British stereotypes: do mention the war, please!

Aus dem  Guardian vom 26. Januar 2012

Brits are portrayed as class-conscious binge-drinkers utterly obsessed with the war. It's a thumbnail sketch, not the whole picture, writes Jonathan Freedland

The stereotype is itself a stereotype. The European image of the Brit – either pukingly drunk football fan or snooty City gent, both living off past imperial glories, sullenly resenting being in Europe rather than ruling the world – is itself a cliche. Just as Brits know that every good Frenchman wears a striped shirt and beret, and that ruddy-faced Germans subsist on a diet of beer and sausage, so we know precisely what all those Europeans think of us.

And, sure enough, drink, class and the second world war all crop up in the thumbnail sketch of the British (Europeans tend to use "British" as a synonym for "English", rather forgetting the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish)provided by our colleagues across the Channel. It would be nice to say that our neighbours have us all wrong – but, sadly, cliches only become cliches if they are built on a foundation of truth.

Start with the bottle. Sure, we can cling to the statistics that show we are far from Europe's heaviest drinkers. In fact, the last round of OECD figures ranked us 11th in Europe for alcohol consumption, far behind France in first place, followed by Portugal and Austria. But while the French, German, Spanish and Italians are drinking much less than they did in 1980, Britons are drinking 9% more.

Still, it's not the volume of pints (or litres) consumed that has led to our boozy reputation. It's the way we drink that's the problem. The French figure may be high, but that's driven up by a lot of people drinking moderately: the glass or two of red at dinner. The British disease has even entered the French language: le binge drinking is the preferred phrase for vast, rapid consumption aimed solely at getting hammered. It's this falling-over, vomiting brand of drunkenness, visible in most city centres on a Friday night, that has become part of our national image. One study found that 54% of British 15- and 16-year-olds admit to binge drinking, compared to a European average of 43%. In other words, there is more than a little reality behind the image.

Class conscious?

What, though, of this description of us as "awfully class conscious"? It's tempting to say that that's out of date, that most Britons now belong in the vast, sprawling middle class. But the figures are much less comforting. The OECD put Britain at the bottom of the social mobility league table, finding that children born into poor families here have a lower chance of getting on than they do in Italy, France, Spain or Germany.

Even if the figures were not against us, we could hardly complain if our fellow Europeans think we have a hang-up about class. What message do we Brits think we send when our signature cultural export of 2011 was Downton Abbey, a show entirely about the intricacies of class and which apparently longs for a return to Edwardian notions of hierarchy? The smash West End play One Man, Two Guvnors similarly revolves around class. Unfortunately, it's not just a foreigners' myth that in Britain how one speaks and what school one attended still counts.

Second world war obsession?

Nor can we easily deny our obsession with the last war. When David Cameron wielded his veto at the December save-the-euro summit, the speed with which he was compared to the British Tommy in the legendary 1940 cartoon – stoically declaring, "Very well, alone" – testified to a nation that still views Europe through a wartime lens.

For reasons that are not all bad, we have turned 1939-45 into a kind of creation myth, the noble story of modern Britain's birth. We vote for Churchill as our Greatest Briton and revere the Queen in part because she is a direct link to that chapter in our history, the moment when we were unambiguously on the side of good.

That, of course, is a key difference between us and our fellow Europeans, for whom that period is anything but simple or unambiguous.

And yet no Brit could accept the caricature of us without some dissent. For one thing, it's contradictory. How can Britons simultaneously be both self-controlled and prone to rip our clothes off in a drunken haze? (One answer might be that we're repressed and need alcohol to loosen up, but then go too far.) But it is also incomplete.

More tolerant?

For the stereotype captures much of what we were and still are – but misses out who we have become. We are now a much more diverse and varied society, especially in our big cities, than the hooligan/City gent image allows.

There is a vibrancy to modern British life that eludes the cliche's grasp. There's a hint of it in that Polish suggestion that the Brits are "kind and friendly to immigrants".

Compared with other European countries, it's probably true that Britain is, generally, more tolerant. Some of our public services – the NHS, the BBC – are still cherished. We are not merely a mini-America of let-it-rip free-marketism.

Despite everything, Britain is not broken. And if that's hard for some of our European neighbours to accept, then they should hear what we say about them.

Read the German translation in the Süddeutsche Zeitung  tomorrow.