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3 days ago
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In Chris Bush and Richard Hawley’s musical, Standing at the Sky’s Edge, there’s an exchange that has stuck in my mind. The scene is Sheffield’s Park Hill housing estate at Christmas 2002. The postwar estate was once a place of modernity, civic pride and hope, but it is now run down and decaying. There are rats in the flats.
Jimmy, a young security guard, and Joy, a nurse, still live in Park Hill. They talk constantly about finding a better future and a fresh start for themselves. But where could they go to do that, Joy asks? To Mars? “No,” Jimmy insists: “A proper fresh start. Clean slate. Australia.”
Joy is unconvinced. But Jimmy presses on. “Why not? I know a couple of lads who did. You can nurse anywhere. I’d find something. This time next year. Christmas on the beach.”
It is not too much of a spoiler, I hope, to reveal that Jimmy and Joy never make it to Australia. But the exchange is resonant because it articulates a dimension of the British mind-map that existed very strongly in the years before 2002, especially during the imperial decades, and while the White Australia immigration policy was in force – until 1973.
Today, the White Australia policy is long gone, immigration of all kinds to Australia is much more restricted, and the country has mostly shaken off any remaining deference towards Britain. Yet a certain idea of Australia still lingers strongly at the back of the British mind today, many years later, as a place where one can live a British life, but more prosperously and with better weather.
In spite of all the changes, it’s an idea of Australia that gets a boost whenever there’s a suggestion in Britain that Australia is becoming a mecca for British emigrants. “Young Britons flocking to Australia for a better life,” announced one story this week. “We are here to steal your workers,” announced a Western Australian trade delegation in 2023, triggering a flurry of “new life in the sun” headlines. It’s an idea that rests on assumptions that we don’t often think about or discuss, and which are in many ways now an anachronism.
What stayed with me when I heard Jimmy’s speech imagining Christmas on the beach in Australia is how much of what he was expressing was a specifically British daydream. His words were predicated on the existence of an alternative anglophone world in which it is easy for British people to imagine themselves living, with more rewards and fewer disappointments.
Of course, it was not inconceivable that a French or Italian equivalent of Jimmy or Joy might also think about making “a proper fresh start” somewhere else too. But the more you think about the wider European experience, the more you realise that this option is far more easily accessible to British people than to others. The dream of finding a better life in a place where they already speak your language and where daily habits are familiar is one that few other nations can match so readily.
Of course, many other European countries had overseas empires, too – but these were either more distant in history compared with the British empire, were less enduring or smaller, or involved less emigration for settlement.
France had a large empire too, but the francophone world today is smaller and less powerful than the anglophone. So are the global residues of the Dutch, the Danish and the Belgian empires. Spain once had a huge Latin American empire, but it is more than 200 years since most of it collapsed and emigration there from Spain is now slight. Portugal’s empire lasted longer, but Brazil long ceased to be a leading destination for the Portuguese.
The other huge factor is that the US speaks English too. Things might have been different if France had won the seven years’ war – as a visit to the Musée de l’Amérique Francophone in Québec City poignantly illustrates. But it was the English speakers who prevailed. This gave the British – who then included the Irish – a powerful extra incentive. Even before the first world war, there was far more British emigration to the US each year than to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Even in the 20th century, there was something substantive to those connections. The historian JGA Pocock, a New Zealander himself, called such white Commonwealth countries “neo-Britains”. His fellow historian AJP Taylor, a radical in many ways, nevertheless waxed lyrical with the claim, written in the pro-empire Sunday Express, that “Millions of people in Canada, in Australia and in New Zealand are our relations by blood. When they or their ancestors left this country, they did not cease to be British. They went to the colonies or the Dominions in order to remain British.”
Views like that can sound absurd today, not least in a United Kingdom that struggles to agree on what Britishness is, and whose union has been under such threat in recent years. But they were common in the 20th century, and they lingered on in Jimmy and Joy’s glum assessment of their prospects in Sheffield when compared with Christmas on the beach. And they linger on today, not least for those who gravitate to Australia in such numbers on gap-year trips, or to watch an Ashes test.
Every former imperial state struggles to adapt to its post-imperial circumstances. They do so, however, in very different ways. Emmanuel Macron’s pre-Christmas arguments with inhabitants of Mayotte, the tiny French island possession 5,000 miles from Paris in the Mozambique channel, which was devastated by a cyclone earlier this month, demonstrated a distinctly French way of getting it wrong.
Yet the psychological need of some Britons – especially white ones, albeit fewer now than before – to cling to the long-outmoded belief that countries such as Australia are still neo-Britains is a distinctly British example of the same failure. So too is the even more outlandish fantasy, not wholly absent from arguments about how Britain should respond to Donald Trump’s return, that the US is such a nation too.
Millions of Britons today certainly want a fresh start and a clean slate, just like Jimmy and Joy. But they will find it at home, not on the beach in Australia. That’s one of the many forms of escapism on which Britons should learn to turn their backs. They will only find a fresh start that lasts, if they can find it at all, in communities like Sheffield and in the renovation of places like the Park Hill estate.
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Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
