Dragging Nick Griffin into it

I promised a response to Hugo Rifkind’s Times article. Here it is, a little later than planned. He argued that, for the past 20 years, there have been two sorts of Britishness. And do you know, one of them has ‘has often been hijacked by the Nick Griffins of the world’.

Now what is this person, Nick Griffin, doing here? There is, and I point it out here quite a lot, a perfectly good tradition of honourable British patriotism, based ultimately on Anglican Christianity, free of bigotry, not aggressive or expansionist or triumphalist or crude. It’s from that tradition, and from the writings of Edmund Burke, that I seek to derive my position. I believe that all my aims and political desires are consistent with that.

Nick Griffin, a man who once went to Libya to seek the help of Muammar Gadaffi? Nick Griffin, whose party was (is it still? I can’t keep track) explicitly racialist. Nick Griffin, who has, er, a thing about Jews? Well, he has adopted, and no doubt will adopt, many positions which I have adopted, or positions similar to mine. All kinds of people do. But that has no bearing on whether what I say is legitimate or right. These others do not say the things they say, or think the things that I think, for the same fundamental reasons. They do not share my principles. So the fact that they hold other, disagreeable views has no bearing on what I think. So why mention them? 

In Mr Rifkind’s case, I doubt if he has much idea why he does it. It’s just what people of his generation tend to do, when they meet conservative opinions. Their mental world, furnished or rather cluttered with stand-up comedians, pop music, TV ‘satire’, and the general post-Christian, post-patriotic, post-hierarchical, post-personal responsibility, post-deferred gratification post-puritan, deconstructionist world view with which their minds have been filled, cannot cope. So rather than think about it, they shudder, mutter ‘BNP’, or ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ and shut their minds. They have been raised in a world in which all views but their own are assumed to be tainted by a suspect bigotry. Don’t go there, or you might become one of them, and lose all your mates.

So if people such as me say anything which gives them pause, or to which they are secretly attracted, or which sets the little rodent of doubt gnawing in their intellectual vitals, they sheer away with a muttered ‘racist!’ or ‘bigot!’ or ‘fascist!’ or ‘homophobe!’ or whatever it is.

Sometimes, they may even be right to do so. There are bigots and racialists and would-be despots in our society. But Mr Rifkind’s generation will not discriminate between them and people such as me. I have met such bigots. I have had letters from them. I have sometimes tried to persuade them to alter their views, or withdraw their support from Mr Griffin. That’s one way of knowing for sure that they aren’t the same as me.

On the other hand, I have also known people who are publicly right-on leftists, but who in private use abusive terms for other ethnic groups, or people of different sexual tastes,  terms that I would never think, let alone speak. And no, I won’t say who they are or were.

Mr Rifkind defines one kind of Britishness as a sort of sentimental theme park – The Queen, Parliament, cricket and scones. Well, maybe. But I’m no sentimental monarchist. I don’t own a single Coronation mug or Royal Wedding plate, and hope not to. Parliament, pure and simple, does little for me. It’s the adversarial tradition, the inch of difference in which we all live, that has produced jury trial, habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights and constitutional monarchy, that do it for me. In fact, if I had to choose between jury trial and Parliament, I’d choose jury trial (though as it was before Roy Jenkins, not the poor wounded thing it is now). Cricket? I don’t much care, though, as Michael Frayn once put it, I want to want to like it. The Armed Forces, more or less right, though not, I suspect, in the way Mr Rifkind imagines. He’d have to tell me what he thinks. Even then, I might have some difficulty expressing myself to him about the Royal Navy. He wouldn’t understand the terms I used. Mr Rifkind completely misses the force of poetry and literature, of the Authorised Version of the Bible, Shakespeare and Cranmer (and for me Wordsworth, Gray’s ‘Elegy’, Tennyson and Larkin). Not to mention landscape – not necessarily the spectacular or the picturesque, but the handsome, the unwrecked and the wistful.

Mr Rifkind attempts to describe another sort of Britishness as ‘a more nebulous idea. So nebulous, indeed, that Will Self soars beyond it. This is a Britishness of Spice Girls, Minis and multiculturalism’.

But surely a national cultural feeling cannot co-exist or be synonymous with multiculturalism. It’s an oxymoron. The Spice Girls are a void of noise, the Mini is built by a German company, and sold on an association with the King’s Road sixties, ie the very cultural revolution which blew Protestant Britain out of the water, while appropriating the Union Flag as a marketing device.

Then he expresses some curious thoughts on whether it is easier to accept that Mo Farah is British than he is English. I know what he is driving at, but in the end I don’t see any fundamental difference - unless he means that the new ‘Britishness’ is so loosely defined that it encompasses anyone. Personally, I think that Mo Farah could become British in my way (people will say ‘What about religion?’, and I would reply ‘I don’t want to make windows into men’s souls’. A different religion will work, provided the person who holds to that religion accepts that this is a fundamentally Christian country.)

In his article (I wish I could show you the whole thing, but it is behind a paywall), Mr Rifkind muses: ‘Ultimately, Farah has to be both. Otherwise, Britishness is reduced to a trick for letting the aliens into the club without having to stop calling them aliens — a depository for all the folk whom other British identities still secretly don't want.’

There’s something struggling to get out of this segment.  But it can’t quite escape, though you can make out its hunched shape, pacing in the half-light behind the bars. The clues are the words ‘trick’, ‘ aliens’ and ‘identities’ and ‘secretly don’t want’. I think it has something to do with the idea, or belief, that there is a covert racial bigotry behind all this somewhere. I’ve written at some length to Mr Rifkind about this, and will await his reply before forming a hard judgment. But that’s what I tend to think at the moment.

Then we come to what seems to me to be the heart of it all. Mr Rifkind wrote: ‘Now. Find me somebody who disapproved of Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony and I'll show you somebody who feels that Britishness ought only to be the first of these [The Queen, Scones, Cricket bit, PH], and saw a great spectacle designed to usurp it in the national psyche with the second [Spice Girls, Minis etc, PH]. I offer you, by way of example, the now infamous MP for Cannock Chase, Aidan "multicultural c***" Burley, and also the Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, who yesterday complained on the radio that the ceremony had been a political show intent upon "telling people who were not part of the cultural revolution that they had lost".

I don’t regard myself as being much like Mr Burley, I’ve never attended a Nazi-themed party in my life, don’t use lavatory words in public writings, and I loathe the Rolling Stones. My idea of Britishness doesn’t fit either of Mr Rifkind’s models. As I’ve said to him, I don’t think he has the faintest idea what I really believe. In fact this passage demonstrates how effective the cultural revolution has been in destroying the old concepts and cutting the young off from them. It’s like the conversation between Winston Smith and the old man in the prole pub. Winston’s mind is so full of propaganda about the past (propaganda that he thinks is fact) that he can’t begin to grasp the truth.    

Mr Rifkind informed me: ’This is precisely wrong. I've been mulling over Boyle's vision for a fortnight now and every day I look back and admire it more. This was not a revolution of one sort of British over another. Rather, it was a reconciliation of both.’

I have asked him to explain why this is so. Doesn’t reconciliation involve concession, and acceptance? What significant thing did Mr Boyle and Mr Daldry (a man who, I suspect, knows his Antonio Gramsci, or at least knows what Gramsci meant) concede to me or people like me? When did I accept it? Would I want to offer any concession to them? And am I not better-equipped to judge this than Mr Rifkind, since I am the one who is unreconciled, and has been prepared to say so in public despite an almost overpowering wave of mental conformism since the Opening Ceremony? He is the butterfly upon the road preaching contentment to the toad, I think.