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Home Rule For England, English Nationalism, and Edwardian Debates About Constitutional Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2017

G. K. Peatling
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Extract

The body of recent historical explorations of Englishness and Britishness can seem practically interminable. To some, this work is more a cause than a product of the dynamic underlying recent constitutional changes in the United Kingdom. Linda Colley, in particular, is singled out for vituperation by right-wing commentators for an alleged attempt to depict the United Kingdom as “an artificial creation, built from opposition to Frenchmen and Catholics and lacking any form of coherent cultural core,” thus preparing the ground for its wilful destruction by the Blair government. Yet others have suggested that Colley overstated the hegemony of the idea of Britishness among the nations of the United Kingdom. It is contended that British identity penetrated in England to a unique degree, a process which has produced long-term imbalance and instability in the United Kingdom. Tom Nairn thus blamed English arrogance for this instability. For other commentators the historical absence of a tangible demand for English self-government is to be problematized and regarded as an indication of “backwardness.” As Bernard Crick wrote: “England is the problem. Because English nationalism is suppressed and not explicit, it is soured, not wholly in control of its own reactions and is difficult to deal with by the other nations.”

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Research Article
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Albion , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , Spring 2003 , pp. 71 - 90
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Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 2003

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86 Observer (20 Mar. 1932): 16b. The assumption that England can lead the world in doing without national identity altogether, though most often found on the “internationalist” English left, can thus be seen as a curious hangover of the British empire: see Michael Bywater, “Englishness: who cares?,” New Statesman (3 Apr. 2000): 11-2.

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88 An attitude apparently most common amongst English radicals, whose efforts at political pluralism, though noisy, were often fundamentally half-hearted: See Daily News (8 May 1916): 44-8.

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93 Peathng, British opinion, p. 118.

94 Note however that Gladstone’s Scottish connections lead him to be claimed by some Scots: Forsyth, “Empire and Union,” p. 9.

95 Lecky, “Some aspects of home rule,” pp. 636-37. Jonathan Parry observes that Gladstone’s championing of Scottish and Welsh nationalism, which incurred Lecky’s ire, “generated more distrust of him in England, especially among those most anxious for Great Britain to play a forceful international role.” While this is a substantially accurate observation, it begs many questions: Parry, Jonathan, The rise and fall of Liberal government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1993), p. 306.Google Scholar

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98 Notes on nationalism,” in George Orwell, Decline of the English murder and other essays (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 164, 163. In his defense, Orwell is not just talking here about nationalism as modern observers would understand it, but two attitudes which have been associated with it by some scholars: “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’,” and, more fundamentally, “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests” (pp. 156, 155).

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102 On which see Eastwood, David, Government and community in the English provinces, 1700-1870 (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 1–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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