Karen Hewitt - Understanding Britain Today

Mobile phones are used by the young (and not so young) in Britain all the time without embarrassment. The decision that a mobile phone user has to make is: 'Do I decide to allow incoming calls to interrupt me or do I switch my phone off?' That question is absolutely different from the one I have tried to analyse as typical of English social responses: 'If I phone I might interrupt someone who might not want to hear me at this moment - so should I do it? And should I impose my conversation on others who cannot help hearing me?' In both cases our culture used to teach us to say 'Probably not', but such obligations are no longer relevant for the young, even those who are naturally polite.

Furthermore, although our privacy is recognized in law, our own commitment to it has been seriously challenged. British people used to think of 'the-right-not-to-tell-the-authorities-about-our-private-lives' as an essential part of British civilization. We do not carry around internal passports or identity cards, we can move freely in our own country, and no policeman or other official has the right to demand personal information from us - so we are free! This was always a great claim of the British when we looked round at other countries in the world.

The situation has changed because of modern technology. Sophisticated computer programmes mean that many databases exist which will provide any enquirer with our names, addresses, and often details which we would prefer not to be public. That is a situation shared by the population of the world. What is odd is that the British have enthusiastically adopted CCTV cameras all over the country, more per head of the population than in any other country. The cameras are certainly helpful in capturing criminals, but at the same time they mean that it is possible to trace the movements of almost anyone at any time in an urban environment. Perhaps such surveillance does not matter although it worries many libertarians (people who consider that the freedom of the individual is the most valuable quality in society, more important than 'solidarity', 'authority', etc). The oddity is that our willing acceptance of CCTV cameras does not fit with our other enthusiasm for privacy and the right of the individual not to disclose information. So perhaps our culture of social behaviour is changing radically.

If you ask the English themselves what they think are typical 'English' values, they will talk, with some hesitation and embarrassment, about tolerance and fairness. These are helpful concepts. Indeed the notion of 'tolerance' shows an intriguing cultural development. I explained in previous paragraphs how our insistence that we must not impose on others leads to our willingness to accept oddities and eccentricities. When we began to receive immigrants in large numbers from different parts of the world, we complained, as people do everywhere, of the unpleasant smells of their food, of their their discordant parties, their unEnglish habits. But because of our culture of toleration, it was much easier to accustom ourselves to these oddities than it would have been in some more conformist cultures. We could not think of any reason why they should not have their own food or parties or strange habits. So we could not protest with the weight of culture behind us, as perhaps that the people of that small country mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, would have done.

(Do not think that everyone quickly learnt to be tolerant. Immigrants, as I have said elsewhere, have suffered and continue to suffer abuse and violence. But by international standards we have accepted and assimilated them quite successfully, and now enjoy those food smells, that music, those now-English habits.)

The other quality on which we pride ourselves is our desire to be fair. Throughout this book I have tried to show how fairness is embodied in our institutions. For example our decisions about financing universities, our attitude to health rationing, our worries about the presumed innocence of defendants are based on issues of fairness. Governments always justify policies by saying they are trying to be fair. (Their decisions may turn out to be very unfair or confused. My point is that in public and in private we try to be fair. Yes, people now jump queues who used not to do so - but they are resented and subject to public disapproval; the majority of people still accept that queuing is fair.)

Fairness is a value which sees individuals in their relationship to other individuals in society. It does not encourage people to think alike, nor does it encourage each individual to assert himself or herself. Instead it goes along with that sense that other people have a right to their own lives, to be themselves.

'A right to our own lives.' 'The importance of evidence and examples.' A society which values fairness.' We keep circling round these notions which are not notions to which Russians instantly turn. (In providing the context in which we think about freedom, such notions are also very un-American.) Critics of the English say that our attitude can more accurately be expressed as 'you are free to go your way and I am free to go mine'. Is that a celebration of tolerance or a casual kick into loneliness? Foreigners in England can find themselves very bewildered and forlorn because people leave them alone. You, as a foreigner, want to hold out your hand and find another friendly hand to hold; but the other hand is not there, its owner is too tolerant, too private to come and search for you.

So, if you are a Russian in England, what do you do, if you want to pierce through the emotional silence that seems to confront you? Unless you know them already, approaching individuals does not work very well for all the reasons outlined above. But if you read Part 6, Chapter 2, and then look for groups, associations, classes, campaigns which might interest you, you will quickly find the other side of the English - the lively, liberated, enthusiastic, slightly crazy side to English life.

You will be exasperated by the unofficial way of approaching important matters without taking any notice of any authority. You will not understand how we can be so ridiculously emotional about some sudden group idea, nor how we can make it work in practice without turning it into a grand scheme. But you will make friends. Within groups it is easy to make friends because you have something in common to talk about; no-one needs to worry about 'imposing' on someone who may not be interested. Outside the group you will still encounter reserve at first; but group social events will soon change that. Friends, even the English, open their homes to other friends, and people with shared interests are the best kind of friends. You might even begin to get some glimmerings of our sense of humour.

The English are notoriously slow to get involved in serious conversations. But once they have started, you will find their talk very difficult to follow. Serious analysis of a problem or a detailed account of personal life is always filtered through humorous, self-deprecating irony. Such irony is utterly confusing for foreigners; we share a distinctive sense of the absurdity of life which simply does not seem funny to most people. The 'English jokes' which appear in Russian textbooks are meaningless, banal or incomprehensible for us. English humour is not a matter of jokes or anecdotes, but a way of looking at the world and undermining its threats and cruelty through our self-mocking sentence constructions that come as naturally as talking itself.

(Russians have something similar, but it works in a different way, and, as with English, it is deeply rooted in the possibilities of the Russian language. Still, it must be said that there is much which the English believe they can recognise in Russian literature. They may be wrong, but they do laugh.)