Hélène von Bismarck twice quotes (in an officiously corrected version) Robert Burns’s lines: ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!’ She is congratulating herself on assuming this role in writing a book about Britain as a German. There is no doubt that out of a mixture of self-regard, curiosity about other people’s points of view and the occasional outburst of ribald mockery, the British have long enjoyed accounts of themselves by visitors. Whether these narratives possess any accuracy or unusual perception is another question, but there seems no doubt that a British audience exists even for ones of the utmost mediocrity and banality.
Fantastic Kingdom is a book that reveals much about the prejudices and unquestioned assumptions of a particular class of person. Bismarck – she is not a descendant of Otto, but I dare say the name has been helpful to her career – is virulently in favour of the European Union and rather given to scolding Britain for pursuing a contrary path. She takes for granted that those who were sceptical about the EU were culturally detached from Europe. This is nonsense, although it suits European propagandists that any British person unenthusiastic about the professional standards of Jean-Claude Juncker, Sabine Weyand and that Belgian answer to Sir Anthony Beaumont-Dark, Guy Verhofstadt, must also detest Beethoven, post-Impressionism, taleggio, the tower villages of the southern Peloponnese and any word of a foreign language.
Maintaining this position obliges such apologists to ignore the existence of Norway and Switzerland, not usually considered backward or unsuccessful countries. It also makes them pretend that the recent history of such pro-EU countries as Germany, France and Spain has been anything but a total disaster, piling economic stagnation on top of all the necessary conditions for a total breakdown in social order.
In this brief book Bismarck devotes chapters to migrant communities, the monarchy (of course), ‘elites’ and the devolved nations, but there is nothing on literature, music and technology or much on education and sport. In place of this, she brings a bafflingly uninteresting chapter on religion. She seems to have talked to very few people, and most of those she has interviewed or read agree with what she has decided she thinks. In short, this is a book about a nation’s culture written by somebody who really knows very little about her subject and is disinclined to find anything out. But, as I say, an account of mediocrity may still be worth looking at.
Bismarck takes the government to task for describing the United Kingdom as ‘world-beating’: ‘The rhetoric stood in marked contrast to reality… budgets for development aid, the BBC World Service and the British Council were drastically reduced… yet Britain was apparently still “leading the world” in manifold ways.’ She sees no possibility of a nation taking the lead without vast public expenditure. The thought that commercial ideas and large cultural phenomena might mean more than that hasn’t occurred to her. The German government has pumped colossal sums into the Goethe Institute’s literary programmes around the world. Yet their juvenile citizens still prefer to queue to have their photograph taken at Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station.
People, in Bismarck’s world, are not allowed to have more than one aspect, and if they do, it marks them down as hypocrites:
Margaret Thatcher, today revered in the party as a kind of patron saint, was the harbinger of a radical programme of economic transformation who enjoyed buying antiques for her private drawing room.
So what? She also went to Switzerland on holiday and had a memorably happy conversation with Herbert von Karajan. Did that discredit her analysis of the Maastricht Treaty?
Bismarck sees no possibility of a nation taking the lead without vast public expenditure
Bismarck assumes far too much when talking about people on her side of the argument. The Green party, we are told, ‘is also doing consistently well in local elections. Given the salience of environmental questions, their potential to mix up British politics should not be ignored’. In fact the rise in support for the Greens has very little to do with environmental questions. The Green candidates, whom Andrew Gilligan has been doing such sterling work in exposing, didn’t alarm most people recently because they were talking in a saintly way about recycling. It was their apparent willingness to give credence to a very ancient bigotry and circulate far-left economic fantasies that did so much to ‘mix up British politics’.
Bismarck assures us that ‘the United Kingdom was never some kind of liberal nirvana devoid of racism or bigotry’. We meet with our old friends imperialism and slavery, yoked together by violence; and the King’s comment in a 2021 speech that slavery was an ‘appalling atrocity’ that will ‘forever stain our history’ is quoted without any acknowledgment that he was citing the same words in a speech of 1840 by Prince Albert. Albert was unusual for a person of Bismarck’s nationality in his social attitudes.
Perhaps if you are going to draw attention to British concerns about immigration, you might compare it with other European countries. The first black writer to publish a novel was J.E. Casely Hayford MBE, whose Ethiopia Unbound appeared in 1911, in English. The first non-white MP was elected in the UK in 1892. There were black professors at British universities in the 1940s at least. By contrast, the first non-white MP to be elected in Spain was in 2016. When was the first novel by a black writer published in Germany? Not all of idyllic and progressive Europe has been very fast to catch up with the rights and freedoms that the British have taken for granted for many decades, even centuries. The last region of Switzerland to grant women the vote did so in 1991. Many of us who were concerned about the continuing encroachments of Bismarck’s beloved EU were frankly worried by some demented social attitudes prevalent among prominent politicians of the bloc. But that doesn’t seem to have registered.
It is hard to imagine anyone learning much from this book. Its judgments are expressed in some staggeringly mediocre phrasemaking:
England, by far the largest of the four nations, both in territory and population, has always stood out, which is not to say that the contribution made by Scottish, Welsh and Irish people to British politics, trade, industry, science, art and security were in any way insignificant.
Reading Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek or Karl Marx does not automatically turn anyone into their acolytes, yet few would dispute the value of informing themselves a little about these highly influential political theorists whose books sparked revolutions and inspired constitutions.
Fancy that.
Sometimes one wonders whether Bismarck has really thought about what she’s saying. The last paragraph of the book is a good example:
None of the many positive things that make the United Kingdom fantastic should be taken for granted, and nor should they ever be forgotten or dismissed. They are worth cherishing, defending and building upon.
But what would ‘building upon’ mean in practice? Who is to do this work of defence? Vast multinational organisations run by Verhofstadt? Is that the slightest bit plausible, given that almost none of the ‘positive things’ were created by those organisations? Or is it more likely that an energetic and confident culture, which most of us believe will reassert itself in time, will find its own way to move forward?
I am genuinely surprised that John Murray has published such an inadequate, tedious book. I’m pretty keen on reading works I disagree with, but not ones whose analysis resembles that of a mid-ranking MA thesis at a second-tier university.
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