Unfashionably British Gaw takes issue with a Great Living Englishman.
Jeremy Paxman in Saturday’s Guardian (he has a TV series on the British Empire coming out this autumn):
…”Britishness” was forged through war, industrial expansion and, absolutely crucially, the building of an empire. With the empire gone and the United Kingdom a part of the European Union, it is a political identity which increasingly feels like an unnecessary woollen sweater on a warm summer’s day, one layer of political clothing too many: it is oddly appropriate that English nationalism has been commandeered for the moment by swaggering boot-boys in T-shirts. But how long can nationalism remain their preserve? The Westminster dullards’ inability to imagine casting off a surplus piece of political clothing is no reason for the rest of the English to feel the same way indefinitely.
He thinks losing a political identity that’s been established for at least three hundred years, one that underpins a notably stable and liberal state, is as easy as ‘casting off a piece of surplus clothing’. I suppose it’s because he thinks it no longer has any ‘use’, identity being just like a jumper.
But what use beyond providing a secure place to belong does a political identity need to have? I would have thought it makes life easier and safer not to put this sort of thing to any use, to avoid national missions. Previous forays hardly reassure.
Paxo also seems to think it inevitable that boot-boys will eventually lose their hold over English nationalism. No idea why – they seem to like their t-shirts. And I wonder what he thinks these new English nationalists might be like. I have an idea but I can’t see him liking them much.
I suppose thinking like this makes me a ‘dullard’.
Paxo is putting these exciting ideas forward at an unlikely time. Political identities that one might think of as useless or outdated are proving stubbornly enduring on the other side of the Channel. They’ll probably kill off the Euro, despite its many rational uses.
It must be frustrating to be a Paxo, surrounded by people with such little imagination.
Well said Gaw, we do need checks and balances, individuals capable of rational analysis of the likely outcomes of the actions taken by our lords and masters or a particular direction taken by society and forcefully trumpeting those results, hard and fast within the public arena. It is highly unlikely that a preening, self regarding individual such as he, living within the kraal of the BBC will be capable of such analysis.
Merely a pawn he is given access to our living rooms by those on the flight deck of the star ship anti-enterprise, which begs the question what’s their little game then
He would be better employed as a Strictly contestant.
Hear hear Malty – and Gaw!
Note how Paxo makes no distinction between Britishness and Englishness – presumably he can’t see any. Paxo’s kind of ‘thinking’, by the way, used to be very prevalent in the upper reaches of the ‘civil service’ – and probably still is.
I think I shall go away and read G Orwell’s essay Notes on Nationalism over and over again while Mr Paxman’s series is on. I bet I will learn more that way.
Increasingly he looks like Tom Baker, but not the vibrant, time-travelling Tom Baker in a long scarf, hero of many a childhood… rather the old Tom Baker who appears as a supporting character on that TV programme about a Scottish island.
The real question for me is: why on earth did Simon Jenkins bother writing that book?
Simon Jenkins seems to have disappeared so far up the Establishment that there doesn’t seem to be anything left of him.
Re Paxo’s upcoming effort, I was wondering whether we really need another TV series with tie-in book on the British Empire. We seem to have had plenty in recent years.
At least in this article, he appears to make rather unthinking use of conclusions drawn from Linda Colley’s Britons. I hope he has more to offer than this. But it doesn’t look too hopeful.
However, I think Britons was brilliant. It’s just I don’t think that by showing how an identity was created in response to certain circumstances one demonstrates that it can only survive whilst such circumstances obtain. Many modern nationalities were created in opposition to threats and opportunities that no longer exist.
Z’s Orwell reference made me think: is anyone today writing well on nationalism? In fact, has anyone had anything new to say on the subject this millennium?
Alex Salmond
Paxman is unaware that he is merely an end of the pier entertainer, a Punch n’ Judy man. It would be humorous if so many others in the media did not share in his self-mystification.
The intellectual respectability of journalists is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating from the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whilst many academics had been discredited by events, some journalists were making the running in interpreting what was going on. ‘Journalistic’ ceased to have the same pejorative force when uttered by dons. The shift in influence has lasted.
The term journalist as a job description seems to have little validity in the audio visual faction of the media, television in particular appears to be the means by which ego is well scrubbed up, what we have today is not the presentation of news but the airing of an interpretation of events, how many times do we see the on-the-spot people vainly attempting to be Ed Murrow, the end result being a performance, not a relaying of the facts, McCarthyism would tremble not at todays clones. that major news organisations use their slot to promote their own political baggage carries as much hypocrisy as a politicians expenses claim.
That we tax payers fund one of these organisations on pain of imprisonment if we don’t adds injury to the insult.
Televised news has become virtually unwatchable, as a forum for open, honest debate free from hidden agenda, television is a sham, and ain’t that a bummer.
But Paxman isn’t even a journalist. He’s a TV presenter, like Esther Rantzen, or Jamie Theakston, or Ant and Dec. Or Jonathan Dimbleby.
He started out as one, including a stint as a reporter in Northern Ireland.
Indeed. I started out as a paper boy, but that was a long time ago now.
I think I have vague memories of a younger Paxman interviewing Gary Numan, or a similar figure from that epoch.
Paxman is a populist and unconsciously (or not) nods toward an imagined Daily Mail constituency in the same way as those who refer to that miasmic entity as the ‘Daily Heil’, chortle, snigger.
He is also a bit of a fraud, a minor fraud. In his book The English he refers to Buchan’s hero, Colonel Hannay, as the essential Englishman (or something like that).
Paxman poses as an expert on Buchan. But of course Hannay was not only Scots, but he was quite specifically NOT an Englishman. Buchan makes this quite clear, whilst not being anti-English in any way.
The old fraud might have put this right in subsequent editions…
But, minor frauds, small-scale failures of scholarship, tiny but obvious bits of dishonesty, reveal the rodent claws scrabbling for advancement.