This week another crisis at the BBC emerged with the proposed abandonment of the UK theme which is usually played at about 5.40am on Radio 4. My somewhat blurred appreciation of this medley of British folk tunes (created I think by Fritz Spiegel) makes me somewhat indifferent to its fate. I seem to remember enjoying it the first time I heard it, and on subsequent occasions finding it increasingly irritating, perhaps because it reminded me of music lessons in school where the music master seemed to think the best way to keep us entertained was to get us to sing loudly such tunes as Men of Harlech and the British Grenadiers.
The defence of this thirty year old component of early morning broadcasting will no doubt be made largely by those who see it as yet another attack on our national identity. Walking along the Dorset cliffs between Lulworth Cove (whence Keats left England for the last time) and Durdle Dor a few weeks ago, I was thinking about this matter of national identity mainly because Dorset is one of those places which makes me glad to be English/British. Of course what being English means to each one of us depends very much on the part of England we grew up in, our education, and our cultural and work experience. If England means to you a village in the Cotswolds, a proper rice pudding, Sturminster pippins, Elgar, A Brief Encounter, Henry V’s speech before Agincourt, and the voice of John Arlott, you may be unique.
A more generalised influence on our national identity may stem from the fact that we are the largest island in Europe and have consequently developed over many centuries a complex attitude towards the mainland. In addition, we have historically influenced the rest of the world to an extent disproportionate to our size, but having won a global war from which we emerged bankrupt and despoiled of an empire, we are no longer certain of our place on the world stage. Moreover, nothing seems to work in the way it once did; governments find it difficult to inspire confidence, the media sees its role in purely critical terms (potential England Football managers take note), most national institutions (including churches) are in crisis, multinational corporations are seen as unscrupulous conspirators (cf The Constant Gardener) and life seems to run from one state of anxiety to the next, with regard to education, health, pension provision, the environment, crime, traffic congestion, family and friends. And as we grow more uncertain so we get more angry. We find ourselves speaking to the person phoning us from a call centre in India about better deals on our telephone calls, with a degree of rudeness we might once have thought ourselves incapable of.
And that phone call is of course an example of the globalisation the perceived threat of which makes some people fight for the UK theme. We are told that our fears are misplaced. Globalisation is the consequence of what people want. But now what I want and what I am prepared to do to get it has to relate to what everyone anywhere in the world also wants. The satisfaction of my needs is increasingly dependent on the satisfaction of the needs of others. And there is an irony in the fact that we feel morally bound to hope for development and opportunity in the Third World and then demonstrate against the globalisation which economists tell us will help provide those opportunities. And there is an irony in our resistance, in the name of national independence, to the international organizations which alone could have the power to make the multinational corporations operate fairly, and to curtail the way in which state governments pursue protectionist policies, price fixing agreements, and local subsidisation, thus preventing the poorest countries from competing in a fair market. All of which means that we may need more globalisation and not less if the world is to become a better place, and that economically, juridically, culturally, and spiritually we now belong to something larger than the nation state.
That rather compressed summary of a very complex issue began with the idea of what people want. So it is said McDonald’s is everywhere because everywhere there are people who want Big Macs (though not it seems Richard Dawkins who in an interview for a student newspaper some years ago assumed a Big Mac was a form of word processor). And everywhere there are people who have pension funds who want to invest in the providers of Big Macs. But what makes us want something? It is not enough to say that people want a Big Mac without asking whether it is the price, the appearance, the convenience, the advertising, the cultural significance or image of a Big Mac that makes them want it. And it should not be seen as a symptom of nannyism to ask whether it is good to want such a thing, and whether if they had been able to find a certain kind of freedom they would still want it? Is there such a thing as a spiritual freedom which might enable us not to be afraid to stand apart from all those things which our society, culture and economy tell us we need in order to concentrate on our true needs. Such freedom is only achieved perhaps through a potentially frightening process of being stripped bare (at least in our minds) of much that we take for granted. What do I most need and most want and is it possible for that need or want to be fulfilled without in the process my contributing in some way for such fulfilment in my neighbour? That is a question which we might go on asking ourselves both as individuals and as citizens of the world as we approach Lent.
With my love and prayers,
Fr Stephen
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker