by Daniel Inman, The Critic
The Church may yet prove to be the last anchor of national life
In 1927 the political scientist Ernest Barker remarked that the English were curiously blind to their own national character until a moment of peril. It was then that we discover that “there is a rock on which we stand and from which we are hewn … but we keep it shyly secret in reserve, and it is only in some destined hour of national crisis, such as came to us in the mid-summer of 1914, that we can see for ourselves and show to others the stuff of which we are made.” His metaphor was not sentimental: it suggested that beneath the shifting surface of politics lay a deeper foundation, something durable that was rediscovered in the face of existential threat — as it did, arguably, in the decade that followed in mass unemployment, the Abdication Crisis and then in confrontation with Nazi neo-paganism. In each, the touchstone of the Judaeo-Christian faith was cited as a defence against the exaltation of the Volk, of the dictator, or of an over-weaning state. A Guardian editorial of March 1939 saw the Church of England as a “safeguard against the tainting of this country … the association of Church and King witnesses to the Christian truth, now assailed in Europe, that man’s final allegiance is to God alone.
A century later Britain once again finds itself in crisis — not an existential war, as yet, but something subtler and in its way more dangerous: the disintegration of any common confidence in a national community. Across the political spectrum the upper echelons seem unable to articulate a vision around which the social contract can be sustained. Labour, captive to managerial technocracy and led by a Cabinet with little intellectual curiosity, speaks in the arid idioms of spreadsheets and “change”, yet offers no vision of what a Britain exhausted by culture wars and identitarian politics might actually look like. The Conservatives, drained of conviction in their own traditions, veer between empty gesture and orchestrated outrage. And while Reform channels raw discontent and the instincts of deeper England, it remains unclear how such anger could ever unify a nation rather than merely condemn its rulers. After decades of neo-liberalism hollowing out institutions, a debt crisis that stifled confidence in common prosperity, and a Brexit that failed to deliver renewed nationhood, Britain’s politics looks to be in a state of perilous drift.