How do we define "England"? Flickr/Matt Buck. Some rights reserved.
Tonight I will talk about England. My home; my country. England is troubled, England is uncertain. And now, after the referendum, England isn’t even sure how we should be governed, where decisions should be made, or who should take them.
We don’t know where England is going; but England isn’t going away. And that’s a very strange thing. A dozen years ago a mini-industry declared England to be dead. Peter Hitchen’s ‘The abolition of Britain’ (which was really about England) was published in 1999, Roger Scruton’s ‘England an Elegy’ in 2000, and Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s ‘The strange death of Tory England’ in 2005 all said England was dead. They didn’t mean, of course, that England had disappeared, but a particular idea of England had died. One embodied perhaps in this man:
