David aka Britology Watch's blog

David (Cambridge, Britology Watch): I’d like to draw a new 10 Downing Street e-petition to the attention of OurKingdom readers. This reads as follows:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to state whether he recognises that England is a nation”.

Readers will doubtless have their own ideas concerning the value and purpose of such petitions, especially as those demanding impossible concessions (such as immediate independence for England) abound! However, this one is meant to strike at the real heart of the issue: before we can even address the question of whether England can or should have its own parliament or even independence, we need to establish what, and indeed whether, England actually is.

David (Cambridge, Britology Watch): What is the Union from which Scotland would separate if it voted for independence? Is it the United Kingdom (that is, of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: the continuation of the 1801 Union between Great Britain and the whole of Ireland); or is it merely Great Britain (the Kingdom that resulted from the 1707 Union between England & Wales and Scotland)?

If it is the former, then I would concede the point that only those living in Scotland should have the automatic right to vote for Scottish independence in a referendum: irrespective of questions of national sovereignty, it satisfies the demands of natural justice that it is the people living in a particular country or region who should decide whether to separate from a larger national or supra-national entity of which that country or region has hitherto been a part. The analogy here would be with the 1995 referendum on independence for Quebec. It was right that only those living in Quebec were entitled to vote; and even if independence had been carried, the rest of Canada would have remained Canada without Quebec. Similarly, the United Kingdom would still be the United Kingdom without Scotland, albeit a continuation of the 1801 Union in which the absence of the southern part of Ireland would now be paralleled by the absence of the northern part of Great Britain. I hope we could then sensibly call it the ‘United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland' rather than what could well be regarded as a ‘logical' alternative in view of this ironic ‘symmetry' of Irish and Scottish independence: the ‘United Kingdom of Southern Britain and Northern Ireland'! Let's at least include England in the name of the state now that Great Britain was no more - even if England did continue to be governed, as it is now, as if it were the UK.

David (Cambridge, Britology Watch): There has been much discussion recently – including on Britology Watch – about whether English nationalism can be reconciled with progressive politics; and whether progressives need to espouse the nationalist cause, associate it with left-of-centre values, and thereby prevent it from falling into the hands of the far right.

David (aka Britology Watch): There have been several recent threads in OurKingdom that have touched on the questions of whether, and to what extent, ‘progressives’ should espouse the ‘cause’ of English nationalism – whether that cause is defined merely as the goal of an English parliament or is part of a more long-ranging vision for England after what many, including myself, see as the inevitable demise of the present UK (see eg Mark Perryman, Arthur Aughey and Paul Kingsnorth). Hitherto, the left has assumed it had the monopoly on progressive politics.

In addition, it has been de rigueur for nationalism-averse, centre-left progressives and liberals, and not just Britain-obsessed New Labour, to articulate their vision as if it were a vision for Britain as a whole and not what it can only really be, post-devolution, which is an agenda for England.

Now David Cameron is trying to muscle in on the progressive act, defining the Conservative Party as the “champion of progressive ideals in Britain today” in an Independent article earlier this month. But on closer analysis, his prescription emerges as just a new version of the same old Blairite ‘market economics with a social face’: positioning the Tories effectively as the party that will actually realise the market-driven social and economic reforms that New Labour promised but did not deliver. In addition, Cameron’s remedies are similarly articulated as being intended for Britain – whereas, in reality, the policies discussed in the Independent article would all form part of his government’s England-only remit in education, the environment and local communities.

There is little chance that a supposedly progressive agenda for ‘the country’ would gather momentum and carry the assent of a broad cross-society majority of all the people – which is what it would have to do if it were to be a genuine movement of progressive change for that society – unless we can be honest and unashamed about which society and people are the objects of that progressive programme: the society and people of England, not those of Britain ‘as a whole’. The two things are fundamentally interlinked: social reform and national-political re-engagement – politicians have to demonstrate they actually care about England, and seek to be genuinely accountable to the people of England, in order for the people to care about politics and believe once more that it can effect beneficial change in their lives, individually and in their communities. And this suggests the outline of a genuinely radical, progressive agenda for England.