarly feudal. Compromises all the way down (and further yet), meaning in its exasperating way Ukania manages to be none of these things. We might add, this ancient land is so concerned with its greying bona fides that it finds it necessary to constantly invent traditions, against the onslaught of the modern world it helped unleash, and in service of the contingent whims of Toryism and monarchy. (Both Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hitchens’ small book on the Royals are able to provide context.) English leaders have learnt at least that, second to colonial massacres, nothing grants legitimacy quite like the subtle pong of overripeness.

Each day of 2023 has presented the British with another reason to weep. With everyone raising the alarm, from the trade unions (“filthy Trots!”) to the Financial Times and the IMF (“bleeding, uh… pessimists?!”): public services are on their knees, millions are immiserated, starving, and the forecasts are, well. We could spend the next few hours scouring their reports and gawping at their jaw-dropping charts, but it’s enough here to say: had the average British wage kept up with (once) comparable nations over the past decade it would now be £8,000 higher. Out of the “major” economies the IMF predicts only Britain’s will shrink, something the flailing and heavily-sanctioned Russia will avoid. Important hospital appointments are being cancelled. Life expectancy is backsliding. Energy prices are the highest in the world. Oh, and our rivers are now fully integrated into the sewage system.

What interests me, however, is the lack of anything approaching a fitting response. There’s anger, but it is wild, undirected, and quite likely in a couple of election cycles to devolve into barbarism. The “British nation” has proven to be a fiction more outlandish than anything out of Swift. United Kingdom an insult to language itself.

Nothing is shared here, see, nothing except the ever-present sense one is about to be mugged by the Somehow Worse.

The recent wave of strikes will show many that other things are possible, but it will be localised and relentlessly demonised by governments and the Fourth Estate. You think an incoming Labour administration would somehow be different? It’s a shame you missed it, but one of the many sad realities confirmed by recent years is that the PLP’s function is to channel leftist energies into full-time jam making.

Culturally, Ukania is dead.

Yah?

With all these (reappropriated) riches, intellectual and material, and these many wondrous museums and libraries, the British — and here I mean the English — remain the most pig-ignorant and plain stupid tribe on Mammon’s brown earth. It is galling, an insult to every inch of ground stained by runoff from the Butcher’s Apron, to have so much and yet so little up there. A world historic tragedy: how much was lost for yet another reality TV show or football tournament or pedophilic National Treasure or ‘nother damnable Royal scandal? In the 1930s, the anthropologist Tom Harrisson wrote a book ostensibly about the natives of the British possession of the New Hebrides. In fact readers found themselves treated to a trenchant reflection of the occupiers, us, our “Savage Civilisation.”

And that is what we remain. Wittgenstein, an émigré that both this country and analytic philosophy proved unworthy of, wrote: We have a civilisation; one day we may have a culture. Unduly hopeful, looking at the trajectory taken. Culture depends above all on educated layabouts. For all its faults, feudalism offered that in the form of aristocratic scholars, and the social democratic flash-in-the-pan produced a couple of generations of spectacular creativity. Indeed, the oversized influence of the British in the 20th century was a direct result of the grammar schools and a generous dole. Both are history.

Across Europe, it is not uncommon for the words of the nation’s great philosophers to become part of the general conversation. Most Frenchmen can take as a given that were they to repeat a line or two of Sartre their meaning will be understood; existentialism there not limited to the suicidal. (A brave few may even defer to Robespierre, whose popularity I suspect has yet to peak.) Germany is much the same, and the average Muscovite will be familiar with the works of not just Tchaikovsky, but Gogol and Turgenev. Might a wayward pilgrim expect the land of Shakespeare, Shelley, Eliot and Woolf to host a similarly vibrant intellectual culture, with world-class verse and prose steeped into the Brits’ very bones? Sun headlines and LBC soundbites are what she gets. And what’s more she’s told, all that sounds a bit uppity. “Chaucer” positively foreign. Well, that was just the lot milling about the town square (the pavement in front of the big McDonald’s), perhaps the middle classes have something more to offer? Spectator headlines and Today Programme soundbites: not much better, but the RP is authoritative.

There’s a particular refrain you may have heard, “at least we’re not as bad as America.” What insurmountable standards! This is surely why these islands became synonymous with class. Only, in matters of the mind this dubious hoorah is not even true. American intellectuals, whose parapets undoubtedly overlook a few million square miles of volcanic despair, are part of a culture infinitely richer and more serious than ours. There is of course Chomsky, Deneen, Lasch, Trilling, Vidal, and Baldwin, but even insiders, former courtiers, such as Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kaplan, and (dare I?) Henry Kissinger, are willing to step outside the treacly centre and offer up the proposals which may yet keep civilisation from the precipice. Fair enough if you think that an unworthy goal, but Ukania’s think tankers and commentariat have always imagined themselves at the very frontline in Civilisation’s defence. We’re Churchill, they’re Hitler, and should you quibble you are Chamberlain. This is just silly, a deeply unserious way of carrying on. Although they themselves never shut up about the omnipresent “woke Twitter mob!!1!” the British media class is a throng of the foulest and most pernicious kind. Jeremy Corbyn, that commendable, irritatingly conflict-averse advocate for social justice, was made by them into a mobile Guy Fawkes effigy. (Incidentally one of the few others to enter Parliament with honest intentions.) Kicked around television studios, denounced as a great threat to common decency (and your sausages!), a dangerously premature anti-racist, a leftist crippled by self-hatred, until — wait for this — he unveils his grand plan to reopen Auschwitz. Any day now. And they are all complicit, that nest of vipers known as Fleet Street.

Back in the day, when British journalism was decidedly better, the hacks still couldn’t look themselves in the mirror, turning to drink. Yet those bastards who encamped outside an unassuming Islington terrace, in order to harangue a thoroughly decent man day in day out, didn’t have alcohol pumping through their veins. They were possessed by something far more potent: the self-righteousness of head boys wrongly taught to expect the world.

Solutions?

In a country as unenlightened, decrepit and as taken with self-directed sadism as this it is only the radicals who have any sense. What horizons can we descry on those edges?

On the Right, it had once been that the market-fetishists were outliers. Until Maggie Thatcher, there remained in Toryism some vague commitment to the Commonwealth, and not simply class loyalty. Lovers of hierarchy which upheld a belief that the lowest ought to be uplifted somehow. This, and it pains me to say, saw Tory administrations prove better overlords during Ireland’s famines (although Ottoman Turks and Choctaw Indians proved better friends) — a sort of highwaymen content to flick back a ring or two. Perhaps because it was during those decades that the capitalist class found itself represented most reliably in the parties of Liberalism. Those insipid ragers for the Machine, originators of bootstrap claptrap, moral vacuums who replaced duty with compulsion. The actual story of “Whig history” demonstrating the uncomfortable truth that liberal demands for social freedom are inextricably tied — and are secondary — to market freedoms. Jesus, and on good days the NHS, may be the official religion, Charles III our head of State, but it is over to avarice this kingdom’s been given. (Just think what would happen should you give that highwayman the nation’s purse.)

All of which is to say: those who by any sane metric are radical right-wingers are now the mainstream, at home in the contemporary Conservative, Liberal Democratic and Labour parties. Any and all proposals they put forth can be safely ignored. (“But growth,” you may exclaim, forgetting that is just another self-destructive attempt to elude politics.)

So what of the Left? Even here, I’m afraid, we struggle to find an out. The British socialist tradition, now entirely sidelined in Starmer’s Labour, is nostalgic in all the wrong ways.

‘45! It has been said that this post-war regime was one George Orwell, the greatest socialist writer England has produced, would have been happy with. (He expired before it was possible to properly render judgement.) If that were true, and I see in his work arguments for and against, that would necessitate a ruthless reassessment of both the man and the “common sense” patriotism he championed. There is no authority more trusted or deferred to in pub banter, bus-stop chatter or SW1 than Common Sense, the disUnion’s unwritten prayer book. But how many have applied — to delve all the way back to Tom Paine’s original meaning — a modicum of reason to it? That “common” would be a virtue in a land that boasts hereditary legislators and reserves seats for clerics in its upper chamber (an arrangement shared exclusively with Iran’s Islamic Republic) strikes one immediately as suspect. Is somebody pulling a fast one? Suddenly great reverence should be applied to what the riff-raff — well not think exactly, but how they feel?

Looking at Clement Attlee, we see an incredibly successful attempt to turn class antagonism, its barely contained rage, into patriotic feeling. We’re all in this together was not a lie conjured up by David Cameron, who in any case is utterly incapable of original thought. It would be unjust to discount the achievement which was the National Health Service, and too the expansion of welfare, but with the distance of time it becomes all too clear the regime of Attlee and Bevan conceded just enough to keep Ukania’s compromises going.

They marketed themselves very much as the “responsible white men” Churchill insisted was required for continued Western dominance. Internally, the historic institutions of privilege were largely left untouched: the public schools, Whitehall. But internationally Attlee was a disaster. Rather than decommissioning the war machine, Labour saw in its continuance the opportunity to play Greece to the new Rome.

Where it was just impossible to remain, they got out of dodge, haphazardly drafting the lines which haunt entire peoples to this day. While the tens of millions wailed and bled out below, the crumbling bust of old Blighty cast its head westward and bowed.

“Right and left we are indeed leaking BOTs (British Overseas Territories) but what do you make of these brand new WMDs?” Thanks to Attlee, Ukania became a fully-paid up member of the Nuclear Age, with stipulations which put Washington very much in charge, and was pivotal in the establishment of NATO.

This is not to suggest there weren’t efforts at maintaining the Empire itself. Caroline Elkins has written powerfully about the gulag system instituted in Kenya, and has never been forgiven for seeing in the torture and brutalization of Russians and the torture and brutalization of Africans a moral equivalence. Attlee also oversaw the rearming of soldiers of the former Japanese Empire to crush Malaysian communists, an awful colonial affair which saw the first widespread use of herbicides in war.

The above may appear to be a needless detour, but it is important to recognise what is considered our most radical government — Labour’s triumph — served Britain while failing the British (regressing into the Old Tongue). It is also necessary to understand why the rest of the world perceives this country the way they do, what those perceptions are, and once stiff drinks have been taken, what it might take to make good.

An End

Victims of the Empire harbour within themselves the unmistakable urge for revenge. To do great psychic damage, not to anyone in particular, but to “the British.” Just how anyone not completely corrupted by humanism or possessed of suspect allegiances reads the details of those blinding February nights in 1945 and thinks: that’s what Dresden deserved. That’s what Germany deserved, and Hell, why not? That’s what Europe deserved. This of course exempts the brilliant Kurt Vonnegut, for whom the sight of deep fat fried Dresdenians prevented him from seeing Dresden as Germany as the Third Reich. (Crass? Did you expect anything less?)

But it is here, in the total subjection of Ukania in the eyes of the world, that an ironic point of light may be found. And it cannot be understated, Ukania is done for. It’s all over Baby Red, White and Blue. It was always a state lacking a nation, but now even on that count it fails. The finger cannot be pointed at a Napoleon, Axis coalition or even a Trotskyist insurgency; this was entirely self-inflicted.

A total Allied victory made Germany humble, and it is now it has become a nation respected by all the right people for all the right reasons. Humility, too, is within the grasp of the British, should they reach for it rather than yet another distraction (the amorphous “wokerati” is a likely candidate, if not the usual guff about foreigners).

The international community may at last have what they need to accept the English, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish and those Irish north of the border, as comrades, brothers and sisters fallen on hard times. Just please leave the Windsors at the door.

…

For a final thought, we can turn to Fernando Pessoa, that incomparable Anglophile, who knew better than most that a dramatic recreation of oneself needn’t entail death.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality. This has nothing to do with anything.

Only, it has everything to do with everything.