The birth of any new nation-state typically requires revolutionaries. And the British and Unionist Conservative Party is today the (perhaps surprising) political agent of a potentially new English nation-state. For this is not a Conservative party that is interested in conserving anything, least of all the conditions for keeping the United Kingdom’s constituent parts together. The threat of a no-deal Brexit is looming, support is growing in Scotland for independence, and in Northern Ireland the prospects of a Border Poll that could lead to a United Ireland are accelerating. Even in Wales, support for independence is rising. Boris Johnson’s rhetoric around the so called ‘surrender bill’ designed to stop a Halloween no-deal crash-out is pitched squarely at an England still trapped in the last reel of a Second World War movie. And it could play well with the electorate. A hard Brexit of some sort before or after the presumably imminent General Election could see the constituent parts of the British state peel away, leaving the English state standing alone. And the New English state will not be pretty.
English nationalism does not have anything of the progressive potential which smaller nationalisms fighting against larger oppressive political units can often have. English nationalism is the larger oppressive nationalism. It has I think four key features.
Firstly, England has a strong centralised state, around which it has wrapped a supra-national political unit called Britain – including Wales and Scotland and the United Kingdom, which included the whole of Ireland from 1801 until 1921 and now Northern Ireland. This wrap-around state construction was designed to stop Scotland and Ireland being a place where European enemies could launch intrigues and attacks. So English nationalism taps into centuries of distrust directed at European powers and is itself a power-hoarding apparatus.
