Across from my flat, a homeless man called Steve sits on the steps of a bank, drawing tattoo designs. A few coins get thrown in his direction, and by the end of the day he has eaten at least once. We are, after all, in the Garden of England, as the county of Kent is known in this green and pleasant land.
In the daytime, Rochester High St sells its antiques and vegetables. But come Friday night, it turns into what’s known as the “Rochester mile” – a string of 12 pubs that the natives take it upon themselves to visit serially, in the time-honoured English tradition of binge drinking. When the pubs shut at 11.00pm, the drinking tribes charge out like wounded bulls, piss in the alleyways, wrestle with the rubbish bags, smash bottles on the pavement, break the occasional shop window, and do a lot of braying. A few weeks ago, Steve was attacked by a drinking pack. They broke his jaw and left.
This puts Kiwi drinking behaviour into perspective. We are heavy drinkers, true, but not generally given to violence and vandalism. Looking at England’s apocalyptic drinking scene and the social malaise it represents, it is edifying to trace back the roots of Pakeha culture and think not only about what we are as New Zealanders today, but also what we might have been had our ancestors stayed put in England.
It is said that Europeans drink to enhance consciousness, while the English drink to annihilate it. Alcoholic aggression is one of the most distinctive and deplored features of English social life. The Economist called it “grotesque behaviour” and newspaper columns lament “the English disease”. And yet it is treated as something foul but permanent, like the weather: something you can’t do much about except avoid. When a drunk, carbuncular teenager in my street pissed in the doorway of a charity shop one evening, his mates cheering, I challenged them and nearly got a bloody nose. By an unwritten law they own the street. Somehow, over time, English streets have been usurped by half-formed bullies whose boredom mates with self-hate to become destructive anger.
Treating the English disease, however, is as difficult as avoiding it. One suggested treatment, which is part of the Labour government’s campaign to eradicate “yob culture”, is to remove the early closing time of pubs and have them open late into the night, the European way. This, the argument goes, will ease the pressure of last orders and limit bingeing. Nonsense, the counter-argument goes: it will only prolong the misery. Look at Ireland and Scotland and their liberal liquor laws – drunks rage all night. Still, although the Scots, Irish and Welsh aren’t exactly teetotallers, alcoholic aggression thrives among English males more than in any other nation of the United Kingdom. In Dublin and small-town Ireland, for instance, the night streets are alive with buskers and bands play in the pubs. It’s loud, but non-threatening.
So the problem runs deeper than pub regulations. In fact it runs into a sea of particularly English woes, including the post-colonial variety. There is tacit tolerance in England for laddishness and anti-social behaviour, rooted in the working-class tradition of loutish males moving in packs and literally pissing on all things “clever” and foreign (hence the “Krauts”, “Frogs” and other delightful references to neighbours). As an English friend in New Zealand put it, “The working class have always prided themselves on their savagery and ignorance – they think it’s charming.” He comes from a working-class background, by the way.
The ugly face of English hooliganism was most recently displayed at the Euro 2004 football championship in Portugal. English streets were festooned with the red and white flag of St George. Pasty youths wrapped in the flag walked up and down the streets, yelling “Eng-er-land, Eng-er-land”, and forcing elderly men to kick giant inflated footballs “for England”. Meanwhile, their brothers in Portugal bellowed on TV, “If it wasn’t for us, you’d all be Krauts” – a statement both pathetic and historically inaccurate.
Here, we come back to the woes. The English soccer team is the only one unattached to a nation state. It is, however, attached to a desperation to hold onto something worthwhile. The culture of hooliganism abroad and yobbishness at home is the last refuge for the culturally dispossessed, the downsized, the in-secure. A very small guy driving a very large car comes to mind. England is today less than the sum of its parts – in fact, it is just a part of what it has created, almost lost within its expansionist achievement. It is a neat postcolonial irony that the nation that created the greatest Empire since Rome by exporting Englishness has been, for decades, in the throes of an identity crisis, or postcolonial cringe. Having a great past is not easy – how do you live up to it? As an English teacher I know put it, “We have the curse of superiority.”
New Zealand-Aotearoa might have two names, but at least they refer to the same thing. The English live in a country with five accepted, but not interchangeable names: England, Britain, Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the more geographic British Isles. Each of these is problematic for different sets of its inhabitants, with the exception of Britain, which omits the cringing “Great” and remains almost all-inclusive.
In the last decade or so, the Scots and Welsh have had a cultural revival, loudly proclaiming their difference, and the Irish were always apart. The English, squashed between the ethnic pride of the UK nations on one side and the rise of New Europe on the other, are left with a generic British kit. This includes various ethnic strands now part of the mainstream – Indian and Chinese food, African and Caribbean music and the sterile American diet of popular culture. No wonder they feel the need to prove that they, too, are special – or as a BBC commentator put it, “desperate to feel proud of being English”. A Guardian journalist suggested that “the modern English identity is an identity crisis”, and the English-born, US-based writer Christopher Hitchens wrote that “to be English is to be mildly embarrassed by the very concept of identity”.
This, of course, only applies to the thinking populace. Back in 1941, George Orwell mocked the left-wing intelligentsia for such thinking. “In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.” But, he hastened to add, the working class more than made up for it with their “insularity” and “xenophobia”.
Indeed, “Two world wars and one World Cup” is today the desperate cry of English louts spotted vomiting on Friday night or urinating in the streets of a foreign country. But they represent neither the new face of England nor the proudest English – or is that British? – values of justice, democracy and tolerance.
The recent quest for Englishness has pushed the revival of St George’s Day celebrations, in response to the success of St Patrick’s Day in Ireland. The problem is, Englishness is an ethnic rather than cultural thing. Have you heard of English Asians or English Africans? All migrants are British. Unlike Britishness, Englishness is racially exclusive, and therefore problematic for those in favour of diversity. The Scots and Welsh, unburdened by Empire, are free to be ethnically special as well as British. The English are reclaiming this right, too, in their fumbling way, and you can’t help empathising with them – the very Empire they created has robbed them of “ethnic” distinction. Put it this way: the English could never be exotic.
It doesn’t help that repugnant political parties have appropriated the flag, such as the ultra-right British National Party, whose main dogma is “Asylum is making Britain explode”. But the amusing thing is that, unlike St Patrick, who converted the Irish to Christianity, St George the English patron saint never set foot in England. In fact, he wasn’t even white – he was a Roman soldier born in the Middle East. Defenders of the St George flag have pointed out that a red cross on a white background has a lot of blank space. This is perhaps why during Euro 2004, 30 million flags were reportedly sold in Britain. The red cross was displayed not just on white vans, the distinguishing vehicle of the white drinking-class male, but also in the windows of Indian restaurants and Chinese takeaway shops. The night the England team was kicked out, my neighbour, a Scottish builder, came home from the pub almost in tears. Is there, after all, space for everyone on the flag, along with the swarthy Roman soldier? Or is it that Englishness is nothing more than a spectre?
The hosts of Euro 2004 will likely say that far from spectres, the English are brutes. Too bad for the “English gentleman” stereotype. Contrary to one school of thought, the soccer lout is no longer spawned from an alienated, lumpen class, the product of the Industrial Revolution. He can be university-educated and middle- class now, or, in the words of Observer columnist Mary Riddell, a “white genteel lager-swiller”. The slow thawing out of the dinosaur that is the English class system has produced the monster of the demo-cratised yob. Another school of thought suggests that hooliganism is simply a bunch of insecure males challenged by the police of a foreign country and instantly turned into a rag-tag army. But this doesn’t explain the smashed shop windows and Steve’s broken jaw at home.
Either way, the “English gentleman” is dead, along with the England of stodgy breakfasts and colonial superiority. Modern England is an unhappy mutant going through the growing pains of all ex-empires brave enough to look in the mirror and see a constantly changing face. In this morphing England, the culture of tabloidism and pornography is rife, and celebrity is the new aristocracy. Anyone can be a celebrity, or at least have access to their private lives. If you don’t have a national dish, you may as well have David Beckham.
In one of his books on Empire, the writer Niall Ferguson relates an anecdote from the hand-over of South Yemen by the British. The night before independence, the British governor said to the defence minister, “You know, Minister, I believe that in the long view of history, the British Empire will be remembered only for two things. The game of soccer and the expression ‘fuck off’.’’ When the high street is besieged by yobs on Friday nights, this rings horribly true. But it is useful to remember that the louts, the BNP supporters, “the Rule Britannia stuff”, in Orwell’s words, are not the only English around. And that, apart from soccer and expletives, the British Empire has also cultivated the right soil for the most culturally diverse population in Europe, the most tolerant religious policies, civil rights for everyone and the best news network in the world.
Okay, there is still contempt or envy of Europe, depending on who you are. But the great British values have taken firm hold, to create a modern Babylon of cultures. Naturally, this frightens the exponents of racial and cultural “purity” – elsewhere known as inbreeding and dullness. Sporting white English males will have to get adjusted, with or without the help of lager, or perish as a species. The medieval rallying cry of Henry V at Agincourt, “Cry ‘God for Harry! England and St George!’’’ – still bellowed at soccer matches and meetings of the Far Right – is a nervous squeak, not a resonant battle cry, because that battle is long over. There are new, different battles to be fought now, the rules have changed if the flags haven’t, and, as always, those who catch up fast have more chance of survival.
There is something else. Nationalism is gradually being submerged in the developed world by the deluge of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. Subcultures are becoming more powerful than nationalism. England was always a nation of subcultures because of its rigid class system. Now that class is superseded by the mock democracy of consumerism, it is possible that the English, with their blurry identity and the dumbing down of their mainstream culture, are in fact leading the way. I suppose it could be worse.