Heard of Alex Phillips? Neither had I, until last month when she popped up on the BBC calling for non-Christian faith schools and the burqa to be banned. In the spring of last year, as Reform UK’s spokesperson for culture, media and sport, she was given a standing ovation by the party faithful for a speech in which she deplored the entry of “cultural mores in direct conflict with our own”, arguing that, “by gagging and demeaning and forsaking our own culture, all we do is allow more potent and dangerous cultures to dominate”.
If you’re going to issue a cultural call to arms, it helps to have an idea what “our own culture” actually means. Reform and the Conservatives only know what they are rejecting: Islam and Europe. As for Labour, when Lisa Nandy became culture secretary a year ago, she pledged to transform Britain into a “self-confident” country, one where everyone can “see themselves in the stories we tell”. On the question of what that national story is, however, she was tellingly silent.
One answer was to be found earlier this week, at Lords Cricket Ground, where England and India contested one of the most exciting test matches in living memory. The game marked the triumphant return, after injury, of the English fast bowler Jofra Archer, born in Barbados. The winning wicket was taken by a Briton of Punjabi origin, Shoaib Bashir, who toiled heroically with a broken finger. As the Indians like to say, cricket is an Indian game that the English accidentally invented. All of this qualifies it for prominent inclusion in “the stories we tell” — including about empire.
And yet the Government seems unbothered by the fact that most children in this country are ignorant of the game. At Lords this week, of Lisa Nandy, whose Bengali father no doubt played as a pupil at St Xavier’s, Calcutta, there was no sign. No sign, either, of the “self-confident” country she predicted a year ago. Cultural highs like a memorable test match aside, the historically informed reference points that used to unite us are melting away. Our political parties unite on the need for a national revival: but when asked to define the nation they deliver platitudes about diversity or values. Nandy isn’t alone. Few people in public service today boast the imagination or institutional firepower to identify the events, heroes and artefacts that make up our national story — let alone harness them to a revival commanding broad enthusiasm.
For cultural libertarians, of course, such a top-down approach chills the soul. They scoff at the German government for funding opera houses in every market town, and the French for asserting the superiority of their civilisation in reports on the country’s drains. According to this argument, Britain’s small “c” version of culture is partly propelled by personal taste: take, for instance, the exquisite series of Chagall stained glass windows commissioned by the D’Avigdor-Goldsmid family in the Anglo-Saxon church at Tudeley in Kent. Profit, for example in the form of the rampantly successful King Penguin books of the Forties and Fifties on cultural subjects, also has a role, as does philanthropy. Liverpool’s splendid Walker Gallery, built by the eponymous brewer, shows the impact that philanthropists can have on the inner life of the nation.
Of cultural tsars, the theory goes, we have no need. And yet the cultural identity of Britons today has been partly shaped by fiat. In 1951, the Festival of Britain, centred on London’s South Bank with satellites around the country, brought contemporary style and primary colours to a nation that had been conditioned by war to truckle in gravy browns and khaki green. Two years later, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II announced a “Second Elizabethan Age”, with a ceremony that combined youth, promise and rituals that had been cut and pasted from 1,000 years of monarchy.
In 1969, the country’s arbiters of taste, the BBC and Lord Clark, got together to make Civilisation, 650 minutes of television that showed that while the British hadn’t actually produced a lot of the world’s greatest art, they understood it better than anyone else. Civilisation attracted unprecedented viewing figures for a series on high culture. As the future deputy chairman of Christies was told by his daily help, “now I understand why you love art so much.”
Britain last told its story to the world at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. “Isles of Wonder”, Danny Boyle’s spectacle depicted a country that was both traditional and forward-looking, stable and dynamic. The Left was thrilled by the prominence given to the NHS, Windrush and the Suffragettes; the Right revelled in the Chelsea Pensioners, the Industrial Revolution and the Eton Boating Song. There was a comic turn by the Queen and James Bond, and 62,000 people came together to murder “Hey Jude”. In its end-of-year review, Q magazine called the ceremony “the most surprising, moving, spectacular cultural event this country had ever seen”.
Step away from Britain, meanwhile, and back to the 19th and early-20th centuries, and it becomes clear that the movements of mass awakening that generated that remarkably successful unit of social currency, the nation state, were the result of concerted efforts to devise national stories. Verdi’s Battaglia di Legnano, written after five days of street fighting that drove the occupying Austrians out of Milan in 1848, was an “opera with a purpose” in the words of the music historian Charles Osborne. Certainly, it gave Italy’s Risorgimento its hummable tunes, and it’s surely no accident that some nationalists used “VERDI” as an acronym for “Vittorio Emanuele, Re d’Italia” (“Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy”). It was a similar story elsewhere: in 1873, the Turkish playwright Namik Kemal’s Homeland or Silistria, a thunderous dramatisation of a successful rearguard against the Russians in the Crimean War, inspired a new understanding of the nation founded less on the authority of the Sultan than the valour of his subjects.
National cultures are often born or revitalised in wars and emergencies. Ireland’s identity was formed in the 1916 Easter Rising against the British, and the civil war that followed the establishment of the Irish Free State four years later. The slow death of the Ottoman Empire culminated in defeat at the hands of the Allies in the First World War. From the wreckage, a nationalist army officer called Mustafa Kemal established a republic, based on his interpretation of the Turks’ language, history and culture. His system has survived — albeit with modification — down to the present.
“National cultures are often born or revitalised in wars and emergencies.”
I spoke recently to Olesya Khromeychuk, director of the Ukrainian Institute in London and the author of a moving memoir about her brother, a soldier and casualty of Putin’s invasion. She told me that her compatriots’ culture has been strengthened by the current war, with bookshops proliferating, theatres rammed and world classics hitherto available only in Russian selling out in Ukrainian. Something similar is currently happening in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where, trapped between the mullahs and the regime’s foreign enemies, ordinary Iranians exhibit an ever-greater attachment to their own culture, from the epic Shahnameh to the revival of pre-Islamic traditions such as the winter solstice, celebrated with readings from the national poet, Hafez, alongside mountains of pomegranates.
“A culture is made up not simply of works of art, or of literary discourses,” Orlando Figes, the historian of Russia, has written, “but of unwritten codes, signs and symbols, rituals and gestures, and common attitudes that fix the public meaning of these words and organise the inner life of a society.” The irony is that the rapid erosion of such codes in this country — mention “Alfred and the Cakes” and many young people look at you as if you are mad — has coincided with strident calls for national revival and, in the case of Reform, salvation. Yet such calls are unrealistic if the cultural foundations on which such a revival might be built are undermined.
Our culture has been impoverished. There are many culprits here. Woke traduces hundreds of years of history as tainted with criminality, leading to swathes of our national story, in all its gore and glory, being lost to sight. When I attended a high-profile Shakespeare production recently, it was clear that one of the younger actors barely understood the words she was saying. The fault didn’t lie with the actor, I suspect, but with that patronising and self-fulfilling pose of egalitarianism, common in many schools, that considers Shakespeare too “inaccessible” to teach properly.
Such was the glee of the Thatcherite Right in dismantling the unions in the Eighties that it did not stop to think that the death of the collieries would also kill the brass bands, clubs and solemnities that gave substance and meaning to the country’s mining communities. The Right deplores the turning of churches into mosques while itself remaining vacuously irreligious. The Church of England is itself complicit, having long ago abandoned those adornments of our written culture, the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. A far-Right participant in last summer’s riots was hard-pressed to explain what he was fighting for, other than the right to go to the pub.
When I asked a young Briton to summarise the dominant culture among his generation, he replied, “an international version of American culture that can be found anywhere.” The Right demands that immigrants “integrate” — and rightly so — but if we are not careful there will be nothing left to integrate into.
Whether or not we end up fighting Putin’s Russia, in which case young Muslims and white Britons will become brothers-in-arms in a war for national survival, the cultural emergency is real. 2012 is an age ago. The Queen is dead and Bond is on gardening leave. Society has been further weakened by rancorous lunges for power by aggrieved minorities, whether ethnic, sexual or religious, and the furious reaction of their opponents.
It’s time, then, to revive culture by fiat. Put the British Museum’s Nicholas Cullinan, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Tristram Hunt and the Royal Ballet and Opera’s Alex Beard in a room together, and don’t let them out until they have written the story that Lisa Nandy airily suggested would write itself. Involve universities, public intellectuals and faith leaders; make the endeavour itself a cause for celebration. That Shakespeare will be the lynchpin is inevitable — his is the last word on so much of the human condition — with supporting roles for those cultures that have entered the bloodstream of Britain, overwhelmingly for the good.
Britain’s relationship with Islam, for instance, is much older and more interesting than the culture warriors would have us believe, from the establishment of Oxford’s first chair in Arabic, in 1637, to the 62,000 Muslims who died fighting for the British Empire in the First World War, a sacrifice that the Right passes over in silence. That cricket, with all its potential as a unifier, should be included by many in the “inaccessible” category, is another short-sighted omission that has been facilitated by bien-pensant loathing for the empire. Tell the story of this country, warts and all. But tell it. Tell it and tell it again until we see ourselves in it.
Among the artefacts that must be honoured in the national story is a building I visited last week. In November 1940, Coventry’s medieval cathedral was destroyed by German bombs. After the war, the Scottish architect Basil Spence rebuilt it. When the new building opened in 1962, traditionalists hated it for being too modern, while modernists hated it for following a Gothic plan. Yet in its blend of old and new, of the sombre and the hopeful, it has become one of this country’s greatest treasures.
The visitor comes in through a huge glass wall animated by engravings of saints and angels that fly between the window bars, creating a sense of lightness and liberation. Immediately the eye runs to the curved wall of colour on the baptistery wall — designed by John Piper — its stained glass a mass of blues with splinters of red, green and yellow, redolent of a sunburst, eternity, or a shining power.
And so you advance, into the cavernous, darkening space, along stepped walls that angle away from you for the slow reveal of yet more stunning abstract stained glass. The effect is monumental but unpompous; each feature, from the altar of hammered concrete to the wooden choir stalls surmounted by a canopy that evokes the crown of thorns, is impeccably designed and finished. The final resting point of the travelling eye is the stupendous tapestry that hangs the full height of the cathedral — 23 metres — at the chancel end, designed by Graham Sutherland and depicting a loving Christ in an almond-shaped aura, his foreshortened knees forming a second, echoing aura, and the whole suspended in luminous greens and yellows. That Britain is no longer a country of observant Christians makes the enduring power of Spence’s masterpiece all the more remarkable.
The New Carolean Age has started limply. But King Charles III’s longstanding interest in culture, in the broadest sense of the word, and his much advertised respect for religious faith of all kinds, make him the natural figurehead for the quest for a national culture. Come Maundy Thursday next year, when the monarch hands out coins to the old folk, he should do so in Coventry Cathedral, in the heart of his realm, a fit setting for a culture that is not a game you either win or lose, but a “casket”, in Basil Spence’s words, full of “jewels”.
