Britain’s philistine Remainers presided over decades of pseudo-cultural insularity posing as cosmopolitanism
As the EU apparatchiks indulge in their customary brinkmanship of down-to-the-wire, cliffhanging, essay-crisis posturing in the climactic moment of the Brexit trade talks, we need to refocus on another aspect of our newly-won independence: we should recognise the cultural implications of our departure from the European Union.
The first requirement is for us to stop talking about our future relations with “Europe”: the EU is not Europe, but a bureaucracy constraining the disparate countries of that continent. Europe is a geographic and cultural entity of which Britain is an intrinsic part; we could not leave that authentic Europe even if we wanted to. Instead of brooding over what links we should retain with the Brussels machine, we should instead be mapping out how to interact culturally with the individual nations of the continent.
“Culture” has routinely been weaponised by Remainers as just another area in which our lives will be impoverished by belonging to a sovereign nation. From the hysterical luvvies forecasting a holocaust of the arts (they will no longer be eligible for EU funding) to insecure “progressives” carrying copies of the Guardian as a token of intellectual respectability (oblivious to the irony of that notion), there is a consensus on the left that Brexit heralds a new Philistine Age.
That “narrative” claims that only knuckle-trailing morons with no educational qualifications voted for Brexit, their brute demography overwhelming the forces of Remainer civilisation, represented by graduates and all thinking people. The fact that one of those knuckle-trailing Brexiteers was the late Sir Roger Scruton, the most intelligent man in Britain of his generation, does not register with Remainers who, since his opinions were conservative and therefore proscribed, had probably never heard of him.
Snobbery – the characteristic of the ineradicably insecure – is the sole basis of the attempt by Remainers to define themselves as an intelligentsia and their opponents, in corollary, as stupid. Remainers pique themselves on their cosmopolitanism, as witness their undocumented Filipina maid, their villa in Tuscany (bought on the off-chance of meeting Polly Toynbee as a neighbour) and their self-conscious dialogue in Franglais with the natives when they invade the Dordogne in quest of the black Périgord truffles acclaimed both by the glossy volume of cuisine porn they were given at Christmas and (more threateningly) by their aspirational friends.
This unfounded intellectual snobbery was not born of the Brexit dispute, it has been a characteristic of the Left for generations. It is a matter of record that, whenever majority opinion resists the prescriptions of the elites, snobbish progressives get in touch with their inner Mitford.
The arrogant assumption of intellectual superiority by the Left has always been an imposture. Never has the notion looked less credible than when associated with Brexit. In 1975, some of us voted in the referendum to confirm membership of the EEC on largely cultural grounds. Since the political project had been concealed from the electorate, entry into the European Community was envisaged as an opportunity to offset Britain’s insular mentality by intensifying our exposure to the rich cultures of the many great nations of Europe.
For those of us who espoused that naïve notion, disillusionment was not long deferred. EEC and later EU membership in no way improved our cultural relationship with Europe. There were a lot of grandstanding institutes and foundations, fecund in jobs for the boys, and plenty of junkets at school and the freeloading municipal councillor level, but no deep or substantial cultural intercourse. It takes more than a notice proclaiming “twinned with” on the outskirts of a town to cultivate real understanding of the history, literature and art of a foreign country. Slapping a circle of gold stars on public projects was never an earnest act of cultural sympathy.
Over 47 years of EEC/EU membership, cultural relations, so far from improving, actually diminished, while American influence increased in Britain. The supposed cosmopolitanism that Remainers mourn was never a reality, but a myth created by their own vanity and sense of entitlement. What is the litmus test of cultural empathy and the main route to mutual understanding? Incontrovertibly, it is language.
At the very least, then, even if it was hardly to be expected that an in-depth appreciation of European literature could be inculcated into British students on any large scale, at least the nuts and bolts of language ought to have been imparted, as a first step. How did that project prosper? Not quite as successfully as the Titanic, is the answer. The teaching of European languages in British schools, in the decades that represented the apogee of our EU membership, was a travesty – and a fast-dwindling one, at that.
There is no alibi, as embarrassed Remainers would like to pretend, in the Brexit referendum as the cause of British youngsters shunning European languages. Consider the evidence of the two decades before the idea of an In/Out referendum became a serious prospect, the years of unchallenged EU membership from 1994 to 2014.
In 1994, entries for the A-level examination in French numbered 29,101, a derisory 4 per cent of entries; by 2014 it had fallen to 10,433 (1.3 per cent). In 1994, there were 10,858 entries for A-level German, representing 1.5 per cent of entries; in 2014 the figure was down to 4,187 (0.5 per cent). Only Spanish, among EU languages, bucked the trend (4,755 or 0.7 per cent in 1994, rising to 7,601 or 0.9 per cent in 2014), but still a pathetic percentage of A-level entries.
At GCSE level, since 2002, French has declined by 63 per cent and German by 67 per cent; again, only Spanish has increased, by 75 per cent, an inadequate compensation for the plummeting rate of engagement with Europe’s two leading languages. Yet this chronicle of relentless decline into monoglot cultural isolation is the educational record of the era to which Remainers now look back as a supposed golden age of cultural intercourse with Europe.
No section of the Remoaner Greek chorus of doom has raised a more distraught keening over Brexit than the educational establishment. But where was its concern for cultural bonding with the peoples of Europe during those decades of unchallenged and, it was assumed, unending EU membership, when it allowed European languages virtually to follow in the footsteps of Latin and Greek as Cinderella subjects on the British curriculum? Where were the Remainer politicians, so strident in proclaiming their allegiance to Europe, when the educational system for which they were responsible became more insular than they accused the Brexit Party of being?
It was all a sham. The pretentious Liberal Democrat, ostentatiously clutching a copy of Proust’s À la Recherche (in translation) as evidence of cosmopolitan credentials, was a paradigm of a papier-mâché Europhile attachment to “culture”, as bogus as old-fashioned suburban snobbery about “doilies” and “serviettes”. It was all quite pathetic and, as we can now see, barren of any genuine cultural achievement.
Brexit, on the other hand, caricatured by its defeated opponents as a Philistine project, has the potential to cultivate a real, rather than synthetic, cultural intercourse with Europe. Art does not need the oversight of supranational institutions to flourish. England was aggressively independent when Shakespeare penned his masterpieces, with plays embracing Danish princes, Veronese gentlemen and Venetian merchants; and if his representation of those societies lacked realism in certain respects, that was no more the case than with some of his depictions of English society.
The same applies to European art. There was no European Union when Balzac wrote his Comédie humaine, or when Barbey d’Aurevilly imitated Sir Walter Scott in his fictional exposition of the culture of Normandy; Beethoven somehow, like Mozart, contrived to survive on private patronage and public acclaim. Are painters, composers, novelists, poets and philosophers somehow inhibited in interacting with one another’s works by the lack of some overarching political structure? Of course not; and any such structure carries the threat of imposing an ideological patina on cultural endeavour.
Culture is not dependent on bureaucracy; nor is it an exclusive preserve of the left (Balzac and Barbey were both Legitimists, supportive of a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy). Brexit’s enemies claim it aspires to return to a Dickensian Britain; in fact, the literature of Dickens and his contemporaries, English to the core, gained a worldwide following. Dickens’s work was intensely, deeply English – and Russians loved it. A country becomes truly part of an international culture when it exports its true essence for the appreciation of other nations, not by submerging that essence in a synthetic multinational pseudo-culture.
The faux culture of the former Europhile establishment should now be replaced by a healthy, outgoing resurgence of British artistic creativity, a renewal of national identity inspiring a genuine engagement with our individual neighbours in Europe, instead of the barren posturing of the naked emperors who presided over insularity posing as cosmopolitan sophistication.