The Day Britain Died
Andrew Marr
Profile, £7.99, 251pp
Successful political journalists, in the end, can rarely resist issuing a state-of-the-nation proclamation. Perhaps it's all their professional exposure to policy and rhetoric, those overheated Westminster afternoons among the power-wielders and fantasists. Perhaps it's the election campaigns, the sweeps through distant marginals, the growing sense, watching Britain roll past beyond the tinted glass of the press bus, that the truths of these islands are most plainly revealed to travelling lobby correspondents.
Either way, this book, at first, feels deadeningly over-familiar. Andrew Marr, who has written political columns for many newspapers, and has appeared on many current affairs programmes, has produced "at speed" a volume heavily reliant on quotes from his fellow pundits and polemicists.
Here are half-page sections and hurried references from Jeremy Paxman's The English, Peter Hitchens's The Abolition Of Britain, Simon Heffer's Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England - all recent books, all concerned with the temperature of the nation in the early fevers of devolution, and all slightly patched-together, short on original fact and thought.
Ten days ago, on Newsnight on BBC2, Paxman interviewed Marr about the reform of the House of Lords, a subject mentioned in both their books. The impression was left of busy, clever men, slightly distracted and over-committed, their multimedia careers perhaps stunting individual projects. This Monday, Marr is scheduled to appear on BBC2 again, presenting this book's television version.
The thesis he is so efficiently publicising is that Britain is at a "turning-point". The union of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, which conservatives often call ancient but is in fact less than three centuries old, is most likely doomed. Devolution and its consequences, and the deepening tensions between English regions, and the tightenings of European integration and American influence and worldwide capitalism, are all straining the old shotgun marriage beyond repair. If it is not to dissolve into nastiness, Marr argues, then a new, more flexible set of arrangements needs to be found. He and his camera crew have gone looking for them.
For the opening 70 pages, Marr's prose putters agreeably along, up and down the lanes of British history and constitutional theory, nipping up side roads to discuss the dominance of London, the impact of electronic commerce or the future of the BBC, and stopping briefly at the obvious sights - Diana's funeral crowds, the former Govan shipyards - for the modern amateur sociologist. Unlike, say, Heffer or Hitchens, he is never pompous, his underlying arguments sound logical, and he writes fluent, conversational paragraphs; but he does not surprise. It is rather like reading expertly presented revision notes.
As Marr talks to Scots about the inevitability of independence, spies "storm-clouds ahead for the Windsors", and warns of the "slow extinction" of the Commons by public apathy and New Labour's majority, a picture of abrupt and imminent change quite at odds with his measured language comes into focus.
It's what you might call the Charter 88 problem: British liberals have been anticipating the break-up of the established order for so long, and so politely, with countless mild petitions and sensibly researched schemes copied from abroad, that the whole process has come to seem inevitable - consensual, close to boring. In fact, as any fearful glance at the Daily Telegraph will tell you, a good proportion of Britons are hot-faced with outrage at the weakening of the old order. Others are furiously impatient to hasten it. Once Marr starts meeting these people, his pages start to reward more than skim-reading.
There is a towering English nationalist from Buckinghamshire called Cyning Meadowcroft, who looms outside Parliament every Wednesday, and five years ago persuaded an American company to start producing cards for St George's Day (sales have swelled from almost zero beforehand to over 50,000). There is Robin Page, ex-presenter of One Man and His Dog and the rural Right's favourite martyr, railing against Tuscany and bistros and "Blair and his wife prancing about like little emperors [when] you've got farmers who can't get tuppence". There is a trucker from Basildon called Derick who keeps saying other Europeans are "just the same as us", although he can't speak their languages.
Marr listens, then challenges. He contrasts the rhetoric of country conservatives - all their teary talk of a threatened grassy idyll - with the actual history of much of the British countryside: "enclosures... waves of agricultural and industrial revolution... hellish working conditions and bad housing". He confronts Eurosceptics with the complicity of the British political institutions they idealise in the quiet advance of Brussels. In fact, every time someone says anything lazy, Marr politely demolishes it, like a modest student winning a pub argument.
The Britain that emerges is mixed-up, complicated, and "in a state of constant flux". The supposedly cruel capital, for example, absorbs immigrants more easily than allegedly friendlier regions. The English patriots of the Home Counties know more about Normandy than the north of England. The idea of Englishness itself, Marr suggests, may never, at any time, have meant the same thing to everyone. His writing relishes these tensions and contradictions: English tabloid culture is neatly summarised as "swagger and self-pity"; the "strange, sharp flavour" of modern Britain is crisply evoked.
Marr concludes that only a federal country, with separate parliaments for each of its parts, can hope to hold such a hybrid together. He fears a complete break-up, interestingly, for the squeeze it might put on minorities. Smaller countries may want more standard sorts of citizen; to judge by the homophobia currently popular among some of Scotland's cultural guardians, Marr could be right. And by the finish here, as his sentences lengthen and implore, and repeat earlier motifs, and stretch towards a mild sort of oratory, it is possible to imagine his television series ending quite grandly.
