Bagehot

Feb 1st 2020 edition

Brexit and English nationalism

The Tories need to put the genie of English nationalism
back in the bottle
1 Brexit is a Rorschach blot into which everybody reads their own preoccupations; one of
the few interpretations universally accepted is that it was a triumph of English
nationalism. The English voted in favour of Brexit by a big margin while the Scots and
Northern Irish voted against. The Welsh, who also voted in favour, did not play a large part
in the campaign, which was run by self-consciously English politicians: Jacob Rees-Mogg
with his double-breasted suits and Edwardian vowels; Nigel Farage with his pint and fag;
Sir John Redwood and his excruciating attempt, as Welsh secretary, to mouth the words of
the Welsh national anthem. The whole thing was saturated in English iconography, from
the flag of St George to the white cliffs of Dover.

2 If foreigners are confused by the distinction between Englishness and Britishness, that is
hardly surprising, because the confusion is deliberate. For centuries, as the senior partner
in “our island story” in terms of both size and power, the English used “England” as a
synonym for “Britain”. J.R. Seeley, a great Victorian historian, entitled his history of the
British Empire, “The Expansion of England”. George Orwell’s essay on the national mood
during the Blitz is “England, your England”. The Scottish and Welsh put up with being
marginalised because they did well out of empire, industry and the Labour Party. It was
when they stopped putting up with it that English nationalism, too, grew teeth.

3 Although thanks to a combination of geography and religion English nationalism has

been around since Henry VIII declared that “this realm of England is an empire” that didn’t
have to bow to a foreign pope, in its modern form it has been forged by three great blows
to the national psyche. The first was the loss of empire, which lent it its dominant tones:
an elegiac sense of loss of past greatness and fury at power that has been wrongly
snatched away. The second is the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism, which won the
smaller nations parliaments. This not only made it impossible to keep using “England” to
mean “Britain” but also gave birth to the English question. Why should the Scots and
Welsh have a parliament and not the English? Why should England continue to subsidise
such ungrateful satraps?

4 But it was Europe’s determination to transform itself from a trading bloc into a political
union that most infuriated the English nationalists. Eurosceptics such as Sir Bill Cash were
convinced that Europe was bent on castrating Parliament and subordinating English
common law. Andrew Roberts, a Tory historian, published a novel about the heroic
struggle of the English Resistance League against a European Reich that had renamed
Waterloo Maastricht Station and forbade women from shaving their armpits.

5 Euroscepticism and English nationalism proved self-reinforcing. Mr Farage succeeded in

distilling English nationalism into an insurgent party, with the misleading name
of UKIP (he seldom went north of the border) and the revealing slogan “we want our
country back”. The three and a half years of parliamentary stalemate after the referendum
result further stoked the fires of English nationalism. The Daily Mail summoned all the fury
of Middle England against “traitors”. Mark Francois, the Captain Mainwaring of the
European Research Group of MPS, railed against Germans on television. Mr Rees-Mogg
talked of “vassalage”.
6 In its new form, it is a dangerous concoction. It has destabilised geopolitics by robbing
the EU of one of its biggest members. It has divided the British Isles and exposed
constitutional problems that wise statesmen have done their best to conceal. Britain has
always been a peculiar multinational kingdom because one of its component parts,
England, accounts for 84% of its population and more than 85% of its income. Brexit has
thrown this contradiction into sharp relief and revealed growing weariness with the
union. In 2018 a poll showed that three-quarters of Tory voters would accept Scottish
independence and the collapse of the Northern Ireland peace process as a price for Brexit.

7 For Scottish nationalists, the fact that Scotland voted to remain constitutes irresistible
grounds for holding another referendum. If the government agrees to one, they might
well win, particularly given that Britain’s reckless decision to leave the EU has neutralised
the Unionists’ strongest argument, economic prudence; if it doesn’t, the belief that they
were dragged unwillingly out of the EU will continue to fester. In Ireland the Unionists feel
betrayed by Boris Johnson’s decision to, in effect, put the border in the Irish Sea. That
weakens Ulster’s links with the mainland at a time when the demographic tide is turning
against the Protestants.

8 The Tories need to repair the damage that their flirtation with English nationalism has
caused. This means folding English nationalism into the wider carapace of British
nationalism and forging a broader patriotism that can appeal to all sides of the Brexit
argument. The party brings some distinctive resources to this battle. The Conservatives’
commitment to the Union is enshrined in its official name, the Conservative and Unionist
Party. Mr Johnson is loved by provincial Tories but was a successful mayor of London. He
demonstrated that there was no contradiction between hanging on a zip wire waving tiny
Union flags and reaching out to ethnic and sexual minorities. The government is already
mulling over a host of projects designed to bring a fractured United Kingdom back
together: embracing a global and forward-looking version of Brexit; making the border in
the Irish Sea as invisible as possible; devolving power to the English regions. But none of
this will work if the Conservative Party does not return the more bellicose advocates of
English nationalism—Rees-Mogg, Francois, Cash and their ilk—to the obscurity from
which they came.
9 Noisy English nationalists are enjoying their moment of triumph this weekend with
“Independence Day” shenanigans on the white cliffs of Dover. Mr Johnson must make this
their last hurrah and engage in his greatest piece of political alchemy to date: turning
English nationalism back into British patriotism.

Brexit and English nationalism | The Economist