They thought it was all over on Thursday, but Italy’s defeat on Friday evening confirmed it. England are out of the World Cup, dumped at the earliest possible stage. Now the introspection and recrimination can begin in earnest.
There are theories aplenty from the weakness of England’s defence to the abundance of non-English players in the Premier League but the most arresting explanation came from football writer Alyson Rudd. “They looked like the England of old,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “Slightly lost and not knowing who they were. They have no national identity.”
Rudd was not speaking solely about football. She contrasted Roy Hodgson’s team with the men who had beaten them. They were from a small country, the smallest to compete in the tournament. Yet Uruguay “somehow managed to find a national identity”.
It is an intriguing notion, that the uncertainty shown by the English national team reflects an uncertainty that lurks within the English themselves, that if the 11 on the field didn’t know who they were, they were ably representing a nation that feels similarly confused. But is it right?
There is indeed a confusion that surfaces the moment England take to the field. It begins with the national anthem, England expected to sing a song that belongs to the entire United Kingdom rather than to their nation alone. There’s a perennial call for Jerusalem to take its place as England’s answer to Flower of Scotland, but it never happens. So Gerrard, Sturridge and Rooney mumble their way through God Save the Queen instead.
Of course, that’s a mere symptom of the underlying oddity. Sometimes we tell the rest of the world we are one country with Britain’s single seat at the United Nations marked “United Kingdom” sometimes we are four. Italy don’t turn up at football tournaments with separate teams for Piedmont, Tuscany, Sicily and Emilia-Romagna. But propose a single UK team, as Jack Straw once did, and watch the football fans of these islands come out in hives.
Most of the time the British shrug at these anomalies. They are simply bumps and knots in the crooked timber from which Britain is made. So what if their country has not evolved on neat, logical lines. They are indeed something unusual, a union of four distinct nations bolted together but never merged. If that set-up doesn’t fit the template of others, who cares?
If it was just a matter of football and anthems, no one would be too bothered. But the confusion goes wider. Following the “Trojan horse” affair, Michael Gove insisted that British schools teach “British values” without specifying what they might be: cue hoary gags about queuing, tea, diffidence and embarrassment. Now, though, the Department for Education has spelled it out, insisting that “the fundamental British values” are “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs”.
Few would oppose any of those items, but the idea of drawing up a list at all provokes discomfort. When former British premier Gordon Brown banged on about Britishness in the last decade, groping for a definition, the right mocked him. Now the left greets Gove’s effort with similar derision. The most common objection is that a set of virtues like that offered by the education secretary is not exclusively or even peculiarly British. Do the Swedes oppose liberty, do the Spanish believe in mutual disrespect? And, come to think of it, don’t the Greeks have a prior claim on democracy?
The Financial Times’ Janan Ganesh disposed of these objections well last week. “A country’s values do not have to be unique in the world,” he wrote. “The purpose is to bind a population, not define it against others. The only truly unique form of national identity is ethnic and that option is mercifully not open to multicoloured Britain.”
Besides, he argued, Britain can fairly describe itself as an early starter when it comes to rebelling against arbitrary power and forging liberal institutions a case he managed to make without so much as mentioning Magna Carta, 799 years old this week.
For all that, Britons have not fully embraced the national identity of values that Gove, or Brown before him, advocate. The British Social Attitudes survey this week revealed that 51 per cent believe that to be “truly British” it’s important to have “British ancestry”.
It’s a telling phrase, suggesting that signing up for tolerance and the rule of law is not quite enough, that you can maintain and even revere British values and still not quite belong. And what does “ancestry” mean, exactly? Does it mean having British ancestors? Because if it does, that would exclude quite a lot of us (me among them).
In other words, we might think Britons reject the blood-and-soil nationalism associated with continental Europe in the darkest years of the 20th century, but we haven’t quite made the transition to a values-based, civic nationalism either. In the US, where national identity is all about adherence to an idea, the notion of “American ancestry” as a requirement of being truly American would either be laughed at or not understood. Yet here it persists.
And yes, I know, I have slipped seamlessly from English to British and back again. Since those who live in England account for 85 per cent of those who live in Britain, it can be hard not to. Come September 18, that habit will surely have to be broken once and for all, whether the Scots vote yes or no to independence.
The referendum asks a question of the English as well as the Scots, demanding they define more precisely who they are, beyond being citizens of the UK. The answer is not straightforward, not when London can seem like another country more like New York than Nottingham and when the borders themselves are in a state of flux.
By 2017 it’s perfectly possible that England could find itself almost alone, abandoned by Scotland and outside the European Union. It might cling to Wales and Northern Ireland, but how long before those nations too thought about going their own way?
It’s easy to get carried away. But these are times of uncertainty for England, unsure who its partners are, where its borders end, even what song to sing. Those 11 young men carried quite a burden on Thursday night. We wanted them to know us better than we know ourselves.
Guardian News & Media Ltd
