England ain't so bad

Why this year I'll mostly be identifying as English

One good thing about last year’s riots (okay, the only good thing about them) is that they generated some serious debate about the state of the nation. Albeit tempered by the threat of imprisonment. Particularly since the riots, my interest in the question of community - as I discussed with my last post - has really grown. Indeed, it goes beyond community itself to the wider grappling with questions of social class (as I discussed at the turn of the year), and of nationhood (as I discuss here and will do so again next month alongside controversies over race and culture, and the future of the West).

While immigration became a focal point for some of the violence we saw back then, for the vast majority of those affected (and who could have been unaffected?) it wasn’t about race at all. Despite demented talk of a resurgent far right goose-stepping their way from the 1970s, the wider sentiment was one of shock and sorrow over the poor young girls butchered in Southport. And yet there was also that nagging sense that as horrific as it was, it wasn’t a one off. It wasn’t the first frenzied attack on innocents of recent times.

While attacking Mosques and hotels housing migrants was condemned by everyone, there was a legitimate anger that had been building up long before the tragic events that sparked last Summer’s unrest. The anger, while misattributed by an idiotic and malignant few, was largely and rightly pointed in an upward direction. Many felt a profound feeling of betrayal at having been ignored and let down. Some more than others of course, but I think many of us felt it. For sociologist and author Frank Furedi, the riots were ‘fuelled by the conviction that enough is enough’.

For many people across the country, mostly in England but violence erupted elsewhere too, there was a lashing out at what ‘they perceived to be the forces responsible for their predicament’. Furedi was critical of the framing of the violence on our streets as a coordinated campaign directed at ethnic minority communities. That wasn’t the case at all her argued. It was much more organic. ‘Communal tensions and conflict prevail in many parts of Britain’, he argued, with many feeling ‘marginalised and ignored by the institutions of the state’.

Historian and broadcaster David Starkey described the riots as an example of how we have become a Two Tier Britain, divided by tribal identities, balcanised into separate self-governing cultural groups. I want to come back to this question of culture in a future article, but what really interests me here is how Starkey understands our current predicament in its historical context, as part of the story of our nation (or nations). The English, he explains, have long been the dominant partners in the political union of Britain; around a common language, religion, values and the monarch. And we have only quite recently lost a sense of who we are.

Since the Blair years, says Starkey, there has been a suppression of England into a devolved, federalised system uniquely (as he puts it) without representation, overseen by overmighty judicial powers, and undermined by uncontrolled immigration. Far from bolstering the Union, this combination of events is leading to its disintegration he contends; and the specificity of England is being progressively diluted. You might read racial undertones into this, especially given the controversy Starkey has provoked on this issue, but I don’t think that is what he means.

His main concern is with the internal relationships and workings of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Up until the Blairist technocratic revolution, the relationship of the ‘cultural nationalism’ of the other three nations within the Union was effectively ‘absorbed into a Greater England’ he explains. Starkey argues that Britain is quite unique as a pre- or early modern state that has dominated in a modern world full of nation states. It is a peculiar political entity into which these separate national traditions have been fused.

Despite its strange mutant form, Starkey, quite refreshingly in these gloomy times, is England’s biggest fan. He loves his country. And you can see why. It is, he says:

The nation that has changed more, done more, and shaped human consciousness and world history more than any other since the fall of Ancient Rome.

It’s a bold claim and a persuasive one, but not without its difficulties. Englishness, unlike Scottishness, Welshness or Irishness, is associated with a ‘top nation’ or ‘great nation’ kind of nationalism. Which was all very well when Britain really was Great, whether in geographic influence or reputation. But with its loss of status over the last century or so, and (quite unusually) in the absence of any racial or cultural basis to its national heritage, England has also lost its historical meaning and so, consequently, has the Union. Despite this seemingly grim reading of our historical trajectory, I think there is optimism in there somewhere too.

Starkey is clear that Britain has long been made up of a delicate ‘patchwork’ of relationships, based as it is on a historical accommodation, an exercise of pragmatism in the mutual interests of each of its constituent national parts. For a man still effectively cancelled for his alleged racism, and unabashedly an opponent of multiculturalism, he is nevertheless keen on ‘biculturalism’. The idea, implicit in our Union, that we have a kind of double identity. Britishness, he argues, is almost uniquely able to accommodate people and their separate cultures and traditions.

I think what I like about Starkey’s historical account and formulation of the problem is that it offers us a way out of the identitarian trap in which we find ourselves today. We don’t have to identify with our race, gender, or whatever else it might be that divides us from our fellow citizens. We can identify with something bigger than ourselves. Something that connects us to other people. A kind of bordered universalism, where we try to re-establish what it is we are about as part of a national (or bi-national) project. Where we try to pull together around what it is that we believe makes us special.

A new patriotism is possible - arguably essential for our future flourishing if such a thing can be imagined. It might be hard to compute post-riots, but who wouldn’t want to integrate into a nation that both has a rich, troubled, but ultimately proud history, and in which we can look forward together? Maybe it’s hard to get your head around when we don’t have a strong sense of who we are now. We don’t really know what we believe in, or what matters to us - maybe we do but we struggle to articulate a shared sense of what it is we cohere around. Indeed, it can feel like there is no ‘us’ as such at all. It’s all very fragmented. Without a national project we don’t exist.

So, I don’t know about you but I think belonging to a nation, almost any nation, is far preferable to the alternative. In the present circumstances it might even seem like an act of faith but - dare I say it? - I identify with England. What could be more inclusive than that?

Image: Hel-hama