Mad Dogs and Englishmen

“Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
The smallest Malay rabbit deplores this stupid habit.
In Hong Kong, they strike a gong, and fire off a noonday gun.
To reprimand each inmate, who’s in late.
In the mangrove swamps where the python romps
there is peace from twelve till two.
Even caribous lie down and snooze, for there’s nothing else to do.
In Bengal, to move at all, is seldom if ever done,
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.”

The phrase “small boats” has recently been doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Two ordinary words into which anxiety about sovereignty, race, masculinity, Europe, crime, demographic change and national decline can be poured.

Nigel Farage understands this perfectly. He talks of “invasion,” of deploying the Royal Navy, of restoring control. The language turns a difficult question of asylum, borders, policing and international law into something much older and emotionally cleaner.

An enemy is approaching.

We are here.

They are there.

The sea is between us.

But before asking how to stop the boats, there is another question.

What exactly is being defended?

Britain? England? Kent? Sovereignty?

Or something much less tangible: an idea of England itself?

Psychoanalysis does not ask whether the symptom is imaginary. The boats are real as are the deaths. Smuggling networks are too. Governments have a legitimate interest in controlling borders.

The question is different.

Why has this particular object acquired so much excess meaning?

Lacan gives us a grammar.

The *Imaginary* is the picture of national wholeness: white cliffs, green fields, the island intact, the sea performing its ancient duty as moat. England appears as something complete.

The *Symbolic* supplies the institutions and language that hold the picture together: “illegal migrant”, “sovereignty”, “border security”, asylum law, Border Force, Union Jacks and eventually the Royal Navy.

The *Real* is what refuses to stay inside the picture: bodies in cold water, children being pulled from boats, contradictory legal statuses, rescue obligations and the deeply inconvenient fact that no border can make a society whole.

It is a structure I have watched elsewhere.

On Poland’s Belarusian border the scenery is different: forests, mud, ghosts, competing languages and barbed wire. The Imaginary of national protection is stitched together through the Symbolic vocabulary of security, procedure and “hybrid war”, only to be punctured repeatedly by the Real, corpses in forests, pushbacks, thermal-camera images, people who stubbornly remain human when the political vocabulary needs them to become a category.

England has water.

And water is psychologically useful.

It looks clean.

It appears to establish an absolute distinction: here and there, island and continent, us and them. It removes footprints. Geography itself seems to have drawn the boundary.

Except the boats come from somewhere.

The boats come from somewhere

The largest groups crossing the Channel recently have included people from *Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran and Somalia*.

Read those names again.

Eritrea.

Afghanistan.

Sudan.

Iran.

Somalia.

In the contemporary English political imagination they sound like somewhere else.

Historically, they are nothing of the sort.

Britain invaded **Afghanistan** three times during the imperial period. Then it went back after 2001, as part of the Western intervention that lasted two decades.

Britain spent much of the twentieth century deeply involved in *Iran*, not least through oil. When Mohammad Mossadegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Britain and the United States helped organise the 1953 coup that removed him.

*Sudan* was conquered by Anglo-Egyptian forces and then governed under a condominium in which British power was dominant.

Northern **Somalia** became British Somaliland.

Britain administered *Eritrea* after defeating Italian forces there in the Second World War.

Then there are Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Britain joined the United States in invading *Iraq* in 2003. The Chilcot Inquiry later concluded that peaceful options had not been exhausted, intelligence about weapons had been presented with unjustified certainty and the consequences of invasion had been inadequately prepared for.

Britain and France were central to the 2011 intervention in *Libya*. A later House of Commons inquiry concluded that a mission presented as civilian protection drifted towards regime change without an adequate strategy for the aftermath. Among the consequences it listed were political collapse, militia warfare, humanitarian crisis and migration.

The point is simpler and more disturbing.

*The supposedly clean distinction between inside and outside does not survive contact with history.*

Britain has been outside for centuries.

It crossed oceans. It occupied territory. It drew borders. It removed governments. It recruited soldiers. It extracted resources. It constructed trading systems and administrative systems and legal systems. Much later it joined military interventions whose consequences it frequently proved unable to control.

Then people travelled in the other direction.

This did not begin with dinghies.

India and Pakistan emerged from the violent partition of British India.

Nigeria was assembled into a single colonial state under British administration.

People from India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Nigeria and elsewhere later came to post-war Britain, often because Britain wanted workers.

The direction of movement changes.

The relationship does not simply disappear.

The migrant appears as the radically alien object approaching us from outside.

Yet he may come from a society Britain has already entered.

He is *extimate*: outside and inside at once.

The English subject knows perfectly well that Britain had an empire.

There are museums.

Statues.

Churchill.

Television programmes.

School maps once coloured red.

*We know very well.*

And yet.

When movement occurs in the opposite direction, the connection disappears.

There is only a foreign man in a boat.

The formula of fetishistic disavowal almost writes itself.

The Channel performs the trick.

On this side: tea, cliffs, home.

On the other: empire, war, intervention, consequences.

The boat ruins the arrangement.

England imagines itself as Britain

There is another confusion so habitual that it barely registers.

England routinely imagines itself as *Britain*.

An English football crowd waves the Union Jack. English politicians talk about “this country” while moving almost imperceptibly between England, Britain and the United Kingdom. Dover becomes the British frontier. The English Channel becomes the national moat. The Royal Navy appears as the military expression of an English island fantasy.

But England is not Britain.

Constitutionally England is oddly difficult to locate. Scotland has a parliament. Wales has a Senedd. Northern Ireland has an Assembly.

England, despite containing the overwhelming majority of the UK population, has no equivalent national legislature or government.

England hides inside Britain because England is also the dominant power within Britain.

A beautiful arrangement.

England can exercise power without having fully to name itself as the subject exercising it.

Westminster is British.

Whitehall is British.

The Army is British.

The Royal Navy is British.

The monarchy is British.

The nuclear deterrent is British.

Empire was British.

Yet the demographic and political centre around which these institutions developed was overwhelmingly English.

Britain therefore functions partly as England’s **ideal ego**.

England enlarged.

Provincial England dressed for dinner.

Britain gives England a global costume.

Without Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, England would hardly be poor or insignificant. It would remain a large European state.

But symbolically something enormous would disappear.

England has no Royal Navy of its own.

No separate Westminster.

No independent permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

No autonomous imperial history separate from Britain.

England without Britain looks strangely naked.

Not materially a rump, perhaps.

*Psychically a rump.*

A large European country suddenly required to recognise itself as one country among others.

No longer the centre of a world system.

Just England.

Perhaps that is why the Union Jack, Royal Navy, Churchill, D-Day and empire arrive so quickly when the southern coast is imagined as being under threat.

The threatened object is not simply territory.

It is *scale*.

There is something particularly delicious about using the language of invasion here.

For Welsh and Irish historical memory, and differently for Scots and Cornish people, the English have not always been the people behind the fence.

Frequently they were the people coming through it.

Then came a maritime empire built by people who became exceptionally accomplished at crossing other people’s seas.

And this is where D-Day becomes so useful symbolically.

In June 1944 thousands of Allied ships crossed the same Channel carrying an army towards Normandy.

It was an invasion.

A necessary invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.

But an invasion travelling *outwards* from Britain.

The Channel of national memory is a place from which heroic men depart.

The Channel of contemporary anxiety is a place from which unknown men arrive.

The arrows have reversed.

And suddenly the Royal Navy must restore the proper direction of history.

## Who owns England?

There is another awkward question.

If the man in the boat is coming to take *our country*, who exactly is the *our*?

The monarchy does not personally own most of Britain, as popular mythology sometimes has it.

The reality is both more prosaic and more peculiar.

The Crown Estate controls a vast commercial portfolio including urban property, rural land and much of the seabed. It is not the King’s ordinary private property and its profits go to the Treasury.

The Duchy of Lancaster provides land and assets associated with the sovereign.

The Duchy of Cornwall holds a substantial property portfolio for the heir to the throne.

The technical distinctions matter.

But so does the survival of the structure itself.

In England, ask who owns the ground beneath your feet and very quickly you travel backwards through corporations, aristocratic estates, duchies, Crown and conquest.

William the Conqueror understood land.

After 1066 much of the existing English elite was dispossessed and land redistributed among Norman followers. Domesday Book was, among other things, an extraordinary inventory of the resulting order: who held what, who had held it previously and what value could be extracted from it.

The invaders did rather well.

Almost a millennium later land ownership in England remains remarkably concentrated. The exact percentages are difficult to establish – ownership is itself surprisingly opaque – but aristocratic families, large estates, corporate owners, investment vehicles and institutions still control extraordinary quantities of the physical country.

And now the new aristocracy lives alongside the old.

Investment funds.

Developers.

Offshore companies.

Pension funds.

Multinational corporations.

Land banks.

A medieval technology of accumulation has learnt modern finance.

So whose soil are we defending?

England has been invaded, parcelled, inherited, enclosed, mortgaged, accumulated and sold for centuries.

Purity arrived late.

Even the monarchy performs a lovely little Symbolic operation.

The name *Windsor* sounds immemorial.

Stone walls.

English weather.

Oak trees.

Continuity.

Except the dynasty has only been called Windsor since 1917.

Before that it was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

George V changed the family name during the First World War, when sounding German had become politically inconvenient.

I am English.

And sometimes I am a little ashamed of it.

Not ashamed of tea, provincial towns, football, gardens, bad weather, pubs, understatement, or *mustn’t grumble*.

I love much of that England.

It is funny.

Local.

Self-deprecating.

Suspicious of pomposity.

A nation that likes to imagine itself as a collection of villages that somehow accidentally acquired a seat at every important table in the world.

But behind this provincial self-image stood one of history’s most ruthless imperial machines.

*Parochial at home. Imperial abroad.*

Tea on the lawn; Maxim guns somewhere else.

*Mustn’t grumble* in Surrey; regime change in Tehran.

For centuries Britain operated rather like an enormous aircraft carrier moored off the coast of Europe.

Looking outward.

Sending ships.

Taking ports.

Moving soldiers.

Administering people thousands of miles away.

And the genius of the arrangement was psychological as much as military.

The ordinary English person did not need to **feel imperial** while living at the centre of an imperial system.

Empire happened elsewhere.

The violence remained beyond the horizon.

The English Imaginary could remain small, domestic and innocent while British institutions performed the imperial work.

The boomerang

Aimé Césaire understood that colonial violence does not stay safely in the colony.

It returns.

Hannah Arendt saw something similar in the movement of imperial practices back into Europe. Foucault later described a colonial boomerang in techniques of domination.

Fanon takes us deeper.

Empire does not merely control territory.

It produces subjects.

It manufactures ideas about civilisation, race, authority, masculinity, language and normality.

It produces the colonised subject.

But it also produces the metropolitan subject who experiences himself not as historically constructed but simply as **normal**.

The Englishman.

The accent.

The institution.

The hierarchy.

The distinction between somebody who naturally belongs and somebody whose presence requires explanation.

Empire produced Farage.

Not by itself, obviously.

But the repertoire he uses – Navy, invasion, sovereignty, island, masculine protection, dangerous foreign males – comes from somewhere.

Empire produced me too.

It produced Cambridge and Oxford and Whitehall.

It helped create the global English language in which a Sudanese man can explain an asylum claim to a British official.

It produced the Royal Navy that Farage wants to send into the Channel.

It helped construct the routes and relationships along which people later travelled.

And it produced those magnificent red-faced Englishmen shouting at television screens that foreigners have suddenly appeared from nowhere.

The red-faced man is performing a contradiction inherited over generations.

He lives in a provincial country that once ran a global system.

He calls himself British when he needs the aircraft carrier and English when he needs the garden.

He invokes an imported dynasty as ancient continuity.

He stands on ground whose ownership records carry the sediment of earlier invasions and complains that invasion is foreign to English history.

He wants the Navy to restore a border which empire spent centuries crossing.

He looks across the Channel and sees somebody else’s history coming towards him.

What he cannot see is his own.

That is why facts alone struggle to defeat Farage.

Tell somebody that most small-boat arrivals claim asylum and he may respond that the asylum system itself is corrupt.

Tell him that many receive refugee status and that proves the judges are soft.

Reduce the crossings and the boats that remain may become even more intolerable.

The fantasy repairs itself.

Because the boat is not really carrying only its passengers.

It is carrying loss.

Loss of imperial scale.

Loss of confidence.

Loss of secure social position.

Declining public institutions.

Stagnant wages.

Housing shortages.

Brexit’s strangely unfulfilled promise that sovereignty would make Britain whole again.

And beneath all of those lies perhaps the most disturbing question.

*What is England?*

Not Britain.

England.

What holds it together when it cannot borrow Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, empire, Europe, Churchill, D-Day or the Royal Navy to enlarge itself?

What is England when nobody is invading it?

That question is much harder than stopping a dinghy.

Farage offers an answer.

*We are the people being invaded.*

Suddenly the lack has a cause.

The cause has a body.

The body can be deported.

The boat becomes the object around which the impossible desire for national completion circulates.

*Stop the boats and we will have our country back.*

Except the country being promised never existed.

The psychoanalytic response is therefore uncomfortable.

The stranger at the border is not entirely a stranger.

Empire created Farage.

It created me.

It created the institutions standing behind us.

And it helped create the historical world from which the person sitting in the dinghy emerged.

That does not give everyone an automatic right to enter Britain.

It does mean that nobody arrives from outside history.

Perhaps that is what makes the small boat so intolerable.

It carries history back across the water.

The Channel cannot wash it clean.