In defence of the Little Englander We can track his evolution through football

This was the week a German became the manager of England — or as the Daily Mail put it, a GERMAN. And it was a week of “debate” about the reaction to having a German in charge. “Anyone watching this press conference with Thomas Tuchel who still thinks we should have ‘gone English’ with our new manager is living in Cloud ‘Little Englander’ Cuckoo Land,” ventured Piers Morgan on X, capturing the view of the centrist masses: bien pensant populism for the podcast era.

Many others piled in. “My mother was born in Nazi Germany and had to flee for her life,” wrote David Baddiel. “I’m OK with it. So fuck off.” Much was aimed at the Daily Mail. One comment which captured the spirit of anti-Daily Mailers simply said: “Ha ha ha ha!.. I’m loving this appointment, if only for how much it triggers the little englander gammons.” A Labour councillor had the same thought: “It’s exactly the kind of pathetic Little Englander comment expected from the Mail.”

The reaction to Tuchel’s appointment certainly reveals much about Britain today. One obvious conclusion is that to be a “Little Englander” remains the ultimate faux pas in polite society, universally understood as a bad thing combining all that is wrong and embarrassing about our country: small-minded, parochial, uncouth and, well, embarrassing.

Rather than being a distinctive set of views, Little Englandism is more of a sensibility marking out the stupid in the eyes of their betters. See, for instance, how the former Sun editor turned anti-Brexit commentator, David Yelland, described the recent brouhaha about Taylor Swift’s security as “utterly ridiculous, Little Englander, pathetic and damaging to the reputation of the country”. What will the neighbours think remains the most powerful instinct in English life and a core tenet of anti-Little Englandism. A large dose of the shame many felt, and feel, about Brexit is reputational.

To admit to being in any way uncomfortable with Tuchel’s appointment is, then, to reveal a characteristic that automatically makes you suspect, perhaps even a little conservative — or worst of all, Brexity. The historian Linda Colley has described Little Englandism as the reaction to the loss of Empire, or “the other side of unparalleled imperial dominion”, as she put it: “A cleaving to the small and the relatively known in the face of alarm or fatigue or disgust at the prospect of the very large and very strange.”

“Cleaving to the known” is not a respectable look any more. What is prized is a sense of well-travelled ease and gentle sophistication: to understand what everything means on the menu and to abhor the kind of English nationalism that is the preserve of the “skinheads, lager louts, and soccer hooligans”, as the New Yorker put it in an essay on Brexit. This was the essential analysis of the Irish historian Fintan O’Toole, too, who believed such Little Englandism had been largely suppressed “until David Cameron blithely gave it a vast stage in June 2016”.

But it did not always carry this connotation. It was originally adopted in the late 19th century to criticise those who opposed the British empire. The term was adopted by Britain’s most enthusiastic imperialists whose poet and prophet was Rudyard Kipling, and who had used his “Recessional”, first printed in the Times in 1897, to warn Britain that it must take up imperial duties, lest:

If drunk with the sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law.

As J.B. Priestley wrote in The Edwardians, not everyone shared that view. “I remain a ‘Little Englander’,” he wrote, irrespective of the label, “believing that no people are good enough to rule other people thousands of miles away.” But this understanding of Little Englandism has almost entirely vanished.

It was during post-war Britain that it changed subtly from meaning small-minded socialist opposition to empire, to small-minded socialist opposition to Europe. In the parliamentary debates over the Schuman declaration of 1950 — proposing a new supranational entity called the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to today’s EU — Winston Churchill was mocked from the Labour benches for his “champagne” continentalism, which was contrasted with their “honest draft” of British socialism that they represented. At the time, most Conservative Eurosceptics were “empire loyalists” who could not be defined as Little Englanders because they were concerned primarily with maintaining British power overseas.

As the winds of change blew through the British empire, the instinct to attack Little Englanders passed from the old imperialists to the new pro-Europeans who saw the EEC as a vehicle to protect British influence in the world. Just as Colley identified Little Englandism as “the other side of unparalleled imperial dominion”, so too is British pro-Europeanism.

For Ted Heath, the first — and last — genuinely federalist prime minister to hold office, Europe was always the means to make Britain great again. From the beginning, then, the animating spirit of Britain’s pro-European movement has been tied up with a desire for greatness — or at least relevance. A good example of this tendency came in an interview with the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Alex Younger, who described how he came back from a recent trip around Europe “profoundly depressed… nobody mentions the UK”.

Worse even than the neighbours sniggering at us, then, is the neighbours forgetting that we’re here. Do the Little Englanders not understand this? “What should they know of England who only England know?” Kipling asked. Priestley’s response was simple enough: “A great deal Imperialism chose to ignore.” “While it was busy painting so much of the world map a bright red, hundreds of thousands of houses down England’s mean streets could have done with a lick of paint.” It is an argument that has never really changed.

What is so striking about the evolution of the idea of Little Englandism in post-war Britain is that it managed to retain its negative connotation while completely changing who it applied to. And as with the reaction to Tuchel, it is possible to catch glimpses of this evolution through football.

As Dominic Sandbrook points out in his account of the early Seventies, State of Emergency, when Heath signed the Treaty of Accession taking Britain into the EEC, the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, chose to display his patriotic disinterest by not only staying in Britain to avoid giving his blessing, but going to a football match. He was an ordinary Englishmen.

Attempting to counteract this, Heath tried to sell Britain’s entry into Europe by staging an international friendly football match at Wembley in which a combined eleven from the six original EEC members took on a team from Britain, Denmark and Ireland, the bloc’s three new members. Pat Jennings, Bobby Charlton, Johnny Giles and Peter Lorimer turned out for the “Three”, while Dino Zoff, Franz Beckenbauer, Ruud Krol and Johan Neeskens played for the “Six”. Yet the public reacted with a notable lack of interest, with only 36,000 turning up for the occasion.

Back in the Seventies, English football was far more parochial, with almost all the managers and players either English, British or Irish. Ironically, however, this was also the time of English dominance in Europe. In the 12 years between British entry into the EEC, in 1973, and the Heysel stadium disaster of 1985, after which all English teams were banned from European competition, English club sides reached the final of the European Cup nine times and won the competition seven times — including six times in a row between 1977 and 1982. For all the financial dominion of the Premier League today, and its access to the best foreign talent and managers, it has never come close to the success it knew when it was run by the Little England gammons of old.

Curiously, English football has almost entirely managed to swerve the Little Englandism stigma that has attached itself to other mass entertainments. In fact, so successfully has football adapted to the post-war growth of the educated middle class, that to be a fan today still offers the kind of everyman credibility that it did for Wilson in the Seventies, without any hint of disreputability that might come from, say, a visit to a UFC fight. Today, the Prime Minister is expected to understand and comment about football and even welcome the appointment of the new England manager.

Just as Britain is much more middle class than it was, so too is football. Our pundits are expected to adhere to the social expectations of its fans, avoiding any hint of parochial backwardness. A host of football podcasts now describe the sophistication and quality of continental football, mocking the provincialism of pundits such as Richard Keys and Andy Gray who dominated in the Nineties before being sacked for “prehistoric banter”. Today, the pair are the highly paid frontmen of the Qatar-based BeIN Sports where they talk about the English game with what today’s generation see as similarly prehistoric views. The stain of “Little Englandism” is now as toxic in football as it is in most other aspects of middle-class life. To be critical of Thomas Tuchel’s appointment is to emit a whiff of that small-minded parochialism.

Such instincts are not new. Even George Orwell, who admired what he saw as the gentle patriotism of the English, remarked upon the “insularity” of his countrymen and their “refusal to take foreigners seriously”. Perhaps this was true in the Forties, but it’s hard to argue that today despite the reaction of some former players and pundits to Tuchel’s appointment.

There is not another football league in the world which is as global in its reach or talent as the Premier League. Where there were hardly any foreign managers in the league in the Seventies, today 80% of Premier League managers are foreign. In fact, since the Premier League’s inception in 1992, not a single English manager has guided a team to the league. Tuchel is the third foreign manager to take on the England job after Sven Goren Erikson and Fabio Capello, neither of whom did as well as Gareth Southgate.

In contrast, not one of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Brazil or Argentina have appointed a foreign manager to take on their national team. For all the knee-jerk reaction to the Little Englander gammons who criticised the appointment of a GERMAN, English football, much like its economy, is not marked by its insularity but the opposite — its distinctive openness. While the French rule yoghurt manufacturers to be of strategic national interest unable to be bought by overseas investors, we let the French build our core energy infrastructure. The irony of the Little England charge, in other words, is that the real marker of European sophistication would be to be less open to the world — and less English.

The appointment of Thomas Tuchel, then, is not a departure in any sense, but another example of globalised England. We don’t just get the Germans to manage our football team, we have the French running our power stations, the Emirates running our ports and the Chinese buying up pretty much anything they want — provided the Americans don’t notice. George Osborne got a Canadian to run Britain’s monetary policy and wanted an American to head up the police. Perhaps we should put the premiership and Treasury out to tender too. We know what the neighbours think, they are right here. Those complaining about Little Englanders holding the country back have not been paying attention. Little England died a long time ago.

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Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016, due to be published in September 2025

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