Sorry We Are English

I USED TO THINK THAT MY GRANDFATHER, WHO LIVED from 1900 to 1991, had seen as much change as anyone ever would. Across his lifetime there was a breadth of technological and social revolution that would have seemed inconceivable to his forebears— jet airliners, plastics, atomic weapons, antibiotics, space travel, feminism, gay liberation.

His birth date defined many of his experiences against mine. All his life he preferred whisky to wine because when he was young, the wine on offer in Britain was either disgusting or hugely expensive. Unlike him, I have always enjoyed more than a choice between Algerian plonk and budget-busting Bordeaux.

He predated much of our modern standardisation. He never had to take a driving test; he just bought a car. He then had his first accident, aged about 17, in a vehicle in which the accelerator and brake pedals were reversed from the model on which he had learned.

When he first had a telephone line installed in his house, his number was only two digits long, and if he was not at home when you rang him, the operator would tell you where he was and when he would be back. Then in 1945, hav­ing become an MP, my grandfather met Stalin in a small, dark, overheated office in the Krem­lin—“a thug” as he recalled, but he then lived long enough to see glasnost and perestroika.

Now, I think I will live to see more changes than he did, because the British way of life that I remember from my own youth in the 1960s is long gone. At the age of eight, I was sent to a boarding school where we were drilled in privileges, responsibility and duty, were occa­sionally physically beaten for minor infractions, and attended chapel at least once a day and twice on Sunday. We were taught such useful things as the principal exports of Saskatchewan and how to express indirect speech correctly in Latin.

No one has to put up with things like that anymore, because the sturdy style of educa­tion I endured was designed to produce a kind of imperial administrator we no longer need. Our recently dethroned prime minister, Rishi Sunak, simply wanted us all to learn more mathematics for longer, to prepare peo­ple for hi-tech industry. He represented a new, non-traditional style of ‘conservatism’, but others on his side of politics are still actively concerned to shut down the genuine opportunities that British education once offered. Such people constantly call for the return of ‘grammar schools’, which didn’t teach a lot of grammar, but had selective admission poli­cies based on an entrance examination. They were originally intended to give the brightest pupils a more intellectual curriculum, regardless of their family’s income. Now, the advocates of grammar schools are simply trying to keep their children safe from the infectious degradation of the lower classes, to help their offspring get a clear run at the better-paid jobs. So grammar schools are no longer a way of giving lower-income families the chance to turn their children into higher earners, but of preserving the high incomes of higher-income families. As organs of social mobility, grammar schools have been converted into a means of preserving social inequality. Our long-departed King Edward VI (reign: 1547- 53), who founded many of the country’s most famous grammar schools, will surely be turning in his grave. (NB: I knew those dates from memory, as my old history teacher once required me to do. Under threat.)

I now believe that Britain has changed more in my lifetime than in my grand­father’s. British demographics have changed in three ways: our population has grown, it is more ethnically and religiously mixed than ever, and its age profile has massively changed with the survival of more people into old age than at any previous point. Britain is now older and less white than when either I or my grandfather was a child.

HIS COULD BE viewed simply as a modern circumstance, of no particular interest to anyone on a personal basis, but these two factors are beginning to produce what may be a much longer-term political change. It may be that the modern British Conservative Party is about to be rendered obsolete.

The general election of 2024 reduced Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives to 121 seats, their worst ever electoral result, which may well prove to be as pivotal a political moment as Clement Attlee’s election win in 1945, or Margaret Thatcher’s in 1979. Attlee led the first majority Labour government, riding a wave of national unity after the efforts of World War II. He founded the National Health Service (NHS), nationalised the railways and the coal mines, and actively began to unpick the seams of empire. Thatcher rejected the so-called ‘post-war consensus’ and changed British attitudes to taxation, welfare, nationalised industries and the regulatory role of the state. Both elections produced historic political turnings.

Now, as 2024 draws to a close, we see Keir Starmer’s newly elected Labour government level or lagging in the polls with the insurgent Reform UK Party, while the Conservatives languish behind both. The question is: If the Labour Party broadly represents the left of British politics, and the public have rejected the Conservatives as the main party of the right, who do the Conservatives now represent? They love to describe themselves as the most successful dem­ocratic political party in history, but now almost anyone with a grievance is holding it against some aspect of Conservative policy, and that includes mass immigration, which the Tories signally failed to control over the last 10 years.

The old Venn diagram of British politics used to have Labour and Conservatives as big circles which overlapped a little during the Blair and Cameron years (1997-2016). This diagram could be read from left to right more or less on a class and income basis, with some outliers—a handful of intellectuals and champagne-tippling columnists on the left, and a few post-Disraeli, patriotic, working-class Tories on the right—to disrupt the neatness of the picture. But the rise of Reform UK portends the end of this model.

Those who still have socialist principles— nationalised industries, generous welfare, anti-discriminatory legislation, a preference for socioeconomic equality—can still cleave to the Labour Party. But many among the low­er economic echelons who would never have voted Tory, especially those of senior status, are lapping up the populist solutions offered by Reform UK. Labour was always the party of the working classes, while the Tories tried to modernise by discarding their image as the party of business and rebranding themselves as the party of Britishness. Brexit was not a Tory party policy before the referendum of 2016, but it became closely associated with the party after it. Then a combination of the chaos surround­ing Brexit, the many disruptions of the Covid pandemic, and the relentless rise in both legal and informal immigration on the Tories’ watch allowed space for simpler policy solutions to appear to the right of the traditional Tory centre of gravity. Now Reform UK attracts not only hard-right Tories who feel their own party is too soft, but also former Labour supporters who believe that the party has abandoned the interests of the British working classes.

It remains to be seen whether these shifts are permanent, and we are not due another general election until 2029, but the chastened Tory party of 2024 is in danger of disintegrating, with its softer, socially liberal wing defecting to the Lib­eral Democrats, as many did in the 2024 election, while the hard right cultural supremacists feel they are only adequately represented by Reform UK. There is a slow flow of high-profile defectors from the Tories to the new outfit, and although it is not yet a flood, it might become one if the polls stay where they are. It is also hard to see how the Conservatives can develop a policy platform that seems convincing and distinct now that Reform UK has basically stolen their clothes on most of the traditional Tory issues that gave the party a viable base in both middle and working classes. Someone may soon be writing a sequel to The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935), titled something like ‘The Strange Death of Tory England’.

Politically, we don’t handle change very well in the UK. In 2019 we had a political party that was actually called Change UK which, by means of defection from the major parties, defended six seats in that year’s general election. All that it managed to change, however, was the number of its members, from six to zero.

But away from politics, British culture has been transformed over the last 40 years.

IT IS QUITE noticeable how the English language has changed. Idioms are never fixed, but they generally have some grounding in common experi­ence. This, however, no longer seems to apply. For instance, being ‘up to snuff’ used to mean being either good enough or mentally sharp. But young Britons now say ‘up to sniff’, which doesn’t have any obvious meaning, though it might owe something to the idea of passing ‘the sniff test’, meaning whether something seems fishy, especially in ethical matters. Perhaps young people have never encountered snuff, or are unaware of its stimulating properties, which were well known to Brits of other eras.

There are a host of other examples. For instance, people now talk about ‘honing in’ on something, where formerly they would have said ‘homing in’. ‘Homing in’ carries a real sense of getting near your destination and ignoring distractions. ‘Honing in’ doesn’t mean anything, except perhaps to whittlers of sticks, but you can find it everywhere. See also: ‘for all intensive purposes’, get­ting off ‘Scotch free’, being kept on ‘tender hooks’, having ‘another thing com­ing’, or making ‘a last stitch’ effort. Most of these are misplaced or mal-attached consonants, but as an older citizen, I must also comment about the inability of the younger generation to say anything without including the word ‘like’ somewhere, as in the middle of, like, a sentence.

Elsewhere, in modern Britain we now send half as many letters as we did 10 years ago, thus imperilling the viability of our postal service, which has just been bought by a foreign billionaire. About 1,000 people a year used to die in house fires in the 1980s. Happily, the figure is now around 300, largely because people smoke less, cook less, and our electrical appliances are generally wired properly. All good. Over the same period, road accident fatalities also came down by roughly the same proportion, but sadly this decline has now stopped and, because almost nothing has changed about cars, this may mean that we have reached the natural limit of our willingness to drive sensibly.

Understanding social change is difficult, but historians gain insights by looking at the laws that a society enacts, because legislators don’t ban things that no one is doing. So, when we look at a mediaeval society, we detect cheats and frauds, because there are multiple laws against adulter­ating food and drink, giving short weight, and clipping or forging coins. In modern Britain we have just passed a law making it illegal to steal cats and dogs. Under the Pet Abduction Act (2024), for the first time domestic pets are now treated as sentient creatures and not just as personal property. And what might that tell us?

An optimist might say that our desire to protect both distraught owners and distressed animals in this way speaks of our enhanced humanity. Or, a pessimist might despair that we have become so disconnected from our fel­low humans and the natural world that any­one could even think of doing something so loathsome. What a country. We can’t speak properly, or drive sensibly, and we have fallen into stealing each other’s pets to make a living. It almost makes me glad that an animal lover like my grandfather didn’t live to see it.

2025 New Year IssueBritish societycrimedemographygeographyJames McMurdockLee AndersonLondonNew Cross houseNigel FarageRichard TiceRupert LoweSouth London