Ten years ago this month, David Cameron’s Tories won an overall majority in the UK’s general election. By the end of May 2015, Cameron had fully committed his government to holding a referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union or stay in it. Ireland was waking up to a reality most of us had managed to ignore: that English nationalism is a real thing and could have profound consequences for the future of our own island.
A decade on, the question is whether English nationalism is still a force we may have to reckon with. A lot hangs on the answer. If the UK stays together, Irish people will get to decide on their own future – and specifically the future of partition – in our own time and at our pace. But if the UK is falling apart, a decision on Northern Ireland’s place within it could be forced on us in much more chaotic conditions.
Cameron’s commitment to hold a Brexit referendum was delivered in the Queen’s Speech, by Queen Elizabeth, ten years ago today. Cameron was comfortable with this because he assumed he would win it. His confidence was rooted in insouciant ignorance. Like most of the British political and intellectual establishments, he did not take English nationalism seriously. It was an obsession confined to those they dismissed as “swivel-eyed loons”. Nationalism was a Scottish and Irish disease (with a minor Welsh variant); the English were far too phlegmatic to succumb.
He was, of course, profoundly wrong. English nationalism was and is ambiguous and largely unarticulated. For centuries, it was wrapped in a double layer of packaging – Britishness and Empire. But it never went away and Brexit was its moment to emerge. We didn’t really get to hear what it is in simple language, but we were left in no doubt about what it is not – European.
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But Brexit was a terrible solution to the problem of English identity. It did nothing to allow ordinary people to “take back control” of their lives. Its only achievement has been to wipe about four per cent off Britain’s GDP. Instead of Britannia Unchained, there is Stagnation Nation, characterised by low public and private investment and high regional and household inequality. Low-income households in Britain are now 27 per cent poorer than their equivalents in France and a staggering 60 per cent poorer than those in Ireland.
It is logical to assume that Brexit‘s bitter harvest means that the English have lost their taste for nationalism. But logic has little to do with identity politics. There is plenty of buyer’s remorse. Polling in January, to mark the fifth anniversary of the UK’s departure from the EU, found that “fewer than half of those who voted to exit the EU in 2016 can point to a positive outcome in any area”. And yet, who is the rising figure in English politics? The man who did more than anyone else to make Brexit happen: Nigel Farage.
Startlingly, supporters of Farage rank “being English” above “being a parent” as a marker of who they think they are
The best way to make sense of this seeming contradiction is to look at the latest edition of the ongoing Future of England survey run by the political scientists Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones. They find that “those voters in England who identify primarily as English rather than British are made both angry and fearful by contemporary political life... among those English-identifiers, we found ambivalence towards the Union as a project and a commonly held sense of grievance about the perceived cost and political influence of the other nations” within the UK.
What seems to have happened is that Brexit did, at first, act as a pressure valve, letting out some of the steam of English separatist resentment. But since 2022, the pressure has been building up again: over 40 per cent of people in England now say that “English” is a better fit for their sense of identity than “British”. Not surprisingly, these people are much more inclined to support Farage‘s Reform UK or the Conservatives than those who identify primarily as British. Startlingly, supporters of Farage rank “being English” above “being a parent” as a marker of who they think they are.
This is a profoundly unhappy tribe. Henderson and Wyn Jones find “an England whose English-identifying inhabitants, at least, are deeply conscious of what they clearly regard as a jarring contrast between past glories and a present brought-low; an England whose eponymous national group seems to feel besieged both from within and without; an England that has secured major changes (not least, Brexit) in order to assuage its concerns, yet remains deeply dissatisfied with the results; an England that is angry at its lot.”
One of the things we learned during the Brexit debacle was that English nationalists did not care about its consequences for the maintenance of the Union. If Brexit meant Scotland and Northern Ireland walking away – and thus the effective end of the UK – so be it. And what Henderson and Wyn Jones’s latest study has found is that the failure of Brexit has done nothing to change their minds. They report “a striking degree of ambivalence about the continuing territorial integrity of the UK state among English-identifiers”.
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A particularly worrying finding for unionists in Northern Ireland is that 38 per cent of people in England believe “levels of public spending in Northern Ireland should be reduced to the levels in the rest of the UK”. If this were implemented, its effects would be disastrous. Spending in the North is 19 per cent higher than the UK average, making a difference of £2,700 (€3,200) per person.
The warning from Brexit was that there is, on our archipelago, an incoherent, unacknowledged but highly potent identity crisis – the unresolved business of English identity in a post-imperial world. It erupted in 2016 and there is no reason to think it will not vent again. The political durability of a chancer like Farage is a seismographic signal of the pressure that is still building beneath the surface of English politics. We in Ireland have to remain alert to the tremors beneath our feet.
