CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY
By Professor Duncan R Shaw
Madrid, 11 June 2022
In 1948, Alan Paton denounced South Africa’s degradation towards the frightful apartheid system by writing Cry, The Beloved Country. The award-winning novel depicted a country torn apart by racist injustice, international isolation and political corruption.
Instead of writing a complete novel about the current state of my own country, I will instead just write this brief column – with the Patonesque indignation of an expatriate who sees the land of his birth degenerating into chaos and conflict.
My distaste for what Britain has become is expressed in several of my books. This distaste has actually now turned into despair, in the light of events since the nightmarish Brexit referendum of 2016, when 52 per cent were persuaded to vote Leave mainly because of the xenophobic and anti-immigrant lies of Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. More of which anon, unfortunately.
I was born in the north of England in 1961, to progressive middle-class parents who believed that the country was, broadly, on the right track: towards more equality of opportunity, towards a well-functioning welfare state, towards better public services, towards a more equitable society – and towards the European Economic Community (as the EU was then known) and away from the moribund British Empire.
Instead of moving in the right direction, however, Britain has clearly moved in the wrong direction, since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 (with less than a third of the vote, on a low turnout). For the past 43 years, according to all commonly accepted objective measurements, Britain has inexorably become a more unequal, more divided, more unhappy and more polluted country (in unhappy contrast to the countries of the EU), with an underfunded public health system which collapsed during the Covid-19 crisis, with scrappy public services – and with thousands of unfortunates (not to say millions) queueing up at the food banks.
Brexit (which Thatcher strongly recommended, before her death in 2013) has not only isolated Britain internationally and damaged its exports. It has also shattered the fragile ties that have held the United Kingdom together for three centuries. Northern Ireland seems poised to join a reunited Ireland, eventually, while the ruling Scottish National Party is pushing for a second independence referendum (they narrowly lost the first one, in 2014).
Quo vadis, Britannia?
In 1962, former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously remarked that Britain had “lost an empire, and failed to find a role”. Mutatis mutandis, it now seems that after childishly walking out on the EU, Britain has lost a role and failed to find an empire.
I left Britain for good in 1985, at exactly the same time as Thatcher was cruelly and spitefully humiliating the country’s striking coal miners; they went from being national heroes (especially during the two world wars) to being “the enemy within”, in her infamous denunciation.
Most of my university friends (Leicester and London) have also left the country (for continental Europe, the US and Australia), disillusioned with what Britain has become since 1979.
Britain briefly captured the world’s attention last week, away from Ukraine temporarily. The Jubilee celebrations for Elizabeth II’s 70 years on the throne (with deliquent princes Andrew and Harry pushed out of the foreground into the chorus line) were an expensive and largely futile attempt to paper over the kingdom’s many cracks.
These divisions were thrown into stark relief on Monday when almost half of the Conservative Members of Parliament voted no confidence in the embattled Johnson. Almost all political insiders have said that the mendacious, faithless Prime Minister will only be able to stagger on for another year or so – rudderless, directionless, reviled and despised, for his lying ways – until the Conservatives finally give him the coup de grace.
On Friday the hapless, vacuous Johnson again blathered on about bringing back Britain’s arcane imperial system of weights and measures (which was largely abandoned in favour of the metric system in the 1970s). In his desperation, he also tried to talk up the “wonderful opportunities offered by Brexit” – and again defended his hugely unpopular (and expensive) scheme to deport illegal immigrants and refugees to Rwanda, against international law.
Empty vessels clearly make the most noise, as the old adage goes.
As Paton said in 1948: cry, the beloved country.