Albion’s re-enactors

For Restore Britain, restoration seems to mean something more like repetition. This is why the pedantic (and fun!) attacks of asking when exactly they plan on restoring Britain to rather miss the mark. Restore is a movement against history: it has a hint of the post-Christian. Rather than going out and trying to engage with the world, Restore retreat as fast as possible away from anything that might require agency and action. Any hint that history, that knowledge, is anything more than a dead letter or pristine statue would force them to confront the world as it is. That fear, while understandable, has no place in anything that purports to be a political party. 

Just last week for example, the head of Restore Britain’s investigations noticed that someone was teaching baby witches to hex the moon. When someone pointed out that Exeter’s PhD program in Occult and Magic Science was more likely to be researching Assyrian religious practices, the attack changed. Could we, he asked, really trust the modern woke university to teach it properly? It was, after all, a dangerous subject, especially for Christians. Though he did admit that research into the “elite’s interest in the occult” would be prudent.

Christian religious literacy unsurprisingly plays a central role in Restore’s platform. Universities will be free to praise (or else) our constitutional monarchy with its beloved freedoms, to teach the Christian roots of our law and toleration and commercial success. Rosy cheeked children will be told in our schools about Agincourt, Henry VIII, the Glorious Revolution, a certain view of the enlightenment, followed in quick order by Nelson, the Raj, the World Wars, and how something or other happened in 1997. Christian historical literacy, then, serves to fill out the hollowed out shells of Britain and Britons and Restore calls for a full re-ordering of the state to fulfil this objective. 

What Britons will not be given is religious instruction, but rather “historical literacy”

When it comes to Christian belief however, Restore discovers agnosticism. Britons will learn of the glorious deeds of their ancestors, how we ought to be proud of them, emulate them, perhaps even give their statues little kisses. What Britons will not be given is religious instruction, but rather “historical literacy”. They will certainly learn that Christianity was the most critical thing for Britain, but not why it was so important that those heroes believed and died for it. The castle and church will be restored, but only as a kind of stage on which we can mechanically recite the lines and play the parts we internalise at school. Individual belief takes second place to common performance. 

Exeter’s program, however, better continues British history’s delightful obsessions than Restore’s mechanical imagery. Nothing, in fact, was more British than state stipends for oddballs to follow their antiquarian or mystical obsessions. At the low low price of enough for lodging and at least one and a half square meals a day, otherwise radicalisable young men were kept far away from the levers of power and left to idle away their lives beavering away in search of God. 

For many years, we called this the “Anglican Church”. The requirement to give the odd sermon and an obligation to comfort the grieving with the hope of life everlasting was the price for the freedom to spend one’s life learning any number of dead languages, comparing manuscripts, researching ancient music, or even — we have my mother’s priest to thank for this — creating Thomas the Tank Engine. The supposed pointlessness of academic life, of slow specialisation in arcane scripts, other’s beliefs, and of confronting the folly that haunts greatness, was as much a part of British Christianity as the mill owner’s search for God in efficiency.

Indeed, the genius and challenge of Abrahamic faiths lie in the call to find God’s providence in the relentless march of history. It is, of course, difficult to see your home burning, your crops failing, to endure the slow decay of a fenland market town and yet to grit your teeth and mutter gam zu l’tovah. That this, too, is for the best. Yet it is what God asks of us, even as our natural tendency is to turn away from the sheer contingency of daily suffering by embracing, like the Assyrians for example, some cyclical myth of greatness and decay, abundance and famine, flood and inferno. God, in other words, asks us to resist this natural human tendency to inhabit comfortable old characters and to steel ourselves in the tumult and anxieties of life. 

The village church functions less like a Christian church than as a lynch-pin around which Britons can be born, die, and be reborn

Despite their claims to Christian “historical literacy”, Restore seeks to escape the thorny question of belief at all costs. The village church functions less like a Christian church than as a lynch-pin around which Britons can be born, die, and be reborn. Antiquarianism, whether of the university student or parson, risks puncturing the timelessness in which British characters conquer. Actual belief might re-open religious wounds. It would certainly ask the person to look out at the world around them. If they imagine museums and art galleries consist of moralising labels telling viewers to feel bad about themselves, then the extent of their ambition is to have the labels make the viewer feel good about themselves. 

What they do not want, what they resist at all costs, is any hint that Britain exists in history. This is understandable, given that it pitches itself at those whom history has left behind. It is the cry of a group who have been rejected economically and socially, first by liberal modernity and then – much worse – by Nigel Farage. Yet Farage at least understands that politics is an active process, that British culture is not something out of a ladybird book, but a living, raucous, vivifying argument. 

Like the Anglo-Saxons driving sheep through the Roman ruins, Restore gaze upon the mighty works of the British past and judge the gulf almost insurmountable. Unlike them, Restore seeks to remake the villas as they imagine they were and wear the ill-fitting togas in the childish hope that Romanitas will bring the Empire back to life.