Don’t Run, Lads
Programming Note: Ever since the 2016 Brexit referendum, I’ve been thinking about making work around the islander juxtaposition of the inherent violence of English nationalism versus the proud, measured, authoritative calm of maritime language. Articulating them through our common, shared language of tabloid newspapers is an unfortunate by-product of the work.
Watching the Brexit process unfold, unravel, and unwind the country I’m from has been a difficult thing to observe from a distance. While I don’t agree with the motivations behind the referendum, the steps behind the decision, or how the decision has been implemented, I have empathy and experience with where it’s come from.
A disillusion with a political system that goes beyond just Britain’s borders, and an ostracized sense of powerless division across age, geography, wealth, investment and education have all been compounded with the Old English specters of immigration, class, control and culture.
The Divided Kingdom, and England in particular, is a proud place. We’ve a strong sense of history, our place in history, and our responsibility to that history. A hundred years later, we still celebrate the blood and treasure of Empire, are intensely nationalistic when it comes to sport, and as a nation are easy to provoke into xenophobia and violence. At school we learn about military victories, but never about defeats. We miss our place in the world.
We’ve a populist nostalgia for the good old days, even if those good old days were of miners’ strikes, the poll tax, and the rampant racism and fear of immigration that still pervades most parts of the country. But as the Coronavirus pandemic compounds an already fragile sense of self, the English are becoming proud of their inherent sense of fight. Their inherent sense of the national welfare. Their inherent desire to work together to do the right thing. But it’s hard and contradictory. We envy Germany’s efficiency to respond to the virus, but want no part of a relationship with them. What surfaces in the face of a pandemic is how petty so much of the Brexit conversations of the past few years have actually been. How redundant they are in the face of truly needing to work together, across the political, national, racial, economic and cultural divides that simply don’t mean anything any more in the face of a non-discriminatory disease.
We’re a strong maritime nation, and celebrate our islander status, something that’s became a lightning rod in recent years. I’m hopeful that our current need to work apart together will remove many of the cultural divisions that have been legitimized by the Brexit process. And I’m hopeful that the rampant nationalism, xenophobia and confused future it’s brought will disappear as swiftly as it was accepted.
