Home Truths from Abroad

A friendly but candid view of Britain and the British makes for a welcome antidote to the Island Story mythology

Perhaps the most enduring reason for Britain’s often troubled relationship with Europe, inside and, now outside of the European Union, has been its stubborn refusal to look through the other end of the telescope - to see itself as it is seen by its neighbours and, heavens forfend, to admit also that they have politics too.

I first came across this as a young reporter for Reuters in Brussels during the early 1980s. Margaret Thatcher was demanding cuts in farm subsidies as she campaigned for a rebate on Britain’s contribution to the EU budget. Month by month, senior British diplomats would whisper in the ear of British journalists that all would soon be well. The Bonn government had been brought on side in the battle with Paris.

And, month by month, the same diplomats would look on ashen-faced as, at the 11th hour, Germany lined up with France in defence of butter mountains and wine lakes. Britain never quite grasped that, much as Helmut Kohl was indeed keen to cap EU spending, Germany had its own farmers to think of. In any event, safeguarding the founding Franco-German alliance would always be Bonn’s first priority.

The lesson was not learned. As chancellor, Labour’s Gordon Brown’s approach to negotiating in Brussels was to set out his position and then explain to his European colleagues that what was best (and politically convenient) for Britain was quite obviously best for them also. He could get quite cross when others demurred. For his part, the Conservatives’ David Cameron refused to understand that Angela Merkel would not throw overboard the integrity of the single market just because he had been foolish enough to stake British membership on a referendum vote.

Even now, as Keir Starmer’s government edges back into a more constructive relationship with the EU, ministers find it hard to acknowledge that Paris, Berlin, and Rome as well as Brussels have their own interests, and their own domestic political constraints, in any discussion about acceptable terms for a reconciliation.

This is not just about Europe. As the German historian and Anglophile Helene von Bismarck writes in Fantastic Kingdom, A Stranger’s Notes on a Contrary Country, the habit crosses continents. The thread though her illuminating portrait of Britain and the British is her understanding that a nation that once ruled the largest empire the world had ever seen still struggles to see why it should grapple with the realities of “abroad”. Let alone imagine what others see when they turn their gaze towards Britain.

What unites an otherwise constantly squabbling political class and media, Bismarck observes, is “the conviction that nobody from abroad can begin to understand them - a view that takes nothing away from their deeply ingrained confidence that they understand the entire world”. Never mind that, convinced of their worldliness and global outlook, the same elites for the most part speak no foreign languages.

Bismarck is a sympathetic observer. She calls the United Kingdom here “home-from-home”. She has been fascinated by British politics and society for more than two decades. It’s a standpoint from which her short but insightful survey of the habits and traditions that inform Britishness is well placed to point up the self-deceptions embedded in the national myth. The confusions and contradictions in British attitudes to the monarchy, the church and to outsiders are deftly explored.

In spite of Brexit and a recent turn against immigration, she sees a “still admirably, pluralist, and open society”. But, alarmed by the far right xenophobia of Nigel Farage’s Reform party, she notes the collision between an inclusive “Britishness” that did not blink at Rishi Sunak’s Asian heritage when he became prime minister and the ethno-nationalism that demands he is excluded from the “English” tribe.

Brexit, she judges, was a blow to the rest of Europe as well as a self-inflicted wound for Britain. They can learn from each other. And they need to as they confront a world of geopolitical upheaval that has seen Russia overturn the European security order and the United States repudiate its commitments to the wider Atlantic community.

Bismarck is right about that. But, for the short term, I am not optimistic. If Starmer has been overly cautious in rebuilding bridges with Europe and investing in Britain’s military capabilities, those competing to replace him in Number 10 scarcely engender confidence. “Does any of them have a passport?”, a sceptical insider asks of the front runners for Starmer’s job, Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner. Burnham, the front runner, prefers to talk about the buses than about Ukraine, the EU or the now defunct special relationship.

Some 70 years ago an astute Whitehall official Sir Henry Tizard made a prophetic plea for Britain to look at itself as others see it. “We are not a great power and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a great power we shall soon cease to be a great nation.” The politicians, it seems, are still running scared of this essential truth.