Contra Kruger
On Tuesday evening, Danny Kruger MP spoke of the Smithian economy as part of the ASI’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations. He reminded us of Smith’s remark that:
“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things”.
Kruger suggested that the “natural course of things” was promoted by a society that inter alia had a common grounding in faith - he unapologetically promoted the Church of England for this role - and was “reasonably homogenous”.
Kruger comes across as charming, cultivated and good-hearted. I can understand why he might feel that nations need unifying public themes, that our own nation does so; but I was left uneasy by those upon which he settled.
First, his underlying thrust bears the misfortune of bringing to mind Mussolini’s Dio, Patria, Familia, not to say other watchwords of similar period and provenance. None of these went well.
Second, the most recent census showed the UK as less than one half Christian, with outright irreligion close behind. It is an everyday observation that faith is professed most ardently by what the armed forces used to call “other denominations”. These are inauspicious grounds for reliance upon the Cof E as a national unifier.
Third, it is impossible to base national unity upon homogeneity when that ship has so transparently sailed, with 40% of British children born with at least one foreign-born parent at present.
So, for all that I agree that tokens of unity are much needed in the UK at present, it is hard to see how these choices can serve.
If we look overseas, the United States relies upon foundational symbols - the constitution, the flag, an unapologetic sense of exceptionalism going back to Cotton Mather, as well as the continuous reinvention effected by a relentless political calendar. Less formal unifiers include education, national employers, popular culture including sports, and Ike’s highways.
France relies upon its language, literature and other aspects of high culture, the revolutionary tradition, plus popular motifs extending from jokes about the shape of the country “l’hexagon”, to celebrations of its cuisine, waggishly reinforced by De Gaulle’s observation that France’s 365 varieties of cheese attest to its intrinsic ungovernability.
Britain once had its own such themes. Yes, the Church of England, in company with the other estates of the realm: the Royal Family, the military, the Houses of Parliament extending to the aristocracy in general, together with various historical achievements, including constitutional monarchy, the Industrial Revolution, and such great victories as the Spanish Armada, the hat trick of 1759’s “wonderful year”, Trafalgar, Waterloo and the Second World War. And yes, the British Empire. So too the English language and literature and the country’s contribution to natural science.
Much of this will no longer fly. Of the realm’s once great estates, only the Royal Family continues to enlist anything akin to devotion. Our constitutional arrangements look less attractive after a lifetime of mixed political fortunes culminating in a decade of chaos. The Industrial Revolution is tarnished by the legacy of a provincial rustbelt and its associated discontents. Almost every other aspect of our political history is contested by revisionists keen on bigging up its defects. Examiners have erased much pre-twentieth century writing from the curriculum, as teachers struggle to retrieve pupils’ attention from social media. Mind you, this is no novelty: sixty years ago, the culprit was two channels of television.
What is left to us? The Beatles and Association Football? Pubs? The ailing NHS or the equally ailing BBC? I’m not sure what else. The country’s few pockets of excellence fail to command popular support: the City of London is hated; Oxbridge is now seen as a source of fluent wide boys rather than a vessel of social mobility.
These are unfertile fields for any of us seeking tokens of national unity. Me, I would push the English language and our literature in the broadest sense, incorporating them into the qualifications for nationality. I would encourage sixth-formers to hallow Burke’s gradualism and celebrate the “natural course of things” divined by Smith and restated as Keynes “animal spirits”. I would invite history teachers to revisit the Whiggish themes of Magna Carta, Simon de Montfort, the English Reformation, Cromwell and the Glorious Revolution, exploring how Britain then treated property rights, and treating the post-19o6 redistributions as topics for debate. I would welcome TV which talked up the British contribution to science and engineering: Newton, Watt, Stevenson, Darwin, Brunel, Fleming, Turing, Crick/Watson , Berners-Lee- with a view to communicating optimism about the future. Maybe that’s enough.
In any event, let me offer such themes in the hopes that they might prove more compelling than the alternative with which I started: the CofE and “reasonable homogeneity”.
Miles Saltiel