Background
(This is based on pieces written for The Independent in the mid-90s)
The British are reserved, class-ridden and orderly, says the cliche. Utterly wrong, says RDN. In fact, we are expressive eccentrics, markedly free of an Establishment. And we are born anarchists. We are presently convulsed with the problem of whether to become civilised and successful, like the continentals. But we are not at all sure we want to let go centuries of mild devotion to the absence of anything like a grand idea, anything like a serious ambition at all.

The British are the most free people in the world. Now we are also rich, we face losing what we love most, an easy-going life with a dash of hooliganism. We may need to become civilised. Yet the more obvious effect of our affluence is a new nastiness.

(1) Our peculiar national psyche: the first post-peasant society
An Englishman's home is not his castle, it is his country estate. Historically, our immediate surroundings have most commonly been small houses with small gardens in small and scattered hamlets. The family house - or cottage - has always been our ideal, and it breeds that attitude of live and let live which flows from not living hugger-mugger in cities. Englishmen of every class and generation have expressed increasing good fortune by building or buying a bigger house with a bigger garden, in an estate, or better still comprising a complete estate, in the country.
Few people aspired to be urbanites in Britain. Until recently, London was a place to which sensible people went to run the country when Parliament sat, conduct business, meet a mate, conduct an affair, returning as soon as they could to rural life. The intellectuals and the ambitious might need the cities, but the rest of us thought them misguided in what they did in life and benighted in where they had to live it. London, the first city in the world which was allowed and encouraged to sprawl (it's been at it since the seventeenth century) was once the only really big urban area in Britain. Even it was a series of swamped villages infilled with terraces and gardens.
This history is still being written: about half the new home building in France, Germany, and Italy is in apartment form, and about a quarter of Dutch buildings are: the best estimate for the United Kingdom is that about 15 percent are. In Britain, less than twenty percent of people live in flats or over the shop, the rest live in the detached, semi-detached or terraced houses which the French are only now beginning to emulate with a sensible craze for the jardin anglais.

Just as we don't have city-dwellers, we don't have peasants, who are the proper expression of real country life. Much earlier than most other countries, we abandoned the idea of the small farmer living surrounded by his own fields (often in extreme penury). This country pioneered the large farm, which still makes our agricultural politics awkward within the rest of Europe. It was manned by worker-villagers without land, and we have kept up that trend.

The Continental provincial city was and is a place with a fully-fledged urban life. The modern city Frenchman carries on a tradition in which people had relatives, or second homes which they often inherited, in a countryside they recognised as being part of their ancestral roots. He has real contact with a peasant culture, though that is now in a decline French society will find hard to adjust to.
In Britain, though, farm-workers grew, as their massively depleted numbers still grow, their boss' cash-crops. They were and are lucky if they had room to have a hen or two. But most English country-dwellers were employees, not stake-holders. They retreated to their families and their houses or cottages - the latter often very squalid - as their major claim to individuality. Earlier than on the Continent, Britons left a countryside from which they were in any case uniquely alienated and went to live in slum towns. The workers lost their shallow rural roots entirely, and lived in cities without taking on an urban civilisation. They have always retreated to suburbs as soon as they could afford to.

The process is now intensifying at a great rate. Whether the result is horrifying is one of the great conundrums of our time.

A hundred years ago, perhaps 15 percent of the population had the kind of affluence which conferred real choice, usually expressed as a house with a garden, and a servant - expressing the urge to possess a retinue, of being a large character with dependants. Now, micro-villas are available to vaster numbers. The average household in this country has two-thirds more real disposable income than it had twenty years ago and its income has grown by more than a third in the last decade. That is forcing the pace at which Britain is becoming even more suburbanised than it used to be.

The process should properly be called rurbanisation. Suburbs were the accommodation to living near a city by those who aspired to be in a hamlet. It was not the idea of community which was missed: communities, in the English thinking, are merely small numbers of people living too close to one another and hating it. It was the privacy without loneliness of the suburb which people sought. People made a demi-paradise, a paradise of semis.
We are rebuilding the country in the image of the British dream: small houses with a garden front and rear. Our homes are connected to our work by lengthening commuter journeys. Amongst Europeans, only Luxemurgers spend as high a proportion of their income on transport as the British.

The idea of going shopping has had to be important to the British for longer than for people abroad who lived in a subsistence non-economy. Our abhorrence of public transport and urban centres ensures that our shopping is done at out-of-town or town-fringe megastores with car parks. In the 90s, Tesco and Safeway both reckoned on opening a new store every other week, with an industry average of about 35,000 square feet per store, and a land take of ten or so acres a throw. In the past twenty years, the number of single outlet grocery shops, mostly in town centres, has halved, in spite of the counter trend of the revival of specialist small shops.

The new rurbanism puts the country under intense pressure. It is true that the creep of concrete over the land proceeds slowly: only 13 percent of the Rest of the South East outside London (ROSE, in the planners' jargon) is built up, and current plans will only urbanise a further few percent by 2010. But that obscures the way that the roads, small towns, regional centres, tourist attractions, wildlife reserves will all come under increasing pressure.
This is a country on the move: cars and motorbikes carry the average Briton three times the distance they did thirty years ago. Because more and more cars are used by lone drivers, the vehicle mileage has grown faster: it is four times greater than it was in 1960. It has more or less doubled since 1970, whilst the road network has barely grown at all in the same period. Building motorways helped accommodate some of the growth in the 60s, but there are no plans to accommodate the future likely growth. The Department of Transport has for years thought traffic, left to its own devices, would more or less double by 2025, but even in the 90s its controversial roads programme would only have added about 10 percent to the network's carrying capacity. There are jams today, expect worse jams tomorrow. Expect congested old towns, bypasses through meadows, bumper to bumper crawls on motorways, country lanes like city rat-runs.

Not that traffic jams much worry the British: a man in a company Moneo going nowhere is not necessarily unhappy. His car is his home on wheels, with the advantage that it frees him from the wife and kids. The motorist is catered to by a wide range of radio programmes and a limitless range of music. He is at peace with the world, free to think and fantasise, even to pray. He is nearly as happy as he is at home with the video recorder - a uniquely British obsession - which frees him from finding entertainment in public in towns.
But he is losing something, and it nags at him. The modern sprawl is destroying the last vestiges of scruffy rusticity in much of Britain's countryside. The Briton is not interested in success, which confers on more ambitious nations their sense of reality. The Briton, instead, is always looking for signs of permanence, and they are harder to find now. There is an uneasy feeling that nothing is real any more, which is difficult for a nation of matter-of-fact nostalgics.

(2) The dangerous dullness of the new Britain
The British are now rich enough to get what they want, but find they have spoiled what they came to find: rurbia - the neither-town-nor-country - has beaten scruffiness. Our joyful anarchy may turn into yet more hooliganism.
The fake is everywhere, and confuses us. British do not find it easy to complain that their domestic architecture is stupefyingly dull and fake, with its tricked up Tudor timbers, or its tacky veneer of some local feature, say flint-facing in Sussex, or pargetting in Suffolk, or a bit of timbering in the Marches. The satisfaction, now given to an unprecedented number of us, of acquiring a house and garden outweighs doubts about its authenticity.
But people would prefer something a little more genuine, if it could be had. The pubs have all been done up. The town centres are pedestrianised and sanitised. There seems nothing left which has sawdust on the floors, mud on its boots.

We will find that National House properties - the preserve of the direct debit squirearchy - will be over-run. The tiny percentage of modern farmland which is walkable will be criss-crossed by dog shit alleys, as the Barbour brigade walk their boxers. Most rurbanites' experience of being in the countryside, rather than passing through it, is in country parks or nature reserves: this is the countryside as a theme park, and people are beginning to be dispirited. The brave insist on their rights to walk along the footpaths marked in Ordnance Survey maps, but few would know the name of the person who owns the land, or feel they were welcomed by him.
But though we are destroying it with a busy and ersatz overlay, it is the rustic, hamlet-based tradition that helped the British be the least materialist country on earth. Clothes, theatre, restaurants, practically any expenditure away from home: these were never the most important way of expressing social advancement. Indeed, in the British ethic shabbiness was and is a watchword, and ostentation was and is deplored as a sign of unrootedness.
Our ideal, rural but sociable living, appeals to us as being the oldest way of life we know. It is simultaneously savage and civilised: it allows violence expression without a descent into chaos. Hunting, fishing, shooting, dog-owning, horse-riding: these are all appease the primitive in all of us.

We have always lived our lives, expressed ourselves, in rural sportiveness, and in pubs whose whole point was that they were buccolic and easy-going, even if they happened to be in a city. Because we aspire to rustic life, rich in archaism, our images of pleasure are informal.

They are also eccentric. Famous for our reserve and repression - both utterly false images - we love hysterics and the homo-erotic. We hero-worship excitable men like John Harvey Jones or Lord Hailsham, the sexually ambivalent like Mick Jagger, Freddie Mercury, and Eddy Izzard and . As Jagger has pointed out, it is never hard to make an Englishman dress up as a woman. There is no obsession, from train-spotting to dolls' house making, which is not made the object of the informal networking with which the British make up for their reluctance to organise themselves.

Of course, even amongst the most orderly of our citizens, competitiveness must be expressed, if only in golf, the game which most internalises violence, by pitting the competitor as much against himself as against his opponent, which is why the Japanese love it. Our perennial passion for games ensures that golf-promoters spent much of the last decade pushing for hundreds more golf courses, with a potential land-take equivalent to the area covered by Greater London.

We romantically fancy ourselves as outdoorsmen, sailors, adventurers. But with affluence comes pressure of numbers. There are 154 marinas on the 155 estuaries of Britain: a further 78 have been proposed. Wherever you go, you find the same suborning of the previously wild into the rational and policed. Ski-ing developments are being pressed into the nearest we have to Arctic mountains, the Cairngorms. Mountain rescue squads are helping five times as many people as they did twenty years ago, as mountain-bikers, hang-gliders, hot-air balloonists and all the other adventurers in day-glo come to grief on the moorlands of Britain as they use their financial muscle to explore risk.

Not all risk-taking can be orderly. Wine bars in rural towns spill out people looking for fights; there are bouncers on the doors of pubs in market towns; joy-riders and other car-criminals take mayhem onto the roads of town and country. The British are only really dangerous when they are bored.

Risk is very important to any people, but especially to the uncivilised male, which the British non-cities, suburbs and ruburbs are terrifically good at creating. The British males do not believe in some very of the very important civilising qualities of the urbane, consensual, foppish Continental model. We do not like to be bossed about, we do not believe in conformity, we do not believe in pandering to women, we do not believe in work. We do believe in individualism, eccentricity, gamesmanship, and risk-taking. That is why the British have always made great pirates, and why we are the best soldiers in the world. This is especially true of the kind of unorthodox, guerrilla, essentially piratical, warfare waged by our celebrated SAS, which is the perfect expression of the British acceptance of discipline, provided there is a concomitant chance of serious mayhem to be made.

The British capacity for risk-taking characterises our commercial success and our industrial failure. We tried for a while to set the colonies to work for us, without noticing that they were as inefficient as we, and bolshier. We discovered it was better to trade with them than run them. This fits the facts: the British are good entrepreneurs but poor managers. We trade, but don't make. We gamble, but we don't construct. We do, however, love the idea of property, sometimes to the detriment our trading instincts. We prefer our money to grow in our houses rather than in a share portfolio or a young firm. The result is high interest rates, reduced investment in industry, and a bingo in bricks. We have splendid journalism because there are so many talented people who would rather argue than run anything. Our passion is for argument, not consensus.

The Continentals pay for their orderliness. Only the most crushing civilisations can keep violence at bay. Perhaps France can do it, except when its over-wrought tidiness of society gives way to revolution or upheaval. They saw violence in the 90s, and was suburban. It was a revolt against Corbusier-in-exile, against the peripheral estate, in which neither of the traditional continental virtues - self-conscious urbanism and full-bloodied ruralism - is expressed. The German historic propensity to break out of dullness into violence is the expression of a society which doesn't understand the need for routine hooliganism, the British triumph.

The Nordics are far more enigmatic: so extraordinarily socialised that they can be non-violent. What of Denmark, for instance? Perhaps producing Vikings simply exhausted them for a millennium. In any case, they are beyond comprehension in their niceness: so close in latitude to the British that their incredible difference of attitude is the most vertiginous thing about that flat land.

The British have a pluralist society because it amuses us as we fail; the Continentals have a consensus society because it is tidy and works. We excel, in short, wherever dissidence is at a premium: guerrilla war, rock 'n roll, theatre, journalism, abusive politics, the cult of personal style seen in teddy Boys, punks, hippies. All these come tumbling out of our suburbs and ruburbs as glorious expressions of a people who insist on being free. The new Britain is too boring for such people: they will become dangerous.

(3) The civilisation option
The new dull Britain is running out of options: our dissident, easy-going ways will have to give way to discipline. The Continent, not America, beckons as we learn how to make things work.

The British govern themselves by having pitched battles. We overturn politicians and their governments as sport, to keep us amused not efficient. Some politicians may protest, but we have designed their business to maximise excitement, not organisation. Politics is our theatre, and we like it bold and divisive. But we are subtle too, and ironic. We enjoy aristocratic socialists and common conservatives. We like the argument between left and right because it expresses itself in such good, if unproductive, rows.

Dedicated to muddle, we have no establishment and deplore elites. We have, for instance, a stable civil service of great talent. But the civil servant is not powerful in Britain: he enjoys a stoical abstinence from power, preferring the elegance of disinterested administration of whatever the present ministry advocates. He despises politicians for their trade of pretending there are answers in a country which fails on purpose.

British society does not organise for wealth creation, but for dissidence. Indeed, political power and money making are divorced on purpose, and in case the place becomes a huge national Plc like Germany or France. On the other hand, our absence of a serious class system allows the latest wave of wealth-creators and wealth-accumulators to be ennobled or elected, ensuring that power is vulgarised and refreshed by the successful.
However, our wealth creation, like everything British, evolves without encouragement from an elite. In Continental Europe, people learned a different way. Universities, politicians, civil servants, banks, and industry co-operate to plan, map things out, historically under the guidance of absolute monarchs or rulers, and now under a genuinely establishmentarian system.

On the continent money links with enterprise and government to iron out local opposition, overcome short-term problems in favour of the long term goal. That explains why the Germans have such a strong chemical industry and why the French have nuclear power stations on a scale undreamed of here. That is why the French have as many kilometres of motorway and of trunk road per square kilometre of total land surface as here, but only half the population. The West Germans have roughly three times as much high-class road on the same land surface as Great Britain. The French can build special high speed train routes, whilst we cannot.

What in Britain would be progress trying to subvert democracy, on the Continent, and especially France, is the people creating national triumphs. In Britain, however, the Luddite campaigner - the defender of the archaic and the rustic - was always and is still celebrated as he tries to halt or hinder the march of progress. Recently, he has been working within, and skirmishing aorund, a planning framework which few Britons realise is the most democratic in the world. It accounts for much of our economic failure, but contributes to our sense of freedom.
In Britain, it was not the Establishment which created Victorian industrial wealth, but dissidents. It was Quakers and non conformists who were energised to discover and invest in money-making products. It was engineers of vision and creativity who by inventive force made new products and processes, and became capitalists by mistake. True, they could raise money on the stock exchange or from banks, but in Britain the banks deplored anything like a partnership with industry. The City is anarchic and trading: it lets losers be losers and does not help them be winners.

The British passion for technical incompetence at every level of education flows easily from its insistence on the rustic, the archaic and the anarchic. Disliking manufacturing as urban and too disciplined, reluctant to submit to the slide rule and the machine tool, we never learned to admire technical expertise. As soon as we could afford to disrupt it, industry became little more than an arena for dissent.

Embracing dissidence for the fun of it, we abandoned the only known system for education - fact-stuffing - for an argumentative system in which anarchy flourished. Now, a third of British children leave school with no qualifications, and only Greece has fewer sixteen year olds in further education. Britain, by mistake the founding nation of industrialisation, has half as many engineers as Japan.

The demise of a role for productive, under-educated workers makes the unemployable, under-educated poor potentially dangerous. According to forecasters at the Henley Centre, the only serious growth in blue collar jobs will be amongst "personal and security services". In other words, there will be employment at the menial and muscular end of looking after the ageing and the affluent in a skilled society whose less intelligent will wield toilet paper and truncheons, if they work at all.

There are of course ways in which Britain could avoid the social upheaval the bored or the unemployable will resort to. We could become more conscientious, consensual, conformist: more continental. Children could work harder at school, and be pushed to become technicians. Families could start eating formal meals in a formal setting, and thus begin the thought early in children's lives that structure, discipline and social order are important.
Some reforms are difficult. Much of Britain would work better if more people accepted that work was important. For instance, services like trains would run better if a sense of elan, of elitism, could be returned to railwaymen's work: the Continentals never lost it, after all. Anyone seeing the sloppiness of many of Britain's young railwaymen will sense how much of a revolution this would require.

Some reforms are nearly impossible: we are so deeply committed to houses that it is improbable in the extreme to believe that we will ever believe in cities or the countryside and really make them work.

On the whole, though, we cannot avoid the power of the continental model. We have just lived through a twenty year experience - Thatcherism - whose main premise was that Britain would be better if it took freedom-loving America for its inspiration.

But America is vast, and populated by a people which possesses the hybrid vigour of the immigrant. It is stiff with people who have demonstrated that they are self-starters by leaving the unsupportive homelands of their forefathers. They have an aggressive sense of the need to get on, just as people on the Continent are driven not to disappoint society's expectations.

Mrs Thatcher of course failed to make us American. Her only real success was in liberating the old lower middle class from their traditional repression and prudence, despised by the old working and upper classes alike for their failure to understand that indulgence in drink and debt are inevitable to those who seek pleasure.

And she was wrong, too, about Europe. She thought that taking Europe seriously would erode our noble freedom. Actually, of course, it threatens to civilise us. But the young especially detect that there is no alternative.
Hooliganism is not on the menu as it once was. The wild places now are rich in fluorescent anoraks. The muddled countryside is down to Happy Eaters. The drink driving laws are making relaxed rustic life all but impossible. The United Nations will rob us of the right to military mayhem. Exploiting the Third World is a matter for guilt not opportunity. We are even beginning to worry about our health. We are at risk of needing to be civilised because the safety valves of our previous and preferred anarchy are being blocked up, the comforting images of archaism going under concrete. We are within an inch of realising that civilisation is necessary because though it is idealist and a sublimation of the primitive, we have too little left of the old deliciously vigorous world which once made up our reality.

ends