Londoners are not English (Jackpot January #18)

To some, this title will be inflammatory; to others, trivial. I am not trying to argue in favour of England as a white country, nor will I defend dog-whistles like national identity or cultural heritage. As always for me, this is about connection.

Today I played through Thank Goodness You’re Here and it made me think of how I like this country more than I care to admit. There’s plenty of atrocities and injustices to be ashamed of, but we also pioneered punk, grime, and a whole bunch of other great music. We developed a particular style of irreverent, subversive humour with radical and rebellious potential. But then again, we often fail to extend our cultural power into meaningful, organised action.

When I say ‘we’, I should clarify that I am, in fact, talking mostly about a subset of Britons. The working- and lower-middle-classes, the racialised, the queer and femme, the disabled, the displaced, and their allies. And in a strange way Thank Goodness You’re Here reflects that. The game’s naff quaintness is not a pastiche of British in its totality; rather it takes place in Barnsworth, a fictional town in the North of England. The game is therefore not just an English comedy game, but a Northern English comedy game.

While playing, I reflected on how hard it was to imagine the game taking place in London. It wouldn’t just be a case of swapping out the accents and changing the architecture, the game simply wouldn’t have worked. I could more easily imagine it happening in Hampshire, where I grew up, than in London. If nothing else, the game demands a provincial setting.

As a Londoner by adoption, I have found that, with time, the city only grows stranger. At first it seemed large but pretty easy to grasp: there were the touristy areas and the cool areas that the locals know. Then, I came to recognise that different demographics, local cultures and scenes which have sprung up across the city’s history. Now, I’m conscious of so many postcode feuds and labyrinthine rivalries that it’s impossible to think of London as a single place. It’s rather more like meiosis, cells dividing, halving, doubling without end.

So you meet many people who do not identify as Londoners per se; they are East Londoners or the Peckham gang or Chelsea girls or settlers in Ealing. One of my colleagues loves Tower Hamlets more than anywhere and never wants to move. While the ‘London bubble’ is very real, those who are attached to specifically their local area always seem to be somehow more worldly than the self-professed ‘cosmopolitans’ of the inner city. They tend to be bilingual, multicultural, queer, or all of the above. They are rooted in the world.

The Londoners I despise are the ‘cosmopolitan elites’ I mentioned. I hate that phrase, reactionary as it is, but there is some truth to this stereotype. They are the gentleman’s club dwellers, the daddy’s-money kids who never leave home without their signet ring. As kids, they are taught their ancestry by heart, they fret over whether they are old- or new-money. Their heirlooms are stolen land, ugly souls, and poisoned blood.

As a student, I traded one provincial home for another. In Durham, the student populace was a surreal mix of privileged Londoners, international students, and working-class kids from the North or the Midlands. My only lasting friendships were formed with the latter two groups, simply because I had a lot more respect for them. What they valued in others were traits that were actually valuable: kindness, humility, and a lack of snobbery.

There are, of course, plenty of cruel, judgemental snobs among the poor, but nowhere were these traits more universal than in the wealthy London set.

The problem with the cosmopolitan Londoner is their flat, empty-eyed liberalism. It preaches tolerance but lacks genuine curiosity. Other people, the many who are marginalised, become an exploitable resource in the production of their ‘worldliness.’ These are people who travel all the time, but say they don’t need to when ‘the whole world is in London.’ People who love to name drop boroughs and Tube stops and landmarks like a secret code. People who treasure the wretched of the earth, as long as they set up a market a twenty-minute walk from their street.

London, to them, is a shibboleth. They look down on people who aren’t from London. They look down on those critical of it, be they locals or outsiders. They ignore or oppose the grass-roots dynamism of the city they call home; the scuffles and tensions and rebellions that make it what it is. They will protest, but only if the police have sanctioned it. They don’t like resistance but they love debate. They pretend that politics is just a bunch of people disagreeing, and we ought to do it politely and through the proper channels.

This was what I was afraid of becoming. I still fear it: this attitude that London is the world and not a series of towns that became a city, a mega-province, with local organisers and new movements round every corner.

What I am really attacking is their desire for detachment. They believe that knowing one diverse city means they know the world, they believe it makes them objective and impartial. What they ignore is the objective truth that all life is partial. We are all biased in favour of our own survival, of what we believe is right for the groups we care about. For some of us, that groups extends past humanity towards the preservation of all life on Earth, and for others it just means their friends. To the cosmopolitan Londoner, their friends are just whoever commits to a life as bland and airless as theirs.

Englishness, then, is not about race or background or appearance or conduct. At its best, Englishness, like all geographically-constituted identity, expresses connection. Whether it be English, American, Nigerian, Colombian, Palestinian, Bangladeshi, Chinese or what have you, we must abandon nationalism or patriotism in favour of identity based in localised connection. True Englishness is not learning the latest set of slogans or catchphrases to yell at detractors nor is it snubbing your people in favour of a vague, neocolonialist nation of ‘global stability.’ It is paying attention, caring about what’s going on where you are, and connecting with all of the people around you.