Englishness is finally finding a voice, after more than a century. Why has it been muted this long, and is it time now for a strong civic nation, or will an England of blood and soil emerge?
‘Why aren’t we even allowed to be English?’ has become an increasingly vocal refrain in the identity debate across the nations of Britain, and debated in depth in OurKingdom’s ‘For England’s Sake’ page.
'What’s stopping you?' is one fairly
reasonable answer. The English have a self-image as a pretty anti-statist
people. That should make it difficult to pin the widespread ignoral of St
George’s Day, for example, purely on some great political conspiracy, from
Whitehall to town halls, to suppress a bubbling up sense of English pride. Yes,
there has been an official reluctance to articulate an English identity, but
the relative lack of knowledge even of the St George’s day date, let alone the
kind of self-organised voluntary activity common on national days elsewhere
across these islands, must reflect a broader apathy across much of the English
public.
That is changing. How Englishness is finally finding a voice is set out in the
new ippr report ‘The Dog That Finally Barked’, published last week. A rebalancing
of British and English identities sees the English (just about) joining the
Scots and Welsh in giving primacy to their national identity over the
multinational one recorded on their British passports. 'England Arise!' was also an implicit theme
of Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond’s Hugo Young lecture last week. As we decide, across the UK, whether and how
we want to reshape, or to end, the British political settlement over the next
three years, we will certainly find ourselves talking and hearing more about England
and Englishness.
One useful starting point could be to understand why the English voice has been
muted for so long. There have been
three main reasons to not talk about England, or to fear the consequences of
doing so. The first, and longest,
silence about England, was primarily the product of political confidence.
Englishness was under-articulated across the twentieth century largely because
it rarely felt challenged. The big existential threats that England did face
were directed at Britain as a whole.
The second period of a muted England arose from a desire to protect the Union.
Devolution meant that the English question had to be asked, yet the reluctance
to answer it was rooted in a traditional British Unionist instinct to see any
rise in national allegiance as setting us on a slippery slope to the break-up of
Britain. The ippr report offers persuasive evidence that this is a failed and
mistaken strategy, which is doing more harm than good to its own cause.
The English conversation is now happening. Yet, still, there remains some tangible anxiety about
engaging in it. The most commonly voiced fear is that the English voice will be
angry and atavistic, primarily a form of “them and us” grievance politics. Recent
surveys on identity have consistently found ethnic minority respondents
expressing the strongest sense of British pride and belonging of anybody, but
that they have a weaker attachment to English identity. Must the rise of
Englishness, then, mark a retreat from a British identity that is civic,
inclusive and plural towards a ‘blood and soil’ politics of belonging?
***
“Few now sang ‘England Arise’. England had arisen all the same”. Those were the
concluding words of AJP Taylor’s famous Penguin history of modern England,
1918-45. Well, it had and it hadn’t. Taylor was writing about Britain, and more
specifically of how the people’s peace – the NHS and the Beveridge settlement –
would shape post-war Britain’s sense of itself. This offers a symbolic, though routine, example of the
dominant, assimilationist approach to the English/British identity across the
long era of unassertive English confidence.
That habitual conflation of being English and British, in England anyway, was
often said to have been a clever and effective strategy to make Empire, and
shared ownership of it, possible – especially once England made up 80% of the
population of the United Kingdom after 1922. Scottish participation in the
imperial adventure was often enthusiastic, while it lasted. But the conflation
was less strategic, because it was often less conscious, in the post-imperial
age. Attempts to rebrand Scots as 'North Britons' quickly proved futile, but
the South Britons of England were happier to adopt 'British' as their primary
identity.
Even George Orwell, who engaged with English identity more than any other major twentieth century writer, argued in The Lion and the Unicorn that challenges to the habit of using England and Britain interchangeably could be considered a “minor point” of local, and essentially regional, colour within the British family of nations.
'… even Welsh and Scottish readers are likely to have been offended because I have used the word “England” oftener than “Britain”, as though the whole population dwelt in London and the Home Counties and neither north nor west possessed a culture of its own … It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion. Even the differences between north and south England loom large in our own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European. It is very rare to meet a foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English and Scots or even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the Breton and the Auvergnat seem very different beings, and the accent of Marseilles is a stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of “France” and “the French”, recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization, which in fact it is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the outside, even the cockney and the Yorkshireman have a strong family resemblance.'
***
Devolution, in the 1990s, did finally help the English to see the difference
between being English and being British. Yet Englishness remained muted still,
out of a fear of the consequences for the Union of articulating it. So the English
question remains unanswered, and only fleetingly addressed, some thirteen years after the Queen
opened the Holyrood Parliament, not just because the English have not settled
on an answer to it, but also because the Westminster parties have often shared an
instinctive preference to minimise the scale of change wrought by devolution.
That helps to explain why the drive to finally address the English question now does not really come from the
tangible but gradual rise in English identity. It has been triggered more
specifically by new developments north of the border, and how they further
mobilise the increasing English awareness of the current asymmetries. A
Scottish vote for independence remains unlikely in the imminent referendum
(with support having consistently been around one in three) but the debate will
reshape the Union, with some form of devo-max likely to have broad political
and public support in Scotland. (The intuitively attractive offer is
essentially “in Britain, but not run by Britain” to adapt an old William Hague
slogan about the EU, which was broadly popular if without any particular meaning
as to its practical consequences).
Whatever the sources of evasion of Englishness, the question can no longer be
avoided, as
Anthony Painter has argued. It is increasingly clear that it would be impossible to
again reshape the devolution settlement without beginning to deal with the
central asymmetry at its heart: the missing English dimension. There is nothing wrong, in principle, with
uneven devolution, as long as the differences reflect different views, and are
considered to be fair.
The late 1990s settlement reflected big differences in
popular sentiment–Scotland confidently asserting its claim to a law-making
parliament; Wales divided down the middle about whether to embark on devolution
at all; and the English more indifferent, outside London. None of the competing
answers and options for English governance have commanded any clear consensus. The
last Labour government’s preferred answer – regional government – was
decisively rejected in a north-east referendum. The range of reform options mooted
– English votes for English laws; English grand committees; and how to link
address the English question in tandem with reform of the upper chamber – are
known only within the political classes. There has long been broad support for
an English Parliament, but campaigners have never mobilised anything like the
public salience or civic activism of the Scottish Constitutional Convention
after 1992, which made pressure for devolution irresistible.
The ippr research shows that, if there is no dominant view of how to address
the English dimension, pressure to address it seriously is likely to become an
important political force. What was true of Scotland after 1992 is now quietly true
of England in 2012 too: the continued suppression of national aspiration would
threaten the Union more quickly than accommodating it might. As ippr director
Nick Pearce puts it “the longer this debate is ignored or, worse, denied, the
more likely we will see a backlash within England against the UK”. Devolution can be advocated as a provisional
and transitional demand by those whose long-term goal is separation, but it is
sincerely advocated as an alternative to it too.
Those who have wished to defend Britain and Britishness have too often embraced
zero-sum or forced choice thinking about British identity. That is to express a
lack of confidence in what are proclaimed to be its civic and plural virtues,
betraying instead the fear that it might easily be supplanted by more
‘authentic’ national allegiances. Such forced choice thinking is as often now
found on the other side of the argument too.
So Norman Davies offers the
eye-catching provocation in his “Vanished Kingdoms” that “the English in
particular are blissfully unaware that the disintegration of the United Kingdom
began in 1922 and will probably continue”. Up to a point, Professor. The events
of 1940-45, the creation of the BBC from 1922, the NHS in 1948 and the
Coronation of 1953 were all moments when British identity was surely being
strengthened and reinforced during that century-long process of apparently inevitable
decline. Tom Nairn’s The Break-Up of Britain offered a brilliant and
influential obituary notice for the multinational state which Nairn labels “Ukania”.
This might be proved right in the end – that now appears to be the zeitgeist
view among much of the Westminster lobby and some Tory MPs, as well as the
Scottish political elite – but it is worth noting that his book’s first
publication, now 35 years ago in 1977, is now closer in time to the Queen’s
Coronation in 1953 than it does to 2012.
The Conservative Chair of the Welsh Home Affairs Select Committee, David Davies
MP, now says that the UK is “holed below the waterline”, and that the Welsh are
likely to follow the Scots in demanding independence. That is a strangely
deterministic argument when support for independence in Wales has never risen
above more than one out of four or five. We only stay British if we believe
there are reasons to do so - which now includes a belief that it can
accommodate national identities too - but if we choose to stay British we will.
The demise of the UK cannot be said to be inevitable while there are sustained
majorities to keep it across the British nations.
The ippr find, for the first time, more people put English over British first, if forced to choose. But we do not wish to be forced to choose. Only 7% of the English say they are “British not English” while 17% say they are “English not British”. Both identities matter to most people. 40% prioritise their English over their British identity, while only 16% do the opposite but, as 34% feel equally British and English, a majority still feel at least as British as English. Anthony Barnett, accepting Alex Salmond’s challenge, makes the case for a post-British England eloquently, but that remains a minority view.
British Future’s State of the Nation polling earlier this
month found a persistently strong sense of belonging to Britain of 67% in
England, 64% in Wales and 60% in Scotland, alongside an even higher score for
strong belonging to England (72%),
Scotland (82%) and Wales (83%) respectively. What was particularly striking in
the British Future polling was that English respondents were considerably more
likely to say that they felt a strong sense of belonging to both Britain and
England, or to neither. So 92% of those who felt a strong sense of belonging to
Britain also said that they felt strongly that they belonged to England too,
but this strong sense of English identity fell to just 27% among those who did
not have a strong sense of belonging to Britain, with more than twice as many
saying they did not have a strong sense of belonging to England. Suppressing the English voice would be
both wrong and dangerous, but an articulation of Englishness which believes the
key is to throw off British identity will also appeal only to a narrow
minority. Understanding that could be an important key to the civic Englishness
that we need.
***
The remaining anxiety about Englishness is a fear that it will be atavistic,
and more ethnic than civic. Whether it is possible to be black and British was
once the subject of agonised debate. That question has been decisively settled.
But the pluralising of Englishness remains a work in progress. This is an
important challenge – but it must not become a final reason not to talk about
England.
The ippr report shows that non-white Britons are a good deal less likely to
identify themselves as “more English than British” than others. 19% feel more
English than British, with 23% equally English and British, and 37% more British
than English. This is, broadly, a mirror image of how the white English
prioritise these two different identities. There is a note of caution about
small sample sizes, but this confirms the findings of other polls, where
non-white Brits have a marginally stronger sense of British identity than
everybody else, but a weaker sense of English identity.
So some express the fear that a return to the traditional “blood nations” will
leave the ethnic minorities as the last Brits standing, rallying around a flag
that indigenous Brits have deserted. The idea of being “black British” is well
established, while phrases like “black English” or “Asian English” have an
unfamiliar ring. Why were we slow to pluralise Englishness? One, rational
explanation would be that Britishness contained more space – its Celtic fringe
and multinational nature making it civic and plural from the start. But I
suspect it might simply have been that new Commonwealth immigrants joined the
British/English themselves in tending to forget that there was a difference
during those post-war decades of increased immigration, when any distinctive
English dimension to British public life was largely absent.
That non-white Britons place most emphasis on British identity makes a
lot of sense to me. It is British history which explains how we became the
society we are today. I was born British, in Doncaster in 1974, in part because
my father had also been born a British subject, 4000 miles away and three years
before Indian independence, thirty years earlier. My mother is southern Irish,
and both of my parents were among those encouraged and invited to come to
Britain to help staff the National Health Service. That is a distinctively British story of Empire,
decolonisation and the NHS. I would go as far as to argue that is as British a
background as anybody else who can trace their family roots here back to the
Anglo-Saxons. Is it just as
English too? It doesn’t feel like it. That is a question where it sounds to me like
roots and their longevity would count for more. The ethnic lag on English identity can be easily overstated:
the British Future poll found that 72% of the white British in England felt
strong belonging to England, while 27% don’t, while this was 62% among non-white
Britons, including 69% of Asians.
So I am also confident that the English conversation in 2012 will be about an
inclusive English identity. I am English, but would prefer to keep a British
passport, but there is no politically viable English project, which would
refuse me an English passport in the event that the UK did fragment into
independent states. This may
disappoint some of those who assert an English identity as an alternative to
the multi-ethnic muddle, which Britain has become, but any English conversation
is bound to reflect the reality of modern England as soon as it begins.
Our few English public symbols, express a civic and multi-ethnic Englishness
already. It was an argument that took place on our football terraces. For my
generation, the fact of multi-ethnic English team was a settled fact - since Viv
Anderson had become the first black player to represent his country in 1978 - but
that was an argument that we had to win too. I was only ten years old, watching
the slightly fuzzy ITV pictures from Brazil, when John Barnes went on his
brilliant, mazy run at the Maracana stadium to give England a two-nil victory.
So it was only a few years later that I heard the story of the NF contingent of
the England fans singing “one-nil” instead, because black goals didn’t count.
It was an argument that they were always going to lose. “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team
of 11 named people" but an imaginary all white England has no team
to cheer for.
I felt differently – and more confident - about England and Englishness after
the 1996 European Championships, in which the Cross of St George decisively
supplanted the Union Jack as the icon which the English understood to be their
national flag. The English had both a decent team, for once, as well as a
positive sense of who we were and why we were hosting the party too. The
build-up to so many previous major tournaments had so often been dominated by
fears of hooliganism from those whose idea of patriotism was to maraud around
Europe singing “if it wasn’t for the English, you’d be Krauts”. That contest
between different ideas of England involved a lot of grassroots effort, as fans’
embassies and supporters groups tried to make it possible for the non-idiot
majority to go to a game without being herded around like animals. Several
times, during my twenties, I was part of a team of about forty volunteers who regularly
turned up at Wembley at 9am to lay out a pattern of red and white cards on the
seats for fans to “raise the flag” as the teams came out. We stood for positive
English patriotism; against racism, and against booing the other side’s anthem.
(Part of this very English initiative involved putting out cards at the other
end for opposing supporters to raise their own flag too, including a short
explanation of this gesture in, say, Swedish too).
The St George’s Flag is now an everyday symbol of participation and pride in a shared national experience – during our football summers at least, when it as likely to be flown from the people carrier of a British Asian family with 2.2 children as by anybody else. But the same flag might still have a more ambiguous meaning when fluttering from a South London pub on a rainy winter’s night.
So the idea of a mono-ethnic English identity will be stillborn in the England of 2012. A lot of Scottish energy has gone into establishing that the new Scottish patriotism is civic and inclusive, taking pride in how Pakistani Scots lay claim to the identity. If Scotland can have a confident civic patriotism, there is no reason to fear that this cannot happen in England too. After all, England has a good claim to have long been the most internally plural of the British nations, as Roifield Brown argues, containing not just 97% of Britain’s ethnic diversity but a broader plurality of English identities in terms of the mixture of many regional, class, urban and rural routes into England and Englishness. The many immigrant contributions to English literature take in George Bernard Shaw, TS Eliot, Tom Stoppard and Salman Rushdie, but they begin right back at the start, with Beowulf. Billy Bragg’s “English, Half-English” captures a globally engaged nation where hyphenated identity began with the Anglo-Saxons.
Many different voices will rightly now stake a claim to the English conversation that has begun. There will be some important contests over what we decide Englishness now stands for. That should be welcomed: we will all need to choose which English conversations we want to have.