In many ways England has hidden in plain sight; its identity disguised by being part of larger political entities that it dominated. England swallowed its neighbours on the British Isles and Ireland three centuries ago, then spread out across the globe as the British Empire. Out of this expansion emerged a shared British identity; it borrowed mostly from Englishness but also provided a capaciousness under which being Welsh, and even Scottish or sometimes Irish, could fit. [...]
The reemergence of English nationalism from Britishness has been a long time coming. As recently as 1997, a British Social Attitudes survey found that 55 per cent of English voters called themselves British, while just 33 per cent said they were English. But as colonies freed themselves and as Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales increasingly controlled their own futures, the English started to believe that Britain was holding them back too. By 2012, the 22-point gap in the BSA study had vanished: now 43 per cent of voters identified as English, the same number who identified as British.[...]
The English – especially those who voted Conservative – noticed that England, per head of population, got less money from the Treasury than the other British nations. The central British government had ministers for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – but none for England. Scotland, where state expenditure per head is £1,600 higher than in England, has free NHS prescriptions. Scotland also has free – and excellent – university education. In England, students must pay. [...]
Sifting through the imagery driving this form of English nationalism, the vision of England that emerges is an old and familiar one. It is white, it is church-going in a ‘tea with the vicar’ kind of way and it celebrates World War Two’s victories as if they happened yesterday. It distrusts the foreign and the urban: it prefers villages and a never-changing countryside. It was best summed up by Conservative prime minister John Major in 1993 when he spoke of warm beer and cricket matches. It is a powerful vision and one not limited only to the right. The idea of England as a pastoral idyll, harking back to a pre-industrial age where everyone was content and at peace in nature, is a common one in culture, literature and politics. [...]
It is a fair point. For, if the progressive wing of English nationalism is to win out from the ruins of Brexit, then it will have to succeed at something British nationalism failed to do: knit a wide disparity of people together by persuading them of their mutual class interest in social justice. British nationalism did not succeed at this; its failure to convince a Glaswegian docker and a Birmingham factory worker that they have more in common than either has with a wealthy banker from Edinburgh or London partly explains the current fragmentation of British identity (and the British state). As the empire’s glow faded, a true class-based politics failed to emerge that could have provided a viable push for a British party of the left that fought for social justice across the whole United Kingdom. But Labour never operated in tribal Northern Ireland, it has been virtually wiped out by the SNP in Scotland, and in Wales must continually fend off the leftward jabs of Plaid Cymru.
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