ERO: First they came for the immigrants
What being British means; Routemaster buses
Learning outcomes
Is there any more apt Tory truism than, ‘you don't know what you’ve had until you’ve lost it’? The news that the Home Secretary has dragged Sir Bernard Crick in his wake from the Department for Education, and tasked him with heading a committee that will report on ‘citizenship reforms’, should bring an especially guilty form of sorrow to all Conservative hearts. For what Sir Bernard will do for Mr Blunkett in his new role is exactly what he did his old, as chairman of the committee that produced the lamentable Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools in 1998. The bitter fruit of which is being harvested this very month with ‘citizenship’ becoming a compulsory part of the secondary school curriculum. But who ploughed this furrow to begin with? We, fools that we are, did, with the introduction of the national curriculum by the last Conservative government. Now we see the sort of weapon we have handed our enemies. However, worse by far than the nonsense being poured into the ears of children, is what the state will soon require of its new subjects. This is a fight that the Tory party ought to be engaged in might and main, but without doubt will choose instead to ally itself with the government, with progressive opinion and with the destruction of all that made Britain what she still is.
The specific purpose of the new Crick committee established by the Home Office is to flesh out the ‘citizenship’ requirement of the pending Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill. It is, in short, explicitly to be the ideological underpinning of the new regime. When new Britons-to-be make their approach here, they’ll be tested (in English, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic) to ‘show an understanding of UK society and civic structures’. Successful completion of this will lead to a suitably and newly minted citizenship oath and a ‘pledge at a formal ceremony’. To begin with the obvious absurdity of supposing that non-Anglophone immigrants will opt to be tested in anything other than English, can we perhaps deduce anything about the Government’s attitude towards Britishness that no theoretical sop was thrown towards Ulster, and that ‘Irish Gaelic’ is off the list? Of course we can, for the keystone of this government’s approach to British nationality is that when it finds a real test, it flunks it. We’ll return to what a state that mandates a notion of nationhood on the individual, yet cries off imposing it on the trickier types, means shortly, but why has as practical a fellow as David Blunkett decided to go down this fraught road?
The answer, very simply, is that this Home Secretary is starting with the newcomers on a crusade that will end up with him instructing all of us likewise. Let him speak for himself: ‘we want British citizenship to embrace positively the diversity of background, culture and faiths that living in modern Britain involves’ (except in Northern Ireland, naturally). There is an idea of Britishness here, it’s a very New Labour notion, and this government, unlike all its much more modest predecessors is going to make a fist of imposing this fantasy on actual, living Britons. We might be tempted to dismiss the notion that granting citizenship on the basis of passing a pop quiz of ones knowledge of received Blairite wisdom as the fatuous ‘change for change’s sake’ that it partially is. That the idea that someone who can answer such questions is, by virtue of that skill, more deserving of gaining citizenship than someone who cannot, is banal even by this government’s standards. But again, we should see the larger danger, the real assault: David Blunkett is going to take becoming British (and then, in time, being British) away from the simple, undemanding reality of proffering allegiance, to a state where adherence to an idea is the thing. Specifically, inevitably, his idea.
As ever, ignorance and racism explain why the government will receive much Tory support for this measure. For the Home Office loudly proclaims that the point of all this is making unsavoury foreign types a lot more decent, and thus a lot more congenial to us, by making them, well, more ‘British’. When in fact, they are doing nothing of the sort - the very process being attempted is in itself the negation of traditional Britishness. To see where this madness takes us we have only to look across the Channel to France. Robert Tombs, writing (in 1998) in the TLS, of the French attitude to nationality, and with specific reference to the question of ‘assimilation’ of France’s muslim population caught the issue perfectly:
the root of the [problem is] not in the inconsistency of past policy, but in the very consistency of the present-day 'neo-republican' concept of citizenship formulated in the 1980s, with its stress on formal acceptance of 'republican' principles of secularism and individualism . . . [this]compares a British approach which incoherent but works, with a French approach which is coherent but does not work. [Favell] is torn here and does not try to conceal his perplexity. He belabours French intellectuals and their republican myth-making, which raises unnecessary obstacles to political integration, and yet he admires the serious intellectual content of French debate and policy-making. He grudgingly admits the 'paradoxical' success of the British 'Old regime', whose post-imperial monarchy, unwittingly following Hobbes and Locke, proves easier to belong to than a forbiddingly austere republic.
If you doubt that Britain, of all countries, is set to the same rationalist fallacy as France, look only back to Prof. Crick and his committee.
Sir Bernard – a leading member of our foremost humanist and rationalist societies (so pleasingly Victorian that) – brings with him some trusty old warhorses of the New Left like Prof. Tim Brighouse, but most of the committee are relative virgins at this sort of thing. Indeed, and illustrative of the tokenistic racism that pervades this entire enterprise, although whitey in the form of Sir Bernard has been left in charge, of the 13 members, only four others are white. Because, of course, such is the moral bankruptcy of progressive thought, deed and behaviour in modern Britain, that certain jobs, even when they entail contemplating our ‘diverse’ national identify, are fit only for black people – and only black people are fit for them.
Being the good rationalist that he is, Bernard Crick knows full well what he is going to repeat with his work for this committee – and that’s a result consistent with his belief in ‘the standards of universal reason and human rights that arose in the eighteenth century of enlightenment’ [sic]. Much as his citizenship classes for children can be taught any which way, as long as they arrive at a single preordained outcome, his citizenship facts for adults will assuredly fail to tolerate only what the good knight finds intolerable. Though what that is, in light of his comment to the Rationalist Press Association – ‘how I wish that many popular journalists could be re-educated’ – is an open ended question.
To return to Robert Tombs
French and British policies rest on different traditions of what a nation is and should be. In France, the stress is on common culture, unity of purpose and adherence to universal principles. In Britain, toleration, allegiance, liberty of the subject and keeping the peace.
Your being British rests on what you are, and not on what David Blunkett tells you you should be. Look out for our newfound friends, for next the Government comes for you.
ERO on the buses
There are lines of argument that send the heart sinking, regardless of whether one has any idea what is being argued about. Take this as an example: ‘People will have to overcome their attachment to the double-decker bus and accept that the bendy bus is the future,’ says the chairman of the evidently radical millenarian pressure-group, the National Federation of Bus Users. ‘Hallelujah!’ some may say. All instinctive Tories will, however, upon reading this sentence, immediately embrace the double-decker bus and rain instinctive scorn on the oddly-named ‘bendy bus’ out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
In case you are baying for more detail, though, here it is. London Mayor ‘Red’ Ken Livingston is gearing up to introduce a not-really-very-red-at-all £5 daily toll on motor traffic into London in order to ensure that only very rich people can enter our city from February onwards. As a sop to hoi polloi, however, it has occurred to him that he probably ought to do something about London’s public – for which read ‘dysfunctional and expensive’ – transport system first. His solution? Ken plans to buy us all a fleet of bendy buses which he will then substitute for the much-loved Routemasters.
And we promise you, even if you know absolutely nothing else about buses, you’d recognise the Routemaster, the bright red double-decker behemoths that first turned up in London circa 1954. ERO has personal knowledge of children who grew up playing with diecast Routemasters everywhere from Malaysia and Kenya to North Carolina. Now that bobbies wear shellsuits and Dr Who-issue phone boxes have been turned into smelly plastic lean-tos, these buses are, along with the chimes of Big Ben, the only remaining filmic trope for ‘London’. How typical, then, that London, which spends fortunes trying to sell its ‘brand’ abroad, then goes and spends even more fortunes to get rid of something people actually liked about the place.
For the sake of balance, perhaps we ought to air a few of the arguments that pro-bendy modernisers adduce for their pet project. Apparently bendy bus can carry 140 people rather than the Routemaster’s 80 – although as 91 of these will have to stand, this won’t much help those with children, shopping or infirmities, which probably rules out most people anyway. The bendys have three doors rather than one, which we are told will decrease the time spent at bus-stops – something that ignores the remarkable ability of tourists to treat bus-drivers as guides, counsellors and even seers. Indeed, one of the most important motives is probably an unspoken one. The hapless have long had a propensity to fling themselves off the Routemaster’s platform into the traffic behind them, raising tiresome questions of liability. Perhaps Ken is full of particular solicitude for such people. But as for us at ERO, we’d rather take our chances than risk entombment for hours in some traffic-jam-stranded, aesthetically unsatisfactory nanny-bus. If this is the future, let us off now.
electricjotter, September 11, 2002 04:02 PM