Robert Jenrick, in his bid to become the next leader of the Conservative Party, last week wrote an hysterical commentary in the Daily Mail claiming that “the very idea of England is at risk”. Confirming the party’s unassailable lurch to the right in recent years, the piece is unapologetically anti-immigration and he predictably puts the blame for a divided nation firmly on the shoulders of the “metropolitan establishment” whose attitudes and policies he blames for weakening English identity.
Because he’s keen to link what he perceives as a fraying national identity to increased immigration, Jenrick concentrates his concerns on England, which, as he puts it, has borne the brunt of mass immigration. He writes as if immigrants exist in a bubble with no acknowledgement of their contribution to the economy and indeed to our culture. English cultural identity is, of course, inextricably intertwined with the wider British one.
Nigel Farage made similar comments at the recent Reform Party Ltd’s conference on the very same day that Jenrick’s article was published. Attributing the problem to the whole of Britain, his example of this crisis is that “people don’t know their neighbour’s names”. He is very worried about British culture, which he defines as “family, community and country”. One word away from being an exact carbon copy of Jenrick’s version: “family, community and nation”. But as Jenrick is quite happy for Farage to be invited to join the Tories, this is no surprise.
Jenrick, after having produced such a passionate piece mourning its diminishment, struggled to define what English identity actually is when pressed on Sky News. No wonder, when the deliberately nebulous descriptor of ‘family, community and nation’ was his main point of reference.
What is English identity or British culture?
Putting the three-word slogans aside, how others see us is a good indicator of how we outwardly express ourselves, and therefore to some degree our identity.
When people think of Britain, and England in particular, they often see our cultural identity expressed by the Royal Family, Downton Abbey, Shakespeare, certain sports like football, rugby, cricket and tennis, pragmatism, cups of tea, the Beatles, the BBC, pubs, and fish and chips. These may be clichés of our national identity, but they are not false.
However, as with most things, there is more to the story behind the image.
The class system and pragmatism
The Royal Family and Downton Abbey are representative of a very developed class system for which Britain is also famous. This system is beneficial only to a select minority yet it is totally ingrained into our culture.
All Things Bright and Beautiful is a classic British hymn sung by primary school children for generations. Verse three reads: “The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, And ordered their estate.”
Any child in France caught singing that would spark a local riot. But in Britain, and especially in England, we have the tendency to calmly accept our lot to the extent that Karl Marx was left utterly exasperated at our pragmatism and its complete rejection of the notion of pulling down the state. Britain, alone among other major European states, never produced a mass Marxist party, opting instead for the Labour Party which sought to work with the parliamentary system, rather than to overthrow it.
This parliamentary system, often referred to as the mother of parliaments and unironically quoted as a source of pride by Jenrick in his commentary, is the very same one that he voted to illegally shut down in 2019.
The arts and sport
We can be proud of our legacy. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, the Brontës, Austen, Dickens, Wordsworth, Orwell, Tolkien, Rowling, Zadie Smith: the list of globally renowned British authors, many English, is impressive and continues to grow.
Aside from literature, we have a world-renowned music industry. The Beatles remain the best-selling band of all time and since the 1960s British music has dominated popular music culture. The BBC is the world’s oldest national broadcaster and cultivates enormous soft power for Britain. It has adapted to changes over its long history from its wartime radio broadcasts and coded messages to the French Resistance, the World Service, shipping forecasts, and TV and radio shows to currently publishing the world’s largest website attracting an incredible 1.2 billion visits per month.
As for sport, football in its present form, rugby, and cricket all originated in the UK.
Jenrick and Farage make no mention of these impressive national cultural achievements. On the contrary, the Conservatives wanted to end the BBC’s charter and Lee Anderson ripped up a television licence reminder on stage at Reform Ltd’s conference. As for music, if the Beatles were starting out today, thanks to Farage’s Brexit, they may never have secured the Berlin gigs that defined the band they went on to become.
Since Jenrick’s party came to power in 2010, our state schools have sold off their playing fields by the hundreds, while private schools have acquired more land than ever. This sad fact was reflected in this year’s Olympic Games when, despite representing only 7% of the population, 33% of the 2024 Olympic squad were privately educated.
Pubs and fish and chips
Pubs are associated with Britain the world over and for centuries have been a meeting place for all walks of society. With their colourful names represented on pub signs by monarchs, various trades, hunting grounds, historic events and local folklore, they have been an important popular resource for affordable leisure, company and warmth for over 1,000 years.
What pubs are to beverages, fish and chip shops, in many ways, are to food. Introduced to the British by Jewish immigrants, they have been providing nourishing, cheap and warming meals across the land in their present form since Victorian times. The meal was considered so important to national morale that it was excluded from rationing during the first and the second world wars.
Despite the national importance of these two cultural institutions, they are struggling to survive and closing at an alarming rate. In the 10 years between 2012 and 2022, Britain lost 7,000 pubs and this year we lost 239 in the first quarter alone. Likewise with fish and chip shops, a whopping 50% are forecast to close by 2025.
The reasons for this are rising costs of basic products, energy prices and a lack of staff. These costs are passed on to customers and a night at the pub is no longer such an affordable option. Other cheaper alternatives have been springing up. Streamed films, shop-bought alcohol and American-style fast-food outlets have been lethal competitors for pubs and fish and chip shops.
Covid was a game changer but the added impact of the cost-of-living crisis and Brexit on the nation’s disposable income and access to staff has struck a fatal blow.
Blame the foreigners and deny the past
Of course, Jenrick doesn’t want to take responsibility for his party’s role in the very real problems facing Britain after 14 years in office. He instead blames outsiders and suggests nativism as the solution. “A nation should put its citizens first” is highlighted in bold and he suggests social housing should be reserved for those “born in the country” with no reference as to why social housing is in such short supply.
Instead of showing pride in the reputation of our universities and arts, he ludicrously asserts that students are taught that we have a “uniquely evil past” before a swipe at the National Arts Council for funding projects that “denigrate our past”.
Aside from the baseless nature of these claims, educating the nation to know their country’s past is surely a good thing. The undeniable problems the nation currently faces, along with any achievements made, will form the past that our grandchildren will learn about. Maybe that’s what’s worrying him.
Jenrick’s own identity crisis
Like Farage, Jenrick likes attacking ‘Metropolitan elites’. He is a Cambridge-educated lawyer with two homes in central London and a grade 1 listed manor house in the country. To loosely quote Gilbert and Sullivan, another example of our cultural icons, he is, in fact, the very model of a modern metropolitan.
Identity isn’t static. Victorians didn’t have the same identity as Elizabethans. Identity doesn’t live in the past. It’s just a societal mirror. If Jenrick doesn’t like what he sees, maybe he needs to take a long look at his own reflection and consider his part in that.
Johnny-Foreigner rhetoric has forever been the lazy refuge of the politically empty-handed. If Jenrick thinks he can win elections by mimicking Farage, he’d do well to realise that it’s always the original that wins, not the copy.
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