10
ISSUES: Citizenship
Chapter 1: Citizenship in the UK
Four years on, are we still the Britain of
Danny Boyle’s Olympic ceremony?
C
an it really be four years since
the Olympics came to London?
As Rio prepares to light the
flame for the next Olympiad, it must
be so.
Many of our memories of that summer
will be personal. For some, going to
the Games themselves: taking my
children to watch equestrian events
in Greenwich Park, undeterred by the
occasional shower, or going out to
watch the Olympic torch being carried
through our streets.
The biggest moments were shared
across the nation: that triple gold
medal hour for Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis
and Greg Rutherford on the middle
Saturday that British athletics will
find it difficult ever to surpass. Above
all, there was Danny Boyle’s opening
ceremony – the night when 27 million
of us stopped to take in the sweep of
our island story of how we, the British,
became us, the people we are today.
How the Industrial Revolution came
to our green and pleasant land; the
democratic changes sparked across
a century of war and peace; the
soundtrack of our lives through these
decades of social and technological
change.
That Olympic summer surprised
people in its ability to bring the country
together. Four years on, Britain looks
back on it in the wake of a big moment
in our post-war political history, a
referendum vote that divided us
politically over our relationships with
Europe, and illuminated many of the
economic, social and cultural divisions
in Britain today.
The most economically and culturally
confident sections of our society
have had the unusual experience,
on the losing side of the referendum
vote, of feeling disoriented and
discombobulated by defeat. So
Remain voters in the 2012 host city
may have watched the
Imagine
documentary on the making of the
opening ceremony with a sense of
nostalgic reverie, understanding, for
the first time, the appeal of the Faragist
slogan “I want my country back”, albeit
looking through the other end of the
telescope. Some will feel a sharp sense
of dissonance between the resonance
of the opening ceremony for them and
the referendum outcome.
Indeed, the ceremony’s writer Frank
Cotterill-Boyce has voiced this sense
of dissonance, casting the referendum
campaign and its aftermath as a “kind
of anti-opening ceremony”. Yet the
clue is surely there in the numbers:
with 27 million Britons tuning in that
night, this could not be a story of
Britain that belonged to the 16 million
who voted for Remain or the 17 million
who were part of the 52% majority.
There is plenty in that same opening
ceremony story, scripted by Cotterill-
Boyce, to resonate with the sense of
identity and pride which underpinned
the choice of many fellow citizens to
vote Leave, too. It was the story of how
our country made and remade the
modern world, the spectacular forging
of those Olympic rings representing
the industrial heritage of a country
that took pride in making things
before the information age arrived,
where popular pressure from the
suffragettes and the Jarrow marchers
extended democracy and created a
welfare state.
And this is part of what it means to
be a nation. There are histories and
cultural meanings that are shared by
those who take very different views
on the biggest political questions.
Our popular national institutions –
the monarchy, the NHS or the army,
and indeed Team GB itself – belong to
those on both sides of the issues that
divide us by party or cause when we
go to the ballot box.
Indeed, the ceremony also told a
story of British exceptionalism. The
choice to join the Common Market
in the 1970s did not quite make the
cut for the moments depicted in the
opening ceremony. Our four-and-a-
half decades as reluctant members of
the European club are an important
part of our recent political history,
deciding the fate of more than one
Prime Minister, but harder to place in
the grand sweep of our national story
across the centuries.
Peter Hitchens, taking part in a
Newsnight
discussion with me this
week, was having none of this.
Elevating the position of professional
curmudgeon almost to that of being a
national treasure, he could not see how
a ceremony that was positive about
the 1960s, and included rap music, had
anything to say to those with a more
traditional sense of identity.
Hitchens felt conscripted into a sense
of “compulsory joy”, complaining of
feeling pressured to say that he liked
the ceremony – which is, naturally, a
matter of personal taste and opinion.
But that anti-ceremony view was not
very widely shared. The ceremony’s
inclusion of Jerusalem, Nimrod and
Abide with Me, as well as Dizzee
Rascal, may explain why its story of
British pride did prove broadly popular
with Britons of both a conservative
and a liberal disposition. People did
feel that the ceremony represented
their sense of Britishness, by a margin
of 65% to 67% in attitudes research
conducted shortly after the games,
with similar margins of six-to-one
agreeing that it was entertaining and
that it represented a positive balance
between traditional and modern.
Perhaps that was even more striking
in the Scottish referendum of 2014,
a vote about whether to break up
Britain itself. Danny Boyle was much
more aware, in 2012, than the London
Olympic organisers would have been
in 1948 or 1908 that British identity
had become a more complex thing.
His ceremony opened with songs from
the four nations and images of them
competing against each other on the
rugby field.
The themes of the opening ceremony
featured in the Scottish independence
referendum too, even if Danny
Boyle’s Olympic poetry got lost in
the dour sceptical prose of a Scottish
pro-Union campaign that became
rather more “No Thanks” than “Better
Together”. What was striking was how
the pro-independence side staked
