To cringe at the phrase "England isn't England anymore"

[Sounddofsilence]

Said by a friend.

Another one sounded off about Easter Eggs now being called Chocolate Eggs so not to offend people because it was on the news!

Argh!

The thing that always struck me talking to my FIL (born 1909) is what a resilient person he must have been to have lived through all the changes and still retain the same bright-eyed and (mainly) non-judgmental interest in life. This was a man who could remember the time before WW1. And still did not seem out of place in the 1990's. I hope I grow up like him.

This what I think of my mum born in 1923. Apart from the WWI bit, though she talked about her dad

Re the Cadbury Easter egg scandal:

Seeyounearerthetime Kids now even go to "Proms" and not the school discos of old.
I'm 31 this year and I went to a prom. In a limo too! And proms had been happening for years at our school...

ghosty Growth of divide between rich and poor - yes because in 1970 we where loaded! except we wheren't
The divide between rich and poor has grown massively since the 1970s. That is a fact. Just because you personally may be/feel better off doesn't mean everyone is.

Also, various social problems are linked to high inequality, rather than whether people are rich or poor overall.

I went on holiday to Berwick-on-Tweed with my best friend and her parents in 1977. My mum told me to behave myself and gave me lots of spending money with strict instructions to treat my friend.

On the first day we rose at the crack of dawn to set off in their car. At about 9am we stopped at a service station for breakfast.The programme Happy Days with The Fonz was really popular and I was thrilled to be able to order coffee and doughnuts, which was glamorously American. My friend wanted them too but shook her head when I offered to buy them for her.

I learned why. Her dad kept going on about common things and Americanisation and people who allow their children to eat junk and watch too much TV. Miserable fucking bastard.

It didn't get better. That was the worst holiday of my life.

England is still England. It's changed. But it always changed. 1950s England was not the same as 1850s England. Which was not the same as 1750s England. And on and on and on. Everything changes and always has!

Not sure of your point Ghosty?

Are you simply elaborating that change is the only constant?

My Dad went to a high school & he's 60 next month & had a ball at the end of year 5 (now year 11), DH had a prom at the same High School & he's 33. My year had one too but I went to college a year early reprobate that I am.

Of course England has changed though, it's ever evolving. If Dickens or Shakespeare were suddenly to appear now (or in each others lifetimes) they wouldn't recognise the country, that doesn't make it bad.

"There are still areas of london which have the traditional feel like hampstead, muswell hill and some parts of hackney/islington"

Sides are aching at this comment, the traditional feel is entirely faked in these areas.

The UK is and always has been a melting pot. This isn't England anynmore if everything remained the same it would be Angleland, and we'd speak old English.

My great grandmother was born in 1887 - I remember talking to her about what it was like to see the first plane, computer, tv, fax, mobile phone etc. She embraced life's changes and all of the technologies which arrived during her lifetime - she died when she was 103 (and I was about 16), still loving life, still learning - and most importantly, interested in and by people. I hope I'm like her when I'm 103 - open to ideas and change. Yes the world has changed, some things for the better, some maybe not so much - but 'twas ever thus, and will be for evermore!

Think about women's lib and what a shock that must have been to the older generation.

And when the lower classes stopped doffing their caps and bobbing curtseys.

The use of first names.

The coming of electricity. The spread of literacy. The abolition of the corset. Trousers for women. No more top hats. (I actually have two top hats sitting on the desk as I type but I notice dh doesn't seem to wear them).

This is one of the things I really enjoy about Downton Abbey (all right, I may just have a full collection of the box set sitting around somewhere....): the sheer physicality of the changes. That image of telegraph wires going over Bates' head as he sits in the train in the opening scene. The snazzy hat worn by Thomas at the fair at the end of series 3 (which presumably gets the shit beaten out of it at the same time as its owner). The change in the women's clothing. Mrs Hughes' electric toaster which has Mr Carson and the hall boy galloping up with fire buckets. And how you see how after a few years the changes that caused such an upheaval are just taken for granted (is that a wireless you see in the Servants' Hall by the last series?)

Human beings are made to cope with change. But unfortunately also sensitive to being whipped up by demagogues.

at cory.

Surely 'England isn't England any more' is rude because it implies the speaker has the right to define what 'England' means for everyone else?

England is different from how it was years ago, obviously. But I dislike the idea that someone can claim exclusive rights to define my country and my culture for me and everyone else. I've heard this sort of phrasing from people complaining about Asian 'immigrant' families round where I grew up ... families who have been there several generations now, and formed the 'England' I grew up in! Bloody cheek.

They sell Easter eggs in Jeddah. I have just been there for work and I am a girl. You shouldn't read everything the mail says and believe it.

JeanneDeMontbaston

"Surely 'England isn't England any more' is rude because it implies the speaker has the right to define what 'England' means for everyone else?"

This

I've always understood the appropriate response to "England isn't England anymore" to be "Well, where is it then?"

"Surely 'England isn't England any more' is rude because it implies the speaker has the right to define what 'England' means for everyone else?"

Yes.

It's brainless rhetoric. See also 'British way of life', 'British values' and 'indigenous British people'.

I think this about myself all the time: Who is it who answers when someone calls "Cat"?

I've changed so much - at a biological level, I've grown fat, aged, the cells in my body have changed enormously; my personality has changed - would child-cat even recognise me as a friend, let alone the same self?

Likewise, I guess, "England".

Change and identity are tricky old things, aren't they?

I guess the people who say this are mourning something they think has been lost and objecting to something they see in the present. I suspect you have a good idea what that might be.

For myself, I rather miss the decline of social mobility and a belief in the value of public goods.

I suspect that people who use this phrase don't tend to mean to mark the passing of this. I wonder why people like me don't grab hold of the name "England" and try and seize its meaning a bit more.

Actually, there's also a debate to be had as to whether nostalgia is always reactionary, I suppose. Is embracing change always a progressive/optimisitic state of mind? Is there a value in certain forms of nostaligia? Is nostalgia ever able to be progressive and even revolutionary?

It's interesting how many "English" (why not British? ) progressive movements are deeply nostalgic (eg. William Morris' somewhat doomed medievally inflected socialism) or seek to authenticate their truth in a notion of the past.

I doubt the people to whom the OP is referring have any of this in mind - and that's kind of odd, really.

I'm going to go off and ponder this a bit today. So thanks, OP, for posting a strange little conundrum for a blowy Easter Monday.

Really interesting musings, cat. On the 'progressive nostalgia' issue, perhaps we find it easier to look back to something that's already happened, rather than imagining from scratch a whole new world?

Now I'm pondering too, cat!

I wonder if nostalgia being reactionary is also a culturally specific thing? Maybe English people 'do' nostalgia differently from Greeks or Italians or whoever?

Interesting points. As cat says, there are plenty of examples of progressive nostalgia in this country. And it could even be debated whether the current brand of Conservatism is actually all that reactionary, or conservative.

I think politicians, like religious innovators, do have a basic understanding of human psychology and its inherent fear of change: you cannot sell an idea of any kind by claiming that this is new and untested. So you assure your potential converts that this is a return to traditional British values, or pure Apostolic Christianity, or the matriarchy of hunter-gathering times.

I don't think that is specifically British: it says something fundamental about human nature.

"And it could even be debated whether the current brand of Conservatism is actually all that reactionary, or conservative."

OnlyLovers I'm going to confess how old I am now. I was terribly into French feminism when I was younger, and I liked the French femisnist (Irigaray?) who put forward an idea of a feminism that espoused a purely progressive, non-nostaligic politics: "The right to say that feminism says 'Not this; not yet.," - or something like that!

I thought that was so progressive when I was younger! But now I wonder if that doesn't just place you in the trap Cory alludes to: of not recognising the revolutionary, very non-conservative nature of (some) reactionary politics.

Things have changed.massively since I was a child in the 70's. Of course there have been many changes for the better.
However there have been many.changes that are not.
Political correctness has gone mental.

Religious terrorism is a massive threat which will surely only get worse.
Living/working in a big city is mostly shit compared to.when I started work in the 80's.
Walking through my home city now you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Saudi Arabia.

I fear for my kids. I hope they at least go and live somewhere either massively rural if they dont get out of the UK.

carmen, could you clarify/expand on some of your points?

• what do you mean, specifically, by 'political correctness'?
• do you know how big, compared to threats like being in, say, a traffic accident, the threat of 'religious terrorism' is?
• can you be more specific on how/why 'living/working in a big city is mostly shit'?
• how do you mean 'you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Saudi Arabia'? And can you explain how and why that's a problem?