In The Return of the Native, Hardy observes of the mummers’ St George play that the proof it is a genuine folk tradition lies in the sullen joylessness with which it is carried out, “which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all”. And yet, Hardy observes, “the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether they will or no”. Much of the same could be said of today’s annual St George ritual, in which Twitter liberals set out to slay the dragon of xenophobic nationalism, and their conservative opponents the equivalent monster of oikophobic deracination. No other European nation behaves like this. Even within our home archipelago, the Irish do not do this on St Patrick’s Day, nor the Welsh and Scots on St David’s or St Andrew’s Days: it is no doubt a marker of my fundamental un-Englishness that I find this trait strange and maladaptive. In this hysteric faux-cosmopolitanism, so distinct from the national consciousness of our neighbouring Dutch or Danes or Norwegians, the English prove themselves the very weirdest of the weird. But then: “What should they know of England, who only England know?”
This uniquely English parochial cosmopolitanism courses through the recent, flourishing discourse on political Englishness. As the Economist’s Duncan Robinson has correctly observed, English nationalism is the dog that refuses to bark: there are no meaningful popular campaigns for an English parliament, secession from the UK is a position of the extreme fringe, and even Boris Johnson’s scrapping of the modest constitutional reform of English Votes for English Laws was met with mass apathy. If the English are, as Chesterton claimed, “the secret people… that never have spoken yet”, it can only be assumed that that is because they prefer silence.
And yet, as a consequence of devolution, there has been an explosion in recent years of political commentary on that mythical dragon, English nationalism. What is perhaps most remarkable is that this discourse is entirely driven by the Left: in so far as English nationalism exists in Britain it is a product of centre-left think-tank panels in Westminster. As nationalisms go, it is thin gruel, but then it’s explicitly meant to be. For what is most striking about this SW1-endorsed Englishness is how it is inevitably framed in terms of “reclaiming Englishness from the radical Right”, despite the fact such a thing does not meaningfully exist in England and shows no appreciable sign of coming into being.
English nationalism, indeed, often appears like a culture-bound syndrome of Celtic nationalists, a foil for them to rage against, or a danger to be guarded from, even as England continues on its course with amiable indifference. Bearers of strong ethnic identities themselves, Celtic nationalists perceive their equivalent potential in England, even if the English themselves prefer not to. From the Ukania hypothesis of British dysfunction and disintegration put forward by the Scottish nationalist Tom Nairn and Anglo-Irish grandee Perry Anderson, to the musings of the recently-deceased Labour MP-turned-Welsh-nationalist David Marquand, England is a problem to be urgently solved, by granting the English a sensible, Scandinavian-style social democracy before the English belatedly adopt something harder-edged for themselves.
It is explicitly within this vein of thought that the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has published her new book, Another England, written to fend off the risk that “politicians and others… will use this latent tension for their own ends, stirring up emotions, provoking confrontations, and hoping to ride the same kind of nativist rage that took Donald Trump to the White House”. There is much to admire in Lucas’ book: her love of England’s natural beauty, so poorly served by Conservatives who profess guardianship of the land; her appreciation of the genuine diversity of dialect, vernacular architecture and sentiment packed into such a small area; her sensitive reading of English Literature, drawing on her PhD research. Many of her suggestions — for an English Parliament, civic autonomy, a land value tax, nationalisation of common goods, and expansion of the right to roam — are sensible and good: all are sentiments that are, in their way, fundamentally conservative, at least when compared to the radical liberalism of the Conservative Party.
Yet the remarkable thing about her book — perhaps the most English thing about it — is its squeamishness in framing Englishness as a national identity like other national identities, the cultural heritage of a specific people in a specific place over historical time: just like the Japanese, or the Palestinians, or the Kurds (whose lack of national self-determination in their ancient homeland Lucas takes the time to lament). Remarkably, hers is a book about fending off English ethnonationalism in which her object of inquiry, the English as an ethnic group, does not appear.
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