England likes to think of itself as “the cradle of liberty”. True, if you think of cradles as places you must leave to grow. The English are the only people in recorded history to have cut off a tyrant’s head, only to try and reattach it a few years later. We found democracy so wearisome that within a few years of executing Charles I, we had to find a brand new Charles to make decisions for us.
We pretend we restored Charles II to the throne because he was fun and freedom-loving. But then neglect to mention that the Merry Monarch merrily persecuted Quakers, imprisoning hundreds of them in York Castle until they died! He merrily hunted members of the judiciary and had them summarily executed! He merrily dissolved Parliament every time it did something he didn’t like! It’s possible a monarch’s louche, devil-may-care merriment doesn’t represent a flowering of freedom if he also demands that every official in Scotland swears a new oath of personal loyalty to him as king.
The British use the word “puritan” to mean “killjoy”, but at least the Puritans had proper impulses towards freedom. They got up, crossed an ocean and founded a new country because they disliked being told what to do by a man who happened to tumble from a royal pelvis. They preferred instead to take orders from a stern man in a white collar, who was, in turn, being told what to do by an autocrat in the clouds.
Most historians of the seventeenth century equate the king having sex with lots of people with the country being more free. Which is pretty much all liberty means to the English. They have long believed that freedom is the right of the most powerful to do what they like and the right of the rest of us to go along with what the powerful say.
Boris Johnson likes to portray himself as a libertarian, despite his first action as Mayor of London being to ban alcohol on the Tube. As PM, his most decisive act was to restrict the right of the people of Britain to trade freely with their closest geographical neighbours, or to live in delightful places like Barcelona and Berlin. Only a truly perverse (or English) sense of liberty can see the erection of more borders, with more officials able to inspect more of your papers more often, as evidence of “liberty”.
This nation even came up with a definition of free trade that encompasses no freedom at all for almost anyone involved in the process. At the heart of the swashbuckling image of British adventurers are splendid chaps on ships opening up new markets. Like in 1840, when sixteen British warships arrived in Guangzhou and bombarded it until they were allowed to sell opium there, despite the Daoguang Emperor’s efforts to stop his people becoming addicted. Only in England could free trade mean “my freedom to sell you stuff you don’t want at gunpoint (stuff, incidentally, which I’ve stolen from other people at gunpoint)”.
A similar system was employed at my school, where the biggest and most violent boys were encouraged to impose a culture of daily balls-punching, head-toileting and imprisoning of small children in games lockers. It meant an order was imposed without teachers having to get involved.
He demands obedience to our biggest pricks (vas deference)
Hardly surprising that generations of boys who emerged from that system constructed a philosophy where freedom means “the freedom of bullies to be unconstrained”. It was most famously articulated in Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty. In his inaugural lecture to the University of Oxford, Berlin drew the very English distinction between negative liberty (the freedom to go around biffing someone on the back of the head) and positive liberty (the freedom to go around with the back of one’s head un-biffed). He came to the conclusion that only weeds and wets desired positive liberty and proved his point by debagging John Maynard Keynes at the Yalta Conference in 1945.
Berlin, of course, went to one of London’s best known public schools, St Paul’s, and then Corpus Christi Cambridge. His is a very useful philosophy for those near the top of society, as his thesis demands our obedience to some of the country’s biggest pricks (vas deference).
There was a moment after WWII when there was a serious attempt to give the British real freedom: the freedoms afforded by health, education, secure housing and disposable income. This burst of liberty led bit by bit to the wild excitement of the 1960s and ‘70s. Then the 50-year backlash we’re still living through.
We are ruled once again by King Charles and his government of stern-faced ministers, slapping our wrists whenever we reach for hope. The ease with which Keir Starmer took to appointing peers to his Cabinet suggests he’s under no illusions about how much the English value liberty. He knows we give more scrutiny to how Greece and Cyprus always vote for each other in the Eurovision Song Contest than to our own democracy.
We Britons are a penned-in herd who need to be set free. Really free: to breathe our own air, swim in clean waters, to laugh, hope, travel, revel in culture and learn history that’s been liberated from government-approved ideology. Free to argue and to see the world getting wider for our children. The British need freedom, and we need it now.
Instead, we are bombarded with the opiates that society expects will take the place of freedom: convenient 24-hour delivery, ultra-processed foods, victimisation of the most vulnerable members of our society. The swashbuckling, ruddy-faced, devil-take-the-hindmost, free-marketeers are still opening new markets. Nowadays, however, they have their guns trained on us.
Nathaniel Tapley is a comedy writer and performer on the TV shows you hate
