England: an elegy
Roger Scruton Chatto & Windus, 270pp, £16.99
ISBN 1856192512
While enjoying Roger Scruton's England: an elegy on the shore of Lago Maggiore in north Italy, I was accosted by a man wearing fat woollen socks with Jesus sandals and a face as red as the cross of St George. "Are you English, too?" he demanded, pointing to the GB sticker on my wife's car. "Let me shake your hand. Bloody Germans and Italians all over the place here." With that, he was off, trailing perspiration and indignation, still outraged to find that "abroad" is occupied by Johnny Foreigner - one of those cartoon Englishmen for whom there is a corner of a foreign campsite that is for ever Esher. It occurred to me then that many in Britain would take one look at the subject of Scruton's new book and dismiss it as similarly blimpish - which would be about as profound a critique of Scruton's sophisticated theory of Englishness as complaining that Italy is full of Italians.
Scruton confidently predicts that "this book will be scorned" by fashionable opinion-makers. But then, he works hard to sustain his reputation for being unfashionable, and New Britons who come to bury this funeral oration for Old England will not be disappointed. From his insistence on village cricket as "the eloquent symbol" of the English sense of community to his sense of loss at the impending demise of "the English climate as it was celebrated in our art and literature", Scruton offers himself up rather too readily to those who would caricature him as a John Major speech-writer. (However, I savoured his description of the "triumph" of our national cuisine, which, by reducing all food to "flavourless stodge", had elevated English stoicism over Continental sensation-seeking.)
No doubt Scruton's many critics will also have fun suggesting possible connections between his praise for the English aristocracy (with the country house as "an ideal of English civilisation") and his revelation that he believes he might be descended from a bastard son of the lords of Scruton Hall.
Yet, if those on the left could withhold their prejudices, they might learn something, not only about Scruton, but also about themselves. When Scruton describes England as a "gentle" country, calm and repressed, with a love of respectability, he is doing more than describing the upper echelons. He is talking about the role of the labour and protest movements in sealing "the English settlement" between the classes. All English "corporate persons", the trade unions as much as the Institute of Directors, displayed the same quiet patriotism, the same "clubbable instinct, which prefers custom, formality and ritualised membership to the hullabaloo of crowds". Where there was class friction, "the conflict between the haves and have-nots was domesticated by the English". Scruton sees this permanent peace process as a product of England's mysterious "enchantment", rather than anything to do with ideology or empire.
If English dissenters and rebels were essentially conservative in the past, they are bordering on reactionary today. In its championing of the local, the rural and the organic against the global, the urban and the developed, there is much in this backward-looking book that would resonate with today's direct-action pro-testers, from such old Labour tradi-tionalists as Scruton's own father to Seattle-style anti-capitalists and fuel-price renegades.
Even when Scruton attacks democracy, he is less far out on a limb than he might imagine. His complaint that we cannot "represent the interests of dead and unborn Englishmen, merely by counting the votes of the living" chimes with ideas that are popular among today's self-styled young radicals. Eco-activists are forever wheeling on the battalions of the unborn to support their arguments for restraining development, and to justify bypassing parliamentary democracy. And when Scruton the Burkean traditionalist calls for "respect for the dead" as "the foundation of the attitude of trusteeship on which future generations depend", he will surely appeal to the many advocates of identity politics who see their cultural heritage as a moral claim on the future.
In fact, the more I thought about it, drinking in the sun and the wine by Lago Maggiore, the more it seemed that Scruton could be the lost leader of the new conservatives of the left. He would certainly lend more coherence and conviction to their cause. His conservatism is honest, deliberate and intellectual, whereas theirs is unconscious, ignorant and wrapped in a self-delusory cloak of radicalism. As England: an elegy shows, by contrast with the vague anti-capitalism of the new conservatives, Scruton is also prepared to spell out the consequences: he explicitly rejects reason and progress, and endorses hereditary peers as more representative of the real English than their elected but tainted MPs.
But then I remembered that Scruton is also a fox-hunter, an advocate of free speech against the "new form of intolerance" that is political correctness, and an admirer of the view that "homosexual desire is an abomination". Which presumably means that he is a fascist, and that his book should be banned.
Mick Hume is a former editor of LM magazine. He will be writing regularly for the books pages
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
