It’s not all high tea and crumpets

Posted on December 28, 2009
Filed Under Society and culture, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

What’s going on with the UK?

Like a billion little pin-pricks, the myriad stories of the UK turning into a giant big-brother, police state are circulating, just under the surface of the regular media. I hadn’t been paying it no mind; I don’t necessarily remember the UK being that way, and it’s always a bit jarring to hear people describe it that way.

But. I DO remember the “twitchiness” in the air in the run-up to the time I left. A sort of perpetual calm-before-the-storm. It’s easy to forget about other parts of the country: I remember on some brief trips up north to places like Bradford and Manchester and having a very distinct feeling that there was something in the air; that it would only take a spark to light shit up once and for all…

High Tea

Those who have gone forth and colonised every nook and cranny of the globe tend to find that, even long after they’ve retired from their imperial adventures, the colonised have the annoying habit of following their erstwhile masters home. This irony surely is not lost on Britain: the British really are the devil everyone knows. Which makes them better than the devils noone knows. Which in turn makes everyone flock to them.

The Brits never did get to grips with being an immigration destination. It was never part of the plan. It wasn’t supposed to ever be a part of their history. It really wasn’t. So while places like the USA* and Canada have, just by dint of their evolution, and the action of a million different arrival events accreting into a vaguely accultured sense of ‘how to receive outsiders’, the UK has never had such precedents to borrow from. Not unless you go back to Normans, Celts, Angles and Saxons. Or even Vikings. And if I remember my high-school history, a lot of that was about conquest; not so much integration (though that did happen too).

The point is that “Great Britain” has spent a long time believing that Britons were simply better than anyone else. This wasn’t a narcissistic superiority complex. They weren’t out to eradicate everyone else. They just “understood” their superiority… based mainly on a long experience/history.

<aside>We also don’t help them in this regard -- I’ve met a lot of non-brits who believe that Brits really are superior. They believe this at a cellular level. They hear that quaint accent and wilt before the majesty and intelligence that is entirely presumed</aside>.

Now if that had been all there was to the British, their trajectory would have been very simple: they would have built the Great Wall of Britain, skewed the law so that you could not be naturalized by birth or by marriage, and they wouldn’t have bothered with ideals like the Commonwealth.

Any number of fairly xenophobic-till-recently countries could have been a perfect model for Britain. (And let’s not forget England’s Germanic heritage). After all, if you don’t brook any nonsense from outsiders from the get-go, nobody expects any better of you, no body comes to you, nobody tries to get IN, and everyone with the wrong ethnicity soon forgets about you as a DESTINATION for starting a new life. Some nations have pulled this off quite well. We don’t notice cos we’ve already written those nations off, which is exactly what they would prefer.

Unfortunately for the Brits -- and luckily for everyone else -- they had open-minded, liberal tendencies, and fancied themselves as RATIONAL people above all else. And so a draconian rebuttal of the incoming hordes was not available to their collective imagination till quite late in the game. (Though they did jump on that wagon, and quick).

Now, the schizophrenia induced by fond memories of old class structures and the exultation of Britishness (the Welsh, Irish and Scots would quickly argue “Englishness”), along with trying to do the right thing by people, has led to the state of confused division that Britain is now in.

It wants to be fair to immigrants.
It wants them out.
It wants to celebrate difference.
It is wary of the different.
It wants to be welcoming.
It is dislikes what outsiders bring into its midst.
It wants to be a part of Europe.
It does not.
It wants to uphold the law, and invididual rights and freedoms.
It wants to nip terrorism in the bud.
It wants everyone to live as equals.
It believes the different demographics are equivalent at best, but not equals.
It wants to tell it like it is.
It wants to be politically correct.

“Wait,” you might say.. “isn’t every nation on earth struggling under the weight of identical opposing pressures?”

Yes they are.

But the Brits believe.

They BELIEVE, rightly or wrongly, that they have what it takes to maintain such a balance. One of the key ways in which they try to do this is to provide equal opportunity for all (and as with most developed countries, they do this quite well, actually). And yet the opposing pressures take their toll. It is a continuing fight to prove that none of the items on my made-up list are mutually exclusive. To have one’s cake and eat it too.

Take London as an example. It’s a very multicultural city, but not in the way Toronto is, where you routinely see kids of every stripe hanging out together as one unit. Not the way I can walk down the street and see a Persian store flanked by Korean stores or a Caribbean restaurant smack-dab in the middle of Chinatown over here. Ghetto-isation was, for a long time, the modus operandi of multiculturalism in the UK (To be fair, ghettos are the most frequently-occuring first step on the long road to multiculturalism. The question is how much further you can move along that path. And I’m not saying Toronto is all peaches, necessarily, but its just further along**). I also distinctly remember that with school-children, they almost always went to school with, and hang out with, their own kind.

Crumpets

Another thing:  Brits are known the world over for football hooliganism. Although it’s prevalent in Europe in general, the Brits seemed, for a moment, to make it their national pastime to riot (talking of which -- if you want experienced riot police, hire the bobbies). Without trawling through the extensive literature on this subject I’m gonna just stick a finger in my mouth, pull it out and see which way the wind is blowing: yes -- I declare, almost on a whim, that it really boils down to the class structure struggles of that country. It is members of what they like to refer to as the ‘lower working class’, that engage in scuffles on and off the football pitch.

Then there are the pub fights, especially at ‘last call’ -- when drunken and irate males (this time, presumably, from any  stratum of that society) like to have a good brawl to finish off a good night out on the town.

Hooliganism and thuggish behaviour is just a natural outgrowth of a street (and in any other country, what would be called a ‘gang’) culture. Once again, the pervasive schizophrenia stops everyone short of calling an ass an ass -- for since it is supposedly quintessentially English to be a gentleman, and quintessentially English to exercise restraint, and quintessentially English again to not have to stoop to physical brawling of any sort to solve one’s problems, mainly because it is far simpler/safer to exercise the gentlemanly power (read: inherited wealth) available to one, the Britannia meme has consistently marginalised the way of life of an entire demographic (or two)… of what after all constitutes itself (the nation). Naturally the castoffs have been in a pissy mood ever since. Rightly so, perhaps. My guess is that demographics which celebrate machismo generally grow out of having needed machismo to get by/make ends meet, at one point. Or as a collective sort of coping mechanism. Long after that mode of survival is not needed anymore, its remnants will already have become a part of the prevailing culture. So I don’t know exactly what birthed Brit thuggery, but we can be pretty sure some people needed to resort to that, at one point. Too bad it’s still here, that’s all I’m saying.

Another thing: hooliganism and its related activities, as with gang culture, captivates the minds of the next generation, and British youth are now amongst the most feared, planet-wide, as far as fear-of-our-own-kids goes. “FOOOK” is a growing planetary phenomenon, but the Brits have it REAL bad. I don’t know why that is. Were they the first to stop disciplining their kids? (running joke: everyone who is not British has parents who have decided that this is precisely what must have happened. The rest of us have been threatened enough times with ‘becoming like these british kids who don’t respect their parents‘ to know. :-) ).

<aside>

So it is with great interest that I was in the movie theatre the other day, when a trailer for Harry Brown came on.

HOLY ****, I thought. Are they really gonna put this in a movie? Instead of say, some series on Channel 4 with Helen Mirren as head cop? This is like, a *hollywood* movie, shedding light on the seedy underbelly of Britannia’s housing estates…

I’ve gotta see this. And, it’s Michael Caine. How can I resist?

</aside>

I do hope the UK can pull off it’s balancing act. If anyone can, I would hope they can… they’ve had too long of a history to not have learned how to pull something like that off, surely?

And as I said, it’s not ALL high tea and crumpets.
It’s a good place. No, seriously… it is.

***

*Actually -- the USA is, officially and emphatically, NOT an immigration destination. This is what they want everyone to believe. They are much chagrined that noone actually believes this.

**Further along on that particular continuum. I still think Toronto has a LOOOONG way to go in terms of becoming a great city in other respects.

- One final note: I know that Welsh, Scottish and Irish hate the use of the word ‘British’ in places where they feel ‘English’ would be a lot more accurate, so I apologise for my erm… laziness.

Tenuously Linked (blame my tagging):

• Running scared of ‘Precious’?
• District9 vs the ‘America under attack’ meme
• Fitness amongst human languages

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