Plural Identities

Reith's wreath

I ended up watching a little bit of "Victoria's Empire", where Victoria Wood visits various parts of the former British Empire, on BBC1 last night, mainly because our Virgin ntl-aswas cable TV service has gone phut so we only have terrestrial and that was the least unappealing programme available.  It wasn't very good, telling me nothing I didn't already more or less know, in contrast to the programme I am half watching now, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Dispatches, Channel 4, on India. 

"Victoria's Empire" reminded me of a riff on Lee and Herrings' BBC1 series "This Morning with Richard Not Judy" where they invited programme ideas based on 'famous' people's names. My favourite was "Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Huge Furry Wishing Stall", where Hugh F-W tours the country on a big furry throne granting wishes.  It passed into family folklore, since which Hugh F-W has been known in our house as "a bit of Huge Furry" - cue for a nice glass of wine and watching someone else muck out pigs, salt a fish or chase chickens.

I suppose we should be grateful it was not "Victoria's Wood", where Victoria Wood tours the country interviewing charcoal burners, wood turners, foresters etc, or indeed "Victoria Gets Wood" where Victoria Wood tours the country interviewing male porn stars.

Nonetheless, being without cable has made me more sympathetic, even nostalgic for Reithian TV;  the culture of a nation formed by a small number of publicly funded channels, which try to inform as well as entertain.

Even our son has been quite docile about being deprived of 'Ben 10' and 'Scooby Doo' for a few days, watching lots of 'Thunderbirds' and 'Night at the Museum' instead.  But if I have to hear the 'Mr Men' theme tune once more, I will have to chuck a brick through the screen.

Japanese shoodle hoax

In the past few days I saw or heard this story, about Japanese women mistakenly buying shaven sheep thinking they are poodles, on Jonathan Ross on BBC1 and on the News Quiz on Radio 4 and also (apparently, not that I read it, but it does have the essential semi-nude photo, of course) The Sun.  It's a hoax.  Even I was prepared to believe there might be a grain of truth in it, after years of having to answer questions along the lines, of "yeah but basically the Japanese are weird, aren't they?"

Thamesblink*

Although I think there is at least a PhD thesis if not an entire book to be written on the British and their inability to complain, or deal well with complaints, and how it relates to race and class complexes (particularly on trains), I believe there is something actively poisonous about the Thameslink* trains (probably the seat layout, smelliness plus inevitable delays) between Bedford and Brighton that causes psychotic, antisocial behaviour.  In the past few months on the few times I have unavoidably travelled on Thameslink I have witnessed a violent rant from a working class black mother convinced that a white, middle class man (started off polite, then became increasingly snotty) asking her to stop her daughter from kicking him was racially motivated, through to an entire carriage staying quiet, or moving to another carriage, or rolling their eyes at each other until a cool, young, blonde haired, attractive woman finally asked the hormone fuelled, mixed sex, black, working class teenagers ricocheting  around the carriage to think about how their behaviour was upsetting others (turned out she was a teacher in Lewisham) with brilliant effect.  The rest of us just  watched and admired her hitting exactly the right tone, which none us, I suspect, would have been able to reach.

In fact Thamesblink trains are so toxic and usually overcrowded that there doesn't even have to be a class or race angle for people to succumb to trainrage - I got to the point where I actually wanted to punch a woman (standing) who took exception to my asking her to stop leaning on me (sitting) by continuing to lean on me and then occasionally biffing me on the head with her bag or hand 'by accident' and then saying "oops sorry" in an exaggerated way.  She was white and middle class, as am I.

*OK I know it became FIrst Capital Connect a while ago, but until they change the rolling stock and improve reliability it will always be Thamesblink to me.

Conway twitty

Well obviously I suppose I should read the report in full, but the way the Civitas report from David Conway has been reported in the Sunday Express is riddled with self contradictions.  If you cite as being particularly pertinent the fact that the July 7th bombers were all second generation immigrants, ie are the product of an immigration inflow dating back 30 years, then why is it suddenly so much more worrying that we have a 42% increase in net immigration last year (which in itself strikes me as a suspect figure, as the UK had net inward migration until recently, so 42% might just represent the fact that there were 100 extra immigrants over emigrants last year, and 142 this year) and the Labour government since 1997 is somehow to blame for it all?

Hear the 'discussion' between Philippe Legrain and David Conway on the Today programme for more of a flavour of the particular axes that David Conway has to grind ("they bring AIDS, TB and marry their cousins!!).  And this gives some clues - there seems to a Christian fundamentalist axe being waved too, plus he's a senior research fellow of religious studies at Roehampton University (formerly World of Carpets) and writes for the Tablet. Nuff said.

Aye but no but aye but...

"Are we going to another country?" asked my son, as we set off to see some friends in Edinburgh during the Easter holidays.  No, but yes, but not really, but interesting question, I found myself saying.  Once we got there I felt, even more than I had on many previous visits that there is something clearly different about Scotland, even Edinburgh. 

It's partly something to do with the architecture - austere solid stone versus flimsy pretty brick, shingles, stucco but also, as I looked at all the posters saying "kick out Jakey McConnell" and how the SNP will spend the money on the NHS and education not Trident, I wondered how different Scottish cultural values might be different to English cultural values and what kind of impact that might have on trying to define Britishness, as taught in schools or as part of the British citizenship test.

The female half of our Scottish friends in Edinburgh said she felt the same way about the architecture, when she visited Kent recently, and also said something about rather liking the hierarchy in England - I asked if she meant the class system, and she said "sort of".  I suspect, as a senior manager, she rather likes the deference she gets south of the border.  I asked Marcus, of  Harry's Place, (Scottish born, but also brought up in Yemen and Germany), over lunch today and he said he also found England to be much more class ridden and Scotland to be more democratic.

The second aspect Marcus mentioned is that the Scottish like to think of themselves as more left wing than the English, and in particular do not forget lightly the Thatcher era.  Certainly the male half of our Edinburgh friends is visceral in his hatred of Mrs T and memories of the miners' strike etc are still very fresh for him.  When I asked him about Tommy Sheridan and said "isn't he guilty as hell?", my friend said yes, but we all hate the News of the World even more, so cheered when he won against them.  So more left wing in the sense of deep, long lasting grudges?

The third aspect that Marcus and I discussed was the respective education systems.  Why is the Scottish education system still producing better results (and probably helps explain the less class ridden Scottish society)?  Marcus reckons it's cultural - being a hostile land to farm, Scottish people have had to find something other than agriculture to make a living, and this has meant work that requires education (running the British Empire for example), so education was much more valued, and more widely available across all classes.

So values surrounding class, politics and education differ, but, we concluded, it seems that the often mentioned British "sense of fair play" and "sense of humour" are both given importance north or south of the border.

Why I've no chance of becoming the local MP, despite the all women shortlist

The only thing I wholeheartedly agree with in the leaflet from local Labour councillors and candidates which I have  just delivered round my neighbourhood is the proposal that the Jubilee Library ought to open on Sundays.  Otherwise, their statement of support for our MPs voting against Trident and voting against the invasion of Iraq and their cry of "our children's future is not a lottery" (no, of course our children's future should be based on our ability to manipulate a consistent and predictable set of rules, and by having the money to spend on moving house into a catchment area for a 'good' school.  As for your chavvy children, well, sorry) all leave me cold, but I know, and they know, will play well with the local leftwing middle class vote.  Still, it was good to get some outdoor exercise on a beautiful spring day.

Playing cultural monopoly

Baljeet Ghale, President of the National Union of Teachers in the UK, is falling into the same trap as  the British academic Terry Eagleton, in saying there are no "British values" because the British do not have a monopoly on values such as fairness or decency.  Actually I suspect it is perfectly possible she is not inadvertently falling into the same trap, but that she read his article in the Guardian earlier this year and had one of those nice moments of liberal left self affirmation that the Guardian is so good at providing its readers with, and, seeing her gut instinct thus articulated in such an esteemed organ, decided it was therefore OK to take a public stance on it.  It played well to the NUT activists, who like any new excuse to attack the Blair government, tied in well with her 'first black President' self titling, and, culiminating with a why can't we be more like Cuba comment, earned her a standing ovation.

It's a trap, or a straw man if you prefer a different metaphor, because noone who seriously studies or tries to define national cultures says that any country has a monopoly on any particular value.  What most studies try to do is assess the relative weight given to different values in different societies.

What I find fascinating, and I don't think has been studied enough, is how typical members of a culture react when two strongly held values come in conflict.  For example, Japanese people can be very process oriented but when a request comes from a more senior person, the strong sense of hierarchical deference takes precedence, and the process can be crashed.  In terms of British identity, it leads to some interesting silent hypocrisies, for example our strong sense of fair play, which conflicts with our enduring class system, producing an apologetic middle class ("don't hate me for being middle class, I'm nice really"), a ruling elite in denial of class differences (you try bringing up class at a chattering classes dinner party and see if you get invited back) and an aggrieved working class - "you say we've got rights, and yet somehow we're still being screwed".

This particular British hypocrisy aside, it is a legitimate government concern, and not state oppression by those who think their political interests are being undermined by the diversity of the People, right, yeah - as Terry says, that there are groups of people in our society who give allegiance to religious values precedence over the rights of people to live unharmed, or who insist on loyalty to family over freedom to choose a husband or retain a clitoris.  Yes Christianity has in various forms been in conflict and some wings still are in conflict with the values of our liberal society, but the redemptive aspect of radical Islamism and the value this implies - lives are worth sacrificing for my redemption - cannot be absorbed into British cuture and British values should not be challenged or transformed in the process, as Terry Eagleton says they should.

European identity

There was a useful summary in The Times a month ago which showed the different emphases placed by each EU member country on what yesterday's Berlin declaration should contain:

• Social Europe (economic freedoms, social rights, a constitution): Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain
• Collective security: Czech Rep, Hungary, Poland
• Future prosperity (economic benefits of a single market rather than fiscal and legal harmonisation): Denmark, Great Britain, Netherlands, Sweden
• Christian history: Italy, Ireland, Poland, Slovenia

In the end it was decided that Angela Merkel, as current President of the EU, should be the only one to sign the 2 page statement, which avoided most of the key issues.

So does this mean agreement on an European identity, a set of values, is impossible?  Or is it more practical just to be clever-clever about it and say that this very point gives Europe its identity - we agree to disagree.

Or, even more pointlessly, we could define Europe as being about a liberation from American materialism.  Pointless, not just because of the tired kneejerk anti-Americanism and lack of constructiveness that this entails, but because, as Wim Wenders has apparently pointed out at a recent conference, Europeans are pretty keen on American materialism and popular culture.

I asked a couple of fellow interculturalists at a recent SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) conference what they thought European identity was based on.  I offered the idea, which I have heard some Japanese mention, that we are a 'stone culture', as opposed to the wooden building culture of most other regions, in that we build our buildings to last, and take great care over them, repairing and renovating.  Obviously you could argue that North America may also be a stone culture, but the dimension that is European is the sheer age of many of our stone buildings.  I would add (as there are some stone cultures in Africa) that we also have a common language in our stone buildings in Europe - we can decode them.

My intercultural colleagues agreed, and it was one of them that added the point about how symbolic our buildings are, in particular how, for example, major buildings in Vienna symbolise certain periods of European thought - Renaissance, Ancient Greece and democracy, the Enlightenment etc.  We did not mean this in the sense that Ian Buruma argues against, that Enlightenment values define the soul of Europe.  As he says, there are many people around the world who share the values of free speech and scientific enquiry.  It is something to do with the notion that Europeans share a common history of thought, and how this thought is symbolised in buildings, art and literature, and that most of us, wittingly or unwittingly, recognise these symbols in our cultural surroundings.