English Questions - Arthur Aughey

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.