11 April 2020

Day 20 of UK lock down: plucky little Britain


The brilliant Fintan O’Toole absolutely nailed the disingenuous and embarrassing myth of British exceptionalism in a piece in today’s Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/11/coronavirus-exposed-myth-british-exceptionalism.

A whiff of that particular myth has been steadily seeping under the door during the current lock down, accompanied by nostalgic radio music evoking thoughts of how Winston Churchill and Vera Lynn led the plucky Brits to victory over the foreign menace, with a subtext that our uniquely indomitable spirit will see us through the current crisis, regardless of the serial fuck-ups that have marked our response so far. 

Johnson is apparently on the mend but, according to his father, had his own dulce et decorum est pro patria mori moment, by almost “taking one for the team”.

Britain undoubtedly does have some admirable national characteristics in its societal DNA, but so does every other country on the bloody planet, which is hardly surprising given the boundary-crossing ebb and flow of people over the last 10,000 years. To be constantly banging on about our national greatness is more like an embarrassing show of adolescent insecurity than an adult response to an indiscriminate global crisis.




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