The great British culture crisis…

Gerald Dawe wrote in a 1994 essay that:

“There are parallels that can be pursued between the Northern Protestant situation today, and what might emerge in England in, say, twenty-five years when ordinary English men and women can no longer take for granted the stability and reliability of a given history and a cultural identity based unthinkably upon the post-World War II past.”

What is striking is that Dawe foresaw this identity crisis nearly to the year. On his estimate it would place it on 2019, I would argue it began with the 2016 referendum result and reached its pinnacle moment in 2019 with Boris Johnson’s majority. His party saw the election for what it was, a clambering for stability by a lower middle and working class English electorate that had been crudely destabilised by the 2008 crisis and a feeling that power was slipping further from their grasp – “take back control.”

Fintan O’Toole is most attributed with this analysis of Brexit and the general events of the last few years since the vote. He attributes it to (a confused)‘English nationalism,’ in an interview with the guardian on his latest book he says:

“There’s no WB Yeats of English nationalism. So it’s not very well articulated. It’s a set of feelings rather than a political programme and Brexit offers itself as the way to address it. It says here’s the way to express yourself with an English identity. But it doesn’t answer it.”

What is again striking in O’Toole’s analysis is the parallel between this idea of Englishness with the idea of ‘Britishness’ or ‘Anglo-Irishness’ of the Northern Protestant. Like Daw I hail from this community and understand full well the frustrations at the stereotypes that all too often our self-appointed ‘leaders’ (mostly of the socially conservative variety) slip into. The caricature of the xenophobic Englishman is what the Ulster protestant has had to endure since partition.

Daw outlines this in his compilation of essays ‘the sound of the shuttle’ released recently by Irish Academic Press. In it he casts an eye over the history of Belfast’s industrial expansion, the sneering observation of this by outsiders like Keats and the general failure by writers down the ages in their understanding of the northern Protestant identity. I will say that like Englishness it is a sometimes confused identity, one of hybridity, something scorned often by the poets such as Yeats in his earlier work that pursued a pure Celtic Ireland (although himself a protestant).

He points to Beckett “of having to think about one’s cultural position, of being literally ‘self-conscious.’ More often than not this ‘self-consciousness’ is lost whether by the pursuit of profit in the booming Belfast industries or today when we go in our thousands to English universities never to return. Yeats eventually found his roots and the ‘self-consciousness’ reappeared when in his later work his poems took a sharper turn, a grittier turn and a tone of almost regret that he had in part caused many young Irish men to meet their death in a struggle against the British state. It is like the gritty realism of Northern culture balances out the dreamy romance of an ‘Celtic’ culture.

The ‘Ulsterisation’ of British politics (moreover English politics) described by Sam McBride eloquently in this piece have not receded because a stable majority has been obtained by the Tory party. That victory has been built on the back of such a stratification of political positioning, the regions so long left behind want their self-esteem returned to them, they have done this by harnessing that ‘self-consciousness’ realism borne so long by their cousins across the Irish sea.

What will this great parallel of identity in crisis yield? Let us hope that this hybridity and self-consciousness can lend itself to our neighbours whether it be in building a stable Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom or within a new Irish state. Let us lend ourselves to either endeavour with the same strength of conviction and zeal that we had in building up the great industries of the 19th century (Catholic, Protestant and other). And not borrow from our English cousins the traits they appear to be borrowing from us…

Photo by Emily Wilkinson is licensed under CC0

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