Geoffrey Ashe's column Since 1967 the more obvious crises have twice inspired patriotic appeals in the name of 'Backing Britain'. It happened first under a Labour government. In origin the movement was small, unofficial, and rather attractive. Four typists offered to work an extra half hour daily without getting paid overtime. Whatever the gesture meant in their own minds, it was widely welcomed (in IT for instance) as a rebirth, however naive, of the Gandhian principle that ordinary people should take direct action without being led or managed. The movement spread in that form, and captains of industry and trade-union bosses were uncertain how to react. At last they did. Sensing that the thing was somehow a threat, most of them united to sneer, or freeze it with silence. Meanwhile a few moved in to take charge of it, setting up an organising committee that killed it even in name within a few months. It had died as a reality within weeks.
Backing Britain was revived early this year with a more explicit summons to patriotism. The Sunday Express urged its readers to show the flag. This time the appeal was not ridiculed at high levels, because it meant supporting a Tory government against the miners. The main volunteer action was the recruiting of vigilante corps for 'maintaining essential services', i.e. strike-breaking. Among the ringleaders were several retired officers, an MP who yearned to drive a lorry through picket lines, and no typists. Such Tory patriotism, the Alf Garnett fag-end of imperialism, is still equated with love and loyalty towards your country. But in practice it applies only under a Tory government. If anybody else is in power, all talk of loyalty fades; the spokesmen of patriotism smear their country throughout the world, depress its credit, and sabotage its economy, until the process has restored them to office and patriotism becomes virtuous again. For decades now they have largely imposed their own meaning on the word. Their successful destruction of that first Backing Britain movement, which hinted briefly at something else, is proof. Faced with the take-over, people of a different outlook began long ago to try to shed patriotism entirely. Yet this has nevet worked. It leaves a vacuum. AfroAsian nationalism was enough to make the liberal cosmopolitan stance look futile. Love of country is an authentic passion. And it can imply something quite different from abject loyalty to the Powers·irhat Be.
It can imply exposing those Powers as hostile to everything that is best in your country, an<f patriotically figliting against them. In a colonial context that is easy to see because 'the rul~r.s are fof~ign. What is seldom understood is that in Britain itself, patriotis!ll. used to ha~e a ;imilar meaning. The Right Wing take-over is a semantic fraud. ~t.is · so rarely shown up as such that I think a glance at the actual British tradition is well \ j!orth taking.
Dr Johnson ca1led patriotism 'the last refuge of a scoundrel'. In today's setting it .- sounds an apt remark. Yet it did not have at all the same kind of aptitude when he ~ade it. To Johnson as to many in the' eighteenth-century, 'patriotism' was a dirty, seditious word, almost like 'militancy'. It didn't begin as a mere abstract term, not in 'English !It any ~ate. It was coined for an ideological purpose, just as 'socialism' and 'communism' were.
To be precise, 'patriotism' was invented in 1726. Britain was then virtually a oneparty state. Almost everybody who mattered in politics was a Whig. Even among the Whigs, the only ones with real power were a small, immensely rich clique. Their chief, Sir Robert Walpole, was well into a still unequalled term as Prime Minister. He controlled the King by influence, the House of Commons by bribery. Patriotism began as a battle-cry of opposition to Walpole. The country was in the grip of a corrupt oligarchy. Hence, loving your country implied breaking that gtjp, ana opening the door of opportunity I ~Jw ,all who deserved it. ~ ':Many of the protesters, the 'Patriot Boys'
as Walpole scornfully called them, were the hippies of the day. They dressed strangely, ran satiric underground papers, "formed artsocieties with tastes that caused scandal. They met in 'Hell-Fire' clubs amid sex, drink and blasphemy. The most spectacular of these, at Medmenham by the Thames, was_ a.pseudo-religious order that.made fun ~.~~
who~ .. are lhe pal do of the Church. Its members campaigned for peace during the Seven Years War, and one of them, the great John Wilkes, later fought an epic electoral battle which was the first breach in the system that controlled Parliament.
Such was patriotism when the word was first used in English. It meant revolt, with shock tactics, against an Establishment which was felt to be holding down the most vital elements in national life, and was certainly shipping off Englishmen to die by the thousand in wars for commercial profit. Dr Johnson, a right-winger himself, made his famous remark in 1775. He still thought of 'patriotism' as a fine-sounding word misapplied to a movement of careerist trouble-makers.
I don't know when it became respectable. Perhaps during the reign of Queen Victoria. Anyhow, the first thing we ought to do with it is to restore its pristine tone and make it subversive again ... even (in the eyes of those who exploit it) dirty. lJon't misunderstand. It can be done without bringing back the orgies. I am thinking of a patriotism that is on the same side of tJie fence as those Hell-Fire rebels, but cuts far deeper.
It exists. It has made a comeback in the past seven years or so, largely among people of the Alternative culture who don't label themselves as patriots. Its patron saint is William Blake, the poet-prophet who lived from 1757 to 1827, and who saw the Giant Albion as spellbound in a terrible trance, but foretold his waking in wrath and splendour. Women's Institutes sing (or used to sing) Blake's too-familiar lines about building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land. If they grasped what he meant they might be less enthusiastic. Blake's new Jerusalem is an alternative society, a society of free and creative people which is to grow up in the shell of present evils. Blake is a patriot, very much so, but he rejects almost the whole structure of patriotism as it came to be understood in the heyday of Empire. When Albion wakes he is to sweep away the corruption that covers him. That includes nationalistic pride, success in war, respectable family life, the Church of England: It also includes most of the Victorian idols which Blake himself did not see at their height: the public-school virtues, and philanthropy, and classical education, and the White Man's Burden, and the technological progress that inspire d the Great Exhibition. All, according to Blake, are fetters to the true national genius. One day the people will learn to say 'No more' and pursue their vocations freely together, instead of letting themselves be cut down to fit systems.
This outlook has reappeared, as we all know. And it is Blakean in a more special, mystical way. Blake was fascinated by British legend. He believed that the Giant Albion had once been awake. He had theories about ancient Celtic bards, and Stonehenge, and King Arthur and fairyfolk and kindred topics. Britain had once been a land of high wisdom enlightening the nations, and that was what had to be recaptured.
This may all have been crankish nonsense. though recent researches hint that some of it wasn't. The point is that Blake thought that way; the further point is that many of his modern successors do. The Alternative culture in this country is linked with Glastonbury, with the Mysteries of Britain. with the magical landscape evoked by Jolu: Michell. Again I won't debate how far this is 'right' in an academic sense. It is a fact, and it restores patriotism as a living issue, with a meaning that-can be worn proudly.
Those who still preach patriotism Torystyle, and pervert it to justify stamping on their fellow-citizens' faces, have a talent fer large-scale action which the Alternative Society doesn't match. It is bound to be sc. Still, I can conceive counter-programmes which would project the love of country I am talking about. One Would be to prevent the further torture of Albion in the name of salvation through North Sea oil. Another would be to halt schemes which are supposed to give a sense of national achievement, and merely divert resources from national achievements that might be worth having. Cancellation of Concorde would be a patriotic gesture which even a government might be in~uced to make. !:::
