As William Morgan was being arrested in Liverpool during the riots this August, he can be heard on a police bodycam exclaiming “I’m English, I’m English”. It has the force of outrage, as if it meant they were handcuffing the wrong person – but also of self-justification. He got sentenced to two years and eight months after pleading guilty to violent disorder and possessing an offensive weapon. Morgan was far from alone among the rioters in proclaiming his Englishness. He was taking part in the latest incarnation of a historic tradition of English urban hooliganism and mob violence that has run through the nation’s lymph system since the 18th century. One that from the 1950s has taken on a racist, Powellite form, pumped and refreshed by a vile media.
As well as anti-immigrant racism, a cauldron of socio-economic reasons generated the discontent of 2024, with two novel aspects added to the mix. First, social media transmitted deceitful rumours, incitement and goading at lightning speed, fortified by Elon Musk’s X and Nigel Farage’s calculated empathy. But more resonantly, the riots broke out almost immediately after a supposedly decisive general election, making them appear as violent protests against the result, an English echo of the 6 January storming of Congress by Donald Trump’s supporters. Across the country, the rioters’ chant was “give us our country back”. Only a few may have actually wrapped themselves in St George’s flag. But the desire for a missing national cause goes far beyond the riots themselves.
A few weeks earlier, standing outside No 10 on 5 July, speaking as Prime Minister for the first time, Keir Starmer told us: “Our country needs a bigger reset. A rediscovery of who we are. Because no matter how fierce the storms of history, one of the great strengths of this nation has always been our ability to navigate a way through to calmer waters.” Leave aside the linguistic muddle (a big reset that is a rediscovery in fierce storms of a perpetual capacity to return to calm water?). The call to give us our country back that sounded out in the riots came as a reminder of the unresolved politics of nationhood that stalk “Great Britain”, a country that, whatever the Prime Minister may say, is not “a nation” and will not be calmed by his claim that it is.
In these pages, Jason Cowley recently quoted the new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, as saying the far-right rioters had “forgotten about what it means to be English” and should reintegrate “back into Britishness”. It is an instruction that reveals, but hardly resolves the conundrum. Immediately after the election Cowley wrote: “If narratives shape politics, what is the story Keir Starmer wants to tell about Britain?” After the rioting, and with a much greater urgency, Cowley asked again: “What does it mean to be English, or even to integrate back into Britishness, when the Prime Minister himself says he wants to lead the country on a rediscovery of who we are?”
[See also: The history of English rioting repeats itself]
I believe that Starmer has already told us what he thinks the narrative for England and Britain is and should be. It is there in plain sight. Perhaps the reason it seems hidden is because it is so unbelievable. Nonetheless, it is spelled out explicitly in the Labour manifesto and proclaimed implicitly in the ubiquitous Union Jacks branding every ministerial appointment. Starmer believes Great Britain will be true to itself and its future by “making Brexit work”, and that his task as a superb public administrator is to ensure this happens. But the Brexit Labour is attempting can’t be made to “work” any more than you can have a successful car crash. This is not just a matter of the contradiction of trying to retain “sovereignty” while getting closer to the European Union. At the heart of its impossibility is the effort to resurrect the British state in “national” form.
This is the paradox that condemns our national question to its violent torpor. The British state was an amazing administrative and military achievement, but it was an imperial one, governed by its own global form of sovereignty. It lost its primacy in the Second World War, yet managed to preserve itself in a Churchillist form after 1945 by securing a subordinate role within the American postwar hegemony. As western Europe revived to become an economic powerhouse, pressure from Washington as much as the self-interest of Whitehall led to the UK’s belated joining of the then European Economic Community in 1973.
A new strategy – or “narrative” – was born, of becoming a “bridge” between the US and Europe. The Washington terminus of this bridge always had primacy, lauded in terms of an intangible “special relationship” and an alliance for freedom, while the connection to Brussels was justified as a transactional necessity. Meanwhile, the ghost of glory past was never confronted, let alone eradicated. In 1982, after her Falklands victory, Thatcher boasted that “Britain has not changed” and remained “the nation that had built an empire and ruled a quarter of the world”. The mindset was echoed two decades later, when Tony Blair cabled President George W Bush a week after British forces had tagged along with the US invasion of Iraq to tell him, “Our ambition is big: to construct a global agenda around which we can unite the world.”
But by 2010 all such ambition was shattered – by military humiliation in Mesopotamia and the great financial crash – while the centuries-old magic of parliament itself evaporated in the grubbiness of the expenses scandal. Three narratives were broken at the same time: pride in British military success; belief that the free market knows best; and faith in the honourable integrity of our ruling institutions. Each had helped ensure a general consent to the way we are governed, despite the antiquated nature of our constitution and institutions. As they disintegrated Nigel Farage pointed the way out of the ruins. Blame it on Brussels and leave the European Union!
When David Cameron called for a referendum in the hope of skewering Ukip, he calculated that Farage’s obvious bigotry would have ensured a reluctant majority for staying in the EU. But many other figures shared a belief that, once “freed” from the EU, Britain could find its way back to the greatness of Thatcher. Among the most significant of these was Paul Dacre, then editor of the Daily Mail. Fearing the loss of his last, best opportunity, in February 2016 he plastered this huge headline across his paper’s front page: “Who will speak for England?” His furious editorial demanded that acceptable politicians capable of winning (such as Michael Gove and Boris Johnson) step forward to take the lead in the referendum from the likes of Farage. Buried within the editorial was a telling aside: “Of course, by England… we mean the whole of the United Kingdom.”
If you are English, you need to read this sentence out loud while imagining what it must be like to be Scottish, Irish or Welsh. Dacre was not calling on leaders to speak for England. He is calling for the opposite, leaders who will make a claim on all the nations of the archipelago that make up Britain. This is the “narrative” – an English insistence that our role in the world is to be “Great Britain” – that won the 2016 referendum. And it is a narrative that Starmer is now seeking to implement after the failures of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak to do so.
We need to understand the duplicitous, Janus-nature of this Brexit narrative. Scotland, London and Northern Ireland voted by decisive majorities to remain in the EU. But every region of England outside London voted for Brexit and took the country with them. (It was only the vote of English retirees that clinched Brexit’s narrow majority of 80,000 in Wales, where many of the young had left to work in London and voted for Europe.) Brexit, then, was an English decision. But it was not a vote “for” England but for Great Britain, in which the English asserted a claim on “the whole of the United Kingdom”.
However, many if not most of the liberal Remainers who scorn Brexit as an expression of “English nationalism” are just as Anglo-British as those who voted Leave. This is the most difficult issue for English progressives to internalise and accept. Many cling to the multinational nature of Britishness as a way of avoiding the dangers of bigotry, rather than confronting it. They can’t accept that the only successful way of opposing Brexit-Englishness is by creating an actual English polity. This reality is so unappealing that it requires elucidation.
Overtly, Brexit was about leaving the EU. For the hedge funds and corporate interests that hate regulation, this was a coherent if misguided and selfish project. But for the average Daily Mail reader, the inner psychic project was not about the UK leaving the EU. Rather, it was an opportunity to expel the EU from the UK. “Leave means Leave” did not mean our leaving to go somewhere else. On the contrary, we would boot them out and, once rid of them, return to being “what we are”.
There can be no such going back. We cannot return to 1982 when Margaret Thatcher was regnant, the Falklands made us proud, the neoliberal boom was about to take off, and Boris Johnson was 18. Since then we have been transformed existentially by being part of the European single market, by the ending of the Cold War and the unification of Europe. What “we are” is no longer what we have been. The consequence of our departure is that we have forever thrown away the privileged position of being in the EU and yet also outside the euro, which gave us the best of both worlds. One that allowed us to “opt out” of the European narrative by continuing to be Great Britain – an uncodified multinational monarchy, where the population are subjects rather than citizens, that clings to a pre-war, imperial concept of sovereignty. This never comfortably fitted with the shared sovereignty, freedom of movement and market regulation that have become the norm for European countries. EU member states cannot risk re-offering membership to a major country that refuses to make the transition.
[See also: The rise of disaster nationalism]
Nation, constitution and democracy are joined together like the spine, the hip bone and the thigh bones. There are, to repeat Cowley’s call, only two broad narratives available for the UK. The forward-looking one is to embrace European normality, in which England becomes England. But for the English, including many if not most Remain and progressive voters, this remains a psychologically unbearable reality. After all these centuries “Great Britain” remains their self-conception. The only alternative therefore is an endless effort to update ourselves and the constant promise of “Change” (the word plastered over the Labour manifesto and pledged by the aptly rain-sodden Rishi Sunak when he called the election). Change dedicated to remaining fundamentally the same. It is as true for Starmer as it is for perhaps Farage and whoever the Tories will choose as their new leader, just as it is for perhaps the most brilliant of Labour’s new MPs, Torsten Bell, whose new and eloquent economic treatise is titled Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back.
So when Starmer announces that it is time to “turn a corner on Brexit”, as he did this week on his way to Germany to meet Chancellor Olaf Scholz, it is the same old Great Britain that is turning the page, a country now encircled by external, non-negotiable Brexit “red lines” and committed to the crucial inner project of the subordination of the peripheral nations to the authority of the British state. On Tuesday, just before he went to Berlin, Starmer gave a speech heralded as a “state of the nation” address from the Downing Street garden. He had plenty of time for due consideration, to properly address the riots and deliver his response to them. Yet he failed to address the politics of nationhood. While he rightly saluted those who spontaneously cleared up after the riots as far more representative than the wreckers, he declined to thank those who mobilised politically in the counter-demonstrations that outnumbered the far right. Instead, along with stern warnings of law and order and economic hard choices, he made a feeble appeal to the “coming together of a country”.
This attempt to construct a “disciplined consensus” was first analysed as long ago as 1978 by Stuart Hall and others in Policing the Crisis. It is a dangerously weak response to the riots, as the cry to “give us our country back” draws on a racist definition of Englishness, first articulated by Enoch Powell in 1968. The serpent of Powellism was caged not killed and awaits moments of weakness to strike again. This is why Nigel Farage stands to gain the most from the upheaval, with Professor Matt Goodwin at his shoulder to provide some apparently academic kudos. Speaking out of his bottom, Goodwin sought to analyse the riots through the language of “English in terms of ethnicity”, “majority decline” and mass immigration. It amounted to an apologia – claiming that there really is an exclusive English ethnicity that understandably feels itself a victim of the way we are governed. The notion is, of course, as preposterous as it is treacherous. Englishness is not an ethnicity. There are no “true-born” English. We have known this since 1701 when Daniel Defoe wrote:
A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.
A banter made to be a test of fools…
Since scarce one family is left alive,
Which does not from some foreigner derive.
Here, however, is the rub. If in Scotland or Wales a Goodwin-like media-academic were to claim that being Scottish or Welsh was an ethnicity, the push-back against such a racist claim would be loud and immediate. But not here in England. The noble but ignored John Denham and the ever-reasonable Sunder Katwala express their disagreement with Goodwin. But no leading English politician has yet to speak out for our nation, or even about it, aside from Caroline Lucas in her recent masterpiece, Another England. And she now has understandably stepped down from parliament.
Cowley is right to insist that there has to be a credible new narrative. It cannot be Starmer’s effort to put the Great back into Britain by sheer force of good administration, professional branding and the promise he reiterated from the garden of No 10 that “crime has consequences”. Far from the negative appeal for the English to “reintegrate back into Britishness”, what is needed is a positive and genuine politics that speaks for English democracy, supported by fresh institutions suited for our country’s modern multi-ethnic nature. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own parliaments; now it is England’s turn. In his interviews, letters and in their theatrical celebration, so far only Gareth Southgate’s England squad has expressed the exceptional pluralism and positivity of a 21st-century England. But football can only illustrate the potential. England has to be actually represented politically.
Until this happens there can be no return to full membership of our common European home. The progressive route to achieving this is as straightforward as it is seemingly impossible. First, we have to embrace the fact that Britain is not a nation and that, if it is to flourish as a United Kingdom, it can only do so as a constitutional federation. To achieve this, the perfectly named House of Commons should return to being England’s parliament, with a new upper house becoming the federal chamber with elected representatives from each nation, provided each freely decides to be part of it. This is essential. England cannot become a progressive country while it holds other nations prisoner against their will.
There is no “third way” that avoids confronting this. Ireland, Scotland and perhaps now Wales too, are already European countries in their own distinct fashions. We in England may have to find our own independent way back to the EU. Let’s not be afraid of this. We are nationally English, culturally British and European, and fully able to find a significant role inside the wider multinational entity of the EU where, whatever happens, we will be together with our immediate neighbours. I believe that, culturally, Britishness will flourish if we are all liberated from the politics of Great Britain. The alternative – cleaving to a dysfunctional Westminster state – is a recipe for further unrest. Only a move towards real democracy in a modern, participatory form can see off the rabid display of frustration and wounded pride that Brexit has unleashed but cannot assuage.
[See also: Tom Nairn: The detective of world history]
Content from our partners
Related
