Great Britain

Owen Reading (United Kingdom)

THE NAME says it all: Great Britain. It is not just Britain, not simply another nation in the world, but its citizens (‘subjects’) believe (or believed) that it is the greatest of the countries. Patriotism in Britain is one of the most fervent yet uncertain on Earth – not quite fascism or brutal nationalism, but a frequently voiced confidence of importance, even if the reality today is far from that. We still believe that our Prime Minister is a figure of huge importance and reverence around the world, able to calm troubled waters anywhere he chooses. We still believe that the words ‘Her Majesty’s Government’ on a passport or official form will guide us through the dangers and pitfalls of travel and adventure. We still believe that Britain can influence the US Government to see sense, even when it is painfully obvious to most that the American people cannot influence its own government. We still believe that as a former colonial power, we still have influence and power over the nations of the Commonwealth, even when, quite rightly, they have left and used their rights of self-determination to manage their own country, rather than be plundered and ‘civilised’. And we still naively believe that the Great British currency, the Sterling Pound, can hold its own in the world of the dollar and euro.

I cannot explain in this article where all of this comes from, indeed whole books have been written on the subject, many of them finishing inconclusively. But the pride that Britons exhibit abroad is nothing to the ferocity that they pull themselves apart at home with. The following story will exhibit this.

Recently, the long-running saga of the privatised rail system came to a head. This requires different explanations to different international audiences. To the US and Canada: the former government tried to do what Nixon did to America’s passenger services by sticking them in Amtrak: they tried to kill them off so they wouldn’t have to fund the heavily unionised rail network ever again. Most Americans cannot understand why we would want to keep the railways in public ownership at all, but the truth was and is that they need government subsidy to move people in our crowded public transport network. We need railways, for commuting and long-distance travel. Not like the US.

To my European audience: Britain did a very stupid and illogical thing in the early 1990s. We sold off our rail network to about 25 different companies, which, in a small country like Britain, is totally impractical and fragments the system beyond repair. The old adage about Mussolini that he may have been an evil fascist dictator, but at least he could get the trains to run on time turned out to be disappointingly true.

After six years of buck-passing, government bailouts and three large fatal accidents, the new government pulled the plug on the company that owned the network, Railtrack. We should have cheered. We should have praised them. We should have held our head high once again in the world. But, in the great British tradition, we made a complete pig’s ear of the whole thing. The government did not inform investors in advance, which angered them and most of the pro free-market media. The government did not have a backup plan. The company is still in liquidation and no one knows when its major engineering projects will be restarted. And to top everything off, one of the biggest commuter rail companies was crippled for several weeks by strike action.

To Europe this seems baffling. The French national sport may be striking, but at least the railways and the public services run well, and efficiently for the recipient. The TGV is a marvel of engineering, and the Eurostar through the Channel Tunnel runs about a third faster on the French side. A recent joke on the radio (very few of us still call it the wireless, contrary to popular opinion) highlighted the difference between German railways and ours. Station announcer: "We regret to inform passengers that the train on platform two is, how you say… not arriving when we said it would be… what is the word? Check the dictionary… we have no word for this – wait, the English dictionary! Which of the 400 words shall we use… the train is late."

The crisis, which to many eyes appears to be a storm in a teacup (these people, by and large, are the ones that do not use the railways), has taken a political turn, with the good old British political system coming up with good old-fashioned bickering and disputes within the Cabinet. Peter Hain, our former Europe Minister, and an important Blairite in the Cabinet, weighed into the debate by saying that Britain "has the worst railways in Europe". Something I’m sure the Russians will be pleased to hear. Please – if you live in Eastern Europe and you honestly believe that your railway system is superior to a regular, mostly punctual and relatively modern private passenger rail network, then I’d be pleased to hear from you, because I honestly do not believe that Britain has a dreadful rail network, rather it has come to a head over the liquidation of Railtrack, an event the government was completely unprepared for.

Clearly, most countries who have observed Britain and Britons over many years would have assumed that we would have pulled together, and asserted that our rail system is world-class and can rival any system (except possibly the French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Austrian etc systems). We should have been above this, we should, according to the books, have had pride in our country. But this was not the case. The railways are now a national joke; if anyone mentions them, we issue a customary hollow laugh, and recount one of our own experiences on the rail network. Nowhere will you find a Briton who is prepared to say that the rail system is not merely adequate, but good. It is simply not done, as the phrase may go. It is a great paradox – Great Britain is no longer great in the eyes of its people.

So may I here say a few things in defence of my much-maligned country?

The United Kingdom is not merely the bridge between the US and Europe, although this is something it does admirably, but it is also still a thriving hub for the world. Contrary to what some may think, Britain has an important niche to fill. And here is a list of the wonderful things Britain has done, when generally speaking they should have been done by other, more important nations. Only recently, America, we created The Weakest Link, and then gave you Anne Robinson, we also created Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (Oh yes we did), we created the foundations of the World Wide Web, and we didn’t even complain when Bush was forced on the world. In the past, we have invented Concorde (apologies to the French on this one, but it makes the land of McDonald’s wince), we invented television, we invented the light bulb, we invented radio and long distance radio transmission, and we won the 1966 World Cup (our proudest moment).

There is probably a great deal more that has slipped my mind just now, but I think these few alone are great achievements of any one country. My particular favourite, Concorde, which was developed with France and is one of the great European projects of the later half of the 20th Century, was about to be beaten by America – until they realised what a complete waste of money the whole enterprise was and gave up. But how silly they were. I will have more to say on Concorde in a later article, but put simply, if no one had even tried, what a colossal tragedy for design and aviation it would have been.

The study of individual nations and their cultural differences is not something widely noted in academic Geography, particularly school Geography, but it is one that can be highly enjoyable, and provided you are not too prejudiced against one way of doing things, greatly revealing and productive. National pastimes, obsessions, mindsets and attitudes are something that reveals nations as what they are, not what their politicians make them out to be. For example, the British government is, at this moment in time, profoundly pro-European when they want to be, often to cultivate close relations with other Euro zone countries, so furthering trade and economic happiness. The current British government would very much like to go into the Euro, mainly for reasons of politics and economic success.

These two viewpoints are very different to the traditional British viewpoints, which are still widely held. Whilst Britain may be ‘Cool Britannia’ in the ambassadors’ receptions and halls of Brussels, the true spirit of the British really comes through when an England vs. Germany football (soccer) match comes around.

The England football team is not the UK football team. There is no UK football team. Typically of the British, and much to the annoyance of the world soccer governing body FIFA, the UK has four teams – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, plus the Irish team if none of those succeed. So we have a four times greater chance of success. This strange state of affairs reflects the attitudes of the British; the English hate the Scots, the Scots hate the English, the Welsh hate the English but like the Scots, the English hate the Welsh, and no one can quite remember that Northern Ireland actually have a team, because they never really win anything. Of course, the English hate the Irish, but everyone hates the English. Still following this?

So when an England vs. Germany match comes along, the English get fired up with pride and patriotism (as well as quite a few pints of beer), and the Scots and Welsh prepare to kick England when they are defeated. A bunch of noisy lads leave for the continent (or Wembley, which has now been knocked down in a sorry state of affairs which I cannot go into here), and beat up a few German supporters (who are either drunk and noisy or polite and innocent, generally the latter). The ‘lads’ prepare to put one over Germany like ‘we’ did in 1966 (and 5-1 in 2001, let it be noted here), and the media gets fired up in a frenzied state of affairs to congratulate ‘our heroes’. For those of you not interested in football, only one TV channel will have no mention of it all evening: BBC2 (because it leaves it to BBC1). There you can watch a dreadful wildlife programme with David Attenborough, talking about copulating wildebeest, and other such delights of the natural world.

This is the United Kingdom at the beginning of the 21st Century. We still haven’t quite got used to the fact that the Welsh, Scots and English are all living in the same country. We also cannot believe that Northern Ireland is a part of the UK, being as it is a small war zone (worse than Middlesbrough and Liverpool put together).

To an outsider it is fascinating, sometimes worrying, how this small nation of former seafarers and empire builders ended up like this. How we built some of the richest and most powerful nations on Earth and then left. Britain is a country suffering from an identity crisis.

It has been said that if you looked at the media coverage of other countries and from that judged their distance from Britain, America would be somewhere in the Irish Sea, Ireland somewhere near the Azores, France and the rest of Western Europe around the middle of the South Atlantic, and the rest of the world somewhere between Mars and the Asteroid Belt. Australia would be somewhere around Central America and South America would not even be in the Solar System. As for Africa, it would be but a distant glint in the eye of the Hubble Space Telescope. This is the world as seen from Britain.

As such, Britain is a bridging point between the US and Europe, and has been for many decades. This means we now have a mixture of the two cultures seeping into our own distinctive one. We have McDonald’s and Starbucks (who doesn’t?), but we also have French cuisine, German cars (and very grateful we are too), Italian pizzas (none of that American deep fried muck here), and Mediterranean patios and house decoration. And yet Britain still has its own little traits and idiosyncrasies, which perplex outside visitors greatly. Arriving at Heathrow Airport on the London Underground (‘the Tube’), I stepped off the train as I have been almost bred to do. It comes naturally to the British, they know innately how the Tube works and how to use it. It is almost instinct. We had large amounts of luggage with us, but we still knew how to get it off in time. However, my eye was drawn to a group of four people, lugging bags onto the train, slowly and deliberately, having a dreadful time. They were shouting at each other, and panicking greatly. The door was closing and they tried to wedge themselves into it, shouting all the way. Upon falling into the carriage (this was the stop for Terminal 4, we still had one stop to go for Terminal 3), a tall women from the group addressed the carriage: "Sorry about that, we’re American you see." Most of the carriage, which were nearly all British going on holiday, nodded in agreement and gave a silent smirk. We understood entirely, yet there was something comical about people who cannot ride the Tube when it is so easily bred into our psyche.

From what I have already written, you may think that I am the typical flag-waving, foreigner-hating, bloody-minded Briton, speaking English louder and clearer when someone does not understand me abroad. I don’t believe I am. I think that there are so many other countries in the world where life is easier and more enjoyable, where the people are friendlier and the food tastier (well, that could be anywhere), and simply better and more enjoyable. I am humbled in the face of the world; I want to travel and see the sights and meet people and learn abut new cultures and sample the food and… but I am British, and there is a certain part of all Britons that makes us feel that we should be proud of our little country, and all that it has done. I am not the loud-mouthed bigot that most outsiders associate with Britain, very few of us are. I want to visit other places, and live abroad, but I also enjoy my country. That is why I love Geography, and finding out where things are, and maps of places I may never visit. It opens a new window onto a world you previously thought was inaccessible.

I am now within 500 words of the end of this article. In it, I have hardly touched on most of Britain’s part and place in the world. I have hardly touched on the geography of Britain, but I hope I have given you a useful insight into the culture of Britain, and the view that many of us have of the world and our place in it.

Someone (he was British but I can’t remember his name) said that in the world there are only two different races: the British and foreigners. This statement seems to be the final word on how Britain views the rest of the world, developed and developing. It is something that nearly every Briton, from fusty old retired colonels of Tunbridge Wells to dope-smoking hippy (yes, we do have them still) can relate to easily. It is a sad fact, but as a general statement, the only thing that the British have more contempt for than their own government is a foreigner. Not myself, of course, and probably millions of people in Britain don’t agree with that. But as a rule, it is mainly true.

I should think that this is the only nation in the world for which you could write an article like this. Other nations may have deep-set attitudes, but none are quite as well known and easily associated with one nation as the British have.

‘The times they are a changing, though’, and this is just as true of Britain as everywhere else on the planet. Britain has been undergoing huge changes for many decades now, and many of the things that you may associate with them are also going. Red London buses of the type that you can hop on and off at the back have nearly completely gone, which is a great shame, but of course due to lawyers and safety regulations you weren’t allowed to hop on and off them anyway any more. Red phone boxes have gone, and have been replaced by plastic BT boxes, which are totally soulless. This is probably a good thing, seeing as the old boxes generally smelt of urine all the time and you usually had something stuck on the receiver that would then become attached to your head as you talked on the phone. If that has just shattered your close-held perceptions of Britain, there are a lot more that I could tell you about. But we won’t go into them here, we’ll save them for another time.

There is still a lot to be proud about in Britain, and I would urge you to visit – London is a great world city and ignored at your peril. But when you’re here, just watch out for the British, and if you do have to interact with them, bear in mind what I’ve told you here, and be sympathetic to the poor dears. Not only have they lost an empire, huge wealth, a leading position in the world, a great deal of face over the fate of Israel and the Middle East, but they have to live with a system that simply does not care about them any more. Bon voyage!