The Rest Is History - 180. England & Englishness

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

George Orwell, a love of wildlife, and Raheem Sterling - but what does it mean to be English in the modern world? In today's episode, Tom and Dominic are joined by the New Statesman editor, Jason Cowley, to discuss England and Englishness in the 20th century. Jason's new book 'Who Are We Now?' is available at all good book retailers. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Editorial Assistant: Grace Mainwaring Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes, dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant.

The crowds in the big towns with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not 46 million individuals or different? And the diversity of it, the chaos, the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to and fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the labour exchanges, the rattle of pin tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning.

All these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle? So Tom Holland, that was friend of the show, George Orwell, writing during the Blitz, probably the single most famous evocation of England and Englishness ever written. And it strikes me that every single element of it is now utterly out of date. Do you think that's fair? I think that's a bit harsh because he's talking about the diversity of England. And if anything, England's become, I mean, clearly become infinitely more diverse than when Orwell was writing about it. And yet I think there is still a sense of what,

I mean, England still has a place in the imagination of those who live in the country that is called England. So to that extent, I think he is onto something. I mean, obviously, all the stuff about old maid cycling to communion and the clatter of clogs on Lancashire streets, I mean, that's gone. But plus ça change, c'est la même chose, as Orwell would doubtless have put it. He would definitely not have. There was no way he would have put that. I mean, basically, are there continuities from the present through to the mid-20th century, when always writing that, that go further back or not? I mean, great question.

Well, it's a question about all nations. But what makes it particularly interesting about England is that England is one of the most famous examples of a nation that is not a nation state. So, you know, England has no seat at the United Nations General Assembly. A lot of people who live in England do not describe themselves as English. They say they're British. But abroad, of course, everybody typically confuses England and Britain, as we often do ourselves, don't we? I think less so, though. So I think that's another feature is that uh the sense the english have of themselves within a nation called the united kingdom has definitely grown

over the past decade it has indeed yeah and so somebody who's been a great observer of this tom or are you going to introduce him because you i, have played cricket with him, I guess. I have. So few things are more archetypally English than a game of cricket on a summer green. And I played cricket with Jason on one of the most famous days in recent English history, which was the day of the death of Princess Diana. And the game went ahead, but in a rather embarrassed way. So I remember we lined up outside the pavilion, which had a flagpole and the flagpole was at half mast and we all stood there and we didn't really know what to do. So we took our caps off and twisted them in an

embarrassed way, put them on, and then we just kind of shuffled off, which I thought was a, I think Orwell would probably have recognized the uh he definitely the quality of embarrassment there but am I not also right in thinking that you had a very a ferocious you were ferociously upbraided by your captain yeah so we then went on to um to play the match and um and the captain we haven't even let him speak yet we haven't even we haven't even introduced him the captain who for now will remain nameless his his idea of man management was as i was bowling to yell at me you're losing us the match and the more tense i got the more abusive he became and i knew then that he was destined for great thing and sure enough he went on to edit the new statesman displaying his his

ability for leadership and it is of course the great jason cowley one of the the great editors of our age being at the helm of the new statesman for how long now jason 20 years um it feels like 20 years 13 tom 13 years and before that you uh you great sports journalist uh at the helm of um the observer sports uh weekly when they had that yeah it was a monthly. Oh, it was a monthly, wasn't it? And then I edited Granter for a year, a literary quarterly. So Jason, finger on the absolute pulse of English and dare one say British culture.

So you've got a book that is, I suppose, in a way, the fruit of many decades of reflection on the subject of Englishness and England called Who Are We Now? Stories of Modern England. Jason, who are we now? It's a good question, Tom. And thank you for having me on the show. It's a great honour to be on this wonderful podcast. And thank you for reminding me of my captaincy back in the day. And that was actually a quintessentially Orwellian scene because it was a village called Hatfield Heath, very close to Hatfield Forest in the day. That was actually a quintessentially Orwellian scene because it was a village called Hatfield Heath, very close to Hatfield Forest in Essex. And beautiful late September day, if I recall. And it was a sort of gentleman and players encounter.

Your brother turned up in an open top classic car and a lot of posh Oxbridge types appeared alongside you, of which I am not one. And then on the opposition were a group of local village cricketers. And the guy who took a liking to your bowling late in the game, actually, Tom, you were bowling your accurate medium pieces. A quick medium, I think. Fast medium. Fast medium. The local blacksmith sort of took to them with relish. And they were appearing either over the boundary without bouncing or one bounce.

But Jason, I'd lost it in the mind. It's a game played in the mind and you shredded my self-confidence with your man management skills. Indeed. I did ask you to be canny, didn't I, if I recall? Yes, you did. You did. Anyway, Dominic began with Orwell. Dominic, I think that was from The Lion and the Unicorn, wasn't it?

It was, yeah. Which Orwell wrote in, began in the spring of 1940 and was shot in the throat on the Aragon front and almost died. And when he comes back from Barcelona, where he feels the Republican government has betrayed the cause, taking their orders from Stalin, Soviet Union, and he certainly believed that, he comes back and the book ends with this wonderful vision of England in the south of England. And he speaks about England being sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England. But he's warning them that the English people are about to be awoken by the roar of bombs. And I think when Orwell was writing in 1940, he's writing about Britain rather than just England,

but he uses England. So what you spoke about at the beginning of this sense of England being lost within Britishness, or the two being interchangeable. But at that point in September 1940, what was bringing the nation together was a sense of encroaching threat, was danger. After Dunkirk, Orwell knew what had to be done. The army had to be brought home and the invasion had to be stopped. And this was a clarifying moment for Orwell. It had always been deeply ambivalent about his relationship with England and Englishness. He was an old Etonian, but he hated the public schools. He served as a policeman in Burma and loathed the empire. But at the same time, he loathed the left and what he called book-trained socialism. So here was this very quarrelsome and sceptical

figure, and suddenly he has this clarifying moment. This is England. What is England? And how do we make the nation cohere and come together and find a sense of unity, a moment of heightened peril and danger of a kind, actually, in completely different circumstances that we're seeing in Ukraine? A form of Ukrainian national identity is being formed in war, as it was for the English in 1940 into 1941, which was when Orwell wrote that wonderful essay. So you obviously think there is an England. I mean, your book is all about it. But Englishness, so let's say 30 or 40 years ago, no one wrote about England or Englishness. I mean, it was a question that simply was never raised, wasn't it?

Yes, I think there's been a kind of rear-waking of Englishness or a sense of English national identity. And it's intensified since 1997 and the election of Blair and the devolution reforms and the creation of the Scottish Parliament, when you've also had a simultaneous awakening of Scottish national identity. election of Blair and the devolution reforms and the creation of the Scottish Parliament, when you've also had a simultaneous awakening of Scottish national identity. So as the Scots have become more confident or more assertive in their sense of Scottishness and their sense of national identity, it's naturally forced upon the English a reconsideration of who they are and what they want, particularly as the United Kingdom itself is in danger. I mean, it's fragmented.

And we had a referendum in 2014, which could have ended the union. And Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP, a powerful hegemonic, you would say, in Scotland, and obviously want a second referendum. So again, it's different from Orwell in 1940, but there is also a sense of threat to Britishness, British identity and the Union.

And it's been a period of enormous change and convulsion in recent years. I mean, if you just have to think about the last sort of seven or eight years with the Scottish independence referendum, the 2015 surprise victory for David Cameron, which then led to the 2016 Brexit referendum, the eruption of Corbynism from the left, Trump in America, and so it goes on. And meanwhile, you had this sense of kind of national populism rising through the influence of Nigel Farage and UKIP. So it's been a period of extraordinary change and convulsion and upheaval. And somewhere amidst this is a rising sense of English identity, often identified, I think, unfairly with reaction and loss and nostalgia. But I think one could make the case for a progressive and positive

sense of modern English identity as well within the greater framework of Britishness. Can I ask a quick question about the loss and nostalgia? Yes. Because in your introduction, you say one of the things you want to talk about in your book is the stubborn notion that Englishness and loss are inextricable. And there is something unusual about Englishness and nostalgia, isn't there? I mean, even when Orwell was writing in 1940, a lot of the things he's talking about, the sort of the rattle of pin tables in the pubs, the old maids, they were old fashioned even in 1940. And there is always this sense with Englishness, particularly now, actually, when people talk about Englishness, they talk about it in terms of it being reactionary, backward.

I mean, you mentioned Nigel Farage. He's often seen as a kind of, as an avatar of a kind of Englishness. But do you think that's, we've got the wrong idea that there is another or well with all these things it's so hard to pin down aren't they go on tom sorry well i was i was going to say about that that one of the reasons perhaps for that is that england is as a political entity incredibly old i mean it's a very you know as a as a i mean could one say nation state i mean it as a political, it is very, very precocious. Probably Denmark is its only rival. I was about to say, some historians would say England and Denmark are the first two nation states, wouldn't they? And so you think people are always looking back to the past and saying things were better in the past.

So we've done a lot of stuff on the civil wars and people in the civil war are looking back to the Anglo-Saxons and saying, well, they were free then. You know, and then the Normans imposed a yoke. If only we could get back to the glory days of the Anglo-Saxons. And that basically is a trend that, you know, or John of Gaunt's great speech. I mean, you name the passage of Orwell as one of the great meditations on England, but John of Gaunt's speech in Richard II, Shakespeare's play, where he, again, you know, he's, you know, this wonderful kind of lyrical description of England, bound in by the triumphant sea. And yet there, John of Gaunt again is mourning what he sees as English decline. So it could be that, you know, one of the most traditionally English things

is to worry that England is going to the dogs. That is built in. What do you think, Jason? I agree with Tom. I think I say in the book that there's this sense of something lost or something deeper and purer and more innocent that's been lost flows through the English centuries like an underground stream. And I think it does. And it's there in Shakespeare, Tom, for sure. More recently, it was there in Haussmann and his wonderful poems. It's there in English poetry. And it goes right back. I mean, I listened some weeks ago to your episode on the Norman conquest and the defeat, the sense of Englishness being founded upon a heroic defeat against the Norman invaders. But even, and then, you know, what was lost then? What was lost before the conquest going back to an Anglo-Saxon England?

A sense after the conquest that here was an elite that spoke French and the ordinary English man and woman, you know, the elites didn't even speak the language that they spoke themselves. So I think it's there, a sense of loss, a sense of nostalgia. And then, of course, after the Act of Union, 1707, Englishness was lost within Britishness. And the English were encouraged to see themselves, first and foremost, as British in this great imperial project

in which the English played their role, as indeed did the Scots. So Dominic's right when he said at the beginning that, you know, here's this nation, but it doesn't have its own discrete political institutions. And therefore, England in recent times hasn't been given the opportunity to reimagine itself, as indeed Scotland has through the creation of the Scottish Parliament and all of the conversation and debate that has been generated by devolution and what's followed from that. I mean, if you remember George Robertson, the Labour MP, later head of NATO, said that devolution would kill Scottish nationalism stone dead, I think was the phrase he used. Well, that didn't turn out as he hoped. But Jason, this idea that the English perhaps have of themselves as a people who are put

upon, who have reasons to feel that things have been lost, and Orwell describes them as a gentle people. I imagine that there'll be lots of people listening to this outside England who may feel that this characterisation is perhaps not entirely accurate. I mean, i would imagine within uh within great britain and and certainly within ireland as well the idea that the english are you know are put upon a nation of flower rangers cycling yes exactly and of course you know england was the most powerful component of the country that established the largest empire in world history.

And the English were not gentle in the Caribbean. They were often not gentle in India. Orwell himself, of course, he was a policeman in Burma, absolutely knew that. There is a sense, isn't there, that Englishness is complicated by the legacy of that, not least because large numbers of people from that empire have now come to England. Yes, and that's, I don't think I said the English were gentle. No, Orwell did. And I think there is this idea still people have that the English are a uniquely kind of gentle people. Absolutely. When you watch something like the Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday evening on the BBC, I mean, there's a vision of England that many people wish to identify with.

But of course, go to Newcastle City Centre on a Saturday night and you see a completely different England. Or, you know, I spent a lot of time on the football terraces over the years, as has Dominic. And certainly the England I witnessed in the late 70s and into the early 80s was brutal and violent. And there was an association with the violence in wider society, what one saw on the terraces. Orwell also said that he likened the English to a family with the wrong people in charge, in control. So again, he was deeply critical of the empire. And that's one of the challenges for anyone writing about Englishness today is this contested identity and also the past, empire, slavery, colonialism, the tensions within the British state itself, Ireland, the Irish question, and so on. So I think for those on the left or many on the left, they view Englishness with deep suspicion. And there's often, as I said at the beginning, associated with reaction, even racism. I mean, the internationalist left are

all for celebrating the statehood of others, the Palestinians or the Kurds. But when it comes to English national identity, they're very, very suspicious. And it alarms them. I think that's fair to say, Dominic, would you? I definitely think it. I mean, Orwell commented on that, didn't he? I can't remember whether it was in this essay, in The Lion and the Unicorn, or whether it was in The Road to Wigan Pier, where he talks about intellectuals

who would rather be seen stealing from a poor box in church than standing for God save the king. And I think that element has always been there. Not always, surely. I mean, it's there, isn't it, in the French Revolutionary period? I mean, that's probably where it first starts to appear. The sort of Tom Paine-ish element that England is. Yeah, but the Whigs.

So Fox, you know, basically saying the French Revolution's brilliant and Napoleon's brilliant. And essentially it's not really about Napoleon's French Revolution. It's about his dislike of aspects of Tory England. Yeah, but there is a strain within Englishness. I mean, I don't think other countries have it. I mean, there is a strain in America that thinks that about people who are very anti-American Americans. But I think England is probably unusual in having such a profoundly developed sense of anti-patriotism.

And why do you think that is i don't i mean it's a massive question i mean tom you'll be delighted to hear i think part of it is religious isn't it i mean it's sort of rooted in the isn't it rooted in the kind of dissenting whiggish kind of tradition i think um and it's obviously also a day you think jason a reaction to empire in the 19th century and it's? And the empire obviously looms enormously large in the mindsets of sort of left-wing English or British intellectuals today, doesn't it? Absolutely. And when you listen to or even participate in the debates about Englishness and empire, particularly intensification in recent years, there's almost a sense of shame at times about the pressure of imperial history

weighing on the present. But also I think it's, I go back to the point that it's also a sense of Englishness being lost within Britishness. And there's always a worry about national identity, about ethnicity and blood and soil, certainly. And one of the glories of Britishness, I think, is that it was a non-racial, inclusive, plural identity.

We sheltered under this civic umbrella, if that's not a mixed metaphor, of Britishness. And I would argue, perhaps better than any other European country, the British have welcomed migrants since the Second World War. I know there's been terrible racism and hostility, but the modern British state is pretty harmonious, particularly when you compare it with France, with a distinct neo-fascist right. We haven't had the emergence of a neo-fascist right in this country. But Jason, isn't there a kind of paradox there, perhaps, that since 97, certainly, the rate of immigration into Britain has massively increased, and obviously not just from Commonwealth countries, but from the European Union. And so the proportion of foreign-born children in England has gone up massively. And so you would think that in that period, the salience of Britishness would be all the more important if it is. And I agree with you that it's something that kind of transcends

the idea of ancient national roots far more than Englishness or Scottishness or Welshness does. And yet it's precisely the more that immigration has gone up, the more the sense of people being English or indeed Scottish has gone up as well. I mean, do you think it's a kind of degree of cause and effect there? I think there is. There's a chapter about the cockle picking disaster on Morecambe Bay 2004, but within that chapter, I write- So that's when the Chinese laborers were drowned. Yeah, the undocumented Chinese migrants who were working as cockle-pickers. And I tell the story of the lone survivor of that disaster.

But it happened in 2004. And that was also the year when the EU enlarged and opened up to the Eastern states. And I was talking to Nigel Farage about this, because Farage is a figure in the book, inevitably, because he's been such an influential politician, you know, one of the most influential post-war politicians. And he said to me that immigration and the EU, they were not an issue until 2004. And then he saw his opportunity to reopen the immigration debate,

which he said had been closed down ever since Enoch Powell had delivered his rivers of blood speech. When was it, Dominic? End of the 60s? 68. 68, that was. So he suddenly saw an opportunity and he said he was warned by fellow big figures within UKIP not to go there. This would be too dangerous. But he said it was never about, for him,

it was never about ethnicity or race. It was about numbers and a loss of control. And he was able to manipulate that. And don't forget, of the EU member states, it was only the UK, Sweden, and Ireland that neglected to impose seven-year transition controls. So Germany, France, Italy, the other big economies, chose to impose the seven-year control.

So they wouldn't accept migrants from the East under free movement rules for seven years. And the Labour government at the time, the very complacent new Labour governments, said they expected around 8,000 to 13,000 migrants from the eastern states to arrive per year. Yeah, and the true figure was? Hundreds and hundreds of thousands. But what it was, Tom, was the largest unplanned migration, surely, in British history.

Absolutely. But it still doesn't answer the question of why that hasn't amplified people's sense of identity as British, rather than, say, English. Because simultaneously, you've had the devolution reforms. So when Blair came to power, he gave a speech before he came to power in 1995, where he said, I want this to be a young country. And then he said, we will be a young country. He never spoke about England. He was speaking about Britain. I mean, what an absurd thing to say, Tom. You've spoken already about the deep history of England and the notion of an English nation. And Blair wanted us to be part of a young country. In other words, he wanted to will a new country into being and push back against the burdens of the past as he would have seen them. And he thought one way of becoming a young country would be through the devolution reforms. But they ignited Scottish nationalism. Is that, do you think, because...

They fired Scottish nationalism. Jason, he didn't understand. My take on that would be that he just, because he didn't feel it himself, he simply didn't understand the cultural and political power of nationalism. So it almost didn't occur to him that by creating a Scottish Parliament or a Welsh Assembly, you would create a vessel into which people would pour all these energies which had lain dormant for so long. Do you think he just didn't get that? I think that's right. And also what he didn't understand was there was a restiveness out there in what you might call deep England, in the shires, the smaller county towns and neglected coastal towns, the town I grew up in, Harlow Newtown, for example, where people felt shut out. They felt neglected. They felt ignored. They felt mocked and ridiculed by a certain kind of elite. And they were anxious about the forces unleashed by free market globalization,

inevitably. And globalization lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, notably in China. And the transnational elites, they benefited enormously from globalization and indeed from free movement. But there were many losers. And many of those losers were in the small towns of England. But just to stick up for Tony. You go ahead, Tom. Okay, so the idea of England being a young country, and let's focus on England rather than Britain. We've talked about its antiquity. The sense that perhaps that foreigners have of England is indeed of ancient monuments and tradition and beef eaters and all that kind of paraphernalia. But since the Second World War, England has quite successfully reinvented itself

as a young country to the degree that it is probably, head for head, the most influential proponent of youth culture in the world. Swinging London, punk, raves, all that kind of malarkey. You sound like a high court judge, Tom. I know. But it's all been part of the English brand. And you could say that in a sense, London, for instance, which is the English capital. And you could say that in a sense, London, for instance, which is the English capital, as well as the British capital, is definitely a young city, or it has seen itself as being a young city. But London doesn't feel like an English. I mean, I don't want to sound Farageist, but I don't want to sound Farageist. London feels British,

but I don't think you would go to London and say this feels like the England of deep England. No, of course it doesn't. Of course, by definition, because, because Longleterre Profond, you know, it's not London. I mean, that's the whole point. That's the whole point of it. But it is, I think, you know, it focuses again, this question that I'm kind of just chipping away at, which is, it does feel like a British, you know, it's the British capital. It's a British city. It's a city full of black British, Asian British, Irish British, you know, it's the British capital, it's a British city, it's a city full of Black British, Asian British, Irish British, you know, all these kind of different permutations of British you have. But it's more difficult to attach those labels to English, Black English, Asian English, Irish English. I mean, there's a kind of hint of paradox almost there. So why is it that with the

amplification of immigration, with absolutely the sense that London is now not just, you know, it's not just a British, it's not just European, it's absolutely a global city. Why has that Britishness, the quality of Britishness, slightly been occluded by the growth of Englishness? I mean, it does seem a slight paradox there. It does. But it's because so many people, I think, feel shut out from that Britishness, that sense of modern Britishness that you've rightly celebrated, Tom, you know, the modern London that you and I know and love. many of those people who were attracted by the rhetoric of Farage in particular and UKIP, they don't feel attracted by that modern, cosmopolitan, London Britishness. And nor do the Scots, actually. I remember, I can't speak for the whole of the Scots,

but I remember Alex Salmond, I invited him to come down to London to give a lecture during the 2014 independence campaign. And he likened London to a dark star, sucking the energy forces from the rest of the United Kingdom as it draws more and more people to London. But I said, Alex, hold on here. London also has some of the most impoverished boroughs in the country. There's deep intergenerational inequality and poverty in London. It's a wonderful, diverse city. It's a city of really interconnecting villages. I mean, there is a deep history of London, Tom,

that you understand and well know. As you walk the streets of London, one is haunted by the ghost traces of what has been before. You know, my father came out of the East End and always used to speak very fondly about the old Jewish East End that exists almost today in ghost traces, as it were. it were wg zaybold wrote about so so beautifully i think in austerlitz um so there is a paradox and this these are the these these are the paradoxes that i'm trying to work away uh at in in the book as i try and understand you know who

we are today you know what is england um and what what what these huge, huge forces have done to the country in recent times. There's a wonderful line from The Lion and the Unicorn, such a great essay if you want to think about these questions, where Orwell says it is of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening. And that's really the question that's informed the book and that I've attempted to answer, not with any certainty, but I play with some of these paradoxes, Tom, that you're rightly raising. Let's take a break now. And when we come back, we will play with more paradoxes. And continue. And continue our search for England. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.

That's therestisentertainment.com. And that will be England gone. The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, the guild halls, the carved choirs. There'll be books. It will linger on in galleries. But all that remains for us will be concrete and tires. That was the ever cheerful Philip Larkin writing, I think, back in the 60s. And Jason, one of the things that strikes me about England is that the English are famously animal lovers. They love their countryside, and more people belong to wildlife support groups than in any other country in the world. And yet we have some of the most, you know, we're one of the most environmentally depleted countries anywhere. Our biodiversity is in a constant case, state of crisis. I wonder, England is actually quite

a small country. Is there a sense that the rising population in England is generating these anxieties about whether England, simply because there isn't actually that much of it, and that the more people there are, the more it will turn into concrete and tyres, and the more kind of hedgehogs and hedgerows will vanish? What is the population of England? Is it about 58 million, 57 million? The population of the UK is almost 70 million and England is by far, I mean, it's about 60 million, I would have said.

And it is a relatively small landmass and a small country. And I think that's also one of the anxieties that drives the debate about the British Union. If Scotland was to become an independent country, then England or British, Britain would lose or England would lose access to so much of the territorial waters and the landmass.

I think Scotland's about a third of the island of Great Britain in size. But yes, Tom, I think a lot of people, I think, associate England and Englishness with landscape, particularly the countryside. Yeah, green and pleasant land. Green and pleasant land. You've got Larkin there. I mentioned Houseman's beautiful poems earlier the elegies um wordsworth the romantic tradition about

which tom you've you've written so well particularly about byron um although he liked to wander the alps didn't he rather than rather than the cotswolds he cleared out of england i was about to say top you say about tom writing about byron but that isn't doesn't your byron turn out to be a vampire tom yeah he does yeah he does he's a rootless cosmopolitan, the very worst kind. But there is a constant pressure on the English landscape. One sees these debates around some of the small rural towns which are being built around. And I think the phrase is donated by new modern estates. And at the same time, young people say, we need somewhere to live.

We need more housing. And again, it's one of the tensions that defines the country today. You know, I'm not anxious about a rising population. In many ways, I kind of welcome that sort of boisterous, clamorous exchange of ideas and individuals. You live in Brixham, Tom,

so you obviously relishish city life dominic is a rural man out in the cotswolds exactly yeah i live in a very bland um suburban town so i do live in brixton which is kind of almost the archetype of of the inner city but i i grew up outside salisbury you didn't i want to feel that those green fields are still there but that's that that's where some of this countryside stuff comes from so i was thinking when jason was talking one of them but one of i mean it used to be famous it's not famous anymore but one of the politically very famous iterations of that was stanley baldwin in the 1920s very much a friend of the show uh england is the country and the country is england or the other way around i can't remember which but he did

that at precisely the moment when England was becoming very suburban. You know, his was a message crafted for people listening on radios in new suburban developments who wanted to believe that there was a, you know, their house is called the Larches or something. But as you say, they live, they can't see any larches. And I think that, doesn't that explain England as one of the most densely populated countries in Europe? I think only the Netherlands and Belgium. But absolutely. And you also saw a reworking of Baldwin and indeed George Orwell in some of John Major's speeches late in his premiership. Although indeed another Brixton boy.

Well, he quoted, didn't he? The old maids riding to communion through mists, all that kind of stuff. He did. And shadows stretching across county grounds. And there was a sense of this kind of rural idyll, again, but that plays back to our original idea of something that's lost, something we had, and something we've let go, or has been taken away. It's an anxiety that specifically goes back to the Industrial Revolution,

I guess. Yes. The more England becomes urbanisedized the more salient the natural world beautiful fields the wildlife all that kind of stuff becomes i mean people may not necessarily go and see it but they want to know that it's there um one other thing jason that you mentioned in the first half that i wanted to come back to because you talk about this quite a lot in the book and i know and i know you you've written brilliantly about it in the past is football so football is one of the most famous english exports

and football is central to england i mean actually football a lot of our listeners are not um british and they may find this frivolous or mystifying i would argue that football is probably the most single most important vehicle of englishness and you talk in your book about the england about the england football team and, for example, the black players. So there, surely, there is an example of how you can be... I mean, Tom said black English. It's true. It doesn't trip off the tongue as readily as black British does. But there are clearly... I mean, some of the great icons of Englishness, Raheem Sterling is a good example, are black, aren't they? Indeed. And I think the England football team is a mirror in which we can see the changing face

of the nation. I think football is a real, it's a signifier of so much, but particularly of national identity. I remember going to the England-Scotland match at Euro 96 at Wembley, the famous match where Gascoigne flipped the ball over, was it Colin Hendry? It was Colin Hendry, yes. Slotted home, glorious goal, beautiful, warm, sunny day in London. And when I arrived at the stadium, I remember being absolutely shocked to see so many, the flag of St. George everywhere. Whereas if you look back at footage say of the 1966 world cup at wembley which was england against west germany bobby moore's

great team that won won the world cup the crowd everyone's got the union flag even the world cup mascot um the tournament was held in england wears a little um union jack vest i think it's a little lion wears a union jack waistcoat or vest. So the iconography of Englishness was actually British iconography. But suddenly something happened around the time of Euro 96, a year before Blair is elected. And it's not a top-down state-directed process. It's something that comes from below. And one of the means through which it is expressed is football and the English national football team. And for a long time, particularly the late 1970s into the early 80s, English football, the English national football team was associated

with hooliganism, but particularly sort of far right factions, racist factions. And there was some terrible violence when England went overseas. I remember there was a great goal that John Barnes scored in Brazil, England-Brazil in the early 80s, I think. John Barnes, the black winger who played for Watford and Liverpool, he scored a wonderful solo goal. And some of the thugs who had followed England to Brazil said England had won the match 1-0 rather than 2-0 because one of those goals had been scored by a black man. I mean, a monstrous comment to have made. But fast forward to the present day, particularly what we witnessed last summer, Euro 2020, but delayed by a year because of the pandemic. We saw this kind of wonderful flourishing of English national identity as expressed through the English football team

with many of our leading players being black English players and they were very comfortable embracing the flag of St George, wrapping themselves in the flag of St George. Rashford himself identified very strongly with a sense of a benevolent Englishness and I think England are very fortunate that through these years of polarisation and upheaval and turmoil, they've had Gareth Southgate as their coach, who is an extraordinarily thoughtful man, and has thought very deeply about English national identity. I think at the time of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Southgate said that we, the English, had been a little bit lost in our identity. And I hope through my young team, because of their youth and their diversity, we can offer another vision of Englishness. I mean, Theresa May wouldn't say that, Jeremy Corbyn wouldn't say that at the time,

but Southgate leaned into the debates around Englishness and identity. And then just before the Euros last summer, he wrote an essay, which was published on the Players' Tribune, called Dear England, which was an attempt to address, Tom, the controversies around the Black Lives Matter debate and his team taking the knee. And he located himself in a tradition. His grandfather had served in the Second World War. He spoke about his love of the Queen, of the monarchy, of the military, but at the same time, spoke about his embrace of more progressive causes. And it was a fantastic essay, I thought, and wonderfully argued. And what he was basically saying was, diversity and tradition can go together, they don't have to be mutually exclusive. One can inform the other in positive and constructive

ways. And I think Southgate's England have done more than most to unite many behind the sense of progressive Englishness, I think. But Jason, a slightly more jauntous take on the mirror that football holds up to England would surely be that for most fans, and I'm aware that both of you are much keener fans than I am, but I would guess that clubs are much more important ultimately than perhaps the national team and those clubs there's the idea that jumpers for goalposts local boys growing up

going through the the various squads and then playing for their local team I mean that's the kind of the fantasy that club teams embody and it is a complete fantasy as as you well know because basically the club particularly uh the um the absolute elite clubs are basically as we've been seeing very recently ways for various kleptocrats and oligarchs to um you know to to wash their their dirty linen in a way football is the embodiment of everything that the little man out in the provincial town feels about globalisation. That everything that was local is now a tiny cog in the great churning machine that is globalisation. Just to jump in before Jason, isn't that what that Super League furore,

which was an extraordinary moment, I mean, such a huge story for a few days. Isn't that what it encapsulated, Tom? The idea that something profoundly English had been hollowed out and was about to be lost, and the local was about to be utterly crushed by this idea of an elite, a sort of plutocratic elite but but also i mean there was a match when um chelsea played newcastle just after abramovich had been sanctioned

and yeah johnson was about to fly out to saudi arabia to to beg him for more oil at the same time as um you know 81 people had been executed in saudi arabia and the the sense that you know these two great historic teams with their devoted fan bases were both the toys of these kind of terrible people was i thought a kind of quite sobering moment i think so tom i think i mean the club's certainly the highest level of the premier League, the Premier League is kind of one of the ultimate expressions of let it rip, rapacious, free market globalisations. But the clubs themselves is one of the things for which england is best known today around the world i mean everyone in china knows manchester united and liverpool but that's also why the national team matters because um it's separate from the clubs you know it's not owned by a a gulf autocrat or a russian um what are they called oligarchs um hobsbawm eric hobsbawm the historian said it said something

i like he said the imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people and you see that too in cricket tom i mean you're you're a great fan okay so what but jason what i'd say about that is that um i mean pretty much every country has a football team has a national football team i mean you could say that about italy you could say it about germany say it about spain you say about brazil i mean you could say that about Italy, you could say it about Germany, you could say it about Spain, you could say about Brazil. I mean, you could say that countries across the world. Is there anything particularly English about supporting your national team? No, but what we're talking about is how the England team is an expression of the changing English nation. And it's a contested identity. I think we wouldn't

be having this conversation if we didn't believe it's a contested identity. And football has been one of the, the English football national team has been one of the means by which we have grappled with this contested identity and also begun to understand how the nation has changed and who the English are today. You're right, Tom, when you said at the beginning, some of my black friends, particularly in the 80s and 90s, were very uncomfortable about blackness and Englishness. And they would describe themselves as black British, first and foremost. That was a distinct identity for them. But what we've seen in recent times, delightfully in my view, is a black English identity developing.

And I think that's all for the good. And I welcome it. Can I change the focus a little bit? So we started with Orwell, who, I mean, he's politically so hard to pin down, but let's just say for the sake of argument, at least initially a man of the left, you edit a magazine that's traditionally been seen as left of centre magazine. And for as long as you have edited it, I think you have run stories. I mean, I've written, I wrote one of them myself, about the left and Englishness and the problem with Englishness about the need, I mean, people

were arguing about this with the so-called blue labour moment at the beginning of the 2010s. And you talk in the book about the sort of the death of a kind of Labour England. Do you think there is a kind of way back for the left in england and kind of with england i suppose or because of course there as we said earlier there are so many people on the left for whom the very idea of england and englishness is is unsettling and they don't like it um so how do they get that back yes i think i think it's a huge it's a huge challenge for the left and particularly for the labour party because the labour Party was once so strong in Scotland, where indeed it was hegemonic. In the 2015 general election, Ed Miliband went into that election with 41 of the, many of them are now nationalists, and they've embraced the SNP, not least because the SNP have power and are in control of the money. And all the institutions that are built around power and government are now with the nationalists. So what does Labour have to do? If Labour is ever to win a majority

again in the United Kingdom, it has to start winning in England. But what we saw at the last general election in particular was a huge rejection of the Labour Party in many of its traditional heartlands, in the north of England, in the Midlands. You know, it can't, it loses in Essex, where I'm from. I don't think there's a single Labour constituency in Essex. But if it's ever to start winning again, it has to reconnect with many of its traditional voters. Those who want, you know, Labour, the Labour Party was founded to represent the Labour interest, organised Labour, but it was always an uneasy coalition between organized labor and what you might say the Fabian or Hampstead intellectual. The prune juice drinkers.

Yes. Whatever you call those people, they founded the New Statesman in 1913. But that coalition, if not definitively broken, is fractured into multiple pieces. And Labour is very strong in the cities, in London, in Manchester, in Liverpool, in Cambridge, in Oxford. It's strong among the educated, urban middle class, and very weak everywhere else. And that's not a stable coalition to win. I mean, one of the things that does strike me about England, and I think you could say Britain more generally over the past 10 years, I mean, it's clearly been a very, very convulsive, turbulent, exhausting period, and very upsetting for a broad range of people for all different

kinds of reasons. But I think you could also say that it's been an affirmation of the commitment of England and Britain, perhaps more generally, to principles of democracy. Because what we've seen is how turbulent democracy can be. We have had two existential referendums. We've had one on the very makeup of the country that we live in. And we've had another on the most significant foreign affairs context within which Britain had operated. And we have had referendums on both, and we have abided by the results on both. And also, however much criticism one might level at a parliamentary system, and first past the post, it has facilitated the articulation of some quite kind of radical

positions. So whether that's the SNP in Scotland, whether that is Nigel Farage, who you have cited as perhaps the most influential political figure in recent history, even though he's never been an MP, or Corbyn, and giving a voice to the further reaches of the Labour Party on the left. So couldn't you say that, in a sense, although things may look bleak for Labour, they're still all to play for? Because at the moment, we're on such a roller coaster, we don't quite know where we're going to get to. Yes, I think all of that. I think expect the unexpected. I think the reason Brexit was such a shock for the cognitive elite, to use a David Goodhart phrase, was because it was so unexpected. Orwell, in the essay we've cited throughout this podcast,

uses a phrase about the elites receiving a tug from below when ordinary people are heard. And they were certainly heard loud and clear during that Brexit referendum. And it was such a shock. It swept David Cameron out of power. It brought Boris Johnson ultimately to 10 Downing Street. And it was an exercise in democracy. Am I being overly nationalist if I say that actually other European Union countries had referendums on similar issues and when the electorate delivered the wrong result, they were told to go and vote again? They were told to go and vote again, indeed, which was what a lot of ardent Romanians wanted,

didn't they? They wanted the electorate to think again and they wanted the second referendum. But to decide such an important fundamental part of British foreign policy, in other words, membership of the European Union on a single binary plebiscite as David Cameron did, was an extraordinary exercise in risk-taking, wasn't it? Well, it was. It was. But again, as with the Scottish referendum, in a sense,

these were commitments that had been made by parties in general elections. And so therefore, you could say, well, it shows that British democracy is working because Farage was obviously the spokesman for a vast constituency of people who were not being represented by any of the major political parties. And yet British democracy served to give a referendum. Just to give a sort of more historical spin on that as well, isn't there something, I always think when you look back at the politics of the last, what are we talking, sort of seven or eight years, there's something very 18th century about it all. It's rambunctious, it's boisterous. It's often been very vulgar and very – there's been bad behavior on all sides. There have been demonstrations.

But even the nature of the arguments, you know, is Britain exceptional or is Britain part of a European community? And town and country. Town and country. I mean, these are all – and the sort of the clash of temperaments that people like Robert Toombs, the historian Robert Toombs talk about, the dissenting Whiggish sort of middle classes and the sort of Toryism, the kind of Dr. Johnson, John Bullish side of Englishness. I mean, all of that would be instantly recognizable to somebody in 1760 or 1770 or something, don't you think? I do. And as would the sense of an open exchange of ideas, the coffee houses and the boisterous debates that took place in the taverns and in the public prints. And I think it's been an extraordinary period. And Tom's right. It's been turbulent, it's been boisterous, it's been unsettling. We've been deeply polarized. And what comes next? I think that's the question. Do we have, ultimately, Tom, a second referendum

in Scotland? Does the Scottish national question return to break the British state decisively? Or will it be indefinitely delayed? I don't know. But I don't think this period of turbulence is over. I mean, my feeling is that if the nationalists can't get past 50% at the moment, I can't see them ever doing it, to be honest. In the polls, time will tell. Time will tell. Dominic's point about the 18th century is an interesting one. Orwell in his essay says, what can the England of 1840 have in common with the England of 1940? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Orwell says nothing, except you happen to be the same person. Yeah, I love that passage. I love that. And I think that's what interests me and what I've attempted to explore in the book is this sense of a changing changelessness. What are these continuities through time that connects the English present with the deeper

English past? And that's why I'm so interested in the interplay of paradoxes that we touched on before the ad break. And I think something about changing changelessness defines who we are today. So it really is plus un change, as John Bull would put it. Jason, thanks so much. That was a brilliant tour de force. It was.

It was wonderful. And Jason's book is Who Are We Now? Stories of Modern England. And I can't recommend it too highly. And it makes you proud to live in a country full of paradox. Thanks so much, Jason. Thanks all for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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