English national identity

Roger Scruton writing in the American Spectator, November 2008

The Forbidding of England

I ATTENDED AN ordinary English state school in the late 1950s. In our history lessons we were taught that England is the heart of Great Britain, that Great Britain is the heart of an Empire, and that, thanks to this Empire, ideas of law, freedom, and democratic government had spread around the globe. We were therefore proud of the Empire, which we described as British, not English, and thought of it as proof of our national virtues and a contribution to the advancement of mankind. Our flag was the Union Jack, a striking synthesis of the emblems of our constituent peoples, and we believed that this flag represented a peaceful union, rather than the triumph of one nation over others. We sang “Rule Britannia,” the rousing chorus of which declares that “Britons never never never shall be slaves!”

We had no difficulty in reconciling our attachment to the English Crown, the English law, the Church of England, and the English language with the view that we were British, and no more British than the Welsh or the Scots. In those days there seemed to be no contradiction in our composite national identity, and we could identify ourselves for some purposes as English, for others as British, without divided loyalties. The turning point of the war, when London was saved by the Royal Air Force, was called the “Battle of Britain,” and postwar spirits were raised by a “Festival of Britain,” located in the English capital. And when England played football against France, we waved the Union Jack in support of our countrymen.

Our identity, in other words, was defined in terms of what it included, not what it excluded. It was not belligerently xenophobic, nor was it founded on myths of racial purity or tribal kinship. But it was a genuinely national identity all the same, and we thought of ourselves (Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish included) as a single “island nation,” containing other nations as parts.

Jeremy Rabkin persuasively argues that the nation-state is a natural home of political freedom. But we must also recognize that European nationalism has often been the enemy of freedom and that national identity and nationalism are two quite different things. The “nation” that was to rescue the revolutionary French from their feudal masters became a new form of feudal master, though one which could never be held to account for its misdeeds. It wielded power over its subjects beyond anything imagined by Louis XIV when he declared that “l’état, c’est moi.” The worship of the nation, introduced by the Revolutionaries and given its liturgical trappings by Robespierre and his faction, culminated in Napoleon’s campaigns, which devastated Europe and ruined France. In reaction to Napoleon’s destruction of their country, the Germans too became nationalists. And the rival nationalisms of Germany and France dominated the European scene until the final defeat of Germany in 1945. In light of this history it is hardly surprising if the European Union, which grew from the debris of the 20th-century conflicts, should announce itself as an alternative to the nation-state.

BUT THE EU’s understandable hostility to the criminal use of the national idea, which ought to be directed primarily at France and Germany, has been almost exclusively directed at England­the one European nation to be entirely untainted by nationalism. The most striking feature of the EU’s attitude to my country has been the concerted attempt to remove it from the map. The official map of the Union, which was projected long before the United Kingdom was admitted as a member, mentions Scotland and Wales as autonomous regions, and allows France, Germany, Italy, and the rest to retain their traditional names, even if divided into Länder or départements. But the name “England” does not appear on this map. All that the English are granted is four “regions,” defined geographically. It seems that this corresponds to a long-term policy­ one so deeply buried in the aims and projects of the European Union that it has never, to my knowledge, been openly debated. This is the policy of dividing England in something like the way that the colonial powers divided Africa, and then creating “regional assemblies” to administer the arbitrary fragments.

This policy appeals to the Labour Party, which has already granted national assemblies to Scotland and Wales. For the last thing the Labour Party wants is an English Parliament, in which it could never hope to form a government. The Labour Party can rule over the English only with the help of its Welsh and Scottish MPs. Under its jurisdiction our nation has ceased to be the single nation that we were taught to believe in, and has become three­maybe four­ nations instead. There are Scotland and Wales, with their own legislatures; and there is England, ruled over by a legislature dominated by MPs from Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland, meanwhile, hovers uncertainly on the perimeter. As for the EU’s “regional assemblies,” the Labour Party is proceeding to impose them upon us, even though the scheme has been decisively rejected in referendums and opinion polls.

In short, we are seeing the first moves toward the abolition of England. The core nation in our syncretic national identity, the one from which the idea of “Britishness” derives, the one celebrated in our patriotic literature down the centuries and identified with our common language and culture, has been forbidden.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has therefore made a point of extolling a new kind of national loyalty, one which is compatible with the disappearance of England. He reminds us of the “core values” of Britishness, which include freedom, toleration, compassion, social responsibility, and other qualities that can be read in ways favorable to the socialist state. But he has little time for the core values of Englishness: the stiff upper lip, the well-spoken accent, the ethic of fair play, and the code of the gentleman. These he is happy to denigrate as imperial hangovers and symbols of a privileged caste.

In its 11 years in office, the Labour Party has granted legislatures to the Welsh and the Scots; begun, through the regional assemblies, to deprive the English of a Parliament; removed the hard-won protections of the English countryside; and abolished the old House of Lords. It has attacked and penalized the Public Schools and the old Universities, banned hunting with hounds (that quintessential symbol of old England), and encouraged the mass immigration of potentially disloyal minorities into the English cities. All this fits easily into the EU’s broader agenda and prepares the way for that final abolition of England, which will be achieved because almost nobody has noticed it.

ONE INTERESTING RESULT of this is that people are losing the sense of British identity. The Scots and Welsh have their patriotic songs, their heroes and legends, all of which are celebrated in their history lessons. But they are rapidly forgetting that they are part of a larger national entity, with an imperial legacy and a shared culture across permeable borders. At football matches nobody now waves the Union Jack: the separate national flags are all that can be seen, and if any Englishman raises a flag outside his house it is the cross of St. George, the flag of England. Apart from this symbol, however, the English are allowed precious few reminders of their identity. Our heroes have been effectively excised from the curriculum or recycled as villains, like Clive of India, Wellington, Captain Cook­even Churchill, now painted as the leader responsible for the Second World War. Our legends and patriotic stories are given no airtime on the BBC, and the Arts Council, which distributes taxpayer money to cultural enterprises, and warmly encourages applications from ethnic minorities, refuses to fund an “English Music Festival,” on the grounds that such a jingoist enterprise would offend the multicultural orthodoxies of New Britain.

Americans should not view the forbidding of England with complacency. Although many Americans have Irish and Scottish ancestors, who came to this country as refugees from the English, the fact is that America was made in England. Its constitution was inspired by the reflections of Locke, Montesquieu, and Harrison on the constitution of England; it was made possible by the inheritance of English common law, and by the extraordinary way in which that law has granted freedom to the subject and protected this freedom from oppressive power. The underlying law of the United States is not Roman law, Scots law, or Napoleonic law: it is English law, which has been the guarantee of freedom in every place where it has taken root.

The common law of England is not imposed from above by sovereign powers that hope to control us, but is built from below by judges striving to resolve our conflicts. It is a bottom-up form of legal order, a legal order designed to protect the subject from his oppressors. It is this law that is responsible for the freedom of England, and which was brought to America by the early colonists, there to take root in the fertile soil of a pioneering community. But we should not believe that the common law is a permanent possession. Indeed, it has been the most important casualty of the EU’s relentless dictatorship, which has been concerned at every step to create centralized legislation and courts empowered to enforce it.

At every point, now, our judges find themselves hampered by regulations, by vast tomes of dictatorial edicts, and by a European court of “justice,” staffed by judges raised on the Code Napoléon, whose duty is to enforce the top-down decisions of the Eurocrats, rather than the rights of the individual subject. Once England has been abolished, the hostility of the EU elites will target America as the most important surviving example of a legal order devoted to individual freedom rather than state control. The anti-Americanism that we witness today among the European elites will be nothing beside the anti-Americanism that we are sure to witness then. The pity is that England will no longer be around to sympathize.

Roger Scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter Books).

By David Starkey

QUESTIONS, once upon a time, were things that happened to people in faraway countries of which we knew little. There was the Eastern question, the Balkan question, the Palestinian question, the Indian question and, always and most intractably, the Irish question. What there was not, of course, was the English question. Instead, it was our job as a Power to solve other people's questions (though the Irish, famously and ungratefully, changed their question whenever the English answered it).

But suddenly, at the end of the 20th century, the English have realised, to their surprise, that there is an English question too - within Britain, within Europe, as we ask ourselves: "What sort of nation are we? Are we a nation at all?"

The politicians have already come up with their own attempts at national rebranding. John Major offered cricket and warm beer, Tony Blair cool Britannia and William Hague the British way. None remotely works.

If we continue to get the answers wrong, our future is grim. We will sink beneath the waves we once ruled and become either a pseudo-independent Ruritanian statelet or a sulkily resentful province of the Euro Empire.

On the other hand, if we get them right, the sky's the limit. England could become a new, bigger, more successful Hong Kong, and English could become the global language.

Napoleon sneered that England was a nation of shopkeepers. Two hundred years later, as his vision of a united Europe is achieved, we should go a stage further down our own path. England should become an international marketplace in which people, ideas, wealth and trade all move freely - without taxes, tariffs, censorship or immigration controls. The result would be a nation unlike any other that the world has seen. In some essential way, it would still be England.

Fantastic? Not really. For it's all there in our history. Everybody knows that England was the first nation to industrialise. We were also the first to experience the pangs of de-industrialisation, and the first to develop a flourishing post-industrial economy. The history of English nationalism follows a broadly similar path.

For we were there first as well. As early, for instance, as the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547) England had acquired the whole apparatus of cultural nationalism - something that took the Germans another 250 years to assemble.

There was a national historic myth, a state-sponsored canon of English literature and a determined attempt to push the claims of English itself to be a great European language, despite the fact that it was spoken by only 3m natives and by scarcely anybody else.

One thing even Henry VIII lacked, however, was a national dress. But there were attempts to remedy this in the 18th century by making Van Dyck dress the English national costume.

Happily, in view of its satins and lace, the attempt failed. Indeed, what we can call the classic period of English nationalism proved short-lived. The driving force of royal autocracy was defeated in the civil wars of the 17th century - wars that also led to the absorption of England into the new political unit of Great Britain.

At first, there was an attempt at forging a single national identity for Britain and the Britons. But the attempt foundered quickly. Instead, Britain half-reverted into its constituent elements, which developed two distinct identities.

The Celtic-fringe nations of Scotland, Wales and Ireland took on board the whole panoply of cultural nationalism. In Scotland, it was loyalist and done under royal patronage. George IV, his kilt riding up over his flesh-coloured tights, presided over Sir Walter Scott's tartan pageant in 1821, while Victoria built Balmoral and cosied up to John Brown. In Ireland, the Gaelic revival fed directly into anti-British nationalism.

The English took a different route. Instead of cultural icons, they revered their political institutions, such as parliament and common law. And they thought them the best in the world. In so far as they had national symbols, they were the crown and the Church of England, with its Shinto-like worship of the royal family.

We come now to our immediate millennial crisis. For the English, it is a crisis of de-nationalisation. The decline of Britain abroad and the loss of confidence in our political institutions at home has robbed us of our sense of identity. Nor is there much else we can fall back on - thanks, ironically, to our earlier success. Everybody speaks English and everybody wears the business suit, derived from the Victorian frock coat. Without a dress and language we can call our own, we stand inarticulate and naked among nations - as you will find out if you ask an Englishman to define his Englishness.

For the Celtic fringe, on the other hand, the end of the millennium has been a time of national revival. As their sense of nationhood is cultural, Britain's political decline has left them untouched. Indeed, it has been an opportunity to extort yet more goodies from the weakened Westminster parliament.

But the dividing of the ways is coming. The two great political questions of the moment are devolution at home and relations with the European Union abroad. For, in both cases, the interests and attitudes of England and of the Celtic fringe diverge radically. For the Scots and the Welsh, devolution is an unadulteratedly good thing. For the English, devolution is a disaster, offering only a choice of evils between dismemberment into the so-called English regions or colonial subordination to the governors of Scotland's new Labour.

Over Europe, the faultlines are similar. The European Union will require a merging of political identities. For most European countries this is more or less acceptable, as their principal sense of nationhood is a question of culture and language. If you speak French you are French; if German, you are German; and if Welsh, increasingly, you are Welsh. Language is less important in Scotland. But the folklorique aspects of Scottish nationalism are also what the Eurocrats, like Hollywood, flatter and indulge.

For the Celts, therefore, Europe is not a threat but an opportunity. The English are different. Our sense of Englishness is primarily political, not cultural. Take that away and you take away everything. This is why Europe is a uniquely explosive issue in England. And it will blow up, I imagine, with the fireworks over the dome on New Year's Eve 1999. Thereafter, change will come almost as quickly as the first hangover. First, Britain, swayed by England, votes against the euro; then Scotland and perhaps Wales break with England and plunge fully into the European Union. The breach with Scotland will be the moment of truth. England will be alone. And it must re-invent itself - but how?

There are two choices. The first is nationalism; the second is what I have called post-nationalism. The nationalist route would involve a crash course of indoctrination in national symbols: flags of St George at every corner, Land of Hope and Glory on everyone's lips. It is a step into the past; it would also probably fail. For the new nationalisms of Europe and the Celtic fringe are underpinned by racism and substantial middle-class support. Both are missing in England, where the flag of St George is sported only by taxis and the white-van-driving classes. Nevertheless, in its present mood, I fear that the Tory party will plunge, Gadarene-like, for this obvious but losing option.

On the other hand, it is just possible that new Labour, if Philip Gould's claims about its commitment to permanent revolution are right, will opt for post-nationalism. For post-nationalism represents a real third way. It takes a commitment to political and economic liberalism from England's past. It combines them with the tolerance and the ability to accommodate racial minorities from our present. And from the best of past and present it would forge a future to be proud of: free, free-trading and prosperous. London would become the world city; Ireland, with the divisive symbols of Britishness finally laid to rest, a valued ally, and England would cease to see its future in terms of throwing in its lot with something bigger; ie America and Europe.

For one thing surely is clear. The new millennium will indeed be a new age. It will not be the costly, lumbering mammoths of existing states and corporations that will flourish, but smaller, fleeter-footed creatures. The new post-national England could be one of the first of this new species. Let us hope so.

David Starkey is an historian, broadcaster and fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

The live online debate with David Starkey was held on Sunday, February 21, 1999.

Here is a transcript of that debate, based upon the article above.

Online Debate Transcript

HOST: This is the second chat in the series and it is our pleasure to welcome Dr David Starkey. David Starkey is a historian, broadcaster and fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge

Tom1: Why is it that "the British way", "cool Britannia" or John Major's "cricket and beer" will not work?

DAVID STARKEY: No. Once upon a time England had things like a dress and a language that were quite specific. But then they become part of world culture (English national dress is the business suit!). In other words, we lost our uniqueness because of our success and the fact that other people copied us so much.

HOST: Email Question: Are we a nation at all?

DAVID STARKEY: We are a post-nation. Just as we were first into industrialization and first out of it, so we were first into blood-and-soil nationalism in the 15th and 16th centuries and first out of it in the late 20th.

HOST: Email Question: How would England benefit from devolution?

DAVID STARKEY: I see traditional nationalism as backward (Kurds and Kosovo). Scotland and Wales seem to be opting for this sort of closed society. So the sooner they go the better. Scotland and Wales are also wedded to big-spending, old-style state socialism. We need to get rid of that too.

LizA: Your post-nationalist England would surely still need shared "myths and symbols" (to quote Anthony D. Smith), which of their nature are rooted in the past, so how do you reconcile this vision with Smith's theory of "ethnie" as a major element of national identity?

DAVID STARKEY: I think Smith is dealing with old-style nationalism. English (and American) sense of identity is different. It relates more to institutions and economic well-being and success. It's not about romantic failure like the Celts'!

Beetle: How much influence would a de-unified England have on a global scale?

DAVID STARKEY: Influence in the future will depend on cultural and economic success - not simple size. I think we could do very well.

Suilin: What sort of role do you see the royal family taking in the "post-national England"?

DAVID STARKEY: Probably not much - though in a funny way Prince Charles is beginning to look like a prophet (but prophets, remember, are without honour in their own country!)

amimjf: Hello,.. do you think that society moves in anything other than an ever broadening circle,... won't new things start to represent being English/British, as the old ones disappear..?,

DAVID STARKEY: No. I think something fundamental has happened. The old symbols are dead and there's no sign of any new ones. And I challenge anybody to name them.

Ken: I'm not sure how to reconcile D.Starkey's view of an England smaller "fleeter footed" outside the E.C. when nearby countries (Scotland, Wales) are in the E.C. What does this do to our relationships there?

DAVID STARKEY: By the way, unfortunately for both New Labour and Old Tory, English and British are not the same! If Scotland and Wales remain in Euroland when England has left it that will be their problem not ours as jobs and money flow to the freer markets of England.

LizA: Surely even a post-nationalist England will need an identity, which I cannot identify from your article...

DAVID STARKEY: What is American identity? There's no single answer. Post nationalism is like post modernism. It's fluid and changing and flexible. Fixed identities belong to a dead world.

Paul: Do you think that it would be possible in the near future to directly wire computers into the brain, replacing the need for conventional monitors keyboards etc?

DAVID STARKEY: Quite simply, nations are a human invention. that means they are a creation of time. So they have a beginning, a middle and an end. I know nothing about computers. But those who do seem to think that direct interfaces with the human brain /senses are possible.

stoof: Do you think that the UK can ever become a match for USA in terms of weaponry?

DAVID STARKEY: English defence/aerospace industry is already the biggest after the US. We seem to have both the military experience and the engineering/technological imagination to come up with matching products.

Alex: I agree that England has problem. Our malaise is our continual search for something new. The youth of the country is restless, searching abroad on their years off in the east for originality. At least we have our eyes open. Is this not the symbol of a new Englishness?

DAVID STARKEY: I don't think that England has a problem. The people with problems are the Scots and the Kurds who are going straight back to the nineteenth century if not to the middle ages with their simple, aggressive ideas of fixed, separate identities. We are the future!

Ken: If we are looking for a redefining of "England" is it worth remembering that things are defined not only by how we see ourselves but by what we view ourselves in "opposition" to?

Tom1: Is it not time though that we left behind this ethnocentric attitude that we are the leaders of the world (empire builders if you will) and accept the principle that we are just another country in the wings of the world stage?

DAVID STARKEY: I'm not in the least ethnocentric (I don't believe in an English race). But we are not marginal. Because of English and the importance of economics and modern science, which are Anglo-American inventions, we remain a highly significant player. And that's fact, not nostalgia.

Animjf: The old symbols will take time to fade away ,.. (the stiff upper lip won't go overnight,.. with Viagra and all..!),.. I think England is still distinctive for its amateurisum,.. and reluctance to change,.. but when it does change it will do so very quickly,... I think we will become one of the most opposed of societies with dramatic technological progress and monolithic institutions co

DAVID STARKEY: I absolutely agree about the dramatic suddenness of change in England (look at the 1960s). But our rigid institutions are collapsing. Perhaps it's good-riddance, though they have served us very well (contrast British 20th century political history with almost every other country!)

Marco: How long have you been in England?

DAVID STARKEY: I was born here in 1945 and my father's family at least has been in the north-west of England since the fourteenth century.

Phil: Imagine, if you will, the Fourth Way: that England becomes the 51st State of America. Imagine the prosperity, the influence and the pivotal position England would enjoy. Could this be the Future?

DAVID STARKEY: I don't want to be the 51st state any more than I want to be a province of Euroland. Big warships belong to the Sixties. In the world of the Internet being small and fast is more important than sheer size.

Kismet: You say, that when the 'divisive symbols of Britishness' are eradicated from Ireland the Irish will become a 'valued ally'. Presumably you are referring to the inevitable breakdown of the Union? What role will the Irish have?

DAVID STARKEY: I do think that the Union is finished. I also think that Ireland is an intensely free-market capitalism that will increasingly find Euroland restrictive and England (free market too I hope) an attractive partner. Something similar could happen with Spain.

Tom1: How do you think that the historians of the future will judge the 90s? As a static period of superficial change, or revolutionary post-modern era?

DAVID STARKEY: I think that the post-80s are revolutionary. We have replaced a world of shortage (on which all our existing systems of morality and economics are based) with one of excess. You can already feel the difference in the air!

Beetle: What current developments give you the most optimism about England's future?

DAVID STARKEY: The speed of change, oddly enough. Somethings worry me though, like the tendency to privilege every minority. We don't want Commissions for this and that fostering division and special rights. Instead, we need simple, general and discrimination laws that are enforced in the ordinary courts of law. That's the proper English, law-based way.

LizA: If nationalism is dead, why is there such a furore over the euro/political union with Europe?

DAVID STARKEY: Europe does things differently. It's attitudes to law, the public interest, the role of bureaucracies and parliaments are different. And it risks challenging the enormous gains we have made since Thatcher, at such cost and sacrifice.

HOST: Email Question: With such a multi-ethnic society, how would it be possible to create an English identity without being racist?

DAVID STARKEY: Recreating a traditional English nationalism would be racist (look at the fate of the English in Scotland). I¹m calling for a post-nationalism in which a particular kind of multi-culturalism becomes central to our identity.

Ken: The major problem with the old definition of English is that it left out all the black and asian citizens. Your definition would help to lay down the foundation for a society with a clearer view of itself and where it's going.

DAVID STARKEY: I agree. And the difficulty for the Scots and Welsh with their old-style nationalism is going to be to incorporate such racial differences: a black in a kilt? Do you see it?

HOST: Email asked: How will it be possible to generate interest and enthusiasm in a new identity?

DAVID STARKEY: A post-national identity would be the spring-board for very rapid economic growth. And that's sexy.

Alex: There are a lot of speculations about revolutionary change into the next millennium, I suppose in part sparked off by the level of technology we have reached, but don't you think perhaps it may all be hype? No doubt people at the end of the last millennia foretold all sorts of great happenings - perhaps we are all just victims of new-millennia stress?

DAVID STARKEY: People in 1899 indeed thought that they were on the edge of a new world: replacing production with distribution was how the future archbishop of Canterbury put it. And he and they were right. I think we are on the threshold of even greater change. We know this to be the case anyway because the 20th century really ended in 1989. The Millennium just makes it official.

LizA: If I recall your discussions on the Moral Maze the other day, you weren't at all optmistic about the creation of a multicultural identity in Britain...

HHawk: I have a Libertarian outlook, and firmly and eagerly buy into that a free market England, out of the EU, could take on the world, on every level, but I'm interested in the structural changes that would be needed to get from A to B.

DAVID STARKEY: I don't think that we need to do much that's new. Instead we must avoid reimposing old restrictions, whether from Europe or internally.

HOST: David thank you for joining us this afternoon

DAVID STARKEY: I very much enjoyed the afternoon.

http://www.chronicle-future.co.uk/

The English Independence Party is an ethnic nationalist party set up after, or possibly during, the fall of the civic nationalist Free England Party. It joins the growing ranks* of other ethno-nationalist groups ranging from the England First Party, white nationalists; The BNP, British but in favour of an English 'Volk parliament'; United England Patriots and English Shieldwall, Anglo-Saxon revivalists, and; Steadfast and the English Lobby, both supporters of majority rights for the ethnic English.

There is overlap between these groups but ideologically speaking they are a somewhat disparate collection of ethno-nationalists. Some might be more correctly termed white-nationalists and others cultural-nationalists, but even the more culturally orientated delve into areas of race. The English Lobby, for example, has recently launched a petition to "preserve the White English ethnic group identity".

The other common link that these ethnic nationalists share is a dislike of, or lack of trust for, civic nationalists. So it's perhaps no surprise that new English Independence Party launched into an attack on English civic nationalism with one of the first posts to the English Independence Party blog (originally publically available but now hidden from view).

There's little point fisking this, it doesn't need it. But as a civic nationalist I do feel the need to reply and hopefully inject a bit of reason. I have some insight into ethnic nationalist insecurities through discussions with them on this blog, when they have come to inform me that I am an idiot and to tell me that only the ethnic English can be English. Ethnic nationalists understand 'civic nationalism' to be code for multiculturalism, and they feel that a civic, plural and inclusive English national identity will render Englishness as meaningless as they feel British identity has become. I don't share that insecurity. I want people from other races, religions and cultures that make England their home to feel a sense of belonging, to feel English. In my speech to the Convention on Modern Liberty I asked the audience to ask themselves three questions:

1. What is my ethnic identity?
2. What is my national identity?
3. What is my state identity, my citizenship?

Given England's constitutional status it is perfectly possible, and unfortunately probable, that second, third or fourth generation immigrants will not answer "English" to any of those three questions. That's bad for England. My civic nationalism is about allowing people who are not ethnically English to feel English by national identity, which I hope will help instill a sense of pride in England's cultural heritage and collective national identity, despite the fact - or even because of the fact - that they are not ethnically English. I want to bring us together as a nation, not by being prescriptive, but by providing a gateway into a feeling for England through civic and democratic means. By railing against English civic nationalism as "stupid" the ethnic nationalists are not only a reaction to the multiculturalism they despise, they are an integral part of it. We have arrived at the position whereby each and every ethnic group competes for their 'rights', the logical endpoint of multiculturalism as described by Paul Kingsnorth:

Britain now is a ‘cosmopolitan’ society in which no one cultural identity has pre-eminence, and in which Englishness, Polishness and Bangladeshiness must compete on equal terms. The nation’s many ‘minorities’ are not to be integrated into mainstream society (‘integrated’ is such a problematic word; and anyway, what is the mainstream?) but fenced off, theoretically if not physically: defined as ‘BMEs’, afforded ‘protection’, treated as victims, spoken for. Descended from Pakistani immigrants but born in England? Sorry, you’re still ‘Pakistani’, or ‘Asian’ or’ ‘minority ethnic’. You can be British, if you like, because Britishness has been stripped of meaning and is therefore ‘inclusive’ – but you can never be English (or, presumably, Scottish or Welsh, though this gets less attention) because Englishness is ‘racially coded’. Attempts to define it are thus potentially racist; it’s best if the English just shut up about it and get on with ‘celebrating diversity’ instead.

Is a more inclusive English national identity a threat to the cultural identity of the ethnic English? I don't think so. It may undermine the racial coding of Englishness, but that would be no bad thing, and those ethnic nationalists who are more interested in protecting the cultural inheritance of England should think about the positive benefits of an immigrant population who respect - respect not tolerate - the ethnic English on the basis of a mutual respect and a shared national identity.

* To the starting list you might also add The English Defence League, but their ideology is somewhat unclear.

There is, according to the old joke, no equivalent in Gaelic to the word mañana - nothing, as the crofter is supposed to have said to the tourist, "expressing quite that degree of urgency". By the same token, there is as far as I am aware no equivalent in Gaelic, or for that matter in English, to the word schadenfreude, a useful German expression meaning to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others. But it is not an emotion exclusive to the Germans.

Do I detect a certain schadenfreude among Scots at the apparent current turmoil among the English over their sense of national identity? If so, it is given extra savour because that crisis of identity is provoked at least in part by the creation of the Parliament in Scotland and the Assembly in Wales. Suddenly it is Scotland which is forging ahead in a grand constitutional experiment, and England which is poring over its national navel and asking: who are we ... and why?

Many in England once used the terms 'English' and 'British' interchangeably. Yet, in the wake of our constitutional revolution, the nature of Britain itself has changed. We no longer live in a unitary state, with a single common identity - representative bodies in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and growing interest in regional government in England are focusing attention on the different ways we see ourselves. Britain is now more diverse than ever, with diverse identities: to be British today is more to accept values of tolerance and decency, and a spirit of innovation, rather than being about ethnic origin, religion or even language.

We are increasingly celebrating diversity, and this has implications for several policy areas. In particular, Britain needs much clearer rules for regulating relations between the constituent parts of the Union. Liberal Democrats have long argued for a written constitution for the UK. Now, more than ever before, this is an urgent need, if we are successfully to cope with the tensions that will inevitably arise from the existence of powerful bodies in Cardiff, Belfast, Edinburgh and London.

Supporting diversity also means that we should be taking action through a coherent race relations policy when harmony in this area is undermined, and providing refuge for genuine asylum seekers. We should be proud of the heritage of our isles, but we are an innovative and resourceful people who are not restrained by tradition. The idea of Britain now encompasses the Londoner whose grandparents came to Britain from the Indian sub-continent, and the Welsh man or woman whose family has tended the same farmland for generations. And we will all feel at different times that we belong to different groups - as someone who feels himself to be a Highlander, a Scot, a Briton, and a European, I am more comfortable in the new diverse Britain than I ever have been. The Britishness of the modern United Kingdom is a picture painted with a broad brush, but it is no less a work of art for that.

Yes - these are indeed remarkable times in the relationships between the nations of our isles. For a significant part of the twentieth century, and indeed during the latter years of the nineteenth, British politics has been beset with the problem of how to govern the non-English nations of the Union. First, we had the Irish Question, which exercised Westminster politicians for well over forty years until it was 'settled' in the early 1920s, only to re-emerge nearly fifty years on. By that time, of course, we also had Scottish and Welsh Questions to answer. It was many years until those of us asking those questions received a satisfactory answer.

Yet today, the Scottish and Welsh Questions have been answered basically to the satisfaction of all but the nationalists. We may even be on the verge of an answer to the Irish Question.

So the most remarkable feature of British politics today, is not that politicians are finally dealing with 'Questions' about Britain's non-English lands. It is that there is a new question - and it deals with England. The English Question, put simply, asks how England should be governed in the light of Britain's constitutional revolution. South of the border, people have suddenly realised that England has no democratic structure of its own, and that its affairs are dealt with through a British Parliament in which MPs from outside England sit. Some, most notably Teresa Gorman, have said that a separate English Parliament is the answer to the English Question.

I do not want to rule out an English Parliament, but there are problems with that approach. First, it is simply not true that an English Parliament would entirely solve the English problem, for the situation is not as simple as advocates of an English Parliament suggest. Under the current devolved framework, the Scottish Parliament has more powers than the Welsh Assembly, and they both have different powers to the Northern Ireland Assembly. This means that there are certain areas where Westminster legislates for England alone, but others where it legislates for combinations of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. To tackle this problem we might not need just one extra Parliament, but, conceivably, several - dealing with English, English and Welsh, English/Welsh/Northern Irish, and conceivably English/Northern Irish matters. Would this really make sense to the British people? Would it in any way reflect the identities of communities within the Union?

The second problem is that an English Parliament would do nothing to give voice to the serious regional differences within England. The population of England is vast compared with other parts of the Union. A national Parliament within the UK is all very well for the Scots with a population of five million, but will the forty-six million people of England really get something much more accountable than Westminster if an English Parliament is established? And, if an English Parliament was established in Westminster, as it surely would be, would the people of Newcastle, or Cornwall really feel that it is any less remote than the current UK Parliament? Within England, there are serious concerns in areas such as the North-East and the South-West, that the current Westminster Parliament treats these areas as peripheral. The regions of England are not bothered about Scots and others voting on English matters - they are far more concerned about decisions being taken in a far away place which seems to know nothing of huge swathes of England. An English Parliament would do little to meet these regional concerns.

The third problem with the idea of an English Parliament is that the English Question is itself misphrased. Surely we should instead be focusing far more on a new British Question - how do we create fluid structures which allow new relationships to develop between the different nations and regions of the Union? Instead of assuming that cities such as Bristol, Leeds and Newcastle want to look towards London all the time for their next level of government, we could be much more imaginative. If you live in Bristol, it is, by and large, far more easy to reach Cardiff than London. If you live in Newcastle or Sunderland, your nearest capital city is Edinburgh, not London. And if you live in Leeds, you are probably far more likely to think of that thriving city as the centre of a bustling region with international strengths, than you are to feel like a junior partner to London.

We need in other words, to rethink the idea of Unionism, so that it is no longer associated with the Conservative Party, or one community in Northern Ireland. A new Unionism in Britain should not be about treaties between capitals and crowns. It should be about relations between the regions of England, and the other nations of the UK, in which the North-East works with the Scots, and the South-West works with the Welsh, and both work with Europe, just has much as they feel subject to London. The new Council of Isles to be established as part of the Good Friday Agreement already offers exciting opportunities for liaison between the various UK capitals and Dublin. The English Regions should be added to this equation.

There was much wrong with the old Britain. It was the most centralised democratic state in Europe; it assumed that there was little regional diversity within England; and it gave the non-English nations of the Union with a profound sense of being ignored. In the past three years, the sweeping away of that old structure has been truly a sight to behold.

Yet we must not throw the idea of Britain itself out with the proverbial bathwater. The diversity of the Union gives us many strengths. Centuries of success and innovation have shown the British together to be a resourceful, tolerant and open-minded people, with much to learn from each other, and much to give to the wider world. Michael Ignatieff recently argued that "there is something intrinsically good about multi-ethnicity", and that this applied to the nations of the UK as much as anywhere else. "Let us remain together" he said, "so that we can continue our argument together". There are certainly great arguments to be had within our own nations in the United Kingdom. Yes, this means tackling the English Question. But, just as importantly, it means rethinking the way Britain as a whole is governed, and giving it new meanings in the next century.

Charles Kennedy: Lecture to the Scottish Council Foundation by Charles Kennedy MP, 30 June, 1999