Arthur Aughey

Article for the English Democrats, October 2007.

As an academic, life has its delicious coincidences, especially for someone studying the politics of Englishness. I was recently re-reading AV Dicey’s classic book, England’s Case against Home Rule, first published in 1886 and I couldn’t believe my luck when I picked up the October edition of Prospect Magazine to find Jack Straw, Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor, arguing that pursuing ‘Little England’ policies which create resentment between the peoples of Britain is ‘a sure means of destroying the union’. Defending ‘asymmetrical’ devolution, he couched his argument in terms of the Gladstonian Home Rule debate. Here was implicit criticism of Dicey, for Straw’s message was that critics of devolution from a ‘Little England’ perspective should learn from the experience of Irish Home Rule ‘and understand that it is by embracing devolution that the union has been able to survive and to thrive’. But what lesson is to be learnt? And what are the warnings from history that Dicey was making?

Dicey’s objective was to criticize the policy of Home Rule for Ireland from a purely English point of view because he believed it to be ‘at least as much opposed to the vital interests of England’ as it was a threat to the stability of the Union. It was ‘a plan for revolutionizing the constitution of the whole of the United Kingdom’ and as such, it must be ‘a scheme which promises to England at least not greater evils than the maintenance of the Union or than Irish independence’. Furthermore, Home Rule was not Local Self-Government. According to Dicey ‘Local Self-Government however extended means the delegation, Home Rule however curtailed means the surrender, of Parliamentary authority’. What was on offer for Ireland (and granted today to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) was qualitatively different from what was thought expedient for England. Dicey also disputed the proposition that Home Rule was an equitable compromise between English interests and the legitimate claims of Irish nationality. Home Rule was unfair because whatever its ‘hypothetical benefits it threatens more than countervailing loss to England’. It would bring ‘large pecuniary sacrifice’ without a reasonable hope of ‘creating real harmony of feeling between Great Britain and Ireland’. Finally, Dicey was convinced that the logic of Home Rule was the break-up of the United Kingdom. Interestingly, he believed the pressure would come from not from Ireland but from England: ‘Grant it, and in a short time Irish independence will become the wish of England’. At that point, ‘it will be clear that the Union must for the sake of England, no less than of Ireland, come to an end’.

Contemporary English nationalism has inverted Dicey’s argument but not his logic. His case against Home Rule has transmuted into England’s case for Home Rule (for itself). Let’s consider this case. The English (nationalist) case is surely that devolution has indeed delivered for England the disadvantages of separatism without the advantages of Union; that the English are sacrificing their legitimate claims to nationhood in the interests of maintaining the Union. The alternative to English Home Rule or an English parliament has been regionalism – another way of describing Local Self Government – but this is not only an administrative enormity but also the outward manifestation of the Labour Government’s suspicion of the English nation. By partitioning England into regions it is accused of concealing the injustice done to national identity. That regionalism has been rejected by the people has not meant that English Home Rule is any more acceptable to Government and this shows how deeply rooted is its anti-English sentiment. As for ‘real harmony of feeling’ and ‘pecuniary sacrifice’, the case is that devolution means subsidised self-determination, one in which the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish get the self-determination and the English do the subsidising. This is now a widespread sentiment. A Sunday Telegraph ICM poll last year found that 59% of English respondents approved of Scottish independence; that 68% favoured an English Parliament; and that 60% thought it was unjust for Scotland to have a higher level of public expenditure per head of population than England. Moreover, in a recent study of the Union, McLean and McMillan concluded more or less as Dicey had predicted: that England would lose patience with asymmetric devolution. The future of the Union, they argued, is likely to replicate the ‘Slovak scenario’, a scenario that ‘would be driven from England’ and by an ‘English backlash’.

So maybe Mr Straw is right to be anxious about the direction of opinion. Though I sympathise with his defence of the Union, the terms in which he poses it require serious reconsideration. Perhaps it is time to return to Dicey and, for those interested in the United Kingdom - but who have a genuine regard for England’s ‘case’ - to be sensitive to what it might tell us.

Arthur Aughey is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster. He is author of The Politics of Englishness Manchester University Press 2007.

Arthur Aughey, Eberhard Bort, and John Osmond (Unique Paths to Devolution: Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, IWA):

A decisive influence on how devolution will develop in future will be the by far
and away larger part of the United Kingdom, namely England. Partly under the influence of devolution, but also in relation to the reality of the United Kingdom’s role as a medium-sized state within the European Union, England is steadily becoming more self-consciously English. This can be seen both politically and culturally.

In political terms voting patterns, which have always diverged markedly from England in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, continue to throw up strong differences. As a result there are growing demands at Westminster for England to have powers over its domestic concerns in the way devolution has allowed for the three Celtic parts of the UK. This could begin with ‘English votes for English laws’ within the House of Commons and evolve towards some kind of distinctive English Parliament.

The more such trends gather pace, the more the United Kingdom will move from its existing quasi-federal structure towards a more formalised federation. There are, of course, difficulties with establishing a federation in the United Kingdom since England would be such an overwhelmingly large component. It may be, therefore, that in the medium to longer term, perhaps somewhere towards the mid 21st Century, a confederal solution will be found to the United Kingdom’s constitutional dilemmas.

Do I detect a subtle change of emphasis in these UKanian discussions? In the aftermath of devolution '98 the 'English identity crisis' was discussed and English national identity questioned - much to the bemusement of the English who felt no crisis. Now, however, it is more usual, and - dare I say - appropriate, for Britishness and the future of the Union to be contested.

A small victory, perhaps? Is this change in emphasis a tacit admission that there is an English nationalism, a strength of national feeling, that prevents England from being sacrificed at the alter of Unionism to satisfy the smaller nations' desire for home rule?

The recent news that 51% of Conservative Home subscribers are in favour of an English parliament suggests that there is everything to play for, and that Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolutionists can't expect to get it all their own way.

'Twas always thus.

My pick of the articles that appeared while I was away in Canada is this one from Matthew Parris:

The presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme was doing a quick round-up of the weather on a freezing December morning, just before signing off at 9 a.m. Very cold all over Britain, he said. Later there would be ‘snow in the north of the country’. ‘Which country?’ I thought.

It was an immediate and unconsidered reaction; and of course on reflection context often does make clear. But not in this case. I still don’t know which country Today meant. If the country they were referring to was Great Britain then they must have meant snow in Scotland. If it was England they were talking about then we in the north Midlands were due for snow too.

A small confusion, and slight enough. But faintly it troubled me. As an Englishman, and as 2010 drew to a close, I was experiencing for the first time the thought that, when directed towards a predominantly English audience, the ordinary and natural meaning of ‘the country’ might now be England.

Read it in full here.

This is a subject close to my heart. Regular readers of this blog will know about my 'say England' campaign in which I nag politicians to say 'England' when it is England to which they refer. Politicians often prefer to use the word 'Britain' to falsely convey the impression that they have a vision and mandate for the whole of Britain; or they may use more nebulous terms like 'our country' or 'this country', leaving the un-enquiring mind to assume that they're referring to stories that apply to the entire UK, which, post-devolution, is very rarely the case.

As far as I am concerned our politicians do not mention England because they want to give the impression that the UK is still united, to all intents and purposes a unitary state, and that they and their pronouncements, policies and initiatives are still relevant and of interest to the entire UK. They also have no desire for England to start viewing itself as a distinct national, political and economic community, an idea that constant utterances of 'England' and 'English' might impress upon their audience. Until very recently the Media, who also like to portray themselves as British and who offer no specifically English news portals, have been in connivance with the political class, but that is changing and as Matthew Parris notes Scotland is fast becoming a foreign country to the extent that English ears now substitute 'England' for 'this country' and 'our country'.

Many Scots and Welsh will say 'it was always thus', that for them England was always 'the country'; but according to Roger Scruton the territorial ambiguity of Westminster politicians is a tradition that flows from a wider ill-defined sense of self.

Vague notions of 'kith and kin' animated the builders of empire; but who was included and why remained uncertain. When politicians appealed for support, they addressed not the nation or the kingdom but 'the country' - meaning all those people who were represented in the Parliament of Westminster. But what these people had in common, and what brought them together under a single crown remained wholly obscure. - Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy

If the ambiguity is removed and 'the country' now means 'England' - or 'Scotland' or 'Wales' depending on your nationality - then politicians are going to have to be more specific about when they are discussing England, and they'll need to do this for the sake of Britain because it is 'England' not 'Britain' that is now the ordinary and natural meaning of ‘the country’ in whatever part of Britain you reside in.

UPDATE

Arthur Aughey has referenced this blog post in a lecture at Hull University.

Arthur Aughey's speech to the Literature of an Independent England Conference, 6th November 2010

Recently, I was reviewing a book for Parliamentary Affairs – a very intelligent book on the British political tradition – and there was a Lord Copper moment. The authors claimed that: ‘The Scots, the Welsh, and the Northern Irish can and do debate national identity at length and with arms. The English can mount the occasional sortie but, like sex and religion, it is not deemed a suitable dinner table topic’ – well, up to a point.

I would suggest that the English always have discussed their national identity but have done so in a distinctive manner and it is this manner I would like to explore.

I start with a few familiar references for those attending a literature conference:

TS Eliot

‘Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the Twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th Century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.’

George Orwell

‘solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes, the pub, the football match, the back garden and the "nice cup of tea".

Vita Sackville-West

‘England, Shakespeare, Elizabeth, London; Westminster, the docks, India, the Cutty Sark, England; England, Gloucester, John of Gaunt; Magna Carta, Cromwell, England’

Here are two more recent examples:

Alan Titchmarsh

cucumber sandwiches (no crusts), the National Trust, Thomas Rowlandson, inglenooks, knotted handkerchiefs, Melton Mowbray Pork Pies, the Shipping Forecast, Gardner’s Question Time, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, Betty’s Café, Guy Fawkes Night

Ian Dury & The Blockheads - England's Glory (from which I take only a sample)

Frankie Howerd, Noël Coward and garden gnomes
Frankie Vaughan, Kenneth Horne, Sherlock Holmes

Nice bit of kipper and Jack the Ripper and Upton Park
Gracie, Cilla, Maxy Miller, Petula Clark
Winkles, Woodbines, Walnut Whips
Vera Lynn and Stafford Cripps

For Ian Dury, these are the jewels in the crown of England's glory. And, as the song ends, the chorus claims:

And every one could tell a different story
And show old England's glory something new

Listing
Are these lists nothing more than quaint eccentricities, eccentricity being itself a traditional self-definition eliciting not only national approval but also evoking the national ‘genius’? Are they evidence of the old adage that ‘twice makes custom’ encouraging imitators to stand self-consciously in the line of Eliot and Orwell? Both these things may be true but I think there is something else at work which is worth reflecting on.

Firstly, they are all concrete references.
In his England: An Elegy, Roger Scruton also notes this tradition of eccentric lists of ephemera. For Scruton, recourse to listing suggests that England is ‘not a nation or a creed or a language or a state but a home’. He goes on:

‘Things at home don’t need an explanation. They are there because they are there. It was one of the most remarkable features of the English that they required so little explanation of their customs and institutions. They bumbled on, without anyone asking the reason why or anyone being able, if asked, to provide it’.

Secondly, the relationship between references is implicit rather than explicit
They only make sense in an association distinctively English, even though what may be representative of that association changes. Patrick Parrinder remarks in his Nation and the Novel how, in English literature, ‘associations of Englishness are built up’ - such that, for example, ‘Falstaff’s green fields are English by habitual association’ not because anyone else’s fields (like those of Ireland, for instance) are any less green.

Thirdly, if the changing character of the lists does suggest something ephemeral - the fragments of experience – continuity of association is also evoked.

Take, for instance, Ernest Barker’s conclusion to The Character of England. He thought that it was possible to be too seduced by change and to miss the larger picture. ‘But this long slow movement of the character of England’ he asked, ‘has it not something enduring?’ The answer, of course, is in the question. Orwell makes a similar point when he described England as ‘an everlasting animal stretching into the future and past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same’. And there are affinities also with Anthony Powell’s reflection on English sensibilities in A Dance to the Music of Time: ‘Everything alters, yet does remain the same’.

Fourthly, what remains the same is a feeling of personal connection – for good or ill – with England. This may be grasped by Pierre Bayard’s thesis in How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. For Bayard, culture is a matter of orientation: ‘being able to find your bearings within books as a system’. This requires ‘a command of relations’, not knowledge of every book in isolation. Thus it is possible to feel part of a culture even if one is ignorant of ‘a large part of the whole’. We may not know much of our history, of our culture or of our politics without in any way feeling unable to say something meaningful about it.

Listing is a case in point. It is a way of talking about England without having to analyze it, for enumeration intimates a personal command of relations.

If there is a moral it is possibly the one which Robert Colls makes in the conclusion to The Identity of England: ‘the nation’s propensity for seeing itself as diverse should not be allowed to outstrip its propensity for seeing itself as unified’.

Listing seems a very English way to acknowledge diversity but also to imply its own unity.

However, how do we express continuity in change or sameness in difference? Here is the first analogy taken from that very English of political philosophers, Michael Oakeshott. It is the metaphor of the ‘dry wall’.

Dry Wall
Oakeshott uses the ‘dry wall’ to capture how events are related to one another without premeditated design. A nation remains stable (or not) by virtue of the touching shapes of things rather than by the mortar of national purpose, deeply-held values or collective destiny (which is not to deny that some people do see nationality in that way). The parts of a nation ‘stand-in-relation’ to one another and for Oakeshott the term designates an intelligible connection between related circumstances not mere accident. And it was Ernest Barker, Oakeshott’s friend, who described a nation as ‘united by the primary fact of contiguity’, its members being led by such contiguity to develop forms of ‘mental sympathy’. It is this mental sympathy, Barker thought, which constitutes a common will to live together. Perhaps a better term than common will is Oakeshott’s own – a collected will, suggesting more list than manifesto.

This may seem too thin for a national identity. But consider Julian Baggini’s distillation of what he calls the English philosophy, a product of his having lived in England’s Everytown, which turns out to be Rotherham – strangely, since Stuart Maconie once described it as more like a forgotten chemical town in the former Soviet Union. Baggini’s believed that worries about insufficient national glue holding society together were misplaced: ‘the shared values we all need to sign up to’, he writes, ‘are actually pretty minimal and civic’.

This civic relationship is conveyed by the second Oakeshott’s analogy: ‘conversation’.

Conversation
Conversation has become a cant political term. Indeed, there is popular suspicion that politicians really mean something very different from colloquial usage. As former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott once put it: ‘Conversation means you have a two-way exchange. You ask the question and I answer it. It’s called conversation’. Public cynicism rests on the assumption that the answer is a pre-determined one in the mode of Oscar Wilde: 'I delight in talking politics. I talk them all day. But I can't bear listening to them'.

For Oakeshott, one activity which has benefited from ‘the civilising touch of conversation’ is politics. He thought this to have been the mark of English achievement for ‘remarkably enough it was Englishmen (who are otherwise not greatly disposed towards conversation) who first explored the recognition that politics is supremely eligible to be a conversational art’. And it is interesting to note here that Peter Ackroyd in Albion tracks the emergence of modern English identity to trends for conversation. The term conversation was described by one scholar of nationalism as a very English way of thinking. Indeed it is. Englishness as conversation does not exclude fierce debate and contest. It assumes, to use EP Thompson’s term, that politics is conducted a distinctive idiom and that there can be mutual understanding.

I will cite one illustration without comment.

At an IPPR seminar on Englishness last week, John Denham recalled a train journey from Durham to London with an NUM delegation during the miners’ strike. Its members were going to London to lobby in support of Arthur Scargill. When he asked what they were doing afterwards, they said they were going to Buckingham Palace. They always did just in case they’d catch a glimpse of the Queen.

Anxiety
The popular travel writer H.V. Morton prefaced his The Call of England with lines from GK Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse: ‘An island like a little book / Full of a hundred tales’. England (if not quite an island) is full of many tales and to speak of the ‘identity’ of England at any one time is to speak of the conversation implied in those tales. And that repeats, of course, the glory of England according to Ian Dury. However, mention of Morton suggests a sub-text to the English conversation: feelings of impending loss, of threat, fear of an England that is going to the dogs.

Morton wrote that the English suffer from a ‘vague mental toothache’, a disquiet often based on the feeling that they should feel anxious rather than actually being anxious.

Such anxiety provokes the search the essential England, for the mortar of purpose holding the wall together, for permanent foundations which keep it all up. And it may be – as Oakeshott suggests – that these journeys to find the heart of England indicate a failure of national nerve.

This anxiety today – the English Question – is equally a list of different questions, social, cultural and political and its current expression has a particular context: the new complexity of United Kingdom governance and the uncertainty of how England fits.

Citizens of Nowhere
Hence, by way of a rather Chestertonian English road, I arrive at the title of the paper: the intellectual anxiety that the English have become citizens of nowhere. The phrase is from Paul Kingsnorth’s book Real England. However, it could have been taken from Scruton’s elegy where the English where ‘England has been forbidden’. Or it could well be taken from Simon Heffer, or more recently, Mark Perryman.

This really is News from Nowhere. And those familiar with Morris’s work will recognize the ironic passage:

‘I must now shock you by telling you that we have no longer anything which you, a native of another planet, would call a government.’

The English ‘are very well off as to politics, - because we have none’.

But this is no longer an English utopia. It is a English dystopia. The call to action is to politicize England and to give it a government.

The mood is the message. That mood can be described as 'irritable growl syndrome', a complaint of varying intensity about present conditions. And there is no doubt that it has encouraged nationalist sentiment: support for an English Parliament – Kingsnorth’s preference – or even English separatism – Perryman’s preference. As yet it is a mood and not a movement. But it is capable of transforming from mood to movement - perhaps in a Chestertonian moment - when the people of England finally speak, this time of freedom and not of ale.

The first aspect is institutional.
Simon Lee has argued that constitutional changes have created ‘deficits in citizenship rights, democratic accountability and the denial of the expression of England’s national identity as a distinct political community’. The political case for England, then, must involve ‘the self-determination to vote on policies and issues that affect it alone that devolution has extended to the other constituent nations of the United Kingdom’.

These themes find popular expression in English nationalist blogs, sometimes in the tabloid press (but not only there), and in the Campaign for an English Parliament. There is a tendency to argue that there is an official conspiracy keeping the ‘English question’ out of political debate. And there are two consequences.

Not only are the English as a people rendered invisible.

But England as a place is also erased – spoken of as ‘regions’ without the integrity or dignity of nationhood.

As that distinguished former member of Warwick University, Jim Bulpitt, observed a generation ago, England was never the centre of the United Kingdom. British governments, he argued, ‘attempted to relate to (or distance itself from) all parts of the country in a similar fashion’. For central government ‘if not for the English, England was part of the periphery’.

For nationalists, England should be put at the centre.

The second aspect is economic.
The English need to assert themselves – not only for reasons of patriotic dignity but also for material reasons. For when it comes to public spending, devolution shows how England’s lack of identity is a handicap.

Devolution means subsidized self-determination. The Scots, the Welsh and the Irish get the self-determination and the English do the subsidizing. This is a very different take on conversational nationhood. As Gordon Gekko put it in Wall Street - ‘It’s all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation’. Or as the Cumbria News and Star - put it a few years ago: ‘Scotland the free, England the fee’.

The imperative seems clear. England needs a separate political voice to protect its interests.

One can certainly point to evidence that this anxious mood is having political effect. More people today are willing to call themselves ‘English’ rather than ‘British’. Some newspaper polls put support for an English Parliament as high as 68%; English support for Scottish independence as high as 59%; and majorities opposed to higher levels of public expenditure outside England.

Nationalism, as Tom Nairn might say, has finally caught up with the English. And there are those – like Perryman – who argue, following Nairn, that the mood of the English is already ‘after Britain’ and on the road to independence.

Nevertheless, caution is required for the evidence is at least questionable. For those who wish to do it, translation of mood into movement for change remains a large task.

Feeling somewhere
In their essays for our book These Englands, John Curtice’s polling analysis and Susan Condor’s social psychology show what the difficulties are.

Curtice’s figures suggest:

• There is little sign that English support for the UK has eroded following devolution
• Most people prefer England to be governed from Westminster
• The majority accept that other parts of the UK should have some form of self-governance
• English self-identification has increased but this Englishness does not necessarily correspond with nationalism.

Susan Condor’s interviews discovered something interesting about English responses. Rather than presupposing an ‘other’ against which to define itself, Englishness tends to function as its own ‘other’, constructed not in relation to the other UK nations, but self-referentially. This operates through contrasts with:

• the English past
• different places (North vs. South, urban vs. rural locations),
• different social classes
• different political persuasions.

For most respondents, England remains somewhere and home. If it seems invisible or nowhere that is because most people take England and their Englishness for granted

English patriot and professional Yorkshireman, Roy Hattersley, captures this disposition in own collection, In Search of England. Hattersley proudly proclaims himself English but sees no point in making a fuss about it. ‘Indeed’, as he puts it, ‘not making a fuss about being English seems to me an essential ingredient of Englishness’.

Insofar as this is fairly representative – and it still seems to be – it is a condition not overly favourable to political nationalism.

Conclusion
Baggini’s experience of England’s Everytown led him to conclude that those who ‘wring their hands over the question of national identity’ were missing the point. They mistook the need for people to feel they belonged to England with the need for everyone to feel the same kind of belonging to England, like some collective mortar of national cohesion. Baggini remained a dry wall patriot, where Englishness was a tolerant but tolerable ‘live and let live’.

To persuade the English of the virtue of nationalism, then, is to convince the English to think differently about themselves and their country. This may be difficult, but it is not, of course, impossible.

To return to Ian Dury’s list:

Nationalists must believe that one can tell a different story and show old England's glory something new.

Arthur Aughey is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster and author of The Politics of Englishness (MUP 2007).

Writing on Open Unionism, Arthur Aughey reveals that he feared for the future of the UK in the aftermath of the general election.

The only moment that I felt the Union was in danger recently was when credence was given to the absurd proposal for a ‘progressive coalition’ which would have put the fate of the United Kingdom government into the hands of the nationalist parties and made the Union a bazaar – or bizarre – of Celtic bargains which would have outraged England and provoked disaster.

Arthur was right to be concerned, a progressive alliance which called upon non-English MPs to govern England would have provoked disaster, outraging England and driving English Conservatives into the arms of English nationalism. It didn't happen, but for a while watching millions believed that the anti-English alliance was on the cards.

The Conservative answer to the English Question is "English Votes on English Laws". But in actual fact that is an answer to the West Lothian Question rather than the English Question; English Votes on English Laws does not offer England the form of government of its choosing and neither does it assure England of the government it voted for. It merely prevents non-English MPs voting on England-only legislation once the multi-national UK Parliament, elected by the United Kingdom public, has decided who the government of England should be.

If a convention of English Votes on English Laws had been in place before the 2010 general election, the progressive alliance would still have been a possibility, it would just have been a lame duck government insofar as England was concerned, unable to command an English majority on English legislation. The temptation would have been to overturn the "English Votes on English Laws" convention or run the election again.

Psephologists inform us that majority governments will become less common in the future - hung parliaments more frequent - so the situation that we found ourselves in after 6th May, if combined with an ongoing absence of English government, is a phenomenon whose potential to destablise the Union is only just being realised.

Commenting upon Arthur's article O'Neill claims that the "2010 General Election was not a good one for the nationalist forces in the three devolved parts of the UK". It's way too early to draw that conclusion in my opinion, even if the separatist parties were disappointed by their share of the vote.

The four nations of the UK should not be viewed in isolation because our Union is a union in flux, it is a dynamic political construct undergoing revision, and whose future is dependent on public opinion in the four component parts and the interplay between those parts. However, let's briefly consider where we are in light of the general election result in each of those parts.

In England the majority party has backed down from its 10-year promise to introduce English Votes on English Laws in favour of a commission to consider the West Lothian Question. We do not yet know the details of this commission but if it is done properly and opened up to the public, instead of being a Westminster stitch-up, it could be the beginnings of a national conversation on England that paves the way to an English claim to popular sovereignty. Millions of English people were made aware of the anti-democratic influence of non-English MPs when the spectre of a 'progressive alliance' was raised, and millions too will watch with envious eyes as the Scots debate 'devolution-max' and the Welsh debate a referendum on a Welsh parliament. The Labour and Liberal Democrat parties are aware that they have no mandate for England, and the Conservatives are aware that their mandate for England is compromised by England's place in the Union. At the moment the three parties prefer to ignore England, rarely mentioning it by name, but this will change as pressure is brought to bear to force them to start speaking for and of England. A distinctive English polity and political language will certainly become a reality if Wales opts for its own parliament.

In Scotland the Scots now find themselves governed by a party that won a majority of seats in England but which remains deeply unpopular in Scotland. The 80s revival continues with cries of "No mandate". Scotland may be allowed to defer on its share of the £6bn public spending cuts until after next year's elections to the Scottish Parliament, allowing the Westminster coalition government time to progress with implementation of the Calman Commission recommendations with a view to limiting a Scottish backlash against the Scottish Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in 2011. But the SNP will want to tie the Calman recommendations into a multi-option referendum that includes their preferred option of independence, which presents the Unionist parties with something of a public relations nightmare. The strategic question of 'what next for the Tories in Scotland?' may need to take a back seat to the more pressing tactical demand of pushing through the Calman proposals and absolving Westminster of as much responsibility for Scotland as possible.

In Wales the Tories do not know what they stand for: do they support further devolved powers or not? Conservative and Liberal Democrat Assembly Members generally side with the Welsh public in supporting a Welsh Parliament with primary legislative powers, but the Conservative Party at large will only commit to supporting a referendum on the issue, and even then they are non-commital. There is opportunity here to divide Conservative from Liberal Democrat and Welsh Conservative from Westminster Conservative. It is in Wales that the Barnett Formula comes under most pressure for reform, with all sides agreeing that it is unfair on Wales, and with most in agreement that a needs-based formula would be desirable. However, a needs-based formula would cost Scotland £4.5bn a year, and a formula that did not use English spending as a baseline for determining the block grants to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would remove the only logical rationale that underpins the right of non-English MPs to vote on England-only legislation (non-English MPs have a right to vote on 'English legislation' because it determines the spend in England and, therefore, the consequential grants to the devolved nations). Reform of Barnett is not straightforward, it is an unfairness that has been a vital component of the Unionists' armoury for years.

In Northern Ireland David Cameron's attempt to make the Ulster Unionist Party a political force to bolster Tory England have backfired spectacularly, undermining their credentials as a party of the Union (credentials that Scotland already placed in some doubt). It will pain Arthur and O'Neill to read this, but so long as Northern Ireland remains relatively peaceful it is something of an irrelevance. The province is regarded as a special case and should not unduly influence the dynamic between England, Scotland and Wales in the minds of the British public. Among our Union of peoples it is the Northern Irish who are regarded as 'most foreign' by the others, something that Unionists in Ulster might bear in mind when demanding special treatment in regard to the funding cuts that are to come. David Trimble, who was instrumental behind the scenes in formulating David Cameron's rhetoric about Britishness and the Union, will hopefully be sidelined in light of Conservative failure in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The general election has not solved any of the problems highlighted above, it has merely raised them anew and provoked a reinvigorated clamour for their resolution. One thing is for sure, the Status Quo is not an option, neither in regard to the territorial dimension of our governance or to our common governance by the thoroughly discredited Westminster parliament. O'Neill may be correct to say that the 2010 General Election was not a good one for the nationalist forces in the three devolved parts of the UK, but he might have made a more persuasive case in arguing that the 2010 general election was not a good one for British nationalists: Unionists.

There is much to play for and too many players to take anything for granted.

Let me make a few predictions in the time-honoured academic way of trying to put them into context.

The first context is the unpredictability of predictions, especially about the UK constitution. Writing in the 1970s when talk of the break-up of Britain had become fashionable, the political scientist Hugh Berrington pointed to an enduring problem of political interpretation. ‘There is the tendency to give the ephemeral a permanence it does not warrant, to lend the anxieties of the day a consequence they do not deserve; the other, equally seductive, is to regard real and lasting changes as sudden and transient incidents’. These interpretative uncertainties remain true today: which is not to say that one shouldn’t make predictions.

The second context is the nature of the choices to be made. I would argue that there are three possible constitutional strategies.

• Those who support the continuation of the multi-national United Kingdom are trying to sustain the authority of British association through the re-distribution of instrumental responsibilities to its component nations - with the exception of England. And, though this is a more contentious issue, they are also trying to sustain the international authority of the United Kingdom through common policies with other states in the European Union.
• Nationalist parties are trying to displace British association mainly by expanding the instrumental responsibilities of the devolved institutions and enhancing the authority of their own nations. This does not involve (necessarily) provoking conflict with Westminster, rather it requires convincing citizens in Scotland, Wales, England and even Northern Ireland (though it remains a special case) that forms of self-government within the Union are a poor substitute for self-determination outside it. The European Union is a useful functional enterprise in this strategy for independence because it means that separation does not carry with it the taint of political isolation.
• The constitutional strategy of those who seek to promote the European Union as the answer to national, regional and global questions is to shift its competence from being instrumental to the projects of its member states to becoming more recognisably a self-sustaining association in its own right. This is a very uncertain enterprise since both of the other constitutional strategies are likely, from their different perspectives, to resist that objective.

Of these three, the British strategy still appears the most convincing both in the short and medium term (accepting that in the long run we’re all dead). In their judicious and measured conclusion in Has Devolution Worked?, John Curtice and Ben Seyd suggest that it has neither helped to strengthen British national identity nor served to undermine it. ‘Perhaps the lesson is that devolution is valued not for what it achieves but for what it represents; recognition by the British state of the distinctive national identities of its stateless nations’. But how do we now understand this new relationship?

The third context is how the UK should function in the second decade of the new millennium. Peter Madgwick and Richard Rose in, The Territorial Dimension in United Kingdom Politics (1982) coined the expression: ‘the UK is a fifth “nation” in Westminster’. When he came to develop the idea at greater length in Understanding the United Kingdom which was published in the same year, Rose provided a different stress. In that book he described it thus: ‘To understand the parts, we must also understand the government of the whole. Parliament is more than the sum of representatives from diverse constituencies. It is, as it were, the fifth nation of the UK; it is the first loyalty of some and the last loyalty of others’. What is the difference in the use of the definite and indefinite articles?

• To think of the UK today as the fifth nation is to continue to think of the Westminster Parliament as dominant and limited autonomy in the devolved territories.
• To think of the UK as a fifth nation suggests a different governing perspective, one in which autonomy is extensive and the role of central government as primus inter pares, coordinating and managing diversity in order to maintain union.

One could argue that ‘fifth nation’ still captures an important truth about the UK, that it helps to explain continuity in the state, but that devolution is a process which involves a modification such that the indefinite article becomes more appropriate in domestic matters than the definite. However, this still leaves the English Question unaddressed. English nationalists argue that it is the last ‘stateless nation’. I have a lot of sympathy with that complaint but their problem is convincing most of the English to see things that way so and far they have been unsuccessful.

After that tedious academic circumlocution, and with my three contexts in place, my predictions for 2010:

1. There will be movement towards – to use James Mitchell’s expression – a ‘state of unions’, ie more extensive self-governance for Scotland and Wales. In short, there will be further moves towards greater fiscal responsibility for the first and primary legislative power for the second. The UK will remain a fifth nation in both countries but of no less significance because of this indefinite article.
2. In England the UK will continue to be the fifth nation, with Westminster as the focus of national debate and the West Lothian Question unresolved. The definite article here will become increasingly problematic.
3. In Northern Ireland there will continue to be problems with the operation of devolution since talk of a new and widely shared democratic narrative is to put words into the mouth of history. However, crisis has become a political way of life and the lesson of the policing and justice debate is how desperate republicans are to sustain the operation of British sovereignty.

Arthur Aughey is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster.

This post is part of the Constitutional Futures series.

History never repeats itself, it only stutters as the Parisian radicals of 1968 used to say. What appears to be Groundhog Day is really something different. Nevertheless, politicians cannot avoid drawing lessons from history not because history does repeat itself but because they are interested in politics not history. For example, in October 2007 Jack Straw, Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor, argued that pursuing ‘Little England’ policies that ‘create resentment between the peoples of Britain is a sure means of destroying the union’. Defending the current ‘asymmetrical’ state of the British constitution, he couched his argument with reference to the debate on Home Rule in the late 19th century. Straw’s message was that those who criticise devolution from a Little England perspective should ‘learn from that experience and understand that it is by embracing devolution that the union has been able to survive and to thrive’ (Straw 2007). But what lesson is to be learnt from the Home Rule debate? If Straw really was pointing to a lesson from history, what were the warnings of critics like A V Dicey? I think it is worth revisiting Dicey not in the spirit of drawing a lesson but in the spirit of allowing members of the Campaign for an English Parliament perhaps to understand themselves better. I take as my text Dicey’s England’s Case against Home Rule (1886) and consider an irony – that his arguments against Home Rule for Ireland have become transformed today into England’s Case for Home Rule – at least that is how I read the strategy of the CEP.

Dicey’s objective in England’s Case against Home Rule was ‘to criticize from a purely English point of view the policy of Home Rule’ for Ireland because he believed it to be ‘at least as much opposed to the vital interests of England’ as it was a threat to the stability of the Union. Of course, by ‘England’ Dicey meant ‘Great Britain’ and he used the terms interchangeably, something that is less easy to do today. Certainly, the CEP never confuses the two. Dicey was fully aware of the objection that to consider Home Rule for Ireland from an English point of view was to consider policy from ‘the wrong side’. Surely this was a matter ‘for the people of Ireland alone’ and a question which should be subject only to an examination from an Irish point of view? Far from this objection being valid, Dicey believed that leaving such matters for the consideration of the Irish alone was an entirely misconceived policy, a claim of political convenience rather than of constitutional validity. Home Rule was ‘a plan for revolutionizing the constitution of the whole of the United Kingdom’ and so there was no English arrogance ‘in insisting that the proposed change must not take place if it be adverse to the interests of Great Britain’. The case for Irish Home Rule was a case for a new political partnership, a revision of the Union’s ‘Articles of Association’, and there was nothing imperialistic or denigrating to the principle of nationality in the argument that ‘no modification can be made which in the judgement of his associates is fatal to the prosperity of the concern’. The only scheme of Home Rule which could be acceptable to England, according to Dicey, had to satisfy three conditions:

• it should be consistent with the supremacy of the British Parliament
• it should do justice to each part of the United Kingdom
• it should promise finality.

It must, in short, be ‘a scheme which promises to England at least not greater evils than the maintenance of the Union or than Irish independence’.

In the first instance, Dicey explained that Home Rule was not Local Self-Government. The latter was compatible with the supremacy of the Westminster Parliament but the very aim of Home rule was to introduce a new relationship between the Irish people and Westminster. ‘Local Self-Government however extended means the delegation, Home Rule however curtailed means the surrender, of Parliamentary authority’. In an anticipation of one constitutional debate after 1997, Dicey noted how advocates of reform in England wished local self-government to be greatly extended there and thought that this was a sufficient principle of democratic government. But what was on offer to Ireland was a form of government designed to meet the ‘feeling of nationality’ and it was desired by Irish nationalists precisely because it would check the authority of Westminster, something which no reform of local government could do. ‘When they wish to minimize the sacrifice to England of establishing a Parliament in Ireland, they bring Home Rule down nearly to the proportions of Local Self-Government; when they wish to maximise – if the word may be allowed – the blessings to Ireland of a separate legislature, they all but identify Home Rule with National Independence’. Did not Tony Blair speak of the Scottish Parliament being a mere ‘parish council’? But did not Gordon Brown subscribe to Scotland’s Claim of Right? Dicey’s summary of the effects of this policy was that it was likely to bring not the best, but the worst, of all worlds for England: ‘Home Rule, while involving almost all the evils of Separation, will be found on examination not to hold out anything like the same hopes of compensating advantages’. And this larger point was crucial even before any detailed examination were made of the practicalities of the new constitutional arrangements.

Second, Dicey disputed the proposition that Home Rule was an equitable compromise between English interests and the legitimate claims of Irish nationality. He was not impressed by the notion that England owed anything to Irish nationality by virtue of the need to redeem past wrongs. To anyone who looks at history with philosophical calmness and not with the intent to agitate, argued Dicey, the failures of England in its relations with Ireland ‘have to a great extent flowed from causes too general to be identified with the intentional wrong-doing either of rulers or of subjects’. Though it could be shown that a majority of Irish electors supported Home Rule, and the claim be made that the will of that majority should be recognised, it could equally be shown that a majority of electors in the United Kingdom willed that the Union be maintained. The point that Dicey was making was the insufficiency, not the inadmissibility, of arguments according to popular sovereignty. Such arguments were often at odds with principles of sound government and usually at odds with the idea of the Union for they involved an assumption that the rights of the parts – nations – were greater than the sum of British interests. In this view, Home Rule was indeed unfair because whatever its ‘hypothetical benefits it threatens more than countervailing loss to England’ (286). It would dislocate the whole ‘English Constitution’; it would bring ‘large pecuniary sacrifice’ without reasonable hope of ‘creating real harmony of feeling between Great Britain and Ireland’; and it would mean that England continued to carry a burden of responsibility but had no power to ensure that solidarity was reciprocated by the Home Rule jurisdiction.

Finally, Dicey was convinced that Home Rule would lead inexorably to the break-up of the United Kingdom. Interestingly, Dicey’s case was influenced just as much, perhaps more, by the likely attitude of England as it was by the dynamic for separation he believed Irish nationalists really intended. If it were true that Home Rule could be nothing other than ‘injurious to England’ (this was a big ‘if’ but Dicey was certain of the outcome), his famous conclusion that Home Rule was ‘the half-way house to separation’ needs to be put into Dicey’s own consequential context. The sentence that follows is: ‘Grant it, and in a short time Irish independence will become the wish of England’ (my italics). This break-up of the United Kingdom would be as much the product of English discontent as it would be the product of Irish nationalist policy. At that point, ‘it will be clear that the Union must for the sake of England, no less than of Ireland, come to an end’. One could argue that Dicey’s case was misconceived in its predicted outcomes – ‘a gigantic evil’ - for the stability and well-being of the United Kingdom. Or one could argue (as does Straw) that it was Dicey’s argumentative logic which helped to bring about the very thing that he opposed - Irish separation. Underlying this argument is the old (and rather dated) liberal assumption from Gladstone through to Roy Jenkins and beyond that one of the great missed opportunities was the failure to pass Home Rule in 1886, thereby saving all the bloodshed and preserving Ireland within the Union. That is an honourable argument and it was also the argument in favour of devolution to Scotland and Wales after 1997. Home Rule is a Unionist policy.

The Union is in a different condition today, of course, from the one Dicey described. There has been a re-balancing (some would argue un-balancing) of nationality and a re-ordering of the ‘complete unity’ of Britain as Dicey understood it. However, it is possible to argue that a new Diceyean moment presents itself, one which, though drawing on his logic, now advocates a very different case for England. In short, one can argue that England’s case against Home Rule has become transmuted into England’s case for Home Rule (for itself). That, as I see it, is the way the CEP looks at the United Kingdom today. Here is how I see England’s case against Home Rule becoming the CEP’s case for English Home Rule (and England is England, not Great Britain).

Here are the seven elements of the CEP’s case reviewed in as a fulfillment of Dicey’s concerns:

1. Dicey had argued that Home Rule for Ireland could not be considered by the Irish alone because the consequences for the Union would be general, not particular. The starting point of the CEP case is that England has been ignored in, and its people excluded from, the process of constitutional change. The substance of the case is put as an issue of equity. England has been denied the same opportunity as the other nations of the United Kingdom to express any collective view about how it should be governed.
2. For Dicey, local self-government was not home rule. For the CEP, equally, the Government’s policy of regionalism cannot meet England’s case. On the contrary, it represents another way to deny England its proper recognition. Only England as a whole can be the frame of reference. Parliament first, then local self-government (if required).
3. Dicey had disputed the claim that Home Rule would be an equitable compromise, one that would create ‘real harmony of feeling’ within the Union. It is the consistent argument of the CEP that devolution has not, as Labour claimed, strengthened the Union, but weakened it. And the major reason is the constitutional asymmetry of a Scottish Parliament, Assemblies in Wales and Northern Northern Ireland but no reciprocal arrangement for England.
4. Dicey believed Home Rule would involve a ‘large pecuniary sacrifice’ for the English. His prophesy is one that the CEP asserts has now been realised – that everyone else has got the self-determination and the English have got the subsidisation. That explains the polemics against the Barnett Formula.
5. Dicey believed that Home Rule would deliver for England the disadvantages of Celtic separatism without the advantages of Union. The CEP claims that the English are now required to sacrifice their legitimate claims to nationhood in the interests of maintaining a Union which satisfies only the needs of the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish.
6. Dicey’s view of federalism – or the devolution of ever more powers to national legislatures - was that it would, ‘likely enough be in our case the first step towards a dissolution of the United Kingdom into separate States’. The CEP is more equivocal on that proposition – some are in favour others possibly less so. But this question identifies, I think, a difference of opinion within the Campaign in 7 below.
7. Dicey also feared that independence for Ireland would become the wish of the English, based on his calculation that the frustration the majority nation would experience trying to make a devolved state function. It would become intolerable to England. This is actually the conclusion of a recent book by McLean and McMillan The State of the Union (2006) - the ‘Slovak scenario’, a scenario that ‘would be driven from England’, the result of an ‘English backlash’ - a book which criticises Dicey but reaches a Diceyean conclusion.

Here Dicey perceived a tension between the lure of simple separatism as a way to address national grievances and the drudgery of fashioning intra-Union compromises based on a (possibly) diminishing sense of British solidarity. It is a tension, I believe, which partly constitutes the character of the CEP. In short, the CEP occupies a position profoundly national but not necessarily separatist. This, of course, is the division between nationalism and unionism but it is not one which the CEP needs to resolve – its only objective is to lobby for a Parliament – but it does indicate a tension in the process of lobbying.

Arthur Aughey is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of The Politics of Englishness and has an academic interest in the Campaign for an English Parliament.

In his piece on Ken Clarke's answer to the West Lothian Question Prof Aughey has described me as "the most incisive of the English nationalist bloggers". Praise indeed, and how can I resist reporting such flattery?

He also has some other interesting stuff to say.

The task force’s measure of the current state of English public opinion seems reasonably sound, for the moment at least. As the opinion research by Professor John Curtice consistently shows, the English have remained remarkably complacent about constitutional change and equally complaisant about the operation of devolved institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I'm not so sure. I think the task force underestimates the strength of feeling. The task force has unsatisfactorily addressed a particular grievance - The West Lothian Question - but is has not addressed the question of England itself. A couple of years back Arthur might have been right, but the English have become more assertive, more nationalistic, and things have moved beyond a debate on purely technical matters like House of Commons voting anomalies. It's now about national representation for England, it's about sovereignty of the people of England; or negatively, in an anti-Scottish way, it's about why Gordon Brown should have any say whatsoever in English domestic affairs. Professor Curtice maintains that "every time the question has been asked, more than half [the English] have opted to leave things as they are now", but this claim simply does not stand up to further scrutiny because his poll asks the English to choose between Westminster - the traditional home of English government since the 12thC - or a "new" parliament. In actual fact, every time the English have been asked they have expressed a desire for English Votes on English Laws - a parliament within a parliament at Westminster - thereby preventing Brown and his Scottish cohorts from voting on English legislation (something that Clarke's solution does not do) and effectively rendering the Union Parliament English, and much of Cabinet and Whitehall with it.

English nationalism is still a mood, not a movement, if only because the Conservative Party refuses to mobilise it as such. The taskforce’s objective is to prevent that mood becoming a movement, confirming the Unionism of the Conservative Party, something David Cameron has taken every opportunity to confirm since becoming leader.

True, English nationalism is still a mood and not a movement. In the past people have asked me what would be the tipping point; when would demand for an English parliament become a popular movement? I always thought that a Scottish PM legislating for England combined with a recession, that helped exacerbate the Barnett Formula, would do it. We're now on the cusp of a recession, and we have a Scottish PM beginning to bring through unpopular planning legislation for England (eco-towns & nuclear power) and the marketisation of the English NHS; and in addition, to our surprise, we have SNP and Plaid administrations agitating to the North and West. The English lion isn't yet roaring but it's pacing its cage.

In his book Patriots, Richard Weight thinks the demise of the Union will take much longer than many think.

Why? Because so much stands in the way of radical reformation of the Isles. The Scots will not readily pay for the cost of independence, however much they dislike the English and want to be rid of them. The Scottish ruling classes entered the Union on pragmatic grounds primarily for financial gain, and the same criteria apply in today's democracy. The cost of leaving, rather than fondness for the English and Welsh, keeps them on board. There is a residual British sentiment in Scotland. But it is weak and getting weaker; and in the end, whether the Scots choose to remain in the UK or not will depend of whether they can find the courage to endure the start-up costs of independence. At the moment, they do not possess the courage...What of the English? There is no sign that they want independence. Dazed and confused by the changes which have taken place, they are not sure what they want. Many are indifferent to constitutional issues. However, they have woken en masse to the fact that their blithe unionism is no longer reciprocated and that their seamless Anglo-British identity is effectively redundant. Devolution has forced the English to do what their partners did in the second half of the twentieth century - to reconsider who they are as a people....The English need a sense that their own unique national identity is respected; and that, for all their past sins and present faults, they still have something valuable to offer the UK.

Much of the above Arthur would agree with, apart from the bit about Anglo-British identity being redundant (obviously). But in what way can unionists respect the unique national identity of England without national English government, and without further undermining England's Anglo-British identity....Anyone? Arthur doesn't know. Ken Clarke doesn't know, or perhaps even care. Do the English even know, or are they content to be governed "not by logic but by parliament"? Aughey's instincts are entirely conservative, and entirely Unionist, so he will be hoping that the English are content to be governed by a sovereign UK parliament, even if the politicians within strive for Britain whilst their devolved counterparts strive for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Such blithe unionism is the unionists' logic.

Under a Tory administration it is likely that the West Lothian Question will be appeased, but it is short-termism to think that this is a solution to anything much, and as likely as not a Tory England will only serve to enrage the Scots. The title of Clarke's paper is "Answering the Question: Devolution, the West Lothian Question and the Future of the Union". Unfortunately it doesn't restore anyone's faith in the Union because it doesn't have any answer to asymmetric devolution, or to the English Question, or even any proper answer to the West Lothian Question.

Arthur's mischievous side suggests proportional representation as a unionist answer, a long-term way of mitigating the West Lothian Question as a Tory victory does in the short-term. But let's be honest here, proportional representation merely removes the party political aspect to the West Lothian Question, it does not answer it, or provide an English voice in the union. Ultimately the English are no more likely to accept Scottish MPs elected by PR voting on English issues than they are Scottish MPs elected by first past the post.

The only unionist solution must now be to recognise that we are a union of four nations each capable of governing ourselves to the same extent. The true test of our Britishness, the affirmation of our Britishness if you like, then becomes the extent to which we relinquish self-governance to work together as a united kingdom. Anything else is just pure nonsense.

A few comments arising from my reading of Arthur Aughey's article entitled 'The Return of England' in which he muses upon the emergence of England as a cultural and political entity and what that means for Britain.

England is taking the first steps on a journey of homecoming after centuries of obfuscation in Britain and empire. Much of the recent literature implies that the English suffer from a double lack—a lack of distinct national identity and a lack of distinct institutions of self-governance. The autonomy of populism is here attached to a political demand for greater English self-governance, in the wake of devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. For England it is a return and a beginning—the stuff of romantic nationalism, where recovery and renewal make it possible to become "a nation once again."

That passage rather neatly encapsulates my view on what is happening. English identity has been subsumed by British identity, Britain is, or was, Greater England in the minds of the English and the outside world, a conflation that was understandably much to the annoyance of the Scots and Welsh. The rebirth of Scotland, and Wales, as 'nation[s] once again' has created an identity void that can only be filled by the retraction of British identity - we have already seen the beginnings of this with opinion polls documenting a decline in the demographic that identify themselves British. The danger in this seismic shift away from Britishness and toward Englishness is in the lack of distinctly English institutions and governance. 'Englishness' is in danger of becoming a popular cultural phenomenon, with its roots in an English ethnic base, that lacks a meaningful outlet, exhibited only in moments of sporting tribalism or xenophobia. This is a subject that I discussed in length - quoting Arthur Aughey - in an article for the Campaign for an English Parliament newsblog (English Civic Nationalism). An English parliament would correct the democratic deficit operating in the UK but, more importantly perhaps, it would also allow English nationalism to act as a vehicle of cultural and civic renewal, allowing us to foster an inclusive idea of Englishness. The alternative, adopted by this government, unwittingly causes resentment and allows English constitutional grievances to be used as vehicles for the promotion of ethnic nationalism (or white nationalism) and separatism.

Arthur goes on to speculate on the future of English nationalism:

It is not yet clear whether the issue of English national identity will become politicised. All the ingredients of a nationalist platform are there: a sense of injustice, a feeling of powerlessness, the mood of exploitation and the occasion for righteous anger. For the moment, overtly nationalist groups remain on the fringe, but the sentiments of such groups are more openly displayed in the press.

It cannot have escaped anyone’s notice that English political concerns are now more readily discussed in the press. In the past the government - always keen to portray itself as a liberal guardian of multicultural tolerant Britain, and more keen still to stifle debate that might expose their fraudulent position - resorted to labelling anyone that articulated English concerns as ‘little-Englanders’, separatists, anglo-saxon revivalists, ethnic nationalists or even racists. And this despite the fact that English nationalists, more often than not, asked only for constitutional parity; the recognition of England as a distinct political territory with the same rights as Scotland and Wales to self-governance. The result of this policy of political marginalisation was to allow parties such as the BNP to use English constitutional grievances as a recruitment tool. Regardless, Labour’s tactics have failed, and thanks largely to internet activism and the tireless work of the letter writers of the Campaign for an English Parliament the undemocratic effects of devolution ’97 have never been allowed to go unnoticed. But although it is now very much a vogue subject the upsurge in English nationalism is not without its dangers to Britain. I am quite shocked that the government continually fails to acknowledge the problem. The choice is stark: allow England its natural place within the union of nations or risk turning England into a resentful partner and endanger that union of nations.

But where does a politically assertive, flag-waving, bunting-adorned England leave Britain?

In sum, Britishness has become understood as exterior and formal compared with the interior and sentimental nature of national identity. This has given rise to two competing tendencies. In the first, Britishness becomes dispensable if popular identity is there to be authentically expressed in national institutions. In the second, the national becomes dispensable since Britishness signifies all—the idea advanced in the Parekh report of 2000, a high-water mark of multiculturalism.

The idea that ‘Britishness signifies all’ was never the case in Scotland and Wales, and the year 2000 was probably only ever the high-water mark of multiculturalism in the minds of England’s visible minorities and those that studied the sociology of those populations.

Britishness has become exterior and formal – or remote – in that it increasingly signifies our relationship with the state and monarchy rather than our emotional attachments. For me this is the hole into which Britishness should retreat if devolution is to progress to its natural conclusion, assuming that that conclusion is not dissolution of the Union. Complete devolution would be mean political devolution, sporting devolution (no more British team at the Olympics), and it would mean that the Scots, Welsh and English enjoyed their own national days as public holidays, and sang their own national anthems without feeling the need to boo the British national anthem. Britain would be properly multicultural, a state that respected and honoured the traditional and seemingly intrinsic national differences that make it such an interesting place. We would feel comfortable in describing people as black-Welsh or Scottish-Asian or Irish-English because each individual would be a stakeholder – a voter – to an English, Scottish or Welsh parliament; we would be invoking the idea of an English citizenry. You would still, of course, be a British subject.

Billy Bragg once said that the most important part of ‘anglo-saxon’ was the hyphen. I know what he means, hyphens are important. We need to move away from the idea that identities such as Muslim or African can only be conjugated to the word British. As the indigenous population move away from Britishness it is important that Scottish, Welsh and English are seen as inclusive identities.

The following passage is really the meat and bones of Arthur's article.

The politics of Englishness used to be conducted in an idiom that preferred, as Disraeli once said, government by parliament rather than by logic, an idiom that could see no point in removing an anomaly just because it was an anomaly (see Robert Jackson below). The consequence was an unthinking unionism in which England, as Bernard Crick has put it, was a relationship as much as a thing in itself. The insight here is not that Englishness is a relationship defined by some "other" (and so lacking an identity), or that Englishness has a fixed meaning, but that the Englishness of Britain and the Britishness of England have been bound up together. Devolution has clearly modified things: unionism can no longer be unthinking, because devolution has modified the institutional relationship between England and the other parts of Britain. Bargaining between the territories is more visible than the multinational solidarity that makes such bargaining possible in the first place. As a consequence, the English question has become England's British question, and the question is to what extent devolution has undermined English patriotic identification with the UK. In short, does it inevitably mean disintegration?

It underlines the real problem of the English question. Whereas devolution to Scotland and Wales were wrongly viewed, in isolation, as Scottish and Welsh solutions to Scottish and Welsh concerns (the English public were not consulted) the English question has become the British question. If England is given the same devolutionist opt-out as Scotland, and no one can deny that England has that same national right, then what does that leave Britain as: A multinational unitary state, no; a federal state, possibly; a Commonwealth of nations; a military alliance; a trading bloc?

Devolution to England in the style of the Scottish settlement would in theory leave Westminster as the sovereign UK parliament but the maxim ‘power devolved is power retained’ would be harder to uphold. The English parliament and executive would have massive spending power, and without English legislation to exercise their minds the UK legislature would be freed of matters that currently take up about 70% of its time.

The real fear of those at Westminster opposed to English self-governance is the fear of diminution of Westminster’s power and sovereignty. They are not devolutionist but centralist. Power retained – absolute sovereignty – would have to be replaced with a federal structure to prescribe limits to the powers of the national parliaments. And a federal structure would most probably require a written constitution – a massive undertaking.

Arthur ends by asking whether the English should "turn their attention from the management of British decline into the management of disintegration, a sort of "Four Nations and a British Funeral" strategy."

In my view we should not. We should turn our attention to a constitutional solution to the wreckage of devolution '97. That means creating a new union of nations - which is what the UK should be. I can understand the reluctance of political parties to address the issue, addressing the English question means questioning the union itself and redrafting the rules of engagement between the nations and the state. But it has to be done.

It was with Helen's recent post on British values in mind that I sat on my flight back to England reading the CRE's paper 'Citizenship and Belonging: What is Britishness?' (pdf).

It has long been my view that the British identity politics preached by the British government are a hamper to successful integration in England. The CRE's paper reinforced that view; following are some selected extracts:

In England, white English participants perceived themselves as English first and British second, while ethnic minority participants perceived themselves as British; none identified as English, which they saw as meaning exclusively white people. Thus, the participants who identified most strongly with Britishness were those from ethnic minority backgrounds resident in England.

There is a difference between being British and being English. English is being indigenous, being white and from this country. But being British, the primary thing that comes to mind is that you have a British passport. The second thing is that you live here and you function here, in this society [...] I am British. I am not English (Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, London)

For many ethnic minority participants, in particular, maintaining the difference between the English and the British was crucial, because this provided them with some space to belong.

This seemed to be more important for ethnic minority participants who lived in England than for those who lived in Scotland or Wales, where they were happy to take on those national identities.

At the most basic level, all British passport holders know they are British citizens. However, not everyone attaches any value significance to being British. In Scotland and Wales - and this is true among both white and ethnic minority participants - there was a much stronger identification with each country than with Britain.

We therefore found that most black Caribbean participants identified as black British in England, as black Scottish in Scotland and as black Welsh in Wales.

...it may be that partial devolution in Scotland and Wales means that Scottish, Welsh or even European identies become more attractive than a British identity.

Those extracts seem to suggest that the British government is failing in its aim to integrate immigrants in England, whilst the Scottish and Welsh governments are having some success in fostering a civic, rather than ethnic, nationalism in those countries. Immigrants to England feel distanced from the indigenous population; they largely regard themselves solely as British, certainly in a legal sense; they rarely regard themselves as English, which they see as a ethnic or racial identity.

Why is England failing where Scotland and Wales are succeeding? Well, a quote from Helen's article may help shed some light:

...the government has announced that “All secondary school pupils could be taught about "core British values" such as freedom, fairness and respect under new plans unveiled today.

That British government directive applies only in England; in Scotland and Wales it is the concern of the Scottish and Welsh governments. Why does the British government feel the need to foster a sense of Britishness in an English population that feels palpably more English (and increasingly so) than British, and, conversely, why reinforce a sense of Britishness in an immigrant population that feels palpably more British than English, in defiance of the indigenous population's views? Isn't it all a bit arse about face!

The main drive towards this New Britishness comes from Gordon Brown who has his own selfish reasons for moving against the swelling tide of English self-awareness. It's a mad, bad and dangerous policy - he is playing fast and loose with identity politics for political gain - and the net result may not be a happy one. I forewarned of this in my article English Civic Nationalism which was first published on the Campaign for an English Parliament website in November. I hope it will find an interested readership here.

English Civic Nationalism