The myth of a silenced English majority betrayed by a liberal metropolitan elite goes back decades
- Patrick Wright is the author of The Village That Died for England: Tyneham and the Legend of Churchill’s Pledge
Like some of the emeritus professors who have recently steamed into the Conservative party’s “anti-woke” campaign under the name of History Reclaimed, I grew up in a less fractured country, in which, stately occasions apart, waving union jacks seemed largely left to the National Front.
In English classrooms, we were encouraged to be more moved by the famous list of “characteristic fragments” that George Orwell pulled together in the first months of the second world war, as he searched for a unifying “pattern” in the diversity of English life. He wrote of old maids biking to communion through autumn mists and the clatter of clogs in a Lancashire mill town.