Midsomer Murders is a long-running English detective series produced by ITV, based upon the characters created by Caroline Graham. Chief Inspector Barnaby and his team solve crimes in this (fictional) county of small villages and lovely rural landscapes. In Midsomer people ride their bicycles past thatched-roofed houses to attend fetes, go to Church of England Sunday services, and relax in the evenings at the local pub – it’s all very peaceful, except of course for all the murders, difficult though not impossible to solve. In 2011 the show’s producer, Brian True-May, was suspended by ITV for comments he made in an interview, in which he was asked why we never saw any ethnic minorities in Midsomer. The Telegraph reported:
“We are a cosmopolitan society in this country, but if you watch Midsomer you wouldn’t think so. I’ve never been picked up on that, but quite honestly I wouldn’t want to change it,” [True-May] said.
Asked what he meant by “cosmopolitan”, Mr True-May, 65, replied: “Well, we just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work. Suddenly we might be in Slough. Ironically, Causton [the town in Midsomer Murders] is supposed to be Slough. And if you went to Slough you wouldn’t see a white face there.
“We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.” …
Mr True-May gave the interview to promote the 14th series of the show, which has been sold to 231 territories around the world and continues despite the recent departure of central character DCI Tom Barnaby, played by John Nettles.
Explaining the secret of its popularity, he said: “When I talk to people and other nations they love John Nettles, but they also love the premise of the show. They love the perceived English genteel eccentricity. It’s not British. It’s very English.”
Writing about the Brexit vote, Tyler Cowen (an American in favor of Remain) also notes the distinction between British and English:
As I interpret what happened, ultimately the vote was about preserving the English nation, and yes I use those last two italicized words deliberately; reread Fintan O’Toole. Go back and read English history. For centuries, England has been filled with English people, plus some others from nearby regions. Go visit Norfolk and also stop in Great Yarmouth, once described by Charles Dickens as “…the finest place in the universe,” and which, for whatever decline it may have experienced, still looks and feels like England. London does not.
There is a tension, for which there is no easy resolution, between wanting to have a society that is open and welcoming and inclusive to people and their traditions from around the world, and the preservation of what is seen to be special, exceptional, about the extant native culture. When Cowen wrote a book praising globalization in the cultural sphere, for all the ways it makes our lives more interesting, anthropologist Clifford Geertz excoriated him for his shallowness, his willingness to see unique cultures around the world swamped by global cosmopolitanism. I marvel at cosmopolitan cities – Toronto, New York, London. But not everybody does, and some folks are more happy with their town staying much the same as it always was.
Can protection of national culture, and desires to keep limits on immigration, veer into racism and xenophobia? Of course, and we see it all the time. American voters who want to ‘take our country back’. In Canada, when a Quebec ‘Leave’ referendum failed to pass (barely) in 1995, the leader of the separatist movement was quick to blame “money and the ethnic vote“, i.e. those who were not “pure” Quebecers. And some, but not all, British ‘Leave’ voters.
I don’t defend Brian True-May – he is wrong, and there is nothing non-English about having an immigrant or descendant of immigrants in Midsomer County in the pub, working in the village library, teaching in the school, or, come to that, being a cunning and sophisticated murderer. English village life certainly has a distinctive culture – ‘the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th century Gothic churches’ and all that, as T.S. Eliot put it – but to consider that to be a ‘white’ culture is appalling.
But wanting to preserve a culture that people feel is in danger of disappearing is entirely natural. At least half of the articles that appear on the artsjournal.com site are on this topic, laments that high culture is dying through lack of new audiences, or the poor quality of new creative work: ‘the novel is dying’, ‘classical music is dying’, and people who love those cultures feel a real loss. Likewise, as an academic I am surrounded by people conservative in their ideas on education and what a college ought to be, and that interlopers are ruining what was once so much better.
Immigration, whether from other countries or just other parts of town, changes the culture of neighborhoods. We praise diversity because we think it makes a non-superficial difference in the culture of organizations or places, not just that it will look different. I prefer cosmopolitan cultures. I am an immigrant myself, as were my parents to Canada. I think the Leave vote is a terrible result for the future of the UK (if there is one), for its economy, for the opportunities for British youth, for the people of Scotland and of Northern Ireland.
But not everyone feels that way, and there are those with strong preferences, not born of racism or bigotry, to preserve the culture that has shaped them. I think there has been a lack of appreciation of this in the immediate aftermath of the vote.
I very much enjoyed your comment, which bounces the basketball through the minefield in a very elegant way. Culture is by nature inherently local, while capitalism is by nature inherently global. Culture looks to tradition, while capitalism looks to destroying the old to create new markets. How will these conflicts be resolved?
And on a more specific and perhaps scientific note, Germany’s unemployment rate is under 5%. They need the labor provided by large numbers of immigrants while many other European countries don’t. Germany is posturing its acceptance of immigrants as a moral stance, but it is also based on self-interest.