Gareth Young reviews Beyond the Constitution: Englishness in a post-devolved Britain by Michael Kenny, Richard English and Richard Hayton, ippr.
New ippr report calls for positive engagement with Englishness but ignores the need for political recognition.
(ippr, February 2008, 11pp)
This ippr pamphlet challenges the widely held assumption that the rise of Englishness necessarily signals the death-knell of the values and identities associated with Britishness and the legitimacy of the UK's polity.
That a sense of Englishness is on the rise is not disputed. What is disputed is the political salience of that rise in relation to the current devolution settlement. Englishness it is argued, refreshingly, is not necessarily a malign force that will undermine Britishness.
But the authors' wish to confine English nationalism to purely cultural terms; to deny a "for-itself" political expression of Englishness. This stems from their idea that a politically assertive England would undermine the multi-national solidarity of the UK.
Those familiar with Arthur Aughey's The Politics of Englishness will experience a feeling of déjà vu. Not only is the terrain the same, but so are the arguments traversed, and the conclusions drawn. Crucially:
There may be a good case for a concerted re-evaluation of the relationship between Britishness and English identity, and a consideration of how a positive vision of Englishness can compliment, rather than threaten, a rejuvenated civic Britishness.
This is the crux. According to this paper Englishness does not require political nationalism, nor the democratic and institutional trappings of nationhood recently acquired by its partners in the UK. It can instead be sated and mollified by positive engagement with Britishness and a flowering of English cultural nationalism and self-awareness.
The authors cast doubt on the notion that greater identification with England stems from any political resentment and financial grievances that have arisen as a consequence of devolution. Rather the phenomenon of increasing Englishness is a culturally-orientated wave of consciousness that began in the mid-1990s.
It is noted that, in spite of English dissatisfaction, the Conservatives have resisted the temptation to play to the politics of English resentment (David Cameron's "sour little Englanders" is referenced), preferring to leave that to fringe groups on the far-right. No opinion is offered as to whether these fringe groups are the best vehicles for the articulation of English resentment but the authors do state that:
none of the parties displays any kind of confidence or willingness to bring Englishness into the heart of its strategic and policy thinking. Fearfulness and the hope that English nationalism will quietly subside have been the abiding watchwords of the political elite.
And though this may change, the parties as a whole do not envisage a scenario in which "English nationalism will mutate into a small-nation resentment at its position within a larger multi-national entity". Put bluntly the authors do not envisage the English resorting to an Anglo-centric version of the little-Scotlander mentality, the political ramifications of which have disadvantaged England and precipitated the need for the very English renaissance called for. It is suggested that politicians have failed to engage with Englishness as this might signify a readiness to contemplate constitutional reform in a manner that acknowledges England. Catch-22.
Quite what the English have to gain by forgoing political nationalism is left unsaid, though it is suggested the Union may be endangered and that Britishness is a more attractive national identity to liberals and ethnic minorities. Britishness may be more accessible because it is the idea of values, as opposed to substantive moral and cultural traditions; again, among liberals, rather than the population at large. What British values are is left unclear and a quote from Brown's Green Paper offers no clues:
A large part of what we describe as Britishness traces back to our own civil war, its ultimate resolution the Declaration of Rights of 1689 and the Acts of Union. Our relative stability as a nation is reflected in a relative lack of precision about what we mean to be British.
The irony of the English points of reference is apparently lost on the authors, although they do suggest that the confidence of this statement of ‘British history' could lead to parallel discussion on English governance. But having dismissed regionalism and warned against the populism of an English parliament or English Votes on English laws (they muse upon how the Government might build a bulwark against these seductive proposals) it is hard to understand what the authors are actually proposing, other than a nice poetic Englishness that can cosy up to a splendid civic Britishness. There is no discussion on the potential benefits of English citizenship and English civic nationalism.
The problem which faces those who take the approach of our three authors is that multi-national solidarity rested on a contract between the peoples of the UK, a contract that was renegotiated by the devolution referendums and, crucially, renegotiated without input from the people of England. The fear now is that any real or imagined grievances that follow from the asymmetric settlement will lead to an English renegotiation on English terms, for-themselves.
This passage from The Politics of Englishness crystallises what the authors are grappling with:
Devolution...has clearly modified the relationship between England and the other parts of the United Kingdom as a legal and political agreement and as a consequence the English question has become in large part England's British question. The question, in short, is to what extent this constitutional modification has undermined English patriotic identification with the United Kingdom.
The fix that the authors seek is not a constitutional one. For them it is a problem best solved by English acquiescence in the face of the English-British dichotomy. A self-confident Englishness embellished by patriotic identification with the UK is what is needed. In fairness the authors do debunk Kumar's thesis that English identity is subsumed in Britishness. To argue otherwise would oppose the very premise they start from: that English identity is strong enough; that it is capable of being part of a multi-layered English-British identity and secure enough to have just the British part of that multiple identity recognised constitutionally - it's a sacrifice the English must make while allowing the other UK nations to do the exact opposite.
In summary the authors, like the politicians, don't know what to do. The only explanation as to why the English should not have a parliament of their own is a reiteration of Prof John Curtice's mistaken claims that the English are content with the Status Quo.
This is the first of two reviews by Gareth of the new ippr reports on the future of the Union. Gareth is a member of the Campaign for an English Parlament.
