Imagining the British

Jon Bright (London, OK): Interesting rumblings in the Welsh blogosphere over Brown's Monday speech - like everyone else, they've picked up on how many times he said the word 'British'. This is a real area of interest for me. Consider this from Normalmouth

Ultimately, nations, unions and states are all based in an idea - or perhaps an ideal - of commonality. In times gone this was territory, ethnicity or language. Today, shared values are what we are told unites us. Personally, I believe the shared values that supposedly embody Britishness are nearly all universal values and that British, English, Welsh and Scottish identities are too diffuse and diverse to be neatly categorised. In short, the people who live on these islands are nothing special merely by dint of living on these islands.

Spot on - sort of. Brown's "shared values" are 'universals' - when he talks about equal treatment or civic responsibility he is talking from a Enlightenment tradition which feels all humans are born fundamentally equal, and should be treated as such (though this doesn't mean these ideas are held universally). States, and other such institutions, can be based on ideas of commonality like this, for sure. But nations are based on more than just 'commonality'. They are based on the idea of difference, exceptionality if you like - this is why Peter Oborne cries foul when Brown tries to found Britishness on abstract values - they don't differentiate us enough from the rest. Celebrating our human rights seems to him like neoliberal vacuousness - we may as well define a low rate of corporation tax as a 'British value'. But stuff that used to make sense - territory, ethnicity, language (as Normalmouth says above - I'd add institutions as well as Oborne does) - doesn't work any more. Whether ethnicity was ever foundational can be questioned - Benedict Anderson famously had it that all nations were imagined. But it's precisely this - imagining Britain - that is becoming more difficult. This month's Prospect asked 50 different 'writers and intellectuals' to give their take on what it means to be British - it's no surprise they got 50 fairly different answers.

It usually takes a crisis to expose foundational problems. The current crisis, if it is one, was brought about by devolution - an attempt to start owning up to the problem and then stop again. But the process unleashed may be difficult to halt - especially with the likes of Alex Salmond about. Cameron's EVEL (English Votes for English Laws) is an attempt to have his cake and eat it on West Lothian - Jack Straw bit back in the Telegraph today by pointing out this would break up the union, but his solution (carry on as before) is a Comical Ali-esque denial of reality ("there are no tanks in Baghdad!" etc.). None of the main parties will talk about an English parliament or a federal solution. Britain in its current state simply doesn't make sense - and this is why what it means to be British is beginning to matter.

Brown's Britishness is an attempt to solve this crisis, to halt the entropy. He wants us to unite around Britain despite the fact that its logic is now questionable: but for this he needs an imagining of Britishness that is wide enough to include a multicultural, multiracial society, but narrow enough to still exclude the rest of the world. A "spirit of the South Atlantic" inducing war might do it - or at least paper over the cracks (this is Robert Putnam's take - though he calls for the "moral equivalent of war" to fire up a lost civic cohesion). But without it, wither Britain?

For a real solution, he'd be better off reading this from GWE:

As for 'Britishness'... Yes, I see myself as Welsh and European. But I have no 'problem' with Britishness whatsoever. My problem is with what Britain currently is - a constitutional mess. Talking about supposed shared values won't help, workable reforms will.

In other words - less people would be bothered by the meaning (or meaninglessness) of Britshness if its constitutional arrangement made sense. Perhaps such radical changes would be politically untenable for Brown. But as devolved institutions continue to strengthen, this arrangement will surely have to be made by someone, lest the British become unimaginable.