What happens next? Right now perched on the edge of a new decade, with a new government and a new phase of Brexit, it feels like the only question. And it’s one that underpins New Model Island, Alex Niven’s clear-eyed yet freewheeling, brisk yet deep book that is also a rare thing: a critique that provides practical suggestions about how to change things – specifically England – for the better.
The problem with England, Niven argues, is that it is a “geopolitical void”. Englishness has long been vexed, not least because – in the context of the now-disappeared empire – it was confused with the identity of Britain. The confusion is summed up by the opening credits of the TV sitcom Dad’s Army, where the musical refrain ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler, if you think Old England’s done?’ intones over images of the union flag.
Niven lives in Northumberland, works at Newcastle University and is very conscious of the financial and political power exerted by London. His solution to the problem of England is a new regionalism, one that would accentuate the fluidity of a country whose history is characterised by migrations rather than insularity. Power should be bestowed on regions west and north of the I’m-alright-jack south-east.
The journey to this conclusion is a bewitching and unexpectedly moving one. A birth and a death compelled Niven to write what he describes as “part cultural polemic, part memoir”. His first child was born at the end of 2016 at the crest of the Trump-Brexit maelstrom. In early 2017, Mark Fisher, a friend of Niven’s, Repeater Books’ co-founder, sociocultural blogger and author of the influential leftwing polemic Capitalist Realism, killed himself. A crisis of faith ensued and New Model Island is Niven’s attempt to tunnel into the light.
In the first chapter he turns his attention to his last communication with Fisher, a Facebook exchange about a family day out to Alton Towers the theorist was planning. “England’s Disneyland”, a place Niven has visited many times himself, is used to visualise England’s “garbled history and exploited masses, while concealing its real identity as a means of generating profit for a large and powerful aggregation of corporate interests”.
Psychogeography is a background influence, but Niven argues that the work of Iain Sinclair and others is often “smothered in foreboding and melancholy, and underpinned by a sometimes exaggerated sense of historical curse bordering on conspiracy theory”. Losing yourself in an eerie fog misses the fact that there is nothing theoretical about this particular conspiracy: “England is a backward-looking … place, not because of any actual mystical curse, but because its populace has continually been oppressed, constricted and prevented from self actualisation by the violent and mostly unchecked ascendancy of its ruling class over the last several hundred years.”
Only by implementing radical regionalism, Niven argues, “bringing together the best features of leftist anti-nationalism and anti-imperialism on the one hand, and left populism and communitarianism on the other”, can we avoid furthering far-right claims on English identity through pandering to false romanticisms.
• New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England by Alex Niven is published by Repeater (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
