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These are proving tricky times to navigate through, for many of us as individuals, for us collectively as a nation. Events of the past few weeks have been challenging, deeply disturbing and often downright frightening, horrifying in some instances but quite inspiring in others. There are dangerous currents to be wary of and many hazards to be avoided as the good ship Britannia progresses into the second quarter of the new century. But we've been here before, of course, many times.

If you know me personally or through my writing, you'll know I'm not so much interested in "taking our country back" as in trying to move it forward as a better and fairer society for all (regardless of colour or creed). A friend asked me via social media for my take on what's happening and why. I haven't responded directly, but this blog is my reply, for what it's worth. I'm not telling anybody what to think (though I've been accused of that before). I'm  putting forward a theory, supported by facts and reasoning, and I'll pull no punches. Sorry if it's a long blog. Naturally, you as readers will make up your own minds.

In researching for this piece, I came upon an apposite illustration (below), a cartoon drawn by James Gillray in 1793 (shortly after the French Revolution), depicting Britannia as "the vessel of the constitution, steered clear of the Rock of Democracy and the Whirlpool of Arbitrary Power.". That was at a time of great political uncertainty in Europe, when it was feared by the liberal intelligentsia that this country might become the victim of a popular revolution as had happened in France, or of a more autocratic monarchy. Neither happened.

Britannia between Scylla and Charybdis, James Gillray cartoon of 1793

The Scylla and Charybdis allusion is from Greek mythology. They were twin hazards in the Strait of Messina that Homer epitomised as sea monsters in the Odyssey, perils that Odysseus and his crew had to sail between in their voyage back to Ithaca. As a saying, the modern equivalent would be "between the devil and the deep blue sea", or "between a rock and a hard place."

So what, in 2024, are the twin perils we as a nation are now trying to navigate safely through? It's a tough question, a complex situation, and there may be more than two obstacles threatening our future as a peaceful society, but if I had to name two, I'd say Selfishness and Xenophobia. You might have other candidates in mind. If you think they are strange choices, I will try and elucidate. Let's address Selfishness first (including Entitlement). 

Who is in favour of the NHS? And good schools? Pothole-free roads? Effective policing? Prompt refuse collection? Clean water? Efficient public transport? Reliable, affordable energy? Safe green spaces? I'm assuming all of us. Of course it has to be paid for, and the burden quite rightly falls on us as citizens, via various forms of taxation and right now there's a serious shortfall. Here are the issues. 

Number one. For the last fourteen years we've had a government in power one of whose mantras has been to lower taxes, to reduce the tax burden as they put it. It's a policy that won votes because people are essentially selfish and will usually pay less if offered the opportunity to do so. But what has transpired over those years of Tory power is that the price we've paid for a lighter tax burden is a vast underfunding of all those services we said we wanted, and the social fabric has suffered badly as a result. To add to the problem, we have an ageing population. Consequently the NHS is creaking, roads are pot-holed, the police are under strength, schools are becoming ghettoised, the public transport networks have shrunk, youth clubs have been axed, affordable rented accommodation has become scarce and so on and so forth. 

Number two. For decades under those same Tories, public utilities have been sold off (energy, water, telecoms, transport), ostensibly to make them 'better run' and less of a burden on the public purse, but in many cases they are not better run and are run not in the best public interest but in order to make quite obscene profits for shareholders at the expense of proper maintenance of infrastructure. We've let it all happen because we are selfish (and foolish with it) and they are selfish and quite without conscience.

Number three. The tax burden doesn't fall equally. Yes, at one end of the spectrum some people have such a low income that quite rightly they pay no income tax at all and get rebates on other taxes, but at the other end there are people on very sizeable incomes who pay the same tax as those earning a fraction of those sizeable incomes. I'm all for a sliding scale by which those with increasingly large incomes would pay increasingly more tax, because they can afford to. In principle it seems fair.

Number four. The exchequer is defrauded of approximately £90 billion every year (let that figure sink in) through a combination of fraud, tax avoidance and tax evasion, because people are basically selfish. It has never been in the interests of the Conservatives to tackle that issue! By the way, only about one per cent or £1 billion of that is through 'benefits' fraud, reprehensible though that is.

Okay, on to Xenophobia, the fear or dislike of anything that is foreign or strange. A fear of difference is understandable, but it's not inevitable. However, this has traditionally been a lever by which one group of people has whipped up anger and violence against another group, particularly in times of economic hardship or wider social unrest. More recently and way more cynically it has been used as an attempted route to power by parties of the right. Here are the issues.

Number five. For the last two hundred or so years, the world has been growing rapidly more integrated. All those western powers who happily built empires in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean granted rights of citizenship to the peoples of their empires, often welcomed them as labour resources especially after the Second World War, gave those who chose a right to settle in the mother country when their native states went independent.

Number six: Integration hasn't always been easy but has worked well when ordinary people have been allowed to get on with each other. Enoch Powell infamously tried to make immigration an issue and stir up tensions in the late 1960s but half a century later most second and third generation immigrant families rightly regard multi-cultural and multi-racial Britain as their home. Only a small number of avowedly racist malcontents are trying to incite that same climate of fear by proclaiming on social media 'Enoch Powell was right'. I think the last fifty years have proved that he was wrong. 

Number seven, Race and religion are becoming far less important indicators when it comes to questions of nationality. I know white Muslims, white Rastafarians, black Jews, black Buddhists, brown Christians, brown Humanists as well as brown Muslims, brown Hindus, white Christians and yellow Buddhists. One thing they all have in common is their nationality. They are all British and they all  live in England. They are all also lovely god-fearing people (except the Humanist, who is just lovely).  Even many white people with racist tendencies quite often have 'coloured' friends who they make an exception for. So it can only be ignorance and an irrational fear that allows them to be manipulated into adopting racist views and rhetoric.

Number eight. Brexit led to millions of Europeans quitting the UK permanently, leaving a huge labour shortfall in the agriculture sector, in the hospitality sector, in pubic transport and perhaps most vitally in the NHS and in social care. It seems that many who voted for Brexit didn't realise that an obvious consequence would be a vast influx of non-Caucasians to fill the gaps, people recruited from Africa, South America, Asia, brown and black-skinned people as if that mattered, though it clearly does to some.

Number nine. Net migration (the difference between people moving to the UK and those leaving it) had risen slowly and steadily over decades since the 1970s. It actually fell in the immediate post-Covid year and then rose very sharply in 2022 (for reasons explained above) only to fall again in 2023. The latest official net migration figure (for 2023) was 635,000 (the difference between 1.2 million in and 565,000 out). For those who are concerned with so called 'illegal' immigration, that figure for the same period was 40,000 (a tiny 3% of all immigration), though technically under international law there is no such thing as illegal migration. These are desperate people seeking safe refuge after all.

Number ten. One consequence of the cuts under the Tories was a deliberate reduction in personnel in the home office department dealing with asylum seekers. It seems it was government policy to slow down the rate of processing immigrants, allowing a backlog to build up, requiring people to be housed at considerable expense to the taxpayer in hotels, holiday camps and ex-army barracks, all privately owned. It's as if they wanted to make it a huge political issue. And I won't even start on the ridiculous waste of money that was the Rwanda scheme.

Number eleven. The media, both the right-wing dailies like the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Sun and Telegraph and some TV channels have kept 'the boat people' (3% of  all immigration don't forget) front and centre for years and social media platforms like X in particular, but also Facebook, Telegraph and Tik-Tok have been awash with fake news and incitements to 'stop the boats', 'kick immigrants out', and lurid nonsense like 'London is an Islamist enclave' and 'Britain will become a Muslim State'.  The execrable and irresponsible Elon Musk is the latest stirrer with his claim that Britain is entering into a civil war.  His tilting at the new Labour government clearly shows his concern over the proposed Online Safety Act which is bound to affect his revenues.

Those twin perils of Selfishness and Xenophobia have led us to where we are now, and because it's become topical again and is still at the root of much of the current malaise, I'm including here a poem that dates back to 2016 and the whole sorry and regrettable Brexit fiasco. In all honesty, I can't claim much of the credit for it, as I based it on a newspaper article written back then by the brilliant journalist A.A. Gill (sadly no longer of this planet). By rights. it's a 'found' poem. I have taken much of Gill's wonderful prose, added some wordsmithery of my own, and recast it into verse form. It should probably be credited to A.A. Gill feat. Steve Rowland (or Steve Rowland feat. A.A. Gill). Whatever, it's a powerful piece, I think you'll agree.

Getting Our Country Back

It was the woman on Question Time that really did it for me.
She was so familiar. There is someone like her in every queue,
every coffee shop, outside every primary school in the country.
With her weatherproof expression of hurt righteousness, she’s
Britannia’s mother-in-law, big sister, and distressed daughter.

The camera panned in close on her as she shouted: “All I want
is my country back. I’m for Brexit. Give me my country back.”
It was a heartfelt cry of real distress. The rest of the audience
erupted in sympathetic applause. It was a captivating moment,
show-casing the constant mantra of all manner of Brexiteers.

But I thought: “In reality, back from what? Back from where?”

Of course, I know, as we all know, what it is they really mean.
They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back from some brink,
back from the future, back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and
dry stone walls, country lanes and church bells and warm beer,
skittles and football rattles, cheery banter and clogs on cobbles.

Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and ‘Carry On’ fart jokes, back
to Elgar and fudge and British weather and herbaceous borders
and cars called Morris, the News of the World, Victoria sponge,
with 22 yards to a cricket wicket and 15 hands to a horse and
3 feet to a yard, proper shoe sizes and gooseberries not avocados.

Yes indeed. We all know what “getting our country back” means.

It’s snorting a line of that pernicious, debilitating drug, nostalgia.
The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective 'yesterday' with
its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain
(England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy
point in our oh so glorious past where we achieved peak Blighty.

It’s the belief that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing
we can build will ever be as lovely as a Georgian country house,
no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as ‘If’,
no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow
as fine as a cottage garden, no hero be greater than Lord Nelson.

It’s the retrograde conviction no politician is better than Churchill,
no Empire better than when Britain ruled the waves and the world,
no spirit better than our wartime grit, no view more throat-catching
than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything
as fine as a Rolls-Royce, bouncing bomb or Flying Scotsman again.

The dream of Brexit isn’t about forging a better, brighter tomorrow.

It’s a vain desire to shuffle backwards into all our yesterdays, just
a regret-curdled inward-looking comfort blanket. In the B-fantasy,
the best we can hope for is to kick out all true entrepreneurs, those
work-all-hours foreigners, and become caretakers to our own past
in a stagnant self-congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.

Of course, Brexit turned out to be the unmitigated disaster that many of us warned that it would be. It's not just that it "hasn't been implemented properly" as some apologists claim. It was always going to shaft us as a country, economically, politically and socially in relation to the rest of the world for decades to come. In the wake of that shipwreck, the Tories (who were responsible for much of the mess) are a sunk force for a while and I get the impression that Reform are going to be just a different flavour of the same low tax, xenophobic ticket because they'll see a populist vote and a possible route to power that way - but would do nothing to improve the quality of life for all if, heaven forbid, they ever won a general election.

I hope the rebuttal shown to the haters by decent British people in recent days will change the course of events. We need healing, not stealing, caring not burning, a stand for common humanity, though clearly there is a cohort of people out there who feel disenfranchised with what's happened since 2016.

The challenge now for Labour and those other parties of the centre /left (the Liberal Democrats and Greens), is to restore faith in democracy, in social justice, in re-integration (for we can be proud to be British and European, just as our neighbours are proud to be French, German, Irish, Italian and European), by finding ways to dial down on those elements of selfishness and xenophobia in the British population that have threatened to prevent us being the best country we can be. 

Thanks for reading. Feedback, as ever, is welcomed. S ;-)