The National Interest
Winter 1998/99

The Balkanization of Britain and the Rise of English Nationalism

By Robin Harris

 

The continued existence of Britain as a medium-sized power with a more than medium-sized role has long been one of the given assumptions of international affairs. It is also a strategically crucial American assumption. Enthusiasts for the “special relationship” extol alleged Anglo-Saxon commonalities of culture, values, and understanding. For their part, the more realpolitik-ally minded emphasize instead Britain’s unique status as a UN Security Council member with a first-rate professional army, and at the same time a country with no psychological inhibitions about accepting the realities of American world leadership.

But what if all that were to change? What if not just the institutions but the allegiances and even the identity of Britain were fundamentally to alter? Until quite recently such a hypothesis would have seemed risible. But suddenly it is not. For, though most of the rest of the world has not yet grasped it, Britain is now Balkanizing and, as elsewhere, the dynamic imperative in the process is changing national awareness.

The British, and especially the English, have traditionally considered themselves above nationalism. The Right has understood that as well as the Left. For example, in his Dictionary of Political Thought, Roger Scruton, Britain’s leading conservative political philosopher, notes: “In the United Kingdom nationalism is confined to the celtic fringes, where it has been associated with movements for home rule in Ireland, Scotland and — to some extent — Wales. English nationalism is virtually unknown, at least under that description.”

Professor Scruton’s judgment has an array of disparate evidence to support it. But one of the more revealing testimonies is provided by music. Here the uneasiness of the nation with reflective self-definition is quite apparent. The British national anthem is, for instance, an expression of loyalty not to the nation but to the sovereign — even though he is slightly ominously urged to “defend our laws and ever give us cause” to continue to sing “God Save the King.” “Rule Britannia”, composed in 1740, is a somewhat strange affair. It refers specifically to Britain’s naval prowess (“rule the waves”) and to its political freedom (“Britons never will be slaves”), but not to its cultural identity or geographical characteristics, or even its people. “Land of Hope and Glory”, though evocative of patriotic pride for the wartime generation, is in essence just a celebration of imperialism: “Wider and still wider shall thy bounds be set; / God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.” It is, observably, the expansion that is celebrated, not the characteristics of the national identity expanding.

As for English nationalism, it has generally been a subject for ribaldry. This was so in Victorian times when Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” ironically extolled the First Lord of the Admiralty who, “in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, remain[ed] an Englishman.” And it was still the case in the 1960s, when in their comic “Song of the English” Michael Flanders and Donald Swan sought to remedy the lack of a suitable national song with a composition whose chorus line runs: “The English, the English, the English are best: I couldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest” — a refrain that even the most enthusiastic anglophobe would admit to be self-mockery.

None of which, of course, is to suggest that the British in general, or the English in particular, have altogether lacked self-awareness. The apparent absence of introspection has often been a pose. But it began as a reflection of the reality that the British in their heyday did not need to assert their national identity because it was already so pervasive. And not just good manners but common prudence required that such power be cloaked in a degree of self-effacement.

When Britain’s Empire bestrode the globe and the schoolroom maps were largely colored red, London was a vantage point for overseas advance, not a refuge for a threatened society in retreat. The mentality this induced still affects the outlook of the older generation of British politicians. In her memoirs, The Path to Power, Margaret Thatcher describes her first visit as a young girl from a provincial town to the metropolis: “For the first time in my life I saw people from foreign countries, some in the traditional native dress of India and Africa. The sheer volume of traffic and of pedestrians was exhilarating; they seemed to generate a sort of electricity. London’s buildings were impressive for another reason; begrimed with soot, they had a dark imposing magnificence which constantly reminded me that I was at the centre of the world.”

The notion of London being “at the centre of the world” may already have been wishful thinking by the 1930s. But it was a pretty accurate description of geopolitical realities over much of the previous two centuries. In such circumstances, it was only natural that the constituent components of the British state — English, Scots, Welsh, and even on occasion Irish — were generally prepared to ignore their national differences. Britain thus became that very rare entity — a multinational nation-state.

Of course, it was never entirely harmonious. Not just Scots but even some die-hard English objected to subordinating their primary national identity in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland. But the economic benefits arising from the removal of internal trade barriers reconciled all those actively prepared to exploit the new opportunities. Even the irreconcilables, alienated by religion and culture from the new dispensation, were less united than they have sometimes been portrayed. Nowadays historians recognize that the 1745 Jacobite rebellion — the last rising by the supporters of the Stuart cause — was about religion and the distinctive problems of the Scottish highlanders, not essentially about the fate of an as yet largely unformed “Scottish nation.” As many Scots — perhaps even as many highlanders — fought on the “English” as on the “Scottish” side at the subsequent Battle of Culloden. It took the romantic genius of Sir Walter Scott to turn the highlanders into a quaint epitome of Scottishness — though arguably he and his later, more clod-hopping successors thereby did the Scots no favors by encouraging them to cultivate a mythic reality that a recent Scottish writer has described as “the Bogus State of Brigadoon.”

The Welsh, having been formally united with England since Henry VIII’s reign, are accordingly even better integrated into the British framework. In fact, over the years most of Wales has been economically, socially, and culturally anglicized, sharing fully in the ups and downs of Britain’s industrial economy and absorbing a large English immigration. Admittedly, the western part of Wales has retained use of its own distinct language. But the four-fifths of the Welsh population who only speak English regard the resolve of the Principality’s dogmatically multiculturalist political elite to impose bilingualism as a tiresome and inconvenient obsession. Language is thus tangential to the question of whether Welsh nationalism can properly be said to exist. Certainly, anyone who witnesses the reaction of the Welsh spectators at Cardiff Arms Park when Wales plays England at rugby will be conscious of pride and passion. And there is a distinctive religious, cultural, and political atmosphere which strikes the Englishman who ventures far beyond Offa’s Dyke. But then something similar is true of Yorkshire, Cornwall, and other English outlying provinces too.

The Irish were always, of course, in a different category. To a greater extent than either Scotland or Wales, Ireland was subdued and colonized through the brutal assertion of English power. Moreover, the Irish question after the Henrician Reformation was both affected by and has itself constantly exacerbated the anti-Catholicism of the British state. Yet even so, today’s Irish nationalists are wrong to portray the relationship between the Irish and English as exclusively one of struggle and repression. In truth, Ireland can as little shake off its English connection as the English can disentangle themselves from the fate of Ireland. One commentator, arguing the case (albeit tongue in cheek) for re-unification of the Irish North and South, but within the United Kingdom, has pointed out: “A man from Mars would find it difficult to understand why there are two states in the British Isles in the first place.” None of the usual ethnic or linguistic criteria for nationhood seems to apply in this [Irish] case. A glance at the current Irish cabinet reveals nine Irish surnames, six English or Scottish and one [de Valera] Spanish.

There was moreover another, oddly perverse, effect of the tangled and treacherous Anglo-Irish relationship. This was that the perceived danger from Catholic Ireland long provided an element of ideological solidarity for Britain as a whole. During most of the days of Empire — until, in fact, the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 — Britain was a self-consciously Protestant state in which predominantly Protestant Welsh, Scots, and Ulstermen were its especially representative citizens. Of course, the later decline of Empire and the processes of secularization and liberalization would weaken those bonds. This is Linda Colley’s influential thesis: “As an invented nation heavily dependent for its raison d’être on a broadly Protestant culture, on the threat and tonic of recurrent war, particularly war with France, and on the triumphs, profits and Otherness represented by a massive overseas empire, Britain is bound now to be under immense pressure. . . . [T]he re-emergence of Welsh, Scottish and indeed English nationalism . . . can be seen not just as the natural outcome of cultural diversity, but as a response to a broader loss of national, in the sense of British, identity.”

Illuminating as it is, this analysis only partly explains why the sense of British national identity has weakened so much. For it does not take account of the fact that the inhabitants of the United Kingdom today also feel less British because they have been systematically persuaded that all of the more recognizable features of Britishness — language, history, tradition, ethnic homogeneity — are suspect. This is a long process with parallels in other modern nation-states. But recently it has taken a new twist with the election of Tony Blair’s New Labour government, which has managed to provide a fresh challenge to the concept of British nationhood by making it seem at once rebarbative and ridiculous.

Mr. Blair and his colleagues have declared war on British history. The prime minister confessed early on to feeling that “British pageantry is great, but it does not define what Britain is today.” The process of “re-branding” Britain then proceeded apace. Initially, four gray plastic “space-age pods”, created by a well-known exhibitor of erotic designs, were installed on Horse Guard’s Parade — the traditional site for Trooping the Colour, one of the more effective bits of British pageantry — and were used to display “cool” British products. Then a video was circulated among Commonwealth leaders improbably depicting “Britain: The Young Country.”

But most effort to design a new politically correct Britain has gone into the £800 million Millennium Dome at Greenwich. The creative director of the project has made it clear that he sees no place in the Dome for the Union Jack (the British national flag), or for “other nationalistic” features that would “give the wrong signals.” Apparently without intended irony, and in the absence of a conventional Britannia with her lion and trident, it has been decided that a sixty-foot high metal statue of a woman with a tiny head, long legs, and muscular thighs will straddle the Greenwich meridian line next to the Thames. This intimidating Amazon has been described by government spokesmen as intended to represent the “New Britannia”, or alternatively to be “a universal figure which draws on the history of all people.”

 

A Kind of Nationalism

Both the complex historical and the crass contemporary reasons for a decline in the sense of being British affect the English, as well as the Scots, Welsh, and Irish, but necessarily in somewhat different ways. This is because for most of our history as a politically united island no clear distinction was drawn between Englishness and Britishness.

In this matter, assumptions tell their own story. When Admiral Nelson signaled before the Battle of Trafalgar that “England expects every man will do his duty” he was not thereby excusing the fleet’s Scottish, Welsh, and Irish sailors from doing theirs. When John Buchan wrote that “[British] Imperialism is . . . a sense of the destiny of England”, he was not thus implicitly excluding his fellow Scots from the Imperial enterprise. In the era of British greatness it was indeed quite difficult for foreigners to work out just who among the powerful people they encountered was not English — like that confused eighteenth-century Italian hotelier who remarked, “We have ten inglese in tonight, four of them French, five German, and a Russian.”

The identification of the British with the English was in fact quite understandable. After all, the language spoken in the British Isles, outside of a part of the (ethnically misnamed) Celtic fringe, was quite definitely and properly described as English. And language then as now was one of the principal accepted determinants of nationhood. Norman French, Gascons, Welshmen, Scots, Dutch, and Germans — all have over the centuries sat on the English/British throne. But from the early fifteenth century on — when Henry V was the first English king to write letters in English — the conduct of important affairs in Britain has mainly been in the English language.

English economic, political, and cultural dominance of Britain is the central fact of British history. Both opponents and defenders of the Union often feel unhappy about accepting that — the former because it puts into sober historical perspective the grandiose claims for Scottish, Welsh, and Irish separateness, the latter because it provides an all too brutal reminder of what the Union of the United Kingdom in fact signifies.

It is rare for nations to challenge political structures that they already dominate. But there are exceptions. It was the Russians, to whom all other inmates of the “Prisonhouse of Nations” had to defer, who finally overthrew the Soviet Union, and it was dominant but paranoid Serbs who rendered Yugoslavia unviable. The English may, in very different circumstances but with equal lack of reflection, be starting to drift along the same route.

A kind of English nationalism is now astir in Britain. Those two overused words, “kind of”, are however required, for English nationalism is as yet underdeveloped. It puts in a regular appearance at middle-class English dinner tables, invoked by grumbles about the Scots. It is speculated about by Tory politicians anxious for a cause, and worried about by Labour strategists. It is the regular stuff of journalists’ gossip. Indeed, The Spectator has opened its columns to continuing debate on the issue. (Hence the frequent references here to contributions to that journal.)

 

Under the Cross of St. George

But the change is perhaps clearest at the bottom of the social pile — and it is difficult to get much lower in any heap of humanity than the English football hooligan. Though there is a precedent. As in the public games of old Byzantium, where the rival teams of “greens” and “blues” also formed the core of a primitive party system, so in Mr. Blair’s Britain, where any debate on national identities is frowned upon as atavistic, it is reasonable to look to sport to understand what the English feel about their political identity. When in 1966 the English national football team played in the final of the World Cup, London’s Wembley stadium was a waving forest of Union Jacks, symbols of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. But in the summer of 1998 it was all quite different. The Union Jacks were now replaced by the red-on-white Cross of St. George, the national flag of England. Streaming from giant banners, painted on the faces of lager-louts in a hundred English urban centers, finally worn by chanting mobs in the back streets of Marseilles, the Cross of St. George was omnipresent. In such circumstances the genie of a kind of English nationalism finally burst from its bottle, which was then smashed in some unfortunate Frenchman’s face.

Hardly less significant was the reaction to the misbehavior of the English fans. There were, of course, condemnations and apologies by British ministers. But the immediate response of the fans themselves, and indeed of the media commentators until their more politically correct editors got to them, was quite different. As one sympathetic television report had a whining hooligan explain: “Since the afternoon, the Tunisians were provoking us, insulting us and making obscene gestures. Some young English fell into the trap and couldn’t contain themselves.”

It is, of course, tempting to consider the behavior of the “young English” as an unfortunate but essentially insignificant reflection of the wider problem of the underclass. But this would be mistaken. There may be many reasons why the “young English” riot, not least among them being that working-class English youths have always traditionally had a proclivity for violence: when harnessed, it has in the past been turned to formidable use in the armed forces. But there is a special reason why the “young English” gathered for mayhem under the Cross of St. George in such numbers this summer. They had lost — or more accurately had been deprived of — a sufficiently compelling British national identity, and they wanted to flaunt, in the way they best knew how, a new identity that they had made their own. In this, the English condition has something in common with the next most frequent offenders among World Cup fans, the Germans, whom English hooligans now apparently regard as their most worthy opponents. The Germans are expected to channel their national self-interest through the European Union, and the English through the Union of the United Kingdom. And in neither case is it now enough.

Nor did the new flag disappear with the dismal termination of England’s participation, or even with the World Cup competition. For a full two months the Cross of St. George flew from London taxis, was draped outside pubs, and became the all-purpose motif for tee-shirts. Indeed, only the implacable depression of a chilly, drizzly English autumn proved sufficient to break the spell of English fervor: by October the red-white bunting had at last been taken in. But by now the middle classes and the chattering classes had woken up to the phenomenon.

Indeed a handful of intellectuals had already done so, betraying the tell-tale signs of disillusionment with the traditional concept of Britain and hankering after a more congenial English identity. The novelist Peter Vansittart, author of In Memory of England (1998), is not himself apparently interested in politics; he is concerned with investigating the historic character of the English. For all that, his reflections are a sign of the current national mood of self-analysis. By contrast, Edwin Jones does have an implicit program in The English Nation: The Great Myth (1998). His purpose is to expose the myths, as he sees them, that have led the English to think of themselves as un-European, and his goal is to restore the nation’s true organic identity.

The BBC’s most irritating interviewer and sometime social commentator, Jeremy Paxman, is the most recent contributor to the debate on Englishness. In his book, The English: A Portrait of a People (1998), Paxman debunks most of what the British (or indeed English) once thought made them distinctive. But he argues that “the most vital sense of national identity is the individual awareness of the country of the mind”, and concludes optimistically that, “The new [English] nationalism is less likely to be based on flags and anthems. It [will be] modest, individualistic, ironic, solipsistic, concerned as much with cities and regions as with counties and countries . . . based on values that are so deeply embedded in the culture as to be almost unconscious.”

Such ambiguities find no favor with the distinguished polemicist of cultural conservatism, Peregrine Worsthorne, who takes an apocalyptic view of what the national future holds. He predicts: “The break-up of the United Kingdom will give the best and the brightest of the English the decisive push which will take them off the fence in favour of the European Union, not because they love England so little but because they love England so much. For a nationalistic Little England will be a travesty of Britain’s former self, with all its vices bloated and all its virtues shrunken.” Worsthorne’s laments at the vulgar, brutish nature of English nationalism reflect the fact that serious political movements require leaders, not just a stock of raw passion. Where might such leadership be found?

 

No Gratitude for Labour

Not, of course, in the Labour Party, which is ever more painfully impaled on its Scottish policy. Labour has, after all, long depended upon its strength in Scotland in order to be a viable British party of government. Some of the government’s most senior — and, not coincidentally in English eyes, least popular — members are Scotsmen, including Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer; Robin Cook, the foreign secretary; and Lord Irvine, the lord chancellor. Labour initially imagined that its promise of a Scottish parliament would win it the lasting gratitude of the Scots. But it has not done so. A number of opinion polls have shown the Scottish National Party (snp) in the lead and even suggested majority support for its radical program of Scottish “Independence in Europe.”

Scottish voters have turned against Labour since the general election for a variety of reasons, the desire to punish Scottish Labour Party corruption and misbehavior being among them. But essentially they have done so because they have turned against the English — and “English” is what Labour in power in Westminster now seems.

It is difficult to overstate the shift in Scottish attitudes, which have rapidly developed from resentment into something approaching hatred for everything and almost everyone from England. An opinion poll published by the Sunday Times in June showed that “4 in 10 [Scots interviewed] believe anti-English sentiment is increasing north of the border, [that] most regard themselves as Scottish rather than British, [that they] believe independence is an inevitability and feel they will be better off economically in an independent Scotland — at which point a third believe they should break their links with the Queen.” Among Scottish schoolchildren 45 percent felt a little — and 30 percent a lot of — antipathy toward the English, whom they considered “arrogant, ill-mannered, aggressive and untrustworthy.” The Scottish editor-in-chief of The European and The Scotsman, Andrew Neil, has also recorded — and condemned — the phenomenon: “Children with English accents are bullied in the play-ground (one teen-ager was recently murdered for the ‘crime’ of being English). . . . The English have every right to be mystified by this outpouring of denigration and hatred.”

Mr. Blair too may be forgiven for being mystified. His problem is that, though he was born and went to school in Scotland, the Scots have detected in him a leader as English as their traditional bête noire, Margaret Thatcher. The prime minister’s attempts to lead the Labour Party’s fight-back against the SNP have exposed him to a deluge of bile from the Scottish press. His claim that he would draw support from a “Middle [i.e., middle-class] Scotland”, as he had from “Middle England”, was subject to particularly waspish criticism, for even the Scottish middle classes now think that they have nothing in common with their English equivalents. That poses New Labour an insurmountable problem: it can neither satisfy the obstreperous Scots, nor reassure the English who resent their manners.

The Liberal Party, relatively strong in Scotland and priding itself on its commitment to devolved government, is equally incapable of articulating English national sentiments. Which leaves the Conservatives. Shell-shocked by the worst defeat in their history, enmeshed in complicated structural party reform, led by an unpopular and still insecure leader, the Conservative Party was initially reluctant to embark on any such controversial strategy as trying to exploit English national exasperation. But Tory toes are now being tentatively dipped into these troubled waters.

The occasion is the need to resolve an abstruse but fundamental constitutional issue long associated with Scottish devolution. This, the so-called “Midlothian Question” (so named after the constituency of the Scottish Labour mp who first expounded it), relates to the fact that after the institution of a Scottish parliament to handle most of Scotland’s domestic policies, Scottish Westminster mps will be in the absurd position of voting on English education, local government, and housing, but not on Scotland’s. To add insult to injury, English MPs may then be outvoted on matters that concern England because of Scottish votes.

One response to this would be for English mps to meet and vote separately on English matters. But some leading Conservatives want to go further and have begun to argue the case for a new institution, an “English parliament.” The new Tory leader, William Hague, is attracted by the politics of this option and in his speech to the Conservative Party Conference in October signaled the fact. Hague emphasized that the Conservatives would not “become an English Nationalist Party.” But he went on to say: “We are going to see that the voters of England are fairly represented. . . . For the first time we will have to become the advocates of major constitutional change. It may be a change in the voting rights of Scottish MPs, it may be an English Parliament in some form.”

Of course, the Conservative Party would not be true to its current reputation if it were not split on the issue. Those most fearful of European federalism believe that a separatist England would be more vulnerable to the European project of turning the country into a glorified Euro-region. For their part, some expatriate Scottish Tories now representing English seats at Westminster fear that such talk might amount to giving up on the Union altogether. The two most influential right-of-center English newspapers are also fiercely opposed to the whole project, as they showed in their October 9 reaction to the Tory leader’s speech. The Times commented, “[Mr. Hague] should have scotched [sic] more firmly any question of a Tory flirtation with English nationalism. . . . An English parliament is not compatible with the stability of the United Kingdom.” The Daily Telegraph sourly condemned the notion of an English parliament as an “anti-Union concept.”

 

Riding the Tiger

Of course, the great difference between Conservative politicians and Conservative newspaper editors is that only the former have to get elected. If there are votes in English nationalism, the Tories will surely find a way to reconcile it with their traditional constitutionalism. It is naive to expect otherwise. But for the country as a whole there are also drawbacks.

The first is obvious: the more explicitly English grievances are stated and English interests declared paramount, the more opportunity the Scottish nationalists will have to fuel separatist passions, bringing the break-up of the UK nearer. That would not always have been so. There was a time — ideally in the 1970s — when some straight talking by English politicians might have done wonders in providing a cold douche for tartan zealots. The case could have been put in the starkest terms: “Either accept your [Scottish] responsibilities within a unitary British state, along with all the benefits, or face up to the cost of outright independence. No middle way exists.”

Even in the 1980s the stratagem might have been attempted with some hope of success. The Conservative government had, after all, a clear rationale for opposition to devolved government. Margaret Thatcher held that true devolution consists everywhere — not just in Scotland — of returning power to individuals, not creating new political and bureaucratic structures. It might thus have been possible to put the case both for unitarism and for capitalism in clear terms north of the border. But, by and large, it was not done. In Scotland Conservative ministers took public pride in their ability to keep government spending high and state intervention intrusive. What chance, then, of persuading Scots today that low spending and low taxes work? In John Major’s time, Scottish ministers desperately toyed with Scottish symbolism (returning the Stone of Scone to Scotland) and further institutional devolution. But it was already too late. The illusions had become too deep-rooted, the subsidies too habitual, the blaming of England for everything too automatic.

Consequently, it is only reasonable to assume that an appeal to English nationalism now would probably bring Scottish independence somewhat closer. And such a prospect, it must be repeated, is hazardous for all concerned — including Britain’s allies and neighbors.

Scottish nationalists, of course, imagine that they will launch the new state on a sea of black gold. But even if Scotland comes out of the inevitable legal tangle enjoying the lion’s share of current British North Sea Oil revenues, there will remain a gaping deficit in its public finances from the loss of the English taxpayer’s subsidy. At present Scotland receives 10.25 percent of UK public expenditure but only provides 8.9 percent of UK tax revenue. The SNP already promises to raise taxes; but on these figures it would have to hike taxation still higher than it envisages if it wants to balance the books. Nationalist socialism north of the border would also lead to further drainage of home grown talent and foreign investment from Scotland. The SNP assumption that the European Union will bail out Scotland with transfer payments is a pipe-dream. Doubtless, many Europeanists would relish seeing the break-up of Britain, which would then be less strongly placed to frustrate their sort of federalism. But with the EU already committed to extend eastward, taking in more industrially primitive and heavily agricultural members, the chances of the Scots enjoying the kind of largesse that currently boosts the economies of Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Greece are negligible.

In fact, clean contrary to what the Nationalists believe, one of the strongest reasons the English governing elite has fought to keep Scotland within Britain is the fear that an independent Scotland may, for all these reasons, suffer an economic collapse that would cause a flood of destabilizing migration across the border. There is a still worse scenario. From the hard-left socialism of the Scottish Labour Party and the extreme nationalism of the SNP there could emerge a People’s Republic of Scotland that might prove no end of a nuisance — not just to the English, whom it would continue to blame for its predicament, but to foreign multinationals, banks, and doubtless (like other socialist Third World countries) America. In short, an unstable left-wing regime in Scotland could prove a major international headache.

There would also be special problems for the other non-English who remained behind in English-dominated Britain. The Welsh would certainly lose out, albeit modestly. The limited significance of Welsh nationalism would become more limited still, and Wales’ ability to claim special treatment in central government programs would be lessened, as the British state became still more firmly focused on London.

Far more serious, though, would be the implications for Northern Ireland’s position within the Union, already fragile and uncertain as the so-called “peace process” slowly results in the fulfillment of Irish Republican demands. For historical reasons the English have never felt as committed as the Scots to the defense of Ulster. So Matthew Parris directly links the fates of Scotland and Northern Ireland: “I am giving up the increasingly strained attempt to include in mycommentary on ‘our’ political scene the unspoken implication that this includes Scotland. In these twilight days of the Britain we were born to, we English must learn to let go. Scotland is another country. So it is in the sense of ‘our’ that I say that the Northern Irish are not English, do not feel to us like ‘our’ people.”

With Scotland a separate country, and with pro-Irish Republican American pressure on a weaker British state correspondingly more influential, the Unionists in Northern Ireland look even more likely finally to be abandoned to their fate of incorporation into the South. Paradoxically, this “success” of American and Irish policy will most likely rebound on both; for the Republican and Loyalist terrorists show no sign of disarming, and without the threat posed to their activities by the British armed forces it is an odds-on bet that one or other group will eventually find a reason to renew the conflict. If that results in a new peacekeeping mission, it will most likely be the Americans, certainly not the British, who will head it.

 

A Dysfunctional Nation?

What of the position of the English within truncated Britain? Nations, like men, do not live by bread alone. Because of the historical congruity between Englishness and Britishness, there is a real loss to England if a part of Britain secedes. Retreats easily become routs. The retreat from Empire made perfectly good sense, and was reasonably well managed, but it left scars on the nation’s psyche, scars that were wide open when Dean Acheson made his notorious jibe about losing an empire and not finding a role, and which are still not fully healed. Even the recent unavoidable retreat from Hong Kong prompted nostalgic regrets. Collective psychoanalysis may be even more uncertain a science than the individual kind. But a nation does need to retain the will to hold on to what it is and has — and perhaps even suffer the occasional temptation to expand — if it is not to become dysfunctional. Dysfunctional nations are also unreliable allies. It is not just its checkered history that prevents Germany from taking an active part in high-profile international military operations. Germany’s angst, its tortured mixture of self-loathing and self-assertiveness, is the condition that rules it out, at present at least, from being accepted as an “ordinary” country. English Britain after dismemberment might be saner than Germany, but it too could well experience a nervous breakdown.

There are also risks of more tangible English losses. There has been little serious discussion of the military implications of separation, but they are large. For example, the British submarine-based nuclear deterrent has for many years been very satisfactorily stationed on the Clyde in Scotland. It would quickly have to be relocated in an English port. The business would be costly and disruptive, and it might open up all sorts of opportunities for unpleasantness between the two countries. (The tensions between Russia and Ukraine that arose from the division of ussr military assets do not provide an encouraging precedent.) The SNP has already started publishing the elements of the British military arsenal it imagines it will carry off as booty. Certainly, the famous Scottish regiments would be weakened if not destroyed. Scottish soldiers remaining in the British army would overnight effectively become mercenaries.

Then there is the matter of Britain’s permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council. In theory this should not be affected, for in fact and in law it will be clear that English Britain is the successor state of the United Kingdom. But that may be over-optimistic. British Security Council membership is already a source of resentment among a variety of European and non-European powers and might be subject to renewed challenge. Membership, with its right of veto on actions threatening the national interest, is the practical public expression of Britain’s world power status. Loss of it would represent a major downgrading of the country’s role, not least as the most steadfast ally of the United States — something the Americans themselves might also have cause to regret.

The truncation of Britain would also have implications for the already difficult relationship with Europe. True, some Conservative intellectuals — as Peregrine Worsthorne predicts — might be so aesthetically repelled that they fall back into Euro-federalism. But that hardly seems the likely general reaction. Particularly if Scotland achieved membership of the European Union — which of course Britain would still be in a position to veto, but probably would not — English resentment against the EU would undoubtedly increase, as the English taxpayer was expected to make a substantial net contribution to the EU annual budget, benefiting the Scots.

English interests would thus altogether be best served by staying with the present arrangements that include Scotland within the UK. That would be better too for the Welsh and Ulstermen. Britain’s allies, particularly America, would be spared new uncertainties. The Scots alone fail to see the dangers they face.

 

Amputate to Save the Patient

But, all that said, by any realistic assessment the status quo is no longer a long-term option. If the United Kingdom has lost the support not only of the Scots but of a substantial section of the English too, it is only sensible to recognize the fact and act upon it. English nationalism then begins to make sense.

And there are some compensations. A better articulated English nationhood might help heal the inevitable psychological scars of separation. It would certainly make easier a clean break with the Scots on terms that give neither side lingering cause for regret. There is still a risk of further last-minute constitutional concessions to appease the unappeasable. Outright British federalism, with sovereignty itself divided between two or even more parliaments, would appeal to the Liberal Party because it is federalist by conviction, and to Labour because it might become federalist by convenience. But such a program would further undermine Westminster, worsen English government, and only encourage the SNP.

The transition period to independence will, above all, be one for clear thinking and hard bargaining. A strong dose of English nationalism could avoid the sort of compromises over rights of citizenship, access to social security, and possession of military hardware that would lead to endless wrangling in the future between two neighbors with a mutual need to cooperate.

In the longer term, there are other potential gains for England’s own governance from Scottish separation. The present Scottish left-wing socialist base of the Labour Party would at a stroke be excised from the new body politic. That would be highly beneficial for England. Mr. Blair would have to press ahead faster with his program of making New Labour free-market friendly so as to continue to attract the support of middle-class England, if he was to remain in government. But if he failed in that task, the disappearance of viscerally anti-Tory Scotland from the British political equation would allow the return of a Conservative administration. Either option would open the way for the radical action that all parties accept is needed, but none dares currently carry out: to curb welfare spending and the dependency culture.

Still unanswered questions about the country’s international orientation and role could also at last be openly addressed. A fundamental re-assessment of English Britain’s relationship with Europe, and even integration within an Atlantic Free Trade Area, would become possibilities, once the mirage of Scottish “Independence in Europe” had disappeared from the horizon. All of which suggests that with sickly states as with stricken individuals, victims both of prolonged misdiagnosis and maltreatment, amputation, though painful and inherently undesirable, may ultimately be part of the remedy — as long as the patient is strong in heart and mind and retains the will to live.