Do the British people still exist? When the Queen ascended the throne
in 1952 her subjects, for all their class and regional and even
national differences, thought of themselves quite consciously as forming
a community and sharing a culture—a people with certain things in
common and a special allegiance to one another.
The British, although an “old” people, were also busily renewing
themselves in the early 1950s—the BBC and especially the NHS were both
recent inventions and the welfare state and national service gave
Britishness a solid grounding in everyday life.
To most of us, most of the time, national identity is no more than a
background noise, but in the post-war decade it was quite a loud noise. I
recently met a senior civil servant who remembers as a boy at a west
country grammar school in the 1950s deciding to become a scientist
inspired by the early developments in civilian nuclear power; he saw
this explicitly as an exciting national project that he wanted to be
part of.
A lot has happened in the past 60 years to muffle or disrupt that
background hum—economic and cultural globalisation, European
integration, large-scale immigration, devolution, the decline of
external threats and above all the vast increase in incomes which has
allowed us to live freer, more mobile and less collectivist lives. The
very phrase “the British people” now sounds anachronistic, associated
with Michael Foot or Enoch Powell back in the 1970s.
There is often a sense of regret about that weakening of national
identity, especially among older people; and politicians in the past
decade or so have tried with limited success to halt or even reverse the
process.
They are right to try. Living in a rich, individualistic and diverse
country with what seems like fewer opportunities to see fellow citizens
as collaborators in a common project, ordinary national feeling has
become a progressive and binding force. Collective action is easier when
people share at least elements of a common culture and ascribe to some
common norms. And many of the things that we take for granted—democratic
accountability, equal rights, the welfare state, redistribution between
regions, classes and generations—not only take place within a national
idiom but are underpinned by an idea of the specialness of fellow
national citizens.
Yet, as Michael Sandel has put it: “In our public life, we are more
entangled, but less attached, than ever before.” We need some sense of
“emotional citizenship” to underpin those political and welfare
transactions even while repudiating the racial and chauvinistic form of
nationalism that was the norm in 1952 (well described in David
Kynaston’s Family Britain: 1951-1957).
And the raw material of national attachment still seems to be there
even if we, especially the English, struggle to find a comfortable way
of expressing it. The number of people who were very proud to be British
fell from 57 per cent in 1981 to 45 per cent in 2003. But the number
who felt “somewhat” proud or very proud in 2003 was still a healthy 86
per cent. This does not look like a crisis of national identity even if
people are now identifying more strongly with their core
country—England, Scotland or Wales.
What seems to be happening is that national expression is adapting to
a more fluid and individualistic society, one with fewer collective
projects or the kind of external threats that inspire solidarity. It is
like the shedding of a skin: as we move further away from the purposes
and symbols of one national period—the British imperial and then
post-imperial period—we gradually take on the shape of another.
Britishness itself is less intensely felt than in the first half of
the 20th century, which leads naturally to a looser relationship between
the constituent nations, possibly including independence or home rule
for Scotland. It is also perhaps less focussed on the formal symbols of a
top-down Britishness—flag, royal family and so on—and more on the
common life of citizens. According to a recent Demos pamphlet “A Place
for Pride,” less than a third of people strongly agree that the Queen
makes them proud of Britain; they are proud nonetheless.
What about the emergence of England in this story? For most of the
Queen’s reign England and Britain have been interchangeable for the
majority of her English subjects, and English nationalism has been the
preserve of eccentrics and extremists and largely shunned by the elite.
The English imperial elite in the 19th and early 20th century often
saw nationalism itself as something rather vulgar, for lesser breeds.
This disdain for the national came to be adopted in more recent decades
by left-wing and liberal England, reinforced by guilt about empire and
anti-racism.
Indeed, one of the reasons that England and Englishness has struggled
to emerge from under a British blanket is that it has been a dominant
nationalism in an egalitarian age—it cannot draw on the small-nation
solidarity of the Irish or Danes or the anti-colonial spirit of many
countries in Africa and Asia.
The English are only semi-literate in the language of modern national
identity but the Scots, by rearranging the union, present an
opportunity for the English to learn to speak it normally and robustly,
like the Scots do themselves. What might that mean? A national story
which sees England as special but not superior; a blurring of the rigid
distinction between civic (political) and ethnic forms of
identification; an understanding that there are many ways to be English;
and finally more public and institutional forms for the expression of
that moderate English national feeling.
Out of this could be emerging a new sense of English national
identity, with a residual Britishness for state occasions. It will be
weaker than in 1952 but more open, and could help to keep the show on
the road. I think Her Majesty would approve.
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