WHAT’S it like to live in a country that hates itself?
I’m asking that in all honesty. I was born and grew up in Birmingham. I’m not English, but I am a Brummie. Not a Brummie Brummie.
But a Brummie all the same. An Irish Brummie. These are very real distinctions, and it is those distinctions that made growing up in a multicultural society what it was.
There was Birmingham and, within Birmingham, lots of other Birminghams. An immigrant city. There were strains and stresses.
There was some ugly language, and there were racists and bigots for sure, but by and large my experience was of a city that functioned well as a place. As a city.
There was also a wonderful, self-deprecating humour about the city. It was an ugly place then, full of abandoned factories and horrendously planned concrete subways.
The humour of the place recognised this. It’s a dump, but it’s our dump and we love it was the tenor of the days. No one claimed beauty for the place, but no one despised it. No one hated it.
I’m gone from there now, and gone a long time, however much the place still echoes in my voice. I get now to look at the country I grew up in from a geographical and cultural distance.
And when I look at England, and look at the woes of England, I can’t help but wonder: why do the English hate themselves so much?
And it is the English. Not all the communities within it, but the English English, if you like. They just hate England, don’t they?
I love Ireland and I love being Irish. Not with any sense of superiority or specialness, but with a real pride in the people and culture I grew up among and was reared by.
I love many things about England too, and many English people. And while there is a certain strand of aren’t-we-the-greatest-little-country-altogether about some sections of Irish society, there’s plenty of self-mockery and cop yourself on too. We’re grand, like, but don’t be getting carried away.
Bizarrely, though, both here and over there, over there in England — and especially over there at the moment — those who are most proud of their Englishness are the ones who seem to hate the place most. It’s really, really strange.
Take the recent Reform conference, which, fittingly enough, took place in Birmingham. When someone heckled the speech of the party’s leader, not only did he mock his fellow English person for having a university education, but members of the crowd tried to hit her and thump her. With what looked like utter hatred.
The men in balaclavas who disrupted the symbolic English town of Dover acted out of a belief that England is a lost thing: a terrible place, overrun and unsafe.
So awful is the country they live in that the only way they can think of to protect it is to parade threateningly through the streets.
Numerous other patriotic voices insist that London, if not the other big cities of that fair and pleasant land, is utterly unsafe. They love England so, so much, but insist that it is overrun by crime, that it is a hellhole of illegal people and illegal activities.
Their patriotism is like a pretty gruesome country song in which love and hate are the same thing. Their England is the bare knuckles tattooed with those two words: love and hate.
And, in truth, they do hate England. The patriots, that is. They hate it. They hate the way it is. They hate the country that it is. They don’t love England. They love an England that doesn’t exist and never did exist.
A famous Englishman once said that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, but patriotism now is the first port of call of the deeply troubled. If you love something so much that you hate it, you’re clearly in a bit of psychological bother.
Which England quite clearly is. A troubled place with troubled people.
There’s nothing pleasing about seeing it this way. But I do wonder: what is it like to live in a country that hates itself?
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