BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

cultural heroes in the manner of Goethe and Schiller, thus excusing a traditional benign neglect
of Shakespeare, and he gloried in English freedom from laws restricting rug beating or car
washing to certain days and hours as in Germany. 5 Along with this triumph of individualism
over holism, Paxman offered explanations for English self-stereotyping which would certainly fit
foreign accusations of cant, or hypocrisy. English ruralism countered the very real grime of
coalfields and factories, domesticity refuted the fact of authoritarian imperialism and the image
of John Bull presented the diplomatic face of an honest, no-nonsense merchant/trader while
public school-bred aristocrats actually ran the empire. 6
If Paxman presented a light-hearted view of Englishness, consistent with centuries-old
British stereotypes, other writers dwelt on a sometimes gloomy English separatism. Simon
Heffer felt England had been betrayed by a “political class” in having to passively endure the
devolutionary, and economically suicidal, ambitions of Wales and Scotland, and he decried the
blind sentimentality of fellow Conservatives who held on to the nostalgic fiction of union. 7
Referring to the English as a Christian and monarchist people, and to nationalism as a “potent,
visceral force,” Heffer called for a “conscious atavism” in rebuilding English identity. 8 For
Heffer, the European Union “Superstate,” even if socialistic and counter to the English spirit,
would actually liberate England economically, culturally and politically through greater
5 Ibid., 131, 138, 192-93, 260-61.
6 Ibid., 183.
7 Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1999), 3, 51, 81-83, 86, 110.
8 Ibid., 17, 41, 127.
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