Plural Identities

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.

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.

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.

Bill Bailey on Britishness

A version of this was on telly last night, reminding me of the time I saw Bill Bailey at the Orange Tree, Richmond and wept with laughter, and also how very British he indeed is.  ...infused with a wistful melancholy... chipper... casual violence... Nectar Points

This one is good too - "we crave disappointment", "we're just a bunch of stoned, illiterate, wheezing, shagging, lardy bastards", although it does have the obligatory for British stand-ups in order to get whoops from the crowd anti-American bits too.

Glass of white wine for the ladies

"Al Murray's Happy Hour" on Saturday night reinforced my view that it is the funniest thing on TV at the moment.  He must have felt too, as he sang "Killer Queen" with Madness, that life doesn't get much sweeter than this.

It's fascinating watching him play with his pub landlord character, particularly from a class perspective.  I remember him as an outgoing but not particularly loud fellow-historian a year below me at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.  Apparently he went to private school and is a direct descendant of William Makepeace Thackeray and has a British diplomat grandfather.  His audience (which seems to be a mix of middle class students and working class - taxi driver, betting office clerk, postman, pub of the week employees)  must surely know that the xenophobic Essex working class persona is a total fake, and yet laugh along, are not insulted by this very middle class, even upper middle class, person's parody of a working class stereotype, partly I suppose in the way that Alf Garnett/Jonny Speight allowed taboo subjects and suppressed prejudices to be expressed and then by covertly laughing at them, de-fanging them.

It is very very British and most of all in that it allows us to laugh at ourselves.  It got me laughing at myself, last week, when queuing for the check in at Narita airport.  I was being very British, joining a long queue on the assumption that if there was a queue I was doomed to join it, only to find, when I got to the end, that it was the Economy Class queue and there was in fact an Upper Class non-queue I could have not joined.

As I was unnecessarily queuing, a man started to double queue next to me, almost edging in front of me.  I stiffened, gave sidelong glares (see Kate Fox, Watching the English, for more detail on this behaviour) and eventually said "Would you like to go in front of me?" (again, so British of me in my polite sarcasm).  He shrugged and said "no, no".  There was something about the "non" of the "no" that made me squint at his passport.  French.  The Pub Landlord bellowed in my ear "Rules is rules.  If we didn't have rules, where would we be? France!"

Other apercus from the Pub Landlord:
On the British when it's sunny: "Out come the shorts of hope, the pale legs of experience, the sandals of folly"
On being a single male Brit: "There's nothing sadder than taping Eurotrash.  There's no such thing as an ironic w**k."

Talking Italian

I was having tea with an Italian friend today - she asked for tea, not coffee.  She's been living in the UK for 15 years and has recently started a job which involves having to deal with southern Italians on supply chain issues. Easy, you would think, as she's Sicilian, but she says it is driving her crazy, and is reminding her of all the reasons she prefers to live in the UK.  "They have a completely different sense to me of right and wrong!"

I mentioned that I had been talking with a Japanese manager who had been sent to a factory in Italy, recently acquired by his Japanese company, to spread Japanese manufacturing techniques.  He was  not having much success. In response to my question of what three key things a Japanese expat manager in Italy should know (my three for the UK being: expectation that managers should be good communicators, need to respect status and job roles, must observe fair play and due process).  He said expect a totally messy decision making process with the end result appearing suddenly out of nowhere, to have to be a strong top down boss and a need to be flexible.

My Italian friend agreed and added, with regard to her preference for British 'fairness' and queuing, that she felt even more alienated from her original culture when she tried to renew her ID card in her hometown in Sicily recently, and turned up at 8am when the town hall was supposed to open, only to find it closed.  The official finally turned up at 9am, with a friend, with whom he had been having breakfast in a bar.  When she complained, he simply went into his office with his friend, and left her to wait.  When she complained further, he then filled in her form incorrectly (deliberately).  She complained again, and he told her to go elsewhere.  "But this is where I come from, there is no elsewhere!"  she protested. 

I asked her what she liked about the UK, and after some discussion, she boiled it down to the British lack of intrusiveness.  She gave as an example, that the Italians that she worked with felt they had a right, even after only working with her for a week, to pass comment on whether or not they liked her clothes. 

I think I will add 'lack of intrusiveness' to my Britishness list.

Random Italianness facts from recent surveys covered in the Financial Times:
Italians are the second most pessimistic after the French, in Europe, in terms of believing that life in their country is getting worse.
Italians take the least time off work (absence, not holidays) in Europe

Bonnes Nouvelles

A Prospect magazine 'web exclusive' review of a book about Muslim immigrants in France by Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse points to some encouraging findings, as well as giving some figures on the French headscarf issue:

Only about 1,200 schoolgirls wore a headscarf before the ban was passed, in early 2004; on the first day the law was enforced, 639 girls showed up in a headscarf at school. A year later, the figure had dropped to 12.

The conclusion:

None of this is to deny that the rise of Islamist extremism remains a serious concern. The problem of the re-Islamisation of disaffected young French Muslims seems particularly daunting, especially when there is no quick fix for the broader economic problems that afflict them and the rest of France. Of course, as Laurence and Vaisse point out, the revival of faith need not lead to radicalism. But it can. And when it has, a report by the International Crisis Group suggested last spring, it has been because hardline Salafi groups have filled the vacuum left after Muslim civic groups created in the 1980s and 1990s failed to mobilise their constituents. This is a bleak observation, but it carries an implicit recommendation: get young Muslims involved in mainstream politics.

The Protestantisation of Muslim belief

I did gulp rather when I ripped open my copy of Prospect this month to see that the cover article was on Identity and Migration  and was written by Francis Fukuyama.  I knew I needed to give it (as with all Prospect articles  - of course!) due care and attention, read it in full and make note of it in this blog.

So, I finally found some space, albeit interrupted by Harry and his Bucketful of Dinosaurs and the new (look Mummy, I told you, it's NEW Scooby Doo!) Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get a Clue, to take a proper look at it.

It certainly answers many of the questions I had been asking and trying to answer in this blog.

Is there anything in the Muslim religion which encourages Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, above and beyond other religions?
Fukuyama implies not, although he says it is an open question.
There have been many points in history where Muslim societies have been more tolerant than their Christian counterparts.  Fukuyama sees contemporary radical Islamism as a product of identity politics (happiness lies in the recovery of the inner identity), and a problem we have seen before with young people who have become anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Baader Meinhof gang.  It is 'modern' because the question of identity does not come up at all in traditional Muslim societies, where an individual's identity is given by that person's parents and social environment.  To the question 'who am I?' radical Islamism answers - you are a member of the global umma, defined by adherence to universal Islamic doctrine, stripped of all its local customs etc.

How do we solve the problem of jihadist terrorism?
Not by bringing modernisation and democracy to the middle east ('good' though that may be in its own right) - this might even increase rather than dampen the terrorism problem in the short run.

His answer seems to be a more energetic effort to integrate non-western populations into a common liberal culture, and at the same time a recognition that liberalism cannot ultimately be based on group rights, because not all groups uphold liberal values.  He points out that asking Muslims to give up group rights is much more difficult in Europe than in the US, because many European countries have corporatist traditions that continue to respect communal rights and fail decisively to separate church and state.  In the UK this would be state-funded faith schools, for a start. Even France, he argues, has not been consistent in this respect and the "religious symbols at school" ban of 2004 was actually a belated attempt to reassert older concepts of republicanism.

Ultimately, he says, post modern societies need to assert positive values and shared beliefs more vigorously than before, which is difficult given that we cannot agree on the substance of the good life to which we aspire in common.

Read, as they say, the rest, preferably without Scooby, Shaggy and Harry's background commentary.

Chewy Brits

Some chewy bits from the recent British Social Attitudes survey as reported in the Financial Times :

The proportion of the public who say that British is "the best or only" way to describe them has dropped from 52 per cent to 44 per cent in just a decade, the survey found.

That is more because a sense of Englishness is rising than a sense of being British is declining in Scotland and Wales.

There has been no decline in the proportion of people who identify themselves as belonging to a particular class. Many more, however, now define themselves as middle class, reflecting actual changes in the class structure of British society.

Although hasn't social mobility declined recently?

Social class "is no longer related to a distinctive set of values", said Anthony Heath, professor of sociology at Oxford and one of the study's authors.

On the radio (BBC Radio 4) the morning the survey was announced, I heard one commentator saying the main thing that differentiated British social classes now was the way they spent and invested their money, specifically the proportion the middle class spend/invest in their houses.  Although I sensed, when I was living in the East End of London in the 1990s, that thanks to the 'right to buy', certain more prosperous parts of the working class were just as keen to spend/invest money on their houses as the middle classes.

Religious identity, however, still produces markedly different views to the non-religious majority on issues such as pre-marital sex and abortion, even if membership of a religion or attendance at religious services remains in decline.

In 1964, three-quarters of the population said they belonged to a religion and attended services, and only 3 per cent said they did not belong to a religion. In 2005, a mere 31 per cent belonged and attended services while 38 per cent said they did not belong at all.