Arthur Aughey on Real England

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Arthur Aughey reviews Real England: The Battle Against the Bland by Paul Kingsnorth.

In his The Costs of Economic Growth published in 1969, EJ Mishan famously observed that economic growth, without appropriate and countervailing measures of ecological conservation, would lead to environmental degradation. In a play on Galatians Chapter 6, Verse 7 (‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap'), Mishan believed that the modern motto should be: ‘as you grow so shall you weep'.

The bulk of Paul Kingsnorth's book is a cry for his beloved country, an England becoming ever more inauthentic (I suppose this is the correct term) because of the relentless pursuit of growth. As the ‘globalised, placeless world spreads' and ‘the spreading plastic of the consumer machine' grinds with homogenizing force, the people of England are being turned into ‘citizens of nowhere'.

His book tracks the struggles of those ‘fighting the cause of the real England' - from the struggle to keep up the traditions of ‘real ale' in the ‘traditional English pub' (and not in the traditional English pub, which like traditional fish and chips, can often mean a corporate simulacrum) to the fight to maintain the amazing variety of English apples against the drab uniformity of Fuji and Golden Delicious, neither of which are indigenous to the country.

The villains of the book are exactly as you would expect in this very English rendering of the familiar American tale of Main Street (though an English Main Street becoming increasingly Clone Street) against Wall Street. They are the large supermarkets and Tesco in particular; the big brewers; multinational chain stores; the corporate property developers; the Common Agricultural Policy; and last, but certainly not least, Governments both Conservative and Labour which have acted as the agents of these forces of soulless ‘modernisation'.

How can this be allowed to happen? How has this economic ‘Machine' or ‘Thing' been allowed to destroy so much of what is distinctive and beautiful in England and so worthy in English national life? In an echo of the good old cry of radical England, the answer is that these changes ‘are the work of elites, and elites never ask permission'.

Kingsnorth is conscious of being part of a tradition that includes Cobbett, Chesterton and Priestley (amongst others) but he seems insufficiently aware of how deeply a part of that tradition of English cultural criticism he actually is. For example, there is no reference to the work of David Matless who chronicled similar concerns about the depredations of the modern throughout the last century in his Landscape and Englishness (2001). But then Kingsnorth's book is not an academic text, rather it is an index of popular frustration at what Anthony Giddens has called those ‘abstract systems', social, political and economic, which ‘sequester experience' and over which the citizen feels no control. In particular (though the book certainly doesn't use this term), Real England captures popular disaffection with progress which the Germans, in their language of inventive paradox, call Verschlimmbesserung. The rough translation of this term is 'as things improve they also get worse', though the unfortunate impression that Kingsnorth gives is that nothing improves and everything gets worse.

He is acutely aware that critics - especially those with a vested interest in the ‘homogenisation of our landscapes and cultures' - will denounce his challenge to the political-commercial complex as mere nostalgia or a Jeremiad against change. He is correct to refuse the superficiality of that simple-minded notion of progress because the condition of England he evokes is much too real to be summarily dismissed. In that case, Kingsnorth should not have presented such a one-sided and pessimistic view of English experience. My criticism is not with the author's passionate concern for what is happening to his country but with what he chooses to designate as ‘real'. The fate of the pub, the small shop, the village, the farmhouse and the canals are taken as emblematic of quintessential English institutions. However, what of (for the sake of example) many English churches, once the focus of vibrant congregations, institutions of worship, community and self-help, an integral part of national identity the influence of which, until very recently, required the singing of ‘Abide with me' before the beginning of every FA Cup Final? Is their de-consecrated fate not also a product of that culture of materialism about which Kingsnorth is so eloquent? I make this point not to detract from the force of the book's cultural criticism - there must be some selectivity - merely to show it is selective and that what is England really is not always as self-evident as he assumes.

The book ends (as it begins) by defining the problem in terms of what I have described elsewhere (The Politics of Englishness) as the anxiety of silence. It is this silence which Kingsnorth defines as the truly profound national malaise. Here his radical, Orwellean, instinct confirms what Roger Scruton once called the ‘forbidding of England'. This is indeed common ground because patriotic concern for national well-being should not be an issue of left against right.

Because of this silencing of Englishness, the argument goes, people are more susceptible to the empty attractions of that global culture of homogenized, globalised taste which, according to Kingsnorth, is destroying the country. I happen to think he is wrong on this point and would suggest that it is just not true that the English (more than anyone else) ‘are becoming almost a de-cultured people' or that the English ‘are almost comically reluctant' to discuss their identity. The English always have talked, and continue to talk, of themselves. If anything has changed it is this. The English used to believe that what was particular to them was of universal significance, that they were both exemplary as well as exceptional. That manner of identity-speak has waned (though it has not entirely disappeared) and discussion of Englishness is adjusting to England's present modest circumstance.

Equally, to document, as Kingsnorth does well, how what was once distinctively English is no longer representatively English is not the same thing as documenting a de-cultured people. The real England is much more complex than that and its people much more imaginative.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that what shocked him so much during the whole Watergate scandal was the discovery that his own Government did not really like the people it governed. Kingsnorth's book expresses a similar sense of shock and outrage at the complicity of politics in the destruction of his real England. He concludes that England now needs its own Parliament for two reasons: to address a democratic deficit within the devolved United Kingdom and to give the English a sense of themselves sufficiently strong to ‘tame the Thing'. I believe that there is no necessary relationship between these objectives but at least Kingsnorth has made the case.

(Paul Kingsnorth, Portobello Books, April 2008, 304pp)

Arthur Aughey is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster.

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