"Old England, ruddy and strong, with a hawthorn robustness." D. H. Lawrence isn't the easiest writer to love, but in his long, wandering, still-controversial career he turned many a memorable phrase.
That's from the title piece England, My England, a collection of stories dating from the First World War, often with military conflict as their backdrop. When Lawrence wasn't defending his recently published novel The Rainbow from charges of obscenity and confiscation by the police, he and long-term partner Frieda Weekley ranged over the Alps to Italy, and then, much later, to Australia and New Mexico. Her nationality (German) and his (English) ruled out easy coexistence in either European country.
A Londoner myself, though one happily based for years in Chicago, I've been cogitating Lawrence's desperate, half-accusatory title England, My England. On the other side of the Atlantic, Britain is lurching from what was, six months ago, "merely" widespread economic stagnation to what is now also a full-blown political crisis. An incompetent Prime Minister, inept government, scandal-plagued Parliament, and angry populace now vie with acid-tongued journalists on Fleet Street to see who can skewer the latest culprit in the politicians' scandal over phony expenses and so, in turn, appease the country's grim sense of disaffection.
The gallows humor that is palpable in the British press is currently swamping interest in practical remedies. At the London Times, columnist and former Conservative politician Matthew Parris calls Prime Minister Gordon Brown "a shell of a man, propelled by anger and pride," whose twin characteristics—or demons—have "brought his Government to its knees." Meanwhile, his colleague Janice Turner, writing of the newfound political optimism here in the States, conveys both sadness and envy in having to leave New York for London. "Obama's America is good for you," she opines, while hatred of Brown is doing untold "damage to our own national psyche."
I have to concede, all the emailed jokes I've received recently from British friends and expats seem curiously united around one topic: they feature scenarios in which Brown dies with excruciating pain and no one seems to mind or to lift a finger. That's the joke, apparently.
"For eight years," Turner explains, "we [Brits] could, in equal measure, mock and pity America: for its culture wars, its nut-job religiosity and redneck unreason. We could sympathise with liberal friends about their word-fumbling comedy president, his sulphurous VP, torture, rendition, provincialism, paranoia... Not any more. Watching a dazzling Obama address the Muslim world you suddenly remember the point of America: its big-picture optimism and modernity, its epic generosity and can-do attitude. And Britain seems by contrast self-loathing, curdled, introspective, hopeless and small."
In case you think those are just isolated examples of journalistic bitterness, things are worse over at the Guardian. There, columns optimistically titled "Brown and Out?" or gleefully describing "Brownfall" vie with opinion pieces calling him "The Half-Dead Prime Minister." The columnist Marina Hyde, in a devastating piece, sees the nation as acting out the Stephen King thriller Misery, or a Swiftian version thereof, with "Gordon Brown as Kathy Bates. And Westminster as Lilliput." "You may think this is implosion," Hyde observes, "but in fact it's the endgame Tony Blair predicted for the New Labour Project."
She has a point. Readers are also quick to remind her that Blair is getting off scot-free while Brown is taking all the heat for their shared mistakes. Others mock Brown's performance anxiety after publicly clamoring for the Prime Ministership, only to fail miserably in executing even its most basic functions, as if he were suffering from the political equivalent of erectile dysfunction.
While Britain's best journalists savage the country's floundering politicians, there are signs that the economy is taking a decided turn for the worst just as its national debt is rising to alarming new heights, sparking fears of a credit downgrading from the International Monetary Fund and, with it, a possible run on the pound. The political crisis couldn't have come at a worse time. In yesterday's local council elections, one seat went to a member of Britain's far-right nationalist party, and there are grim indications that the British National Party will continue to gain seats while Labour dithers over its own political demise.
It's not a good sign when Westminster starts resembling Lilliput.
At such times, Britain does indeed look to outsiders rather "self-loathing, curdled, introspective, hopeless and small," as the Times put it. The country badly needs to get its mojo back—or, to adopt a more British phrase, what Lawrence called its "ruddy, passionate quiescence and ... hawthorn robustness."
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