Why Talking About British Values Will Never Go Anywhere

The reason why nobody is able to define “British values” or “English values” without coming across as complete tit is as follows.

Great Britain came into being as a result of the Acts of Union of 1706 and 1707, combining England and Scotland – which had previously been separate states in personal union (ie with the same monarch) since 1603.

That became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland following a couple more Acts of Union in 1800. Ireland had been in personal union with England since 1542.

If “Britain” can be said to have values – in the sense of something that more or less united its people in pursuit of something or other – then that was global economic and political dominance, expressed as imperialism and colonialism. 

The primary beneficiaries of imperialism and colonialism were the aristocracy of wealth – not the British people as a whole. That is, of course, not to say that the British poor and working class didn’t do somewhat better out of colonialism than a lot of the colonised peoples. But I think it’s reasonable to say that the principal benefits they accrued were:

• Not being killed or formally enslaved
• A vicarious sense of being part of the biggest and best power in the world – much like the World Cup today

At the height of the imperial period, local elites in Edinburgh and Dublin started agitating for a bigger share of London’s power – and started developing ethno-cultural Scottish and Irish nationalism as counterforces opposing “Britain”.

Economic grievances in poor parts of England and Wales were no doubt comparable to some of the suffering experienced in Scotland and Ireland. But they have lacked voices capable of mobilising those grievances behind an articulation of “being different”.

That Britain has already lost its struggle. It lost it with decolonisation, which really began with the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland.

And so of course there is nothing we can say really represents “British values” – because in a postcolonial world, nothing that you could genuinely hold up as “British” is considered a virtue any more, other than instrumental virtues or means to ends we can’t talk about any more.

Why should “keep calm and carry on” be a virtue? Carry on doing what? Endure whatever shit you are being subjected to quietly, without questioning why you should be going through it in the first place?

Hence we make a virtue out of stoicism or quietism, no matter what use it is put to. Hence we make a virtue out of democracy, no matter how disgusted we are with what it leads to.  

These are just means to the sort of ends people can actually identify with.

In 1962 the American Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said:

Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.

52 years later, it pathetically avoids finding a new role by clinging on to its absurd imperial dreams, buying aircraft carriers at the same time as closing hospitals; pretending there’s nothing wrong at home while threatening pointless wars abroad.

No wonder a hell of a lot of Scottish people want to leave. Because the hope of something better is the kind of motivator people can get behind, even when it’s irrational or even when that hope is forlorn.

It’s only in recent years that people have begun to think about “Englishness” at all, primarily as a result of recognising how moribund British identity is compared to those which have defined themselves in opposition to it.

Are English people really more selfish and right-wing than Scottish people? Or are English people really less hospitable and prone to romanticism than Irish people? I don’t think they are. I think these are attributes appropriated by cultural nationalists to distinguish the Scots, the Irish etc from cold, materialistic Britain – in the sense of the British Empire. And they’ve proved themselves on the right side of history by distancing themselves from that.

Trouble is, what does that leave the English to define themselves with? A whole host of “good” virtues and attributes pinched by various Celts, a load of “bad” virtues and attributes nobody sensible wants to associate themselves with any more or a load of thoroughly tedious virtues and attributes that no one gives a toss about?

We might as well be discussing “Ukrainian values” or “Iraqi values”. Or Austro-Hungarian values or Yugoslavian values. The people who live or lived in these places form multiple communities based on values, but those communities don't and never did coincide with the shapes marked on the maps going by those names. 

Only when the English let go of “Britain” will they be able to decide who they want to be. Once they’ve done that, maybe we’ll find that we’ve got more than we thought in common with all our fellow inhabitants of the British Isles. 

Looking Inside Myself

It’s June and this is only the 11^th blog post I have written this year.

Long-term readers will perhaps have noticed a downward trend in the frequency of updates since the prolific days of 2011, when by June 2^nd I had racked up 28 posts.

Quantity is obviously not everything, and no doubt there are those (from whose number I do not automatically exclude myself) who think that the quality has deteriorated since then too, when I declaimed loudwise about the divinity of the sun, about dinosaurs and about Eurovision.

Monologues like that – whether intended to be funny, serious or whatever – just don’t seem to come to me complete and ready for compression into 1,500 words or so any more.

Perhaps I have exhausted the store of all the experiences, ideas and connections built up over my 38 years alive that seemed worth sharing. Perhaps I am running on the fumes of what occurs to me between posts.

I dunno.

Part of it is definitely work-related. It’s all got a bit more serious in the last couple of years, and so when I have mental free time it tends not to be spent on flights of fancy but on the tiresome matter of making money for somebody else. Not on purpose, obviously – but I used to quite enjoy waking up in the dead of night with a thought I couldn’t get out of my head, whereas I don’t really now.

Part of it is just sheer ennui.

He is perfectly capable of not pulling this stupid face

Yeah, I COULD write about UKIP but what’s the fucking point?

I’m not doing this to point out what other people have written or thought, or to provoke people into arguments. I’m doing this to express my views where they are different or new. And I seem to just have fewer views than ever before.

I could write about Eurovision again – which was won by a bearded lady this year. How shocking. Oh no, wait. Didn’t a transgender person win it in 1998? Wasn’t that more shocking? Or does the beard push it over the edge? Doesn’t it stop being shocking when you know it’s all being done purely with the intention to shock?

I haven’t watched Eurovision in years. The whole thing just feels like (i) an in-joke that everyone is in on and (ii) something that takes place solely for the reason of generating opinion pieces (or “ten ways to have a Eurovision party” articles). The Buzzfeedisation of everything makes me want to blow up the internet. But I still look at it. 

I could write about Ukraine, but OH MY GOD how much work would it be to actually form opinions based on some foundations of fact rather than “goodie/baddie” or “everybody baddie” narratives we are presented with? Ukraine won Eurovision in 2004, with Ruslana’s “Wild Dances”. Just Google it yourself – I don’t need to link to it, do I?

This is what I KNOW about Ukraine

I can’t believe some of the topics I wrote about in the past, insofar as I can’t believe I gave enough of a shit to spend the time writing about them – and being satisfied enough with what I’d written to give it a public airing.

Don’t worry by the way – I am not going to treat this like a cheap sitcom Xmas special, where we reminisce over a load of links to past posts. Do you remember Viktor Bout? (Fade to late 2010...switch on laughter track...)

I have long resisted the temptation to start reviewing TV programmes or films, but...but then, what would the point of doing that be? We already have the Radio Times.

Dear readers: would you rather see more or less on here? Would ODHSNM be better as a blog with a theme rather than just as a random assemblage of ephemera? Should I perhaps experiment with the possibilities of the blog as a literary form rather than ape the columnists of the dead tree press (complete with punning headline – BUT WHY?)?

Answers below please. Come on – I NEEEEED your validation so bad. 

Aurela Gaçe for Eurovision victory

Apparently, the UK's Eurovision entry – former second-tier boyband Blue – will do a naked photoshoot for the Daily Star if they win Saturday's competition.

There are a couple of small flaws in this strategy for victory.

Firstly, the Daily Star is read almost exclusively by white van men and prisoners, who are characteristically neither likely to be Eurovision fans nor to wish to see pictures of naked men in their 30s.

Secondly, unless ABC figures are wildly off, the Daily Star is little read in the 44 OTHER EBU member states, whose citizens are the only ones actually entitled to vote for the British entry.

No matter how popular the reformed Blue might in the UK – I use the word "reformed" in the same sense as food packaging companies use it to refer to their cheaper meat products – and no matter how tantalising the prospect of seeing pictures of them holding a Union Flag across their collective naughty bits in a newspaper for people who can't understand the long words they use in The Sun, we can't vote for them.

Still, no matter what you think about Blue, they are considerably less pathetic than Ireland's entry.

Presumably operating on the Father Ted principle (Ireland having no money at all left with which to put on next year's debacle), Ireland has put forward subnormal teenage fantasists Jedward.

As a slight aside, the only thing that was ever funny about these two has been sacrificed in calling them "Jedward" – that is, the way they introduced themselves by saying "I'm John; and I'm Edward; and together we are John and Edward".

Hopefully, they will be eliminated in Thursday's "semi final" (for anyone who has not watched Eurovision for a few years, this is a new process by which they eliminate the shit songs from small or poor countries, so that only the best go through to compete against the shit songs from large or rich countries).

So, buoyed up by my triumphant efforts at encouraging everyone to vote for AV, I urge all ODHSNM readers to vote for Albania's Aurela Gaçe (pictured) – not just because the song is bonkers in true Eurovision style, but also because there is an eagle in the video, and eagles are AWESOME.

Plus if Albania wins, Terry Wogan will probably have a stroke.

Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley

May 14^th is Eurovision time! And while we wait for all the election and referendum results to come in from May 5^th's contests, let's consider a different competition decided by a manifestly unfair voting system in which the only guarantee is that Britain will come out as the loser.

The UK pretends to not take Eurovision seriously, but in fact I would say that it takes it far more seriously than the rest of Eurovision-land.

I can't imagine that many other nations are outraged year in, year out by their failure to win – despite entering bollocks like Scooch, Daz Sampson and Jemini. The latter, lest we forget, were totally out of tune on the night and wholeheartedly deserved their nul points.

The British mistakenly believe that pop music created in the UK is inherently superior to anything produced on the continent – indeed, that pop music from elsewhere in Europe is inherently ridiculous.

Not only is it ridiculous, but the silly foreigners are completely unaware of their ridiculousness. So while we are simply being ironic when our entries are rubbish (because we don't care if we win, because the whole thing is a fix anyway), they have no idea how stupid they look.

Really? Was Lordi's winning 2006 entry from Finland delivered entirely without a tongue in cheek? Was Dana International 's 1998 transsexual hit "Diva" a seriously considered attempt to represent Israel to the world?

For god's sake – Terry Wogan spent most of his career taking the piss out of silly foreigners' Eurovision entries, and then huffed and puffed his way out of the commentary job complaining that they had the temerity to vote for one another instead of us. Leaving us, might I add, with Graham Norton.

While there may indeed be an element of truth in the idea that other countries don't vote for the British entry for non-musical reasons, I think it's less likely that it's about the government's support for war in Iraq than it is because they – like everyone – love to see someone who's over competitive shown right up.