Sunday West 45

Thanks for your support in 2023

Merry Christmas everyone, and a Happy New Year. Thank you so much for supporting the substack in 2023, and for recommending it to friends. If you’re interested, I also have a book – or at least a recent UK edition – to plug.

Since the last newsletter, I’ve written about Palestinian Christians, and how the east v west narrative in the Holy Land is a bit more complicated.

I published a how to write a substack guide, for anyone interested.

I wrote about volcanoes, and how they influence human history.

On the BBC documentary Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland.

On What the Italians did for us.

On American eugenics.

And finally, on Bradford, J.B. Priestley, and British trains.

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Elsewhere, Post-liberal Pete on Diego Maradona, street football and the changing nature of childhood.

It is important to stress that the decline of street football — outside of its last bastions in the cage football scene of South London, the Ballon Sur Bitome of the Banlieueus in Ile-De-France and the Pelada of the Brazilian favelas — is only partially attributable to the rise of the modern-day football youth academy system. The decline of street football also reflects the trajectory of child-socialisation in general. According to some estimates, ‘child-based exploratory play has declined. In the United Kingdom, research has found that children today play outside on average slightly more than 4 hours per week, compared to 8.2 hours for their parents' generation.’ According to an article published in 2016 by The Guardian, three-quarters of UK children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates…

Wayne Rooney, who you could argue was the last great English street-footballer of the classic type (i.e as pugnacious as he was skilful,) has spoken, in the 2022 Amazon documentary about his life, about the differences between his childhood (he was born in 1985) and that of his sons (he has four sons, the eldest of which was born in 2009.) Rooney notes, in particular, that when he was a pre-teen, he would usually be found outside in the street playing football, unlike his sons, who would be more likely to be found inside the house playing computer games. In a previous Wayne Rooney documentary, made in 2015 by the BBC, you get a glimpse into that street footballer childhood when he recalls how he celebrated scoring his first goal for Everton, when aged 16, that is, by returning to his local area of Croxteth in Liverpool to play football on the streets with his friends, something that would be harder to imagine the current crop of elite young footballers doing, given the extent to which they are now protected. 

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Fred Skulthorp on Twee Britannia

The triumph of Twee Britannia, however, is built upon a dark truth. Beneath the surface of Keep Calm and Carry on Posters is a nation in the grips of a far more severe existential crisis. Popular culture is dead. Big name comedians, television events, even national treasures are a thing of the past. We are a nation of Only Fans, viral Tik Toks and Instagram influencers. Streaming and big tech have torn apart the strange glue that light entertainment and popular culture had on British identity in the second half of the 20th century. Now we live in an atomised culture, oscillating between a cerebral curation of personal interests, nostalgia and the viral indulgence of the downright inane.

For those still left in the increasingly exclusive business of asserting a popular national culture, the burden has never been felt greater. Through the old sources of influence — bestselling books, state funded films and terrestrial television programmes — they have found themselves trapped in the false allure of twee Britannia. There is after all nowhere left to turn. The future holds misery and horrors. The past, beyond 1997, a murky cavalcade of paedophiles, racism, sexism and year zero evil politicians. The present, a minefield of culture war faux pas and cancellations. No surprise, then, that the nation has embraced an ahistorical, unmoored aesthetic of Britain trying to reassert its inherent twee above all this nastiness. Beyond all the discord of Brexit fallout and culture wars, there is a society that increasingly defines itself purely by awkward moments, baking, creative swearing, fake nostalgia and cups of tea.

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On a similar note, Gareth Roberts on insane sensible centrists.

Centrism is the wrong term for this blight. It conjures up images of quiet background competence. But this is not the case with these people. They aren’t responsible, ordinary, sensible or anywhere near the centre. They are all mental. The things they believe in are bonkers. They seem reasonable only because they are well-spoken and dress boringly, seasonal knitwear excepted.

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And on a lighter subject - 66 good news stories from the year.

Egypt became the first country to eliminate hepatitis C, (which is crazy given that it used to have the highest burden in the world), the Maldives became the first country to eliminate leprosy, Bangladesh became the first country to eliminate black fever, and also eliminated elephantiasis, Niger became the first African country to eliminate river blindness, Benin, Mali and Iraq eliminated trachoma, Timor-Leste, Bhutan, and North Korea eliminated rubella, Ghana eliminated sleeping sickness, and Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Belize eliminated malaria.

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What is Switzerland? A fascinating post in the Pimlico Journal.

By this point, you may have noticed that all the various names you have encountered are German names. Where’s Geneva? Where are the Italians? The Rumansch? There is a simple reason for this. For most of Swiss history, Switzerland was not a bilingual or trilingual union. It was an essentially German confederation. Switzerland’s most basic national myths – the battles of Morgarten and Sempach, the oath on the Rütli, Wilhelm Tell – all involve its foundational German cantons and their German-speaking citizens.

There was no equality for French-speaking Swiss until 1798. In bilingual areas like Fribourg, German was the official language. The Canton of Vaud, which contains Lausanne, was for most of its history a subject of (German) Bern. Geneva, while a longtime ally of the Swiss Confederation, was an independent Calvinist city-state, only joining Switzerland in 1815 after being assigned to it in the Congress of Vienna.

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Christopher Caldwell on Germany.

What is clear is the direction Europe wishes to go. Today Denmark, where financial support for asylum seekers is negligible and where it takes an average of 19 years for a migrant to become a citizen, gets about 2,000 asylum applications in an average year. Germany is expected to get 400,000 by the end of 2023. Denmark is the country on which virtually all European governments have announced they wish to pattern their policies. Germany is the country whose example other countries most wish to avoid.

The last two defenders of the German way gave it up at the end of September. One was Sweden, which in 2015 had been the most enthusiastic backer of Merkel’s Willkommenskultur and wound up taking Middle Eastern refugees in the hundreds of thousands. In the years since, the Pew Research Center has predicted that, by the year 2050, should it receive a moderate amount of immigration, Sweden will be 20% Muslim. Should it receive high immigration, it will be 30% Muslim. In late September, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson requested the help of Sweden’s army in quelling violence in the country’s housing projects that is largely due to immigrant gangs.

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In the Critic, Will Solfiac on the big issue with the Big Issue.

The Big Issue’s founder John Bird has a great quote in a 2010 interview: “I’d love to be a liberal because they’re the nice people but it’s really hard work — I can’t swallow their gullibility and I think their ideas are stupid.” I think you can see this original clear-eyed sentiment in the way the Big Issue was originally designed, and in the way the magazine currently works you can see how this sentiment has been lost.

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I asked the general public whether Twitter was getting worse or better, and once again we ended up with the cursed ratio. I’m in two minds; community notes is a great addition, and would have been hugely influential during the BLM years, while Elon has definitely reduced some of the bias which manifested itself in users getting suspended for stating basic facts. On the other hand, it does seem to be getting nastier, and in fairness most of that seems to come from the Right; I don’t know what can really be done about this and suspect it will get worse, but people tell me I have a tendency towards pessimism.

Anyway, thanks for subscribing, and have a fantastic New Year!