11 - Backing Little Britain: Distempers

Summary

The 1960s were marked by wide-ranging debates about British decline, so much so that historians have identified a culture of ‘declinism’ affecting all asspects of contemporary life, from the prescriptions of economists to the activism of the (short-lived) ‘I’m Backing Britain’ movement in 1968. Though declimism principally affected the political and literary culture of England, this chapter explores how it was also reproduced in strikingly similar ways elsewhere - in Australia, New Zealand and Canada in particular - where a proclivity for diagnosing the deficiencies of nationhood became a recurring feature of the broader political culture. Yet such was the focus on national maladies that these wider commonalities and their shared sources of discontent were almost never remarked upon — even as the practitioners borrowed freely from each other’s rhetorical templates. This chapter, then, takes stock of the wider anxieties about the ‘state of the nation’ that converged around the diminished certainties of Greater Britain.