Will the English ever revolt? The threat of ethnonationalism is a progressive fantasy

English nationalism, indeed, often appears like a culture-bound syndrome of Celtic nationalists, a foil for them to rage against, or a danger to be guarded from, even as England continues on its course with amiable indifference. Bearers of strong ethnic identities themselves, Celtic nationalists perceive their equivalent potential in England, even if the English themselves prefer not to. From the Ukania hypothesis of British dysfunction and disintegration put forward by the Scottish nationalist Tom Nairn and Anglo-Irish grandee Perry Anderson, to the musings of the recently-deceased Labour MP-turned-Welsh-nationalist David Marquand, England is a problem to be urgently solved, by granting the English a sensible, Scandinavian-style social democracy before the English belatedly adopt something harder-edged for themselves.

It is explicitly within this vein of thought that the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has published her new book, Another England, written to fend off the risk that “politicians and others… will use this latent tension for their own ends, stirring up emotions, provoking confrontations, and hoping to ride the same kind of nativist rage that took Donald Trump to the White House”. There is much to admire in Lucas’ book: her love of England’s natural beauty, so poorly served by Conservatives who profess guardianship of the land; her appreciation of the genuine diversity of dialect, vernacular architecture and sentiment packed into such a small area; her sensitive reading of English Literature, drawing on her PhD research. Many of her suggestions — for an English Parliament, civic autonomy, a land value tax, nationalisation of common goods, and expansion of the right to roam — are sensible and good: all are sentiments that are, in their way, fundamentally conservative, at least when compared to the radical liberalism of the Conservative Party. 

Yet the remarkable thing about her book — perhaps the most English thing about it — is its squeamishness in framing Englishness as a national identity like other national identities, the cultural heritage of a specific people in a specific place over historical time: just like the Japanese, or the Palestinians, or the Kurds (whose lack of national self-determination in their ancient homeland Lucas takes the time to lament). Remarkably, hers is a book about fending off English ethnonationalism in which her object of inquiry, the English as an ethnic group, does not appear. 

The reasoning is swiftly apparent. She opens with a lament over Brexit having cut our island off from European politics — but though she alludes once to Europe’s rising wave of Right-wing populism, she strenuously avoids addressing the cause. But look at our closest, most impeccably liberal and social-democratic European neighbours: in Germany, the most popular party among the young is the AfD; in Denmark, the Social Democratic government aims for “Net Zero Migration”; in Sweden, the radical Right is buoyant, and in the Netherlands it is the largest political force. Even Ireland, now that it is belatedly undergoing a parallel demographic transformation to the UK, seems to be developing a significantly more volatile reaction (to the discomfort of Irish liberals, who have begun claiming that Irish populism is somehow a British plot).

If anything is remarkable about England, however, it is the near-total absence of such a political current. This is despite the fact that England, far more than Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, is currently undergoing the greatest wave of demographic change since the historic folk migration that carved an England out of Brythonic-speaking Britain in the first place. Lucas herself is relaxed about such a historic shift, even as she observes the academic consensus, like Europe’s observable political reality, is towards it driving political disorder. “On current trends,” she notes, “the white British will become a minority (though still by far the largest minority) at some point in the 2070s… and academic thinking has come from different directions — demography, politics, sociology — to identify this phenomenon as a decisive driver in political populism. But it doesn’t have to be.” 

Yet anyone anticipating a groundbreaking rebuttal of the social-scientific literature finds only the assertion that: “For one thing, we can be confident that a more diverse population is a strength.” In any case, she reassures us, “I won’t be around in the 2070s to see an England where… [future generations] do not see a multi-ethnic, multicultural society as something to fear”. It must be said that the English have taken to such a historically transformative, high-stakes experiment with a rare degree of equanimity. 

Whether or not she is correct, Lucas’s serene detachment is, ironically enough, an unreflexive example of the English Exceptionalism she lays at the door of the Eton and Oxford rotters at the top. Other less enlightened nations may turn to angry reaction as an inevitable result, but such things simply aren’t British… sorry, English. And perhaps she’s right: England really does appear to be an outlier, certainly within Europe. While the majority, in increasing numbers, believe migration, especially under the Conservatives, has been too high — even Lucas states that “in the short to medium term at least, some rules on immigration are also necessary” — there is admirably little hostility to migrants themselves. There are, after all, few if any other nations so solicitous of minorities as to wish to become one: perhaps the English really are the most liberal and tolerant nation on earth. 

Even still, it is impossible to read this book without sensing Lucas recapitulating all the outward-looking, world-beating, boosterish exceptionalism she mocks in the British ruling class, and squeezing it into England’s smaller container. In a book ostensibly aimed at carving out an English political imagination from the constraints of the British state, she spends a chapter lamenting the British Empire, including for its “essentially racist notion that the ‘white man’ had a moral duty to care for… ‘less fortunate peoples’” (no doubt this is different to her own desire to host the less affluent of the Earth). Brexit itself, and the ongoing culture wars over the past, Lucas reads as a top-down displacement activity launched by Westminster elites to stifle progressive change — rather than, as the academic literature predicts, a displacement proxy conflict fought by the dwindling ethnic majority against demographic change, no different to Ulster Protestant fears over the Irish language and Irish Republican symbolism. 

Like the English themselves, the very reason she is writing this book in the first place can only be addressed obliquely, like some malign folk spirit whose naming grants it power. Even as the liberal order is shaken by ethnic conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine, today’s liberals cannot bring themselves, as their predecessors in the Nineties were able to, to address their long-described dynamics frankly, retreating to their comfort zones of Americanised race discourse and elite-driven conspiracies.

It is fascinating, then, that the precipitating factor for Lucas’s call for Englishness is her sympathy for the separatist Celtic nationalisms, which she understands as perfectly natural historical developments. Though she does not address this point, these are of course ethnic nationalisms: the Scottish and Welsh and Irish are nations by virtue not just of their inherent “cultural stuff” (in the anthropologist Fredrik Barth’s phrase), but of the amicable but real ethnic boundaries demarcating the Welsh and Scottish from the English, and the Irish from the British peoples. It is not, after all, through racism that Welsh nationalists resent English homeowners moving into their country or weakening the vitality of their language, but ethnic consciousness and fear of the cultural change English migration brings. 

The fact that these ethnic boundaries are permeable — that Gerry Adams possesses a solidly English surname, and Arlene Foster was born with a good native Irish one — does not mean they do not exist. When, in Lucas’s telling, the Welsh and Scots set off in pursuit of their historical destiny by leaving the United Kingdom, and the Northern Irish (due to shifts in political power wrought by demographic change, though Lucas does not address this dynamic) join the Republic, then the English will find themselves, like the Austrians and Russians before them, heirs to a shrunken state, and at risk of all manner of unprogressive political malignities. It is the work of Westminster liberals, in this reading, to shape political Englishness before the English find it thrust upon them, and Nigel Farage finds his inner Atatürk. Whether the proportional representation Lucas advocates would neuter such an eventuality, as she imagines, or accelerate it, as European politics suggests, remains unclear.

But the assumption, made by Celtic nationalists as well as the English liberal Left, that the English are inherently prone to an aggressively exclusionary ethnic nationalism, which requires constant diverting in a healthily multicultural direction, is so far not borne out by the evidence. When Scotland and Wales, which possess the homogeneous demographics of mid-20th century England, reach the same stage — if they ever do — their nationalist critiques of English intolerance may be worth listening to. As we have seen, it is the precise contrary that is most remarkable, a situation that is poorly explained other than by that unfashionable thing, national temperament. Perhaps that will change, perhaps not: one way or another we will find out, even if Lucas won’t. 

As the writer Paul Kingsnorth (who Lucas incidentally cites in her acknowledgements, without engaging with intellectually) remarked in his own St George’s Day missive, perhaps England’s new non-English majority will choose to become English over time, as immigrant Irish and Jews did before them; or perhaps “England is simply coming to an end, as all nations ultimately do.” But for now, the English seem uniquely happy, or resigned, or apathetic about merging their nation into a new and determinedly bloodless civic identity, a European Canada or Australia. 

In waiting for the English to begin to hate, England’s powerless radical Right, like its dominant equivalents on the liberal Left, have been left waiting a very long time. Here is the irony of Lucas’s position: lamenting an English exceptionalism her worldview depends upon, and yearning for political unity with a Europe whose politics she detests. Perhaps Westminster politicians like Lucas, so keen to ward off the dark potential of English ethnonationalism, can cut the English nation a little slack: if the fearful dragon ever existed, it seems to have died long before our time.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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