Britain’s Limp Upper Lip

James Clayton

Let’s grab a giant knife - or turn on a 24 hour news channel if that’s safer/more practical - and take it to the nation, slice it open and see what we’re made of. Dissecting the British Isles, can we find “the Spirit of the Blitz” that supposedly courses through the country’s core? Do I detect the acclaimed plucky resolve pulsing through our veins? Is that the famed British stiff upper lip that I see?

No: they are nowhere to be found. And you know why? They’re all myths: false notions that people dig out when they feel the need to prop up a sense of British identity, most probably out of a perverse desire to suddenly appear patriotic. Come the crunch, the Union Jacks appear and citizens start beating their chests and babbling about the firm conviction that forms a part of the national character. This may also, if the individuals are old enough, be accompanied by much bleating about beating off Jerry or - by Jove! - the Queen Mother or the “good old days of the Empire”. We’re British damn it! No terrorist attack or exceptional weather event will overcome us!

For in recent years it has been bad weather and the risk of suicide bombers that have prompted rallying cries about British spirit. If you’re feeling insecure about the country’s collective identity, you can always rely on a fabricated threat from “foreigners” and thunderclouds to pull the populace together. At the moment though, musings on British resolve are not coming to fore because of floods or extremism, but because of the recession.

Oh ‘eck: We’re all skint. The country’s debt is huge and the economy is in poor condition as the globe experiences a financial downer. Chin up Brits! We’ve been through this before and came out smelling of roses: remember the three-day week in the seventies? Summon the “Spirit of the Blitz”! We lasted through the days of rationing! We defeated the Luftwaffe as they besieged our island! According to this tradition, the British people are bold, resourceful and unbendingly unruffled in the face of adversity.
Yeah, right. Sorry to rain on your parade of proud patriotism but such a configuration is a total sham. You only have to turn back to the news consider the times to see that, for the most part, this spirit is notably absent. Facing up to the current economic atmosphere I think you’ll find that the feeling is one of panic. People aren’t feeling plucky and empowered, prepared to grit heir teeth and ride out the recession. As a matter of fact, they are more likely to be hysterically anxious.

That's the spirit!

Looking over the headlines of doom, gloom and disaster, you’d be inclined to come to the conclusion that we are reaching the End of Days. It only took the collapse of a few financial institutions to cause commentators to prophesy “the death of capitalism”. That, unfortunately, has so far failed to happen, and I don’t think it will. We may be in a depression, but is it really as bad as it seems? The way that the whole thing has been hyped up, you’d think that we’d slipped into a black hole from which we’d never be able to return. Yet, life goes on.

Irrational, knee-jerk panic isn’t particularly evocative of that British stiff upper lip, and popular reaction to other so-called crises suggests that that lip actually trembles as a default action. To observe another notion stereotypically associated with the British Isles, we come to the weather. When it snowed quite heavily earlier this year the country came to a complete standstill. The nation’s infrastructure, organisation and industry were crippled and the news agenda was cleared out to make way for more images of icy conditions and weather bulletins. Totally snowblind, from the coverage and comment you’d have thought that we’d witnessed the coming of a new Ice Age.

Meanwhile, as our regular routines were rendered impossible by the cold snap here, in Canada life carried on as normal, despite conditions of -19ºc. Although people cope with Arctic (or indeed Antarctic) conditions every day elsewhere in the world with no fuss, the response on these islands was one of incredulity and absolute hopelessly as the nation collectively howled out loud and made a huge drama out of a few inches of frosty stuff.

Likewise, we can also look to the floods of last summer to see how the stern British morale manifested itself in the midst of meteorological disaster. People were quite understandably perturbed as they were submerged under several feet of water and significant damage was caused, but it wasn’t a totally devastating washout. Compare this “catastrophe” - in which one man died by getting trapped in a drain - with say, the deluge that followed Hurricane Katrina, or the frequent floods experienced in places such as Bangladesh and Burma that lack the resources and infrastructure at our disposal. Such cases and the subsequent loss of life, livelihoods and land should have been noted to get a sense of scale, but sadly that didn’t happen. Instead, this self-involved state lingered on in its myopic “woe is me” outlook. I really do wonder how anyone could consider this country to be one of rationale and resolve in view of such apoplectic reaction and lack of perspective.

So, the British people are made of stern stuff and are born with a confident streak that enables them to cope in the face of calamity and crisis? Not so: we are in fact a nation of whinging wusses. What’s more, we are a nation of wusses with a crisis complex and we can’t shut up about it. Are we living in a warzone? Are we gripped by severe famine, drought and pestilence? Is blood and brutal death running through the streets? Get a grip and look around the globe if you want to see real disaster scenarios.