Vindictive Busybodies

On curtain-twitchers, Anglo eccentrics, and Why Post-Liberalism Failed

How much do you have to hate your neighbour, to shop him to the Health and Safety Executive for letting his grandson ride in the tractor cab? A 78-year-old farmer in South Wales has been fined £3,500 by officials, after a neighbour filmed him taking his preteen grandson with him in the tractor cab while he fed the cattle. It’s illegal in the UK to let a child under 13 ride in farm machinery.

There are lots of things one could say about this story. But what stuck out to me was the calculated, mean-spirited busybodying required to turn a heart-warming moment between an old man and his grandson into a weapon. It captures a curious duality of British culture: one I often think about in the context of debates in “post-liberal” quarters about a lost communitarianism.

Restoring more thickly-interwoven community life and social fabric sounds nice, in principle. Except, in practice, Brits hate having neighbours. And not without reason: for there’s a broad streak of authoritarianism in British culture, and also of the kind of vindictive busybodying encapsulated by the tractor story. And what is most characteristic of British culture is that, confusingly, this inveterate love of peering, prying, rubbernecking and meddling coexists with an equally broad streak of “live and let live”, often coupled with deep eccentricity and equally deep aversion to being busybody’d. (Indeed the very fact that we have a pejorative term at all for “taking an interest in family, friends, and neighbours”, which is what most “busybodying” actually is, illustrates this ambivalence in a nutshell.)

History is littered with eccentric Brits, such as “Mad Jack” Churchill, famous for fighting throughout WW2 with a basket-hilted Scottish longsword and bagpipes always to hand. For a more modest modern example, here is a Brit going for a swim in his bin during a heatwave:

@thehalalhamHe was swimming in the bin 🤣🤣🤣 on hottest day ever in england #england #hotweather #swimming #swimmingpool #pool

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Such eccentrics will, to a man, bridle furiously at the idea that anyone should be entitled to interfere with whatever it is they’ve decided to do. But at the same time there is nothing more British than twitching curtains at the neighbours, and interfering in whatever they’re dong. During Covid-19, 200,000 Brits reported their neighbours for breaking lockdown rules. And a startlingly high proportion of Brits loved the lockdown restrictions, with 25% wanting nightclubs closed forever even after coronavirus ended, with a further 20% supporting a permanent 10pm curfew.

Reflecting on these seemingly contradictory traits, the tractor grandad story prompted me to wonder how much they have contributed to the historic Anglo propensity for travel and exploration. We are a coastal people, formed of successive waves of invasion from the ocean, on a little archipelago where it’s not possible to be more than 70 miles from the sea. I imagine us there, all jammed in together, looking out at the great open sky beyond the waves and chafing at surveillance by everyone else in the village; no wonder, perhaps, that the solution to this suffocating feeling must have seemed all too obvious.

Did the Anglo settle half the planet just to get away from the curtain-twitchers next door? Maybe it’s fanciful, but I think there’s something to it. Family legend has it that my aunt moved from Britain to Australia to get away from her mother. My other grandma once described leaving Britain for Africa after the war to me as “like getting out of prison”. And there are innumerable other instances of this Anglo yearning to do one’s own thing without any neighbours too nearby. One of the more colourful examples must surely be Brendan Grimshaw, who bought a tropical island in the Seychelles in 1962, and lived there almost alone for the rest of his life, while transforming it into a nature reserve - and once turning down a $50m purchase offer from a Saudi prince. He left it in permanent trust when he died, and it’s now a haven for birds, wildlife, and giant tortoises: the world’s smallest national park.

This solitary turn applies in the Anglo diaspora, too. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see the Puritan settlers in the New World as being driven, in part, by a desire to get away from the religious busybodies surrounding them. Ironically of course, wherever you go, there you are: accordingly the Puritans would go on to replicate the busybodying instinct in their own communities. To my eye, to the extent that American culture is Anglo-descended, something of this same paradox persists there too, to this day, albeit in different forms to the British (and with larger housing plots): the same uneasy mix of bureaucracy and Don’t Tread On Me.

This mix of yearning for freedom from meddlers, plus inveterate desire to meddle, also has implications for family life. One recurring theme among mum friends on both sides of the Atlantic is the grim loneliness of raising children in an atomised culture - and the reluctance of baby-boom generation mothers to help. This is definitely somewhat a class thing: more working-class Anglo families still seem to be geographically and emotionally closer, and somewhat more intergenerational in their habits. But for middle-class Anglo mothers, it’s not just that grandma wants to go on cruises rather than helping with the grandkids, though this is a common complaint. It’s also that there is an acute ambivalence, for many new mums, about having your own mum around. It’s nice, but also get out of my face. (All the way to Australia, in some cases.)

When I weigh Mumsnet discussions on loneliness and lack of family help against those on interfering mothers-in-law and family members who insist on trying to “help” when a new baby is born instead of “respecting our privacy”, it’s hard to say with confidence that the driver of social atomisation is all economics. It was, as Christopher Lasch argues in Women and the Common Life, mothers themselves who drove the early twentieth-century flight of American families from relatively socially-embedded city life into the isolated suburbs: a shift which then, in turn, gave rise to the alienation underlying Betty Friedan’s famous “problem that has no name”.

Are Anglo mothers our own worst enemies? As Abigail Tucker shows in the excellent Mom Genes, we are happier in direct proportion to how well-supported we are. Indeed you shouldn’t really need a study to prove this, as it’s blindingly obvious that caring for a baby without anyone to help or talk to is more miserable than doing so with friends, relatives, and other kids in easy reach. So the deep-seated yearning for freedom from curtain-twitching neighbours cuts particularly deep for those mothers who strike out into relative or absolute isolation in search of peace, only belatedly realise that actually neighbours can be a good thing in some circumstances.

And this all speaks to a profound Anglo discomfort about communitarianism full stop, born of a love/hate relationship with “busybodying” that runs centuries if not millennia deep. Inconveniently for postliberal romanticisers of tight-knit communities, it follows from this that one of the unspoken reasons why Anglo cultures are so atomised is very simply because overall we prefer it that way. If this is so, it probably also explains why “post-liberalism” has gained so little traction. No amount of encouraging the Anglo to live in intergenerational households because something something distributism is going to persuade us to stop dreaming of the open sea while twitching our curtains at the neighbours. And no amount of theorising about interdependence is, on its own, going to resolve the paradox.

I don’t know what the answer is, but it seems to me a profoundly spiritual dilemma. And we will either have to address it at the spiritual level, or else, eventually, expire, of sheer stubborn independence.