Why The Long Faces?














There is a lot of soul searching going on at the moment, what it means to be English (or British), why the right of centre no longer has a credible voice in politics, why is there so much crime, why is the NHS in such a state - what is wrong with some people?

We are, by any indicators, living in an era of economic stability, an age of increased personal wealth, as a country we are either the seventh or eighth richest country in the world and yet we still search for the utopia of our dreams.

Let me put something down that has been annoying me for years and yet I don't think needs an awful lot of thought to conclude - illegal immigrants don't come to this country because it's great they come because we are an island and the last stop the fight for freedom express calls at. Economic migrants come here because it is great, because residency entitles them to benefits, which they will pay for through taxes and national insurance.

The old argument, used almost daily on the 5Live Boards, is that preferential treatment should be given to those who already live here and have paid there taxes. Fair enough, but given the small amount of real income that people contributed during the period 1951-1979 contributions from those people in their seventies would probably only buy them a prescription, which would be stupid as they qualify for free prescriptions anyway.

My culture isn't defined by Shakespeare, Monty Python, Thatcher, Frederick Forsyth novels or repeats of Dad's Army although they contribute to it. It's also about Chekhov, Seinfeld, Norman Mailer, Albert Camus and repeats of X-Files which have all enriched my life.

My culture is the way I live, my language, it's fish and chips instead of paella, it's being able to walk down almost any high street in the country and buy food that mimics that in countries too far away for me to contemplate ever visiting. It's being able to register my approval of the Government every four or five years, and if one day the Conservatives ever do get elected again I will be able to register my disapproval.

It's being able to talk cricket with somebody from Australia or Pakistan knowing that we have a mutual interest beyond language and politics. It's about being able to enjoy without prejudice the opinions of people from other religions, races and creeds because we, as an island race, are a mixture of those three things. It's about queuing, it's about being sold goods that have a life time guarantee then reading the small print to find that 'a life time guarantee is as long as this product lasts'.

It's about paying a pound every week to make the shareholders of the lottery company even richer whilst accepting there is only a one in fifteen million chance it will make me richer. It's about knowing if I fall ill on the way to work I will be seen in A & E and don't have to worry about my health insurance being up to date or the cover sufficient for my treatment. My culture has taught me that if I want to turn my computer off I have to press the start button and that if it goes wrong it will take longer for a part to come from Dublin by courier then it will for me to swim to Dublin the long way round.

As an Englishman I am respected for, and expected to have, a sense of fair play. I can travel anywhere in the world (except Russia and some other dodgy countries) without the need for anything more than a picture of me in a small Burgundy coloured book. I can go anywhere and not speak a word of the local language or understand the local customs because they know once I open my mouth I am English and they will take time and understanding to explain things to me.

My culture means growing up with three channels for twenty years, then having four then over two hundred and then pining for the days of "Television's Golden Age." My culture is Upton Park on a misty Boxing Day, it is eating a deathburger in Green Street on a cold January afternoon, of talking to somebody who thinks Bournemouth is next to Brighton. It means having 27 Pornography ('adult') television channels available on satellite compared with only 5 in Germany, 4 in France, 2 in Spain and 1 in Italy.

My culture has produced composers from Thomas Tallis, through Edward Elgar to William Walton and beyond. My culture has chewed up the delta blues, Chicago blues and the music of Africa and beyond, consumed it and then given the world The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Blur and Radiohead. The young have observed my culture and served it up to the world in the music of The Smiths, The Kinks, The Clash, Kaiser Chiefs, Arctic Monkeys, Massive Attack. My culture has bought the best of German experimental music and sold it back to the Germans and beyond as Underworld, The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers to name a few.

My culture has produced an education system that has resulted in 19% of the workforce aged between 25 and 64 having a degree compared with 14% in France and Germany. It is also an education system that is causing 1 in 3 employers to send students back to school to learn how to read and write.

My culture means that I am working the longest hours in Europe, it means I am living in a country that has the highest number of teenage abortions in the western World, I am living in an era when the personal debt of the English is more than the personal debt of all other European countries put together, I am living where the de-criminalisation of drugs is a no-no and yet we have the highest number of drug users in Europe, where the ownership of firearms is the most tightly controlled in the World but where we have 40% of all gun crime committed in Europe, where earning income from prostitution is illegal but paying tax on that income is a legal requirement. It means a country where 75% of rural parishes don't have a bus stop or a village shop and where 110,000 jobs have been lost in agriculture during the last ten years.

My culture means I have greater spending power, more career and social opportunities than anybody in my family has ever done. My culture means that unlike my great-grandfather on my mother's side I don't not have to drag a young family away from poverty ridden Suffolk in the 1800's to look for work in London. It means that unlike one grandfather I do not have to lie about my age so that I can fight in a war aged 14, get wounded and spend the next 63 years of my life with shrapnel in my leg, it means that unlike an uncle I don't have to be hidden for four months in a Dutch family's kitchen after Arnheim went tits up, only to return home and be put out of work when the Government in 1948 sent the troops in to end the Dockers strike. My culture means that I live in a town where between two and five everybody who travels on the local bus service goes free (they are all pensioners between those hours and get free passes).

My culture is my history and my history is my culture, but I live for today and tomorrow not yesterday. Not the yesterday of World Wars, of austerity, of poverty on a huge scale, not the yesterday of high interest rates, of black and white television that closed down at 11, the yesterday of three day weeks, the yesterdays of Austin Allegro's. Those yesterdays and their mistakes have created a great today and the chance of greater tomorrows.

My culture is men pushing lumps of meat around a grill on a summers evening, of teenagers in pimp mobiles driving around town with some American rapper blasting out of their windows, it's about listening to Bob Dylan without having to claim I'm doing it ironically.

People are right to be proud of Blake's Jerusalem but be proud for the right reasons - because it is anti-imperialist, anti-war and anti-religion (where religion is used as a form of subjugating the masses).

As a nation we are rapidly resembling the three wise monkeys in that we no longer wish to see, hear or say anything that may offend somebody whilst not wanting to learn either. We are less tolerant, ruder, fatter and generally more ignorant than we need to be.

My culture is having music that expresses how I feel, how I have lived my life, books, films and plays that either lift me out of my normal existence or make me appreciate aspects of it.


Father mows the lawn and Mother peels the potatoes
Grandma lays the table alone
And adjusts a photograph of the unknown soldier
In this Holy of Holies, the Home
And from the TV an unwatched voice
Suggests the answer is to plant more trees
The scrawl on the wall says what about the workers
And the voice of the people says more salt please
Mother shakes her head and reads aloud from the newspaper
As Father puts another lock on the door
And reflects upon the violent times that we are living in
While chatting with the wife beater next door
If paradise to you is cheap beer and overtime
Home truths are easily missed
Something that every football fan knows
It only takes five fingers to form a fist
And when it rains here It rains so hard
But never hard enough to wash away the sorrow
I'll trade my love today for a greater love tomorrow
The lonely child looks out and dreams of independence
From this family life sentence
Mother sees but does not read the peeling posters
And can't believe that there's a world to be won
But in the public schools and in the public houses
The Battle of Britain goes on
The constant promise of jam tomorrow
Is the New Breed's litany and verse
If it takes another war to fill the churches of England
Then the world the meek inherit, what will it be worth
Mother fights the tears and Father, his sense of outrage
And attempts to justify the sacrifice
To pass their creed down to another generation
'Anything for the quiet life'
In the Land of a Thousand Doses
Where nostalgia is the opium of the age
Our place in History is as
clock watchers, old timers, window shoppers.

My culture has provided the ingredients and I have mixed them together to make my life. I could have done that anywhere at anytime but as an Englishman I can share part of the collective experience of history and language relatively few people have, but many more would like to have.