The Good Brexiteer's Guide to English
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THE GOOD BREXITEER’S GUIDE TO ENGLISH LIT 001_240_Brexiteers Guide_FNL.indd 1 09/07/2018 16:37 THE GOOD BREXITEER’S GUIDE TO ENGLISH LIT John Sutherland PREFACE by John Crace REAKTION BOOKS LTD 001_240_Brexiteers Guide_FNL.indd 3 09/07/2018 16:37 in memoriam Monica Jones, Brexitiste avant la lettre Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2018 Copyright © John Sutherland 2018 Copyright for the Preface © John Crace 2018 The right of John Sutherland to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78023 992 7 Illustration on p. 16 courtesy of the British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent 001_240_Brexiteers Guide_FNL.indd 4 09/07/2018 16:37 ‘Dust.’ – Philip Larkin’s reply to the question why he never chose to holiday on the Continent, in conversation with the author, c. 1966 ‘That jingoistic England that is trying to march us out of the eu, that is the England I don’t want to know.’ – John le Carré, in high disgust, CBS TV, 18 September 2017 001_240_Brexiteers Guide_FNL.indd 5 09/07/2018 16:37 CONTENTS PREFACE by John Crace 11 INTRODUCTION 17 The Battle of Maldon 21 Domesday Book 26 The Tattooed Heart 30 Malory and King Arthur: The Literary Invention of England 32 The Literature of the People 41 The Bloudie Crosse 48 The Brexit Boadicea 49 Boadicea in Stone 56 Enter the Maybot, Clanking 58 Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum: I Smell the Blood of an Englishman! 59 Shakespeare: ‘This England’ 70 The Oxford Book of English Verse 76 001_240_Brexiteers Guide_FNL.indd 7 09/07/2018 16:37 School Songsters 82 Brexiteers, Buccaneers, Musketeers; or, ‘Up Yours, Señors!’ 86 Dickens, Anti-Brexiteer Extraordinaire 91 Our National Anthem 93 Gibbon: The Congenital British Non Serviam 97 Ivanhoe and the Norman Yoke 100 Jane Austen’s ‘England’ 104 W. E. Henley 107 Rivers of Blood Wash over Our Green and Pleasant Land 111 Brexit’s Green and Pleasant Land 118 A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy 121 DNB/OED 125 Land of Hope and Glory 131 Orwell: Quarter-French, Wholly English 134 Rhodes Must Fall. Kipling Must Go. Buchan Goes On and On 137 Kipling Again 145 Nigel Farage’s Favourite Novel 148 King Solomon’s (Not Africa’s) Mines 152 Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘Old England’ is Gone Forever 154 The Amis Objection 160 Philip Larkin: The Greatest English Poet of Our Time 162 Why the Brexiteer Loves Sherlock 166 Mad Dogs and Englishmen (and Jeeves) 169 001_240_Brexiteers Guide_FNL.indd 8 09/07/2018 16:37 The End of Jeeves 173 Invasion by Immigration – From Calais, Mars or Wherever 175 Dracula: Illegal Immigrant 180 God Loves England (Does He Not?) 185 Flashman 191 Goldfinger 196 The Poison Cabinet 201 Lost Englands 205 Virginia Woolf’s Farewell to England (and the World) 206 The Queen and I 211 The Children of Men 213 London Fields 214 England, England 216 Take to the Boats! 218 McEwan’s Objection 222 Hail Hilary! 223 The Satanic Verses: ‘Not English!’ 227 Epilogue 231 References 233 Acknowledgements 240 001_240_Brexiteers Guide_FNL.indd 9 09/07/2018 16:37 001_240_Brexiteers Guide_FNL.indd 10 09/07/2018 16:37 PREFACE John Crace ohn Sutherland is open about having voted for the United JKingdom to remain in the European Union. So this book could be seen as the ultimate work of self-sacrifice; to give the Brexiteers something they were never able to give themselves. Even during the referendum, Brexit was an atavistic set of com- peting interests. Some wanted to get rid of immigrants; some wanted to restore British sovereignty; some just wanted to give the political elites a kicking. Sutherland has given them all a cultural and literary hinterland around which they can unite and against which Brexit can be better understood. The referendum brought what had until then been an inter- nal squabble within the Conservative Party on to the national stage. If the intention had been to unite the country and to settle the question of Britain’s membership of the European Union for good, it backfired spectacularly. The country’s divi- sions were split open by the referendum campaign, and there have as yet been no signs of any healing. Brexit has taken its toll on Westminster as well as on the United Kingdom. The usual everyday processes of running the country have all but stalled as successive governments try to make a success of Brexit – something that has so far proved beyond them. What we have often got instead has been politics played out as farce. 11 001_240_Brexiteers Guide_FNL.indd 11 09/07/2018 16:37 The Good Brexiteer’s Guide to English Lit David Cameron gave up on day one, by choosing to resign the morning after the referendum. That triggered one of the most bizarre leadership elections of modern times. While all the other hopefuls took to the airwaves in the weeks following Cameron’s departure, Theresa May managed to get away with saying almost nothing. Whether by accident or design, it was a stunning piece of political gamesmanship. One by one, her rivals eliminated themselves from the contest by saying some- thing catastrophically stupid, until May was the last person standing. It was the first time in British history that someone had become prime minister by taking a vow of silence. What was so effective in getting her through the doors of 10 Downing Street proved less helpful in keeping her there. A prime minister can’t get away with saying nothing indefinitely, and eventually she had to try out a few phrases, the most common of which was ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ While a few of those who had been enthusiastic about Britain leaving the eu took ‘Brexit means Brexit’ as a sign of intelligent life, most of the rest of the country began to wonder if there was even less to May than met the eye. When May began answering completely different questions from the ones she had been asked, in every interview, a few of us dared to think her brain might have been hacked and taken over by malware. Ask her what ‘Brexit means Brexit’ really meant and she would invariably whirr into inaction and say, ‘I am determined to be focused . [she wasn’t; she really wasn’t] . on the things that the British people are determined for me to focus on.’ The Maybot was born. Things didn’t really improve throughout the first eight months of May’s time in office. First, her government lost its case in the Supreme Court over its refusal to allow Parliament a vote on triggering Article 50. May was not at all happy about this: Britain hadn’t voted to take back control in the eu referendum 12 001_240_Brexiteers Guide_FNL.indd 12 09/07/2018 16:37 Preface only to allow the British Parliament to have a say in how the country was run. She appeared to be even more angry when the Labour Party chose to thwart ‘the will of the people’ by voting with the government to trigger Article 50. Logic never was the Maybot’s strong point. Despite all these very obvious shortcomings, the Conserv- atives still held a twenty-point lead over Labour in the opinion polls, and immediately after the Easter break in 2017, May announced that she would be holding a snap general election – despite having explicitly stated on seven previous occasions that it wasn’t in the national interest to hold a general election. Some people began to wonder if the Maybot were becoming confused between what was in the public interest and what was in her own. The early weeks of the election campaign were characterized by Theresa May going round the country saying ‘Strong and Stable’ in front of a small group of Conservative Party activists who had been herded into one corner of a community centre to make it look on tv as if she were playing to sell-out audiences everywhere. Things didn’t improve with the launch of her mani- festo. Within days she was forced to insist that ‘Nothing has Changed’ as she changed pretty much everything. May couldn’t for the life of her see why everyone was calling her dementia tax a tax on dementia just because it was a tax that targeted people with dementia. Besides, her manifesto had never been meant to be seen as electoral promises; rather, it was just a series of random ideas formed of random sentences. It was around this time that even her advisers started calling her ‘The Maybot’. The name seemed to describe her perfectly: awkward, lacking in empathy and – above all – not very competent. Despite all this, the Conservatives still held a large lead going into polling day, and May expected to gain a sixty-to-eighty- seat majority. But the electorate saw things differently. Having 13 001_240_Brexiteers Guide_FNL.indd 13 09/07/2018 16:37 The Good Brexiteer’s Guide to English Lit been asked to back the prime minister and give her a strong mandate, they instead chose to give her no overall majority.