Locked in the Battle over Britain

There are in reality two Britains: the outgoing, adventurous, open nation, and the defensive, neurotic, static one. Which will triumph? The crisis of Britain is precisely that it is simultaneously seduced and appalled by change

Britain is a promiscuous place, in love with change and novelty; the established wisdom that claims otherwise is obtuse. There are signs of this Britain almost everywhere, whether we look at the forging of the prototype of all precise engineering, in Charles II's reign; Richard Branson's willingness to embark on new enterprises, from record producing to airlines to radio stations; the appetite with which women in Britain after the Second World War took up the new look expressly frowned on by the Labour government; or the speed with which the young have taken to the emergent multimedia, from despised computer games to the Internet. And newness in Britain is not necessarily opposed to tradition: the green concerns that are characteristic of the new politics renew traditional British concerns with this green and pleasant land.

When Mary Quant described British women as "looking, listening, ready to try anything new" she was closer to a sense of what Britain was and is than the melancholy jeremiahs of left and right who either praise or damn the British for their settledness.

How could this place be settled, since above all things it has been through the centuries an import-export port. Just for a moment forget the legendary Britain of village greens and settled communities and imagine a Britain that has long been a multi-ethnic state and has for longer than anyone can remember traded goods, materials, ideas - and built its greatness by appropriating land and resources and trading people as property.

This country is marked by its import-export history wherever you look - and not merely in the obvious places such as the markets where Britain has traded, whether in sugar in the 17th century or the financial services of the present. Signs of Britain's promiscuity can be seen all around us in the streets: whether in Edinburgh, where Tony Blair's old college, Fettes, is designed as a French chteau; or in the street names of West Belfast, just off the Falls Road: Lucknow Street, Kashmir Road, Cawnpore Street.

There are further signs of Britain's outward character in the traffic of ideas that it has engaged in, such as between enlightenment Edinburgh and continental Europe in the late 18th century or between the US and Britain in the post-war period. The monarchy, at least as much as any other aspect of British society, has been shaped by Britain's place in the world. In the late 19th century Queen Victoria became Empress of India to solder together a self-conscious and imperial power; and more recently the monarchy's unwillingness to modernise may be in part a consequence of its core role in the tourist industry, which needs reams of "antique splendour".

There are other signs of Britain's contribution to the import-export business, if more are needed, in the various communities exported from Britain, and in the communities imported from other countries. Chinese sailors settled here in the 18th century, a time at which, according to one account, a quarter of the British navy was black. During the same period, as the historian Linda Colley has recorded in her marvellous book Britons, the British of all classes travelled more than their European counterparts - something that seems to be a tradition, since contemporary statistics suggest that the British are more likely to be emigrants within Europe than their neighbours.

The British fascination with home is an index of how often we have left it, not how little.

For such an outward-going nation, is it any wonder that its arts, both high and popular, have been washed by the sea? This is as true of Turner's "slave ship" painting as it is of Paul McCartney's folksy "Mull of Kintyre", or the imperial "Rule Britannia". And the popular British historical imagination lived at sea until recently, with Francis Drake and the Scottish fishing fleet; with Bonnie Prince Charlie sailing over the sea to Skye and exile; and with the Welsh Prince Madoc's "discovery" of America. This is not, of course, to say that it is remembered or imagined in a uniform way - or that it is something simply to be celebrated. To take two testing examples: the sea should conjure up as part of the British historical memory the boats on which the slaves were transported and the ships on which the persecuted Scottish Covenanters set sail to America.

It is not primarily a question of admiring or damning this outward-looking Britain - this Britain in the world, to quote the title of this month's forthcoming government-sponsored conference. But to forget this Britain, to be amnesiac about it in favour of a dream of cosy insularity, is not to see Britain and its history at all.

If we were searching for an index of this place I have described then the clothing (and fashion) industry might do. It is not merely that fashion and clothing have been important elements of the national economic and cultural life for a long time, but that a casual glance at their history would show how they have been part of the traffic between here and elsewhere. The clothing industry was central to the relationship between the Caribbean and Britain, and to the slave trade, as early as the 17th century; fashion was important in the relationship between France and Britain in the next century when the French looked over the Channel to see what they should wear; cloth was again central when Manchester workers and Indian workers locked horns over cotton; and more recently, whether through designers such as Vivienne Westwood or entrepreneurs such as Shami Ahmed, owner of the Manchester-based Joe Bloggs jeans, Britain's reputation in clothing and fashion is high. And this is not to mention Marks & Spencer, a chain of shops set up by two men, one a member of the Russian Jewish community imported into Britain in the late 19th century. This "immigrant" business is now a flagship for Britain across the world.

If reference to fashion in this imagining of the British seems wrongheaded, why is this? Is it because fashion is trivial? But is it any more so than football, which is pored over as an index of the state of the national psyche? Perhaps fashion is simply not manly enough for a nation that has been taught to pride itself on its manliness - in the Sandhurst mess, on the pitch at Cardiff Arms park, on the Manchester shop floor and in the Glasgow pub? Or is it the fact that fashion and clothing offer back to the nation a vision of itself as a curious and outward-looking place, fascinated by change and display?

There is, of course, another Britain in which all of us live at least part of our time, rather different from this promiscuous one. This other Britain is defensive, even neurotic about change; it works according to precedent, much as English law does. Its imagination is stuffed with despoiled village greens and customs barriers by which it can filter out the traditional from the alien. It never sees change as an opportunity, only as a threat.

This Britain is visible in most aspects of national life. It's there whenever anyone laments the "decline" of the BBC and speaks of the new satellite and cable technologies as if they were necessarily a deadly virus. It's there in the Labour Party over Clause IV and fantasies of class purity which periodically still raise their head: Michael Foot, recently reviewing a biography of Tony Blair, referred to his wife Cherie as "pure English working class", before remembering her family was partly Irish. It's there in those parts of the Tory party which hold on to the centrality of Crown and Westminster to national life against all the available evidence with the desperation of drowning men. It's there in that very traditional British pastime, scapegoating, which seems to have found single mothers as its latest plaything.

While newness is not necessarily a virtue, the same goes for tradition. When only a few years ago the marketing manager of Robertson's jam could respond to attacks on his company's use of the golliwog by saying "Golly is part of our national tradition. An attack on it is an attack on British culture", the limited value of an appeal to tradition is clear enough. Rather than genuflecting before tradition, or trying to pull it down, the British must learn not to be afraid of change and novelty.

The crisis of Britain - which manifests itself most openly in any discussion of Britain and Europe - is precisely that it is simultaneously seduced and appalled by change. Those of us who live here are buffeted by these two Britains which echo at one time or another in our heads; one outgoing and promiscuous, the other fearful and defensive. Which way it will go is no predetermined matter.

Nowhere is this more true than in Scotland, Wales and the north of England, all of which are offered with varying degrees of enthusiasm by the Labour Party some autonomy from London. A sentimental account of these places assumes that the loosening of Westminster's stranglehold will automatically allow their true generous natures to emerge and they will seek out the new relationships, welcome recent settlers and embrace the unknown future. This need not be the scenario. After all, there are strains within these three places just as virulently exclusivist as any in southern England. The Welsh-speaking North Wales people, for example, have never accepted those from South Wales as truly Welsh, preferring to see them as British or - the worst insult of all - English. And how many of the northern English brought up on those films of "real" Northern men such as This Sporting Life and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning are willing to consider the implications of the fact that these films are the outcome of an artistic relationship between Northern scholarship boys and gay Southern film-makers? It would be tragic if in this most miscegenated of islands, a new ethnic purity ran rampant, with the Scots, English and Welsh each searching after its own mythical pure ethnic stock.

Given how critical are the choices that face us, the significance of what is happening on the island of Ireland cannot be overestimated. For it looks as if Northern Ireland, in the wake of the joint framework document, may be launching on an experiment which will involve embracing the novel, making new relationships with old enemies, finding institutional structures that will sustain diversity, and recognising that dual allegiances and loyalties are not simply tolerable but welcome.

The importance of this experiment to Britain seems to be best understood at present by the British Unionist right, who have said in appalled tones that what is happening in Northern Ireland will have profound consequences for the rest of the United Kingdom. Let us hope they are right. For if the Irish experiment works - and no one should underestimate the difficulties entailed - there will be concrete evidence for the rest of Britain that change is not a disease, that novelty is not to be rejected out of hand and even that new constitutional arrangements are productive.

We might then begin to be able to imagine national identity not as something as immovable as Westminster nor as peaceable as a village green, but something as provisional and capable of transformation as a wave; a wave we might all ride.

This is an edited extract based on Philip Dodd's `The Battle over Britain', published today by Demos at £5.95. Copies are available from Demos at 9 Bridewell Place, London EC4V 6AP.