My mother was born in Milan and married an English soldier during the last war. She always used to complain about what she called the hypocrisy of the English people.
As a child, I didn’t really notice it. I didn’t particularly care about it. My definition of hypocrisy was fairly simple: people who didn’t practise what they preached. And I thought that quite a lot of people fell into that category—priests, politicians principally, of course, and the rest of the damn lot. Philosophers too, some of them at least.

But recent events in Britain have forced me to think again about what actually defines British hypocrisy, and what its worst manifestations might be.
I’m thinking particularly about the controversy that has recently set the country alight: the removal of asylum seekers from expensive hotels and their transfer to former army camps.
Now, in itself, that doesn’t seem unreasonable. Why shouldn’t disused army camps be used? Many of them haven’t been occupied by the military for years. It seems perfectly sensible to make use of buildings that already exist.
But there is a difference between these camps and the hotels in which the asylum seekers have previously been housed.
The hotels are generally in towns and cities.
The army camps are generally in the countryside.
And that, I think, is where we begin to see something rather revealing about England.

There are, in a sense, two Englands.
There is the England of the cities: multicultural, varied, noisy, crowded, and populated by people of different religions, languages, colours and backgrounds.

And then there is the England of the countryside: the pub, the National Trust, country walks, Ordnance Survey maps, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, picturesque villages and the sense of an ancient, settled way of life.
This second England is still, to a large extent, a white, English and culturally homogeneous environment.
And suddenly there is a problem.

For years, people in these communities have been able to say: “Of course we have to be tolerant. These people need somewhere to live. We’re not racists. Britain must be welcoming.”
And perhaps they genuinely believed it.
But then the asylum seekers arrive—not necessarily in their own houses, of course, but in an army camp just down the road.
And suddenly the attitude changes.
“Not here.”
And that, to me, is one of the great definitions of English hypocrisy:
Everything is all right, so long as it isn’t in my backyard.
Now, I am not saying that every objection to these camps is racist. Clearly, if you put 150, 500 or even 1,000 predominantly young, military-aged illegally entered men from other continents into a village of perhaps only 200 inhabitants, with its own very english families and children, there can be serious practical problems. There are questions of policing, transport, accommodation, integration and sheer scale.
Those are legitimate questions.
But what interests me is the sudden discovery that something which was perfectly acceptable as an abstract principle becomes unacceptable when it affects one’s own community.
And this is where people begin to say, “No, no, it isn’t racism. We’re objecting to the location. We’re objecting to the disruption of our way of life.”
Perhaps.
But the timing is interesting.
And this leads me to something else: the movement of people within Britain itself.
There isn’t only migration into Britain from the rest of the world. There has also been a huge migration of English people out of the inner cities and into leafy suburbs and eventually the countryside.
I remember this from my own childhood.
I had an aunt who lived in Southall. I was about eight years old when I remember hearing that they were moving away.
“Oh no,” I was told, “we’re moving out of Southall. It’s got too bad. It’s got too much for us.”
I asked, “What’s wrong with Southall?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” I was told.
Of course, I didn’t understand at the time. But I think I understand now.
What was happening was that Southall was becoming increasingly populated by people from Punjab, including Sikhs and other South Asian communities. The character of the place was changing.
But nobody actually said that.
They didn’t say, “We don’t want to live next door to Indians.”
They said, “It’s changed.”
“It’s gone downhill.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
And that is another form of hypocrisy: the ability to express a prejudice without ever quite admitting that you have expressed one.
There is another phrase that is frequently used in Britain: “We are a Christian country.”
But what exactly does that mean?
How many people actually go to church these days? How many regularly attend an Anglican church? Perhaps ten per cent, perhaps five per cent in some places, perhaps even fewer.
So once again there is a curious contradiction between what people claim Britain is and how they actually live.
But perhaps the greatest example of English hypocrisy is not found in England at all.
It is found abroad.
The Englishman abroad.
This is one of my favourite examples.
English people have migrated in enormous numbers to Spain, to the Costa del Sol, to Italy and to all sorts of other countries. They have left England because they want a better climate, a better quality of life, cheaper property, or simply a different way of living.
And yet some of these same people can be deeply resentful of immigrants coming to Britain.
They have migrated themselves.
But they don’t think of themselves as immigrants.
They are expatriates.
There is a subtle distinction there.
I remember one English couple of a certain age who invited me to Sunday lunch in Italy.
It was a wonderful English Sunday lunch: roast beef, two vegetables and apple pie.
It was absolutely delicious.
I said something about how wonderful it was to have such a traditional English meal.
“Oh, we always eat like this,” they said.
“You mean during the week as well?”
“Oh yes. We don’t touch any of that spaghetti rubbish.”
They were living in Italy.
And yet their whole life was a tiny transposition of south-east London.
It could have been Bexley. It could have been south-west London. It could have been Surbiton.
Somehow a little piece of suburban England had been lifted out of Britain and deposited in a hilltop Italian village. And naturally they had voted for brexit in 2016!
All around them were Italian church bells clanging, cafés, bars, markets and the whole Italian way of life.
But they had constructed their own little England.
If there had been an English tea room nearby, I suppose they would have gone there every afternoon.
They had emigrated without wishing to become immigrants.
They wanted Italy without Italians.
And behind this lies something deeper, which is the old English belief in the superiority of English civilisation.
You can see it beautifully in A Room with a View: the English abroad, surrounded by Italy, looking upon the Italians as charming, emotional, rather immature people rushing about while the English represent order, civilisation and good sense.
It is an attitude which has not entirely disappeared.
And this is, I think, a kind of racism.
It doesn’t necessarily look like the racism that we recognise today. The word may never be used. People may never have been taught to think in terms of racism.
But if you believe that your culture is inherently superior to somebody else’s, that your way of life is the civilised one and that other people are somehow less developed, less rational or less respectable, then there is a hierarchy there.
And that hierarchy can be racial as well as cultural.
“We are English.”
“We have the superior civilisation.”
“They are the foreigners.”
“They are charming, perhaps—but not quite like us.”
That is a form of racism, even if the person expressing it would be horrified to be called a racist.
And this brings me back to hypocrisy.
Some people might say that hypocrisy is not really a vice.
I disagree.
I think hypocrisy is a terrible vice.
It is not simply that you fail to live up to your ideals. All human beings do that from time to time.
The real problem is when you demand one standard for other people and another standard for yourself.
You preach tolerance, but only when the consequences don’t affect you.
You condemn immigration, while living abroad yourself.
You say that Britain is a multicultural society, but object when multiculturalism arrives in your village.
You say you are not racist, but quietly assume that your culture is superior to everybody else’s.
You claim to be a decent and tolerant person, while maintaining a private set of rules that applies only to you.
And worst of all, you pretend that you aren’t a hypocrite.
You pretend that you don’t have double standards.
You pretend that you aren’t racist.
You pretend that you are simply defending common sense.
But underneath all this there can be a profound disassociation between what you say and what you actually believe.
And perhaps that is the most interesting thing about hypocrisy: the hypocrite frequently deceives himself as much as he deceives everybody else.
Fortunately, there are many English people who have very little to do with this kind of mentality.
They have travelled. They have lived abroad. They have mixed with other cultures. They have learned languages. They have discovered that England is not the centre of the universe.
They have developed, if you like, a global attitude rather than a parochial one.
And I think that is the real dividing line.
Hypocrisy breeds in a parochial outlook on life.
Tolerance, curiosity and universality come from looking beyond the boundaries of one’s own village, one’s own country and one’s own culture.
The person with a global outlook understands that other people have exactly the same right to regard their culture as normal as we have to regard ours as normal.
Perhaps that is what my Milanese mother saw all those years ago.
She came from outside.
She married an Englishman and lived among the English.
And perhaps, because she was not English herself, she could see something that I, as a child, simply couldn’t see.
The English are not uniquely hypocritical, of course. Italians can be hypocritical. The French can be hypocritical. Americans can be hypocritical. Human beings are rather good at it.
But there is something particularly interesting about the English variety.
It is often wrapped in politeness.
It is wrapped in good manners.
It is wrapped in phrases such as “one wouldn’t normally…” or “people might think…” or “it’s not really the done thing.”
The hypocrisy is rarely shouted.
It is quietly understood.
And perhaps that is why it can be so difficult to recognise.
So there we are.
Hypocrisy: the great British virtue—or the great British vice?
My mother would probably have known the answer.
And after all these years, I am beginning to think she was right.

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