September 19, 2024 - 4:15pm
Modern Britain is functionally a vassal state of her erstwhile colony, the United States. Stagnant, sclerotic, and ideologically schizophrenic, its downwardly-mobile middle class has set out to square the circle of grandiose self-image and declinist reality by reimagining the “stiff upper lip” style of imperial “Britishness” in toy-poodle form, as “Britishcore” twee.
This development arguably began in earnest with Blair’s “Cool Britannia”. But twee reached a new nadir yesterday with a Guardian listicle celebrating experiences that supposedly “define and unite modern Britons”. Though perhaps inadvertently, it captured the middle-class mood of defeatism to a T: “Britishcore” aestheticises learned helplessness, emotional impotence, and both individual and collective downward mobility as — somehow — sources of unity and national celebration.
The modern stereotype of the English as a people of “stiff upper lip” has its origins in the Victorian invention of “fair play”. The typical pre-Victorian Englishman was a very different creature: hearty, sentimental, and often roaringly, drunkenly violent. It was Britain’s 19th-century imperial hegemony that prompted the turn toward self-restraint, which, in context, expressed something akin to noblesse oblige.
A century on from the beginning of the end of that status, though, the stiff upper lip has lost its hard-power edge. Today, it serves largely as a cutesy means of rationalising Britain’s modern impotence. The ne plus ultra of this register was once Richard Curtis films, a sensibility later distilled into the “Very British Problems” X account. This outlet — and now book — generally focuses on themes of repressed emotion, bad food, and cups of tea, while studiously avoiding any mention of the problems that actually afflict our floundering post-imperial rump Britannia. For instance, every political issue downstream of the conviction — pervasive among the Guardian listicle class — that we should make up for the Empire by having no border control at all.
Dylan B Jones’s listicle fetishises cheap ready meals, telly, overpriced drinks, provincial origins in the “Malvern Hills Massif”, wincing at the cost of a classic posho staycation in Cornwall, and keeping up some semblance of Sloaney appearances with “the Barbour jacket you got for a fiver at Oxfam”, while finding ways to express class snobbery indirectly, such as “carefully avoiding eye contact with your neighbour who just bought an XL Bully”. These are less evocative of some universally shared experiences that “define and unite modern Britons” than the type of daily indignities suffered by expensively-educated young adults, waking up to the reality that (say) freelance journalism does not, in fact, support the lifestyle to which their ancestors were accustomed — but whose expensively-inculcated progressive politics do not permit nostalgia for the British ascendancy that did.
In other words: this listicle is intended as a light-hearted, rueful piece at which the reader can smile in recognition. But unless the author is playing a more sophisticated Straussian game than is typical of its publisher’s output, its revelations are mostly inadvertent. Whether or not the author went to public school, the listicle strongly suggests at least an implied readership that did. One that, since leaving school, is now trapped both by economic decline, and also the ingrained reflex of the stiff upper lip, such that the only way to express any feeling at all about the grim realities of downward mobility is through a heavily-ironised and cringingly twee “man of the people” act, which apes a working class they do not understand and secretly despise.
If the unedifying spectacle of “Britishcore” tells us anything, it’s that it’s time to kill off the stiff upper lip. Today, Ozymandias-like, nothing remains of this but two vast and trunkless legs of twee: a mode of emotional self-sabotage our declining fortunes can ill afford. Let us instead return to those older modes of Englishness that the stiff upper lip supplanted, and that twee now prohibits. Let us, for example, abandon “fair play” for Shrovetide football. And let’s, for pity’s sake, bin the twee ressentiment of “Britishcore” for the unforced warmth, cheerful graft, and colossal 5am breakfasts of the real eternal Anglo: Thomas Skinner. Bosh.
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SubscribeAs is any sane person gives a fcuk what the Guatdian and its bigoted trustafarian readers think about anything.
But come the revolution we will have the subscription list
Don’t bother. Those that don’t off themselves or die of chagrin will fade into the woodwork like cockroaches when the kitchen light goes on.
Too true, but as soon as the light goes off
The typical pre-Victorian Englishman was a very different creature: hearty, sentimental, and often roaringly, drunkenly violent.
This is simply blox.
I doubt whether this Guardian article has any relevance to most people in this country at all.
Rather like the Guardian itself. Without the bulk subscriptions of the BBC and Civil Service advertising budgets it wouldn’t be viable.
My initial reaction to Mary’s article was to ask if she had a couple of teaspoons of cynicism with her cup of Earl Grey. However after skip reading the Guardian piece it entirely deserves to be completely ignored or trampled on like an offensive cockroach.
What it captured is that:
A. 20 years after leaving Britain, I have no clue about 80% of the references in the list. Who are all these people/things? Am I now a Brit Of The Past?
B. I’m also old…because I do say “Dishy Rishi” which would make me an embarrassing mum (if I had kids).
Hmm.
I live in Britain, don’t get or have never done a lot of the references either. I sort of get the impression that people a bit like this might exist and I may have met them (possibly in somewhere like Brighton, Bristol, parts of London or perpetual students/minor academics in odd bits of less likely places eg East Mids or the North) but if they do I’d find them deeply trivial and avoid.
The article isn’t about you, it’s about people who read the Guardian, of whom there are only 200k or so in a population of 75 million.
Just to note that the combined total of those working in the civil service and the BBC is about 500k.
They are everywhere in the commenfs pages of the msm: sort of sit back abd enjoy it attitude . Like the Beta Male column, accept failure ruefully, or even warmly.
We may be going down the plug ‘ole, but by God, we’re all going down together!
The word “twee” – is it used anywhere else in the world, apart from the UK? Brits know instinctively what it means, and i can recall the outbreak of the Beatles/Stones being the perfect antidote to that kind of mood in the 60s.
That’s a long time ago now, but surely people aren’t still clinging onto the post-imperial schtick more than half a century, punk and Britpop later?
I strongly suspect this is an attempt by the Guardian to deflect and distract from the real problems we face. It has the same tenor of serious misjudgement as the misjudgement that was applied to those who voted for Brexit.
I’d advise against taking the slightest bit of notice of this rubbish. To anyone reading from outside the UK, this really is not what the majority of the population are about.
Almost all British vernacular architecture is grounded in the aesthetics of twee.
Their was always a paradoxical aspect to the stiff upper lip.In the days when the British upper crust ruled the waves, they seem to have had a strange superiority/inferiority complex. Plenty of looking down noses at the rest of the world combined with a sense that culture and romance was something that mostly occurred south of Dover. There was though a grudging respect for them in foreign parts – these stiff upper lipped, receding-chinned, phlegmatic, pasty-faced blighters; seafaring, colonising anti-heroes who have so disproportionately altered the face of the planet. Days long gone now.
And the particular English part of this Britishness has always got its shortest reputational straw. This satirical characterisation “a land of poets and dreamers; a land of fiercely independent gritty people who know how to take their drink and dance a jig. And you just can’t help but love to hear them sing. Then there’s the food of course – the marvellous food. And so sexy; with that famous dress sense, such gorgeous specimens of masculinity and femininity the English are.” would never survive a Google AI search of “Englishness”. Why is this so? If the English are pricked, do they not bleed? Why has Englishness failed to garner its own version of the self-flattering national mythology of so many other nations? Did this arise from a low national self-esteem count or, contrariwise, an aristocratic disdain for self display? Either way, self-deprecation is a gambit all too likely to backfire. It’s the sort of thing foreigners might associate with the boy or girl they used to bully at school. Then there’s the faintly annoying do-gooder undertones of support for the underdog. None of it is the stuff of which Mel Gibson movies are made.
What rubbish. Try reading some memoirs of this period, especially those of Indian civil servants or explorers.
The stiff upper lip existed when no one was a victim not even if you worked down a mine in the dark or were mangled by a factory machine or the odds of getting back to Blightly from the colonies alive was 100 to 1 against. It is the antithesis of the victim culture that the Guardian champions.
“carefully avoiding eye contact with your neighbour who just bought an XL Bully”
This of course would also apply to the victims of grooming gangs as well as terroristic violence. Not to mention women assaulted by men pretending to be women.
Instead, the Guardian would have you direct any anger at a tiny country in the Levant. Ignore your own decline. Blame the Jews instead.
Then
Just a note, but ‘fair play’ pre-dates the Victorians by quite a long while. More probably to do with obsessions of gambling and competition than the Victorian desire to write down and codify everything. The Guardian list read like 65 things done while drunk, plus some other stuff to make it up to 100.
I believe it came with the Saxons. There is an account of a battle in Essex between Saxons and Vikings. The Saxons had the Northmen trapped on an island with only a small causeway. The Viking leader told his opposite number that it was not right that the Anglo-Saxons should have an unfair advantage. The Saxon chieftain gave it some thought, and decided that it was indeed unfair, so he let the Vikings cross and amass on his side.
The Vikings massacred the Saxons and went on to plunder the area.
Standard Unherd – chuck some Guardian red meat to it’s subscription base.
A silly article, albeit largely satire, then followed with some rage here. That said there is the old Groucho Marx saying ‘a joke isn’t really funny until someone takes it seriously’.
Come on JW, even you surely have to admit that that Guardian long ago jumped the shark of self-parody.
Or perhaps you can’t see the ludicrousness of a newspaper that endlessly rails against ‘injustices’ (that are always someone else’s fault) whilst simultaneously singing the praises of massively overpriced luxury goods and advising it’s readers on where to spend a couple of million on a house in the Cotswolds. It perfectly embodies the moral vanity, pretentiousness and absence of self awareness of our metropolitan class.
It’s almost funny – or would be if these ghastly people didn’t also have so much unaccountable power over the rest of us.
I don’t get the fixation on one specific paper. Is there nothing better to debate/discuss?
You’ll have noticed no articles about the potential dangers of the owner of Unherd owning more of the Right wing media having bought the Spectator and chasing the Telegraph too? Yet a puff piece on the Guardian…again. ‘Red meat’ as I say.
Why shouldn’t conservatives have media outlets? You force us to pay for the BBC, which exclusively promotes your neo-liberal ideology. Why shouldn’t we fund our own media to promote social solidarity and an end to your class wars.
I don’t force you to pay for the BBC. You give me more credit, influence and status than deserved. You can not pay it if you don’t want to and get your media another way.
The Right has always owned most of the media. The question is whether Paul Marshall should own as much of it, but you are v unlikely to see an Article on that question here.
Redeemed by the link to the short Thomas Skinner video at the end.
Quite what Mary Harrington’s fantasy about Britain being the USA’s 51st state has to do with all of this is unclear.
Only in the Guardian could you pay £50 for 4 Morettis (in the list in the article).
Some fair comments below, but even The Guardian doesn’t have one prescribed set of ideological beliefs that all contributors have to sign up to! Yet again people simply don’t seem to make any distinction between medium and message (unless they want the distance themselves from something somebody on “their side” has uttered! Sometimes I think it is just laziness; people can’t be bothered to find out the name of the author of the article (that they disagree with).
I love Mary Harrington. Maybe there is hope for us yet.
Having looked at the Guardian article mentioned, I’m surprised to see it taken so seriously. It seems very silly and adolescent in its humour, and more about things seen on TV, perhaps, than real people. Still, I suppose Mary has a point about a loss of of worthwhile British values–whatever they might actually be. Being older, I recall there always having been ambivalence about Britishness , a sense of pride and approval of sorts, perhaps rather having the monarchy than not, but tempered with a realistic cynicism. It wasn’t unusual to hear someone ask, when the dark side of empire, or industry was exposed, “Are you proud to be British?” I’m not sure if anyone looks at things like that anymore.
You can be proud to be British, yet acknowledge the black marks in its history, just as we Yanks (both North and South) can be proud of the States, yet own up to slavery. Patriotism isn’t chauvinism, it’s a belief that we have done as well as we could in the past and intend to do better in the future.
Only the upper classes had a stiff upper lip. Lower class men simply had taking the p155, the attitude that nothing was beyond a joke, and the ability to give it and take it. Now that humour is banned, we’re not surprisingly adrift.
As far as can be discerned, from my position of relative inexpertise in such matters, the origin of ‘stiff upper lip’ may be traced to 1815 US in the publication Massachusetts Spy. So it would seem that the vassalage to the former colony began much earlier than Mary Harrington imagines.
Just bog off Guardian, no one cares what you think
I note that Skinner, in his tweet, says “Remember if your feeling tiered…”. The self-consciously downwardly mobile really should take note that the 5am breakfast is the remedy.