In an item on The World at Ten on Radio 4 in the evening, there was a vox pop from a pub in Soho. One comment struck me. "It's a great day for gays, for Britain and for the world" (my italics). Well, it will certainly have momentous, and unforeseen unintended, consequences for this country, I predict. But isn't it time we got a realistic perspective on our own global importance? Along with other former colonial powers, we lost our colonies in the last century. Only we still cherish the illusion that we are a "great" power. We still presume we have so much to teach these benighted nations, who've only just emerged from the jungle or the desert. Hello! Isn't it time that we acknowledged that we have at least as much to learn from those on whom, let's be honest, we still look down as we ever taught them? Let's look at ourselves from outside. It would not be hard to paint a picture of a country whose media are corrupt, whose police are compromised, whose financial institutions are irresponsible, whose politicians are venal and whose aspiring leaders persistently and dishonestly deny perverting the course of justice. It might perplex the onlooker how one small off-shore island presumes to judge and intervene in other nations' internal struggles, when it would vociferously and violently resist the same happening in reverse. It might puzzle him how a country planning to spend billions of pounds on upgrading its nuclear weapons' system takes such a morally superior position over others who attempt similarly to defend themselves.
It really is time that we abandoned the notion that we are a "great" nation - and by that I don't mean that we have to give up our national pride; but it needs to be proportionate; it needs to be real. We are not morally superior. I was unexpectedly moved last week watching the programme Make Me a Muslim, in which thoroughly secular model, Shanna Bukhari, set out to discover why more young British women are converting to Islam. The answer was not uniform, but it seemed to be a symptom of a profound dissatisfaction with our apparently enlightened culture, and something that occurred to me was whether our national unease with Islam was partly a reaction to its implied critique of this country's morality, or lack of it. Of course we dress up our Islamophobia in the guise of "It's only the terrorists we mind," but I wonder. Our politicians are not cut from a better cloth than all others. Our institutions are not intrinsically better than others' institutions. The realisation that we are an "ordinary" nation would save us much in terms of expenditure, of unrealistic ambition and popular discontent. I gather Chris Bryant MP was heard to say in Parliament yesterday, "The world has moved on." That may not be the best reason for redefining language and law, but is an excellent reason for reviewing and realigning our global perspective. What happens in the Commons does not shake the world.
