A recent headline in the Guardian was:
"Perfidious Albion: why French faith in Boris Johnson has nosedived."
It's ages since I last heard that phrase. It has a very long history (and an equally long justification). Otto, the Bishop of Freising in Bavaria, used a similar phrase in 1191 to describe the untrustworthiness and bad faith of the English monarchy following a dispute between the crowns of England and Austria during the Crusades. However the phrase really started to gain traction after the French Revolution to the extent that, by the 19th Century, French writers could refer to “la Perfide Albion” as a well known old saying.
The French revolutionaries had been inspired by England’s so-called Glorious Revolution a century previously which saw the Westminster Parliament curtail once and for all the absolute power of the monarchy and replaced the Stuart dynasty with the Hanoverians. The French revolutionaries originally sought to establish a liberal constitutional monarchy along British lines. However, Westminster, and the British crown, soon turned on the French revolutionaries and allied themselves with Europe’s reactionary and absolutist monarchies in a bid to bring the revolution down.
It says a lot about a state that a phrase referring to its supposed proclivity for treachery, deceit and bad faith becomes elevated to the status of a stock phrase. It says a lot, and it says nothing good. Perfidious Albion is the other side of British Exceptionalism. What British nationalists see as the special nature of Britain, which elevates it above the rules and norms that apply to lesser nations, others perceive as an untrustworthy deceit and a willingness to go back on the terms of deals previously agreed. It’s an important lesson that many will heed: you cannot reach a meaningful or lasting agreement with a state which is founded upon the belief that it is beyond the normal standards of honesty and decency that it expects of everyone else.
Examples of the untrustworthiness and bad faith of the Westminster Parliament are abundant. Just restricting ourselves to recent history, the latest example in a long series of British perfidy is the shameful way that the British Government is willing to trash the Northern Irish protocol which it agreed with the EU in order that Boris Johnson could go into a UK General Election and tell the supporters of British nationalism that he’d got Brexit done. Dominic Cummings (OK, not someone who can claim to occupy the high moral ground) now tells us that the Johnson government never had any intention of abiding by the terms of the deal. It was only ever a short term tactical lie, designed to allow the Conservatives to get through a short term political problem.
Johnson has form for this. He supported Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement at a third Commons vote in March 2019 despite the fact that he had resigned from the cabinet in protest about it. A resignation which was itself cynical and tactical, aimed at burnishing Johnson’s credentials with the Brextremist frothers in the Conservative party who would later elect him party leader and give him the keys to Downing Street. He voted for May’s deal, tactically and cynically because it was expedient at the time. His goal was to agree a deal in bad faith and then once the UK was out of the EU to kill it off from the outside. After May lost the Commons vote, she resigned, Johnson became Tory leader and the lying and deceit which was previously merely a strong tendency of the Conservative party became official British government policy. The UK has now shown the international community its true colours as a bad faith actor which cannot be trusted to keep an agreement. This is an important lesson for all those dealing with or who might have faith in Johnson's government: Perfidious Albion will lie, cheat, and say anything to get its way.
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