“The slave trade is the single greatest thing that ever happened to this country. Some people – like Blair - will try and tell you it was wrong. That you should be ashamed of it. But you never should. Because it’s what made your nation the best in the world. (Scoffs) Tony Blair. He wants to apologise for everything. Shame he never apologises for his wife’s face.”
As far as speeches go, Mr Brockhouse’s maiden address to our class of fourteen-year-old wanna-not-be historians hit an unusual tenor. But then Mr Brockhouse himself was an unusual man.
Proudly and unabashedly Old School, his ruddy leathery skin glistened with afternoon sweat, the shiny silver threads hanging from his redundant follicles Brylcreemed into submission across his shiny pate. Festooned in Adidas (for he was a part-time Old School P.E. teacher as well as a historian – a sort of utility teacher, if you will), he had been asked to cover our class while Mr Smith was away, and had seized the baton of indoctrination with glee. As the last word was spat from his mouth, his eyes narrowed and the thin lips creased upwards as he stood, hands on hips, looking us each in the eye in turn.
He waited for the laugh. He had spectacularly misjudged his audience. Pre-political pubescence, even those of us who had an idea who this Tony Blair was had no conception of the aesthetic complexion of his wife. Looking back, that part of Mr Brockhouse’s sermon was actually pretty funny. The idea of a hand-wringing Tony, with Cherie in tow, facing the then-adoring media at his first press conference and intoning in honeyed sincerity: “First guys, before we begin, apologies for my wife’s face. It’s awful”, is quite a comedic notion. The recaltricance of Mr Blair in the final months of his premiership and stoic New Labour refusal to apologise for anything no matter how patently under his control adds a further tinge of irony to this throwaway comment from an obsolete, bigoted schoolmaster.
Mr Brockhouse was prescient in his remarks. Since that unorthodox introduction to international relations, a number of people have indeed told me that the slave trade was wrong. And I’m inclined to believe them. It was an all round horrid affair. Mr Brockhouse’s professed adoration of Britain, what he would no doubt term his patriotism, appears to have been by no means a suitable substitute for a critical appreciation of history.
I apologise if this all seems a rather long-winded way to make a very simple point, but as it is one that has clearly eluded the great minds of the tabloid press and Gordon’s government, I thought perhaps it warranted spelling out. Following publication last month of an altogether sensible report by the Institute of Education at The University of London cautioning against teaching love of one’s country as a credo to our impressionable youth, outraged “patriots” have been hollering to set the bulldog on the report’s authors, happily licensed in their incense by poll-chasing ministers.
Dr Michael Hand, co-author of the report, remarks that the “morally ambiguous” histories of all nations make it “an open question whether citizens should love their countries”. With this sentiment directly at odds with Gordon Brown’s prized “Britishness” agenda, the government rode the waves of outrage churned from the gutter press, and noisily pressed patriotism and the celebration of “Britishness” as a core value in “citizenship teaching”, and the cure-all to the nation’s ills. Where patriotism was in Samuel Johnson’s day the last refuge of the scoundrel, it is in our times the first resort of New Labour in a pickle.
Rising gun crime. Anti-social behaviour. Classroom indiscipline. Gordon’s misguided fear that falling poll ratings are due to his Scottishness, rather than his lack of basic competence. The impending doom of the clash of civilisations between the West and extreme Islamism. The panacea is apparently teaching us to love our country that little bit more. With regards to the latter, some fine logical gymnastics are at play here in Number 10. “Well I’m stuck. We’ve bombed their countries into the ground. We’ve bugged their MPs. What more can we do to stop them hating us?” “Tell them they’re British, sir, and that they should love Britain. Logic, innit?” “Brilliant! It can’t fail”.
Evidently in the government’s idea of a foiled terrorist attack, the bomber goes to pull the pin on his C4 when Thomson and Thompson from Tintin tap him on the shoulder and say: “Come on now, old boy. We’re all British here.” At which point Beardy chuckles and replies: “Gosh, I’m terribly sorry. Thanks for reminding me. Almost had a scene on our hands there, eh?”
The truth is that loving your country is a complete misnomer. It can’t be taught, and nor should it. You can teach taking pride in the decisions you make, the choices you vote for, you can admire and preach to our children the virtues of the facets of British culture and history that make it admirable. Do not, as is the PM’s wont, pass off the embarrassing pretence that democracy, the rule of law and equality are the original preserve of the British. Not least when his government is heck-bent on undoing each of these in turn. You cannot love “Britishness”, any more than you can hate it. To do so is to love an abstract concept.
Nationality is an empty construct. Worse, as Mr Brockhouse inadvertently taught us, it is dangerous. Imagined communities, to borrow from Benedict Anderson, are created ostensibly to unite people, but ultimately divide along the most arbitrary of lines. Teaching children to love Britishness may in Gordon’s world foster some sense of common identity or unity, but for every one barrier that patriotism removes inside these shores, it erects a thousand even higher along our coastline.
Critically, all the values that patriotism supposedly inspires – mutual respect, pride in one’s surroundings, identity, tolerance, fraternity, sorority - can equally be secured by encouraging people to see others not as fellow countrymen, but simply fellow people.
We don’t need lessons in patriotism. We need lessons in humanity. Teach our children the history of this nation, by all means. And trumpet loudly the many contributions it has given the world. But instructing children on the foibles and the faults of our nation, and encouraging love for people rather than political constructs, is surely a morally preferable course of action, rather than blind adoration for an imposed identity in the name of propping up a lame duck Prime Minister.
Disagree with Dan? Email your thoughts to letters@student-direct.co.uk
Comment
Have your say, tell us what you think...