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English or British?
In the 1930s the writer V. S. Pritchett toured Britain for a travelogue on the state of the nation. He found a people pulling itself together out of Depression. Yet he also detected not one people but many, and they were not wholly at peace. He pondered on the ‘devilish inspiration of historical fate’ that had for so long kept ‘these four ill-assorted, quarrelsome peoples stuck on a couple of small islands off the wet and foggy Atlantic coast of Europe’. There they had been ‘forced to live in one another’s pockets for nearly 2,000 years’.
Pritchett did not ask who ‘forced’ them or what made them so quarrelsome. It certainly did not occur to him to draw a distinction between those whom some called Celts and others Anglo-Saxons, while a discussion of British versus English would also have seemed arcane. The United Kingdom was assumed united, and its components haphazard in their dissatisfactions. That said, Pritchett did not bother to embrace Wales or Scotland in his peregrination.
Since the rise of immigration as a political issue in the 1960s and the later rise of ‘national’ sensitivities, numerous attempts have been made to pin down who the British people think they are and whether it matters. In France and America, nationality is regarded as a civic definition of citizenship. To Germans it is ethnic. To some Britons, national identity is a civic concept; to others, it is genetic. To many, it is a mix of both.
The British Social Attitudes Survey, conducted annually since 1983, concludes merely that Britishness is a ‘fuzzy’ concept. It is an umbrella embracing ancestry, language, birthplace and longevity of residence. The surveys do show, however, that over three decades there has been a decline in ‘pride in being British’, in all but the over-sixty-fives. Those feeling ‘very proud’ had dropped from 43 per cent to 35 per cent. Indeed, Britishness is most marked in recent immigrant communities.
A 2018 poll by YouGov was intriguing in a different direction. Older people were more likely to identify as being ‘English’ as well as British than were younger people, by as much as 72 per cent to 45 per cent. The old are clinging to their English identity within Britain but the young are fleeing it. However, turn to Wales and Scotland and this phenomenon is reversed. It was the young who feel more Welsh or more Scottish than their elders.
What is certainly the case is that the number of people living in Britain and claiming to be Irish, Welsh or Scottish far exceeds the population of those three countries. When, as a boy and having lived all my life in England, I was asked my identity, I would always say Welsh, or possibly half-Welsh, in honour of my father’s place of birth. But if I was within earshot of my mother she would forcefully correct me. ‘You should say you are half-English.’ I would do so to humour her, but think it unnecessary and not very exciting.
The desire of the young is clearly for a more ‘interesting’ background than the vague categorisation of Englishness. A Briton who identifies as anything-but-English appears to be more specific, more historic, almost more ready for an argument about it. It was as if, by instinct, we knew which side we were on (with King Arthur) at the Battle of Mons Badonicus. When asked, half my friends manage to cite elements of Welsh, Scottish or Irish in their pedigree.
England searches for itself
Englishness is now a subject of intense debate. Where bookshops would once be lined with works on Scottishness, Irishness and Welshness, it is the vexed identity of the English that now claims pride of place. To boast of being English was long thought of as being rather trite or pompous, like waving a Union Jack as Americans do the Stars and Stripes. There was an archaism to such phrases as ‘English and proud of it’, as there once was to ‘God is an Englishmen’ and ‘mad dogs and Englishmen’. These phrases were used by G. K. Chesterton’s ‘secret people’, who murmured, ‘Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;/ For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.’
English nationalism has often been regarded with some suspicion. The philosopher Roger Scruton called it ‘the forbidden identity’, variously associated with football misbehaviour, right-wing agitation and anti-immigrant marches. Other than on churches on St George’s Day, the patron saint’s red cross was a badge of working-class identity. But Englishness was thrust into a new prominence by the Brexit referendum, seen as expunging inhibitions over English identity, as ‘taking back control’ from anyone not English. The Brexit Party leader, Nigel Farage, openly called Brexit ‘our very own English rebellion’.
The Brexit Party’s roots were in the Referendum Party, founded in 1994 by James Goldsmith, which gave way to the UK Independence Party (UKIP), both coded euphemisms for English nationalist, although both fought elections beyond England’s borders. David Cameron unwisely dismissed UKIP in 2006 as ‘a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists, mostly’. Yet in 2014 it achieved the highest popular vote of any party in the UK European elections. Two years later it could claim to be architect of the Brexit ‘leave’ vote. The trouble, as the historian Jeremy Black said at the time, was that ‘English nationalism is too important to be left to the extremists’.
A study published in 2021 by Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones analysed the new Englishness as ‘a political force transforming Britain’. But it was not doing so in the direction of the union. To them, the issue of who gained or lost most from union did not matter, rather the fact that the argument was reawakening, the wound reopening. For the time being, the antagonism of the Scots and Welsh to what they saw as England’s ongoing hegemony merely had the effect of boosting the ‘Englishness’ of the English.
A serious rebuff to unionism came in 2020 with a YouGov poll that found under half the English, a mere 40 per cent, cared if Scotland went independent, the remainder regarding it as a matter for the Scots. Nor did two-thirds really care if Northern Ireland rejoined the south. It too was all Ireland’s business. Even among expatriates, for whom unionist affection reflects a sort of ethnic guilt, there seemed a detachment from the old debate. The Irish writer Fintan O’Toole concluded in his sardonic epitaph on Brexit, Heroic Failure, that England was now engaged in ‘a form of silent secession’ from the United Kingdom. The unthinkable was happening. It was not the neighbours – dare I say the Celts – who were declaring independence from the United Kingdom, it was the English.
The very concept of a UK unionism seemed to be dissolving into little more than the patriotic mantra of London’s political class. It was absurd for the Conservative Party to call itself (sometimes) the Conservative and Unionist Party when it had so few adherents and almost no MPs from Wales or Scotland. After Brexit, the Tories had no need of Scotland and Wales any more than they had ‘needed’ Ireland before 1922. They had Commons majorities without them. These places were as relics from a forgotten empire, tossed into the attic of the British Isles. O’Toole was right. If there was a political crisis looming in Britain it was one of British nationalism.
A vignette well illustrated this confusion. In the summer of 2021, a brush at the G7 summit in Cornwall had the French president Emmanuel Macron teasing Britain’s Johnson for trying to rule four nations as one. Johnson was furious. His was one nation, he said, and no different from France. A French spokesman afterwards pointed out that he was policing the pandemic as four ‘nations’, playing soccer as four nations, rugby as three and the Olympics as just one, Team GB. Could Johnson not make up his mind? As if to press home the tease, the EU suddenly demanded that British cars on the continent carry UK stickers, not GB ones.
New landscapes of identity
Demography now added its contribution. Rural Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland had long shared with much of England the fate of population depletion. This was a shift from the countryside towards the cities and suburbs – ongoing since the eighteenth century – and from the north to the south. For decades, indeed for centuries, rural communities had seen their populations decline and their young leave home. To sustain their prosperity and public services, such regions need sources of new blood, which means policies actively attracting new migrants. One-third of modern Londoners were born overseas. So too were half a million new (southern) Irish – a tenth of the population – overwhelmingly under the age of thirty-five. On them rests its future.
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have seen modest rises in population compared with a surge into England’s south-east. Now it appears that the severe population losses of the second half of the twentieth century have ended. While exhausted industrial communities are still declining, many rural areas have begun to hold their own. This has largely been through attracting those actively seeking new places to live, whether in retirement, for leisure or through a change in the nature of their work. Wales and western Scotland have seen inflows on a similar scale to the West Country and the Lake District, largely of holiday-makers and the retired, often on a drastic scale.
The political scientist David Goodhart defined these demographic changes as a divide between ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’. The somewheres are static, remaining in or near their place of birth, while the anywheres leave home and are on the move. The latter’s geographical loyalty is more tenuous. This obviously has a close relationship to career choice among the young. A friend educated in Liverpool told me that every boy in his class saw success in terms of leaving Liverpool, the dream being a job in London.
This emigration is as old as the fact of industrialisation. But it is peculiarly sensitive in the case of Scotland and Wales, where feelings of national loyal naturally run high. When I asked a Welsh grandmother how many of her offspring still lived in her village, she beamed with pride: ‘None, they’ve all done very well.’ North Welsh dialect has a word for a sheep considered not worth taking to market and left on the hillside, a cwlun. It was sometimes used derogatively of Welsh local politicians who never made it to Cardiff or London.
The impact of this decline in ‘somewheres’ can be drastic. The English-identifying population of Wales is something approaching 30 per cent. These are mostly people living within half an hour of the English border, for whom Wales is in commuting distance of the Midlands or Bristol. Meanwhile, the coastal resorts of western Britain have seen an exodus of established residents in favour of retirement and holiday lets. Second-home owners are a particular bone of contention. Stories are now common of 70–80 per cent of some seaside villages, from Cornwall to Pembroke, from Gwynedd to the Lake District and from Argyll to Oban lying empty for much of the year, rendering many local shops and services impossible to sustain, to the detriment of the year-round population.
The impact of these changes to Scotland can be as devastating as the Highland clearances. Whether the Covid-fuelled move to working from home can recover some of that lost vitality remains to be seen. In many areas the brightest and most enterprising ‘somewheres’ left behind are the farmers and those who live off the land, their families and their businesses geographically rooted. Frequently there can be a sense of two communities, the farmers with their own pubs and shops, and the ‘anywhere’ newcomers.
The fragmentation of identity
These changes in the demography of rural Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are too recent to assess. Parts of Wales known to me have undergone a population turnover of 20–30 per cent in a matter of a decade, and anecdotal evidence is that the same applies to much of Scotland. This has altered everything from the balance of ages in the population to the proportion of residents with local ‘links’ and the nature of local leadership and institutions. Pubs, schools and churches find their regulars have gone. Art, music and drama groups have new members. A community’s cohesion decays and resentments arise. Where this has special impact is on those communities professing a specific, indeed a national, identity. The concept of ‘local’ in a Welsh or Scottish village or town is different from the Cotswolds or East Anglia, or even the Yorkshire dales. The question then arises as to what is the status of that identity and what legal or other steps are appropriate to defending it.
At the same time, newcomers can bring new blood, new young people and, above all, new money, especially useful in communities in decline. If there is any lesson to be drawn from Ireland in the 1990s, it was that new blood is a communal elixir. As one local councillor told me, ‘I prefer to have people at my meetings who have chosen to live in my village to people who want to keep them out, or whose children can’t wait to leave.’
Governments, local and national, must wrestle with how far the civil rights of British citizens, such as those of freedom of movement and settlement, can be limited for the sake of trying to preserve historic communities. They intervene to protect the physical heritage. Should they do so to protect social heritage? Should immigration into a neighbourhood be restricted, as into an Irish Gaeltacht? Should property rights to buy and sell be circumscribed – denying local people the value of their houses? Can internal migration be rationed by ethnic identity, nationality or language ability? Strict controls already operate on council tenancies. Councils in Cornwall tend to reject planning applications from outsider housebuyers. Severe tax surcharges are levied on second homes in Wales.
Most of these measures merely nudge at the edge of what are seismic upheavals. The most serious and controversial have been those concerning the blatant badge of identity, language. Not just language courses but Irish-medium schools have started appearing in Belfast and Londonderry. A Gaelic-medium school has opened in the Hebrides. The most serious steps at language entrenchment have been in Wales, where it has become the emblematic policy of an otherwise empty Plaid Cymru manifesto.
Overtly championed by Saunders Lewis as the key to Welshness – and to the anger of the non-Welsh speaking Welsh – compulsory Welsh has since the 1980s been what the Irish would call Plaid’s ‘mobilising rhetoric’. Councils across Wales have found themselves vulnerable to concerted lobbying for ever more Welsh-medium schools, irrespective of whether local parents (or children) want them. By 2020 some 450 such schools, mostly primary, had been set up, with a quarter of Welsh children reportedly being taught in the language. Often the school is the only Welsh-speaking presence in a town or village, while parents who want their children taught in English must send them away from friends and neighbours to the nearest English-medium facility.
There is no doubt knowledge of Welsh has increased as a result, though a gulf still exists between such knowledge and ‘Welsh-speaking’ at home or work. Meanwhile, the language has become a nationalised industry, with local officials, teachers, care workers, broadcasters and actors being expected to acquire it to get a job, even though it is claimed to be used regularly by just 17 per cent of the population. A commissioner was appointed to hunt for ‘anti-Welsh’ discrimination, with the power of a £5,000 fine. In English-speaking Cardiff, Welsh-speaking has become the badge of the ‘taffia’, or ruling establishment, compared by some to a freemasonry. Universities are increasingly dividing into Welsh- and English-speaking. Aberystwyth even has a Welsh hall of residence.
Where this authoritarian approach leads is the subject of intense controversy. Young people are forced to learn in a language they are most unlikely to use at home, work or play. For whatever reason, Wales has gone to the bottom of the results league in Britain, in PISA ratings, GCSE passes and access to higher education. One observer commented that it was like Latin in medieval France – great for a job in the monastery, but that was all. Wherever I have seen such communally separate schooling, in South Africa, Northern Ireland and elsewhere, it has eroded social cohesion and deterred immigration. In my experience, middle-class families seem better able to handle it than working-class ones. It is highly divisive.
As De Barra found in Ireland, such policies are largely the product of identity politics. They have little impact ‘in changing the primary language through which most students live and work once they leave school’. It is significant that when the Dublin government abandoned language compulsion in the 1980s, it was seen as a gesture of political maturity and confidence. It was no longer ‘needed’.
What was intriguing in Ireland’s case was that the end of compulsion brought, if anything, a surge in voluntary enthusiasm for learning Irish. It became a matter of cultural pride rather than revolutionary discipline. During lockdown Welsh experienced a particularly steep rise. The website Duolingo – where a language is learned for ‘fun not function’ – registered Welsh as its ninth most popular language among learners in the UK, beating French. During 2020 it was also the fastest riser, with a 44 per cent increase in the year. More people were claimed to be learning Welsh voluntarily, 1.5 million, than were doing so compulsorily in Welsh schools. Either way, I would rather learn Welsh as a matter of pride than of political obedience.