Every so often for the last half-century or so, we have seen some
American arriving, breathless and sweating, with the latest post
from the old country. And his news is always the same. It is that
Britain is finished. All washed up. No more to be seen on the
world stage — except, perhaps, as “the sick man of Europe.” This
Anglo-Jeremiah is sure to quote Dean Acheson’s stunning
aperçu of 1962 that “Great Britain has lost an empire
and has not yet found a role” — which, if it means anything,
simply means that the world-historical drama is short of roles,
these days, for traditional imperial powers, and that Britain
wouldn’t want to play it anymore even if there were such a role.
The latest such prophet of doom is Stryker McGuire in
Newsweek, who was the journalist who coined the
expression “Cool Britannia” in the early days of the
now-unlamented Blair government. “Forget the Great in Britain,”
his article is headed.
Even in the decades after it lost its empire, Britain strode
the world like a pocket superpower. Its economic strength and
cultural heft, its nuclear-backed military might, its
extraordinary relationship with America — all these things
helped this small island nation to punch well above its weight
class. Now all that is changing as the bills come due on
Britain’s role in last year’s financial meltdown, the rescue of
the banks, and the ensuing recession. Suddenly, the sun that
once never set on the British Empire is casting long shadows
over what’s left of Britain’s imperial ambitions, and the
country is having to rethink its role in the world — perhaps
as Little Britain, certainly as a lesser Britain.
Of course, there is no shortage of those in the British press who
have fired back. Gerald Warner in the Daily Telegraph
wrote that
The problem, in the end, is that McGuire has mistaken Britain’s
cyclical problems — in particular, the policies and
composition of this Government — for structural flaws. Yes, we
have problems, but many of them are eminently fixable. After
all, this is hardly the first time our valedictory as a great
nation has been delivered, only to be discredited by national
resurgence. “Britain is a tragedy,” claimed Henry Kissinger in
the 1970s. “It has sunk to borrowing, begging, stealing until
North Sea oil comes in.” The Wall Street Journal
concurred: “Goodbye, Great Britain: it was nice knowing you.”
Over-eager obituarists on the far side of the Atlantic should
not be surprised if this country once again disproves their
terminal diagnosis.
My own sympathies are by nature and experience more with Mr.
Warner than with Mr. McGuire, but sometimes I wonder. One thing
that makes me wonder is the way that the British press
covered the funeral last week of Harry Patch, “the last fighting
Tommy” of the First World War, the last veteran of the trenches,
who was laid to rest not with solemn and patriotic music but with
the sappy anti-war “folk” ditty, “Where Have all the Flowers
Gone,” which was said to have been played “to show Mr. Patch’s
antipathy to violent conflict.” For, as it happens, Harry in
extreme old age had finally broken his silence about his war-time
experiences, now nearly a century distant in the rear-view
mirror, and pronounced that “It wasn’t worth it.” In fact, not
only was his war not “worth it,” no war was. “War,” he said,
taking the generic view of the thing, “isn’t worth one life.”
It would be unfair to expect a man of 111 to show a bit more
respect to his now-dead comrades-in-arms who thought otherwise.
He has earned the right to his own pacifism, even though those
who supposed the victory over Germany “worth it” enough to have
given up their own lives are a mute but powerful testimony to the
contrary view. Yet the media were virtually unanimous in finding
in the old boy an affirmation of a cultural pacifism which has
obviously grown stronger since I lived in Britain 20 years ago.
Perhaps having been told for 80 years by enlightened and
progressive opinion that he was a pitiable victim of the war,
rather than an honorable victor, the idea finally went to his
head. But even if it hadn’t, the enlightened and progressive
would have seen in his demise a justification of their
victim-mongering and their self-congratulation for being wise
enough to make such a mistake “never again.” In the
Times of London, Roy Hattersley — a former deputy
leader of the Labour Party — saw the large crowds who turned out
to honor Mr. Patch as “a sign that we believe that the world
should have grown out of the waste of war.” Yeah. Should
have. But in fact it never has and, pace
John Horgan in a recent number of the British magazine,
New Scientist, never will grow out of it. Mr. Hattersley
is extravagant in his praise of the returning veterans of Iraq
and Afghanistan, both the living and the dead, and speaks of the
debt we owe them, but if he thinks that war is a waste it’s hard
to see what he supposes that debt to be. Weren’t these men,
rather, mere fools for having thrown their lives away for
nothing? If the sacrifice of the First World War was “pointless,”
as he suggests it was, what makes the sacrifice of these wars any
different?
One answer is supplied by the former poet laureate, Andrew
Motion, in the Daily Telegraph, who
recalled meeting Mr. Patch and “the modesty and wisdom of the
last authentic voice of the First World War.” That war, he says,
“changed the world for ever; in its crucible of catastrophes a
world was lost, and the modern period was born. The way we now
take extended suffrage for granted, assume a sceptical view of
authority, demand individual rights: all these things derive from
the suffering and sacrifice in Flanders.” Ah, so then it
wasn‘t pointless. It’s point was the loss of that
other world which allowed these blessings of ours, of
“the modern period,” to come into being. But that other world was
also the world of Britain’s greatness. Let’s just hope that she
doesn’t need it anymore.
