“Sometimes you change your mind about a writer,” Julian Barnes writes in his latest book, Changing My Mind. How right he is. After reading the chapter on politics, it is difficult not to revise my previously-held view on him as a quintessentially English writer characterised by his gentle, clever, if somewhat dry, observations about the reified behaviours of his fellow countrymen. Now I see him as a political extremist who would like to destroy much of what we value and defend.
In the sixty years he has been “enfranchised”, he has voted for Labour, Conservative, Liberal, Liberal Democrat, Greens and the Women’s Equality Party (“I never contemplated voting for the SDP,” he says in a typically gnomic Barnesian aside). One would think that such a voting record would put him firmly in a pragmatist’s camp on policy: he changes when events force him to change. It all sounds reassuringly centrist.
But Changing My Mind reveals Barnes to be anything but a moderate. In the self-styled “Barnes Benign Republic” of the United Kingdom there would, unsurprisingly, be an immediate nationalisation of all forms of transport and energy, and the House of Lords would be either radically reformed or abolished altogether. There are many sitting on the government benches who would nod along to those views. But he is only warming up. Barnes would hold a referendum on the future of the monarchy (“which I would expect monarchists to win”) and then force the Crown to be self-funding. Scotland would be allowed another referendum, and Ireland would be “encouraged” to reunite (there is no mention of Wales in this broken-up Britain, possibly because Barnes doesn’t see it as a country distinguishable from England).
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Should this country be finally no more, it will have been killed off by those eminently reasonable, highly civilised figures
The UK would give up its nuclear weapons immediately, much to the joy of Moscow, and the arms industry would be “dismantled”. In Barnes’s vision, only those weapons “necessary for the country’s defence” would be allowed which, as Ukraine has found out, doesn’t really count for much if you don’t have nuclear weapons pointing at Moscow. All independent schools would be abolished (inevitably Barnes went to an academically selective, fee-paying school) and Old Etonians would be banned from becoming Prime Minister. Legislation on assisted dying would be passed, and the law of trespass would be abolished, allowing anyone to wander wherever they wish. Your land is my land in this brave new world. Net zero, of course, is an absolute requirement.
Barnes goes on to prove that being a woke extremist is not confined to Gen Z. He would like to turn “at least one” royal palace into a museum of the slave trade, and also educate and then “re-educate” and then “re-re-educate” young males on toxic masculinity. Presumably in Barnes’s worldview free thinking is welcome as long as it reflects his own views (he once wrote that his readers are not allowed to vote for Brexit).
“I consider these proposals to be reasonable, gentle and quite possibly popular,” he writes in that highly civilised, detached, upper-middle class tone of voice that is so familiar to those who have heard Crosland, Hobsbawm, Foot (Michael and Paul), Benn and others discuss their own form of national self-loathing. Similar voices, privately or grammar school educated, finished off with the added weight of attending Oxbridge, have been prominent on the far left since George Orwell wrote about them so disdainfully in The Lion and the Unicorn. Indeed, these words could have been explicitly describing Barnes, the arch Francophile:
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanised. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country, they form a sort of island of dissident thought.
They are, of course, islands no longer, and, in 2017, they almost joined up to elect our first (openly) Marxist Prime Minister. Barnes voted for Corbyn, and he believes his version of society would be “a damned sight kinder and nicer place to live in” than, say, Highgate, that dystopian hellhole that Barnes has endured since the 1990s (whether this Corbynland would be kind and nice to its Jewish residents is not something Barnes is inclined to discuss).
Barnes is usually a meticulous and persuasive analyst of human behaviour. Nothing to be Frightened of, Letters from London and Through the Window show him to be one of our most perceptive cultural critics. But how does such a sophisticated mind subscribe to political beliefs that would effectively see this country broken up and bankrupted? How can the author of Metroland, Staring at the Sun and Arthur and George so clearly despise many of the institutions that this country has created and which, in turn, have created him?
Perhaps because most of his mates held the same views. Barnes is, of course, part of the same “Granta generation” of writers which includes Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Christopher Hitchens. In their own ways, each of these very different men find England a little embarrassing. In novels such as On Chesil Beach and Lessons, McEwan enjoyed exposing the essential smallness of the country, in both acreage and attitudes; before leaving the country Amis said he “would prefer not to be English”, so ashamed was he by its parochialism. Barnes describes us as “very unsatisfactory Europeans”, a country which is, rightly, hated by others. England, for these internationalists, is a disappointment.
Orwell wrote, “If the thing we are fighting for is altogether destroyed, it will have been destroyed partly by our own act.” We should never overlook that should this country be finally no more, it will have been killed off by those eminently reasonable, highly civilised figures who, like Barnes, yearn for a kinder place but create, out of their own intelligent stupidity, an infinitely crueler, infinitely less tolerant country. Let us hope this book, like the ideas it promotes, is found in a remainder bin before too long.
