During the long 20th century, an accusation was insistently, glibly tossed at the left - that they hated Britain. From the Webbs to Bertrand Russell to Nye Bevan to Michael Foot, they were accused of being anti-patriotic bien pensants who sneered and jeered at their own country. Their enemies thrust the Union Jack in their faces, and acted as if the national anthem was called Land of Hope and Tory. This was always bogus, but in the past decade, it has become ironic. The right has become ragingly, foamingly anti-British themselves. They have slowly morphed into the caricature they so merrily threw at others.
Last week, as British people flocked abroad on holiday, a slew of writers dug up some old statistics from Migration Watch that suggested "as many as" (words to watch for in any statistics) 340,000 Brits are heading abroad every year and never coming back. They used these numbers as evidence that Britain is a sinking ship whose citizens are fleeing like rats. For example, the BNP leader Nick Griffin's favourite columnist, Richard Littlejohn, declared these emigrants were seeking "a sanctuary from the madness of modern, multicultural, morality-free Britain". Sick of "uncontrolled immigration" which is turning Britain into a "foreign country", they are fleeing all these foreigners by... going to live in a foreign country. Similarly incoherent rants have come in the past from the puckered keyboards of Simon Heffer and the battalions of the Britain-is-doomed brigade.
There's only one problem: it's a nakedly anti-British lie. A massive (and glorious) exchange of populations is happening all over the world. Yes, Britain has record emigration levels - and so does the US, France, Germany, Australia... and every other country in the developed world. This is because it is easier than ever before to live abroad, thanks to cheap flights, more open borders, and a globalisation of culture that means you can watch BBC1 from your new home in the Loire Valley or Kansas. If emigration is a sign that a country is collapsing, then the entire developed world is falling apart.
Yet the right seizes on emigration figures to claim falsely that the people of this country, and the Government they elected, are so unbearable they are driving people away. Littlejohn is only the most explicit. He writes many of his anti-British screeds from a gated mansion in Florida, where he spends months on end, and demands of his readers, "Where would you rather live: Middle America or Little Britain?"
He presents Britain as a nation littered with "scum". When he looks at Britain's high streets on a Saturday night - the place where a whole generation of young Brits joyously laugh off a hard week's work by getting hammered and shagging around - he sees only "slags". When he watches immigrants and asylum-seekers making a net contribution to Britain of £2.5bn a year, he wants to bring it juddering down to appease his prejudices.
This is patriotism? There are plenty of things I would like to change about Britain - from its soaring income inequality to its carbon emissions - but I would never speak about this country in the annihilating, hateful terms of a Littlejohn or his imitators on every right-wing paper. This week I argued about this issue on TV with Nick Ferrari, a shock-jock Littlejohn impersonator. He claimed he "is very patriotic", but apart from a sentimental attachment to the flag, cheering for the England football team and a mental picture of a dessicated 1950s England, what does it consist of? If you want to find a stirring defence of the British people as they are today - liberal, dynamic, multi-ethnic, sexually open - you look to the left.
But those of us on the left have been historically uncomfortable talking about nationalism, associating it with brain-dead we-hate-the-French, we-beat-the-Argies bigotries. True, there has been a ripple of thinkers over the past decade arguing that we should reclaim nationalism as a progressive sentiment that binds us all together. But even they have not pointed out that the left should love Britain because the British people are so on our side.
Almost every opinion poll shows that British people support higher taxes, the right to asylum, gay rights and more, and they vote for it at the real polls too. The Tories have run three times on a Ferrari-Littlejohn agenda, and three times they were crucified by the British people. It is only now, when they are rhetorically renouncing it, that they are climbing in the polls.
That's why the right is becoming ever-more contemptuous of the British people: they know they have been rejected by them. Even at the apex of right-wing domination - Thatcherism - 56 per cent of people went into the polling booths at every election and voted for liberal-left parties committed to higher taxes and higher public spending. It is our absurd electoral system and the disproprtionate power of the likes of Rupert Murdoch that drag Britain to the right, not her brilliant, diverse, liberal people.
We need to start talking about this now, because the Cameroonian Conservatives have become anti-patriotic in a subtly different - and even more dangerous - way. The Tory frontbencher Alan Duncan has already suggested that after devolution, a Scot could not be Prime Minister. Cameron himself wants Scottish MPs to be demoted in the Commons, unable to vote on domestic affairs. These calls will become worse in the run-up to the next general election, when they will be facing Prime Minister Brown. The Tories are proposing to relegate 6 million Brits to second-class citizenship - a massive gift to the Scottish nationalists, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein and all the people who want to see the UK crumble into its constituent parts.
Why would they do this? They believe there is an untapped well of English nationalism that is a potentially Tory force - even though, contrary to right-wing myth, a fat majority of people in England voted for centre-left parties at the last election. For all the clever rebranding, the England where old Etonians such as Cameron are most comfortable - and gain greatest support - is the hunting-and-shooting England of the shires. To stir them and knock Brown, they are prepared to be deeply anti-British - even gambling with the United Kingdom itself.
When it comes to Islamic fundamentalists, the right is fond of saying, "If you hate everything about Britain, you shouldn't live here." I agree - but this logic doesn't stop with jihadists. Omar Bakri and Richard Littlejohn have already packed their bags, and quite right too. It is time for Nick Ferrari, Simon Heffer and the Cameroonians who are prepared to risk the dissolution of Britain to catch the first bus to Heathrow, so they can find a country without the "immorality", "multicultural madness" or "Scottish domination" they so despise.
j.hari@independent.co.uk
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