Authentocrats by Joe Kennedy

Author:Joe Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

Chapter VI

Sneering at the English

Authentocracy fixates on the idea that its despised metropolitan elites are constantly looking down their noses at the little man. They sneer at his nuclear deterrent, his poppies, his cherished imperial history, and they even sneer at his precious country. If the left keeps on going like this, it says, hamming concern, nobody will ever vote for it. In fact, to the authentocrat, pretty much any critique of anything it supposes its beloved white working classes might take offence at is dismissed as unforgivable high-handedness. As this is the case, I might as well stop worrying about paying any lip-service to these identity politics whatsoever; after what I’ve said so far, I’m going to be accused of sneering regardless.

So, here’s a story with a sneer in it. About ten years ago, I was visiting my family at Christmas in the small North Yorkshire town they live in. One afternoon, we walked over the river to a pub we visited from time to time on the hill facing the castle; it wasn’t particularly exciting, but it served a purpose, and the view was pleasant. I was buying a round of drinks when I noticed a piece of lined A4 paper stuck up almost ostentatiously by the bar, and it had a handwritten poem on it, decorated with some St George’s crosses and poppies. The theme of the poem was the subjugation of English identity by “politicians”, who refused to let English people be patriotic even though all other nearby nations — “the Scottish”, “the Irish”, “the French”, even “the Germans” — were permitted to. One couplet in particular stood out, and I can quote it from memory:

What about Shakespeare, Wilde and Shaw?

Nobody teaches them in school anymore.

I don’t know about Shaw, but, having been responsible for teaching lots of students recently arrived at university, and having worked as an examiner in A-Level English, I can say with more than fair confidence that both Shakespeare and Wilde are taught in school to this day. I couldn’t be bothered to point this out, or the more potentially embarrassing (and probably fight-provoking) fact about the troublesome non-Englishness of two of the named patriotic authors. Wilde’s well-known antipathy to patriotism could also have been brought up, as well as the more academic question of whether the point of learning about literature is to shore up a supposedly insecure sense of national identity.

It seemed quite funny at the time, but Englishness has done a roaring trade, and not just in revanchist pub poetry, since this happened to me. Alongside the right’s preoccupation that Englishness should be celebrated precisely because it’s been banned — though no one really knows who did the banning — there’s been a mounting urge to hand-wring about what it means to be English amongst the well-meaning and the trying-not-to-sneer. The more we hear about how you’re not allowed to be English these days, the more obnoxiously present Englishness seems to be. It’s a pretty similar story to the

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