Podsnappery and its reverse

JOHN PODSNAP is a minor character in Dickens’s last completed novel,“Our Mutual Friend”, but he is impossible to forget. He is convinced that England is the best of all possible countries and the rest of the world is nothing more than “a mistake”. His invariable verdict on the manners and morals of other countries is “Not English”, delivered “with a flourish of the arm and a flush of the face”. Encountering a Frenchman at dinner, he gives the “unfortunately born foreigner” a lecture on “le constitution Britannique”. “We Englishmen are very proud of our constitution…it was bestowed upon us by providence. No other country is so favoured as this country.”

The word Podsnappery has since found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary. But as E.P. Thompson, a Marxist historian, pointed out, many English people suffer from the opposite deformation: reverse Podsnappery. This proceeds from the premise that other countries are superior in every way (particularly when it comes to food and sex) and Britain is infinitely ghastly. Reverse Posdnappery is particularly common among the better classes. There is something about an expensive education in private schools and Oxbridge that disposes people to despise their own country. A depressing amount of English literature is an extended version of Cyril Connolly’s complaint that England is “a dying civilisation—decadent but in such a damned dull way”.

The Brexit vote has similarly divided Britain into two camps. Podsnaps are delighted that England is breaking away from the continent, with its meddling bureaucrats and Napoleonic legal code (Podsnaps may say “Britain” but they really mean “England”). Reverse Podsnaps think Britain is rejecting cosmopolitan values in favour of a repulsive Little Englandism. What makes the argument frustrating is that both have truth on their side.

Thus Podsnaps start with good points. Britain does have a uniquely fortunate history. It never experienced revolutionary terror like France or eastern Europe or collective madness like Germany. It contrived ways of limiting the power of the state through parliament and the common law before any other big country. It played the pivotal role in saving the continent from Nazi Germany. This is a history to be proud of.

But this sense turns into nonsense when Podsnaps echo their hero’s view that Britain possesses these virtues “to the direct exclusion of such other countries as there may happen to be”, or when they think being proud of your country means looking down on others. It is an oddity of modern Britain that the leading practitioner of turning sense into nonsense—Mr Podsnap in modern dress—should be the foreign secretary. Boris Johnson seems to regard foreigners as figures of fun and likes to point out that all good things were invented in Britain. During the 2008 Olympics he claimed that, even though the Chinese might be champions at table tennis, the game was “invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century…it was called ‘wiff-waff’.”

Reverse Podsnaps also start with good points. British history is marred by imperialism and exploitation. A great virtue of Britain has been its openness to foreign ideas and intellectuals. Some people voted for Brexit for discreditable reasons. But reverse Podsnaps take good insights to ridiculous lengths. Emily Thornberry, now the shadow foreign secretary, once posted a tweet mocking a “white-van man” who draped his house with flags of St George. Tom Gann, editor of New Socialist, maintains that “Britain has the most morally and intellectually degraded and degrading public sphere in the world”. A YouGov poll last October found that 46% of Londoners named “Londoner” as their primary identity, 25% European, 17% British and only 12% English.

Reverse Podsnappery is defined by double-think when it comes to nationalism. Although English nationalism is the sum of all evils, other forms of nationalism (Irish, Scottish, Palestinian) are fervently embraced. It is also defined by parochialism. Reverse Podsnaps are less interested in other countries than in using them to attack their own. Once upon a time they would fixate on the Soviet Union as a way of criticising Britain. Now they are more likely to fixate on Germany.

Jeremy Corbyn is to reverse Podsnappery what Mr Johnson is to Podsnappery. Despite being brought up in a manor house in Shropshire, the Labour leader has spent his life in revolt against “Englishness”. On leaving school he decamped to Jamaica (where he was known as “beardie”) and Latin America. As a young MP he liked to relax in Irish bars singing Irish freedom songs. He supports an alphabet soup of national-liberation movements. He brought the same starry-eyed credulity to Venezuela that Sidney and Beatrice Webb did to the Soviet Union.

Podsnaps and reverse Podsnaps are both in the grip of the same mistake. They refuse to recognise that all advanced countries struggle with common problems such as low growth, pressure from refugees and rising inequality. They fail to see that economic decisions are about trade-offs, not discovering eternal solutions. The German emphasis on training and the British preference for flexibility both have costs and benefits. But rather than confronting this error they delight in egging each other on.

Time to scrap both Podsnaps

This is at its most dangerous in the Brexit negotiations. Podsnaps see the EU as a plot to destroy “le constitution Britannique”. Jacob Rees-Mogg calls soft Brexit “the equivalent of a ‘Norman Conquest’ that would reduce Britain to the level of a ‘vassal state’.” Reverse Podsnaps see the European Commission as the embodiment of universal wisdom and EU negotiators as reasonable people negotiating with bigoted fools. Taking the country through the complexities of Brexit without splitting it down the middle will be hard even for rational people. It will be impossible if the British refuse to dump the twin bigotries of Podsnap and his alter ego in the dustbin of history.