Part One: Nothing like a two day trip out of London to remind me why I still feel profoundly grateful that I remain a committed citizen of Europe.
In Manchester the north-south divide and Brits against spiks mentality that that coalition of nationalist prejudice UKIP , hard-line Tory Brexiteers, and some Corbynistas are so fond of turning into a battle cry, is defied by a less binary reality.
Under its elected Labour Mayor, the very pragmatic and non-ideological Andy Burnham ,Manchester is a thriving multicultural hub full of commercial enterprise, and its two football teams , two of the best clubs on the world, defined in excellence by ‘foreign’ managers and players as well as an enduring local loyalty.
The dismal service of Virgin Trains and the clogged up local road network leaves one wondering just how much more could be done if British policy and public investment mirrored the example of continental Europe’s exemplary high-speed train network.
And yet I eventually cleared the traffic jams and headed out into the Lancashire countryside, entering the stunningly beautiful Ribble Valley, its villages and landscape full of history and literature, nowhere more so that in the approach to Stonyhurst College.
I was soon following one of Tolkien’s favourite walks, imagining Middle Earth, and marvelling , at God’s Grandeur which the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins found in the brushstrokes of light and shadow of the rolling fields and rivers and skyline and the defined beauty of trees.
This is England in Spring time at its most profoundly engaging, both welcoming and universal and mystical -the first buds, the early lambs, and translucent green, all steeped in a history that defies national boundaries.
At Stonyhurst, one of the world’s leading Jesuits schools, I listened to a hugely enlightening lecture by the College’s historian and curator Jan Graffius about the profound and enduring European roots of English Catholicism symbolised by hundreds of artefacts, letters, and paintings .
The Stonyhurst collection shows the extraordinary creativity as well as resilience that survived the destructive Reformation, an act as insular and prejudiced as the machinations of the Hard Brexiteers . It took more than 200 years for European English Catholic men and women to feel tolerated again in their own country.
Thankfully European Brits of all faiths and none have taken rather less time in the modern era to stand up and insist on their right to play their part in shaping national discourse, in the face of those who claim they have no legitimacy.
Part Two:
I have a close relative and several good friends who work in the House of Commons.
Yesterday as MP’s voted not to be bullied into voting for a dog’s dinner of a deal by a deadline of 29th March for leaving the EU, they were advised for their own safety to either head home early or take cover.
The reason given by their supervisory staff was that a demonstration by hard Brexiteers congregated in Parliament Square threatened a riot if the vote went against them.
Thankfully there was no riot but the atmosphere was hardly consensual, let alone engaging. A snapshot of the crowd outside –largely male, and white, and well into adulthood- had the aggressive edge of hard-core English football fans, waving Union Jacks and mouthing nationalist bigotry of a kind that would have had George Orwell turning in his grave.
And here it is worth pointing out that the size of the demonstration claiming the right to impose the biggest severance of the English people from continental Europe since the Reformation, was not only dwarfed by the more than one million who turned up earlier this month demanding a second referendum to decide our future relationship with the EU, but also very different in character, mood, and adherence.
The earlier massive demonstration, the biggest seen in London in modern times was festive and peaceful, multiracial, multicultural and gender plural with ages that ranged from young children to veterans of WW2.
Yesterday’s attempted siege of the seat of our democracy- inflamed by headlines in the Sun newspaper and social media, was epitomised by the abuse and threats hurled at Europhile MP’s , and the move by a few hundred members of the Beaconsfield Conservative Association to deselect the former Attorney-General , the remain-supporting Dominic Grieve.
So worth remembering here that during the protracted period of unprecedented British government ineptitude, hard Brexit Tory bigotry, and less than exemplary leadership of Her Majesty’s main opposition party by Jeremy Corbyn, few MP’s have shown such non-partisan nobility in gesture and word than Grieve.
He has put his sense of what true democracy is all about before narrow party interest, at the forefront of efforts to ensure that neither the hapless prime-minister, nor the circling sharks of hard Brexiteers and rump of intransigent ‘No Surrender’ Ulster men and women should be allowed to get in the way of a majority of elected MP’s retaining an influence on how the biggest planned constitutional issue in Britain’s post-war history is managed.
At the rally of more than one million people Grieve spoke eloquently as to why a people’s vote through a second referendum might be the only truly democratic solution to the mess Mrs May has dragged the country into.
As Grieve has argued: “One of the tendencies that has crept in throughout the whole of this debate ever since the referendum result came out has been a tendency to close down debate on the basis that it is not proper to pursue it because the referendum result must act as a diktat which prevents such debate taking place.
You cannot have a working democracy where you close down debate … To argue that the referendum result imposes a permanency which cannot be challenged is, in my judgment, entirely wrong and when I look at the mess into which we’ve got ourselves, it does appear to me to be at least in part the consequence of pushing this argument and thereby preventing democratic process working.”
For his ‘sins’ Grieve is being challenged by a group of local Tories who feel themselves better represented by a former member of UKIP, an indication of how May under the guise of trying to keep her party from breaking apart has allowed her party to be infiltrated by extreme-right xenophobes.
And here it is worth noting that not even Boris Johnson believes that Grieve is worth sacrificing on the altar of Eurosceptic political ambitions. “ Sad to hear about Dominic Grieve. We disagree about EU but he is a good man and a true Conservative #grieveforbeaconsfield “, Johnson tweeted in response to the attempt anti-Grieve putsch.
Which is why today I turned to the writings of Britain’s supreme essayist and reread Orwell’s seminal notes on Nationalism. And here I quote some pertinent paragraphs.
“Nationalism is not be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas and involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally, Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he had chosen to sink his own individuality.”
Wanting to be British and European does not make Dominic Grieve a nationalist, but I believe he has his patriotic heart in the right place.
