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Time to Emigrate?
George Walden

Amol Rajan
posted 25 January 2007

The epistolary form in literature has a long and rich association with Western political theory. Some popular ideologies owe much of their foundation to it. Thomas More's Utopia (1516) took the form of a letter written by the fictional explorer Raphael Hythloday to diplomatically-minded Europeans of that period, of whom More was himself one. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was the published version of an actual response from the author to a French friend, who wrote to him in November 1789 to ask what he made of recent events in Paris.

If, as in the case of More's text, either the author or the recipient of the letter is fictional, the decision to create such a character is generally guided by a specific motivation (More's use of a fictional author may have been calculated to distance himself from any ostensible endorsement of utopianism, in case he further enrage the moody Henry VII, whom More had already angered by arguing against tax rises upon his entry to Parliament in 1504. Henry had subsequently jailed More's father). But George Walden is entering this tradition nervously with Time to Emigrate?, which for no sensible reason takes the form of a letter to an fictional son. The resulting confusion is an impediment to both the clarity and the cogency of the conservatism he espouses.

A minister for higher education under Margaret Thatcher, Walden retired at the 1997 general election and, like all former politicians, took up writing books mainly to satisfy that portion of his political ego that Westminster had left undernourished. This latest offer is a repetitive polemic on the state of modern Britain, and submits to all the unquestioned and prevailing orthodoxies on subjects as diverse as immigration, immigration, and immigration.

That, above all, is the target of Walden's anger. He feels that uncontrolled immigration has led to moral chaos and economic failure in modern Britain. Now, it is reasonably obvious to any partial or impartial observer that the argument against encouraging the free movement of peoples has been made forcefully and repeatedly in recent years, but without any especially original thought or change in tone. So it is disappointing that another anti-immigration polemic is drowned not in rational argument but in a despairing voice and that ubiquitous tone of disillusionment, alienation, and weakness in the face of destructive power that seems to define political language today.

Before examining Walden's politics, it is worth questioning why he adopted this form - if only because it is the only challenging question posed by this book. The book is a letter to a fictional son who is thinking about leaving Britain to set up shop in mainland Europe. Walden says both in the foreword and in the main body of the text, 'Emigration is an emotive business, involving individual preferences and feelings, and it seemed to me easier to convey these in an imaginary letter, rather than in a dry factual study'. Why must factual studies be dry? Was Burke's? Walden might argue that the epistolary tradition enables him to create more vividly the sense of a father genuinely concerned by what is happening to the country his child will inherit. After all, it is about 'individual preferences and feelings', so he has to create a son to do the preferring and the feeling.

The trouble is, this book is all about the author's individual preferences and feelings, not those of any imagined or actual son. It is about his disgust at the impurities of modern Britain, and his alienation from the imagined country of his past. The letter form is an excuse to vent frustration, nothing more; indeed, in an excitable admission of this plain fact, Walden tell us the 'two-hundred page letter is the bottled-up result' of worry at his son's potential emigration. 'I'm sorry if it's come out a bit state-of-the-nation, but then that's the reason people emigrate, isn't it… There's nothing like the condition of England question to get the juices flowing, and once I got going I found myself attacking the subject with a certain relish.'

The name of the fictional son, Guy, carries the sense of 'just another guy' - as if Walden were writing to (and for) the common man of England. But it soon becomes clear that this book is about confirming Walden's own prejudices rather than challenging anyone else, because Walden is most interesting in talking about himself, immersing his polemic in the salty water of subjectivity: 'I've been too busy to give the nation much of a thought', 'I began with my prejudices', 'I don't live in England anymore, I live amongst an agglomeration of foreigners', and so on. At one point he gives us 'Prejudiced? Sure I'm prejudiced'. Soon it slips into straightforward autobiography, and Guy is all but forgotten.

Such is the trouble with Walden's choice of the epistolary form. It requires of him that he create fictional characters (not just his son, but his son's wife, their children etc) and an associated narrative. But because Walden's tone is so autobiographical, so self-obsessed, all attempts to manufacture such a narrative are unconvincing to the point of being laughable. Take this paragraph opener: 'In our conversation over dinner you said you no longer saw much of a future for you or your children here. You've never said anything like that before'. But 'events' like this dinner, an example of Walden trying to give depth to 'Guy', are too randomly scattered, too divorced from the possibility of ever having been real, and too surrounded by the reality of Walden's own autobiography, that fiction and fact dissolve into each other, undermining the authority of Walden's authorial voice. The authenticity of Walden's experiences are confused with the imaginary authenticity of Guy's predicament; the result is unpersuasive. A fictional author (like More's) writing to a real son might have been more convincing.

I'm conscious I haven't said much about Walden's politics thus far, preferring instead to criticise the form it takes. That is because the letter device is a bold gamble and a comprehensive failure, but I wonder if in any case we might not be able to get closer to Walden's politics if we played along with him, if we entered his fiction, if we offered his narrative a glimpse of actualisation, if we became, just for a moment, the humble Guy:

Dear Dad,

Thanks for your letter, and for your concern. Don't worry about it's being so long - I know you like to talk!

I must say, on finishing what you wrote I felt rather as if I should be more concerned about you than vice versa. You seem scared, Dad, really scared. Everything you said about England seemed tinged with fear and uncertainty. But what really struck me was that the insecurities you seem to have now all appear to be caused by relatively recent events, as if even in the near past there was a time when, although people weren't as materially comfortable, at least they felt stronger about who they were and where they belonged.

Where do your anxieties come from? I think you offered several clues. At one point, you said 'Yes there was the Bomb, but the point about the Cold War was that it stayed cold, and the very awesomeness of the nuclear threat was a steadying factor. There's nothing to steady things now'. When I was younger (much younger), and you were working for Mrs Thatcher, you told me that she had said there might be a big war in the world, but because we knew it might happen, our country would work night and day to prevent it. I think for you, especially because you were so close to Mrs Thatcher and working for her, that feeling of imminent war gave you a sense of certainty, a sense of purpose. I can see why you don't have that any more.

But is it such a bad thing that we're no longer in danger of nuclear war? Shouldn't you be proud to have served under a Prime Minister who, together with Mr Reagan, saved your children from becoming dust?

I was grateful for your recounting your Dagenham days. You're quite right that the BNP now have a stake in how that place is run. But personally I don't think they're much to worry about, and at least they're out in the open rather than submerged underground. As for the Albanians and Somalis that you now find in the area, you'll forgive me for saying that actually the vast majority of these people - and, for that matter, the Serbs, the Algerians, the Iraqis, the Poles, and whoever else - are utterly decent, hard-working, and law-abiding citizens. The Poles in particular are also excellent at fixing leaky pipes. I'm conscious you feel like a stranger in your own back garden (as somebody said at the last general election, especially when you say things like, 'It's not our country any more'). I know that the England of yesteryear, the England in which you and Mum met, in which Britain was the 'island of tranquillity' that you long for it to be again, didn't have so many of these foreign characters, but have they really had the impact you're saying they've had? Are they really responsible for all the crime, all the rising inequality, that lost sense of solidarity and belonging?

I think maybe it's more complicated than that. But I know you're not alone in your complaints. Uncle Tebbit told me ages ago that we need to be wary of letting too many of them in, and I've heard so many worried people on the street and in the news that there's got to be something underlying it all.

I just wonder though if the reason that you feel so estranged from the idea of England is, well, England's fault - and not the fault of the foreigners. The England you long for, the England Mr Major talked about in the early Nineties - that England seems defined now by its absence from public life. It almost seems as if nobody's really prepared to try to make it real again; only everybody's prepared to talk about how lovely it was 'back then'.

I hope I don't seem to harsh here, Dad. But actually, if you don't mind me saying, I think that you're doing both yourself and your country a huge disservice if you leave. The thing is, England, whatever that means, is up for grabs. Families like ours have got to be prepared to fight for our values, and I think fewer and fewer us are doing just that - which is maybe why so many of them are, like you say, emigrating. But if we all emigrated, if we all stopped defending the way of life we thought was important, then all the hard-working Albanians, Algerians, Iraqis, and Poles would find themselves arriving into a big hole. And obviously they'd end up filling it. Maybe that's what's happening - maybe it's up to us not to run away and escape our countries, but to fight for the kind of country we want, and take pride in that.

You know, just reading your letter and writing this reply has convinced me of where I stand. I think emigrating would be a sign of despair, a cop-out. So I'm going to stay at Britain, take pride in what it is, and do all I can to help shape it into the country it could be - and that's one that even you, Dad, would never want to run away from.

Yours ever,

Guy