The best that can be said is that it's
still got green things in it.
After two years of
Japan, these pictures follow my temporary “return” to the United
Kingdom. Maybe soon the Not-So-United Kingdom if the Scots go independent
next year. Something to think about: who gets the UK's current seat
on the UN Security Council if that happens?
The UK was never
the place I wished to be, nor is it any more so now. But getting
outside London to quieter areas where people are friendlier, and
society not quite so obliterated by the Conservative Party's assault
on all that is good in basic humanity, can offer much-needed fresh
air both literal and figurative. These are the Malvern Hills, a ridge
in the West Midlands near the border with Wales.
Unlike Japan,
England lacks proper mountains and has little left in the way of
wilderness (another thing that sets it apart from Scotland and
Wales). The human presence has thoroughly terraformed virtually every
part of the country it has touched. As such, however picturesque the
countryside, there is no getting away from the UK's persistently
ominous human context.
Last week, acting
on government orders, the police arrested the partner of a Guardian
journalist at Heathrow Airport. They interrogated him for nine hours,
threatening him with prison, and seizing his mobile phone, laptop,
memory sticks, and even his game console: because they feared he was
carrying material related to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, and
the exposure of the systematic spying of British and American
authorities on their own citizens and who knows what else.
So
of course the police invoked anti-terrorism legislation to do this,
while politicians have been bringing out their usual fearmongering
rhetoric about aiding terrorists and the like. As if this were not
enough, the Prime Minister then saw fit to have The
Guardian newspaper threatened
into physically destroying its computers containing Snowden-related
materials, even sending government thugs to go in and oversee that
destruction.
There has of course been a public outcry, and a corresponding
counter-outcry. But this affair stands out not for being exceptional,
but, on the contrary, being typical in the Britain of today. The
sequence seems to go:
a)
Someone does something utterly reprehensible.
It may be political repression like the above, from harassing
journalists to covering up crimes against humanity in the name of
“national security”; or it may be a socio-economic atrocity
wrought under the Conservatives' austerity programme; or it might be
something xenophobic, like the billboard vans threatening immigrants,
or the UK Border Agency randomly interrogating black or brown people
in train stations. Britain is fertile ground for generating creative
forms of cruelty these days.
b)
A lot of people protest and make angry noises.
c)
The bad guys defend the indefensible.
It's always the same arguments – security, counter-terrorism, the
economy, immigration, and so on – the same buzzwords and boogeymen
brought in to justify the same derelictions of humanity, be it
persecuting whistleblowers, widening the gap between the privileged
elite and the most vulnerable's abject misery, or intimidating
foreigners out of plain racism.
d) No-one is properly held to account, and things get worse.
The
thing is, it isn't just monsters in the government, or the banks, or
the police, or the Murdoch press that are responsible for this. The
problem is not just a political but social. Too many people have
embraced these repressive or prejudicial currents, and given them
prominence; too many see fit to make themselves comfortable with the
infliction of shocking cruelties on other human beings, and to
justify that as acceptable, even as necessary,
for a functioning country.
The
British know all this, of course, whether they deplore this state of
affairs (which I hope most do) or live in denial. I wonder how
familiar this is to those outside the UK though? It seems staggering
to me that so many people want
to go and live there; still more staggering that it can still be
defined in global consciousnesses more by romanic imaegs of the royal
family and red buses and union jacks than by the relentless decay of
the actual circumstances for people in it.
Beneath those postcard pictures, this is a country whose defining
dynamic is – and perhaps always has been – conflict. It is
diverse, like perhaps all countries, but beneath its courteous
veneers there rages as vicious a struggle as any between competing
visions of what kind of country it should be. Britain has no singular
cultural base, no dominant heritage to answer that question: there is
no such thing as British ethnicity, Britain's national identity
itself the emergent of hundreds of years of immigration since time
immemorial.
At the south end of the Malvern hills, there stands this hill fort.
Appropriately for this discussion, it's known as “British Camp”.
It is thought to date back about 2200 years, to the UK's Iron Age,
and the archaeology hints at hundreds of years of struggle on this
site since then to define where different Britishnesses began or
ended. The Romans (from Italy); the Normans (from France); the
Anglo-Saxons (from Germany); the Vikings (from Scandinavia); the
Welsh; even bickering dynasties of local nobles, their names adorned
with fancy titles and numerical suffixes, are thought to have
contested these beacons. The Victorians liked the water that came
from these mountains, and developed an infrastructure to draw on it –
and theirs were harrowing visions for Britain if anyone's were. And
when you walk on this ridge nowadays, chances are that you'll
encounter, as I did, people of origins even further afield, talking
perhaps in Polish or Chinese or Punjabi, or with accents from the
Caribbean or the United States; all part of a Britain which still
fights with itself over what “British” means, what “human”
means, and what the relationship is between them.
So let's be clear:
Britain's heritage is not something to celebrate or be proud of. It
is certainly not the case that respect for liberty, diversity and
human righs are the defining characteristics of its national DNA.
Rather they represent at most just one strand of what is still a
double helix, with the other coded from horror and atrocity that must
equally be faced up to. Political repression; power-tripping
authoritarianism; an addiction to punishment and fear and demands for
obedience; and the most harrowing crimes against humanity based on
supremacisms and prejudices across the whole bloody spectrum.
Racisms, sexisms, heteronormativisms, ageisms, fear and hatred of all
who could possibly in any way at all be construed as “different”,
as “other”: Britain's problem may be not just that these are its
problems, but that these became part of what it is.
Is that why the
political, social and economic abuses of today are so accepted here?
When David Cameron orders a newspaper's computers destroyed, or Home
Office thugs round on random Muslims in broad daylight, or success
and failure is judged by abstract economic indicators instead of
actual human experiences and sufferings; is it because that kind of
human callousness is so established in the long British story that no
critical mass can be reached to strike them down? Do they weave on
ancient threads, the likes of colonialism, massacres abroad,
religious persecutions, witch-burning hysterias, and the never-ending
examples of that most unpardonable and foolish of mistakes: the
belief that more force, more fear, is the answer to any problem?
I cannot purport
to suggest solutions to Britain's problems. It is not a country I
identify with; after the things I experienced on account of it, with
the frameworks of alienation and paradigms of persecution of the
“different” still in place here, it is sadly not a society I can feel at
peace with, let alone yet consider reconciliation.
What I feel,
though, is that to even begin to pass as a decent country, let alone the 'green and pleasant land' of its dreams, it will
have to find it in itself to change at a fundamental level. To find
the humility to come to terms with the worse parts of its heritage,
and categorically deny them a place in its future. To get past its
hypnosis on abstract nothings and self-justifying dogmas – the
faith of economics, “interest”-driven politics and foreign
policy, “democracy”, “development” and so on – and come to
measure its worth in terms of how its real decisions affect real
human beings, and take responsibility. To recognize that Britain's
heroes, who fought against tyranny and slavery and patriarchy and so
on, fought not against fearsome demons on the deepest floors of
dungeons far across the sea, but against Britain itself:
against a country which held so many bloodlusts and bigotries to be
natural, normal and just.
Britain has
nothing to fear from immigrants, or dissidents, or deserters, or
whistleblowers, or the deficit. First it should fear itself: that
half of its own soul that hungers for blood at the very mention of
such things. The true enemy of
British human beings is British inhumanity.
