26
The Economist
April 22nd 2023
Britain
Wot’s up wiv Ingerlund?
L
ittle happens
on St George’s Day. There is no bank holiday on
April 23rd to celebrate England’s dragonslaying patron saint.
Traditions are few. Morris dancing, an English folk dance with
bells and flailing handkerchiefs, is mercifully rare. A politician
may post a message against a backdrop of an England flag. Tedious
liberals point out that St George was Turkish and dragons do not
exist. Beyond that, England’s national day passes with no fanfare.
England is absent.
Open a book, read a broadsheet newspaper or head to an aca
demic conference, however, and England is everywhere. Britain is
experiencing “a reawakening of English national consciousness”,
argued Jason Cowley in “Who Are We Now: Stories of Modern Eng
land”. Englishness is “the motor force behind” ructions in recent
British politics, say Alisa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones, a
pair of academics. Another author warns Britain “cannot survive
English nationalism”. This is a genre fond of quoting G.K. Chester
ton’s poetry: “Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget/
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.” Ac
cording to the intelligentsia, the people of England are screaming.
If English nationalism is on the march, no one has told the Eng
lish. Like the life of St George, the rise of English identity is largely
myth, argues Sir John Curtice, a political scientist. Even after de
volution of power to Scotland and Wales, Britain’s departure from
the
eu
, the rise and fall of the
uk
Independence Party and four
straight Conservative generalelection victories, the proportion of
British people who identify as predominantly or only English has
barely budged. If anything, it has fallen. In 1999, 31% of people fell
into this bracket, according to the British Social Attitudes survey,
the most comprehensive snapshot of opinion. In 2020, 22% did.
Chroniclers of English nationalism leapt on the 2011 census,
which showed that a whopping 58% of residents in England iden
tified as English only. Skip forward a decade and this number
plunged to 15%. What caused this shift? A botched survey. In 2011
“English” was the first option and “British” was the fifth; in 2021
“Britain” came top of the list. If the patriotism of Englishmen does
not extend to the lower box of a census form, it may not run deep.
The new nationalism is just as hard to spot in Britain’s politics.
It is often taken as a given that English nationalism was the driver
of Britain leaving the
EU
. England makes up 85% of the country’s
population and, lo, it contributed 87% of the Leave vote. But Eng
lish votes were not enough to win the referendum in 2016. Leave
supporting Scots (38% of Scottish voters) were needed, too. A ma
jority of voters in Wales voted to depart. The votes of the 44% of
Northern Irish residents who plumped for “Leave” were as valid as
those cast in Kent. Brexit was British.
England whispers during national elections. The general elec
tion of 2015, when the Conservative Party wrapped itself in an Eng
land flag, is portrayed as a breakthrough for English nationalism.
Adverts showing Ed Miliband, the then Labour leader, in hock to
Scottish nationalists were everywhere. But Labour increased both
its vote share and the number of seats in England that election. It
was collapse in Scotland that broke the party.
By contrast, under Boris Johnson, the Conservatives offered a
vision in which England was barely mentioned. In 2019 the Tories
duly won their largest majority in four decades. Oddly, one of the
few people to notice the switch from English to British patriotism
was Donald Trump, an
idiot savant
who remarked: “I asked Boris,
‘Where’s England? You don’t use it too much any more.’”
Resentful Englanders are supposedly jealous of devolved pow
ers enjoyed by Scotland and Wales. It is strange, then, that support
for an English parliament is still a minority pursuit. Only a fifth of
English voters back one. A system called “English votes for English
laws”, whereby English
mp
s vet legislation affecting only England,
was passed with much fanfare in 2015. In theory the idea was pop
ular. Yet it was quietly scrapped in 2021. Few noticed; fewer cared.
An obsession with the wants of English voters is understand
able. At the last few elections, a minority of flagwaving, Leave
voting, stoutly English voters proved a significant group in some
seats. Leaving the
eu
upturned half a century of British policy, so
delving into the motivations of Brexit’s biggest fans made sense.
But the British voter is large. He contains multitudes.
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