Referencing widely, from Adam Smith and George Orwell to the author's mentor, historian Tony Judt, Jukes argues that Murdoch managed to elide two seemingly uncontroversial ideas, those of freedom of the markets and freedom of the press, to toxic effect.

The early signs of his freedom-loving spirit were there in 1969. Just after buying the News of the World, Murdoch printed the diaries of Christine Keeler, the call girl at the centre of the Profumo scandal. It marked out Murdoch as an outsider, happy to push the boundaries, in this case to embarrass the Establishment. With the British elite on the wane by the Eighties, he found another closed shop to take on the print unions – and so became a standard bearer for the neo-liberal agenda of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and, as his international holdings grew, a poster-boy for Tony Blair's globalisation project.

In an ambitious argument, it is suggested that Murdoch's brand of news even mirrored the expansion of the financial sector. Stories about politicians and celebrities were akin to derivative markets in which futures could be ramped or dumped for one's own ends, as John Major s government and stars such as Charlotte Church found to their cost, and David Cameron perhaps to his benefit. (What's a little phone-hacking and horse-riding to achieve these goals compared with Libor manipulation?)

Capitalism was indulged up until the 2007-8 financial crisis. Murdoch-style journalism took a bit longer to break because, as Jukes puts it neatly, "News International is not only too big to fail but also, with its government connections, too big to jail".

Many an economic liberal still admires Murdoch's business style, but this is part of the ideological mist. While he presents himself as a free marketeer, Murdoch's newspaper and television interests in Britain and Australia have verged on monopolies. And despite his republican stance, Murdoch runs News Corporation as a dynasty, with three children, Lachlan, James and Elisabeth, all at one time groomed as potential successors.

The Fall of the House of Murdoch was written in haste to catch the tail-end of the Leveson Inquiry and, as a result, is a little unpolished. Yet it is an impressive treatise on how media, money and power in the past 30 years became so locked into mutually supporting agendas that they failed to interrogate each other. If that's not enough, it is worth reading just for Jukes's account of Rebekah Brooks's flirtation with him at a party in 2006

 

Scotsman 11th August 

• 26 Jul 2012
• London Evening Standard (West End Final B)
• JOY LO DICO

Nearly exactly a year ago, I wrote how Obama had bravely faced up to the Islamophobes in the US during his <a href=http://www.labourlist.org/obama-and-islamophobia>;Ramadan speech</a> and worried that Europe lacked such leadership.

<blockquote>The rise of Islamophobia in Europe over the last few years - expression of which I have encountered many times in the past, even on LabourList, - has filled me with a kind a foreboding I haven't felt since the early 90s and the rabid nationalism in former-Yugoslavia, which itself had an anti-Muslim component.

The signs are everywhere to be seen. The US have Palin's 'Ground Zero Mosque' and the threat of Koran burning. We have the French assembly voting to ban niqab, Switzerland banning minarets, and the rise of the English Defence League here in the UK, deliberately targeting Muslim communities with provocation and violence...

We have demagogues like Geert Wilders in Holland getting 33% of the vote by inciting fear and hatred. Meanwhile, opportunist politicians in the UK try to ride the bandwagon, putting forward legislation to ban burkas. This is hardly helped by so-called intellectuals (who should know better) talking about 'Islamofascism' or "Londonistan" and trying to yolk together a religion of universalist appeal with racist ultranationalism.</blockquote>

Don't worry. This is not some gratuitous exercise in 'I told you so'. My hands are no cleaner than others, and in the rise of Islamophobia I have to share some blame (<i>more below</i>). We do not know yet if Anders Behring Breivik acted entirely alone. He may yet win an insanity defence. Yet there's little doubt that both his targets and his motivation were avowedly <b>political</b>. Both <a href=http://youtu.be/rAwp2FnRmsE>;the video he uploaded</a> and the <a href="http://www.peterjukes.com/joomla3/http://www.kevinislaughter.com/wp-content/uploads/2083+-+A+European+Declaration+of+Independence.pdf";>European Manifesto of Independence</a> he passed on to sympathisers should place that beyond doubt Though somewhat rambling and derivative, Breivik's arguments are rational and coherent. He articulates a vision of the 'Islamisation of Europe', deliberately smuggled in by Marxists spouting 'multiculturalism' as their credo. That vision, and his belief that an incendiary act of violence was needed to trigger the inevitable religious and social conflict make it indisputable: the killings on Friday 21st of July <b>a classic act of political terrorism.</b>

Like many young men who search for some final battle between good and evil, Breivik was a dreamer of the absolute, who found his purpose in sacrificing himself for a cause greater than himself. In this, he resembles the extremist Jihadists he purports to despise, and like many of them, he seems to have been indoctrinated and then motivated into a medieval mindset through a quite modern source: what he read <i>online</i>.

Does the Blogosphere Breed Political Hate?

The more that emerges about Breivart's relatively affluent and quiet background in Norway, the more investigators search for the sources of his warped worldview, the more abundantly obvious it is that online conversations with British extremists were a key source of ideology and inspiration. This has led Nick Cohen to assert, in yesterday's Observer, that Britain is the Breeding Ground for Hate

Nothing about Breivik is as interesting as the people he shot, but those with the stomach to read him will find that ideas made in Britain enthralled him. He writes in English. He uses a British pseudonym – Andrew Berwick – and gives his manifesto a London dateline. He meets sympathisers in a London pub and drops strong hints that the organisation he is closest to is the English Defence League. He has a respect for at least some of the EDL's ideas because it does not go along with traditional antisemitic Nazism but agrees with Breivik that there has been a plot by the treacherous "cultural Marxists" of the European elite to undermine the nation state by flooding it with immigrants, most notably Muslim immigrants. British extremists of whatever type have the advantage that English is the language of the web that foreigners must master if they want an international audience. Breivik's references to British sources would not be surprising if all he did was quote from obscure websites and chatrooms. But Breivik did not only listen to British far rightists screaming out their hatreds in the madhouses of the blogosphere, but peppered his manifesto with citations of articles in the Daily Telegraph and other respectable conservative newspapers. Britain's mainstream media, not the fringe on the web, formed the basis of his claim that readers could find all the evidence they need of the multicultural plot to turn white, Christian Europe into a Muslim-dominated "Eurabia"

As usual, Cohen is right about the detail but jumps to a debatable conclusion. When it comes to displaying knee-jerk suspicions of Islam, it wasn't just Murdoch's The Sun who assumed the Oslo attacks were Jihadist in origin: even the liberal New York Times jumped the gun and wheeled out its bloviating Al Qaeda experts. There's also no doubt the English speaking political blogosphere is full of cocoons of craziness and hatred. Outbursts of Islamophobia can be found anywhere. But so too can unfounded claims about Climate Change, the EU(SSR), Obama's birth certificate, or the CIA's involvement in the 9/11 attacks. It's not just on the xenophobic right where echo chambers of extremism flourish. As a regular blogger in the US, I encounter conspiracy theories and apocalyptic thinking regularly on the left too - on liberal blogs like Firedoglake or Dailykos. The internet is still dominated by the English language, and so the growth of extremist rhetoric could be something to do with the nature of politics online. Because you preselect your sites and sources - narrowcasting rather than broadcasting - the net brings the attendant dangers of confirmation bias, and a ramped up atmosphere of increasing hyperbole and extremism of expression. However, as my own experience reveals, blogging has forced me to engage with, and try to combat, generalised arguments about Muslims, Birthers, Climate Change, or the EU. Why didn't Breivik's online excursions lead him him to The Guardian or indeed Labourlist, where his ideas would have been challenged? Short answer: they probably did. But he didn't listen. The internet didn’t create extremism. It might have amplified on some occasions. But there are other example of new media - from the Murdoch scandal to the Arab Spring - where online activism has served more liberal ends. The net is basically a neutral space to share opinions. And when it comes to the recent phenomenon of Islamophobia, those opinions predate Twitter or Comment is Free.

A Brief History of Modern Islamophobia

I'm just back from Sarajevo where the scars of the siege are still visible fifteen years later: the sniper bullet-holes in the buildings, the horrible dragon's claw mark of a mortar shell, not to mention the look in the eyes of men my age. The cataclysmic Twentieth Century was effectively launched by a bullet fired in Sarajevo in 1914 - the assassination by a Serb Nationalist of Archduke Ferdinand - and it's hard not to hear the echo of that shot in the way the century ended: the crump of a shell in the Old Town marketplace, followed finally by the first ever NATO bombs dropped in anger, as planes took out the Bosnian Serb positions around the besieged city. Just as modern Jihadism in the form of Al Qaeda came out of the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, so too I believe Modern Islamophobia was born from the end of the Cold War (for its older incarnation check out Edward Said's Orientalism). The same year the Cold War ended was the same year that Ayatollah Khomeni issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses - 1989. For many liberal intellectuals, this was a sobering moment. Just as the Berlin Wall was coming down, another was erecting itself in people’s minds. Instead of Communism, perhaps religion - particularly fundamentalist religion - was emerging as the new enemy. Many thinkers turned their eyes from the dissidents fighting totalitarian repression in the Warsaw pact, and to the autocratic Arab states in the Middle East. Meanwhile, though hidden under the rock of Communism for decades, nationalist and xenophobic feelings emerged intact in much of Central and Eastern Europe. By now we all know about the tragedy of the former Yugoslavia, and the ultimate direction of the nationalist rhetoric of the Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Though he played on fears of the Croatian Catholic Ustashe, his initial line in the sand in Kosovo was against the 'Turks'. In his famous address on the 'Battlefield of the Blackbirds' Milosevic invoked the historic role of Serbs as the defenders of Europe against the Islamic horde. This toxic religious nationalism culminated in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the final horror of Srebenica, when 8,000 men and boys were massacred and buried in mass graves merely because they were designated 'Muslim'. We're less familiar however, with Islamophobia in the former republics of the USSR. Apart from countless terror attacks in Russia itself, there have been two wars in Chechyna, and other ethnically-based conflicts in other former Soviet Republics, including that of my grandfather's homeland - Armenia - which was engaged in brutal conflict with Azerbaijan over Ngorno Karabakh. Meanwhile, anyone from the Caucasus (whatever their religious denomination) still faces danger in Russia itself. When I was in Yerevan three years ago I met a sculptor - barely darker than I am - who had fled St Petersburg because a friend had been stabbed to death for being too Islamic looking. It's impossible - or at least very difficult - to remove the racial component from Islamophobia. Though no one would recognise my Bosniak or Kosovar friends as Muslim when they walk down the street, the truth is, for most of Europe, Muslims are recognisable by their colour as much as what they wear or what beards they sport. So there's an underlying racist component to Islamophobia, and groups like the EDL (despite having a Sikh among their leadership) exploit this to the full. They say they're not racists. What they object to is fundamentalist religion - and who can object to that? But as anyone who has shared a bus with EDL supporters will attest, this racialist disclaimer is a lie. They're the same old hooligans, Paki-bashers and Nazi bully boys I recall from the 70s and 80s. But intellectually, they draw some cover from surprising sources. I remember Senior Tories, while debating why Britain shouldn't do anything in Bosnia, explaining how Islam would be the next major global struggle after defeating Communism. In this they were merely reiterating what Sam Huntingdon described in his Clash of Civilisations: a new conflict, a New World Order, pitting liberal values against against the intolerance of an unreformed Islam. Unfortunately, this kind of apologia was also echoed on the New Left who mourned the death of non-aligned Socialism, and saw the West 'manufacturing consensus' for intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. They also doubted the camps in Omarska and wondered whether Srebrenica was really an act of genocide and not 'exaggerated'. Some of them formed a Committee in Defence of Milosevic. Islamisation was, to some, the secret plan of Western capitalism to destroy actually existing socialism. Add to this already toxic mix the slow-burning Intifadas in Israel's occupied territories, Hamas suicide bombers, Likudite obstructionism after the assassination of Rabin, and a perfect storm was brewing.... Then 9/11 came along. After the mind-shattering attacks on the World Trade Centre all nuance was lost. The enemy was blindingly clear: the death-loving, mass-murdering, medieval fundamentalism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. In hindsight this traumatic over-reaction was probably inevitable. Gone was the characterisation of Islam as a multifaceted religion of 1.6 billion adherents, with its own major schisms between Sunni and Shia, or Alawites, Ismailis or Sufis. Everyone - TV pundits, newspaper columnists, novelists, playwrights - became experts on the extreme doctrine of Salafist Wahabis. The backlash was set.... For different motives, some of them almost honourable, modern Islamophobia grew out of a strange confluence of four very different currents; old fashioned xenophobic racism, atheist anti-clericalism, socialist nostalgia, and a Neo-con belief in reshaping the Middle East. When future historians ponder the fiasco of the Iraq War, the horrors of Abu Ghraib, or indeed the over reach of the initial policing operation in Afghanistan, I'm sure conclude they will conclude that for several years Osama Bin Laden achieved his objectives. After all, that's what the 9/11 attacks were meant to provoke: a massive over-reaction by the West which would lead to more polarisation, more Muslims being driven into Al Qaeda's arms when the realised the tolerance of western liberal democracy was fake, and we are all Covert Crusaders. We almost played straight into his hands. But not quite. And that's why the battle against Islamophobia is as crucial to our own security as the battle against Salafist Jihadism.

Is Multiculturalism to Blame?

Let us not forget, though there were numerous young Muslims at the Utøya summer camp, Breivik's target wasn't a mosque or the small Norwegian Muslim community, but what he considered their 'Marxist' enablers; young members of the ruling Labour Party, who were using 'multiculturalism' as a back door for the secret destruction of Christendom. It's a completely illogical belief: why would Marxists pretend to be social democrats to ally with Fundamentalist Islam to destroy Christianity? But it's not unheard of in the UK, and on these boards I've argued with commenters who claim that Labour deliberately 'swamped' the UK with Muslim immigrants in the rush for more votes. Despite the crazy conspiracies, Breivik's hatred of multi-culturalism is a popular them among far right parties in Austria, Holland. Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark. For the most part, especially in the Scandinavian countries, these are relatively small ethnically homogenous states and aren't multi-cultural at all. But that doesn't seem to stop them worrying about it. Unfortunately, in the last year, the 'multi culturalism' canard has been echoed by leaders of two of the largest countries in the EU: Angela Merkel in Germany and David Cameron here. As the Nobel Chair and former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland has suggested, they could be "playing with fire"

Four months ago in Munich, Cameron declared that state multiculturalism had failed in Britain, a view immediately praised by Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, as "a further huge leap for our ideas into the political mainstream". Marine Le Pen, vice-president of the far-right National Front party in France, also endorsed Cameron's view of multiculturalism, claiming that it corroborated her own party's line.

"Political leaders have got to defend the fact that society has become more diverse. We have to defend the reality, otherwise we are going to get into a mess. I think political leaders have to send a clear message to embrace it and benefit from it. "We should be very cautious now, we should not play with fire. Therefore I think the words we are using are very important because it can lead to much more."

Though I think Cameron's speech was ill-advised, and a bit of a sop to the Tory right, I don't he can be at all blamed for the atrocity in Norway ten days ago. Indeed, Breivik discussed Cameron as one of his targets. I also don't think that debating 'multiculturalism' is inflammatory in itself. The problem is - as I'm willing to debate - that the term means many different things. In most of Central Europe, Multi-Kulti was a policy to deal with historic minorities of Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles etc left over from the decay of three empires, and not yet cleansed by either Hitler or Stalin. As the Former Yugoslavia shows, that policy of effective segregation was neither stable nor enlightened. When Merkel uses the term 'multi-culturalism' she is part adverting to this, and arguing in favour of rights for long-standing children and grand-children of Turkish gastarbeiter (guest workers) who under the old blood-line form of German citizenship didn't have status, (though an ethnic German from the Russian Volga would). Merkel's attack on multi culturalism is partly an attack on and Jus sanguinis and a defence of integration. However, when David Cameron used the same language, he was kicking a giant strawman. Multi culturalism has never been Government policy here and Jus soli - place of birth - has generally determined citizenship. In terms of civil rights, immigration, housing and cultural policy, Britain has generally followed a path of integration, or - as David Goodhart would argue in recent years - no plan at all. Apart from the unfortunate exception of the former Mill Towns of the north, most our cities are heavily integrated compared to Rotterdam, Brussels, Paris or Berlin. No doubt much more needs to be done, but I know of no-one in the Labour Party, even during left separatist sections in the 80s, ever argue for the policy of segregationalist multi-culturalism. Since the overwhelming majority of our Muslim population are now first or second or even third generation, the question of current immigration hardly solves this point either. And let us not forget, Britain has been for three hundred years a multi-national, mult-ethnic and multi-denominational nation. There will be and always has been a problem between communities. But yolking together, as Cameron did, the problem of Islamic extremist and multiculturalism, is just a bit of short term blindness. Throughout my youth, the problems of integration had nothing to do with religion, unless someone wants to argue the riots in Handsworth, Toxteth, Brixton, St Pauls or Tottenham were a problem of fundamentalist Rastafarianism. Whatever the issues today in Tower Hamlets and Bow, a hundred years ago the press was filled with similar stories of terrorists and anarchists in the East End. These new immigrants dressed strangely, spoke incomprehensibly, ate weird food, and followed disturbing religious practices with their own 'laws'. It was fashionable to denounce them, in newspapers, novels, even in Nobel prize winning poetry. To many their presence in Britain was a huge threat to our way of life and security. Many inveighed against the tolerance of the government, their kowtowing to extremism. Things got so bad that fear of these strange co-religionists and their conspiracies ignited a Europe-wide movement. The tension finally erupted into major street violence, as those who opposed fundamentalist religion marched through the East End... This of course was march of Mosley's Black Shirts in 1936 and their routing at the Battle of Cable Street. These strange and alien people were Ashkenazi Jews, who had fled pogroms in Lithuania, Poland and other dominions of the Tsarist Empire and arrived in London in their hundreds of thousands at the end of the 19th Century. Anti-semitic fascism was stopped in its tracks in London that day in 1936, though it raged unabated in Europe for another ten years, leading to the destruction of Central European Jewry and the ultimate horror of the Holocaust. Though feared a century ago, in many ways redolent of the language to describe Muslims in the UK today, we now see the influx of Jews into this country not as a social problem, but a huge boost to the intellectual, social and economic life of our nation. If 'multiculturalism' means this, the British history of religious and ethnic tolerance, of rejecting faith or raced based hatred as a political program, then what's wrong with it? Let me sign up.

How do We Fight It? And How I Went Wrong

For all that fighting talk, I don't actually think - especially since the modern channels of communication are more virtual - that street battles are the way to go in combating Islamophobia. Just as it has taken root so quickly online, through ideas and theories spreading across the web, our task to to tackle them in the same way: counter the arguments whenever we find them, dispel understandable anxieties with facts, replace lies with real information, and both in ourselves and among others, look for a broader exploration about what Islam really means. As I said, concluding my essay a year ago:

For all these reasons I believe that, left unchecked, this tide of Islamophobia could be as catastrophic for this century as Anti-semitism was in the last. It strikes at the heart of the modern nation state, which was partly created as an answer to centuries of religious warfare, and gives support to extremists and religious zealots everywhere. If we want to preserve our tolerant liberal democracy, should do all we can to expose, argue, and root out Islamophobia wherever we find it - even in our own minds.

And this leads me to a counter-intuitive conclusion: let's welcome the Islamophobes entry into the discussion. Let's not berate them. Let's not just call them names. Islamophobia is a philosophy, a simplistic and almost appealing apocalyptic philosophy that seems to explain our confusing world. Not all of those who express these ideas have thought them through. Many have arrived at them on the basis of false evidence and misinformation. Every human on this planet has a racist side - and we're all hard-wired to look for 'out group' enemies to increase our 'in group' bonding. So banning hate speak, censoring anti Islamic statements, that will not make Islamophobia go away. We should engage with the arguments, expose the contradictions, follow the ultimately dangerous and genocidal logic. Let's shed daylight on this phenomenon, because if the experience of Bosnia teaches us anything, it just flourished buried under a rock. This is where I actually think the internet, and the Anglo Saxon tradition of liberal debate does the exact opposite of what Nick Cohen suggests: it will eventually cleanse extremism with daylight. And this is where I have to share some of the blame. When encountering anti Islamic statements, I have always tried to resist equating the sin with the sinner, making a racist comment an indication of deep and abiding racism. But I have also failed to make that distinction sometimes, and therefore made the hatred unsayable, and more likely to find its outlet in violent or nefarious ways. In this debate, we should be careful to separate out the separate strands of Islamophobia from the hardcore racist element. To those who fear Islam in itself, let us remind them that to characterise this vast religion by the activities of Bin Laden would be as bad as characterising Christianity by the activities of Timothy McVeigh, or Judaism by those of Baruch Goldstein, or indeed Buddhism by the killings of the Aum Shurikyro cult behind the Sarin gas attack on Tokyo. Indeed, analysing modern history by medieval standards plays into the hands of the fundamentalists who, by such simplistic standards, can rightly point out that in the last couple of decades, Christians killed each other by their thousands in Northern Ireland, by their millions in Rwanda and - apart from killing Muslims in Bosnia - Christians invaded with much bloodshed the Muslim states of Kuwait, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq To the Neocons, who wanted to reshape the Middle East, and who believed Arab countries were dominated by corrupt Autocrats, we can point to the positive homegrown examples of revolution in the Arab spring, the faces of hope and resilience in Tahrir Square, the continued struggles in Syria, Libya and Bahrain, and prove that Islam is not always in love with dreams of a medieval caliphate. To the militant atheists and anti-clericals, we can point out that secularism is not just a freedom from religion, but a freedom of religion, and that Britain has - since the time of Elizabeth the First - moved progressively down the road that religion is a matter for private belief, and not to be castigated or controlled by the state. Forcing people not to believe in any God would be just as bad as forcing them to believe in One God. This is the hard core of tolerance, and cannot be defended with intolerance. Finally, to the nostalgic socialists we can say: yes you had a point. Communism did manage to repress the nationalist and religious conflicts under its iron fist. But repression, censorship, banning religious symbols, closing mosques and churches, was merely a cork in a brewing bottle of venom which, when removed, exploded with even more force. The solution to all extremism is exposure: exposure to facts, opposing ideas, diversity of debate. So those who disagree with me... please start below.

 

There is a cliff whose high and bending head

Looks fearfully on the confined deep

Bring me but to the very brim of it . . .

...From that place

I shall no leading need.

 

What follows is one of the most resonant scenes in English Literature. Poor Tom (who is really Gloucester's estranged son Edgar in disguise) leads his father part way up the 'horrible steep', convinces him that he stands on the brink. Renouncing the world, begging forgiveness from his son, the blind man hurls himself forward to a certain death. But Gloucester is deceived. He falls forward on the grass. Returning in the guise of a local peasant, Edgar persuades Gloucester he has fallen the height of ten masts. The old man's life is a miracle. He is purged of his despair. In a single scene the cathartic power of tragedy is expressed: an imaginary fall that restores us to solid ground.

Everything in Shakespeare's description suggests that Aycliffe, renamed after dramatist at least 200 years ago, is the setting he had in mind. Given that this is a key scene in a core work of Western Literature, one might expect it would be a favoured destination on the literary trail: a locus classicus, like the Brontë's Haworth or Wordsworth's lakes. But you are unlikely to meet a cultural tourist retracing Gloucester's steps. The cliff bears no plaques to its pedigree other than its name (and a King Lear Pub in the estate behind). While every adventitious biographical trace has been themed in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Shakespeare Industry has left this monument to the dramatist's conscious poetic powers virtually untouched.

The cliff may have escaped the deadening hand of the heritage business, but it has not been forgotten by history. A few hundred yards towards Folkestone are the remains of gun-emplacement. A little further on, a vast concrete acoustic ear looks out to sea, a means of detecting incoming planes before radar was invented. Behind, a Battle of Britain monument is planned. One of the closest mainland points to France, the cliff tops are studded with relics of our ambivalence to Europe.

The cliff is riddled with symbolism. Seven thousand years ago these chalk downs were separated from France. Now powerful forces are at work again, reversing the process. It was under Shakespeare Cliff that 2000 metres were dug of the first channel tunnel in 1880. The excavations were stopped due to fears of invasion, but coal was discovered in the process; 'Shakespeare colliery' became the first in the Kent coalfield. A century on, in 1974, tunnelling began again only to be halted by the oil crisis. Today that tunnel, which connects the upper cliff with the shoreline, is used by TransManche Link, the consortium responsible for building EuroTunnel.

A heap of office blocks, cars and fencing now surrounds the old tunnel entrance, the operational headquarters for TML. At the cliff foot diggers and bulldozers, scuttling around like giant steel crustaceans, have filled an artificial lagoon with almost five million cubic metres of spoil from the excavations undersea. A mile of new coastline has emerged, bringing England 250 metres closer to France. Half the chalk slopes have been scooped away.

On this, the most precipitous of the white cliffs of Dover, it is also possible to feel a kind of cultural vertigo. A headland that figures prominently in English Literature, that protrudes deep into national legend and dream, the view from Shakespeare Cliff looks out over the fractured myth of Englishness.

*

Most myths are compounded of cliche and inspiration, history and deceit, and the white cliffs of Dover are no exception. Bluff and obdurate, their significance hardly needs comment: they are the face Britain presents to the world: more specifically, the face England turns towards Europe.

The white cliffs look better from a distance. Indeed, the greater the distance the better. Walter Kent, the lyricist of their most celebrated song, who improbably put 'blue birds over/The white cliffs of Dover', was an American who had not been within 3,000 miles of the place. But reality never bothered a good myth. The cliffs loom larger, whiter, and sturdier in the imagination than they do in fact.

'The eyes of homecomers thank these historical cliffs', wrote Auden in the poem Dover 1937. One might add it is not only the homesick who are grateful, the sea-sick too. My own first impression was from a storm buffeted ferry in the 70s, as it fought the waves to enter Dover harbour. For an hour or more the white chalk matched the colour of my knuckles as I tried to retain my stomach contents by gripping the deck rails. In direct contrast to Gloucester's vertiginous image, from the seaward side, the cliffs have represented stability, a fixed reference point in a shifting, reeling world.

Their whiteness is also essential. It recurs constantly in depictions of English landscape, the plain ground on which the countryside's 'greenness' can be spread. Charles Kingsley compared the cliffs the 'soft limbs of Mother Hertha' (a Germanic earth goddess), and during the Celtic revival this whiteness is often associated with native druidic purity. A crude racial metaphor is also often at work.

Others have been disappointed. Sheltering in Dover Harbour just after the sinking of the Belgrano, Jonathan Raban found the cliffs 'maculated with grime, drained of colour, under a ragged fringe of green'. The whiteness can also stand for sickliness, a pallid constitution, an atrophied state.

Above all, the cliffs form natural defences. Julius Caesar discovered as much when he first planned invasion in 55BC and remarked 'This was no place for disembarking'. By Elizabethan times it was already commonplace to describe the cliffs as England's 'bulwarks', the channel as its 'moat'. Not that nature went entirely unassisted. Dover Castle is the most blatant military complex in the area. Later, when cannons rendered the walls vulnerable, a vast submerged Grand Redoubt was constructed on the Western Heights.

But this fortress mentality also had its critics. Cobbett mocked the Grand Redoubt in his Rural Rides: 'What reason had you to suppose that the French would ever come to this hill to attack it, while the rest of the country was so much more easy to assail?' Caesar caught on quickly too, and took his invasion forces to land on the shingle beach at Walmer a few miles up the coast.

These properties converge to make the white cliffs stand out as an evocative emblem of British Resistance. Talk to local historians and they will remind you how Dover has always been a 'front line' town, suffering Dutch Merchantmen, Papist armadas, Jacobin revolutionaries and Bosch Zeppelins.

It was in the Second World War that the white cliffs reached their highest emotional pitch, and again, distance flattered their effect. In 1940 an anglophile American, Alice Duer Miller, wrote a long sentimental poem called 'The White Cliffs' as part of a concerted campaign to get America into the war. It ran to eleven editions, formed the basis of a film, and encouraged other images: Churchill standing on the cliffs looking over 'Hellfire Corner', a Lancaster limping home, a cartoon showing Hitler furiously hurling his planes against the implacable white walls. Ironically, the cliffs are made into a rallying cry by Vera Lynn just at the moment air power renders them militarily redundant. Blitzkrieg placed most English cities on the front line.

But even geology conspires with the myth. Under a powerful microscope the white chalk is comprised of the skeletons of millions of tiny coccoliths, sea creatures laid down on the seabed some 60 million years ago. It is tempting to see the white cliffs as a kind of ancestral graveyard, white with the bones of the heroic dead, a shrine to national sacrifice.

If this myth has a rival, an enemy of equal symbolic weight, a tunnel to France is the obvious candidate. The fixed link was first posited by a French Farmer in 1751 and for two hundred years since, the French have been suspiciously keen, the English paranoiacally wary. From this side of the Channel, the link has been perceived as a conduit for rabies and revolution, an act of foreign subterfuge, almost rape.

It is easy to overplay the symbolism. After all, the channel tunnel is merely a long overdue recognition of fifty years of European economic and political integration. But EuroTunnel does little to dispel the wider resonances. The very name itself, implying a tunnel to the Urals, is a grandiose gesture. Company publicity constantly talks in mythic terms of 'joining Britain to the heart of Europe', of a cultural abridgement, of overcoming 'the great divide'.

They might be right. When, by the end of this year, the first passenger service begins through the twin-bore tunnel, trains will dip underground at Santerre and emerge half an hour later north of Folkestone. Travellers will no longer hang on the horizon for the sight of white chalk, no longer suffer the turbulent currents and the relief of dry land. We are witnessing the denouement of a titanic struggle between two historic myths. In that sense, it seems only poetic justice that EuroTunnel should undermine Shakespeare Cliff.

Shakespeare's profile should be hewn into the chalk, just as American presidents are carved into Mount Rushmore. The dramatist is a key propagandist for Britain's splendid imperial isolation after Henry VIII had broken from Rome, Mary had lost Calais, and Elizabeth engaged in war with Spain. He is still a key component in the corporate image of the trading nation: Great Britain Plc. Henry V is quoted at Tory Party conferences as a rallying cry. John of Gaunt's speech (in Richard II) could form a good lyric for a second rap single from Baroness Thatcher, capitalising on her success with the Gettysburg Address:

 

'This other Eden, demi-paradise

This fortress built by nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in a silver sea

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house . . . '

 

Now the moat is broken. The fortress has been breached. There is a poetic justice - or tragic irony - to this as well. It was Margaret Thatcher who, with President Mitterand, finally signed the treaty which allowed EuroTunnel to begin. Like her other great continental initiative - the Single European Market - the project was supposed to be free trade project, to leave England's cultural identity intact. On both occasions, she now appears like Faust, conjuring with demons that would tear her apart.

*

Back on Shakespeare Cliff, on a clear breezy day, the misty symbolism of nationhood quickly evaporates. Look across, and there are white cliffs on the French coast too. The continent is only a day trip away.

Nevertheless, there is something distinctly English about the white cliffs. First, they are exceptionally pure, some 98% calcium carbonate. Secondly, they are surprisingly rare. There are none in Scotland or Wales: a few in France, Denmark and Germany. Such coastal chalk cliffs are only to be found in Europe, but southern England has the monopoly.

The geology of the cliffs also gives rise to another peculiarly English landscape: ancient chalk grassland. Formed when the downs were deforested by slash and burn, then grazed with sheep or cattle, the thin chalky soil does not allow any single type of vegetation to predominate. The result is a stunning diversity. On average, 30 species of flora pack every square metre of chalk: spider orchids, wild beat, wild marjoram. This has led some to call ancient chalk grassland England's equivalent to the rain forest.

Squeezed between fingers of urban Dover and an abrasive sea, a thin strip of ancient grassland persists on Shakespeare cliff. The jackdaws and the rock samphire are still here, just as Edgar describes them in King Lear. And if one had to isolate a quality that makes Shakespeare particularly English, the outcrops of patriotic bombast are beside the point. One would look for his true Englishness in the texture of his language, the mix of wildness and cultivation, roughness and delicacy, a verbal variety itself rooted in local landscapes. This is true, above all, of King Lear: the open heath in the storm, the 'poor pelting farms', the flowers with which the mad king garlands his head.

Some 80 percent of ancient chalk grassland has disappeared in the last fifty years. As Twyford Down shows, the habitat is under constant threat. Over the last year a tumultuous change has also taken place on Shakespeare Cliff, but with less publicity, even though the site also has its sacredness. The council estate has lost a dozen houses and a school - demolished. The once quiet valley now swarms with men in hard hats and florescent vests. You have to watch out for traffic when crossing over to the coastal path. If a modern day Gloucester wanted to kill himself, he'd be better off throwing himself under a passing JCB.

A great white gash, smeared by rusty bulldozer tracks currently disfigures Shakespeare cliff, has sliced it in two. Unlike the mythic battle, this devastation does not come from some external threat. It has little to do with EuroTunnel or the fixed link. TML's offices here will soon be dismantled, the site replanted with native plants. Keen to win (or buy) public opinion, EuroTunnel has sponsored numerous conservation schemes.

Our own Ministry of Transport, however, has no such qualms. Equipped with compulsory purchase orders they have bulldozed an extension of the M20 to Dover Harbour, across cliff top sites of special scientific interest, over the objections of local residents, right through the centre of Dover, severing the town from its sea promenade. All this by way of compensating the Harbour authority and the Ferry companies for any loss of trade when EuroTunnel opens. In a few months time, Shakespeare Cliff will be another noisy if spectacular motorway verge.

This is not the first time the cliff has been betrayed. 18,000 tons of gunpowder blew a large section away to make a platform for the Dover to Folkestone Railway in 1843. When it comes to undermining emblems of Englishness, we are our own worse enemies.

Yet we cling to the wreckage. Two years ago year Dover Council opened a 'White Cliffs Experience' in town: an animatronic, multi-media attraction about the 'Heritage Coast'. The so-called 'historium' recreates scenes from the Roman invasion to World War II. The ferries get a big plug, but there's no mention of Gloucester's imaginary fall. Nor is the current destruction of the clifftops touched upon. Once again, our national heritage seems to consist of elevating images while burying the facts.

Meanwhile, if you want the 'Gloucester Experience' there is still a little time left to climb the real Shakespeare cliff. Looking over the brim, you may recall how a blind man found his feet by a leap of faith. Or perhaps you will remember the story of Lear, a tyrannical old English King, who only awoke from his madness when his daughter arrived here with liberating forces from France. Or you might just listen out for the sea quietly milling the shingle, before the cars drown it out for ever.

 

Published in the Independent on Sunday May 1993