Pineapple Slices 8: The Festival and the Dome
Electioneering, the state of the nation, a challenge to AI, Pep’s inspiration
Dear Reader,
Launching Labour’s campaign, Sir Keir Starmer explained that the country’s crises – the double-take prices in the shops, the polluted rivers, the bankrupted councils, the housing scramble, the NHS on the edge of a nervous breakdown – could all be attributed to a single cause:
Look around our country. The sewage in our rivers, people waiting on trolleys in A and E, crime virtually unpunished, mortgages and food prices through the roof.
It’s all – every bit of it – a direct result of the Tory chaos in Westminster.
I know. It’s election time. The Pineapple can make allowances. But there’s something very Starmerish about this lack of imagination (one of the characteristics I discuss in a profile of the next PM for Compact magazine.) If there is a crisis, it surely dates back further than 2010. There was the financial crash, for a start. There were the upheavals of hyper-globalisation in the 90s and 2000s. And few people really think our economic model made sense before then either. The libertarians would point to the size of the state, the socialists would lament the privatisation and deregulation. (Maybe they both had a point.)
But even that is much too short-term. Last month the Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty, so often a step or two ahead of the game, visited Shildon in County Durham, a mining town until 1951 when the government told the miners to move out. Then in 1984 the factory making railway wagons went too, and today:
Shildon used to have 14,000 people; now it has about 10,000 – and according to the last census in 2021 they are older, sicker and vastly more deprived than most of the rest of the country. In the heart of town is a large park with glorious views, won by the railway workers early in the 1910s. But money has left this town over the past couple of decades. The street market has gone and there is no longer a single supermarket or bank in town.
Despite having three primary schools, the town’s sole secondary was recently bulldozed and next door to it the leisure centre is rumoured to be next for closure. The editor of the Shildon & District Town Crier, Archie MacKay, says the stories are so reliably bleak that he deliberately puts only good news on his front page.
Chakrabortty notes:
In this election year, you will hear a lot about pernicious austerity and awful Brexit and rotten old Boris. It is a lovely half-truth the country will tell itself about why it is in this mess. Shildon is a reminder that the problems facing the UK go back decades.
But he doesn’t tell us how many decades. Five, to the free-marketeers and the break-up of our industrial capacity? Nine, to World War II and our bankrupting by the Americans? Twelve, to the beginning of the twentieth century and our failure to grasp the nettle of imperial decline? Further back, to something in the national character which has never taken business and technical education as seriously as our rivals? Or was all of that inevitable in the first place, because we were the original industrial nation and thus had “first mover disadvantage,” in that everybody else could copy the best bits of our system while we were stuck with the rough-and-ready prototype? Or was it…
Well, maybe it doesn’t really matter how we got into the present hole; the question is how do we get out. Again, Starmer appears confident that if you put some sufficiently well-meaning and competent technocrats in charge everything will make sense again. But even leaving aside the plausibility of this, there is another, more existential question: who are we? After all, without that “we”, people will not make the sacrifices, sign up for the responsibilities, of public office; will not run their businesses for the common good; will not raise their children as upstanding citizens; will not, perhaps, be able to defend themselves against external threats to the nation.
You can see, in the scandals around the Post Office prosecutions and the dodgy Covid contracts, in the general shiftiness of big business, and in the highly-strung narcissism of the Westminster village, what it means when a country’s leaders have no real identity to shape their roles, and to mitigate the triviality and self-interest which is the default human setting. Part of what makes Mick Lynch such an arresting figure, and enabled him for some time to conquer the TV studios and embarrass the politicians, was that for the first time in ages there was a major public figure who appeared to know exactly where he came from, what was his heritage, whose interests he represented and where his duties lay. But we cannot all be London-Irish motormouth union leaders. There needs to be something, however capacious, however ragged around the fringes, which can unite the elites and the rest of us. National revival needs national solidarity. And what is at the heart of our solidarity?
Now, some people will blame this on rapid mass immigration, which obviously makes it harder to have an integrated national identity. But so, even more fundamentally, does the lack of anything to integrate into. As Robert Colls writes:
Our current predicament is that the main channels of national identity … have almost run out. In the 1960s relationships that for over 200 years had sustained the British people began to erode: their relationship with Parliament and the belief that it was sovereign and essentially belonged to them as key component of a free society; their relationship with the armed forces and the idea of a superior British imperial world; their relationship with Protestantism and the idea of a free heritage; their relationship with manufacturing and their reputation as the world’s oldest industrial nation; and finally their relationship with themselves as British and alike and growing more alike in fundamental ways.
When the Millennium Dome was erected its organisers didn’t know what to put in it. They certainly didn’t put any of this stuff in it. In other words in 2001 there was no “manifest doctrine” of Britishness as there had been in 1851 or even in 1951. It was not so much that the British people had ceased believing in themselves; it was more that over a very short period the conditions of that belief had evaporated. Between the Festival of Britain and the Millennium Dome, say, British national identity was no more.
Raymond Aron paid us a lovely compliment when he said that “L’Angleterre a perdu son empire, sans perdre sa civilization morale.” But as the greatest account of our decline revealed, it is precisely our moral civilization which we have quietly abolished.
So how do you recover, or create, or whatever, an identity? That question will not be discussed at this election. But that does not mean you can’t feel it, the great unraised subject at the table, which will help to make the next six weeks feel a little more surreal, a little more evasive, a little more desperate.
An exchange with ChatGPT:
The Pineapple: Comment on the following observation from Clive James without ironically confirming his point: “Orwell’s style shows us why a style is worth working at: not just because it gets us a byline and makes a splash but because it compresses and refines thought and feeling without ceasing to sound like speech – which is to say, without ceasing to sound human.”
ChatGPT: Clive James’s observation beautifully highlights the enduring relevance of Orwell’s style. It underscores the essence of crafting prose not merely for the sake of literary fame or attention but for the profound connection it forges between writer and reader. Orwell’s mastery lies in his ability to distill complex ideas and emotions into language that remains both accessible and authentically human. This insight serves as a poignant reminder of the power inherent in language, not just to convey information but to evoke empathy and understanding.
I recently learned what I suppose proper football fans already knew: that one of the influences on Pep Guardiola’s astoundingly successful tactical models was watching handball. In his early days in Barcelona’s La Masia academy,
He would talk to the handball coach Valero Rivera about his coaching methods. When you’re going left, they’re going right. You’ve created space by moving the ball quickly from one side to the other. He definitely took that idea from handball.
This is a textbook example of something Iain McGilchrist has remarked on: that inspiration often arises from making connections between two apparently unrelated fields.
Since the last instalment of Pineapple Slices, I reported on a National Conservatism Conference, a silent disco in a cathedral, and Britain’s growing and shrinking churches; wrote in praise of stained glass and Georgian light displays; predicted chaos at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and claimed vindication; reviewed the new Zendaya vehicle, a biopic of Golda Meir and the brilliant newish playwright Matthew Gasda; and sighed over Keir Starmer’s corporate love-in.
The piece which took by far the longest to write, and which people seem to have appreciated most, was this essay about Joan of Arc – her life, her afterlife, her gender and her sanctity.
Image: The Festival of Britain exhibition on the South Bank, with the Dome of Discovery, the Skylon and the Transport Pavilion (Ben Brooksbank/Creative Commons)