BY STEWART SLATER
“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents” it is claimed Cicero, (think Dominic Grieve in a toga with (if such were possible) additional servings of verbosity and pomposity), said. Perhaps he did, perhaps he did not. But if he did, he would not have been saying anything unusual. People have criticised subsequent generations almost since we started producing subsequent generations – we all think we are cleverer than those who went before, and wiser than those who come after.
In this light, the reaction to the recent shock or bombshell findings by The Times make sense (all polls are “shocks” or “bombshells” save those produced by GB News whose generally greater than 95% unanimity suggests the involvement of Kim Jong Un Surveys Plc.). Coming on the heels of another which suggested that a majority of Gen Z were open to the prospect of a dictatorship, the paper of record found 41% were not proud to be British, the same number would not fight for the country, and only 11% would trust the police to help them if they were a victim (in the criminal rather than fashion sense, I presume). All substantially worse than the last poll in 2004. Truly, as those who imagine themselves inhabiting a Wodehouse novel say, a “marmalade dropper”.
Before we erupt into a spasm of harrumphing, however, it might be worth asking if they have a point. Children, like the heroes of Greek myth (a realisation that struck me recently, a mere 30 years after my Classics degree…), are outsiders. They do not come pre-loaded with an understanding of society. As any parent knows, they have questions. And, as any parent knows, they sometimes find the answers unsatisfactory.
Looking at the statistics, can we say they are irrational not to trust the police? The news has been full of stories of the constabulary at best turning a blind eye, at worst colluding with abusers. Reports of street theft, it is commonly perceived, are treated as filing problems rather than crimes to be solved. 48% of neighbourhoods saw no burglary solved in the three years to 2024. Fool me once and I’d be a fool to expect any better.
Looking more widely, what does Britain offer them? Nothing works particularly well, taxes are sky-high (particularly when student loan payments are added in), the chances of owning a house for those without access to the bank of mum and dad akin to those of their ascending to the Papacy and it is reasonably clear that their likelihood of getting a state pension on the same terms as their parents are not much higher. Why would anyone fight for that?
Contrast America. Part of Trump’s appeal is that he promises a new era of American greatness. The youth will have the opportunity to do great things – go to Mars, conquer Greenland, run a very classy casino in Gaza. Their young are being offered a different, better future, ours a continual drudge-like present, not perhaps, a highway to hell, but certainly a motorway to purgatory.
Something must be done, if only prudentially. We are, after all, relying on the young to lay down their lives for the rest of us if the balloon goes up and they won’t if they don’t take pride in who we are.
Maybe, maybe not. Men, Blackadder tells us, will fight for many reasons: country, principles, friends, the glistening tear on the cheek of a golden child. The man himself, famously, would “mud wrestle his own mother for a ton of cash, an amusing clock and a sack of French porn.” If, through some as yet undreamt combination of circumstances, Belgium decided to invade Britain, we cannot be certain that the youth would meekly surrender. They may not fight for their green and pleasant land, but they might to prevent their friends and family being force-fed moules-frites…
Rather than putting this to the test, however, we could perhaps do something to address their concerns. Build new houses, reduce the red tape that stops businesses forming and growing, alter the balance between asset-rich elderly and asset-poor young. But that would involve us taking some pain, and the iron law of British politics is that pain can only ever be borne by others, elections being a referendum on which group gets to pay for the rest.
Much better to take a different approach.
Of course, a country is not just an economy with a welfare state tacked on. It is an imagined community, a story its members tell themselves. If the young are not proud of Britain, it must be because they are not being told the right story. Change the narrative and, hey presto, the problem disappears, and (most importantly) house prices do not fall.
As to how we should do this, there is debate. To those on the right who have watched Zulu more frequently than might be wise, the solution is to change the way we teach history. Less focus on the iniquities of empire, more on the ending of slavery and the numerous times the country has intervened to prevent the domination of Europe. To those on the left, particularly those who came of age in the nineties, a softer approach is required. We are the nation that birthed J K Rowling and Britpop (causes, apparently, for pride not, as would surely be correct, an indelible, soul-clenching sense of shame…).
Both may appear different, but they are actually the same. You should be proud of your country, because of things other of its citizens have done. The left, like Virgil’s Greeks, favour the artsy-fartsy philosophy and literature stuff, the right, like his Romans, the daddy virtues of ruling foreigners and building stuff.
But how reasonable is this? Why should I take pride in something done by people who are similar to me in some ways, but lived centuries before my time? I did not end slavery or export cricket to the world’s benighted regions. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, did any of my direct forebears. There is no ancestral portrait (a cause of deep personal regret) of a Slater of ages gone by, his boot gently resting on a mound of dead Frenchmen. Neither did I play any role in the creation of Harry Potter (not that I would tell you if I had – it is a WWII analogy told, from the Soviet side, in Enid Blyton’s language with some cod Latin thrown in). We would not expect child A to be proud of their school because child B had written a good essay, so why do we expect the young to be proud of their country because of an author or some singers?
A contrast with the ancient world is instructive. The historian Thucydides relates the speech given by the statesman Pericles at a mass funeral in the early years of the Peloponnesian War which has come to be seen as the classic statement of Athenian Exceptionalism. It starts with a tribute to the forefathers of the attendees who “after many a struggle passed on to us their sons a mighty empire”. So far, so right wing. But, conscious perhaps that this is not enough, he continues. Athens is different to the other cities in Greece. It is a democracy (well, ish). It promotes talent from all segments of society (again, ish). More than that, though, the Athenians are different. “In our private business, we are not suspicious of one another.” “We have a peculiar power of thinking before we act.” “We alone do good to our neighbours not in calculation of interest.” Athenians should be proud to be Athenians because they are different to the other Greeks and they are, bluntly, better than the other Greeks.
Such thinking is not unheard of these days. Think of Yorkshiremen wanging on about being Yorkshiremen or the Scot Nats positioning the Celts as a tribe somewhere between the English and the angels. But we know enough not to take these things seriously. Save for the batty British Israelites, whom even the Victorians thought loopy, biological essentialism has never been very British.
The problem is that Thucydides never asks why his Athenians are different (understandable since he is reporting a pep speech during a war, not the proceedings of a colloquium). If the Athenians are different, they are so either by nature, or because they have been shaped into a particular form by their existing society. But in neither case, has the individual actually done anything. They are either taking pride in biological reality with an admixture of random chance, or the actions of others.
It is reasonable for us to take pride in our actions. Someone who does a couch to 5k and shifts some pounds is justified in feeling pleased with themselves. A good outcome has been secured by their efforts, efforts which they might not have made. Nationality is not, in the main, like that. It is inherited. Most of us have done nothing to earn it save being born, something none of us was able to avoid. It is then, like our eye colour or our hair. Do you feel proud of having blue eyes? Or, to come at it from another angle, if we can take pride in the achievements of those with whom we share some inherited characteristics, should my red-headed grandmother have felt a warm “Team Ginger” glow in her flame-haired confrere Peter the Great’s construction of St Petersburg? Put like that, does it not seem a bit silly? Are the young not actually being entirely reasonable in not feeling pride in their country?
The future need not, however, be the atomised, internationalised one of communitarian nightmare. For if it is not rational for me to be proud of being British, it is still reasonable for me to be grateful for it, just as I am grateful to have been born with four healthy (if only marginally coordinated) limbs. It is a wealthy, developed country which offers an array of opportunities to its citizens. It could work better, certainly, but it could also work far worse.
Gratitude is a more durable emotion than pride. The more we learn about ourselves and the past, the more shame we must feel, for, like all nations, Britain has done, and, no doubt, continues to do shameful things. To ignore them is to choose ignorance, and that is no basis for an understanding, either of others or of ourselves. Gratitude allows us to consider things in the round, to admit that, yes, there are things we could have done better, but there are things we are glad we didn’t do worse.
Fret not, then, if the young are not proud of Britain, so long as they are glad not to be French, we’ll be fine.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.