Political Studies Review

The constitutional position of England has become the subject of intense focus following the decision by the Conservative Party to table the question of English devolution in the immediate aftermath of the Scottish Referendum. Various pundits have argued that English nationalism has become a major factor in British politics and a source of deepening territorial tension. Academic commentators have been slower to interrogate the nature and implications of these assertions and, despite the ubiquity of references to English interests and anxieties in political discourse, there is a much less extensive analytical literature on the make-up and political dimensions of the national identity of the largest people of the United Kingdom. How, then, should the political status and character of the English identity be understood and studied? Notions of a politicised Englishness reflect various, often contentious, judgements of both interpretive and empirical kinds. This article highlights the different ways in which ‘politicisation’ in this context has been characterised, and shows that each of these established perspectives yields a different sort of political response and policy approach. I finish with some observations about how politicisation might be conceptualised, and identify the elements of a more comprehensive and fluid understanding of this phenomenon.

In the immediate aftermath of the Scottish independence referendum, Prime Minister David Cameron raised the ‘English Question’ by advocating English Votes for English Laws in the House of Commons. This article explains why. It uses findings from the 2014 Future of England Survey of attitudes to constitutional issues in England. It reveals a group of interlinked concerns in England: about the advantages Scotland is perceived to have in the UK Union, about the absence of institutional recognition of England in the UK political system, and about the European Union and immigration. It shows that these concerns are distinctively English, held in a broadly uniform way across England and held most strongly by people in England who identify themselves as English, and not British. These concerns, and their linkage to and by English identity, differentiate the supporters of different political parties. They are held least strongly by Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters, and more strongly by Conservative and, especially, UKIP supporters. Cameron’s move on the English Question – and subsequent profiling of English issues in the 2015 UK general election – recognised a territorially distinctive electoral battleground in England on which the Conservatives are now competing with UKIP to articulate a new English nationalism, perhaps at the expense of the Conservative Party’s unionist heritage.

Following the result of the Scottish Referendum in September 2014, Peter Hennessy thought that the English Question would become the weather-maker in contemporary British politics. It is important, however, to avoid overemphasis on the novelty of this matter. There is a compelling argument to bring current debates about Englishness into fruitful dialogue with historical perspectives because this may yield more nuanced understandings of the relationship between political argument and enduring expressions of Englishness. This article considers first a tradition of institutional thinking and how that thinking helped to define English national self-understanding, what Sir Ernest Barker once described as ‘never reflective, because it is so simply and obviously a fact’. The article explores the erosion of that national self-understanding in recent years through a number of ‘ironies of inversion’, in which the previous virtues of English institutionalism can appear as present vices. These ironies of inversion have become factors of popular political grievance, especially since devolution, and have added to an insistent mood that the English Question must be addressed, even if there is no consensus about how it should be addressed.

The Union has for over a century been one of the cornerstones of Conservative politics, but with the changes to the old union state in the last 20 years, its value has been increasingly questioned. While the Conservative Party remains committed to maintaining the Union, a new English Toryism is emerging, which has a strong continuity with an older English Toryism which was partially buried by the ascendancy of Unionism. English Tories have always considered the Union to be desirable, but it comes second in their thinking to the need to protect the sovereignty of the British state, the core of which is England and its traditional institutions. What is new about the contemporary Conservative Party is that there is within it the revival of an English Toryism which is happy to discard the older clothes of Empire and Union once so important to Conservative identity and which is unabashedly English in its focus. For an increasing number of contemporary Conservatives, there no longer seems to be any passion about defending the Union or even of continuing to think about the United Kingdom in Unionist terms.

This article sets out to place political support for Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story in the context of debates about Englishness, the European Union and the Anglosphere. It argues that support for this book was not just a debate about the teaching of history, but was part of a wider contest over the memory of Empire and England’s constitutional past. This traditional narrative was deployed to help imagine and suggest a global future for Britain at a moment when a politics of disengagement with the European Union played out domestically. This contest was not formed in isolation, but was part of a re-engagement with ‘traditional allies’ within the ‘Anglosphere’ helping to answer a dilemma about Britain’s future framed in terms of an English Conservative reading of the past. Arguments in favour of Our Island Story served to emphasise a significant tradition in Anglo-British thought that situated England as the dominant partner in a historic political-economic and cultural enterprise with a global legacy ill-suited to the political project of European integration. Thus, Our Island Story was not merely an innocuous children’s tale, but was part of a politics of disengagement from the European Union that blurred the boundaries of political Englishness.

‘Progressive patriots’ have long argued that Englishness can form the basis of a transformative political project, whether based on an historic tradition of resistance to state power or an open and cosmopolitan identity. However, this article suggests that the politics of Englishness presents a number of specific dilemmas for Labour. First, the historical narrative of a radical tradition in British history is not straightforwardly English and cannot easily be used to support a competitive politics of nationhood, in the way that disaffected English identifiers might desire. Second, the deliberately alternative nature of this ‘radical nostalgic’ narrative makes it an unlikely basis for a unifying national story. It is also at odds with Labour’s status as a successful party of government, committed to using the power of the British state, rather than opposing it. Finally, while ‘everyday Englishness’ may well align with core Labour values and be less socially conservative, intolerant or racially exclusive than it is often described, its very nature as an everyday practice rather than a political identity makes it difficult for Labour to co-opt.

This article explores the potential that ongoing regional devolution in England might transform the so-called ‘party politics of Englishness’, complicating and potentially compromising the emergence of a nascent English political nationalism. It provides a primary examination of the extent to which conceptual and normative intersections between nationalism and regionalism are reordering both the constitutional architecture and the party political landscape of England. The article argues that politicised manifestations of ‘new English regionalism’ raise new and important challenges to how the two main Union-wide political parties, the Conservatives and Labour, frame and articulate issues of English national party organisation, policy development and identity. The article concludes by noting that the emergence of national and regional forms of identity politics in England is undermining the plurinational organisation and political unity of both parties.

The rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) has been one of the most dramatic and widely discussed features of British politics in recent years. This article argues that one vital but largely overlooked facet of this phenomenon has been the politics of national identity. It argues that despite UKIP’s ostensibly unionist stance, Englishness is an important pivot around which key elements of the party’s appeal revolve, notably in terms of its Euroscepticism, its opposition to immigration and its anti-establishment narrative. It argues that the Anglo-Britishness promulgated by UKIP allows space for the celebration of English identity rather more easily than of other sub-state national identities, as it does not challenge the legitimacy of the UK state, which is itself seen as the expression of Anglo-British identity and sovereignty. Scottish nationalism, on the other hand, is seen as a threat to the Union and therefore anti-English.