Honorary Graduates

Orations and responses

Response by Lord Haskins

Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, I greatly appreciate the honour you have given me today and from a University which in such a relatively short time, forty years, has already achieved quite remarkable national and international recognition.  And I feel a special affinity because you have built such a reputation in the study of contemporary politics, the subject which is so dear to my heart.  Anybody who wants to know about what has been going on in Russia in the last ten years will need to have merely turned on Channel 4 and found two characters, one Jon Snow and the other Professor Frank explaining it to us. I shall never forget the riveting exchanges they had ten years ago when the Gorbochov message was underway.  Anybody who wants to know anything public opinion polls first thinks about the University of Essex.

I have cohabited in this country with the English for some forty years and with the Yorkshire people for the same period.  So I thought it might be appropriate to say something about the issue which I think should preoccupy contemporary political students more than any other one in this country, and that is “ the English question”.  As an Irishman I am well used to the kind, but patronising concern which English liberals have expressed about us for over a century, the so-called “Irish question.”  So we Celts can now repay such patronage with knobs on by putting the question “What do we do about the English?”

The English have been remarkably skilful at conjuring up different images of themselves, according to the audience they are addressing.  Until 1707 you got what you thought you were getting - Shakespeare and Elizabeth I were English,  as were those who colonised the Irish and singed the beard of the King of Spain.  But, in 1707 the English invented Britain, as a weaze to persuade the Scots of the benefits of a union, a weaze which has worked very well for the English and for the entrepreneurial Scots over hundreds of years.  A British Empire emerged under whose umbrella the Scots were able to share the spoils and rewards of imperial plunder with their English neighbours.  As late as 1955 Britishness still appealed to Scotland.  In that year’s general election the majority of Scottish MPs returned to Westminster belonged to the aptly named Conservative and Unionist Party.  Today, not a single Scottish Conservative and Unionist MP remains at Westminster.

Culturally the English have been deeply subtle about their branding, instead of calling it the English Broadcasting Corporation they plumped for the British Broadcasting Corporation. They then hired an irascible but feudal Scot, John Reith, to set the thing up.  He duly obliged his English masters by insisting that the only acceptable accent for the British Broadcasting Corporation would be an absurdly upper class, public school, home counties English one.  This masterstroke remained unchallenged until a few years ago.

But of course, in the interests of accuracy, when it came to writing a history of these islands, Oxford University insisted on the project being branded English rather than British history.  Nobody seemed to worry.  The Queen herself has never been too sure about this British thing, preferring mostly to be Queen of England or, in order to avoid giving offence to the Celts and the colonies, just being “the Queen”.  She is of course head of the Church of England and her successor must be a member of the English Church if he is to succeed her.  And there are twenty-six English bishops in the House of Lords, no Catholics, no Presbyterians, no Muslims, perhaps the most anachronistic aspect of that thoroughly anachronistic institution.

The last British Prime Minister, John Major, greatly added to the confusion with his British picture of warm beer, cricket fields and old maids cycling to what was clearly a Church of England establishment on a Sunday morning.  This unscrupulous portrayal of Britishness, in such a spectacularly English way clearly confused the loyal, if teetotal, non-cricketing Dr Ian Paisley in Ballymena.  But, then Dr Paisley thinks that when he shouts “No surrender” he is defending his right to be British.  I must however disillusion him.  He is not British in the first instant, he is a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 

And now for the poor English it is all ending in tears.  Posh accents seem to be disappearing from the BBC, the Empire has gone and attempts to replace it with the Commonwealth have failed.  Instead, Britain has reluctantly joined a new institution, the European Union, which appears to work well for all its members, including Britain.  But which seems to threaten Britain’s or England’s historical independence by removing the Queen’s head from the currency, even though this might still be negotiable.

And as if that wasn’t enough, now that the Scots no longer can enjoy the prizes of Empire they have cravenly embarked on a route which might even jeopardise the British Union by setting up the Scottish Parliament.  Its all a frightful muddle and painful for the bewildered and sensitive English sons and daughters of the imperial establishment.  How could the Scots be so ungrateful and how could the Europeans be so arrogant?

But alas for these unfortunate English patriots devolution and European union are both here to stay.  At some point the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish will have to come to terms with the federal arrangement for all these islands.  A journalist friend of mine in Dublin the other day remarked that if Mandela was Queen it would solve everything.

But for federalism to work properly the South East English establishment will have to suffer further indignities.  The English regions rather like the look of what is going on in Scotland.  They are likely therefore to be less subservient to their London masters in the future, and demand a greater say in the running of their own affairs.  And at some point the larger English euro-phobics will realise that full participation in the European Union is not just the best idea in town, it is the only one.  In the end I suspect that reality, or maybe just indifference, will hold sway over delusions of grandeur, which might have been appropriate in the nineteenth century but are entirely irrelevant and dangerous, if not comic, in the twenty first century.

I am most grateful to the University for honouring me in this way and also for allowing it to get some of my own home truths off my chest today.  Thank you.