Why do we care what Martin Amis thinks about Englishness? Particularly in a BBC4 documentary; it's so niche. It's only one or two degrees away from trying to provoke people from your bath. Except there is something in the tone, something in the order and priorities and language of his documentary, that puts him on a particular plinth of the establishment – the old school intelligentsia, the pre-PC intellectual, too smart to be silenced by fashion, the guy who will tell the nation how it really is. What he said was much more textured than the news stories rendered: plus, he is quite contradictory, so it would be impossible to disagree with all of it.
And yet there is a through-line, an overall "These are the things you don't want to hear, you English. This is the mirror you don't want to look in. Especially you, you liberals, inventors of the things that can't be said." Some of it seems almost crafted to cause a stir, to drop like a pearl of potassium, exploding into controversy and disappearing in the fight. His unsayable thing about women is that they [we] all want to be ravished. They (we) have ravishment fantasies, because it means "if you enjoy it, it's not your fault".
Watch yourselves [ourselves], bra-burners; it's a trick. Up close, it's not that controversial. You can have a rape fantasy without endorsing rape; so you're allowed, by the terms of civilisation, to note that other people have rape fantasies without your becoming the rapist's friend. The only objectionable thing is his determined use of the word "ravish", that split second of ambiguity. Does he mean ravish as in "rape"? Is he talking about a rape fantasy? Or does he mean "ravish" as in "filled with delight"? Is he talking about a fantasy of being transfixed, maybe with a macaroon or a card trick? It's a deliberate attempt to drain the act of violation of its verbal power. But he has plausible deniability, here. What would be the point of all that expensive education, if it didn't enable you to belittle the act of rape and then deny it afterwards? You might as well go to a comprehensive.
In this explosive mould is the exploration of English racism: the Pakistani in Boston could call himself American, while the Pakistani in Preston couldn't call himself English (without raising an eyebrow): "There's meant to be another layer of being English. There are qualifications other than citizenship and it's to do with white skin."
It's a convoluted, late-Morrissey point, with an added layer of snobbery where racism is ventriloquised on to another class. He wasn't talking about the black novelist living in Crouch End, not seeming quite English to him – just in the choice of "Preston". He was determining these sentiments as those of a base English lower class, incapable of transcending skin colour the way their betters can. But again, he might respond, "No, no, I just chose Preston because it half-rhymed with Boston. No class demarcation intended. The English intelligentsia has white as an entry criterion. I have white as an entry criterion." In which case, that would be a different kind of remark, a stranger and more personal one, perhaps so strange and personal that its controversy would be washed away.
But there is more to this film (to be broadcast on Sunday) than mischief; there is sincerity, and it's in those moments that you see the indolence of the establishment, and also what a tin ear it has, not because it can't understand, but because it won't listen. Amis notes that class has been replaced, as the foundation for elite institutions, by money. "I have no nostalgia for the class society," he says, "but I have no very great enthusiasm for the money society." Sure, the problem with a meritocracy is that people at the top think they belong there because they're better.
At least the aristocracy knew they just got lucky. Money only fleetingly even reflects merit; it is not humanly possible for five people's merit at the top to be as great as 13 million people's combined merit at the bottom. And still they think they deserve it. But that audible shrug, that careless "I hated then, I hate now" – it affects unpalatable realism yet merely defends the status quo.
But, finally, what, apart from the weather, really determines our world view? It's a sense of national decline, the inexorable result of the end of our empire. This is what makes us drink ourselves to oblivion, which is the only way "they [we] forget their glorious past and reconcile themselves with a reduced present". The tabloid newspapers, their "scurillity", are so "consonant with British decline … the general coarsening of British nature".
They hang pretty strangely, these garments of Britannia: if our decline is down to the loss of empire, how can we call that a coarsening? To do so would be to accept the empire itself as refinement. It wasn't: it was slavery by a posher name; to its victims, I should think, indistinguishable. Even if you thought colonialism was a good thing, and some nations were inherently better than others and born to rule them, you would still have to accept that it was a pretty brutal way of life.
Who has been coarsened by the loss of this ugliness? Who in Preston, say, is drinking to a stupor to avoid thinking about Rangoon or Rhodesia? Who would accept this definition of Englishness, the mourning for a jackbooted past whose losers ran into millions and whose winners didn't even extend below the ranks of the English upper middle class?
It's preposterous, but more than that, it shows no interest, not even the mildest enquiry into life in England now. Martin Amis is a man in love with his definitions of 1940s poverty – "socks greasy under your feet, that disintegrated after a couple of weeks" – with no interest in what people's socks are like now, how greasy they are, how long they will last.
What makes his programme a provocation is exactly what makes a cabinet full of Etonians a provocation; the considerations of these people are very narrow. They may say some interesting things, but they cannot distil or explain the national character, because they are not listening.
Twitter: @zoesqwilliams
