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1104   22 August 2005  

1105  21 August 2005

Britishness
Simon Partridge enters fray...

From: Simon Partridge

I set out below a list of major articles and correspondence on Britishness prompted by the bomb attacks on London on 7/7 and 21/7 - although the list is not comprehensive: there have been many more.

I view this as a somewhat surprising development, but one which I welcome.  I addressed the same issue in my Catalyst think-tank pamphlet The British Union State: imperial hangover or flexible citizens’ home?[1] at the beginning of 1999. Here I called for a “thorough recasting of Britishness…..reconceived as a common civic citizenship, distinguished from the varied ethnicities and multiple identities which now occupy these British-Irish isles”.

I find it interesting that Michael Howard and Jonathan Freedland, both articulate in their own ways, fall back on American inspiration when it comes to finding a more appropriate form of Britishness for the 21^st century.

But as I have pointed out elsewhere [2], even the proto-British state of Wessex was not purely Saxon [the Angles were predominantly northerners and easterners] since it had in the mid-9^th century already incorporated the p-speaking Celts of Cornwall – England’s almost forgotten [at least by the metropolitan centre] Celtic nation. Multi-culture was inscribed in an “English” kingdom from the start, and was unmistakable once the French-speaking Normans [Norsemen originally, closely related to the Angles and Viking settlers] soon took over and established an Ascendancy across our islands.

There can be no other state which has had such continuous experience – including its long overseas empire – of sustaining and negotiating a multi-cultural polity, albeit not always peacefully or successfully.

It is therefore puzzling why this indigenous tradition of political multi-culture cannot be drawn on with more confidence. “British” [itself a word of Welsh derivation and reinvented by the Tudors who had their roots in Gwynedd, north west Wales] is really only the name we give to that constant process of negotiation and renegotiation.  There is no reason in principle why a moderate Islam on these islands cannot find a place under this broad umbrella.

Is it so obvious that we can’t see it?  Perhaps the reticence is partly explained by our failure to find a negotiated place for the Catholic Irish in the early 20^th century after the Rising of 1916, a failure which hopefully the Good Friday Agreement will bring to some lasting resolution.  Might it be in part due to a fear that a substantial portion of "British Islam" might take the a similar secessionary route?

PS 22 August 2005

I wrote this piece last Friday [19.8.05] before I had read Sarfraz Manzoor’s excellent piece “We pass the Tebbit test” in The Observer of yesterday.   In it, he provides one of the best operational definitions of Britishness I have yet come across: “The idea that there is a singular way of life to which all immigrants need to sign up to assumes that Britishness is something fixed, whereas it is and always has been a work in progress, a continuing historical narrative in which we all play our part.” 

This echoes a comment I made in my Catalyst pamphlet where I wrote: “So, we are faced with a great irony of history: a Scottish king [James I/VI], with Welsh prompting, draws on ancestral memories and reconciles the English (or rather the Anglo-Norman ruling elite) to being part of a Greater British polity. Britishness has always been a complex formation, requiring considerable political skills to maintain.” [p.10]

Simon Partridge

Articles etc 

1.8.05: New Statesman issue “Why Britain is Great: A Country worth Defending” 

3.8.05: “The identity vacuum”, Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian 

13.8.05: “Racism is the terrorists’ greatest recruiting tool”, Naomi Klein, The Guardian 

16.8.05: “The force behind fanatics”, Letters in response to Klein, The Guardian 

14.8.05: “Citizenship - Why I want to be British”, Ned Temko, chief political correspondent, The Observer 

17.8.05: “Talk about the British dream”, Michael Howard MP, The Guardian 

“Britishness – These islands now”, First Leader, The Guardian 

18.8.05:  “Dangerous Dreaming”, Letters in response to Michael Howard, The Guardian

Notes 

Simon Partridge is a London-based independent political analyst & writer focussing on British-Irish relations, UK devolutionary issues, identity politics and the transformation of large-group conflicts. 

• 1. The British Union State: imperial hangover or flexible citizens’ home? [The Catalyst Trust, London (1999) - available at www.catalystforum.org.uk/pubs/pub4.html ] - particularly chapter 3, “The new social geography of Britain and Ireland”, which documents the extensive cultural and population overlaps.

• 2. See his essay “Devolution in England: Possibilities and Prospects”, drawing out some of the cross-islands implications, published in April 2005 in a book from University College Dublin Press in association with the Institute for British-Irish Studies about the new territorial politics in our islands: Renovation or Revolution? –  New Territorial Politics in Ireland and the United Kingdom, Eds. John Coakley, Brigid Laffan and Jennifer Todd; foreword by Tony Blair, see pp.71-91.

Other complementary pieces can be accessed by searching “Simon Partridge” at www.google.com

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