Comment Articles

Net freedoms are all at sea

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 16 Jul 2002 11:06 BST

The English have always been a nation at home with paradox and irony: imperialists and champions of liberal emancipation, experts in politesse and rampaging football hooligans, inventors of sports that we never seem able to win. That innate ability to encompass opposites is particularly marked in our approach to government and statehood: we genuinely like our unelected, medieval monarchy while excoriating our elected leaders. We're embarrassed about being English, but proud of what it means.

You can see this most clearly in films like the post-war Ealing comedy, Passport to Pimlico. In it, the eponymous small area of London discovers that by historical accident it's really part of French Burgundy. Pimlico rises up and declares itself independent of Great Britain, which is going through severe rationing and other austerity measures, and transforms itself to a Bacchanalian parody of the freedoms enjoyed by the hedonistic French. But doesn't that turn you into a bunch of foreigners, one character is asked? Her answer makes perfect sense to anyone born hereabouts: "We always were English, and we always will be English, and it's just because we're English we're sticking out for our right to be Burgundians!"

It's more than fifty years and umpteen lost semi-finals since that film was made, but the sentiments are far from dead. Pimlico may now be nothing more than a cluster of overpriced temporary accommodation, but the autonomous Englishman retains his castle. Or, in this case, fort -- Sealand, an abandoned wartime construction six miles off the Essex coast that has for around thirty years been the home of Roy of Sealand, erstwhile army major Paddy Roy Bates. He, his family and some chums colonised Fort Roughs Tower in 1967,when it was outside the then-three mile territorial limits of the UK. He declared it sovereign territory. The British government didn't like this, and sent the Navy in to dissuade him: he fired at the warships, which promptly backed off, and was hauled in front of an English court. Who threw the case out, declaring that it was outside UK territory and thus nothing to do with them.