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UK 27 NOVEMBER 2019

The English Question and Brexit

In the coming years the people of these islands will be roiled
by a succession of constitutional crises.

BY MICHAEL KENNY

N
ot since the election held in December 1910 was dominated by the Irish Question
and by the status of the House of Lords, has a British poll had such a major
bearing upon two seismic constitutional questions at once. The current election
will do much to determine whether the UK leaves the EU, and, the timetable by which it
does so – if the Conservatives are able to form a government. It is also the “future of
the Union” election, with its result bound to a ect whether the UK will continue to
exist in its present form.
In Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, domestic constitutional questions are vital
ingredients in the campaign, and these sometimes clash with the politics of Brexit. If
you are a Scottish Conservative voter who wants to Remain in the EU and opposes
independence, you could well face a tough choice about which of the unions you
prioritise when deciding how to vote.

But in England the domestic constitutional drama gures far less. All the questions
about devolution, national identity and governance, which are staple themes
elsewhere, are notable by their absence in the campaign in England. In part this is
because there are plenty of other major issues competing for attention, aside from
Brexit itself. Yet still it is quite remarkable that the English appear so detached from
the likelihood that the territorial integrity of the state in which they are the largest
partner faces mortal danger, especially given the SNP’s commitment to making a
formal request for a second independence referendum, and the growing possibility of a
border poll in Northern Ireland. Should Johnson win a majority on 12 December, the
stage is set for a major confrontation between his administration and the Scottish
government.

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Even if British politics has reverted to the default assumption that the English care only
for bread-and-butter issues, like health and the economy (Brexit aside, of course), it is
a mistake to assume that the English are indi erent to the questions being debated so
loudly everywhere else in the UK. An appraisal of the national sensibility and political
world-view of England’s multitudes is imperative at a point when a good deal of
opinion has fallen for a caricature of chauvinistic nationalism sweeping across the
English heartland.

In fact, changes to the English psyche of a more subtle, contradictory and far-reaching
kind have been under way for some time. Grasping these is increasingly important
because the UK’s future will be determined not just by the decisions of voters in
Northern Ireland and Scotland, but also by how the English, and their political
representatives, respond to them. In ts and starts over the last three decades the
compound of mutual tolerance and English indi erence upon which the British system
is built has begun to dissipate.

A growing sense of grievance about who bene ts from the union, and England’s place
within it, became intertwined with a range of other discontents from the mid-2000s.
Some of these grumbles were age-old, such as the question of how funding is dispersed
across the kingdom and whether the representatives of the smaller nations can hold
too much sway over English a airs.

Over time, a majority of the English have come to believe that in the wake of devolution
their own national community needs more protection and greater recognition within
the British system of authority and governance – a desire that is extremely hard to
meet in institutional terms. The Conservative Party did introduce a baroque set of
changes to the House of Commons governing rules, a system known as “English votes
for English laws”, after the Scottish referendum in 2014. But this remains invisible to
people outside Westminster and barely understood by most within it. The majority in
the English heartland paid little heed to the establishment of devolution elsewhere,
and Northern Ireland receded markedly in the English imagination once the Troubles
abated. Both the media and political establishments in London put Northern Ireland
out of their mind in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

But the English were becoming more interested in themselves. A new focus upon what
being English now meant, and whether its constituent traditions were being eroded by
the twin forces of globalisation and European integration, marked the onset of a
second public moment of Englishness – just over a century on from the late 19th
century folk revivalism that accompanied another period of technological and
economic transformation. Some pundits and politicians began to detect a political
resonance to this new, and old, Englishness – the “forbidden identity”, according to
Roger Scruton, which was disavowed by the liberal political authorities and politicians
busy promoting a civic and multicultural Britain.

The forbidding that Scruton chafed against was evidently not that e ective, as English
symbolism achieved mainstream commercial and cultural status. The ag of Saint
George uttered in a thousand pub gardens, decorated numerous co ee mugs in
o ces and adorned T-shirts across the land from the 1996 European Championships
onwards. However, at some point after 2010 the English mood changed, becoming
sourer and more internally divided. Many polls showed that those who identi ed most
strongly as English in their sense of national identity were also keenest on the idea of
the UK leaving the EU.

In London, and a few other large cities, a very di erent pattern was visible. Britishness
became a much more popular badge of nationality, and it is here that the Remain cause
has found many of its strongest champions.

These divergent strands of patriotism are the e ects, not the causes, of deeper shifts in
mindset and outlook. And despite the many claims about English pathologies that
inform our polarised discourse on Brexit, we remain largely ignorant about how much
these national identities matter to di erent groups of people, whether they drive or
re ect political values, and how they sit within the assortment of place-based, and
other, identities that all of us juggle.

There are, however, signs that the English are starting to engage with these domestic
constitutional issues, jolted out of their traditional indi erence by the Scottish
referendum and the forcible reminder of Northern Ireland’s unique position given by
debates about the Irish backstop. But a marked ambivalence characterises this re-
engagement. Polling suggests that people here, as elsewhere in Britain, tend to see the
UK as a union of consenting partners, with each having the right to secede should they
wish to do so.

But a growing number of English people also feel that the democratic rights a orded
by devolution have created a deeply unbalanced system, which re ects an ingrained
tendency for the state to favour other national minorities. And this reservation has fed
into a much wider mood of disenfranchisement.

“Why do we never get a vote?” and “When are we going to be consulted?” were the
questions typically posed by English audiences in the course of the Scottish
referendum campaign. In June 2016 they got their chance to vote in the Brexit
referendum – on a di erent, but not unrelated, issue, which also touched on deep
questions of identity, self-government and shared sovereignty.

Team spirit: the end of the cricket World Cup nal between England and New Zealand,
14 July

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In the election campaign two very divergent governance propositions are on o er,
neither of which are likely to address this stirring mood in a meaningful way. Labour
has proposed investing heavily in a programme to bolster the northern regional
interest. These meaty spending pledges are accompanied by a commitment to a model
of regional devolution that carries echoes of New Labour’s failed e orts to introduce
regional assembly government in England. On the sensitive questions of England’s
democratic de cit, and what kind of constitutional order the UK needs to develop, the
party has little to say.
The Tories, meanwhile, o er a new brand of English-centred unionism. This involves a
more muscular and assertive demonstration of the value of Great Britain, and re ects a
seam of thinking associated with Michael Gove and the think tank Policy Exchange. Its
abiding aim is to rectify the de ciencies of Labour’s centrifugal devolution model and
to make the Conservatives the leading force within unionist politics across Britain. This
project displays some sense of the need to address English disenchantment – with
extra funding promised for some of its poorest towns – but it faces the major challenge
of selling pan-British unionism to three nations in England, Scotland and Wales which
are, in key respects, pulling further apart – a process bound to be accentuated by
Brexit.

Which of these projects will come to the fore depends on the election result, and other
political contingencies besides. The coming years will be made even more uncertain by
the question of how English opinion responds to the prospects of Irish uni cation and
Scottish secession, both of which are likely to move into view as real possibilities in the
next few months.

The Conservative parliamentary party’s support for Boris Johnson’s withdrawal

agreement, which places the six counties of Northern Ireland within and without the
EU’s customs union, says much about the priority that Brexit has assumed for many
Conservatives, and the di culty of balancing it against other conservative instincts. It
also opens up a pathway towards greater disengagement from Ulster by the British
state at a moment when support for uni cation with the Republic is rising. The
contrast between the British unionism that prevails in today’s Conservative Party, and
the stance of its Edwardian predecessor towards Irish Home Rule and Northern Ireland
is striking. For many Tories back then, opposition to any form of Irish self-
government was a vital principle, re ecting an underpinning belief in the unitary
character of the United Kingdom, and Ireland’s place within it

The end of the Anglo-Scottish union would be felt much more fundamentally, and the
Conservatives will ght hard to avoid this outcome. But whether the Anglo-centred
unionism that Boris Johnson champions is a useful weapon in this ght, or more likely
to in ame rather than calm Scottish opinion, remains to be seen. And if Labour forms a
government, with SNP support, the prospects of a second independence referendum
would be very high indeed, even as Brexit becomes less likely.

As these twin crises impact upon British politics, the party system that has buttressed
the union is coming under the most intense pressure. This process began with the
Scottish Labour Party’s collapse, and has continued as the Scottish and Welsh Labour
parties become ever more disgruntled with the approach of their UK counterparts. The
Corbynista mantra that class solidarity trumps the politics of nationhood looks
increasingly ill-suited to the constitutional moment.

This divide is apparent in the Tory party too, where tensions have emerged between
the Johnson government and the approach taken by the party in Scotland – with Ruth
Davidson’s resignation in part re ecting this deepening rift.

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If over the next two or three decades Ireland reunites and the Anglo-Scottish union
breaks, we will have come full circle back to the 16th century, with Wales uneasily, and
resentfully, incorporated into a system of English governance. Welsh politics would
very likely develop a stronger pro-independence orientation, a trend that is already
discernible as Plaid Cymru’s leadership talks more boldly about secession, and several
senior Labour gures have declared themselves to be “indy-curious”.

For England, the coming years may feel like Groundhog Day, as successive
constitutional crises follow hard upon each other. Long-avoided questions about what
kind of nation England is, what kind of political community it wants to be, and what
kind of union it is able and willing to share with others, have moved inexorably into the
heart of domestic politics.

Michael Kenny is the director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge
University