Review: What Everyone Knows About Britain, by Michael Peel

Description

How do you see Britain?

That might depend on your point of view, and as long time British foreign correspondent, Michael Peel has come to understand, it can look very different from outside. It’s tempting to think of the UK as a fundamentally stable and successful nation. But events of the past few years, from Brexit to exposés of imperial history, have begun to spark fierce public debates about whether that is true. Is Britain, just a marginal northern European island nation, marked by injustices, corruption and with a bloody history of
slavery, repression and looting?

And yet UK politics, media, and public opinion live constantly in the shadow of old myths, Second World War era nostalgia, and a belief in supposedly core British values of tolerance, decency and fair play. British politicians regularly exploit a damaging complacency that holds that everything will turn out okay, because, in Britain, it always does.

In WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT BRITAIN, Michael Peel digs into the national consciousness with the perspective of distance to pull apart the ways in which we British have become unmoored from crucial truths about ourselves. He shows us that from many perspectives we are no different from other countries whose own national delusions have seen them succumb to abuses of power, increased poverty and divisive conflict.
The battle over Britain’s narrative is the struggle for its future and its place in the world.

So, how do we escape the trick mirror – and see ourselves as we really are?

My Review

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book and to Anne for organising this blog tour. I also bought myself the audiobook to listen to while I was out and about. I played it at 1.35x speed because the narrator was so slow.

In eight chapters Peel covers:

• the image Britain has of itself and the reality,
• nostalgia in politics and daily life,
• monarchy,
• prophecies of the future, both from the past and present,
• financial matters, particularly the North Sea oil revenues,
• the Imperial project and its consequences in the modern age,
• trade and diplomatic relations with the rest of the world, particularly South East Asia and its potential for major problems if we get dragged into something too big for us to get out of (some sort of South China Sea clash)
• A rather positive view of the path forward

An outside view is always a useful thing to have on a complex situation, and the outside view given by someone who was once on the inside, and has experience of many other cultures and critical thinking skills, is even more useful. Peel returned to Britain after many years living and reporting from different parts of the world. What he found was a country very different from the one he left. So he set about talking to experts to work out what is going on. I enjoy this sort of analysis; it draws on actual data and expertise, interviewing many people from other countries who have experience in dealing with Britain or people from Britain working in other countries, to understand the state of the United Kingdom in 2024 and its place in the modern world.

The essential message I got from this book is that the world has changed and we need to change with it. Britain isn’t an Imperial state anymore, but a middle ranking nation who really doesn’t have the reach and power it thinks it does, but who also still has a lot of soft influence and friends in the world, we just need to stop being idiots about it. Peel identifies the shift in the world from an Atlantic-European to the Asian-Pacific focus, and since the fall of European empires and former colonies taking control of themselves, newer powers have risen and we need to respect them.

The actions of the Conservative government since 2010 have made the shift into the modern world harder, first by focusing on Brexit and then by lying about the negligible impacts of newer or proposed trade agreements, especially when compared with trade with our European neighbours. The Conservatives used nostalgia and the twisted mirror of our self-image (and many, many lies) to drag us into a hard-Brexit, and now it’s obviously a failure, they’re too afraid to admit it was a fuck up, that extremist factions in the Tory Party are dragging them further right, and that we need to rethink the whole thing in light of limited trade with other states. The Labour Party aren’t much better, trying to ‘out-Tory the Tories’ in their fiscal policies and not challenging the draconian policies of the current government.

I enjoyed the interviews with former diplomats and experts in trade, the insights into the complex relationships we have with the rest of the world. I learnt about the Alliance of South East Asian Nations, and the varying governments in that part of the world. I did not know we had a Gurkha division in Brunei! It brought up some questions for me. What happens if there’s a pro-democracy rebellion against the Sultan? Are we going to be dragged into it? Or a wider conflict in SE Asia? Don’t we have better things to spend our money on that two huge aircraft carriers, that we have to borrow aircraft and support craft from other nations in order to use and maintain? What if a visit by one of those carriers triggers an incident?

Refocusing on the reality of our place in the world, as a relatively wealthy nation with terrible internal inequalities, and focusing on looking at what we actually have and where we want to go, not what we once had or wish we had, not the fantasy of ourselves or our future path, should be the national project, especially in an election year. Politicians need to stop arguing over minor cosmetic changes and think about long term improvements to people’s lives and decreasing inequality.

I enjoyed the writing style of the author, conversational, informative and well-sourced. I highly recommend it for a sensible look at the current situation in Britain today.

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Author Biography

Michael Peel first joined the Financial Times in 1997. Since then, he has been a foreign correspondent posted in West Africa, the Middle East, South-East Asia, and Europe. Peel’s work has won awards, including from the UK Foreign Press Association and the US Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. He has also written for many other publications including the London Review of Books and TLS. He has appeared on the BBC, Sky and other broadcast media.

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