Opinion: Cameron Can't Solve England's Identity Crisis

(May 13) -- I was at Oxford University at the same time as Britain's new prime minister. But while I spent all my free time at a famous old pub opposite the historic Bodleian Library with a pint of Guinness in the company of some old Irish porters, I never saw David Cameron there. Which makes me doubt his suitability for office.

That's not because I think the prime minister should be overfond of alcohol (at Oxford, Cameron was a member of a very upper-crust private drinking club famed for smashing places up). Rather, it's because Cameron is the wrong man to unite the pub-drinkers and the rowdy aristocrats -- and all the other splinters of a society still shattered by Margaret Thatcher's destruction of the old identity of Empire.

The coalition Cameron will lead reflects an identity crisis among the English that has developed in the two decades since Thatcher's reign. It's much deeper than mere political divisions, and I don't think he's equipped to resolve it.

Here's why: Cameron casts himself as a Tony Blair-style modernizer of his Colonel Blimp Conservative Party. Well, a Blair type would've found a way to be at the pub and at the aristocratic social club all on the same night. Though in the end Blair merely papered over the cracks in the English identity with his "Cool Britannia" hype, Cameron lacks even that much chameleon charisma. He represents the insider politics rejected by the British people at this election. This is a man, after all, who worked for a Conservative member of Parliament who was also his godfather and also for an old Empire trading company in Hong Kong.

Even if he does want to modernize, it'll take an unthinkable shift in the Conservative Party for him to do what the majority of voters want: to change the entire political system, including the method by which votes count and Parliaments are formed.

Look at a map of Britain's election results. You'll see the cities and Wales colored red for Labor. Scotland is orange for the Liberal Democrats. England outside the cities is uniformly blue for the Conservatives. That means Cameron's vote is suburban and rural. When you think of political change, do you think of the suburbs and the countryside?

The whole point of being Conservative, of course, is not to disturb the way things are. The Conservatives are still getting over the revolution they unwittingly wrought under Margaret Thatcher.

She wanted to turn Britain into the quaint village-oriented community she imagined had existed in the 1950s. She ended up creating a proto-United States free market in which people obsess about their real estate values and gossip in an almost paranoid fashion about their fears that their overstimulated children might be left behind unless they claw their way into a better school.

Unlike Wales, Scotland and Ireland, England essentially has no unifying identity. For years now, pundits have been pointing out the erosion in the bonds between the English, even as the old regional and class distinctions wore away. After Thatcher, it became -- as Cameron said on taking office -- a place of unadulterated selfishness and entitlement, which showed up in rising personal debt and government spending. Not so long ago, a noted British journalist wrote that "the only thing we can say is truly English is the business suit."

The country that gave us Shakespeare shouldn't have an identity crisis, but that's how it is. Even parliamentary democracy, which the English used to be proud to have given the world, was tainted last year when it emerged that hundreds of legislators were bilking the taxpayer for exorbitant expenses. Turns out, the Parliament was too corrupt to take pride in.

With no clear vote for Cameron, or for the Europe-boosting Nick Clegg, or the old-fashioned, stern-faced Gordon Brown, this election is an absolute reflection of that English confusion about what we stand for.

A measure of the problem: Soccer player David Beckham is the nearest thing to a uniformly popular English icon -- a metrosexual fashion plate who plays in Italy and Los Angeles, and whose skinny wife seems to prefer to become American. With all his talk of modernization, Cameron isn't ready to create a new English identity that might shove out the Beckhams.

It's a shame, because a soccer star wearing a sarong to a fashion show doesn't represent a culture I want any part of.

Born in Wales, Matt Beynon Rees now lives in Jerusalem. He is a former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine, and the author of an award-winning series of crime novels, published in 22 countries. Read his blog on Red Room.


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