How to be a Brit

bumpkins (if you
live in London or another city).
    But as all these amount to
only 187 per cent of the population, you can justly be proud of your people.
    A member of this group once
remarked: ‘Running a vast Empire does — inevitably — create arrogance. The
Empire is gone; let’s stick to the arrogance. We must keep something.’
    3. The Staunch
Independents. Very well, say members of this group, we accept reality. But
we do not give up our national pride. Running to the International Monetary
Fund or the EEC and others for money is undignified. But we accept no
conditions. We shall never — never! — allow foreigners to run our economy. They
might cure it. Look what these Germans, Swiss, Swedes etc did to their own
economy.
    4. The Little Englander. England is gone. It has become a country of no importance. It is an off-shore
island. A new Jamaica. We know it was wrong to rule two-thirds of the world.
Our mistake. We do apologise. We’ll never do it again. True, we still have some
virtues and assets. We still have some brilliant writers, a magnificent
political sense, great courage, tremendous experience, unrivalled skills in
some fields but all this is really not our fault. We have not been able to get
rid of these virtues quickly enough to fit our new, modest position in the
world, but we shall do our best. We shall try to sink lower, difficult though
it is, with all our gifts. But we’ll try. We won’t give up. Sorry for being
alive.
    5. The Mikes Group. Or you can join me. This is what this whole book is about. We will say — and we
may be right, or we may be too pessimistic — that nations grow old, just like
individuals. They lose their competitive spirit; their ambitions; their
virility. In other words, they grow up, become wise, likeable and humane.
    If you have to become poor,
learn to enjoy your poverty but do not become a showing-off, conceited nouveau pauvre; if you become weak, find new strength in your weakness; if you have
to decay, decay with elegance and grace. An ageing gentleman cannot be a great
tennis champion, a devastating fast bowler or a record-breaking long-distance
runner; on the other hand those loudmouthed, vulgar youths cannot be shrewd,
mature and wise old men.
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HOW TO BECOME A COLONY
     
     
    The British are
brave people. They can face anything, except reality. You can tell them that
they have lost an Empire and that they are slowly sliding out of the first
eleven of countries: that is obvious. But you cannot tell them — so don’t —
that they are being colonised themselves.
    They are being colonised by
rival powers. First of all, they seem to have become a colony of Saudi Arabia.
Sometimes, looking at certain districts of London, you would think that there
can be no more Arabs left in Riyadh. There must be more sheiks in the London
casinos than in all of Jeddah. During the hot, long summer of 1976 the country
was actually being turned into a desert, with a few oases here and there. We
have even got the oil — as befits a country which other countries want to
colonise.
    The Arab menace, however,
is much less serious than it seems. It is true that they buy up half of the
country; it is true that they fill the most expensive British nursing homes
with patients grand or humble, to such an extent, that in these establishments
all notices, menus etc. are printed in Arabic with an English translation (for
the staff). But the Arabs, at least, return to Britain a substantial part of
the money they make on their oil. Not so much through the nursing homes —
although what they rake in is not inconsiderable — as through the gaming
tables. This is fair and decent of them. Whenever they raise the price of their
oil by ten per cent, they also raise their losses on roulette and chemin de
fer by the same amount.
    The Indians, too, are
getting even with the British. Small trade — as a first step — is being taken
over by Indians and Pakistanis. In Fulham, where I live, one shop after another
has passed into Indian hands: the newsagent’s, the grocer’s, the greengrocer’s,
the small post office, the chemist and so on. I am not sure that the Indians
were so pleased when we took over their land but I, personally, am delighted by
their turning Fulham into an Indian colony, with my television-repairer as its
viceroy.
    The small, dingy English
grocer-shop has become a splendid little supermarket; at the post-office
service — and courtesy — have improved beyond