Britain’s changing mood NICHOLAS BOYLE


Towards a new reality


The novelist Virginia Woolf identified December 1910 as the moment when human character changed. Could the same point 100 years later mark a similar seminal time for Britain? The author of How to Survive the Next World Crisis presents the evidence that the country is entering a new era


E


ric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, now aged 93, is the celebrated author of a history of the nineteenth century of which the third volume is entitled


The Age of Empire. He was reputedly asked recently when he thought the Age of Empire had ended. “Let me see,” he is said to have replied, “I think it was last Wednesday.” “Last Wednesday” was the day of the Comprehensive Spending Review and the day, Hobsbawm was pointing out, when a British Prime Minister told the House of Commons that the country could no longer afford the military resources of an imperial power. The most deeply symbolic image of 2010 was the television shot of a row of past prime ministers and current Cabinet members in Westminster Hall, listening with close atten- tion to the words of a Pope reminding them of moral responsibilities and a moral authority that surpass and outlast kingdoms and empires. Over five centuries, the British Parliament, Church and empire grew out of Henry VIII”s rejection of the authority of Rome and his claim that England was itself “another empire”. If the Empire has gone and the Church is not what it was, we must expect Parliament, too, to be transformed. Since the general election in May 2010 there has been, in the British public mind, one of those slight shifts of mood by which you know that somewhere, almost beyond


cables published by WikiLeaks are more remarkable for what they don’t contain than for what they do – diplomats turn out to have been saying to each other more or less what we thought, and they said, they were saying. But it is surely sobering to see displayed, to anyone who notices it, the insignificance, in American eyes, of British concerns, interven- tions or public figures. The last remaining sign that Britain once had a world role is that an American diplomat thinks it worth passing comment on some inanities uttered by a mem- ber of its royal family.


the edge of consciousness, something very big has changed for good – rather like the moment in late August when, at about 4.30 p.m. on what was a warm afternoon, you think you will put on a pullover, and know that the autumn has come. “On or about December 1910, human character changed,” Virginia Woolf wrote, and perhaps she will prove right about the centenary of the date too. The human race may not have changed much, but maybe the attitudes of British people to the rest of the world, and so to themselves, have become different, and more realistic. Admittedly, the confidential American


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Of course a lot of people round the world feel sober at the moment and wish they weren’t. Waking up to a hangover after a binge has been a common experience in Western countries (and not confined to Christmas). Ireland has tasted the bitterness of double bankruptcy, financial and spiritual, even though the Irish have always known that if you sell your soul for fairy gold your winnings will turn into dead leaves. Perhaps Ireland’s reaction to the sexual crimes of its clergy has been so vehement not simply because of the earlier arrogance and authoritarianism of the Irish Church but because of a guilty sense that during the years of the Celtic Tiger the country had betrayed its Catholic past. The growing shrillness of Britain’s new atheism may similarly reflect a deep resent- ment at the country’s detachment from its previous identity, which in customs, institu- tions and beliefs was intimately bound up with the English Church. But Britain has been losing its past for much longer than Ireland, and has been much more reluctant to acknowledge what has happened. If 2010 saw a change, it was that at the highest level of public life the threads at last began to part and the truth began to show through. Over the last 40 years, Britain has been shielded from the truth of its situation by two strokes of (apparent) good fortune. First, there came the discovery of oil under the North Sea. And then, and particularly after the col- lapse of the Soviet Union, there was the rise of deregulated global finance, which London, thanks to its position midway between the time zones of the Far East and North America, was well placed to exploit. From these crocks of gold, rivers of revenue flowed into the UK Treasury, which the governments of the day spent on making themselves popular – Mrs Thatcher on benefits for the unemployed


8 | THE TABLET | 1 January 2011


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