England: a National Disgrace. posted by Richard Seymour

A dissection of David Aaronovitch's England.

Here's the title:

English actually

It's about time that we stopped being afraid of celebrating our nationality. After all, we can be quite nice

David Aaronovitch
Sunday November 23, 2003
The Observer

Of course "we" can, David. You were just being "nice" when you slandered the left by association with anti-semitism , accused them of being liars and ... oh, what was it? Apologists for genocide? Something like that.

Aaronovitch's little dream sequence is apparently prompted by the victory over Australia in the rugby. Two points - a, noone watches Rugby and b, "we" couldn't possible have lost.

Mark this :


"The occasional great win becomes England even more than always losing - it's winning all the time that is alien to us. The period of Empire, when we - together with fellow Britons - ruled arrogantly over millions of foreigners in faraway lands, sometimes seems like a departure from national character, an unpleasant aberration - a bit like a staid aunt getting drunk and making fart jokes on New Year's Eve."

No, dear, taking a vast chunk of the planet by force and subjecting them to extreme oppression and slavery is not "like a staid aunt getting drunk and making fart jokes on New Year's Eve". And several hundred years is a very lengthy aberration indeed. Funny how it took a series of Marxist and nationalist rebellions to shake the drunk old slag to her senses, no?

"We will now see a resurgence of discussion about Englishness."

How good of you to make the first contribution, David, but do you think you could keep it in perspective a bit? "The coincidence of the World Cup victory with two new movies that are centred in notions of England and its history" may well form the occasion for a lengthy mastubatory fit of nationalism on your part, but I wonder how many of the 58 million residents of England are now hastily jotting down notes from Simon Schama, Roy Foster and Norman Davies, ready for the next pub discussion about "Englishness"?

"We have always known what Irishness is, of course".

Of course "we" have, David! The fact that "we" were in their country for a few hundred years might be considered a good reason to be thoroughly well acquainted with "what Irishness is". But I wonder if perhaps "our" understanding of "Irishness" isn't perhaps a kind of Orientalism - you know what I mean, the Irish are childish, suspicious, given to fantasy, good liars, lazy, untrustworthy, full of native good humour, illogical etc etc. Irishness, perhaps, is not much more than Oirishness in this context.

"But Englishness has had nothing to push against. It sometimes becomes easier to know what it isn't."

Yes? Go on...

"In August, on the hottest day of a hot summer, walking down the high street through a sea of heat, I did not feel as though I was in England. Somehow the sun had changed everything, in much the way that darkness or disaster do. London had become somewhere else."

Ah, so it's the weather that makes me peepers go squinty! Too roight, Meeery Popins. Nowt but a loada bleedin owld rain!

"Vomiting on the pavement is to England what circumcision is to many African tribes - a painful and messy rite of passage."

Well, dear, not everyone gets to read one of your articles, but I daresay there is something decidedly "English" about that yank of the guts as you realise you're consuming undiluted drivel.

"Our ambivalence about victory and defeat, our desire to see ourselves as part of the small battalions (even our pageantry has a Ruritanian quality, maintained in the face of modernity), are what gives World War II its particular value for us."

Not the defeat of Fascism, then? No, the English troops were charging into occupied France thinking "Ooh, does my battalion look big in this?"

"Despite the best attempt of our hooligans to prove him wrong, England remains as Orwell described it - characterised by a complacent gentleness in which fascists do not get elected to very much, and where populists are treated with suspicion."

Orwell's description of 'old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning'
might inspire a little scepticism in most, but as far as Aaronovitch is concerned, the Sixties never happened - and, God willing, they never will.

"We are fonder of under - rather than overstatement."

But not overly strong on our sense of irony, if the rhetorical bombast of this article is anything to go by.


"But the overwhelming characteristic of the English is the way in which tradition and modernity operate in a constant dialectic."

Now, now. We're entering dangerously New Labour territory here ... traditional values in a modern setting, hmmm?

"Take the rural idyll. Every few months an otherwise rational English writer or journalist announces that he or she has sold up and moved the family to some place that has two names, rather than just one."

Is this irony intentional, or unintentional? How far can David go before the editor realises he's taking the piss?

"There can be no other country where a complete genre of aspirational programmes consists of people getting out of cities and moving to the country (sometimes any country will do)."

I doubt if David watches a lot of Icelandic television, or even scans the German channels for the late night porn. But this, I suspect, is a delivery of instinct. England is SUCH a rural country, so it must be true. It's self-evident, is it not?

"Richard Curtis works both sides of this line. City singletons live interesting lives in semi-communes, before finding happiness in a castle. The pull of the country house is always there, but he acknowledges the vigour of the city. In this hugely urbanised country he is right to do so."

And this, my fellow outpatients, is where we're finally let in on the joke. Curtis obviously gave Aaronovitch a quick phone call and said "look, is it possible you could concoct some ridiculously bloated, pompous load of old cobblers for the Observer and make it an ad for my film? It's just that some people are having a go at me for not representing England realistically. It's almost as if they think I'm painting a caricature of Merrie Little Englande just to sell my movie to naive Americans."

Don't believe me? Read on!

"It struck me, after Love Actually, that one of the most distressingly authentic moments of Englishness was when a critic expressed the wish that the 10-year-old character's precocity be rewarded with 'a clip round the ear'. We are still a nation that likes to beat its kids."

That's appalling in any country, let alone a nearby one. But I wonder if David missed the even more startling and brutal reality that we like to bomb kids with some regularity too?


"I hope that Master and Commander will supersede Braveheart, Rob Roy and all those other movies where the English are seen as effete sadists who cannot pleasure their spouses. It contains a more essential truth about the English than do those travesties."

Quite. Showing the English engaging in a bit of derring-doo bravery is "essential truth" while showing them as colonial occupiers and sadistic is a travesty. Flawless logic. I'll let the next bit speak for itself:

"We can be a bloody good lot, and - just for today, accusations of smugness notwithstanding - we are going to make sure that everyone knows it."