First slum of Europe: a role
It won’t be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

-Philip Larkin

There is a certain mood that descends on an English city centre on a mid-December weekend that is difficult to describe. The light is weak, the air is cold and damp, the clouds are grey and pregnant with rain. But the whole aspect is filled with warmth and excitement by the yellow glow from pub windows, the sparkle of the Christmas lights hanging from every tree and lamp post, the feeling that everybody has left their cozy sofas to engage in a communal enterprise of fun. We are all, somehow, in it together. And one is reminded at such times that despite all of its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, England is a beloved home. There is something called Englishness, and it is a good thing that it is important to preserve.

I was reflecting on all of this last Sunday when I took the kids to watch a panto in Sunderland. It was the matinee and I had totally overlooked the fact that the show times almost precisely coincided with the timing of the Tyne-Wear derby; the city centre was consequently awash not only with theatre-goers and Christmas shoppers but also with football fans (Sunderland has to be one of the most football-mad cities on the planet; 250,000 people live there and its stadium seats nearly 50,000 - a fifth of the entire population are at the ground on match days).

And this mood, the mood I described, was thickly present. Everywhere there was friendly chatter and cheerful grumbling (something only English people know how to do); everywhere there were laughing faces pinched by the cold. Can there be anything more English than to walk out of a theatre into the mid-afternoon gloaming on the 14th of December having just watched a pantomime, and then toddle off to the pub for a pint to take in the last ten minutes of a football match? There were a lot of us at it, and it felt great.

We often bemoan the fact that the UK is badly governed and bereft of anything resembling a genuine elite. And foreigners are often misled by YouTube Shorts and TikTok videos into imagining that it has become a hell-hole of casual violence, rape and anarcho-tyrannical policing. The truth of the matter is altogether more complicated. The English have been terribly let down by those who are in charge (the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish perhaps even more so). A lot of things do not work and there is an all-pervading sense that the wheels are about to come off more or less everything. In some respects things are shockingly worse in comparison to how they were twenty or thirty years ago.

But there is a quiet goodness to English life that hasn’t left it. I would challenge any foreign visitor to go to a panto at the Sunderland Empire in the run up to Christmas and then head for a pint at the Dun Cow or the Peacock and not be completely charmed by the experience. It is down-at-heel, rough-around-the-edges, unsung and looked-down upon. Yet it is the home of a real, authentic, culture that has existed for generations and which is in its own way the equal of any on earth - as unique and ancient as that of Japan, Bali or Tibet. It is only because our elite have been educated into contempt of that culture that they cannot see it for what it is, and only because familiarity to the rest of the world has smoothed over its distinctiveness that it is not more widely appreciated. But the people who live here know it - even if they cannot always articulate it.

It is important not to lose sight of this as the time ticks closer to midnight. The pieces are now all in place for genuine political and economic danger to unfold here. The current government has now cancelled or postponed two rounds of local elections across the country on the grounds that there are ‘extenuating circumstances’ (those extenuating circumstances being that Labour was likely to lose handily); it is proposing to abolish jury trials except for very serious crimes; it is increasingly censoring online content it considers ‘hateful’, interpreting ‘hate’ to mean anything that it finds embarrassing or awkward; legislation is already on the statute books providing ministers with a framework within which to compel the population to purchase ‘energy smart’ household appliances into which the flow of electricity can be remotely regulated by government. Matters could take a very authoritarian turn; in a sense they already have. It will be a tinpot, bargain-basement authoritarianism of a kind that would have made East Germany blush, but that will not be much consolation to those of us who have to live through it. And that is not to mention the fiscal crisis which lurks just beyond the horizon and which threatens national insolvency or at the very least a rapid deterioration in living standards.

And yet there are many people who live here who love the country and wish it well, and there is still much about it to love. All that needs to happen is for those people to start to roll their sleeves up and try to make a difference. I am reassured that the feeling of impending doom is starting to focus minds, and that people of calibre are beginning to get involved in the practicalities of politics. There will need to be a change of regime, of that there is no doubt. But people now know what is at stake - the sense that we have indeed entered an era of ‘regime politics’ is palpable. Such an era can only end in transformation - and the smell of it is in the air already. The only question is what form that transformation will take and precisely how painful the process will be.

This is a period of great uncertainty, then, and there is going to be suffering and hardship. It is impossible to be anything other than pessimistic about the short term prospects for the country. But, to repeat, England is a beloved home and Englishness is good. People who love the place will, in the end, try to tidy it up and sort it out and put it back on its feet, and those who do not love it will leave when there is nothing to keep them here. It is a great pity that the country will have to go through a crisis of some kind for this to happen. But sometimes it is through a moment of crisis that a better future emerges. The task now is to each try in our own small ways to shape that future in the best way possible. It starts with reminding ourselves what is worth preserving. And when one starts, one discovers there is in fact rather a lot. And so - all together now: ‘Oh no there isn’t! Oh yes there is!’

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