The Cloud of Witnesses
CfaBB paper: Growing apart: The rise in British political sectarianism and how to respond
GAWAIN TOWLER
Professor Betz mentions a book, and a book recommended by a professor of war is not easily ignored, so two volumes of Esmé Wingfield-Stratford now now winging their way towards me via Abe. The History of English Patriotism appeared in 1913. Its author believed that every generation holds England in trust for the dead and the unborn, and that a politician who squanders the inheritance will answer to both.
He could not know how soon his readers would be asked to prove it. Within eighteen months many of them were in France, and the trust he described was being paid in lead and chlorine.
The recommendation came in Betz’s foreword to Growing Apart, the anonymous report on political sectarianism I’ve written about regularly. He quotes Wingfield-Stratford on successive generations as trustees of a common heritage, and on the recognition of a nation’s enduring personality as patriotism’s first and great commandment. Forewords of this kind often quote with more confidence than accuracy, so part of the purpose in buying the volumes is to check, and to wallow in the bright dawn..
The doctrine is Burke’s partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn, but Wingfield-Stratford gives it a story. English history becomes the life of an idea passed from keeper to keeper, none of whom owns it. The phrase “first and great commandment“ is Christ’s answer to the lawyer in Matthew 22, and a historian who set love of country beside it was making a claim few would dare now. Betz doubts the book could be published today. He is probably right.
Betz borrows a phrase for the ancestral dead. They are a cloud of witnesses, which is Hebrews 12 in the Authorised Version, “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.” In 1913 the witnesses Wingfield-Stratford had in mind were the men of Agincourt, the Armada and Trafalgar, safely in the past and gilded by it.
Within a year his readers had joined them. The young men who might have taken the book from a school library in 1913 were at Mons in August 1914, at Loos the following autumn, and on the Somme on the first of July 1916, when the British Army lost more than nineteen thousand dead before nightfall. Trusteeship stopped being a metaphor.
That generation took the doctrine literally. They held the inheritance and handed it on, at the price of never enjoying it themselves. A trustee does not own the estate and is not promised its fruits. They understood this better than the historian who described it.
Which brings me back to the paper Betz was introducing, which deserves more attention than his foreword. The Centre for a Better Britain published it this week with a short commentary on its Substack. Its case is that we have been arguing about migration in the wrong currency. We tally housing, wages and GP appointments while the larger cost goes unmentioned, which is what numbers on this scale do to democracy itself.
The first charge is that nobody voted for it. The paper tabulates every winning manifesto since 1979. Thatcher promised to restrict work permits, Blair in 2005 that only skilled workers would settle, Cameron the tens of thousands, Johnson that numbers would come down, Starmer that he would reduce them. No winning party in half a century sought a mandate to raise immigration. In 1964 the British Election Study found 85 per cent agreeing that too many immigrants had been let in, and that majority has softened in sixty years, in part due to the very numbers that have arrived, without ever turning around. Net migration has meanwhile exceeded 100,000 in every year since 1998 bar 2020 and reached 906,000 in the year to June 2023. The people asked for restraint at every election and received the opposite.
The second charge is philosophical, and here the report and Wingfield-Stratford speak to each other across a century. The author reads the social contract from Hobbes to Mill as a long inquiry into what a people must share before law can work. Hobbes needs a common desire for peace, Locke a common moral order, Burke the inheritance held in trust, Mill a cultivated civic character. None can be conjured by statute. The paper then imagines Britain slowly coming to believe that men and women should not mix freely in public. In a settled country that change would take decades of argument among people who shared the same experiences. Introduce a large population for whom segregation is already normal and the conclusion arrives early, not because anyone was persuaded but because the electorate was swapped. Elections become a demographic headcount.
Why should imported habits persist? The author turns to Alan Macfarlane (anybody who highlights the work of McFarlane in this field is, I feel, already walking in the right direction), Peter Laslett and Emmanuel Todd on the English nuclear family, rare outside a thin strip of north-west Europe, which obliged mobile households to trust strangers and taught men to vote as individuals. Where clan and congregation come first, the vote follows them. Garett Jones’s The Culture Transplant adds the finding that migrants tend to remake their new country in the image of the old, as we did throughout the Empire.
The thought experiment, it turns out, is a description. In 2024 four independents backed by The Muslim Vote took Labour seats. YouGov found 41 per cent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi voters naming Gaza as a deciding issue. Independents, Greens and the Workers Party took 9.1 per cent nationally and more than 26 per cent in each of the twenty most Muslim constituencies. Iqbal Mohamed opposed a ban on first-cousin marriage by appealing to custom in South Asia and the Middle East. A Labour MP asked the Prime Minister for what amounted to a blasphemy law. A Burnley councillor called for segregated areas to end free mixing between the sexes. At the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, observers recorded family voting in 15 of the 22 polling stations they watched, though Greater Manchester Police found nothing that met its evidential test, as the report fairly notes.
The Commonwealth franchise is the clearest case of an inheritance turned against its heirs. The British Nationality Act 1948 let Commonwealth citizens vote when the Commonwealth meant Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It now means 56 states and nearly two billion adults, each entitled to vote from the day they arrive with leave to remain, while most of their countries offer Britons nothing in return.
The remedies suggested are modest. End mass migration and lengthen the road to settlement to ten years. Confine the vote to citizens, with sensible exceptions for the Irish and for reciprocal agreements. Return postal voting to those with medical need, as before 2001. Look hard at faith schools that draw from a single community. A citizens-only franchise is already the rule in Canberra and Ottawa.
The CFABB commentary opens with Rishi Sunak, who warned in The Times that Britishness must not become a DNA test. There is something in his fear. A nation that cannot absorb newcomers retreats to the one definition no newcomer can meet. But the retreat is a symptom of the numbers, and as Chancellor and Prime Minister Sunak signed off the largest inflows in our history. He gave away the estate and now frets that the heirs are reading the will too literally and with justified anger.
Wingfield-Stratford put his name on the title page. The England of 1913 was no gentle place. Suffragettes were burning pillar boxes, the docks and the railways had been paralysed by strikes, and Ulster was drilling for rebellion against Home Rule. Yet a young Cambridge historian could publish two volumes in praise of his country’s patriotism and expect to be reviewed, not ruined.
The author of Growing Apart has not signed his work. His proposals would have seemed unremarkable to Wingfield-Stratford and are the settled law of other democracies. Only citizens should vote. Postal ballots should be cast by those who cannot reach a polling station. A man should live here some years before he helps decide how the country is governed. For saying so in careful prose, with footnotes, he fears for his job, his comfort, and certainly his dinner invitations.
Put the two title pages side by side. One carries a name and a college. The other carries nothing. Between them lies a century in which Britain grew richer, freer in law and far less free in speech, and in which the governing class came to behave as owners rather than trustees. As Atlee’s Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross bellowed across the House in 1946 “We are the Masters now” ( or actually he said ”We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come.”) but the point was made.
An owner may dispose of his property as he pleases and resents anyone who mentions the heirs. An elite that believes it owns the house does not care to be reminded of the trust, and the blank title page is the evidence.
What does that say about the rest of us? It would be comfortable to blame the governing class alone, and it would not be true. The author of Growing Apart does not fear the Home Secretary. He fears his employer, his colleagues and the people at the next table. He fears us.
We have taught one another that some plain truths are unsayable, and we enforce the lesson ourselves, with a raised eyebrow or an invitation unsent. No statute obliged any of it. The trustees did not only sell the estate. The rest of us watched and said nothing, because saying something might cost us a promotion or a supper, and silence of that kind is only a more comfortable form of consent.
The men of 1914 were asked for more than a signature. They gave up the years in which they would have enjoyed what they held in trust, and most of them left no opinions behind, only their names. The least their heirs can do is lend ours. I sign mine to this, for whatever it is worth.
Every English village keeps the ledger. It stands by the lychgate or on the green, a column of names with the same surname two or three times over, brothers and cousins from the same few streets. It records what the trust cost and who paid it. Nobody in Westminster reads it, except on one Sunday in November with the cameras present.
Wingfield-Stratford told his readers they would answer to a cloud of witnesses. Within a year they had become that cloud. Their names are cut in stone at the end of every high street, and on the question of what has been done with their inheritance, they have never been consulted.
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(UKR)
