This was brought to mind by a fascinating article in Prospect magazine that dredges up the whole question of England and the Union. James Hawes, a historian and author, comes close to suggesting there is no country worth the name, and never has been. It’s a longish piece but well worth a read. He goes back to the dark ages to explain how we in England, and originally in various parts of it, have been governed by different foreign elites.
From the Danes (he could have included the Romans too I suppose) through the French (1066), the Scots (James 1), the Dutch (1689) and the Germans in Hanoverian Britain, our rulers have quite often been foreigners who couldn’t even speak the same language as the ordinary people.
He draws a big distinction between the north and south which he says is and always has been irreconcilable. He cites Churchill having a go at answering the EVEL (English votes for English laws) question by suggesting an ‘imperial’ parliament overseeing the devolved nations and the empire, plus one for England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Before that got off the ground the Irish decided they had had enough anyway as Hawes claims Scotland will very soon. This is Hawes:
"In 1912, Churchill—desperately trying to hold together his beloved UK—knew very well that in seven of the eight elections since the dawn of the modern democratic era in 1884, the Tories had carried England thanks to their total command of the south. This would doom his proposed imperial parliament for a federal UK: “If there were, as there very likely might be, a divergence of feeling and policy between the English parliament and the imperial parliament, the quarrel between these two tremendously powerful bodies might tear the state in halves and bring great evils upon us all. To avoid the possibility of such a quarrel”—the Westminster Gazette had the MP for Dundee saying, before he concluded by pre-empting the logic Gordon Brown is peddling today—'they would have to face the task of dividing England into several great self-governing areas'.”
He also quotes the words of Lloyd George which might prove inspirational for Boris Johnson to use about Scotland in a few years time.
"A century ago, prime minister Lloyd George explained to parliament that Ireland, the nation that comprised almost a third of “us” when we were founded in 1801 (and which provided almost 40 per cent of the British Army in 1840) had finally lost patience: 'scores of millions—I am not sure I could not say, hundreds of millions—have been expended lavishly by the British taxpayer on making Ireland contented… But the fact remains that Ireland has never been so alienated from British rule as it is today. Therefore the grievance, such as it is, is not a material one'.”
Interesting how history repeats itself eh?
When Scotland, Ireland and probably Wales are gone:
"In a lonely England, the north-south divide will be as clear as when Bede first noted it 1,300 years ago. Since Disraeli, our elected leaders have often spoken of it. Many have explicitly framed policies to bridge it. None has succeeded. For England’s twin economies and cultures aren’t just different, they are incompatible. As recent by-elections have shown, you can’t please both the Red Wall and the Home Counties. For all its patriotic blather, this government, like every other, will eventually have to choose its England."
England, says Mr Hawes, is "no more a single country than Great Britain or the UK. The 'Jurassic divide' in our geology—traced by the Trent-Humber river—has split England since before it was England. Archaeologists can work out immediately whether an Iron Age settlement came from north or south of it.
"From early on, the tribes who entered post-Roman Britannia from Germany bifurcated naturally along this ancient line. The first great English historian, the Venerable Bede from Northumbria, mentioned an over-arching split between northerners and southerners nine times in his work. In his lifetime, the Church of Rome recognised this by dividing its English organisation into the York and Canterbury branches."
He says the Tory party is now the party of English nationalism and I think this is right. We know Farage was a Tory and many members of UKIP fled to the Conservatives and I don't think it's beyond imagination that members of the BNP or English National Party would find themselves quite comfortable in the modern Tories.
He asks why this hasn't happened before:
"The obvious question is: why didn’t the Conservatives become English nationalists then [in 1885]? They couldn’t because this elite were first and foremost imperialists: citizens of everywhere and hence nowhere, as we might now say. To them, 'England' wasn’t any real nation but a vision of Imperial HQ (not for nothing did Kipling ask 'what do they know of England who only England know?'). Yet after 1885, their power depended on the loyalty of southern English voters and a nationalism that they had to keep safely contained."
Hawes says, "Scotland, seeing that the game was up for the UK, went over almost totally to the SNP at the [2015] general election, and followed up the next year by voting the opposite way to England in the Brexit referendum."
The final proof that it's all over for the UK or, as the FT once put it, Brexit had “read the rites over British conservatism” comes from polling which shows clear majorities of Tory voters were and are prepared to end the UK to accomplish Brexit which was "merely the means to free up a new English nationalism—led from the south."
Before you say other modern European countries also came together out of regional power bases, Italy and Germany being to the two best and most recent examples, they didn’t have an imperial legacy or mindset and neither did they try to keep former national identities in ‘united’ kingdoms.
In a few years time the notion of the four nations being united will be laughable.
