Is self-loathing the British disease?

Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left suddenly finding all sorts of reasons why only the UK – ‘a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island’ according to Emma Thompson, patron of the Refugee Council – would do as a final destination for these poor people. It was especially ironic that the place which the great and the good decreed unfit for humane habitation was a country of which liberals have historically approved: France. The phrase ‘French flu’ was coined in the 1950s to describe the cultural cringe of British progressives towards France as the source of all things civilised. They had Brigitte Bardot and Jean-Paul Sartre; we had Diana Dors and Malcolm Muggeridge. Despite the cosying up to Putin by Macron and the police brutality towards working-class farmers, this attitude persists.

While France is ceaselessly flattered by a certain sort of self-loathing Briton, it’s rare to hear anyone say anything nice about this country. Unless, that is, they grew up under communism. Konstantin Kisin left the Soviet Union as a teenager, coming here to live with his dissident grandfather who could remember a time when people were jailed for eating food from a newspaper which had a photograph of Stalin’s face on it. Naturally he was going to notice creeping authoritarianism in his adopted country, no matter how much it dressed up as a unicorn garbed in a rainbow flag.

In 2018, Kisin – a comedian by trade, but a writer by nature – was asked by the School of Oriental and African Studies to sign a ‘behavioural agreement form’ promising to swerve humour which might not be ‘respectful and kind’:

By signing this contract, you are agreeing to our no tolerance policy with regards to racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamo-phobia or anti-religion or anti-atheism.