England is a confusing country. Just look at the English national football (soccer) team and their fans. If you watch footage from their famous World Cup victory in 1966, you will notice that many England supporters are waving the Union Jack flag. The Union Jack is a combination of three flags: the Scottish white-on-blue saltire of St. Andrew, the Irish red-on-white saltire of St. Patrick, and the English red cross of St. George. They are brought together in the Union Jack to symbolize a united isles—the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, a short-lived sovereign state founded in the nineteenth century. Never mind that Wales, the fourth nation in the union, is not represented on the flag. Or that by 1966 Ireland had been out of the union for 44 years (though Northern Ireland remained). Or indeed that it was England—not Britain, nor the UK—winning the World Cup.
Now let us fast forward to 1996. England are playing in the European Championships. Watch footage from that tournament and you will barely see a Union Jack in sight. Instead, England fans are now flying the St. George’s Cross, England’s flag. How unusual it is for fans of a national football team to change their flag so comprehensively despite no formal change in the corresponding nation or indeed their flag.
One possible reason for this flag switch is that English folk started seeing England as a discrete identity separate from their British identity. This discovery of a national identity is the topic of Englishness, by Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones. Their argument is that a surging English nationalism has disrupted British politics, introducing a series of contradictions that will surely see the UK heading toward crisis. They reach this conclusion through a method that places extensive analysis of survey data in a wider political context to produce an analytical narrative of rising English nationalism over the past few decades. The book is an instant classic in the study of British politics.
Englishness is a culmination of a long-standing research agenda that the authors have pursued in collaboration with other political scientists. Long before Englishness was proposed as an explanation for the Brexit vote in 2016, this research team was researching the politics of English national identity, chiefly through a series of major surveys of public attitudes. The results from those surveys—that English national identity is on the rise—proved prescient. Chapter 1 surveys the role that Englishness played in two crucial electoral events: the 2015 UK general election (where talk of a coalition between the Labour Party and Scottish National Party spooked a number of English voters into supporting the Conservative Party) and the 2016 EU referendum (which despite being about the sovereign status of the UK was notably supported by those describing themselves as English rather than British).
This analysis goes to show that England is indeed a confusing country. As the football flag-waving shows, many English people have at least two national identities: English and British. Chapter 2 highlights how the relationship between these two identities has changed over the past 30 years. In 1992, those in England identified themselves as British rather than English by a ratio of two to one. By 2011, more people in England were likely to describe themselves as English. Digging into the data, however, the authors show that this is not just about the rise of Englishness per se, but also the fall of Britishness. Why the change?
The book’s explanation hinges on how recent changes to the British state have simultaneously encouraged a revitalized Englishness while also leaving those with that identity feeling cheated, underappreciated, and ignored. The authors develop the concept of “devo-anxiety” to highlight core parts of this dynamic. The “devo” part refers chiefly to devolution, the process in the late 1990s whereby power was granted to the three minority countries of the UK—Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—in the form of legislative bodies, thereby highlighting the politics of England. The “anxiety” part refers to attitudes of some English voters in response to this: that England is not sufficiently recognized (it has no equivalent devolved assembly), that England loses out fiscally to Scotland (who receive a disproportionate level of UK public spending), and that the sovereignty of Parliament is under threat. For similar reasons, those who identify as English also tend to be Eurosceptic. This direction of travel—the dilution of sovereignty, England ignored—is anathema to English nationalism, whose proponents see glory in the historical expansion of England through Britain and its empire.
This helps to explain some of the puzzling overlap between England and Britain: for English nationalists, Britain is a vehicle for expanding England’s greatness, but has been corrupted in recent years. England needs to change Britain for the better by returning to those values. In this worldview, Brexit is an important step. But a step toward what, exactly? A kind of UK independence, with sovereignty de-pooled, but for what ends is not especially clear in the terms of the ideology. This ambiguity about the end goals of English nationalism is key to understanding why it is so disruptive to British politics. Chapter 7 reviews how English nationalists can be accommodated and concludes there is no obvious way to do so. English nationalists want a strong, sovereign Parliament, so a dedicated English assembly will not help. More devolution of any kind will likely strengthen English nationalist grievances, yet is surely what the future holds.
There are a couple of weaknesses to the book and its approach. This is clearly a book pitched at a British politics audience, written to be read beyond political scientists. This can pose a trade-off between relevance (in this case to nonacademics interested in British politics) and significance (to scholars interested in nationalism more generally). Succeeding in one is challenging enough and this book certainly achieves the former. The uniqueness of English nationalism remains somewhat an open question, despite some comparative analysis in chapter 8.
The book explains the recent rise of English nationalism very well, but a proper explanation needs to appropriately address the extent to which it was a re-surge or just a surge. While the English nation has existed for many centuries, it is unclear how old English nationalism is, given that nationalist ideology only started to spread through Europe after the initial union between England and Scotland in 1707. Some of these questions are addressed in wider literature—one can think of Tom Nairn and Andrew Gamble, both of whom successfully place English nationalism in the long durée of British political development—but this kind of work is only mentioned in passing (or not at all in the case of Gamble). Devolution is a key factor in the explanation of the book. But devolution is presented as a fact, rather than the contingent outcome of a centuries-long struggle to hold together the various unions founded on and through these North Atlantic isles, of which this question of Englishness is a current manifestation. Taking a historical perspective, however, would be a challenge for a book so wedded to public attitudes. But perhaps that is the only way to truly grasp the coming constitutional crisis of the UK.
