I am sure there will be many who are in the ‘Told-You-So’ mode as the current administration in Westminster lurches from mishandling to mishandling since the Johnson election propelled, with a substantial majority, the Brexit-bearing wing of the Tory party into power. The fact that many of the leading figures have gone AWOL, and left an inexperienced and uncertain leadership in place, brings a worrying reality into focus.
Brought up on the understanding that London ‘knows best’ is not something easily flushed out of the collective system. I, for one, think back to growing up as a young boy in 1950s Belfast with a sense that everything from medical to educational to cultural ‘policy’ was handled by experts, with real knowledge and the authority to make informed decisions concerning ordinary people’s health and educational opportunities, irrespective of their class, gender or ethnic background. Dream on. It was a cruel fantasy but the legacy of which the sixties did, in part, reflect and consolidate until, in Northern Ireland, the Troubles blew the lid off the whole thing.
The corporate Thatcherite years which followed were meant to produce a new technocratic revolution in the renovated UK. Did that happen? I don’t know. But in the re-run of the endless anxiety and tug-of-war about where England actually sits in the political order of post-Cold War Europe, we are left, those of us schooled in that egalitarian dream-time, admitting that the England of today looks, under the Johnson administration, already tattered and tawdry, indeed inept and under-resourced and drawing the country into a much deeper sense of crisis than that which Brexit was reputedly going to override.
The sunny uplands are looking more and more like a mess of empty promises, false hype, and unimpressive planning. How this will all pan out in real-time is for others, who are experts in economic policy and global trade relations, to analyse and project.
However, one shouldn’t allow the Johnson government to get in the way of the long-standing cultural and intellectual relationships between both Northern Ireland and the Republic and England. The academic connections pre-date the EU and will outlast Brexit, if enough thought goes into the unfolding situation.
For instance, the ties of historical links between Irish writing and England – English publishers, theatres, festivals, and all the other literary-cultural outlets – are just too important to become frozen or, even worse, subject to the lies on buses which delivered the Brexit-bound fantasy to the politics of the UK.
Whatever about our differing views on many things the opportunities which English centres of cultural activity and recognition have offered to generations of Irish writers are indispensable. And now, maybe more than before, the Irish reciprocation might well need revisioning and rebooting.
Recently, reading Hilary Mantel’s fiction, literary journalism and memoir brought to mind such an utterly different worldview to that currently on display in the major media outlets, that it was a bit of a shock.
The steadfast ironies of playwright Alan Bennett’s diaries and his unstinting defence of national institutions such as the NHS and the library services of England, long pre-date the current critical moment. And so many poets, novelists, dramatists, from so many different ethnic, gender and cultural backgrounds stand for versions of England and Englishness much more inclusive, challenging and open than the caricatures presently on display.
But perhaps more than this, the political ineptitudes and moral jiggery-pokery of Johnson’s government will become increasingly more obvious as the social impact of the pandemic and Brexit merge and filter through the stunned levels of mainstream multicultural English society.
The lethal mix of arrogance and incompetence is reminiscent of Edward Heath’s short-lived premiership which produced such civic damage, particularly in regard to Northern Ireland, but also in the manner in which it led towards Thatcher’s regime and the self-inflicted Poll Tax mess, among many other national blunders.
Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic but is there anything convincing in the current UK government to inspire even the most restrained and reasonable of Tory voters, wherever they are, watching what is happening to their country, and knowing full well the drama unfolding before their eyes has nothing to do with Europe this time around.
As Lisa Appignanesi presciently put it in Everyday Madness (2018): ‘Wresting control from [the EU] seemed to provide an excuse for being out of control at home. It was not so much a question of ‘taking control’ back to Parliament as of unleashing self-control in the name of ‘righteous’ rage’.
Cue Mr.Cummings, entering into the garden, 10 Downing Street, somewhat like an actor in a Jacobean drama.
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Gerald Dawe’s The Sound of the Shuttle: Essays on Cultural Belonging and Protestantism in Northern Ireland was published by Irish Academic Press earlier this year.
“John O Gaunt” by jack_pickard is licensed under CC BY-ND
Gerald Dawe is a Belfast-born poet. He was professor of English and fellow of Trinity College Dublin until his retirement in 2017. He has published twenty collections of poetry and literary criticism, including most recently, The Last Peacock and The Sound of the Shuttle: Essays on Cultural Belonging & Protestantism in Northern Ireland.
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