Anthony Barnett (London, OK): The Frank Field in yesterday’s Telegraph is a must read. I know he is very irritating and the article is stitched together by slight of hand, but for all that…
Of Britain’s seven big constitutional questions he connects three. He looks at the national question, starting from Scotland's white paper and connects this to the European question, and then connects both to the identity, citizienship and immigration question.
The problem he sees but does not solve (can anyone?) is that becoming part of the EU is experienced differently by the English compared to the Scots and Welsh. There is a special English-British resistance to Europe which means that the more the UK integrates into the union of the EU, the more the union of UK itself is threatened. This process of potential British disintegration is then turbo-charged by migration and its challenge to define ‘who we are’.
What is Field asking for? Under the guise of calling on Brown to save the Union he prepares a call for England to declare independence from both the UK and the EU.
Defending a distinctly non-European relationship to Europe, Field says, but bear in mind that when he says Britain and British he means England and the English,
As with all identities, part of Britain’s has been backward-looking, involving how the country had come, over the past century, to define itself as being separate from Europe. And there are good reasons for doing so. Two world wars equated continental Europe with danger in the eyes of most British voters. Forming the Common Market was the response of western European governments to the threat of another great war.
British voters have never denied that such an approach may be the right one for mainland Europe, but what could well be right for mainland Europe was never automatically seen by British voters as right for Britain. They never saw the point of losing their British identity for a European one, as they were never among the agents for war in the first place.
This argument is historically quite wrong. From declaring war on Germany in 1914 to appeasement in 1938 this country was been a co-architect of Europe’s catastrophic civil war that cost it too so dear. However, saved by the American alliance from direct occupation after 1940 (but subservient to Washington ever since) the perception has indeed hardened in the way Field describes.
Gordon Brown has not listed stubbornness and pride (not to speak of upper-class bad faith) as among his 'British values'. Or are they English! At any rate, Europe, Scotland, England, identity and citizenship are not easily separated as distinct 'policy areas' each solvable in its own terms. Unionists are going to be increasingly hard put to define Britishness in a way that retains Scottish and Welsh loyalty unless England can make its home in Europe.
