The tycoon believes the country is on course for civil war. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
When work follows you everywhere, how do you switch off? You can, if you wish, hide from your emails by spending £500 a night on a remote luxury retreat for the digitally frazzled in the Canaries, complete with designer bed linen and no phone signal. But those in the know take their holidays from the internet closer to home: camping on Britain’s eastern coastline. If you know where to go (no, I’m not telling you) you can find bucolic rural surroundings, sandy beaches, honesty-box raspberries and such superbly bad network coverage that doomscrolling just isn’t an option.
It’s often struck me that camping life of this kind is perhaps the Platonic form of a certain type of postwar English sociality. Amenities are frugal, but pleasantly so. You have neighbors, but not too close. (It’s an unwritten rule of camping that you don’t pitch your tent right next to someone else’s unless you absolutely have to.) People say hello, but socializing is optional. Everyone’s kids play together, only vaguely supervised. The dogs are generally well-behaved. And, importantly, it’s high-trust by definition: after all, you can’t really lock a tent.
In the absence of any phone signal for doomscrolling, I took for holiday reading a forthcoming book on English pastoral. In Fields of Green traces this literary trope of ideal rural landscapes as a response to the development of modern England. Its author, André Gushurst-Moore, argues that England has always needed “pastoral” as a literary mode where we can take refuge from upheaval, technology, and social fracture in the temporary Arcadia of England’s rolling green hinterlands.
That’s certainly how it felt to take a holiday in a grassy field, without handheld access to the relentless rage and demoralization fodder online. The feeling of implicit trust in the campsite was also as restful as the lack of phone reception. But this year, I found my peace troubled by a nagging fear that environments of this kind might be, in some fundamental way, under threat.
From my tent you couldn’t drive far without passing signs for the nearby town of Great Yarmouth, Rupert Lowe’s constituency and heart of the Restore Britain movement: the epicenter of an angry, anxious sense to the effect that Britain used to be a high-trust country but isn’t any more. That is: Britain in general used to be more like my East Anglian campsite, but is growing increasingly hostile, fractious, and genuinely dangerous.
Restore output typically blames this phenomenon on immigration. And it’s true that there is evidence linking illegal migration in particular both with other kinds of criminal activity, as well as the sort of friction that arises when incompatible social norms come suddenly into collision. But is the sense of decaying cohesion really just the fault of foreigners? Were we really always a “high-trust” society, until those immigrants came along and ruined it? I’m not sure we were. Rather, that sense of comparative national unity marked both the culmination, and end, of “Great Britain” in her imperial pomp.
If, in Gushurst-Moore’s telling, pastoral has always served as idealized respite from a more turbulent real-world England, that grittier England is also to be found in literary history. In prewar literature in particular, this England comes across as a vigorous, exciting, but not particularly “high-trust” place. Defoe’s 1722 Moll Flanders recounts the first-person narrative of a career criminal. Dickens’s 1839 Oliver Twist is set almost entirely in London’s criminal underworld. Plenty of other literary works detail the rampant fraud, theft, violence, and criminality of early modern and Georgian Britain. It was, in fact, predominantly the Victorians who set the nation on a path toward the centralization, order, and robust public mores that would eventually produce the “high-trust” Britain, that now feels as though it persists only in rural hinterlands and middle-class enclaves.
As certain of their own correctness in every respect as they were dedicated to large-scale infrastructure, technological innovation, improving the morals of the poor, and expanding British dominion to every corner of the earth, the Victorians established the road patrols that ended the highway robbery of the Moll Flanders era. They also founded the police force that tackled the pervasive criminality of Oliver Twist’s London. And they built the factories and schools that, for better or worse, drilled generations of working-class Britons into regimented assembly-line work punctuated by shift-end bells.
The English pastoral dream grew more intense, and was more desperately clung to, as real-life Great Britain industrialized, stripping coal-fields, belching smoke into the sky, and unrolling canals, railways, and roads across the landscape. Evocations of deep England such as The Wind in the Willows (1908) were, in this sense, a product of their own antithesis in the cities and suburbs — where, by the time Kenneth Grahame wrote it, most British people lived.
The historian AJP Taylor observed, in his Oxford History of England, that “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”. But that fateful August, just six years after The Wind in the Willows was published, the world of order, industry, and moral purpose the Victorians built came to its climax, and also the beginning of its end.
When war broke out in 1914 every facet of Victorian innovation — the factories, the administration, the large-scale coordination of workforces, the patriotism — came together in a whole-of-society war effort. The English novelist Mary Augusta Ward described this phenomenon in 1916: an enormous, coordinated mobilization that reached into every corner of English society and geography, and re-oriented every part of it to supporting the same cause.
After 1918, that regulatory Leviathan never really went away again. With the Second World War it expanded still further, adding blackout rules, rations, the mass evacuation of children from city centers, and a host of other emergency measures. By and large, everyone pulled together, under the organizing moral focus of existential threat. Those wartime habits, and the cultures they produced, persisted well into the long 20th-century peace that followed, legitimating the establishment of a nationwide welfare state, National Health Service, and much else we now take for granted.
This is why we’re still obsessed with the wars: they really did create modern Britain. Wartime Britain also represented the pinnacle of that “high-trust” culture whose disappearance is now routinely blamed on immigration. But the Victorians, who turned a relatively lawless Moll Flanders Britain into that orderly, industrial empire of our recent past, understood something we’ve chosen to forget in the decades since: that order always implies a measure of violence.
Periodically, when Elon Musk decides, in his wisdom, to intervene in British politics, he likes to imagine all of Britain and her inhabitants as basically hobbits: bucolic, small-minded denizens of rural Arcadia, desperately vulnerable to predators. But this is both wrong and unhelpful. Yes, Tolkien’s Shire is one of the most famous evocations of that pastoral idyll. But historically, Britons were the despoilers of the Shire as well as its hobbit inhabitants. The Romantic spirit of Wordsworth, and the Arts and Crafts movement led by John Ruskin, harked back to a mythic, rural deep England; meanwhile, technologists and visionaries in the real-world 19th-century Britain had little compunction about driving roads and railroads through those fields of green in pursuit of “improvement”.
This people produced Cecil Rhodes as well as John Ruskin. They invented steam engines, sterilization, and vaccination, not to mention a host of lethal weapons. They imposed law and order on Britain, routinely resorting to corporal punishment, hanging, or deportation. They did the same to a great many other geographies besides — some of which retain the bones of our common law to this day, even while agitating for reparations. Even education was delivered with unembarrassed, righteous ferocity: the tyrannical, pedantic Mr Gradgrind, in Dickens’s novel Hard Times, vividly illustrates the methods used to impose knowledge and manners on the children of Victorian Britain.
By contrast, since the two wars Britain has seemed determined to hold fast to our legacy of wartime solidarity, order, and peace, built on those brusque Victorian foundations — only now, without ever needing to be tough. It’s as though we want Elon to be right; as if, were everyone only to play by the rules, all of England might be forever Arcadia. But instead, it’s allowed, that culture of order and common purpose by degrees, to soften, to the point where its goods are rapidly evaporating. We congratulate ourselves on having abandoned “Gradgrindian” teaching, while teachers collapse under the stress of bad behavior in the classrooms and kids learn nothing. Local policing is nonexistent. Rules are only for suckers. Our border enforcers hand out visa-sponsorship licenses to vape shops, or Islamic centres allegedly linked to the Iranian state, or to vape shops in Bethnal Green.
But the decay in our capacity to enforce even the rules we have is as much, or more, a cause of immigration as its effect. And, pace Restore Britain, plenty of the rule-flouting is home-grown. Just recently, for example, the BBC reported on a huge rise in hare coursing, a deeply medieval-sounding illegal bloodsport, in which participants coordinate online to mass-trespass onto farmland and gamble on sight-hounds chasing hares across open fields. Such events are reportedly often linked to wider criminal gang activity; but there’s nothing to suggest the gangs themselves are anything but British. They just aren’t doing the postwar “high-trust” thing.
Fifty dead hares dumped outside your country shop hardly evokes Arcadia. Nor, as the secessionist villagers of Piddington in Oxfordshire recently realized, does the prospect of having your community of 400 imminently outnumbered three-to-one by 1,250 male asylum seekers at a nearby military base.
It’s understandable that, after the two wars, no one wanted ever to live through anything so horrible again. The result was a desire both to preserve Britain’s war-forged social cohesion, and also to reject every trace of the toughness, and willingness to follow through with violence, that many blamed for the catastrophe of war. There followed some halcyon decades of peace with very little violence — but those decades are now, palpably, at an end.
And yet the mistake wasn’t to dream of Arcadia as such. It was imagining (as Elon Musk still apparently does) that all of England could be preserved in a state of bucolic green. That’s never what these islands have been. The best we ever managed was preserving some pastoral space amid the upheaval.
In the aftermath of our decades-long holiday from enforcing the rules, it’s going to take more than just being nice to strangers while camping to sustain this — or the postwar utopia of rules. We also need the piratical adventurousness of the Moll Flanders era, and the ambition, toughness, and self-belief of the Victorian one. Perhaps even, if we haven’t the space to jail criminals, we should do as they did. (It would be popular.)
The price of some pastoral idyll is accepting that every such peaceful community has an edge. In the 21st century, you can’t hide from the internet forever — even, as those poor hares found out, in the countryside. And especially in the internet age, no space of “high trust” will stay that way for long, unless we stand ready to defend it.
