Public Affairs
Why did I want to write WHO ARE WE?
It was when I looked aghast at the way in which our politicians began to bait and berate China, after the May 2019 visit of Michael Pompeo, then US Secretary of State, to the UK that I began this book. Not that I have the remotest sympathy for the Chinese Communist Party, which, since 1949, has done so much damage to Chinese civilisation and the Chinese people. No, I was not thinking of China. It seemed to me that, in slagging off China, British politicians showed that they have a very confused conception of our country’s place in the world, are irresponsible in preferring personal grandstanding to thinking through our relationships with rising powers like China and are indifferent to the interests of their electors, the British commoners.
I had been wanting, after many busy years, to realise my early ambition of writing fiction, so was out of touch with mainstream political issues. I tried to beef up on those and, as you can see from my citations, did some reading. Conversations were even more useful, and I list in the book those of my interlocutors who also were kind enough to read bits of the emerging manuscript and comment. None necessarily agree with me.
I have taken a risk in foisting upon my readers a new name for the Offshore Islands, WISE. The reasons are twofold: my background is multicultural and I do not want to exclude one of my countries of origin, Ireland, from the discussions, even though my points about modern politics are based on Britain, from which Ireland is terminologically excluded.
My father, though born in the USA, was raised in Ireland and, in his passion for horses, fighting and pretty women, conformed to the stereotype of an Irish swashbuckler. His sister married at 19 to a stern Scot and lived most of her life in the Lowlands or Caithness. ‘I do not love the English’ she used to say, in the Dublin accent she used in private, ‘but I admire them’. It was not only she who showed me how to look at Britain from outside – from different cultures and from another era – but my mother’s mother who spoke Doric to her dying day. Grandmother, from Aberdeenshire, had been a nurse in WW1 and met and married the army medic in charge of the field hospital at the battle of the Somme. He, my maternal grandfather, was Ulster Scots. After WW1 he went into private medical practice.
Uncle Hassan, an Arab friend who took a five year old me to watch the Limassol carnival, told everybody with great pride that the little man on his shoulders was English. As a child I would boast that I was English, because the prestige of England was so high among the Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Italians and Germans with whom I played. When we moved to England, my grannie inspired me, by reading Scotland’s Story to me and having me sing Scots songs at the piano, to vaunt my Scottishness. In Scotland in my twenties I found that I was not really acceptably Scots, so I would say I was Irish. At the same time I served in a Scots army unit and found myself a student of the Scots language (the Mither tongue) and complicated multiculturalism of Scotland.
Why do I want to see WISE as one country, four systems, rather than be further broken up? The different traditions, the varied genes, have complemented each other over centuries; they need each other. England without the Irish would be dreich; Ireland without the Scots too passionate; Scots without Welsh poetry, dour. And now we have Asians, Africans and Eastern Europeans to enrich our lives yet further.
WHO ARE WE? then, is about WISE. Its past, its future.