Better Angels
Martin Kettle used his column in The Guardian recently to make an impassioned call for someone to save the UK by appealing to the better angels of our nature.
Now if you ask me the way to achieve this is to introduce 'home rule' in Scotland so that the Scottish Parliament is clearly in charge, save for matters such as defence and foreign affairs which are, arguably, better dealt with on a UK wide basis.
But until that happens the Labour and Conservative parties will remain on the back foot trying to buy-off the general disgruntlement of the Scots with a few extra powers here and there, instead of accepting that what's required is a very different approach.
To save the union, Britain will have to find its own Abraham Lincoln
By Martin Kettle - The Guardian
Words and poetry matter more than anything in today’s troubled United Kingdom, but Cameron and Miliband show no skill for the job of national orator
This 1905 artist’s rendering depicts Abraham Lincoln giving his Gettysburg address in 1863. Photograph: AP/Sherwood Lithograph Co via the Library of Congress
Enter the special exhibition room at the Morgan Library in New York between now and June and, if you are a British visitor, you will immediately be struck by something that our own increasingly petulant and divided little country lacks. Lincoln Speaks: Words That Transformed a Nation is the title of an exhibition highlighting Abraham Lincoln’s remarkable oratory. Even the insular British know a bit about the importance of the two inaugural speeches Lincoln delivered in 1861 and 1865, at the dawn and the close of his nation’s civil war, and at the dedication of the Gettysburg war graveyard midway through the conflict. Thanks to Daniel Day-Lewis, we may even imagine we can hear the tone of voice in which those words were delivered.
What this superb exhibition in New York brings home, however, is the sheer importance to America’s survival of Lincoln’s hard-honed talent with words, not just on those great oratorical occasions but day to day, in his private discourse with his generals, political allies and rivals. In today’s argot, he was a brilliant communicator, and it is no surprise that the film that accompanies the New York exhibition soon features another skilled, though unquestionably lesser, practitioner of the art – Bill Clinton.
Lincoln’s great skill was to speak simply. He searched for language that was spare, colourful and accessible to all. He was well read, the Bible and Shakespeare in particular, but did not lace his speeches with classical allusions, as his contemporaries William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli did. Nor did he pile on the verbal folderols and tarradiddles in the way his rival Stephen Douglas liked to do.
Lincoln’s political case relied on reason rather than emotion. He liked it dry, clear and cogent, but he liked colloquialism too. As Harriet Beecher Stowe put it, Lincoln’s language always had “the relish and smack of the soil”. An aide tried to get him to withdraw the phrase “sugar-coated” from a speech once, on the grounds it was undignified. Lincoln would have none of it. He was also a great pruner: the Gettysburg address, perhaps the best-known political speech in English of all time, is less than 300 words long and took as little as three minutes to deliver.
The great cause to which Lincoln gave his life 150 years ago next month was the preservation of the union. And it is the eloquence with which he pursued that cause that is the most striking thing about the New York exhibition to any contemporary British visitor. For the preservation of the union is again a living cause, not something from history. Our union is deeply vulnerable today, not in the same way that America’s was a century and a half ago, and not, thank goodness, on the battlefield as theirs was. But it is threatened fundamentally nevertheless, as the polls made clear again this week. In the war for this union, words, reason and poetry arguably matter more than anything.
If, in the coming years, Britain proves to be a house divided against itself, as with the rise of nationalism it may, it will also require someone to fill Lincoln-sized shoes if the house is to continue to stand, both within these islands and in the union with Europe. Does such a master of language exist? Neither David Cameron nor Ed Miliband, for all the importance they attach to speeches, has displayed any talent for the job of national orator, let alone of national healer and unifier. They won’t even debate with each other.
The words Lincoln used in his first inaugural address have a particular resonance in today’s troubled United Kingdom. With only a little allowance, he could be talking about us: “We can not remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends?”
Lincoln finished that speech with these words: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
When he ran for election in 1860 and gave that speech in 1861, Lincoln knew he had a country to save. I am not certain, in 2015, that either of the men about to contest the premiership know that they too have a country to save and rebuild. What is clear, though, is that someone somewhere in British public life has to make a Lincoln-like effort to inspire the better angels of our own nature and to try, again and again, to halt the current fissiparous abandonment to our worse ones. We are not enemies either. Here surely, Michael Sheen, is something to believe in.
Unless this happens, our house may not stand for long. The chances of that producing a “more advantageous or more satisfactory” outcome are tenuous at best. Who can give believable voice to what needs to be said? It is hard to think of the statesman or woman with the standing to speak for our union. Perhaps an archbishop can attempt it. Perhaps a poet. Where, and who, is our Lincoln?
Enter the special exhibition room at the Morgan Library in New York between now and June and, if you are a British visitor, you will immediately be struck by something that our own increasingly petulant and divided little country lacks. Lincoln Speaks: Words That Transformed a Nation is the title of an exhibition highlighting Abraham Lincoln’s remarkable oratory. Even the insular British know a bit about the importance of the two inaugural speeches Lincoln delivered in 1861 and 1865, at the dawn and the close of his nation’s civil war, and at the dedication of the Gettysburg war graveyard midway through the conflict. Thanks to Daniel Day-Lewis, we may even imagine we can hear the tone of voice in which those words were delivered.
What this superb exhibition in New York brings home, however, is the sheer importance to America’s survival of Lincoln’s hard-honed talent with words, not just on those great oratorical occasions but day to day, in his private discourse with his generals, political allies and rivals. In today’s argot, he was a brilliant communicator, and it is no surprise that the film that accompanies the New York exhibition soon features another skilled, though unquestionably lesser, practitioner of the art – Bill Clinton.
Lincoln’s great skill was to speak simply. He searched for language that was spare, colourful and accessible to all. He was well read, the Bible and Shakespeare in particular, but did not lace his speeches with classical allusions, as his contemporaries William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli did. Nor did he pile on the verbal folderols and tarradiddles in the way his rival Stephen Douglas liked to do.
Lincoln’s political case relied on reason rather than emotion. He liked it dry, clear and cogent, but he liked colloquialism too. As Harriet Beecher Stowe put it, Lincoln’s language always had “the relish and smack of the soil”. An aide tried to get him to withdraw the phrase “sugar-coated” from a speech once, on the grounds it was undignified. Lincoln would have none of it. He was also a great pruner: the Gettysburg address, perhaps the best-known political speech in English of all time, is less than 300 words long and took as little as three minutes to deliver.
The great cause to which Lincoln gave his life 150 years ago next month was the preservation of the union. And it is the eloquence with which he pursued that cause that is the most striking thing about the New York exhibition to any contemporary British visitor. For the preservation of the union is again a living cause, not something from history. Our union is deeply vulnerable today, not in the same way that America’s was a century and a half ago, and not, thank goodness, on the battlefield as theirs was. But it is threatened fundamentally nevertheless, as the polls made clear again this week. In the war for this union, words, reason and poetry arguably matter more than anything.
If, in the coming years, Britain proves to be a house divided against itself, as with the rise of nationalism it may, it will also require someone to fill Lincoln-sized shoes if the house is to continue to stand, both within these islands and in the union with Europe. Does such a master of language exist? Neither David Cameron nor Ed Miliband, for all the importance they attach to speeches, has displayed any talent for the job of national orator, let alone of national healer and unifier. They won’t even debate with each other.
The words Lincoln used in his first inaugural address have a particular resonance in today’s troubled United Kingdom. With only a little allowance, he could be talking about us: “We can not remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends?”
Lincoln finished that speech with these words: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
When he ran for election in 1860 and gave that speech in 1861, Lincoln knew he had a country to save. I am not certain, in 2015, that either of the men about to contest the premiership know that they too have a country to save and rebuild. What is clear, though, is that someone somewhere in British public life has to make a Lincoln-like effort to inspire the better angels of our own nature and to try, again and again, to halt the current fissiparous abandonment to our worse ones. We are not enemies either. Here surely, Michael Sheen, is something to believe in.
Unless this happens, our house may not stand for long. The chances of that producing a “more advantageous or more satisfactory” outcome are tenuous at best. Who can give believable voice to what needs to be said? It is hard to think of the statesman or woman with the standing to speak for our union. Perhaps an archbishop can attempt it. Perhaps a poet. Where, and who, is our Lincoln?
