Brexit is often said to be driven by English nationalism. In recent decades England has certainly become a less shy country, made aware of itself thanks to the growth of Scottish and Welsh national consciousness and the banal fact that we now talk about the English NHS, English schools, and so on, in a way that we never used to prior to devolution.
Yet on today's English national day I saw not a single flag of St George flying on the train journey from London to Cambridge and back (travelling through Essex, supposedly one of the heartlands of English nationalism). And when I opened my Sunday papers I found no reference to it at all. (Though Jeremy Corbyn did briefly grab the lead item on the BBC News with his suggestion of a national holiday on St George’s day.)
As I argue in my new book The Road to Somewhere (about the value divides that have led to Brexit) one of the unspoken fault lines in modern politics is between those, mainly conservatives and centrists, who see racism and nationalism as hostility to out-groups and those, mainly liberals and leftists, who see them as not only that but also about too strong an attachment to your own ethnic or national group.
It is, of course, possible to have too strong an attachment to your own group which is why we have the rule of law and anti-discrimination laws. But for too many people Englishness is one of those identities that is almost by definition ‘too strong’.
This is a quirk of history reinforced by England’s demographic domination of these islands. The great historic nation of England disappeared more thoroughly into Britishness than any of the Celtic countries—consider all those British Union Flags when England beat West Germany in 1966. And as Britishness has faded in recent decades and the ‘home’ nationalities have grown in strength, a mainstream Englishness has emerged only falteringly.
It was not taken up by the English political or cultural elites for whom a 19th century imperial distaste for narrow national feeling had easily mutated into a liberal 1960s anti-nationalism. Englishness that had once disguised itself in order to make its superiority more complete now disguised itself out of embarrassment and, at least until recently, the symbols and language of Englishness was left to cranks and extremists.
For while the Irish, Scots and the Welsh could quietly escape any moral responsibility for empire by claiming (most implausibly in the case of the Scots) that they had in fact been the first victims of English colonialism, that option was not there for the English. It could not easily exchange a bad-dominant nationalism for a good-egalitarian one.
Today’s Scottish nationalists often claim that their nationalism is civic and progressive, while the English variety is ethnic and nostalgic. There is some truth in this but all national identities are a mix of the civic and the ethnic and England can reasonably point out that it has actually been living multiculturalism (16 per cent of the English population are non-white minorities compared with 4.5 per cent of the Scottish) while the Scots have mainly just been talking about it, and have had a more deeply entrenched religious sectarianism too. And for all the SNP’s pieties about openness and wanting more immigrants, a higher proportion of Scots say you have to be white to be truly Scottish than the more mongrel English.
Scotland has, however, shown the plasticity of national identities. A new version of Scottishness has been conjured up by the SNP in the past few years, framed by the modern independence project. Could Brexit do the same for England? Probably not without the more active embrace of Englishness by the educated middle class and ethnic minority England, two groups that were notably unenthusiastic about Brexit.
And can a more normal, self-interested Englishness co-exist happily with the other nations of these islands? Brexit has already conjured up memories of an over-mighty and domineering England in Scotland and Ireland apparently oblivious to the interests of the smaller countries over the Good Friday Agreement and so on.
At least we start from the position that most English people, and the Tory party, which has some claim to being the English party, want to preserve the union in some form. A more public, confident but still restrained, Englishness, that sees one of its tasks as preserving this unique multinational state called Britain is surely not just a St George’s Day dream.