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Britishness

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Warwick, for prompting this debate. I am especially glad that the Motion puts Britishness in several contexts, though I notice that religion is not specifically mentioned in the frame of reference. In a world in which, as we have heard, an increasing number of people define their identity through their religion, the religious history of Britain, there may be a more important guide to who we are today than we often realise. It certainly cannot be compressed into the narrower confines of ethics. Who are the British? As the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, demonstrated, they are emphatically not one ethnic or religious group. But were we to reflect on our religious history a bit more seriously, we may be able to tell our national story in such a way that today's multiculturalism seems unexceptionable. One of my predecessors as Bishop of Norwich 400 years ago gave the chapel of the bishop’s palace to French Huguenots fleeing persecution. They were both religious and economic migrants, welcomed and provided for by a bishop when they themselves did not believe in bishops at all; it is one of the reasons they came here, to get away from them. Perhaps that is why men and women with Huguenot names and proud of their Huguenot ancestry are now found among Norfolk’s church wardens, local councillors and public figures. The existence in a city such as Norwich of a medieval strangers hall and a modern Strangers Club is evidence of a long tradition of hospitality and integration, even if we are a bit more politically correct now in our description of new arrivals. Migrants, of course—new strangers—have arrived again in East Anglia in big numbers in recent years. They are mostly European; they are mostly Christian. Anglican services in Norfolk translated into Polish and Lithuanian would have been unthinkable a few years ago; they are not now. We are enlarged, enriched, and we are certainly changed by such developments. They remind us in themselves of very long historic links between the churches in this country and churches in Europe, sometimes links that we had rather forgotten partly because of the huge influence of the English-speaking union with the United States over the past 250 years; and now it seems to me that the British are looking in both directions, and rightly so, because our identity is always determined in relationship to others. My parents when asked what their nationality was would always say Cornish, not because they denied being British—though it is partly because they thought that the Cornish were the real British, of course—but because they belonged at various levels to contemporary society as it was then. As a Cornishman in East Anglia, I am conscious of plural identities and plural relationships. One of the complicating factors about Britishness is the legacy of empire; we cannot avoid it in this debate and we have not so far. There seem to me to be two fallacies to avoid. The first is to imagine that the recovery of such former power is either achievable or desirable; that sort of nostalgia can be insidious. The second is to imagine that the legacy of empire has been dealt with satisfactorily. A bishop of the Church of England may recognise that some of the tensions in the worldwide Anglican Communion are fashioned in part by our imperial legacy and we cannot really get away from it. People sometimes lament that the absence of a written constitution in Britain is a disadvantage to us, but is there not something valuable in the pragmatism that our unwritten constitution permits? Perhaps in the rest of this brief speech I can sound a note in favour of the British habit of avoiding rigidity in our national identity, even a note in favour of muddling through. The Church of England has plenty of experience here to offer despite the turmoil that we are supposed to be in as I read our newspapers. There is a positive characteristic of this church to which I belong, which is a product of these islands, which I think has relevance for this debate. The Church of England has long regarded herself as both Catholic and reformed. In other words, she has tried to embrace both sides of the Reformation divide, even though she has contained within herself people who have wanted to veer only one way. This leads to plenty of unresolved tensions in our life, but actually expresses something important: embracing difference within a single, accommodating story is more important than cut-and-dried definitions that include some and exclude others. A debate about Britishness has a lot to offer, so long as it does not end up setting hard boundaries which tell us less about who we are and more about who is not one of us. Even the very word ““British”” needs rescuing, from the British National Party, for example, which simply continues the tradition of an earlier generation—some of us remember Colin Jordan’s British Movement; and the eccentric British Israelites, convinced that the British were God’s chosen people, the lost tribe of the House of Israel. Fuzzy boundaries to Britishness may not only be pragmatic, but remind us that differences between people are often much less interesting and important than what they have in common. The word ““tradition”” appears in the Motion. That is always a risk these days; it is an unfashionable word suggesting the imposition of something from the past. However, the hallmark of a living tradition is a continuing debate about what it means to be part of it. If we leave a tradition alone, or if we think that we have settled it, it will gradually wither and die. There is little value in discussing Britishness to define who is in and who is out. This cannot be a debate about border control and immigration, about flag-waving or the transformation of our political or religious culture into something more suitable for the Wembley Stadium or Euro 2008—except that we are not in it. Surely it is about fostering good citizenship. It is about people recognising that their story and the national story are somehow held together. The moral philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote: "““I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’, if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story do I find myself a part?’””." Living within a tradition—a story that may include others—as the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, says, causes us to learn how we ought to live. Belonging within a national story, complex and contested though it is, shapes our moral behaviour. The atomised individualism of a consumerist society simply cannot teach us what is right and wrong. It separates us from our traditions and leaves us with nothing but our own desires to guide our moral sense. That is one of our current problems, and why the Motion is so much to be welcomed. Whatever I have said, I am not arguing for the return of Christendom; that would be both nostalgic and futile. However, if we take our history seriously, think about the legacy of empire and reflect upon our relationships with the United States and Europe, we might recognise something worthwhile about being British. Then there will be a story that people want to know, to which all can contribute in writing the next chapters.