The Politics of English Nationhood

Abstract

This volume supplies a comprehensive overview of evidence and arguments relating to the revival of Englishness, and explores its political ramifications and dimensions. It examines the difficulties which the major political parties have encountered in dealing with ‘the English question’ against the backdrop of the diminishing hold of established ideas of British government and Britishness in the final years of the last century. And it explores a range of factors-including insecurities generated by economic change, Euroscepticism, and a growing sense of cultural anxiety-which created the conditions for a renewal of English nationhood. The book provides a powerful challenge to the two established orthodoxies in this area. These either maintain that the English are dispositionally unable to assert their own nationhood outside the framework of the British state, or point to the supposed resurgence of a resentful and reactive sense of English nationalism. This volume instead demonstrates that a renewed, resonant, and internally divided sense of English nationhood is apparent, and reaches across the lines of class, while also refracting some of the divides associated with them. It characterizes several distinct and competing visions of the English nation in this period, contrasting the appearance of populist and resentful forms of English nationalism with an embedded and deeply rooted sense of conservative Englishness and attempts to reconstruct a more liberal and civic idea of a multicultural England. The book gives particular emphasis to the cultural aspects of the renewal of Englishness and the limited and tentative manner in which politicians and policy-makers have, as yet, engaged with this trend.

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