Lecture 1. The British: Who They Are and Where They Came From

UNDERSTANDING BRITAIN

 

Contents

1. The British: Who They Are and Where They Came From
2. Social Structures: Living and Working Together
3. Personal Relationships
4. Class
5. How a Democratic Society Works: People and Policies in Action
6. British Leisure
7. Living With the Market
8. Britain and the World
9. The Realities of Choice

 

Introduction

 

Although British society, like Russian society, is in continual change and development, the changes have not altered much of the day-to day living. Concerning certain problems and crises, there are still ferocious debates about policy and progress.

Until a few years ago, almost all Russians knew nothing about Britain except information from school textbooks. Those textbooks portrayed a Britain which either disappeared a long time ago, or which never existed. Our dedicated teachers struggled to keep alive a sense of British culture and literature and what they taught you was often misleading and sometimes simply wrong.

We, Russians, are now enjoying (or can enjoy) a Western style of life. We know about it from videos, music, cheap novels, erotic magazines and advertisements which have arrived along with Western luxury goods and a speculators’ market in currency. But this is nonsense. The daily lives of ordinary citizens in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, America are quite unlike those half-lit glittering images. It is true that all these countries are, at present, more prosperous than Russia, and that in significant ways they are more comfortable to live in from day to day – but that does not mean that they all live in a new, shiny plastic world, or, for that matter, in a world of sexual vice, drugs and ‘detective’-style violence.

In this course we will study and discuss a much more complex truth about the British society, about the lives that are really experienced in this country and not about those media –inspired dreams. We will not study the ‘customs and traditions’ which used to fill the pages of your textbooks and which, though fun for the tourist, are not part of the fabric of daily living.

There are three common reactions of many Russian visitors to Britain: academics, students, businessmen, politicians, journalists, social workers, and other professional people. First, the visitors fix on two or three small details and describe these as significant phenomena of this peculiar society. The details may be significant, they may be trivialities; how is a stranger to distinguish between the dominating realities of a society and the accidents of everyday life? A second response is to select what seem like familiar landmarks and construct a picture of the country from them. England then becomes a country important for its quaint rituals, curious idioms and public school education. This is roughly equivalent to ‘understanding Russia’ as a country of bear hunts, Khrushchev’s famous ‘proverbs’ and the trans-Siberian railway. A third reaction, very popular with youth leaders, is to declare that people are much the same all over the world and that therefore British and Russian young men and women will easily understand each other.

All three reactions are failures to respond to the huge differences between our societies, because it is too difficult to search for ‘the truth’. All countries have distinct cultures. Their typical patterns of everyday life, social and political structures, class systems and attitudes to the rest of the world differ one from another. So this course is about Britain.

Lecture 1. The British: Who They Are and Where They Came From

 

Of Citizens, Passports and National Misunderstandings

Let us suppose that you, a Russian citizen, have made arrangements to visit Britain. The all-important visa application form issued by British Embassy in Moscow is in front of you. Question 7 concerns your passport: one section asks for your ‘Citizenship/Nationality’. The question is familiar although you might be surprised that you are asked to squeeze both answers into a tiny space. And there are official answers to the questions.

Imagine now a British citizen who has arranged to visit Russia and who is trying to fill in the visa application form issued by the Russian Embassy in London. To his surprise, the very first question he has to answer, even before writing his name, is ‘Nationality?’ So he writes down ‘British’. The second question is ’Citizenship?’ What to do? What do these terms mean? He’s a British citizen – so isn’t his nationality British? Do the Russians want to know whether he has a Welsh grandmother? Or a French grandfather? Or is this a strange way of asking whether he has a black skin? Or maybe they are asking if he is a citizen of a particular town?

Issues about citizenship and nationality in Great Britain and Russia are not the same. Here are some facts.

First, passports in Britain are based on citizenship. If you are a British citizen you are entitled to a British citizen’s passport. Whether you claim to be Scots, Irish or Welsh, whether you think you have a French grandmother or a Russian grandfather is quite irrelavant. The law on citizenship has changed several times since 1962 and it is now quite difficult to prove citizenship or become a citizen if you have not already acquired the right by birth. But if you are entitled to a British citizen’s passport, you have no other official ‘nationality’.

Secondly, British citizens only require passports for going abroad. There are no internal passports, and a strong resistance to any form of ‘Identity Card’ such as is carried by the citizens of most European countries. In Britain, identity cards are a traditional symbol of improper state intrusion into the privacy of the individual, so that efforts to introduce them in order, for example, to control football hooliganism, have been fiecely resisted. It is supposed to be the proud boast of the British citizen that he or she does not require official papers of identification until he or she chooses to go abroad.

Thirdly, it follows that nobody in Britain has to worry about a propiska, a residence permit. They do have serious problems about where to live, but these problems are nothing to do with official permission. Consequently, several of the questions in the Russian visa application form are puzzling to the British applicant: so many questions about who he is and where he comes from – questions he may have not thought about much. The British no longer need visas to go to America. Nowadays Americans question very carefully those entering their country about whether they have enough money to support themselves – or, if not, whether other people can support them properly.

The fact that there is no official concept of nationality which is separate from citizenship can lead to serious misunderstandings in discussions about ‘nationalities’ and ‘minorities’ and ‘autonomous republics’. Paradoxically, most British people do not think of themselves as ‘British’. They have strong emotional feelings about the countries which make up Britain, and they will privately think of themselves as ‘English’ or ‘Welsh’ or ‘Scots’. What seems strange is that ‘Russians’ live in ‘Russia’ and so do ‘Chechens’ and ‘Bashkiris’. This is surely colonilalism, a concept which is treated with deep suspicion today.

Once an individual has established his British citizenship, either by birth or by later legal recognition, and has his British passport, there is no legal way in which his colour or ethnic origin can categorise him. Individuals can answer the questions in sociological polls about ethnic minority groups as they wish.

There is, however, a new problem and a new set of legal rights and obligations. Passports of the British now show that they are citizens of a member state of the European Union. This is very convenient for crossing the frontiers of other member states but the implications of ‘belonging to Europe’ worry some of them. Does this mean that they will lose their sovereignty as British citizens, or is it possible to be a European citizen and remain as ‘British’ as ever? They are struggling with integration rather than disintegration.

When the British travel abroad, most of them become more patriotic. This is understandable. Everybody criticises their own country at home (it’s the country they know and care most about) but feels some responsibility for it when abroad. However, some Russians sometimes insist to their surprised and embarassed hosts abroad that Russia is (or was) uniquely crazy, barbarous or criminal. There is certainly a place for criticism, even bitter criticism of one’s own country, but it is not in a foreigner’s house in the first few hours of your visit. Now about the British. Britain is the centre of the world. Consider the Mercator projection of the world map. The Greenwich meridian runs through London. And to celebrate this fact, Britain is in the longitudinal centre. And then, the world is ‘tipped forward’ as it were, so that the Northern hemisphere is brought into importance. London (about two thirds of the way up – ‘eye-level’) is the central feature of this world map. Europe nestles round them, the seas lap their shores and everything is neatly to hand. No Russian should rest under the delusion that Russia is the centre of the world! It isn’t; they aren’t; the British are!

England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales...

The national flag of Great Britain is the Union Jack. Sporting leagues arrange games among the four countries, and stamps are regularly issued which distinguish Scotland and Wales from ‘standard’ England.

How important are these national identifications? How United is the United Kingdom?

Let us start with some definitions, for which a map would be useful.

On the north west coast of Europe lie two substantial islands. The larger one, a straggling irregular triangle about 1,200 kilometres in length is called Great Britain. The other, to the west, which is roughly rectangular is Ireland. Since 1922 most of Ireland has been an independent republic which took the name Eire in 1937. Eire has a separate (Roman Catholic) history and culture, although the two countries are very close and citizens of one country can vote in the other, for example. The north-east corner of Ireland, sometimes known as Northern Ireland, sometimes as Ulster, is a part of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Officially it is not a country but a province or ‘constituent region’.

Great Britain is divided into three countries: England, Scotland, and Wales. Citizens of the United Kingdom are known as British, and a useful short form for the United Kingdom is Britain. But the people who live in these islands tend to think of themselves as ‘English’ or ‘Scottish’ or ‘Welsh’. Since there is no category of ‘nationality’, statistics can tell us how many people live in Scotland, but nobody can tell us how many of them think of themselves as Scots; and no statistics will tell us where the Scots live outside Scotland.

Statistics can, however, tell us something about the comparative importance of the meber countries of the United Kingdom. Consider this:

England is about the size of Lithuania and Latvia combined, but it has almost as large a population as Ukraine (47-48 million).

Wales is less than half the size of Estonia but it has twice the population (nearly 3 million).

Northern Ireland is about one-third the size of Estonia but it has almost the same population (1.5 million).

Scotland is rather larger than Georgia but has about the same population (5.1 million).

As we see, even Wales, a deserted country to English eyes, is four times more densely populated than Estonia. Only Scotland which has sometimes been described as the last wilderness in Europe is less densely populated than that other mountainous area, Georgia. Scotland has been losing population to emigration for decades and the Hghlands are indeed deserted. But in England people live ‘cheek by jowl’, with about five times the population of the other three countries combined. The English, for example, take for granted the United Kingdom; they never worry about the fact that London is the capital of both England and Britain, they contemplate Wales and Scotland as wonderful wild places for holidays, and they consider Northern Ireland to be a miserable, problem-area. These countries are on the periphery; England is at the centre.

For the other countries in the Union, the ‘centre’ needs to be questioned. Wales, the mountainous area in the west of Great Britain, was the refuge for the Celtic population at the time of the Saxon invasions (6^th-7^th centuries). To judge by their descendants, the Celts were short, dark, curly-haired and vivid, with a passion for rhetoric, song and language. Wales is rich in medieval poetry and mith, and is the reputed home of King Arthur. Many mountains, caves and wild corners are associated with him, though it is not at all clear that he was a historical character. More important, the Welsh have their own language, which is still the first language of some hundreds of thousands of Welshmen, especially in the north-west of the country. It is the language of teaching in many schools and some university colleges. However, the majority of the Welsh, especially in the industrialised southern coastal region, do not speak the language. What they share is a strong sense of being not-English which derives partly from the fact that Wales was once an independent principality that was conquered by the English in the early fourteenth century, partly from their long poetical and musical traditions that are distinctly un-English, and partly from their solidarity associated with a hard industrial life in the mountains that was lightened by political and religious fervour.

Feelings of nationalism are expressed almost exclusively in cultural terms, for the Welsh are not economically strong and there is little support for economic independence from England. Occasional outbursts of violence and arson have been protests against English cultural ‘colonialism’ and arrogance. Wales feels like a distinct foreign country (and a very beautiful one) to the English. Dylan Thomas was only one of many poets to celebrate this distinctiveness.

Scotland has a long history of vigorous independence. When the Romans marched northwards across the country in 55 A.D. they found it impossible (or impractical) to subdue the Pictish tribes who lived in the north. Eventually they built a wall (Hadrian’s Wall, some of which still stands today) right across the country, separating Roman Britain from an area which roughly corresponds to present-day Scotland. The kingdom of Scotland has existed for many centuries (Think of Macbeth, based on a historical character in eleventh century Scotland!) and, despite repeated attempts by the English at conquest and endless border raids from both sides, the two countries were eventually united peacefully. In the early sixteenth century an England princess married a Scottish king, and a century later after the death of Queen Elizabeth of England, the Scottish James inherited the English throne as well. He was the son of Mary Queen of Scots about whom Russians, like Germans, are absurdly sentimental. Mary Queen of Scots was a menace to everyone including herself (this was the view of her son as well as almost everyone around her), capable of treason, murder and sheer stupidity. After James united the thrones in 1603, the two countries continued to be independent, and sometimes at war with each other until they were united in the Act of Union in 1708.

Scotland has its own legal and educational systems, but there is no autonomous Scottish Parliament. Once elected, Scottish members of parliament go to Westminster to the British House of Commons. From the Scottish point of view, London is a long way away, and the small group of Scottish MP’s can do little to advance Scottish interests. Recently the Scottish Nationalist Party has been very successful at elections. It demands a separate Parliament for Scotland and much greater independence in economic affairs. Scotland, like Wales, has much mountainous country and a central valley, once heavily industrialised but now suffering from unemployment and the decline of industry. Nonetheless, the Scottish Nationalists argue that Scotland produces and passes on to England more than it receives in goods and social benefits. They believe they would be better off if Scotland was independent and directly profiting from the fish, oil and gas in its coastal waters. The British Government argues that Scotland gets money and other government support for its poorer regions which would suffer from economic independence. In any case, central governments tend to favour a strong ‘United Kingdom’. If there were a referendum tomorrow, probably the majority of Scots would vote for a Scottish Parliament and greater autonomy.

The Scots also insist on their national cultural distinctiveness, although the Highlands, a beautiful depopulated region of poor farmers and foresters among whom Gaelic (the old Celtic language) is still sometimes spoken, is culturally quite different from the Lowlands, central valley and eastern coastal regions, areas of strong Protestantism and a tradition of hard, practical work. The Scots can certainly claim that they take education more seriously than the English: more of their pupils stay on at school, more go to University, and even today, the cities of this relatively poor country show great official respect for traditions of learning. Edinburgh and Glasgow are both cultural cities.

As for Northern Ireland and its one and a half million people, the country – mountains, lakes and wild sea coast – is beautiful as Wales and the Highlands of Scotland are beautiful. The people are friendly and hospitable to outsiders, and show all the enthusiasm for language, poetry and fantastic stories of their fellow-Irish in Eire. But for the last quarter of a century, Northern Ireland has been synonymous with ‘the Troubles’, the guerilla fighting that has claimed hundreds of lives and shown the intractability of sectarian conflict. The province has been occupied by the British Army for twenty five years and a generation has grown up knowing that their lives are and will be defined by their identity as Catholics or Protestants. From an outsider’s point of view, the problem can be described as follows:

The English have been eager to colonise Ireland since the Norman Conquest (the eleventh century) and efforts were made to do so for centuries, although the Irish were always rebelling against the English rule imposed on them wherever it was more or less successful. Consequently, the Irish showed no interest in the conversion to Protestantism of the English in the mid-sixteenth century. Their Catholicism (and Catholic allies) became a crucial part of their defiance of the more powerful country. In the 1650’s Cromwell put down an uprising in the northern Irish province, Ulster, with considerable brutality, and then, to keep the region loyal, settled there large numbers of Scottish Protestants. In Ulster the descendants of these Protestants became a majority, whereas elsewhere in Ireland they were virtually non-existent.

When, after centuries of struggle, Ireland finally won the right to independence in 1922, part of the settlement with Britain was that the province of Ulster should separately decide whether it wanted to join the Irish Republic or stay with Britain. Since the majority of the population (about 60%) were protestants who did not wish to join a Catholic Ireland where they would be a minority, they voted to join a ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. Under this arrangement the minority of Catholics in the province were badly treated politically and legally for many years, and the terrorist Irish Republication Army (which is NOT supported by Eire) gained cosiderable sympathy among the Catholic population. Eventually, in the late nineteen-sixties, resentment turned to violence, the Protestant para-military groups and the IRA turned on one another using terrorist tactics which killed civilians – and the British Army was sent in, originally to protect the Catholics and to keep order. They are still there. The Army is resented by both sides, and has added its own share of violence to the situation – but nobody knows whether things would be worse if it was withdrawn. Most people in Great Britain would be perfectly willing for Northern Ireland to be handed over to Eire; the province for outsiders is simply a ‘problem’, a running sore which will not heal, and few soldiers in the British Army enjoy their turn of duty in the area. But if one part of the democracy consistently votes to stay in the United Kingdom, by what right can the other parts of the Kingdom turn them out? There will always be a majority of Protestants in that corner of Ireland. They have been there for three hundred years and more, so it is their home as much as it is the home of Catholics. It is impossible to know how many individual Protestants would be willing for Northern Ireland to join the Republic, and how many individual Catholics are happy to remain as part of the United Kingdom. There comes a point when individual preferences get swallowed up in religious or national identification – which itself becomes a cause for bitter fighting. And that, for all the efforts of many many people, is where the situation rests today. (Since September 1994 a precarious, much desired peace has existed in the Province.)

 

A Mixed Population

If you stand in a street in central London you will be instantly aware of its mixed population. The streets of London are full of white, black and brown people, who originated from all over the world. Moscow is still, essentially, a white city. Forty years ago London was much more like Moscow: seeing a black man on a bus was a rare excitement. Then large groups of Protestants from France and the Low Countries in the seventeenth century, small groups of French Royalists after the Revolution, and individual radicals and revolutionaries of all kinds in the nineteenth century have settled here. Irish Catholics emigrated in their hundreds of thousands to Britain after the Great Famine of the 1840’s, bringing with them a Catholic culture which is quite different from English Protestantism in its traditions, values and family patterns of upbringing. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many Jews from Poland and Russian came here, often working as whole communities in the clothing trades of east London.

But Britain has also been a colonising power. Living on an island with many national resources and instant access to the sea, British traders, from the sixteenth century onwards, established contacts with the Indian subcontinent, with Africans and Arabs, and the settlers in North America. Trading soon meant colonisation. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain built up a powerful Empire which was ruled from London. You can read about attitudes of the British towards their Empire in many novels, especially Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.

Consequently, thousands of people left Britain to work as administrators and officials in the British Empire, and as civil engineers, teachers, farmers, missionaries and traders. Emigration was always greater than immigration in this period.

After 1945 Britain suffered from a shortage of labour, especially in unskilled, poorly-paid jobs. West Indians, and then Indians and Pakistanis were invited to come and work in the country. Between 1955 and 1962 about a quarter of a million arrived in Britain on British citizen passports. Such numbers alarmed many of the white population, partly because they feared for their jobs and housing, partly because they disliked these non-white people coming into ‘white’ Britain. In 1962, the Government, in response to this panic, passed the first of a series of laws restricting right of entry into Britain and changing the status of British Commonwealth citizens. Commonwealth immigration was much reduced. Small groups of Hong Kong Chinese, Africans and Vietnamese were also accepted into the country during these years.

Why should four million people among fifty-five million make such a difference to the life in Britain? And why are so many of them in London (far more than 5%)?

First, some definitions. The polite word for describing people whose ancestors came from Africa used to be ‘Negro’. This is no longer so. The standard polite word is ‘black’. It exists as both noun and ajective. Most blacks came to Britain from the West Indies, and a currently popular term is ‘Afro-Caribbean’. The immigrants from the Indian sub-continent can be devided nationally and culturally into Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. The current general word for decsribing them is ‘Asians’ though ‘blacks’ is also used. For the Asians themselves, one word is not sufficient because the major distinction is between the Muslim population (mostly Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) and the Sikh and Hindu population.

When the blacks and Asians arrived in Britain they settled in the big cities where they were required to work: London, the urban West Midlands and (for Asians) West Yorkshire, especially Bradford. Blacks and Asians have suffered higher unemployment, poorer living conditions and discrimination of many kinds. From the literature of the British Empire it is known that colonised black peoples were regarded as less capable, less intelligent than the white people, more like children than adults. The first language of the Asian population is not English. The younger blacks are not of course immigrants at all. More than forty per cent of blacks and Asians were born here and are as much Londoners as their white neighbours. Meanwhile, the white British eat different kinds of food, enjoy different kinds of parties, music, festivals, learn directly about different religions and traditions. They are simply less narrow than they were. Racial prejudice still exists and occasionally flares into violence, but somehow the British have become a society of mixed races. The only way to reduce racism is to increase awareness, educate people. Variety of experience is the best way of education.

What Do the British Know About Their Own History?

In order to understand the people of another country, you may not need to study their history in detail, but you need to know about their own idea of their past.

The British (apart from those in Northern Ireland) live in a country which has not been invaded for 900 years.Monuments to their past cover the countryside: bronze age burial mounds, Roman walls, churches from the tenth century onwards, castles, palaces and simple country homes are all part of their landscape they take for granted. Because much of their building was in stone or brick it has survived better than the wooden buildings in Russia, for example. A ‘story of Britain’ is crude, simple and not very accurate, it goes something like this:

After the stone age, bronze age, iron age, Romans, Saxons and Danes, England became England. William the Conqueror invaded England from France in 1066 (this is the date that everybody knows), killed King Harold and became English King. In the Middle Ages they built beautiful churches, started limiting the power of the King, died in millions of the Black Death and beat the French at Agincourt (though they forget that the French won the war). In the sixteenth century they had Henry VIII with his six wives. He abolished the Pope as the head of the Church in England and made himself Head instead. (This was a popular move.) Under Queen Elizabeth they fought and beat the Spanish; under James I they captured Guy Fawkes just before he attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, an event which the English population celebrated every year on the fifth of November with big fires and effigies of Guy Fawkes. Under Charles they had a Civil war, executed the king, had a Republic briefly under Cromwell and in 1660 restored the monarchy – on conditions. Power passed into the hands of Parliament and was – more or less – enshrined in law. In the eighteenth century they invented new scientific, agricultural and industrial processes, such as the steam engine. Then they beat Napoleon. During the nineteenth century they extended their Empire even further, produced learned men like Darwin, refined their sophisticated Parliament, increased Britain’s riches and went into battle in 1914 with all banners flying... At this point the triumphant story falters. Many of the conscripts in the First World War had to be rejected for mal-nourishment and ill-health. The consequences of industrialisation had been horrific (and in any case America and Germany were beating them). Yes, they won the war, but the soldiers returned to unemployment and even hunger. Some people, anxious that the poor at last would have rights, hoped for a revolution such as had happened in the Russian Empire. The colonised peoples of their Empire were growing restive too. But Britain, unlike Germany, was never poised on the edge of revolution. Despite a General Strike and a recession, many parts of the country were getting more prosperous. Between the wars, millions of people moved for the first time into decent housing, and electricity, roads and other public services became widely available. Their politicians wondered whether to fight Hitler. The people seem to have known that war was inevitable and that it would be grim and necessary.

In Britain far fewer people were killed than in the First World War (about a quarter of a million, of whom some tens of thousands were civilian victims of bombing). In Britain every able-bodied adult was conscripted; women were sent to do war-work; gardens were turned over to vegetables and spare pieces of land were cultivated. They needed food. Although never invaded, they suffered considerable bomb damage, and many people, especially children, were evacuated to safer parts of the country. Everybody was affected.

After the war, the world position of Britain altered. Their Empire collapsed around them – and they conceded that they no longer had the right to rule other countries. They joined NATO and became part of the ‘American sphere of influence’.