‘We shall never know we are Englishmen until we have lost India.’ I conceal the source of that Great Victorian quotation for the moment, but it’s a good point of departure for exploration of post-imperial England. I meant to offer the Scottish Review an account of an ‘undiscovered’ England to match my account of what had escaped me in Scotland. Instead I found myself wondering whether England has been rediscovered, not least by the English themselves. And how the English see themselves is a matter of intense interest for Scots who live next door – very close but a bit different.
When I first knew England as a student and (something that dates me) as a national serviceman, I soon recognised many of the differences. The most obvious was that the lower orders had accents that took a little getting used to, for they were sparingly heard on the BBC, our only broadcaster and source, along with D C Thomson’s boys’ papers, of my earliest impressions of England. But there were few signs of strident or even distinctively English self-assertion. The St George’s Cross made only an occasional limp appearance on country churches.
The natives were friendly enough and the main problem for the Scot was their inability to distinguish between the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’ which, if not treated as synonymous, seemed inter-changeable, as they were in that curious quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Inland Voyage’. Nowadays most Scots, even those as unionist as myself, not only recognise and understand but clearly state the difference. The English don’t understand it but, as I later discovered, unconsciously recognise it.
I can trace the moment of my discovery. I was watching a rerun of the first episode of ‘Dad’s Army’. Captain Mainwaring is exhorting his newly mustered local defence volunteers to defend their homes and loved ones. ‘We English…’, he continues, but the speech comes to an emergency stop before the Ancient-Mariner’s gaze of Private Frazer: ‘We British….’, it resumes.
There’s a truth hidden in the over-worked joke – not just the necessary political correction but the key to that apparent carelessness of English usage. When Scots (or Irish) unionists speak and think also as British there’s an emotional as well as intellectual conviction usually absent among the English when they choose to be British. Rupert Brooke could not have written of a foreign field forever Britain, or Browning of Britain now that April’s there.
The English can grasp the notion of the British constitution, parliament, and crown, but when the more personal and emotional aspects of monarchy arise they lapse too often into what ought to be an untutored Americanism and talk of ‘the Queen of England’. Only in the great age of empire, of rousing British cheers and British pluck, did English emotions reach beyond those of ‘Little Englanders’. For even the most imperialist Englishman recognised the British Empire as a partnership with Scots and such Irish as were so minded. It was appropriate that the only emotional concept of home and beauty briefly to rival an idealised England – the soldier’s ‘Blighty’ – was linguistically as well as historically derived from India.
For all that, I wish England well, hopeful in some things and anxious about others. My chief hope is that while its urge for political regionalism remains weak its provincialism may be reviving.
With India long since ‘lost’, Stevenson’s oddly-worded prophecy has to be taken seriously. I have long seen a self-evident connection between the end of empire and growth of Scottish nationalism. But it was also inevitable, even without stimulus or provocation from Scottish and Welsh devolution, that a post-imperial age should bring reassessment of English identity. That has now happened, both in crude ways associated with football chauvinism and the ‘English Defence League’ and in thoughtful and moderate ones. They range from the increasing celebration of St George’s Day and flag to the campaign for an English parliament and the inclination of some English Tories (despite David Cameron’s firm hand) to ‘let the Scots go if they want to’. With symbolic gestures and constitutional speculations go day-to-day grumbles about the way devolution finances seem to favour Scots on a range of issues from student fees to social work care.
There’s enough substance in these moods to make me wonder whether Tam Dalyell’s West Lothian Question over devolution is giving way to the English Question. It’s logical to have either regional assemblies or an English parliament to make for a more symmetrical devolutionary system for the United Kingdom. I doubt if it’s practicable. I’ve never met any desire in England for the artificial revival of Wessex or Mercia and even the best-looking prospect, Northumbria, came to nothing. I’d like an English parliament and executive to be workable but I still doubt if they can be, even if consigned to Crewe or Basingstoke, for they might overshadow Westminster and Downing Street. It was bad enough having the SNP and their fellow-travellers pretending in 1999 they were reviving the pre-1707 Scots parliament without inviting local English politicians to see themselves as the true heirs of Hampden, Pym, and Cromwell.
For all that, I wish England well, hopeful in some things and anxious about others. My chief hope is that while its urge for political regionalism remains weak its provincialism may be reviving. Cultural provincialism has an honourable history in English literature and politics: Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy; J B Priestley and Arnold Bennett; Joseph Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin; C P Scott and ‘Coronation Street’. Even Shakespeare returned to his roots in Stratford.
It was when Scott’s Manchester Guardian fled to London that I began to think English provincialism was done for, and the decay of BBC and ITV regional broadcasting seemed to confirm that. Even where studios remain and programmes are made they are not strong – apart from ‘Coronation Street’ and ‘The Archers’ – in regional character. Where major regional newspapers like the Yorkshire Post survive they struggle even more than Scottish papers against the dominance of wherever Fleet Street has moved to. But now I wonder if I was wrong because I thought too much as a media man. In an age of media multiplicity the prestige papers and grand studios, much as I love and want them, may not be as necessary as they once were to assert provincial confidence and character.
Seeing Bristol again recently cheered me up. Its modest regional daily and good evening paper are no great powers in the land, though I’m glad I was once on a takeover inquiry that blocked an undesirable bid for them. It has a substantial BBC presence, but the most distinguished part is a natural history unit more concerned with Madagascar than the West Country. Yet to visit Bristol now is to sense why it was once and may be again the second city of England. It has sorted itself out after the damage done by a wartime battering and too hasty rebuilding. It has been more successful than Glasgow in making its old inner-city dockland fit for new purposes. And who with any sense of amenity, environment, and history – for Bristol’s’ history takes in Brunel, Burke, and Wesley, reform riots and the moral challenge to slavery – would not rather live there than in a London suburb?
Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham haven’t the same attraction but have also picked themselves up. That is the good news. The bad news comes in tensions within urban England (especially Birmingham and some northern towns) and the possibility that an increasingly cosmopolitan London may become as separate from the rest of England as New York often seems to be from the United States. Significantly, London gained the 2012 Olympic Games by emphasising that cosmopolitan character and English football, in which the provinces still count for more than the capital, was cruelly rebuffed when it sought the 2018 World Cup.
What worries me about contemporary England is that some fresh assertions of English identity are reactions to changes that have come too fast and gone too far.
There’s nothing new in worrying about whether London’s sprawl and scale are good for England. See, for example, the polemics about ‘the Great Wen’ from William Cobbett, the radical patriot who comes across as an early 19th-century Orwell. What’s new is the extent to which immigration, unexpected in scale, pace and variety, has not only changed the face of large parts of London (in ways quite different from anything seen in Scotland) but raised questions about what it is to be English. Is it simply to live in England? Or is it to belong to an indigenous culture and tradition to which many new inhabitants of England are not admitted or choose not to belong?
To raise this question is to risk being accused of ‘racism’ – as all-embracing a charge as the old service one of ‘conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline’ – or to lapse into clichés of liberal optimism which insists that modern immigration will be as beneficial as Huguenots, Scots, and Jews were when London absorbed them. I therefore let it be raised in a quotation which I find as striking as the one from Stevenson about losing India. It’s from the successful writer, Precious Williams, West African in origin but raised in England. ‘I am an African and also British but no "enlargement of whiteness" is ever going to result in me being labelled English.’ (Independent, 17 May).
Maybe that’s only a personal view but there’s corroborative evidence. Try googling for British Asians and English Asians. I got 156,000 references for the first and for the second was referred back to British Asians. Or try ‘black British’ – millions of entries – and ‘black English’, where you seem consistently directed to language and not people.
What worries me about contemporary England is that some fresh assertions of English identity are reactions to changes that have come too fast and gone too far, forcing the other parts of the United Kingdom to worry in new ways about the English Question.
In the half-century since the end of empire the problems of maintaining the United Kingdom have seemed to be about accommodating the reassertion of Scottish and Welsh identity and the dual identity of Northern Ireland. We worried about how to relate to an increasingly centralised, London-dominated England. Now Scots have to consider how we relate to a more self-conscious, assertive but less united England containing many people who live there but think of themselves as hyphenated British rather than English.
I neither want England to become a mere geographical expression nor to see a racial rather than a cultural prescription for what it means to be English. I loved many things in the old England and disliked a few. Now, despite the signs of rediscovery, I’m not sure what the new one will be like, politically or culturally.
R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster and a former editor of the Church of Scotland’s magazine Life and Work
