The questions for the British Defense Secretary, on a visit during Labour Party conference which began yesterday just across the Mersey, ranged from “What will this mean for local jobs?” to “Is Russia about to attack?” This just about sums up the dilemma facing UK defense policy: are we in a period of incrementally raised threat, demanding incrementally higher defense spending; or should the severity of the global situation demand the urgent expansion of investment into Britain’s historic military hardware production sites, to the necessary detriment of spending on everything else?

Amid its polling slump, Labour is desperate to demonstrate delivery on its domestic agenda, and is conscious that no matter how statesman-like Keir Starmer and Healey look on global stage, there are — as yet — few votes in national security and defense. But the prospect of conflict with Russia, given the recent doubling of Russian incursions into Nato airspace, rightly haunts the British government. If the worst happened, according to one senior military officer I spoke to, here’s what it would look like. In Phase One, all the expensive kit is destroyed, the stockpiles of complex weapons are expended; the long-practiced maneuvers end in stalemate; and trench warfare begins.

In Phase Two, both sides are lobbing drones and missiles at each other’s industrial base. Their armed forces consist mainly of raw recruits, and their cities look like London during the Blitz. In Phase Three, one side’s scientific and technological base begins to innovate faster, using AI, robotics, space and lasers to make itself unbeatable, and their opponent loses the will and the means to fight.

Any of these phases can be circumvented either by a strategic nuclear attack or a devastating act of economic warfare. And the preparatory phase looks much like the present: unexplained cyberattacks on major infrastructure, “protest” movements driven by disinformation and — as is currently happening in Moldova — outright interference against elected governments.

Nobody in their right mind would want to begin such a conflict. But the fragmented state of the Western alliance, and the irrationalism of the man in the Kremlin, mean that our surest way of avoiding it is deterrence — nuclear, conventional and economic — and by strengthening our alliances. If you want to understand how pivotal those alliances are, look at this map, produced by my colleagues at the Council on Geostrategy. It shows that, though Nato’s frontline with Russia is on land, stretching from the Black Sea to the Arctic, the alliance itself is essentially maritime. Its flanks are seas; its supply lines are oceans; its communication networks rest on seabeds.

Though few British citizens are prepared to accept it, and few politicians are prepared to lay it on the line in these terms, that is the stark background to Britain’s rearmament program. Since February this year, when US Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth told his counterparts that the USA was handing the conventional defense of Europe to European states themselves, the British government has scheduled a hike in defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, promised 3% in the next Parliament and signed up to the new Nato target of 5% in 10 years’ time.

In UK defense circles, the concept of “fight tonight” has evolved from an edgy thought experiment to a concrete criterion for readiness. Britain has committed, in short order and without any debate in Parliament, to fielding a “sub-strategic” — tactical — nuclear weapon, to be carried on F-35A combat aircraft and deployed under Nato command.

In the new National Security Strategy, the UK has also pledged to embrace higher risks when it takes action and accepted that, in pursuit of enhanced security, its “interests” may have to override its “values”. And, in the upcoming Defense Investment Plan, the Ministry of Defense will decide how to match its weapons systems, forces and deployments to the threat, given the size of its budget.

The outstanding problems are: how to pay for rearmament; how to secure consent for it, from a civil society that is atomized and fractured by disputes over identity; and how to ready political and military leaderships for the possibility of having to manage Russian escalation.

The money problem is acute. In the Thirties, once it accepted the possibility of war within a decade, the Treasury understood it would have to be financed by borrowing. Though it rationed the spending increase, and forced hard choices on the military — prioritizing the RAF over both other services — between 1932 and 1939 the Treasury raised defense spending from 2.3% to 9% of GDP.

That would be hard to repeat today. First, because the UK’s public debt is 96% of GDP. Though that is lower than it was at the start of rearmament, today the government borrows from investors free to move their money across borders, not from a middle class whose savings are constrained by capital controls as in the Thirties. Second, because of the welfare state. On the eve of rearmament, when defense spending stood at 2.5% of GDP, the rest of the public sector accounted for just 17%. During wartime, when defense spending ballooned to 50% of GDP, state spending on civilian services shrank below 7%. Today the non-military public spending accounts for around 42% of GDP, much of which is unshrinkable.

“Total war”, of the kind we fought twice in the 20th century, is unthinkable for states with public health, welfare and pension commitments. As a result, the fiscal debates and the rearmament debate in British politics are misaligned: the 5% Nato commitment remains aspirational, while the Treasury and the OBR have yet to agree a methodology that could measure the upsides of this investment in terms of growth.

The British government is engaged in discussions over a proposal to put cash into a multilateral fund, with allies who have better credit ratings, and to borrow against it on the capital markets. That could delay the cost of some defense spending, effectively moving it off balance sheet for the medium term. But the UK has distanced itself from a City-led project to finance such borrowing, known as the Defense Security and Resilience Bank, and is making slow progress in its own negotiations.

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Britain is not ready for war

By Aris Roussinos

In the meantime, selling rearmament to the electorate has barely begun. Keir Starmer was warmly received when he told the London Defense Conference that security and defense were no longer “one priority amongst many others” but “the central organizing principle of government; the first thought in the morning — the last at night.” But that is not yet a priority shared by the electorate, nor even most MPs. When the first thought in the morning for millions of people is how are they going to meet their food and energy bills, rearmament is a hard sell.

Labour got a taste of just how hard last month when, by a narrow margin, the TUC Congress voted to stop supporting increased defense spending. Despite pleas from the two big Labour-affiliated manufacturing unions — GMB and Unite — white-collar workers from the teachers, lecturers and health unions voted for “welfare not warfare”.

So those of us who want to make the case for defense spending need to do so in a much more convincing way. “Welfare not warfare” is a compelling slogan only if you believe warfare can be avoided through disarmament and multilateralism. Ukraine found out the hard way that, when dealing with an insane ethnonationalism, these don’t work.

One of our strongest arguments is the economic multiplier effect of defense investment. The economy of Barrow-in-Furness, whose submarine order books are guaranteed for decades, is now booming to the point of overheating. With the government committed to building similar clusters, in Plymouth, Clydeside and Belfast for example, new defense manufacturing jobs should become available, each paying 40% above the average factory wage.

But at some point, the national conversation has to move from the opportunity to the threat. My father’s generation of Labour-voting miners didn’t switch from pacifism to rearmament simply because they thought it would raise wages; they did so because they didn’t want to live in the Third Reich.

Today, many young people are rightly appalled by the wars going on — in Gaza and in Ukraine — but their attention seems fixed on the injustices only of the former. It does not seem to occur to the British public that, when Russian-paid saboteurs torch warehouses in London, or take down airports and hospitals in cyber attacks, that might be in preparation for something worse.

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How Noël Coward made me a Marxist

By Paul Mason

Yet those who study the Russian state media know that the UK is constantly portrayed as the main enemy, and the fantasy peddled is that Putin will one day drown Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast with a giant nuclear-detonated tidal wave, followed by our abject surrender.

The key to change lies beyond the confines of electoral politics. There is, in Britain, a military-industrial-academic “complex” that has become used to conducting its business in conditions of quiet and opacity. The armed forces don’t look or sound like the country they are defending. Our defense giants tiptoe around the issue of their presence on campuses.

Banks hike lending costs to defense SMEs over “reputational risks”. Our two major Christian churches refuse to let their trustees invest in defense. Students pursuing careers in defense related science and technology face peer pressure to opt for something softer — and, for the most talented, that is often a more lucrative job in finance.

Yet China has seven of its elite universities signed up to top-secret military research, and leads the USA in 57 out of 64 defense-related categories of science, while the whole of Russian society is geared for war. So before the population moves, it is this ill-defined but critical community of bankers, vice-chancellors, civil servants, religious leaders and opinion formers who will have to move first.

Their assumptions accumulated since 1991 — towards reliance on international law and institutions, towards improvisation in a crisis, and towards incremental change — will need to be abandoned. So will the tradition of conducting all discussions about threat, strategy and deterrence out of earshot of the public. So will pension funds’ reluctance to invest in defense, and universities’ reluctance to shout about the defense-related research they do.

In the Thrties, the air of unreality lasted from Hitler’s march to power right through to the Battle of Jarama in February 1937, when — mobilized by the Communist Party — the first British and Irish troops went into action against a fascist army in Spain. After that, something snapped in the British psyche. Labour, which had voted against every defense budget since 1919, became the most ardent supporter of rearmament.

Today, though politicians like Starmer and Healey are already there, the wider electorate — both Left and Right — has yet to make the leap. When they look at the half-finished ships in places like Birkenhead, and its sister yards in Govan and Rosyth, the public sees, if anything, jobs and apprenticeships. When military planners look at these same chunks of metal, they see vital deterrent weapons systems whose deployment cannot come soon enough.

That was how, at the age of 13, I became aware that the placid politics of the 1960s would be replaced by class warfare. And that behind the facade of Seventies respectability, the establishment lived secret lives according to different rules.

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The fall of the Wall powered up my politics

By Ruth Davidson

Soon, my dad’s prediction came true. The miners’ strike forced power cuts and the three-day week. I remember my schoolfriends, sent home early, pilfering from market stalls in the pitch dark.

But I don’t think the outbreak of class struggle would have had the same radicalising effect on me had it not coincided with my discovery that Catholicism was a sham.

At my school, the priests who taught us railed every day against the twin evils of masturbation and homosexuality. But on arrival we were told by older boys to avoid entering a room alone with some of them, in case we got “touched up”. And in the name of gentle Jesus meek and mild, some were in the habit of inflicting random, psychopathic violence.

This atmosphere of political crisis, combined with the daily experience of hypocrisy and menace at school made me search for answers. And by coincidence, answers were already lodged into my brain — because at the age of 10 I’d played one of the newsboys in Noël Coward’s play This Happy Breed.

Coward’s portrait of a working class family during the General Strike, the Depression and the Munich crisis includes a character called Sam Leadbitter, a caricature communist from central casting. Sitting in the wings at night after night, I found his lines the most vivid. My 10-year-old brain did not see Leadbitter as a caricature at all, but rather the only honest character among a bunch of “apathetic, unthinking, docile supporters of a capitalistic system which is a disgrace to civilisation”, as Sam himself puts it.

These lines stuck with me. Unwittingly, and from beyond the grave, it was Noël Coward who steered me from hormonal teenage revolt to a real and lifelong engagement with the world’s most coherent liberation theology: Marxism.

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Who will speak for today's working class?

By Paul Embery

I read The Communist Manifesto in the school library, together with an introduction by A. J. P. Taylor designed to convince us that it was bullshit. One priest noticed what I was doing and tried to engage me in a discussion about Catholic social teaching. I curtailed the discussion by telling him that Catholic social teaching was bullshit, and that belief in God was irrational. But my Marxism remained, at this stage, book-learned and pretty basic.

Then, aged 15, I went to a youth club disco. At the edge of the dancefloor were some very tough looking kids — Irish, black, Italian — who I’d lost touch with after primary school. A record came on that cleared all the Slade fans off the dancefloor: crackly silence; a black man’s voice wailing. Then a crunchy R&B tune kicked in, and all the rough lads threw themselves into a dance that was a mixture of kung fu, shuffling and acrobatics. They did the splits; they spun like ballerinas. This was the Northern Soul culture in its heyday and within a couple of minutes, I was part of it.

I now discovered that it was not just the establishment and the Catholic clergy that could live a double life, but everybody. There was a mass criminal underworld selling drugs all over the North of England, organising thefts from pharmacists or shipping “backstreet” drugs from Amsterdam. To get to the Northern Soul all-nighters you had to catch the last bus and stay out all night, and hunch in doorways at first light until the bus and train services restarted.

Suddenly I was part of a vast working-class Bohemia, operating with absolute solidarity in the face of police raids and searches. We idolised the black kids on our scene, and we venerated black performers like Major Lance and Jackie Wilson. We were white working-class kids curating the R&B music of Detroit and Memphis, and the rest of the world could go to hell.

So when the National Front started holding their racist “anti-mugging marches”, we knew what we had to do. I remember waking hand in hand with my girlfriend as a military-scale convoy of police riot vans sped past us, on the way to confront an Anti-Nazi League protest. I told her: “Next time, I’m joining in”.

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Sex, sin and the Catholics

By Christopher Rhodes

That was how I ended up on my first political demonstration: a 25,000 strong Anti-Nazi League demo in Manchester, in July 1978. My mum told me not to get into trouble. I went alone, spoke to no-one apart from to say “no thanks” to a Left-wing newspaper seller. I marched, I chanted, and then I got hit in the face with a heavy banner pole after the wind snapped it. It took a lot to convince Mum that I had not become some kind of anti-fascist rioter.

That is how — via atheism, soul music and strife — I became politicised.

Looking back, across 40 years of political engagement with the Left, some of the ideas that crystallised in my head at the age of 15 have remained pretty constant: a total lack of deference to authority figures; the default assumption that politicians and religious leaders are corrupt liars; a general preference for spontaneous action; a lifelong revulsion against racism.

Another legacy is that I always understood the importance of counterculture in working class life. Northern Soul, punk and later hip-hop and garage for me had a political meaning, embodied in the taking and holding of physical space at night, for the breaking of rules and the mixing of ethnicities and sexualities.

There are people on the Left who fetishise the old working class culture I come from, and who construct a nostalgia project around it. But for me, alongside the official signifiers of beer drinking, football and respectability, real working class culture has always included a counterculture — of drugs, music, iconoclasm and evading arrest.

I think that’s what inoculated me from the nostalgiafest, and allowed my political commitment to adapt in an age where political opposition movements are full of diverse, networked, educated people.

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Is there a future for English nationalism?

By Paul Mason

With hindsight, it also looks like the work of that progressive priest was not in vain. To defeat the Catholic humanism of Rerum Novarum, I had to build, out of the texts available to me at sixteen, a Marxist humanism, with ethical and moral implications. This has strengthened throughout my life.

Today we are faced with anti-humanism on all sides: from the far-Right, with its race science and violent misogyny, to Silicon Valley, where humans are seen as “already algorithms”, lacking agency and free will. At its most extreme, the post-humanism movement seeks to replace homo sapiens with hybrids of machines and flesh.

My opposition to this is based largely on the conclusions I reached in the school library in the Seventies: human beings have evolved as imagineers, teamworkers and linguists. On that basis it is possible to propose they will free themselves through technological change and self-liberation. If you strip out all the specifics about class, economic crisis and poltical tactics, that’s the basic proposition of Marxism.

It had tried to shield the old and poor from the worst of it, but at the cost of taxing the middle class, the rich, and the country’s vital tourist trade. It met the targets of the European Central Bank, privatised the ports and airports, played an exemplary game in international politics, and spent more of its GDP on Nato commitments than any other member.

In the end, many of its supporters stayed at home, while the far-right vote switched back to the conservatives, and Syriza lost power – scoring 31.5%, compared with 40% for the centre-right New Democracy party.

For the some on the far Left, the fall of Syriza government is the termination of an embarrassment. Alexis Tsipras led the party to power in 2015 on a promise to resist austerity but after a few nail-biting months was forced into abject retreat, with the country’s banks closed, chaos on the streets and vital services only a few days away from failure.

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Time's up for Greece's populist demagogue

By David Patrikarakos

For me, however, there are positives to take away that have implications for the entire project of the global Left. First, Tsipras showed that with a clear narrative, a message of hope and some competent advisers, the far-Left’s project can work in government. The oligarchy, whose two-party system (Pasok and New Democracy) collapsed, expected Syriza to be amateurs: in fact they brought professionalism and openness to an endemically corrupt and chaotic state.

Second, by being radical in opposition, and refusing to give up radicalism even when forced into retreat, Syriza and the wider Greek Left defeated one of the most violent and open fascist threats in the European continent. Its conservative predecessors had tolerated Golden Dawn’s infiltration of the police, and murderous violence on the streets. Without a Left prepared to risk taking power, Greece would have degenerated into a battleground of populisms.

Third, Syriza supplanted the traditional Greek social democratic party Pasok as the “natural” party of Left government. Its spokespeople, pundits and aligned senior journalists now inhabit the Greek airwaves and cultural life.

Finally, the shock of seeing the Left in power has changed – for now – the behaviour of the Greek conservatives. They were forced to exchange ageing playboys and oligarchs for politicians who look cleaner and more restrained.

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How Europe smothered the radical Left

By Peter Franklin

On the downside, the experience of the 2015 “Greek Spring” proved beyond doubt that, within the Eurozone, the political space for a radical Left government will always be constrained. You can defy the Maastricht rules on public finance – as Italy’s Matteo Salvini is doing now – but if you do so in combination with a radical shift of power and wealth towards the people, the coercive force of the central bank will be used against you.

To understand where the radical Left goes next, you have to understand how modest its achievements have been outside Greece, and how its enemy has changed.

In Spain, the advance of Podemos-Unidos, an alliance of traditional communists with the new “horizontal” activist movement that sprung up in 2011, has stalled. After scoring 14% in April’s general election, its leader Pablo Iglesias is now forced to be a junior and inconsequential coalition partner in the socialist-led government. The same rough arrangement applies to the Left Bloc in Portugal – currently polling 9%. In Denmark, another electoral pact between the far-Left and social democrats has put the latter in power.

In Finland, a general shift to the Left has put the radical Left Alliance into a broad governing coalition with Greens, Social Democrats and Liberals. Germany’s Left Party, born out of the former ruling communist party, survives on around 9%, and plays a leading role in the “Red-Red-Green” government of the Berlin region.

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The heat is on for Greece

By DAVID PATRIKARAKOS

In general, overtly anti-capitalist Left parties have peaked below 20% as the memory of the financial crisis fades, while a shift to the Left by traditional social democrats has stemmed their own decline.

But the political forces emerging out of the 20^thcentury Left face two new challenges: the so-called Green Wave, which has swelled the electoral support of Green parties everywhere; and a growing electoral threat from far right or overtly racist parties, some of which are building support among the working class communities where the Left used to be strong.

Syriza, Podemos and the rest prospered after 2008 because their politics, and to an extent their style, resonated with the mood of anger as deep austerity followed the bailout of the banks. Faced with a crisis of consent for democracy, the rule of law and human rights, the whole Left – including both Marxists and social democrats – is being forced to make choices it wanted to avoid.

The first hard choice is between redistribution and saving the planet. Orthodox Left doctrine tells you this does not have to be a choice, and that the challenge of rapid decarbonisaton should be an opportunity for the Left to sell – indeed to converge around – its well-worn projects of state direction and intervention. But to capture the imagination of the young people involved in the US Sunrise Movement, or Fridays for Future in Europe and Extinction Rebellion here, the order of precedence has to be clear.

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Who broke the Left?

By Giles Fraser

In future, Left-wing parties will need to look and sound like they care about the planet more than anything else – and the truth is, our tradition has not always done so. The closer you remain to the traditional working class communities which prospered during the carbon era, the harder it is to walk the walk when it comes to zero carbon.

When it comes to the far-right threat, the Left should be on firmer territory. The very prestige of parties such as Podemos, Syriza and Die Linke rests on the leading role their communist predecessors played in the struggle against fascism in the 1930s. But today’s far Left is reluctant to make the big tactical change their grandparents’ generation made when faced with Hitler and Franco.

In the 1930s, faced with the rise of fascism, Stalin ordered Western communist parties to form “Popular Front” coalitions with liberal and conservative parties. By 1936, those governments controlled both France and Spain. You could even argue that the spirit of the Popular Front animated Attlee’s decision to join Churchill’s wartime coalition in May 1940.

But leaders like Pablo Iglesias in Spain, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, have invested so much personal energy in fighting the liberal centrist parties that they cannot bring themselves to make the same kind of overt, strategic change of priorities. And there is no Stalin to bang their heads together.

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The permanent punishment of the Greek people

By Peter Franklin

As a result the strategic hopes of the global Left now lie with two veteran leaders who have chosen their own long march through the institutions: Jeremy Corbyn here and Bernie Sanders in the USA. Whereas Syriza had to destroy Greek social democracy in order to replace it, Corbyn and Sanders chose to take over their respective centre-Left parties.

But Corbyn and Sanders face effectively the same dilemma as the rest. To enact a radical programme they need power; to gain power they need a story of hope to energise the poor, competence enough to mobilise middle class voters and – for the youth – to look and sound like climate change is their number one priority. Like Tsipras, they need to jettison the most extreme “anti-imperialist” obsessions of some of their activists.

And as Tsipras discovered, doing all that only gets you into office. Once there, you have to take on the real power: the financial markets, hedge funds, oligarchs and organised criminals who believe they can make and destroy governments at whim.

The sheer scale of the climate crisis will, as the 20^th century recedes and the IPCC’s decarbonisation targets become pressing, change the priorities of the Left. The far-Left is now either in reluctant coalition with its social democrat and Green allies, or resisting even that. For me, the 21^stcentury equivalent of the Popular Front would be an alliance of all forces prepared to commit to spending the hundreds of billions we’ll need to combat climate change, plus the absolute defence of democracy and the rule of law, plus the reversal of austerity. The renationalisation of energy and transport infrastructure is implicit in any radical plan to halve net carbon over the next ten years.

Paradoxically, the most tactically adept Left politician on the planet remains Tsipras, though he is despised by Mélenchon and publicly avoided by Corbyn. Tsipras just survived a four-year crash course in the language of priorities and came out with 31.5% of the vote (with a further 8% actually going to parties to the Left of him). Above all he made a government of the far-Left thinkable, in one of the most polarised democracies in Europe. That’s what I think the minister meant by “losing nicely”.

—

Every nation is entitled to its patriotism. When, for a few brief days during the 2018 World Cup, the England football team started firing on more than its habitual single cylinder, I painted my face with the cross of St George and joined a lot of other drunken people trying to stop traffic at the junction outside my local pub. But beyond football I cannot see the point of English nationalism.

In fact, it’s quite hard to be enthusiastic about a nationalism that didn’t exist when you were young. As a child I played Napoleonic war games, but the regiments we were taught to venerate from the battle of Waterloo were the Gordon Highlanders, the Scots Greys and the Inniskillings. The patriotism I was taught was, if anything, British.

Further reading

The fake patriotism of the liberal Left

By Paul Embery

But it is near certain that Scotland will gain independence in the first half of this century, and a united Ireland is a distinct possibility. So the rise of an English national identity in response to the UK’s breakup would be logical. The problem is, there is very little logic to a purely English nationalism once you get beyond the Tudor era.

From James I onwards, the London-centred elite’s mission for two centuries was to create a single kingdom out of Britain and Ireland, and use it as a springbard to build a colonial empire. Even under Cromwell, the essential mission remained the same. English nationalism, such as it existed, was never about separating off from other countries but conquering them.

As a northern English person, I find it even more complicated. The most resilient identity I’ve carried with me across the airport lounges of the world is “northern”. There’s a strong regional identity which expressed itself, for my Dad’s generation, through antipathy to other parts of England

And then there was mining. Mining culture was one of the strongest components of the British labour movement and created a kind of glue through which people from towns like Easington, Ysdradginlais and Auchinleck could create a shared experience that transcended their national and regional origins.

So it’s not surprising that our current form of English nationalism – centred around southern English culture and traditional institutions such as the Royal Navy, the Monarchy, the BBC and the flat horse racing season – has not proved particularly resilient.

Further reading

More than a beautiful game

By Michael Dalton

On top of all the regional and cultural forces, there is also globalisation, which has created – not just in London but in most of England’s major cities – a cosmopolitan vibe, in which your talent, not your nationality or ethnicity, is the route to success.

Do the polls reveal the emergence of a distinct, new English identity? Not conclusively. Residents of England forced to make a straight choice between “English” and “British” have been dividing roughly equally over the past 30 years.

Pride in English identity is weaker among the young (45%) than among the old (72%) according to a YouGov survey for the BBC. Meanwhile if 61% of white English people express pride in being English, only 32% of those from ethnic minorities do so. By contrast British national identity remains equally strong between all these groups.

The point is, an English nationalism moulded around its current symbols, ideologies and cultures cannot be successful in its own terms. If pushed hard enough, it would divide Britain, alienate the inhabitants of most big cities and find scant support among the creators of culture. It would, at worst, become a form of ethno-nationalism completely unsustainable in a diverse, open economy like ours.

Further reading

How Jane Austen makes fools of her fans

By Tanya Gold

Some on the Left, like the musician Billy Bragg, have argued that the Left should create its own version of English nationalism, out of the radical traditions that inspired the Levellers, Peterloo, the Chartists and the Peasants’ Revolt. But Leveller soldiers were shot by Cromwell for refusing to participate in the founding act of Left English nationalism – the conquest of Ireland. At Peterloo they carried the red cap of the French republic.

Like it or not, our past of continuous trade, conquest and openness to immigration makes the whole English nationalism project difficult to sell.

And yet the centrifugal dynamics of the UK make it inevitable that, at some point, a state comprising just England and Wales will have to find a viable ideology to explain its own existence.

Further reading

Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

My guess is that if such a state ever emerged, the only viable ideology would be one that validated its existence as a confederation of regions. They may not map exactly to the so-called ‘heptarchy’ of the Anglo-Saxon period, but if you separated off South West England from Wessex, made Birmingham the capital of Mercia and created an energetic Leeds-Manchester conurbation as the power centre of a new Northumbria, you would then have something similar to the power balance under King Ecgberht in the year 800.

The ‘nationalism’ that might emerge out of a neo-heptarchy would be centred around a common language, legal institutions and money – and thus be quite weak in terms of breast-beating emotionalism. But it would stand a better chance of being accepted by the 21^st-century population of England than all the current attempts to create a nationalism of exclusion. Having St George as its patron saint – a Greek conscript venerated by Christians from Palestine to Georgia and celebrated as a martyr in Islamic texts – would be pretty cool.

Paul Mason’s Confessions with Giles Fraser is out on Monday