The Daily Mail's Quentin Letts says this EU in/out referendum debate has all been about economics and borders. But it should be about saving the identity of the country he loves....
Battle for the very soul of Britain: The debate has all been about economics and borders. But for the Mail's incomparable QUENTIN LETTS it should be about saving the identity of a country he loves
By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail
4 June 2016
Daily Mail
Nine hundred and fifty years ago, between two hillocks at Hastings, an Anglo-Saxon king took an arrow in his eye and England surrendered her independence.
That was our last - should I say most recent? - defeat on home soil.
King Harold’s forces fought valiantly but they had been exhausted by two earlier battles with invaders up north. A shrewd and ruthless Frenchman, Guillaume of Normandy, seized power and London’s Witan parliament was never heard of again.
British national heroine: In the shadow of Big Ben is a statue called Boadicea And Her Daughters. She was a legendary warrior of the Iceni tribe, which fought the occupying Romans in what is nowadays Norfolk
Within months Guillaume (today we call him William the Conqueror) set about taxing the English to pay for his court and army.
He stole the locals’ land, bastardised their language, changed their laws. He smashed their local councils and desecrated towns by forcing the inhabitants to build him castles. This process was called the Norman Yoke.
The English were worked like bullocks at a plough and they were pretty miserable for centuries to follow. Not until 1399, with the arrival of Henry of Lancaster, were we again ruled by a monarch who even spoke English as his native tongue.
That evolutionary process continued with the dissolution of the monasteries, land reform and the dismantling of corrupt patronage. Not until the end of the industrial revolution did the masses regain significant political power.
Which brings us to the EU referendum later this month. David Cameron keeps saying the referendum will be a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ for us to decide whether or not to be part of the Brussels bureaucracy.
But might the Prime Minister, for once, be understating his case? Might this vote not be a ‘once in a millennium’ moment? If we yield to Continental rule, as he proposes, the consequences for the way we think of ourselves as individuals and as a nation may be as long-lasting as those that followed defeat in 1066.
I have been contemplating poor King Harold a fair amount recently. As it happens, this has nothing to do with Leave campaigner Boris Johnson recently calling the pro-EU conspiracy between Whitehall and big business ‘the biggest stitch-up since the Bayeux Tapestry’.
Prime Minister David Cameron, (pictured right with the head of Sky News, John Ryley), has staked his political career on British voters not wanting to leave the EU. Is he right?
The Bayeux Tapestry celebrated William’s defeat of Harold and his men. As a schoolboy I visited the northern French town of Bayeux to see that tapestry and remember a sting of sorrow as I saw the needlework images of vanquished Anglo-Saxons.
It was always the same when I read history yarns about British chieftain Caractacus fighting the Romans on his hilltop and later being paraded in Rome as a chained captive; or gallant Boudicca (also called Boadicea), Queen of the Iceni tribe, charging towards the Roman lines in her chariot with swivelling blades in its hubcaps. In such accounts, I always rooted for the Brits.
When I read such romantic historical writers as RJ Unstead, Arthur Bryant and GA Henty, I always wanted the dwellers of our dank and foggy, sea-set isle to seize the day. Was it a nascent sketchwriter’s inate bias or inherited love of country from my fiercely patriotic parents? Was that love wrong? Is that love wrong? I still feel that way.
The likes of Mr Cameron and his fellow Europhiles Peter Mandelson and half-Dutch Nick Clegg presumably feel something different when they look at the Bayeux Tapestry. I suppose they experience a glow of quiet satisfaction that William and his forces of European integration overcame the locals.
When such superior creatures see a Norman castle looming over an ancient British town, they probably think approvingly of administrative control and political clout —gubernatorial power being used to quell individualism and petty tribalism.
A deep-rooted part of me rebels against that. I cannot fully explain it but the feeling is surprisingly molten.
I grieve for the freedoms that were squashed. And I feel just the same when I look at a castle built by English lords to crush dissent in Scottish and Welsh territory. My sympathies lie with the invaded.
The reason my thoughts have recently drifted to King Harold and the Battle of Hastings has not, as I say, been because Boris mentioned the Bayeux Tapesty. It has been because I have just finished reading a remarkable novel called The Wake.
This Paul Kingsnorth book, shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize and written entirely in a cod Old English, is set in Lincolnshire in the aftermath of the Norman invasion.
It begins in 1087 and the central figure is a farmer called Buccmaster. This Buccmaster, who has his land seized, his house burned and his wife murdered by the Normans, is not exactly a hero. He is irascible, moody — a difficult so-and-so.
But there is something magnificent about his refusal to bend to the dominating ‘ingengas’ (foreigners) who have taken his country.
Buccmaster was reared by his warrior grandfather to revere the old gods and to give allegiance to no man other than the English ‘cyng’ (king). Even that was done reluctantly. Yes, Buccmaster is one of life’s cussing complainers. It is a trait still common in the English, and why not? How awful it would be to belong to a nation of obedient pushovers.
Buccmaster is proud of his standing as owner of three oxgangs (a measurement of land, each oxgang being about 20 acres).
He is a ‘socman’, a free farmer, inheritor of the ancient rights of ‘Angland’ and thus at liberty to say what he likes, work as he wishes, and in his spare hours to row out in his little boat, onto the fenland waters, to spear eels with his three-pronged ‘glaif’ and contemplate his forefathers and their gods.
Buccmaster resents being told what to do. Like today’s British fishermen, he would not have enjoyed obeying EU fishing restrictions.
This stoical character, all the more convincing for the fact that Kingsnorth makes him flawed, becomes a ‘green man’ (the term given to the independent-minded souls who, post-1066, continued to fight William).
Don't frighten the cows! Brexit king Boris Johnson tours a cattle auction in Clitheroe, Lancashire, as part of his tour of the country
Buccmaster grabs his ancestral sword and scramasax (dagger), and assembles a few comrades to form a ‘werod’ (war band), albeit a pretty hopeless one.
The best-known of the 11th century’s ‘green men’ was Hereward the Wake, another Lincolnshire freeman who is sometimes called ‘last of the English’.
Victorian novelist Charles Kingsley wrote a purple-prosed novel about him but Hereward was a real figure. Like Buccmaster, he had his lands taken by the Normans and decided to do something about it. For a few years after 1066, Hereward and his small army operated out of the Cambridgeshire town of Ely, then an island.
They were beaten only after a treacherous monk showed the Normans one of the secret paths to Ely through the fenland marshes.
It is at this point that my molten fury kicks in and, almost a millennium after the event, I feel a lively indignation on Hereward’s behalf.
What a cur that monk was to betray him. What if Hereward had continued to oppose William? Could he have combined with the still-unconquered Celts and Northumbrians to drive out the ‘ingengas’? Or was Norman rule as inevitable as supporters of the EU now say their governing body is inevitable?
As for that treacherous monk, was he a sort of Roland Rudd of his day (Rudd is the City PR smoothie pulling strings for the Remain camp)?
Or was he merely a venal greaser, like so many of the corporate managers and public-service executives who have in recent weeks done the Establishment’s bidding and told the British people to surrender to Brussels?
My support for Hereward may reflect a surfeit of foolish romanticism. But it may also echo enduring truths about the importance of self-determination and of remaining true to one’s ancestral heritage.
For what are we if we deny the past? What is the point of being British if we are not able to say who governs us?
And let there be no doubt: if we vote to stay in the EU, we will not be able to dislodge the elite that runs Brussels. They will be impervious to our democratic disapproval. They will be as safe as William and his shaven-headed Normans were in their mighty castle keeps.
The EU referendum campaign has, to date, been conducted largely on materialistic arguments. How mercantile, how nuts-and-boltish it has all been. Political strategists say that this is because voters are swayed by their wallets.
Those who wish us to remain in the EU swear that financial catastrophe will ensue if we leave that listing Titanic of an enterprise.
Chancellor George Osborne has come up with an incredible figure - literally incredible, for it is not believable — that families will take a hit of £4,300. No one I know in politics actually thinks that this figure is truthful.
David Cameron, for his part, claims that family shopping bills could rise by £200 a year if we Leave. Two hundred quid! He and his friends pay more for a single ticket for the opera at Glyndebourne. It is roughly the price of a double bedroom (with breakfast) at a middling hotel in London. What is it to be, folks? A night at the Thistle, Kensington, or our nation’s liberty for the next 950 years?
Decisions, decisions.
If only: Alan Johnson and David Miliband, both once tipped as leaders of the Labour Party, discuss who knows what while in Birmingham with the Remain battle bus
The Leave campaign, meanwhile, has urged voters to quit the EU for a range of reasons, again almost entirely practical.
They suggest we would have £50 million more per day to spend on our own hospitals and schools and housing. That figure, too, is open to question. The Leavers talk of immigration and treaties and security and of how the EU’s open-border arrangements are like ‘hanging a sign welcoming terrorists to Europe’.
All this may well be the case and plainly needs to be said in order to rebut the Remain lot’s economic arguments. But is there not something more to this mighty decision we are about to take? Is the campaign not neglecting something deeper in our nation’s marrow?
Hereward the Wake and Paul Kingsnorth’s Buccmaster would have thought so. They would have heard Vote Leave talk of how we must ‘take control’ and would surely have thought ‘I don’t really want control — I want liberty’.
Hereward the Wake was an 11th century leader of local resistance to Norman rule
The word ‘control’ is a politicians’ word. It is a concept relished by managers, by bosses, by big-shots. Control is something that appeals to organising minds.
I can quite see why Vote Leave chose it, for it is an efficient word; short, speedily conveying the idea of how the EU has astonishingly managed to be both dictatorial and chaotically incompetent.
This, after all, is a political system so nit-picking that it even presumes to dictate the tax on sanitary towels, yet is so disorganised that it cannot stop hundreds of thousands of migrants landing on its southern shores. Whatever they use all our tax on, it certainly ain’t naval patrol vessels.
It would obviously be good for us to retrieve national control of trade decisions, tax matters and, most important, immigration policy from this hopelessly undemocratic organisation in Brussels. I agree entirely. But where is the optimism in Leave’s campaign? Where is the appeal to something more positive, more human, more ardent?
The hearts of Hereward the Wake and his ‘green men’ would have burned for something greater; something more essential.
You could call it self-determination or independence but it is basically the right to plant your feet on the clifftops of Kent, raise your eyes to the cloud-scudding sky, and relish your ancient liberty as a free-born Briton.
A volunteer campaigning in Glasgow tries to persuade fellow Scots to vote to remain in the EU on June 23.
It is, I would argue, your right to tell authority to bog off, to fail if you so please, to stand apart from this discordant world and owe allegiance to no one save, grudgingly, the ‘cyng of Angland’ who represents us as a people.
Materially, much has changed since the late 1060s. The Cambridgeshire fens have been drained and Hereward’s Ely is no longer much of an island. The farmlands of Lincolnshire are ploughed now by vast tractors, not ox-gangs. But similarities persist. In the EU’s expansionist plans there remains the ambition of Continental governors to conquer our island.
Just as King Harold had to see off a double invasion from north and south, so there have been concerted attacks from foreign citadels during this referendum campaign.
Only this week, the governments of Holland, Spain and Germany have waded into our affairs, telling us to cease our resistance to the suzerains of Strasbourg. How bloody well dare they? Like Buccmaster, we are free ‘socmen of Angland’.
But if the EU wins this vote, what will be the point of being British? What will be the point of having a national flag, an Army, even a Crown?
Already the first two words on the front of our passports are ‘European Union’. The Queen’s head on our stamps will become meaningless. The royal imprimatur on land documents, in our courts, in our Parliament, will become no more than symbols of a shrivelled power. The ‘ingengas’ will have won.
Like Buccmaster and perhaps like Hereward the Wake, I think of my grandfathers. One was wounded three times on the Western Front in World War I. The other landed in Normandy -Normandy! - just before D-Day to clear the beaches of mines. They fought for king and country, yes, but they fought most of all for an idea: freedom.
The days of ancestral sword and scramasax may have passed but that powerful notion of liberty, the spirit of British dissent which flared so wonderfully in the East Anglian fens 950 years ago, must never be allowed to die. Without it, we would be an island without pride, an island shorn of soul.
Battle for the very soul of Britain: The debate has all been about economics and borders. But for the Mail's incomparable QUENTIN LETTS it should be about saving the identity of a country he loves
By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail
4 June 2016
Daily Mail
Nine hundred and fifty years ago, between two hillocks at Hastings, an Anglo-Saxon king took an arrow in his eye and England surrendered her independence.
That was our last - should I say most recent? - defeat on home soil.
King Harold’s forces fought valiantly but they had been exhausted by two earlier battles with invaders up north. A shrewd and ruthless Frenchman, Guillaume of Normandy, seized power and London’s Witan parliament was never heard of again.
British national heroine: In the shadow of Big Ben is a statue called Boadicea And Her Daughters. She was a legendary warrior of the Iceni tribe, which fought the occupying Romans in what is nowadays Norfolk
Within months Guillaume (today we call him William the Conqueror) set about taxing the English to pay for his court and army.
He stole the locals’ land, bastardised their language, changed their laws. He smashed their local councils and desecrated towns by forcing the inhabitants to build him castles. This process was called the Norman Yoke.
The English were worked like bullocks at a plough and they were pretty miserable for centuries to follow. Not until 1399, with the arrival of Henry of Lancaster, were we again ruled by a monarch who even spoke English as his native tongue.
That evolutionary process continued with the dissolution of the monasteries, land reform and the dismantling of corrupt patronage. Not until the end of the industrial revolution did the masses regain significant political power.
Which brings us to the EU referendum later this month. David Cameron keeps saying the referendum will be a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ for us to decide whether or not to be part of the Brussels bureaucracy.
But might the Prime Minister, for once, be understating his case? Might this vote not be a ‘once in a millennium’ moment? If we yield to Continental rule, as he proposes, the consequences for the way we think of ourselves as individuals and as a nation may be as long-lasting as those that followed defeat in 1066.
I have been contemplating poor King Harold a fair amount recently. As it happens, this has nothing to do with Leave campaigner Boris Johnson recently calling the pro-EU conspiracy between Whitehall and big business ‘the biggest stitch-up since the Bayeux Tapestry’.
Prime Minister David Cameron, (pictured right with the head of Sky News, John Ryley), has staked his political career on British voters not wanting to leave the EU. Is he right?
The Bayeux Tapestry celebrated William’s defeat of Harold and his men. As a schoolboy I visited the northern French town of Bayeux to see that tapestry and remember a sting of sorrow as I saw the needlework images of vanquished Anglo-Saxons.
It was always the same when I read history yarns about British chieftain Caractacus fighting the Romans on his hilltop and later being paraded in Rome as a chained captive; or gallant Boudicca (also called Boadicea), Queen of the Iceni tribe, charging towards the Roman lines in her chariot with swivelling blades in its hubcaps. In such accounts, I always rooted for the Brits.
When I read such romantic historical writers as RJ Unstead, Arthur Bryant and GA Henty, I always wanted the dwellers of our dank and foggy, sea-set isle to seize the day. Was it a nascent sketchwriter’s inate bias or inherited love of country from my fiercely patriotic parents? Was that love wrong? Is that love wrong? I still feel that way.
The likes of Mr Cameron and his fellow Europhiles Peter Mandelson and half-Dutch Nick Clegg presumably feel something different when they look at the Bayeux Tapestry. I suppose they experience a glow of quiet satisfaction that William and his forces of European integration overcame the locals.
When such superior creatures see a Norman castle looming over an ancient British town, they probably think approvingly of administrative control and political clout —gubernatorial power being used to quell individualism and petty tribalism.
A deep-rooted part of me rebels against that. I cannot fully explain it but the feeling is surprisingly molten.
I grieve for the freedoms that were squashed. And I feel just the same when I look at a castle built by English lords to crush dissent in Scottish and Welsh territory. My sympathies lie with the invaded.
The reason my thoughts have recently drifted to King Harold and the Battle of Hastings has not, as I say, been because Boris mentioned the Bayeux Tapesty. It has been because I have just finished reading a remarkable novel called The Wake.
This Paul Kingsnorth book, shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize and written entirely in a cod Old English, is set in Lincolnshire in the aftermath of the Norman invasion.
It begins in 1087 and the central figure is a farmer called Buccmaster. This Buccmaster, who has his land seized, his house burned and his wife murdered by the Normans, is not exactly a hero. He is irascible, moody — a difficult so-and-so.
But there is something magnificent about his refusal to bend to the dominating ‘ingengas’ (foreigners) who have taken his country.
Buccmaster was reared by his warrior grandfather to revere the old gods and to give allegiance to no man other than the English ‘cyng’ (king). Even that was done reluctantly. Yes, Buccmaster is one of life’s cussing complainers. It is a trait still common in the English, and why not? How awful it would be to belong to a nation of obedient pushovers.
Buccmaster is proud of his standing as owner of three oxgangs (a measurement of land, each oxgang being about 20 acres).
He is a ‘socman’, a free farmer, inheritor of the ancient rights of ‘Angland’ and thus at liberty to say what he likes, work as he wishes, and in his spare hours to row out in his little boat, onto the fenland waters, to spear eels with his three-pronged ‘glaif’ and contemplate his forefathers and their gods.
Buccmaster resents being told what to do. Like today’s British fishermen, he would not have enjoyed obeying EU fishing restrictions.
This stoical character, all the more convincing for the fact that Kingsnorth makes him flawed, becomes a ‘green man’ (the term given to the independent-minded souls who, post-1066, continued to fight William).
Don't frighten the cows! Brexit king Boris Johnson tours a cattle auction in Clitheroe, Lancashire, as part of his tour of the country
Buccmaster grabs his ancestral sword and scramasax (dagger), and assembles a few comrades to form a ‘werod’ (war band), albeit a pretty hopeless one.
The best-known of the 11th century’s ‘green men’ was Hereward the Wake, another Lincolnshire freeman who is sometimes called ‘last of the English’.
Victorian novelist Charles Kingsley wrote a purple-prosed novel about him but Hereward was a real figure. Like Buccmaster, he had his lands taken by the Normans and decided to do something about it. For a few years after 1066, Hereward and his small army operated out of the Cambridgeshire town of Ely, then an island.
They were beaten only after a treacherous monk showed the Normans one of the secret paths to Ely through the fenland marshes.
It is at this point that my molten fury kicks in and, almost a millennium after the event, I feel a lively indignation on Hereward’s behalf.
What a cur that monk was to betray him. What if Hereward had continued to oppose William? Could he have combined with the still-unconquered Celts and Northumbrians to drive out the ‘ingengas’? Or was Norman rule as inevitable as supporters of the EU now say their governing body is inevitable?
As for that treacherous monk, was he a sort of Roland Rudd of his day (Rudd is the City PR smoothie pulling strings for the Remain camp)?
Or was he merely a venal greaser, like so many of the corporate managers and public-service executives who have in recent weeks done the Establishment’s bidding and told the British people to surrender to Brussels?
My support for Hereward may reflect a surfeit of foolish romanticism. But it may also echo enduring truths about the importance of self-determination and of remaining true to one’s ancestral heritage.
For what are we if we deny the past? What is the point of being British if we are not able to say who governs us?
And let there be no doubt: if we vote to stay in the EU, we will not be able to dislodge the elite that runs Brussels. They will be impervious to our democratic disapproval. They will be as safe as William and his shaven-headed Normans were in their mighty castle keeps.
The EU referendum campaign has, to date, been conducted largely on materialistic arguments. How mercantile, how nuts-and-boltish it has all been. Political strategists say that this is because voters are swayed by their wallets.
Those who wish us to remain in the EU swear that financial catastrophe will ensue if we leave that listing Titanic of an enterprise.
Chancellor George Osborne has come up with an incredible figure - literally incredible, for it is not believable — that families will take a hit of £4,300. No one I know in politics actually thinks that this figure is truthful.
David Cameron, for his part, claims that family shopping bills could rise by £200 a year if we Leave. Two hundred quid! He and his friends pay more for a single ticket for the opera at Glyndebourne. It is roughly the price of a double bedroom (with breakfast) at a middling hotel in London. What is it to be, folks? A night at the Thistle, Kensington, or our nation’s liberty for the next 950 years?
Decisions, decisions.
If only: Alan Johnson and David Miliband, both once tipped as leaders of the Labour Party, discuss who knows what while in Birmingham with the Remain battle bus
The Leave campaign, meanwhile, has urged voters to quit the EU for a range of reasons, again almost entirely practical.
They suggest we would have £50 million more per day to spend on our own hospitals and schools and housing. That figure, too, is open to question. The Leavers talk of immigration and treaties and security and of how the EU’s open-border arrangements are like ‘hanging a sign welcoming terrorists to Europe’.
All this may well be the case and plainly needs to be said in order to rebut the Remain lot’s economic arguments. But is there not something more to this mighty decision we are about to take? Is the campaign not neglecting something deeper in our nation’s marrow?
Hereward the Wake and Paul Kingsnorth’s Buccmaster would have thought so. They would have heard Vote Leave talk of how we must ‘take control’ and would surely have thought ‘I don’t really want control — I want liberty’.
Hereward the Wake was an 11th century leader of local resistance to Norman rule
The word ‘control’ is a politicians’ word. It is a concept relished by managers, by bosses, by big-shots. Control is something that appeals to organising minds.
I can quite see why Vote Leave chose it, for it is an efficient word; short, speedily conveying the idea of how the EU has astonishingly managed to be both dictatorial and chaotically incompetent.
This, after all, is a political system so nit-picking that it even presumes to dictate the tax on sanitary towels, yet is so disorganised that it cannot stop hundreds of thousands of migrants landing on its southern shores. Whatever they use all our tax on, it certainly ain’t naval patrol vessels.
It would obviously be good for us to retrieve national control of trade decisions, tax matters and, most important, immigration policy from this hopelessly undemocratic organisation in Brussels. I agree entirely. But where is the optimism in Leave’s campaign? Where is the appeal to something more positive, more human, more ardent?
The hearts of Hereward the Wake and his ‘green men’ would have burned for something greater; something more essential.
You could call it self-determination or independence but it is basically the right to plant your feet on the clifftops of Kent, raise your eyes to the cloud-scudding sky, and relish your ancient liberty as a free-born Briton.
A volunteer campaigning in Glasgow tries to persuade fellow Scots to vote to remain in the EU on June 23.
It is, I would argue, your right to tell authority to bog off, to fail if you so please, to stand apart from this discordant world and owe allegiance to no one save, grudgingly, the ‘cyng of Angland’ who represents us as a people.
Materially, much has changed since the late 1060s. The Cambridgeshire fens have been drained and Hereward’s Ely is no longer much of an island. The farmlands of Lincolnshire are ploughed now by vast tractors, not ox-gangs. But similarities persist. In the EU’s expansionist plans there remains the ambition of Continental governors to conquer our island.
Just as King Harold had to see off a double invasion from north and south, so there have been concerted attacks from foreign citadels during this referendum campaign.
Only this week, the governments of Holland, Spain and Germany have waded into our affairs, telling us to cease our resistance to the suzerains of Strasbourg. How bloody well dare they? Like Buccmaster, we are free ‘socmen of Angland’.
But if the EU wins this vote, what will be the point of being British? What will be the point of having a national flag, an Army, even a Crown?
Already the first two words on the front of our passports are ‘European Union’. The Queen’s head on our stamps will become meaningless. The royal imprimatur on land documents, in our courts, in our Parliament, will become no more than symbols of a shrivelled power. The ‘ingengas’ will have won.
Like Buccmaster and perhaps like Hereward the Wake, I think of my grandfathers. One was wounded three times on the Western Front in World War I. The other landed in Normandy -Normandy! - just before D-Day to clear the beaches of mines. They fought for king and country, yes, but they fought most of all for an idea: freedom.
The days of ancestral sword and scramasax may have passed but that powerful notion of liberty, the spirit of British dissent which flared so wonderfully in the East Anglian fens 950 years ago, must never be allowed to die. Without it, we would be an island without pride, an island shorn of soul.
