Is Britain All That Special?

Robert Burns, the 18th-century Scottish poet, once wrote, “Oh, would some Power the gift give us / To see ourselves as others see us!” As he knew, there is a version of us that exists in our head and another—well, innumerable others—outside of it. The same can be said of countries. If you’ve never lived elsewhere, your view of your home country will never quite match up with foreigners’ impressions of it. Though jarring, it can be useful to compare these views, seeing where they meet and diverge, to better understand yourself and your nation.

What Everyone Knows About Britain* (*Except the British), Michael Peel, Monoray, 384 pp., £20, April 2024

This is, in essence, the thinking behind journalist Michael Peel’s new book, What Everyone Knows About Britain* (*Except the British). Born in England, Peel joined the Financial Times in 1996, and since then has reported from many corners of the world and lived in Belgium, Japan, Nigeria, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates.

When Peel returned to his home country at the end of 2023, a decade after he’d last lived there, he could scarcely recognize it. His new book was born out of this disconnect. It aims to point out the problems with modern Britain that modern Britons would rather ignore—or are finally beginning to come to terms with—from the country’s increasingly incompetent political class to the deterioration of key public services such as the National Health Service.

To Peel’s credit, it does all seem to have happened rather quickly, in a way that may have escaped many Britons but not those with one foot still on the outside. Still, the framing of his book occasionally feels flawed. What Everyone Knows About Britain is, more than anything, a book written about Britain by a British citizen. For all the distance the author thinks he has, his observations and complaints, though compelling, are often parochial and tainted by a sense of British exceptionalism that real outsiders may find quite amusing.

People stand among the destruction of a library in London damaged by a bombing in October 1940.Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

That remove, bittersweet as it may be, has its uses. I can now tell, for example, that French people really do value sitting down for proper meals more than most other countries, and they tend to talk about sex and death in popular culture more often than maybe anyone else. My Gallic brethren do not deserve their reputation as averse to showering, but as the stereotype goes, they really are somehow warm yet rude. It is also true that French people tend to moan and whine about anything and everything, even when things aren’t all that bad. I had not fully appreciated any of these things before moving away.

Similarly, Peel returned to Blighty and found it to be a nation in denial about its very nature and its place in the world. The story that took a grip in Britain goes like this: Once an imperial power ruling the waves, the United Kingdom was alone in standing against the Nazi invasion of Europe. It always punched above its weight, culturally and politically, and was a trusted ally to many nations. Now freed from the shackles of the European Union, it can once again lead where others follow, ignoring its status as a mid-size country in the Atlantic Ocean to become a respectable and respected world power.

Is any of it true? As Peel goes to some length to explain, not really. Take the Blitz, for example. It’s commonly believed that citizens, having been urged to “keep calm and carry on” by those iconic posters, stoically did just that. What happened instead, he writes, is that “people developed serious psychosomatic conditions, including involuntary soiling and wetting, persistent crying, uncontrollable shaking, headaches and chronic dizziness.” Oh, and the posters never actually made it to the public at the time.

Elsewhere, Peel reminds us that Winston Churchill, war hero that he may have been, could be a nasty character. When senior government minister Oliver Dowden said in 2022 that the former prime minister was “central to the Allied victory in a fight for survival against Nazi tyranny. Yet some seek to trash his whole reputation,” there was a lot he was leaving out. Churchill, among other things, once said that he hated people with “slit eyes and pig tails,” that Indians were “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans,” and that he “did not really think that black people were as capable or as efficient as white people.” As Peel notes, “It seems that a constituency in the U.K. still struggles to consider the man in full, capable of both extraordinary accomplishments and darker deeds.”

More broadly, Peel writes, the public tends to be wrong about many aspects of British society. He references, for instance, a 2016 poll by Ipsos, which found that Britons thought that 15 percent of the U.K. population was Muslim, when the actual figure was 4.8 percent. On average, they also believed that 15 percent were from the European Union, when only 5 percent were. On economic matters, Britons thought that the EU accounted for 30 percent of all foreign investment, instead of the real and considerably larger figure of 48 percent. Brits weren’t the only ones found to be poor assessors of the state of their nation, but considering those beliefs, it shouldn’t have been a shock that they voted for Brexit that same year.

A statue of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill defaced with the words “Was a racist” on its base in Parliament Square, central London, after a Black Lives Matter demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy on June 7, 2020.Isabel Infantes/AFP via Getty Images

Peel identifies the EU referendum as a catalyst for many of Britain’s worst impulses: its refusal to reckon with a changing world, its inflated ego, its optimism verging on insanity, and its assumption that things will always be fine. “Brexit campaigners thrived by creating misperceptions,” he writes—which, he quotes political scientist Will Jennings as saying, “worsened our inability to be truthful to ourselves.”

It isn’t an unreasonable point. The referendum was much more than a poll on the country’s EU membership. As “Leave” advocates campaigned for their side, they sought to offer satisfying answers to existential questions about Britain’s future: Where does Britain belong in the world? How should it be run? Who should be allowed to make a life there? Naturally, they promised the moon on a stick; the economy would become more robust than ever, with fewer immigrants than at any time in the 20th century. Quality of life was due to improve, as was the national mood. Brexit Britain would go on to live happily ever after.

These “sunlit uplands” promised by Brexit champion Boris Johnson and his ilk— pointedly reminiscent of the way Churchill spoke of the country’s future during World War II—never actually materialized. Several years on, few in the political mainstream seem truly ready to tell the people that they got conned.

As Peel writes, in post-Brexit Britain, trade with the EU is down, and trade deals with other countries haven’t filled that gap. The economy took a sharp hit and is yet to fully recover. Labor shortages have worsened as migration from Europe has slowed. Creative industries, from music to fashion, just aren’t what they used to be. As a result, he argues, British politics today rests on uneasy foundations and cannot truly look to the future, seeing as it will not be honest about its recent past.

It is worth questioning, however, if Brexit really did singlehandedly change everything. Peel frequently takes potshots at Britain’s often unserious political culture, but it isn’t clear that it was ever truly different. As he mentions himself, English comedian Peter Cook once spoke of a country “sinking giggling into the sea” as its public life was simply too frivolous. This wasn’t in 2016, but in the 1960s. Surely this at least partially contradicts Peel’s thesis that the past decade or so has seen Britain overindulge in self-delusion.

Similarly, deep angst about Britain’s place in the world settled into the national consciousness at the end of the empire, more than half a century ago. It is possible, even probable, that the country’s political and economic woes have worsened recently, especially in the eyes of foreigners who have been able to observe the gradual decline from a distance. That doesn’t mean it isn’t the natural conclusion of decades of British political culture.

Indeed, many of Brexiters’ arguments in 2016 were made by their fellow travelers in the 1990s as debates about the Maastricht Treaty, which created the EU, were raging on. That decade saw innumerable screeds on the topic of sovereignty, based on fears (unfounded then and now) that the EU would eventually turn into a superstate and deprive countries of their identities. Those campaigners were a fringe then, but they kept hacking at it until they reached the mainstream. And as Peel does point out, a number of those campaigners either grew up away from Britain or spent large stretches of time abroad. This helped them build a different, idealized version of Britain in their heads, which they believed they could return to.

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In the epilogue, Peel notes that “the country needs to understand itself more deeply” if it wants to secure a successful future. This is both correct and a statement that ought to be true about every single nation on earth. What Everyone Knows About Britain does deliver some home truths to Britain—namely, that the world has changed, and the country’s ambitions must become humbler—but it cannot escape from the notion, hiding in plain sight, that the country really is unique in its qualities and flaws. If Brexiteers who have grandiose illusions about their nation are one side of the coin, then Peel, with his assumption that Britain’s politicians are especially cynical and its citizens especially misinformed, is the other.

Peel’s book, as a result, is an interesting read but an occasionally frustrating one. The United Kingdom isn’t alone in struggling with global political realignments, economic crises, social cleavages, and a deep sense of uncertainty about what lies ahead. Britons are also hardly the exception when it comes to an inflated sense of national pride, a conveniently distorted view of history, and an unwillingness to own up to past and current misdeeds. From where this French-Moroccan journalist is standing, it’s essentially the norm.

That is probably what everyone knows about Britain (*except the British, Peel included). Guys, you’re just not that special.