Gordon Brown presented his ‘Building Britain’s Future’ policy document in Parliament yesterday: largely a re-hash of previously aired proposals in areas such as jobs, training and benefits; housing; education; health care; the economy; and energy and innovation. Given that most of the draft policies related to devolved areas of government, they mostly concerned England only. But once again, this was completely ignored by Brown, who did not say the words ‘England’ or ‘English’ a single time in his speech – not once – compared with ten references to ‘Britain’ or ‘British’.

At the end of this post, I will include a transcription of Brown’s speech and will attempt to annotate in square brackets where it relates to England only, to England plus some other parts of the UK, the whole of the UK, or a combination. This is not always straightforward owing to the overlaps between areas such as education and skills [England], on the one hand, and measures to combat unemployment that leverage the benefits system [UK]. However, it is straightforward in many areas such as education, health and housing.

The BBC yesterday seemed suddenly to have woken up to the fact that where the government says ‘Britain’ in these areas, it actually means England only. I noticed this first in the article on the BBC website anticipating the PM’s statement, referred to in my previous post. This was repeated in the article on the same website reporting on the speech after the event: “The policy document unveiled by Mr Brown in the House of Commons is called ‘Building Britain’s future’ although many proposals relate to England only as a result of devolution in areas such as health and education”. Bravo, BBC; you’ve finally got it!

Indeed, this dawning of the devolution truisms appeared to come as a genuine revelation to the BBC copy editors yesterday. After a brief lapse in the news bulletin ahead of the PM programme on Radio Four at 5.00 PM – where the England-only character of much of the legislative programme was not alluded to a single time – the same channel’s six o’clock news triumphantly trumpeted the fact that the measures on housing, say, were ‘for England only’, while the proposals on education were ‘again, for England only’. The same sort of phrasing cropped up in the news report for BBC2’s Newsnight programme later in the evening. While I was pleased that the penny had finally dropped, the phrase and the tone with which it was spoken seemed to suggest that the government was somehow showing favouritism or an undue concentration of attention towards England by showering all of these national debt-funded goodies upon England alone, as if this implied neglect of the other UK nations. Someone needs to explain to them that it’s ‘England only’ because the government’s scope for action – any action – in these areas is limited to England alone; therefore, they can’t announce measures on housing and education for the UK as a whole, even when appearing to do so: it’s not favouritism but deception – saying the UK even when the measures involved only concern England.

Someone also needs to explain to them about the Barnett Formula: any increases in expenditure in England will trigger corresponding increases in the block grants for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, ensuring that the differential of higher per-capita spending in those countries compared with England is maintained. No measures to reform that inequitous system were announced yesterday, I note!

The government’s avoidance of this particular consideration is wrapped up in its evasiveness about whether or not it is planning to cut or increase expenditure overall across the UK. The terms in which the current argument between the government and the opposition on that issue is framed studiously avoid the really contentious questions about favouritism towards some UK nations at the expense of others: will increases in expenditure on health, education and policing in England have to be funded by decreases in areas where the government’s responsibilities are genuinely UK-wide (such as defence, benefits or tax credits) and therefore affect the other UK nations? Or will they be funded by savage cuts to the budget in other areas of England-only expenditure, such as transport and environmental protection? And, as a result, will expenditure in England as a whole be rising or falling, with consequent, politically contentious rises or falls in the devolved nations? Better not to raise such awkward questions and pretend we’re talking about a homogeneous UK and a single UK budget pot.

That’s one of the reasons why Brown’s speech made not one reference to ‘England’, or indeed to any of the other UK nations, yesterday. The other main factor behind the suppression of the ‘E’ word relates to the more general concern about the legitimacy, or lack of it, of the government and Parliament as a government and Parliament for England. Though it would be more accurate and honest to do so, if Brown, Cameron and Co. suddenly started explicitly stating when they were referring to England only, or a combination of England and one or more of the other UK nations (assuming they even know themselves in every instance), then many more people would have the same startling revelation as some of the BBC staff appeared to experience yesterday: ‘how come they’re discussing these things only in relation to England?’ Then they might start asking the consequential questions about the legitimacy of MPs (and PMs) not elected in England debating and legislating in areas that concern England only, and about how public expenditure is apportioned unfairly across the UK.

Anyway, here’s Brown’s speech and my square-bracketed attempt to ‘de-britologise’ it – to unpick which country / -ies Brown is actually talking about when he says ‘Britain’:

Mr Speaker, in the last year we have taken action to prevent a collapse of banks, protect homeowners against recession and maintain vital investments in public services at the time people need them most. Now as we seek to move our economy out of recession we are setting out the steps we are proposing to support growth and jobs in the economy.

In the last two recessions, tens of thousands of young people were written off to become a generation lost to work – a mistake this government will not repeat.

And so today we are announcing new measures – to be paid for from the spending allocations made in the budget and from switches of spending — to meet new priorities that include creating new growth, new jobs and new housing.

Targeted investments to support jobs and strengthen growth are also the surest and fastest way to reduce deficits and debt in every country.

So my first announcement is about new jobs for young people: [UK-wide] starting from January every young person under 25 who has been unemployed for a year will receive a guaranteed job, work experience or training place.

In return, and I believe there will be public support for this, they will also from next spring have the obligation to accept that guaranteed offer.

This is the first time that any government has guaranteed that jobs and training will be available to young people and, crucially, has also made it mandatory for young people that, if there is a job available, to take this work up and have their benefits cut if they do not.

[UK-wide] To underpin this guarantee, as part of the investments we announced in the budget, 1 billion is being set aside for the future jobs fund that will provide 100,000 jobs for young people – with another 50,000 in areas of high unemployment.

From this September we will realise our pledge to all school-leavers that every 16- and 17-year-old [in England only] will receive an offer of a school or college place – or a training place or apprenticeship. And from this September we will also offer 20,000 new full time community service places [in England].

This complements the help for adults who have been unemployed for six months: who will get access to skills training [in England] or a jobs subsidy [UK-wide] – part of around £5 billion we set aside in the budget and pre-budget report for targeted support with jobs and training.

Mr. Speaker, in total, through the action taken so far – and by rejecting the view that government should cut investment in a recession – we are preventing the loss of around 500,000 jobs. And our continued investment in giving immediate help, through Jobcentre Plus [across the UK], to people made unemployed, is already making a difference – with each month around 250,000 people moving off unemployment.

Mr Speaker, new jobs for the future will also come through making the necessary investments in – low carbon energy, digital technology, financial services, bioscience, advanced manufacturing, transport – the building blocks of the competitive economy of the future so we will use the coming Queen’s Speech to ensure the British economy is best placed to take up these opportunities.

First, the new Energy Bill will enable us to support up to four commercial-scale carbon capture and storage demonstration plants for Britain [although none might be built in Scotland if planning permission is withheld]. The bill complements the £1.4 billion of public investment provided in the budget, and up to 4 billion now on offer from the EIB.

In addition – following our reforms to the policy, [English] planning and regulatory regimes – we will see between now and 2020 as we meet our renewable energy targets – around £100 billion invested by the private sector. These investments will make Britain a major global player in the low carbon market, with another 400 thousand green jobs by 2017, taking total British employment in the sector to well over a million ['Britain' does mean Britain here].

Secondly, the Digital Economy Bill will help underpin our commitment to enable broadband for all [across the UK] by 2012, working towards a nationwide [i.e. UK-wide] high-speed broadband network by 2016 with additional government investment unlocking new jobs and billions of extra investment from the private sector.

Thirdly, a new [UK] innovation fund will be announced today by the Science Minister. £150 million of public money which will over time lever in up to £1 billion of private sector investment in biotechnology, life sciences, low carbon technologies and advanced manufacturing.

Over the coming weeks, the Transport Secretary will set out plans to advance the electrification of transport [across the UK: railways being reserved] – cutting rail carbon emissions – on newly electrified lines – by around one third.

Lord Davies will lead a new drive to improve the country’s infrastructure and so increase the efficiency with which projects are taken forward, with the establishment of a new body, Infrastructure UK [a quango that will presumably have different areas and degrees of responsibility in different parts of the UK but will probably be strangled at birth, in any case, when the Tories get elected].

Further, an asset sales board will work with the shareholder executive to achieve our £16 billion assets sales target – money that can be redirected to public investment. [Euh? I think this is selling off the government's stakes in newly nationalised banks, etc.]

Mr Speaker, these investments will strengthen our economy and create new jobs. And we believe investment by government and the private sector will enable the economy to create over the next five years 1.5 million new skilled jobs in Britain.

Mr Speaker, in every part of the country [implies Britain but can affect England only] there is an urgent need for new social housing and for new affordable home ownership.

So the [English] Housing Minister is announcing that in the next two years – from the re-allocation of funds [England-only funds or funds from the UK-wide budget?] – we will more than treble the extra investment in housing [in England]: from the £600 million announced at the budget to a total of £2.1 billion today: financing over the next twenty four months a total of 110,000 affordable homes to rent or buy; and in doing so creating an estimated 45,000 jobs in construction and related industries.

And by building new and additional homes we can now also reform social housing allocation – enabling local authorities [in England] to give more priority to local people whose names have been on waiting lists for far too long.

We will consult on reforms to the council house finance system to allow local authorities [in England] to retain all the proceeds from their own council house sales and council rents. And we want to see a bigger role and responsibility for [English] local authorities to meet housing needs of people in their areas.

Mr Speaker, we will continue to take forward the far reaching [UK-wide] reforms of financial supervision that we have embarked upon – domestically and globally – since the financial crisis hit in mid 2007. For those who argue that this issue is falling off the agenda, let me make it clear – sorting out the irresponsibility and regulatory weaknesses that led to the crisis remains an urgent imperative and one that we will continue to prioritise both at home and abroad.

The [UK-wide] Financial Services and Business Bill, will ensure better consumer protection, including a ban on unsolicited credit card cheques and in addition, the FSA is taking action to ensure there can be no return to the old short-termist approach to executive pay in the banking sector. And to help tackle tax avoidance, the treasury have also published today a new tax code for banks.

Mr Speaker, alongside our strategy for growth and jobs, we will introduce new [mostly England-only] legislation: for education, to address child poverty and a Policing, Crime and Private Security Bill. And in doing so we will create a new set of public service entitlements for parents, patients and citizens – securing for them more personal services tailored to their needs.

For patients in the NHS [in England] this will mean enforceable entitlements to prompt treatment and high standards of care.

• a guarantee that no-one who needs to see a cancer specialist waits more than 2 weeks
• a guarantee of a free health-check up on the NHS for everyone over 40
• and a guarantee that no-one waits more than 18 weeks for hospital treatment

  And the [English] Health Secretary will bring forward, later this year, proposals to further focus the NHS towards prevention and the earliest intervention; to extend the choices for people to have treatment and care at times that suit them [e.g. via polyclinics, in England only] and whenever possible in their own homes; to reform and improve maternity and early years’ services; and we will shortly consult on far-reaching proposals for how we need to modernise our health and social care systems [in England] so that our country [England] can meet the challenge of an ageing society.

  The second set of public service entitlements [for England] will be for all parents – with the guarantee of individually tailored education for their child as part of our far-reaching reform of our [English] schools system. Mr Speaker, I want all our children [English children, Mr Brown] to have opportunities that are available today only to those who can pay for them in private education. It is right that personal tutoring should be extended to all who need it, so there will be a new guarantee for parents [in England] of:

• A personal tutor for every pupil at secondary school and
• Catch up tuition, including 1-1, for those who need it;

  So that every school is a good school, and so that we meet the national [English] challenge to eliminate underperforming schools by 2011, we will see the best head teachers working in more than one school as we radically expand trusts, academies and federations to increase the supply of good school places throughout the country.

  The third set of new public service entitlements is the offer neighbourhood police teams [in England and Wales] can make to all citizens in every community. Already, since April last year, there are 3,600 teams in place – offering to every part of the country policing tailored to the community’s needs.

  We will now go further; and guarantee local people [in England and Wales] more power to keep their neighbourhoods safe, including the right

• to hold the police to account at monthly beat meetings,
• to have a say on CCTV and other crime prevention measures
• and to vote on how offenders pay back to the community.

  Our Policing, Crime and Private Security Bill will give the police [in England and Wales] more time on the beat by changing and reducing the reporting requirements for police officers on stop and search forms [so they can still stop and search at will but won't have to document it as much; so how will abuses be prevented?]

  And new rights to ensure that [English and Welsh] women are better protected against violence – that will take account of recommendations made in response to our violence against women and girls consultation, to be published this autumn. [Long overdue, in my view, given the way devolution has done English women a disservice in this regard.]

  Mr Speaker, we will also legislate to ensure protection for children [across the UK] – with a new and strengthened system of statutory age ratings for video games.

  Because British citizenship brings responsibilities as well as rights, we will now require newcomers to earn the right to stay, extending the [UK-wide] points based system to probationary citizenship. Very simply, Mr Speaker, the more you contribute to your community the greater your chance of becoming a citizen.

  Mr Speaker, the Foreign Secretary will introduce legislation [UK-wide] to prohibit the use, development, production, stockpiling and transfer of cluster munitions – bringing into British law the international agreement we led the way on signing last year.

  Finally Mr Speaker, Building Britain’s Future must clearly start here – in this parliament – with our commitment to cleaning up politics and establishing a new and strong democratic and constitutional settlement to rebuild trust in politics [how about an English parliament to deal with those England-only matters, then?]. And I can announce today on the House of Lords that we will legislate next session: to complete the process of removing the hereditary principle from the second chamber and to provide for the disqualification of members where there is reason to do so.

  And we will set out proposals to complete Lords’ reform by bringing forward a draft bill for a smaller and democratically constituted second chamber. [How about consulting the UK people on this major item of constitutional reform?]

  Mr Speaker, there is a real choice for our country [England and Britain]; creating jobs or doing nothing. Driving growth forward or letting then recession take its course. We will not walk away from the British people in difficult times. [But you contemptuously turn your back on the English people, Mr Brown.]

  I commend this statement to the House.

I was struck last night by how the panellists of BBC1’s Any Questions displayed a rare unity in condemning the ‘nationalism’ to which they imputed the recent assaults on Romanian migrants in Northern Ireland. ‘There can be no place for nationalism in modern Britain’, they intoned to the audience’s acclaim.

Apart from the fact that statements such as this articulate a quasi-nationalistic, or inverted-nationalist, pride in Britain (‘what makes us “great as a nation” is our tolerance and integration of multiple nationalities’), this involved an unchallenged equation of hostility towards immigration / racism with ‘nationalism’. This was especially inappropriate in the Northern Ireland context where ‘nationalism’ is associated with Irish republicanism, and hence with Irish nationalism and not – what, actually? British nationalism à la BNP; the British ‘nationalism’ of Northern Irish loyalists (no one bothered to try and unpick whether the people behind the violence had been from the Catholic or Protestant community, or both); or even ‘English’ nationalism?

Certainly, it’s a stock response on the part of the political and media establishment to associate ‘English nationalism’ per se with xenophobia, opposition to immigration and racism. But this sort of knee-jerk reaction itself involves an unself-critical, phobic negativity towards (the concept of) the English – and certainly, the idea of the ‘white English’ – that crosses over into inverted racism, and which ‘colours’ (or, shall we say, emotionally infuses) people’s response to the concept of ‘English nationalism’. In other words, ‘English nationalism’, for the liberal political and media classes, evokes frightening images of racial politics and violence because, in part, the very concept of ‘the English nation’ is laden with associations of ‘white Anglo-Saxon’ ethnic aggressiveness and brutality. English nationalism is therefore discredited in the eyes of the liberal establishment because it is unable to dissociate it from its images of the historic assertion of English (racial) ’superiority’ (for instance, typically, in the Empire). But the fact that the establishment is unable to re-envision what a modern and different English nationalism, and nation, could mean is itself the product of its ‘anti-English’ prejudice and generalisations bordering on racism: involving an assumption that the ‘white English’ (particularly of the ‘lower classes’) are in some sense intrinsically brutish and racist – in an a-historic way that reveals their ‘true nature’, rather than as a function of an imperial and industrial history that both brutalised and empowered the English on a massive scale.

This sort of anti-English preconception was built into the design of New Labour’s asymmetric devolution settlement: it was seen as legitimate to give political expression to Scottish and Welsh nationalism, just not English nationalism. Evidently, there is a place for some forms of nationalism in modern Britain – the ‘Celtic’ ones – but not the English variety. While this is not an exhaustive explanation, the anomalies and inequities of devolution do appear to have enacted a revenge against the English for centuries of perceived domination and aggression. First, there is the West Lothian Question: the well known fact that Scottish and Welsh MPs can make decisions and pass laws that relate to England only, whereas English MPs can no longer make decisions in the same policy areas in Scotland and Wales. This could be seen as a reversal of the historical situation, as viewed and resented through the prism of Scottish and Welsh nationalism: instead of England ruling Scotland and Wales through the political structures of the Union, now Scotland and Wales govern England through their elected representatives in Westminster, who ensure that England’s sovereignty and aspirations for self-government are frustrated.

It might seem a somewhat extreme characterisation of the present state of affairs to say that Scotland and Wales ‘govern England’; but it certainly is true that a system that involves the participation of Scottish and Welsh MPs is involved in the active suppression not only of the idea of an English parliament to govern English matters (which would restore parity with Scotland and Wales) but of English-national identity altogether: the cultural war New Labour has waged against the affirmation and celebration of Englishness in any form – the surest way to extinguish demands for English self-rule being to obliterate the English identity from the consciousness of the silent British majority. In this respect, New Labour’s attempts to replace Englishness with an a-national Britishness – in England only – are indeed reminiscent of the efforts made by an England-dominated United Kingdom in previous centuries to suppress the national identity, political aspirations and traditions of Scotland and Wales.

This notion of devolution enabling undue Scottish and Welsh domination of English affairs becomes less far-fetched when you bear in mind the disproportionate presence of Scottish-elected MPs that have filled senior cabinet positions throughout New Labour’s tenure, including, of course, Gordon Brown: chancellor for the first ten years and prime minister for the last two. And considering that Brown is the principal protagonist in the drive to assert and formalise a Britishness that displaces Englishness as the central cultural and national identity of the UK, this can only lend weight to suspicions that New Labour has got it in for England, which it views in the inherently negative way I described above.

However, the main grounds for believing that devolution enshrines nationalistic bias and vindictiveness towards England is the way New Labour has continued to operate the Barnett Formula: the funding mechanism that ensures that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland benefit from a consistently higher per-capita level of public expenditure than England. One thing to be observed to begin with is that Barnett is used to legitimise the continuing participation of non-English MPs in legislating for England, as spending decisions that relate directly to England only trigger incremental expenditure for the other nations.

But New Labour has used Barnett not only to justify the West Lothian Question but has attempted to justify it in itself as a supposedly ‘fair’ system for allocating public expenditure. It seems that it is construed as fair primarily because it does penalise England in favour of the devolved nations, not despite this fact. This sort of thinking was evidenced this week during a House of Lords inquiry into the Barnett Formula. Liam Byrne, the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury, described the mechanism as “fair enough”, only to be rounded on by the Welsh Labour chair Lord Richard of Ammanford: “It doesn’t actually mean anything. Look at the difference between Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland – is that fair?” So it’s OK for England to receive 14% less spending per head of population than Wales, 21% less than Scotland and 31% less than Northern Ireland; the only ‘unfairness’ in the system is the differentials between the devolved nations!

The view that this system is somehow ‘fair to England’ – except it’s not articulated as such, as this would be blatantly ridiculous and it ascribes to England some sort of legal personality, which the government denies: ‘fair for the UK as a whole’ would be the kind of phrase used – exemplifies the sort of nationalistic, anti-English bias that has characterised New Labour. It’s as if the view is that England ‘owes’ it to the other nations: that because it has historically been, and still is, more wealthy overall and more economically powerful than the other nations, it is ‘fair’ that it should both pay more taxes and receive less back on a sort of redistribution of wealth principle. But this involves a re-definition of redistribution of wealth on purely national lines, as if England as a whole were imagined as a nation of greedy capitalists and arrogant free marketeers that need to pay their dues to the exploited and neglected working class people of Scotland and Wales: the bedrock of the Labour movement.

In short, it’s ‘pay-back time’: overlaying the centuries-long resentment towards England’s wealth and power, England is being penalised for having supported Margaret Thatcher and her programme of privatisation, disinvestment in public services and ruthless market economics. ‘OK, if that’s how you want it, England, you can continue your programme of market reforms of public services; and if you want a public sector that is financially cost-efficient and run on market principles, then you can jolly well pay yourselves for the services that you don’t want the public purse to fund – after all, you can afford to, can’t you? But meanwhile, your taxes can fund those same services for us, because we can’t afford to pay for them ourselves but can choose to get them anyway through our higher public-spending allocation and devolved government’.

Such appears at least to be the ugly nationalistic, anti-English backdrop to the two-track Britain New Labour has ushered in with asymmetric devolution. This has allowed Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to pursue a classic social-democratic path of high levels of funding for public services based on a redistributive tax system; that is, with wealth being redistributed from England, as the tax revenues from the devolved nations are not sufficient to fund the programme. Meanwhile, in England, New Labour has taken forward the Thatcherite agenda of reforming the public sector on market principles. In a market economy, individuals are required to pay for many things that are financed by the state in more social-democratic and socialist societies. Hence, the market economics can be used to justify the unwillingness of the state to subsidise certain things like university tuition fees (an ‘investment’ by individuals in their own economic future); various ‘luxuries’ around the edges of the standard level of medical treatment offered by the state health-care system (e.g. free parking and prescriptions, or highly advanced and expensive new drugs that it is not ‘cost-efficient’ for the public sector to provide free of charge); or personal care for the elderly, for which individuals in a market economy are expected to make their own provisions.

These sorts of market principle, which have continued and extended the measures to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’ initiated under the Thatcher and Major governments, have been used to justify the government in England not paying for things that are funded by the devolved governments: public-sector savings made in England effectively cross-subsidise the higher levels of public spending in the other nations. Beneath an ideological agenda (reform of the public services in England), a nationalist agenda has been advanced that runs utterly counter to the principles of equality and social solidarity across the whole of the United Kingdom that Labour has traditionally stood for. Labour has created and endorsed a system of unequal levels of public-service provision based on a ‘national postcode lottery’, i.e. depending purely on which country you happen to live in. Four different NHS’s with care provided more
free at the point of use in some countries than others, and least of all in England; a vastly expanded university system that is free everywhere except England; and social care offered with varying levels of public funding, but virtually none in England. So much for Labour as the party of the working class and of the Union: not in England any more.

There’s an argument for saying that English people should pay for more of their medical, educational and personal-care needs, as they are better off on average. But that’s really not the point. Many English people struggle to pay for these things or simply can’t do so altogether, and so miss out on life-prolonging drug treatments or educational opportunities that their ‘fellow citizens’ elsewhere in the UK are able to benefit from. A true social-democratic- and socialist-style public sector should offer an equal level of service provision to anyone throughout the state that wishes to access it, whether or not they could afford to pay for private health care or education but choose not to. The wealthy end up paying proportionately more for public services anyway through higher taxes. Under the New Labour multi-track Britain, by contrast, those English people who are better off not only have to pay higher taxes but also have to pay for services that other UK citizens can obtain free of charge, as do poorer English people. One might even say that this extra degree of taxation (higher income tax + charges for public services) is a tax for being English.

But of course, it’s not just the middle and upper classes that pay the England tax; it’s Labour’s traditional core supporters: the English working class. On one level, it’s all very well taking the view that ‘middle England’ supports privatisation and a market economy, so they can jolly well pay for stuff rather than expecting the state to fund it. But it’s altogether another matter treating the less well-off people of England with the same disregard. It is disregarding working people in England to simply view it as acceptable that they should have to pay for hospital parking fees, prescription charges, their kids’ higher education and care for their elderly relatives, while non-English people can get all or most of that for free. What, are the English working class worth less than their Celtic cousins?

How much of this New Labour neglect of the common people of England can truly be put down to a combination of Celtic nationalism, anti-English nationalism, and indeed inverted-racist prejudice towards the white English working class? Well, an attribution to the English of an inherent preference for market economics – coming as it does from a movement that despised that ideology during the 1980s and early 1990s – could well imply a certain contempt for the English, suffused with Scottish and Welsh bitterness towards the ‘English’ Thatcher government.

But an even more fundamental and disturbing turning of the tables against the English is New Labour’s laissez-faire attitude to job creation, training and skills development for the English working class. The Labour government abandoned the core principle that it has a duty to assist working people in acquiring the skills they need to compete in an increasingly aggressive global market place, and to foster ‘full employment’ in England; and it just let the market take over. It’s as if the people of England weren’t worth the investment and didn’t matter, only the economy. And it’s because of Labour’s comprehensive sell out to market economics that it has encouraged the unprecedented levels of immigration we have experienced, deliberately to foster a low-wage economy; and, accordingly, a staggering nine-tenths of the new jobs created under the Labour government have gone to workers from overseas. Is it any wonder, then, that there is such widespread concern – whether well founded or not in individual cases – among traditional Labour voters in England about immigration, and about newcomers taking the jobs and housing that they might have thought a Labour government would have striven to provide for them?

How much of the liberal establishment’s contempt and fear of English white working-class racism and anti-immigration violence is an adequate response to a genuine threat? On the contrary, to what extent has that threat and that hostility towards migrants actually been brought about and magnified by New Labour’s pre-existing contempt and inverted racism towards the white working-class people of England, and the policies (or lack of them) that flowed from those attitudes?

Has New Labour, in its darker under-belly, espoused the contempt towards the ‘lazy’, ‘loutish’, disenfranchised English working class that Margaret Thatcher made her hallmark – and mixed it up in a heady cocktail together with Celtic nationalism, and politically-correct positive economic and cultural discrimination in favour of migrants and ethnic minorities?

One thing is for sure, though: English nationalism properly understood – as a movement that strives to redress the democratic and social inequalities of the devolution settlement out of a concern for all of the people residing and trying to earn a living in England – is far less likely to foster violence against innocent Romanian families than is the ‘British nationalism’ of the BNP or the various nationalisms of the other UK nations that have seen far lower levels of immigration than England.

But is there a place not just for English nationalism but for England itself in a British state and establishment that are so prejudiced against it?

“It IS great to be British”. With its emphasis on ‘is’, this phrase reminds me of the opening of the song, ‘Oh, I DO like to be beside the seaside’. Brown’s latest eulogy of Britishness does indeed have something of that tone about it: well, we’ll all pull together, come rain and foul weather; there’s nothing like a crisis to get us going, and we’ll jolly well come up trumps in the end.

Well, that’s all right then. Evidently, we’re in safe hands. If you want an example of what I understand by the term ‘Britology’, this is a prime example. All the motifs are there in concentrated form. I was tempted to produce a detailed, blow-by-blow critique; but, like Brown, I’d just be going over old ground, and it would be dignifying the drivel (if not drizzle) in too high a degree.

If you feel like some bedtime reading to send you off into a fitful sleep spent endlessly turning over the same phrases in your mind, in the desperate attempt to squeeze out some meaning – any meaning; or if you fancy something to make your blood boil; then go ahead, take the plunge and read it. Here are just a few pointers to watch out for:

1) Britishness / Englishness: What Brown says about ‘Britishness’ could just as easily be called Englishness. And that’s because he IS essentially talking about Englishness, as the Britishness he outlines is what he needs the English to think of as their true, underlying ’national identity’ – whereas, in reality, it’s Englishness that is the underlying national identity of Britishness: “We have shown over three centuries that a common ground of Britishness, of British identity, can be found in the stories of the various communities and nationalities that inhabit these islands. . . . On one side, our nurturing Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English identities and sensibilities – now, of course, added to by many others . . . . On the other, carefully balanced and held in tension, the organisations and operations of a British state that, shorn of nationalistic baggage, are the patriotic aspect of the nation state”.

Eugh? Decoded: ‘British patriotism (patriotism, you understand, not nationalism) is the acceptable face of the English nationalism (and national identity) that originally subjugated the other British nations and the colonies, who are now (after three centuries) England’s equals within a common Britishness’.

2) Don’t say ‘England’, or – if you have to – marginalise it: In order for Englishness to be re-presented as Britishness in this way, Brown needs to suppress or marginalise all references to England. This is because the thing he has to avoid at all costs is referring to the real political history of Britain, which is that the British state has been predominantly driven and moulded by English national and economic interests; and that England could once again develop a national consciousness that, this time, could see its interests as being better served outside the UK, rather than inside. This marginalisation is evident in the above-quoted reference to “our nurturing Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English identities and sensibilities”: putting ‘English’ last in line after the smaller nations, as if England were only one and – by implication – almost the least important driver of British identity; well, the least distinctive element in Brown’s Britishness, that’s for sure.

Another example is a quite ludicrous passage referring to the recent financial crisis:

“I believe a debate on Britishness is well timed, because of its relevance to the recent financial crisis. When it struck, no one questioned the British state standing behind banks headquartered in Scotland [yes, they bloody well did!]. No one discussed what a Wales-only response might be to the selling of sub-prime mortgages, or wondered how Northern Ireland might find its own solution to changing global conditions”.

Yes, this is where the discussion ends. ‘What about England, you f***er?’ was literally my response on reading this (well, OK, without the asterisks, if you see what I mean). The point being that people did question whether England would be better off weathering the financial crisis on its own: that it wouldn’t have been so s***ing awful in the first place, and then we wouldn’t have had to mortgage the future of the next generation of English kids and NHS patients to prop up the Scottish banks (and Chancellors) that had been foremost in getting us into the mess in the first place. (While on the subject of the NHS, you’ll love the lyrical passage about how it is an example of our fairness and unity as a ‘nation’. What a load of absolute tosh: there are four NHS’s thanks to Brown and New Labour, and the English one gets the smallest per-capita funding of them all – really united and fair!)

3)  British values: While we’re talking about ‘fairness’, all the pantheon of ‘British values’ are paraded out here, especially – alongside fairness – ‘tolerance’ and ‘liberty’, along with the Brownian insistence on ‘responsibilities’ alongside ‘rights’. It is highly ironic to hear someone like Brown emphasising liberty so much (an irony that seems totally to escape him), given the fact that his government has been responsible for removing countless liberties that have been fought for and cherished by the English over centuries.

4) British, not English, history: What is even more outrageous is that Brown presents this historic struggle as British history:

“But from the time of Magna Carta, to the civil wars and revolutions of the 17th century, through to the liberalism of Victorian Britain and the widening and deepening of democracy and fundamental rights throughout the last century, there has been a British tradition of liberty – what one writer has called our ‘gift to the world’”. 

Ahem: excuse me, Sir, but weren’t Magna Carta and the Civil War part of English history, before ‘Great Britain’ even existed? Not in Brown’s school of history, they aren’t. Just as a common Britishness – not England and Englishness – is the centre and driving force of Britain, for Brown, so ‘Britain’ is the ultimate telos of the history of these islands: the goal to which it inexorably tends and from whose standpoint alone the definitive history of these islands will be told. Or, in other words, those founding events in English history are indeed confined to history; whereas their continuing effects are now framed as part of the British present and future, which transforms those events retroactively into ‘British history’ (no longer English) and a founding part of the British identity. 

This appropriation to Britain of the narrative of English history is dependent on the suppression of the fact that the struggle for modern liberty began in England and is a constitutive part of the English national identity. Indeed, one might even contend that a hidden (or not so hidden) driving force behind Gordon Brown’s suppression of ‘our liberties’ is his urge to suppress England itself: the nurturing mother of freedom. 

5) Nations and regions: Just a few overt instances, made all the more sinister by the general talking up of Britain as the nation [is it my imagination, but are politicians and the media increasingly referring to Britain as a / the 'nation' nowadays, almost as much as they call it 'the / this country'?], while references to England as a nation are avoided at all costs and the ‘regions’ are clearly meant to be English (although they could also be read as referring to Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland, too): 

“There is the changing role of the state and its relationship with our regions, with communities and individuals”. Is that his way of referring to devolution, which he doesn’t mention explicitly anywhere else?! Or is this just a reference to the non-mandated, centrally imposed regionalisation of England; the equally non-mandated reforms of local government; and the steadily advancing encroachment of the state into the lives and liberties of the individual? 

Or again: “a strong sense of shared patriotism can be built that relies not on race or on ancient and unchanging institutions, but rather on a foundation of values that can be shared by all of us, regardless of race, region or religion”. Race, region or religion – the new ‘3 R’s’! Oh, I get it: ‘region’ is the new collective term to refer to what Brown previously christened the ‘nations and regions’. It’s what you might call a more politically correct revision of that previous designation: it doesn’t ‘discriminate’ between the ‘nations’ of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the ‘regions’ of England, by simply referring to them all as regions. Well, that’s all right then. Except we know that, in reality, those nations do now have new national institutions (their own parliaments and governments), whereas we English are lumbered with the ancient and unchanging institution of the UK parliament – unless you count the unelected regional authorities as the new institutions for England. And, of course, this way of looking at it makes Britain the nation, as it is frequently termed in Brown’s essay. 

Elsewhere, Brown refers to Scotland, Wales, N. Ireland and England (let’s get the order right) as ‘nationalities’, not explicitly as nations. This implies that there aren’t four nations in the UK but just four distinct national identities that have fused to form a single British nation. But, ironically, this bizarre coinage makes the indigenous peoples of these islands seem like uprooted immigrants to Britain: having a nationality distinct from the nation (Britain) in which they now live. In fact, ‘nationality’ is more commonly used to refer to a person’s official national identity: their citizenship. We talk of ‘British nationality’ but of the ‘nations’ and national identities of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland (and Cornwall, for some). 

This linguistic confusion marks out the way Brown turns the realities of British national identities on their head: ‘British’ is in reality the name of a ‘mere nationality’ (citizenship, statehood). But Brown wants to make Britain out to be a nation and the core national identity of its citizens. If Britain becomes a nation, then the ‘lesser’ term of ‘nationality’ can be applied to the UK’s historic national communities. And yet, ‘nationality’ is in fact the more ‘proper’ (official, legal, formal) name for a person’s ‘national identity’ – so that ascribing ‘nationality’ to the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish suggests that these – not Britishness – are the founding national identities of the UK. But then, all that is left for Brown to hook his concept of ‘proper’, true British nationhood on to are attributes of citizenship and statehood - those above-mentioned civic British values and the institutions of the state: “the organisations and operations of a British state, . . . shorn of nationalistic baggage, are the patriotic aspect of the nation state. . . . I believe we are discovering that what unites us is far greater than what separates us, and that the values we share most are those that matter most. Recognising them, and with them the rights and responsibilities that citizenship involves, will strengthen us as an open, diverse, adaptable, enabling and successful modern state”. The state as nation; and the nations as superseded, nationalistic ‘nationalities’. 

Well, I’m sorry; I ended up doing the lengthy demolition job after all. Familiar ground, but endless permutations of the same delusional reasoning and twisted logic. But it’s true, there is one thing that IS great about Britain: you’re never far from the water. Deep water in Brown’s case.

I’ve followed the reaction to the Archbishop of York John Sentamu’s recent sermon on Englishness with great interest. On the whole, the response from the English-nationalist community has been highly positive. This is understandable, as Sentamu’s words add up to a celebration of Englishness, which – he argued – should in fact be formally celebrated by making St. George’s Day a national holiday:

“Let us recognise collectively the enormous treasure that sits in our cultural and spiritual vaults. Let’s draw upon the riches of our heritage and find a sense of purpose for those who are thrashing around for meaning and settling for second best. Let us not forego our appreciation of an English identity for fear of upset or offence to those who claim such an identity has no place in a multi-cultural society. Englishness is not diminished by newcomers who each bring with them a new strand to England’s fabric, rather Englishness is emboldened to grow anew. The truth is that an all embracing England, confident and hopeful in its own identity, is something to celebrate. Let us acknowledge and enjoy what we are.”

This makes such a refreshing change from the continuous diet of Britishness that we are incessantly fed by the politicians and the media that Sentamu’s speech is itself something one feels like celebrating. As he himself says, “Englishness is back on the agenda”. Amen to that!

In view of this, it feels somewhat churlish on my part to point out that the Archbishop himself appears at times to have a weak grasp of the distinction between Englishness (and England) and Britishness (and Britain). This is a point I made in a comment to a posting on Sentamu’s sermon in the Cranmer blog, which I reproduce here:

“Archbishop Sentamu does appear to be confused about the distinction between England / Englishness and Britain / Britishness, slipping seamlessly between one and the other in this sermon. For instance, at the very start of his disquisition on the ‘realities of Englishness’, under the heading ‘England’s Debt to Christianity’, the Archbishop writes: ‘Historically, Christianity has been at the heart of the history of this nation. British history, customs and ethos have been gradually shaped by the Christian faith’. Which is it, Archbishop: England or Britain? And which is ‘the nation’?

“And again, under the heading ‘A Loss of Vision’, Sentamu writes: ‘a more serious development over the past century has been a loss of vision for the English people. Central to that loss of vision has been the loss of the British Empire, wherein England played a defining role. . . . As the vision for Britain became more introspective, I believe the United Kingdom became more self-absorbed’. Again, which is it: England, Britain or the United Kingdom?

“This uncertainty somewhat undermines the important point the Archbishop makes in this section, which is something I very much agree with: ‘there has perhaps never been a better time to re-state this question as to how England might re-discover a noble vision for the future? From my own standpoint I believe that it is vital that England must utilize the challenges posed by the current economic turmoil and in restating the questions posed by Bishop Montefiore, England must recover a sense of who she is and what she is’.

“In restating those questions, England must ask them from the standpoint of England, not Britain. Indeed, the ambiguous interdependency between that nation and that state respectively is very much present in Hugh Montefiore’s sermon to which Archbishop Sentamu refers: ‘I sometimes fear that the people of this great country, having shed an Empire, have also lost a noble vision for their future. How can we rediscover our self-confidence and self-esteem as a nation?’ What is ‘this great country’ and which is ‘a nation’: England or Britain?

“This is not mere semantics but goes to the heart of the question about whether we can rediscover a sense of national identity (‘England must recover a sense of who she is and what she is’) and purpose in the post-imperial age. This is especially critical, as Sentamu argues that we need to draw inspiration from that very imperial past to redefine our mission (including Christian mission) and values for the present and future. But can we succeed in defining and celebrating a distinctive Englishness and vision for England if we do not disentangle the core identity of England from that of Britain, as John Sentamu appears not to be able to do? As he writes: ‘Some English people don’t like to say anything about their heritage, for fear of upsetting newcomers. My question to them is simple: Why do you think we came here? There is something very attractive about the United Kingdom. That is why people stay! As a boy in Uganda, I was taught by British missionaries. Just as foreigners brought the Christian Faith to England and the rest of the UK, so British foreigners handed on the baton to me, my family and my forebears. . . . All I am doing now is to remind the English of what they taught me’. All very fine stuff. But who in fact taught him his faith: the English or the British? And which country is it that foreigners come to and like so much: England or the UK?

“As I say, the distinction is far from semantic, as we are living in a political and cultural climate in which England and Englishness are very much being suppressed in favour of Britain and Britishness, and a re-telling of the whole narrative of English history, values and identity is being made as that of Britain. Without defining and affirming an Englishness distinct from Britishness, there will be no English future to build for, the hope for which Archbishop Sentamu expresses at the end of his sermon. Just as he juxtaposes the traditional British patriotic hymn of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ with the English hymn of ‘Jerusalem’.

“So perhaps I was right in my previous comment, after all, to say that the CofE needs to work out whether it is primarily English or British in order to be in a position truly to speak for England and express an authentic vision for England – as England”.

Thinking about this further, I wonder if this overlapping of England and Britain in Sentamu’s speech is not so much a case of confusion as a reaffirmation of the very anglo-centricity of traditional Britishness. In my last post in this blog, I described the way in which Gordon Brown’s Britishness agenda draws on English people’s traditional non-differentiation between Englishness and Britishness to enlist their identification with a new Britishness that makes no reference whatsoever to Englishness or England – literally: the words ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’ are erased from the official lexicon, and are replaced by concepts of Britishness and Britain that take over all the characteristics of their English precursors, including that of the sovereign national identity at the heart of the UK state.

This attempt to appropriate English nationhood and sovereignty to a British state that has hitherto been primarily an instrument of English power has brought about a profound schism in the English-British identity, with many English people coming to reject Britain and Britishness altogether because they no longer seem to represent a vehicle and expression of English-national pride and identity. These latter are what John Sentamu has affirmed in his sermon: but not as being ineradicably at odds with Britain and Britishness but as constituting and epitomising all that is best about Britain – in both its imperial past and its multicultural present.

As this restatement of the positive characteristics of Englishness is a reinstatement of Englishness at the heart of Britishness, it is not surprising that the Archbishop’s list of English values closely resembles similar lists of British values that are regularly trooped out: “fraternity, law, liberty, landscape, language, magnanimity, monarchy, a thirst for knowledge, and a reverence for titles and status. But along with these I would also add, an ability to cope and not make a fuss”. Lists such as these are of course highly disputable, both as typifying the English and in relation to whether they are more aptly extended to all the people of Britain, not just the English. However, the point I would emphasise is that even when adduced as a set of British values, qualities such as these are by default ascribed to the English, as it is the people of England that are intended to embody those values most ‘quintessentially’.

Another question, raised by the Archbishop himself, is whether these things are actual characteristics of English / British people or virtues, as the lists often include qualities with a moral tenor such as fairness, tolerance, honesty and respect for the rule of law. And again, are these ‘virtues’ that the English (and / or British) exemplify to a high degree in some way, or are they mainly characteristics that we hold up as ideals to which we aspire but which we very often fall short of in practice? The same could be said of some of the other qualities commonly termed ‘British values’, which are in reality political ideals or civic virtues, such as: liberty (ironically, a favourite of the oh-so un-libertarian Gordon Brown), equality, fraternity (in the Archbishop’s list), democracy, justice, and hard work. Are these typical characteristics of English / British society or do they merely reflect our aspirations for the way we would like Britain to be – some might say, all the more held up as an ideal the more they are in reality absent, as in the case of liberty alluded to above, or hard work, which Gordon Brown hammers on about increasingly as unemployment rises?

Come what may, whether we hold virtues or values to be more important or revealing about us goes to the heart of what we think should be the fundamental principles by which we live our lives as a nation – however much we do in reality live our lives by those principles. And there’s no doubt that Archbishop Sentamu’s intervention is part of an attempt to reaffirm Christian faith and traditions as the prime mover that has shaped the ‘moral character’ of England, and to reconnect English people to Christianity in the present:

“Whilst it has been suggested by some that virtues such as fair play, kindness and decency are part of any consideration of what it means to be English, the question as to where these virtues came from is usually overlooked. It is my understanding that such virtues and those associated with them, which form the fabric of our society have been weaved through a period of more than 1,500 years of the Christian faith operating in and upon this society.”

Interviewed for the second part of Matthew D’Ancona’s two-part Radio Four series on Britishness (which is basically a plug for a book on the same theme D’Ancona has co-written with Gordon Brown – play-back available only till Tuesday 14 April), the soon-to-retire Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster Cormac Murphy-O’Connor also emphasised the precedence of Christian virtues over secular values. This was, O’Connor explained, because virtues were unchanging principles that give order and meaning to people’s lives, while secular values are continually evolving in line with changes in social mores and material circumstances. A solid core of belief in timeless virtues thus provides a sense of rootedness in a world that can otherwise appear alarmingly mutable and unstable. From a Catholic perspective, these universal principles by definition transcend the individual nations that attempt to live by those principles. All the same, one implication of Cardinal O’Connor’s words was clearly that the principles of Christian faith make at once a higher and deeper claim to our allegiance than the merely civic and secular values that Brown and D’Ancona identify as the founding principles for a multi-cultural 21st-century Britain.

What was even more thought-provoking was D’Ancona’s interview with the leading cleric in the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. This was firstly because of what it left out. On the preceding Sunday, on the Radio Four programme of the same name, they played an excerpt of D’Ancona’s interview with Williams where the author was trying to get the Archbishop to talk of the ways in which Christianity had helped mould Britain’s ‘national identity’. Williams deftly side-stepped this trap by agreeing that Christianity had been formative of “England’s national identity, let alone that of Britain” right from the very start of England’s history as a nation, when it helped to bring together the different Anglo-Saxon tribes into a unified kingdom – a history which Archbishop Sentamu also makes reference to in his sermon. So Rowan Williams refused to allow the Church of England to be used to support D’Ancona’s Britishness agenda by confirming a narrative whereby England’s Christian history had been one of many strands contributing to the development of something such a British national identity and set of values today – which would in fact confine the Church and England to the status of historical entities, rather than as continuing communities with beliefs and traditions distinct from those of modern secular Britain.

As I say, D’Ancona’s interview on the Britishness programme itself was revealing through its omissions, one of which was this very excerpt, which was conveniently edited out of the final broadcast. The part of the interview that D’Ancona chose to focus on in the programme was where Williams was making out a case in favour of the Church of England retaining its established status. Williams argued that this actually helps to anchor a multi-cultural society as it provides a solid foundation of core values, mutual respect, and a model for interaction between all the different ethnic groups – whether or not they fully subscribe to the religious basis for those principles. Indeed, Williams maintained, it was his experience that those of other faiths and of none often told him they valued the established status of the Church of England for this very reason. Clearly, those coming to England – especially those with a strong religious background – value the fact that there is a religious voice and an ‘official’ faith at the heart of the British Establishment. This corresponds to the experience of their own cultures, where there is often a formal, state religion, or certainly a majority religion; and it also constitutes something like a formal set of fundamental English beliefs that enables them to better understand how some of their own cultural and religious practices might conflict with English traditions, and to negotiate a path of integration into British society based on respect for its most deep-rooted norms and values.

Conversely, the absence of a strong religious centre to English and British life can engender a lack of respect and even fear towards our society on the part of migrants, which can lead migrant communities to retreat into their own ghettoes, and may in extremis even contribute towards fanatical jihadist ideas that Islam should become the dominant faith of Britain. Similarly, a lack of a grounding in true Christian principles – including loving the stranger and welcoming those of other faiths from a position of security in one’s own faith – can increase misunderstanding and hostility to those of other faith traditions, obscuring the fact that there is often more in common between people of different faiths (at least with respect to ethics and social values) than between those of any faith and those of none. This touches upon what Archbishop Sentamu means when he writes about ‘magnanimity’ as both an English characteristic and a Christian virtue. This goes beyond the mere tolerance that Gordon Brown and the Britologists spout on about, a quality which can imply division and lack of engagement with those of different backgrounds that one is tolerating. By contrast, magnanimity implies an openness towards the stranger, and a proactive effort to engage with them, to share with them what one has and is, and together to create community.

Matthew D’Ancona insidiously characterised Rowan Williams’s thoughtful reflection on the value of an established faith as ‘clever’ – implying that it was a sort of casuistic attempt to make out that the Church of England could provide a more pluralist, tolerant and even liberal basis for a modern multi-cultural society than the form of secular liberalism that D’Ancona clearly wishes to set up as the fundamental credo of a 21st-century British ‘nation’. This was clear from the end of the Britishness programme – immediately after the edited interview with Rowan Williams – where D’Ancona himself goes into sermon mode, arguing that it should be possible for secular British society to agree a set of fundamental moral and philosophical principles (“lines in the sand”, as he put it) that are non-negotiable. These would constitute a similar set of core British values to that which has hitherto been provided by the Church of England (as Rowan Williams would argue) and fulfilling the same sort of function – providing an ‘official’ statement along the lines of: ‘this is Britain; this is who we are and what we believe’ – enabling those of other backgrounds who settle here to understand and respect British society, and adapt to it.

The difference is that these new values are profoundly secular and liberal; and D’Ancona’s new British nation-state would undoubtedly be secular in its constitution – not an established religion in sight. Indeed, I would characterise these values as ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘absolutist’ liberalism. For instance, two examples of non-negotiable values that D’Ancona skirted past in his final flourish were gay rights and women’s rights. No objection whatsoever on principle. But the anti-religious thrust of D’Ancona’s argument suggested that what we would end up with is more of what we have already endured under New Labour: certain so-called gay and women’s rights overriding and even obliterating the rights of religious groups to believe and do otherwise, and to preach and teach against certain practices – at least, from a government-sponsored pulpit. The ‘right’ of gay couples to adopt children taking precedence over the conscientious objection of Christian adoption agencies, forcing them to close; the ‘right’ of Lesbian couples to both use IVF to conceive children and be registered on the birth certificate as the genetic parents (even if neither of them actually are), obliterating the right of the child to a father; the ‘right’ of women to abortion, to the extent that – and this is quite conceivable – medical staff who refuse to support or carry out abortions could be prosecuted or struck off.

These and more are the kind of ‘British values’ that D’Ancona and Brown would have as the underpinning of their cherished ideal of a ‘Nation of Britain’ – indeed, Brown voted for them all, plus hybrid human-animal embryos, in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, where he came very close to forcing Christian conscientious objectors among the Labour ranks to support the government or else lose the whip. This is ‘tolerance’ of extremes of Brave New World social, and indeed genetic, engineering pushed to such a degree that it tips over into intolerance towards those who dare to disagree out of adherence to more traditional beliefs and models of society. This is liberal fundamentalism, which relativises any claims to absolute truth, and any statements of fundamental right and wrong, other than its own.

And this is a Britishness finally stripped of any fundamental affiliation to the Christian faith and tradition. The English Christian faith and tradition, that is. To tear the English heart out of Britishness, you have to de-christianise Britain; and to de-christianise Britain, you have strip out its English centre. And that is because England is a Christian nation. The large majority of English people may no longer attend church services on a regular basis; but English mores and the English character have been moulded by the faith over centuries. And an England in touch with its roots is an England that recognises how much it owes to the Christian tradition.

Perhaps, then, the reawakening of a distinctly English national consciousness will also lead to a re-evaluation, indeed a renewed valuing, of England’s Christian character and heritage – its virtues even, and its vices. If so, the Church of England may feel increasingly empowered to speak out on behalf of England and in England’s name, and so provide the moral leadership that is necessary in the fight to resist both the total secularisation and the ‘Britishisation’ of our proud and Christian land.

Britain: the English Empire

While other countries formed nation-states, the English built an Empire. If all we English had been bothered about back then in the 18th and 19th centuries had been nation building, then I’ve no doubt we’d have had a unitary Nation of Britain long since: our little island fortress, with our sights and ambitions set merely on looking to our own affairs and keeping our European neighbours out of them.

But that sort of thing was for them, not us. So many of the European nations that emerged from smaller and larger entities alike during the 18th and particularly 19th centuries were landlocked or hemmed in by bigger powers. Not so we English. The open seas stretched out before us, and after we’d seen off first the Spanish Armada and then Napoleon’s navy, we ruled the waves as far as the Americas, Africa, India and Australia.

I’m not justifying all that our world-conquering ancestors did back then in a different world; but let’s not pretend either that our European rivals would not have done the same given half the chance. Indeed, the fact that they had to break out of a land lock helps to explain why the mid-20th-century Germans needed to fight for European domination first as stage one of their plan to rule the world.

The English Empire – what an achievement! Totally un-PC, of course, to speak in such terms – but our modern globalised world and, indeed, our multi-cultural Britain would simply not exist had our mercenary and missionary forebears not sailed off to drag half the world into the modern era. Un-PC, perhaps above all, to dub it the English Empire, not British. But it was the English that were the driving force and the power behind the imperial throne – albeit that many Scots, too, were happy to seize the opportunities for wealth, power and self-advancement that the Empire afforded them, for good or ill.

Should we English be proud of the Empire? To say simply ‘no’ is to conspire with the Britologists that would have everything that is great about ‘this country’ reflect back on ‘Britain’ and lay the blame for all that is bad on England and the English. For them, the English are essentially individualistic, aggressive, even violent; hostile and arrogantly contemptuous towards other cultures, which we supposedly blithely trampled over in the Empire; conservative, narrow-minded and insular. Yet in almost the same breath, they’d have us believe that the Empire in its British essence (as opposed to the ‘English’ aggression and opportunism that drove it) embodied the values that are still true, relevant and British for us today: tolerance, liberty, democracy, fairness and the rule of law. Values, in fact, which – according to Gordon Brown – could and should define a contemporary British ‘Nation’.

Well, I say ‘no’ to that British version of our history: that all-too simplistic dividing of the past into the English ‘black’ and the British ‘white’. You don’t get ‘greatness’ without it containing a little ‘grey’. The Roman Empire was great; its civilisation and technology were prodigies of its time; its law, literature and language, and later its conversion to Christianity, left an enduring legacy throughout Europe and the whole of Christendom. And yet, Rome was built on the back of military conquest, slavery and dictatorship. In the same way, our Empire spread English civilisation, industry, law, language, democracy and Christian faith throughout the world. And yes, it did so on the back of military conquest, slavery and imperial – though not dictatorial – rule. You can’t have one without the other; be proud of one without the other; have your British Empire without your England. You can’t say the ‘good’ values were and are all British but the ‘bad’ actions were all those of the English – because it was the actions and beliefs of the English that created the world in which those values stand today as our enduring legacy: our English legacy. And of that I am truly proud.

Others created nations; we English created the modern world. But as we rightly and democratically surrendered our imperial dominions to their own people, and as other global powers entered the stage, our horizons narrowed to our British island. Without the rationale of overwhelming mutual interest, and without the common enterprise of Empire, the marriage of convenience between England and Scotland that forms the bedrock of the United Kingdom finally looks set to be breaking down. Those who still cherish the ideal image of ‘Britain’s’ imperial greatness – conveniently forgetting the hard realities of domination and exploitation that were an integral part of that story, or ascribing them to England – now seek to build that Britain into a nation; rather than let it slide inexorably into the history books – the books telling the history of England, that is.

Britain never was, still is not and pray God never will be a ‘nation’ in its own right. For some of the Britologists, this is what it should have been from the beginning: from the time of the Acts of Union between England and Scotland in 1707. If this had happened – say, for instance, if Nelson had been defeated at Trafalgar and our energies had subsequently been turned in on ourselves instead of Empire – Britain would now be a European nation-state comparable to those of a similar scale, such as Germany and Italy, that were put together from a collection of kingdoms and principalities during the 19th century. This is how Brown and his ilk would like Britain to be today, fearful that a break-up of Britain into its constituent nations would diminish ‘this country’s’ standing among its European neighbours and weaken its ability to defend its interests within Europe and the international community – albeit peacefully in the present era, thank God.

Of course, logically, such a break-up would by definition diminish this country’s standing if ‘this country’ is defined as Britain: Britain – as a would-be nation-state – simply would be no more. But this would not lessen England’s standing. On the contrary, England would re-emerge from Britain’s shadows as the great nation it always has been, both before and through the period of Union with Scotland: comparable but superior in its past achievements to those other empire-building nations and former rivals France and Spain. England did not need to build a nation of Britain. It already was a great nation at the time of the Union, and the uncomfortable truth is that, from day one, ‘Great Britain’ was more the name of England’s Empire than that of a nation subsuming England. The Union with Scotland was in reality more of an annexation of Scotland – followed one century later by Ireland – into the English Empire, which was already beginning to expand across the globe by the beginning of the 18th century.

In fact, one way of thinking about it would be to say that ‘Britain’ itself was England’s ‘home Empire’ (hence, ‘Great Britain’) as opposed to the Empire ‘abroad’. Scotland and Ireland would then be described as having been originally English colonies, subsequently absorbed into the same political state as England: union within a common state (the English state, renamed ‘Britain’ / the UK to reflect its enlarged geographical extent) but not a common nation. Commonwealth of nations, not British Nation. Unlike a power such as France, whose colonies were all assimilated into France itself, each of the ‘British nations’ (both the other nations of the British Isles and those of the broader Empire) retained or developed distinct identities as nations: distinct from England, that is.

British ‘nationhood’: nothing if not England

So the ‘British’ designation of the other British nations in fact signifies their difference from England – in the past and in the present – as well as England’s enduring difference from Britain. At the same time, however, the British nations’ Britishness mediates a continuing union with England – politically, culturally, socially: a state (in both senses) that can persist so long as England, too, continues to see and describe itself as British. England is the central point of reference and underlying national identity of Britain. This latter term also denotes the commonality and ’sameness’ of Britain, as well as the place of the ‘properly British’: where Britain is thought of as present to itself and in possession of itself, providing a centre of original and authentic Britishness that can be imagined as remaining present through its dispersion across multiple different British nations. But, because it serves this purpose, England cannot define itself as distinct from Britain; it cannot set itself apart from Britain, and / or see itself as superior to the ‘other’ British nations, because this would mean that it was not ‘one’ with – an equal partner to and the means for the unity of – the other nations: the guarantor and foundation of a common Britishness.

These mutually dependent pulls of shared identity / union and continuing difference help to explain why it is over against a distinct, ’superior’ England that the ‘British nations’ both define their own difference and assert a shared Britishness: a Britishness shared with England, that is, but which is predicated on the suppression of an England that is itself distinct from Britain, since England has to serve as the place (literally) of a continuing Britain and ‘proper’ Britishness that those other nations can then both share and differentiate themselves from.

‘We are Scottish and British but not English’. This is still a view, I think, held by the majority of Scots. But it’s ironically connected with another common Scottish perception, which is that English people simply see themselves as ‘British’; that when they refer to England, they tend to mean Britain – and when they say Britain, they generally mean England. (For the moment, forget about the whole British government thing of saying ‘Britain’ rather than ‘England’ even when England is meant; I’m talking about the traditional Scottish assumptions, which are of course related to present British-government practice.) This is ironic because it exemplifies the conflicting pulls and ties of shared identity and difference with and from England that are mediated through ‘Britain’: Scotland is ‘one’ with England but only through Britain; but then again, an identification of England with Britain is asserted (which is what would in fact make that Union with England through Britain truly a union) but is itself framed as an ‘error’, and as the expression of ‘English’ arrogance, imperialism and will to dominate. So, through and as ‘Britain’, England is seen as both one with Scotland and different from it: an identification of England with Britain (and hence, a fundamental union between Scotland and England) is at once asserted and denied. Or putting it another way: Scotland sees itself as both ‘a part of’ Britain and ‘apart from England’ – but only if England and Britain are seen as both the same as each other and different from one another.

I think the same line of reasoning could be applied to the relationship between England and Wales; perhaps more so given the two countries’ much longer and deeper ties of shared and differentiated nationhood within ‘Britain’, which arguably go back to Roman times (or even earlier), when the actual colony of Britannia comprised roughly the territory of England and Wales today. The relationships are more complicated and painful in Northern Ireland. Here, I think the pulls are not so much between Ireland and England within Britain – on the analogy with Scotland and Wales – but between Ireland and Britain ‘as a whole’; although this structure still depends on England providing the ground and basis on which Britain can be viewed as a proper nation, as opposed to a collection of three or four nations. And hence, alongside the Union Jack, the Northern Irish Loyalists fly a flag that is essentially the Cross of St. George with the red hand of Ulster in the centre: as if to say that Ulster’s British centre is England.

So, in order for the other nations of Britain to be seen as nations that are distinct from England, on the one hand, and which are still fundamentally and authentically united with – one with – England in the Union, England itself has to be seen as (and see itself as) one with – identified with – Britain. This provides a core and foundation of ‘proper’ Britishness (British national identity) that the other British nations can then both share and ‘own’ (rather than having to share and own Englishness) at the same time as they can differentiate themselves from and within that Britishness insofar as it is also seen as a self-attributed (and self-defining) ‘property’ and national characteristic of England.

The denial of a distinct England (and England’s self-abnegation) is in this way the precondition for a ‘proper’ British nation to exist: England must be Britain for Britain to be – and for the other nations to be semi-detached parts of Britain not annexes of England. I have to say that I think it is this fundamental structure that allows a phrase such as ‘a Britain of nations and regions’ to make any sense at all. Analysed from a purely logical perspective, this is a complete non-sequitur if you presuppose a logical hierarchy whereby regions are smaller dependent subsets of nations. If Scotland and Wales are the ‘nations’ here, and the ‘regions’ are the sub-national territories formerly known as England, what does that make Britain? A nation or a ’supra-nation’? Well, yes, perhaps the latter – another word for ’supra-nation’ being ‘empire’, which is what – in my contention – Britain always was: the core of England’s Empire. Or alternatively, if Britain is a / the nation in this phrase, then shouldn’t Scotland and Wales be described rather as regions on the same basis as the [formerly] English regions? Yes, of course they should. But the structure isn’t logical in this way, or rather it obeys a different logic: it is the identification of England with Britain that enables the ‘other’ nations of Britain to affirm a distinct national identity while remaining organic parts of Britain; while, if England has become Britain, the smaller sub-national units into which it has been divided are then aptly described as regions of a British nation.

This paradoxical structure results from the two conflicting pulls within New Labour’s attempt to fashion a new British Nation – integral Britishness, on the one hand, along with devolution for some of its parts, on the other. This leads to the need to assert a strong core of British national identity at the centre, allowing the smaller countries at the periphery to be both distinct nations and partakers of a shared British identity: the British identity of England, that is – turning the whole edifice into an integral British Nation. This is in contrast to what I describe as the original and historic character of Britain as essentially the core and name of England’s Empire, with the other British nations as dominions or ‘possessions’ of England. The two structures could be illustrated as follows:

Imperial Britain

Nation of Britain

Comparing the two diagrams, it is noteworthy that a former hierarchy of nations (England as the central sovereign national power within the United Kingdom both governing and ‘owning’ the other British nations) has been replaced by a hierarchy of governance: the central UK government exercising governance / sovereignty over the ‘nations and regions’ in some matters but devolving power in other areas. Or at least, that was the blueprint for the [English] regions until the electorate in the proposed North-East region scuppered the idea. But, as we know, the present government has continued with its regionalising agenda, although the Regional Authorities now are little more than unelected arms of central government. So a more accurate rendition of the present situation would perhaps have been to draw the above diagram with a thick arrow going one-way from the centre down to the regions.

This replacement of inter-national UK governance by inter-tier UK governance reflects the fact that devolution as implemented by New Labour did double duty as a process of delegating to the ‘nations’ certain aspects of governance previously handled by the England-dominated UK government alongside a process of developing a new regional tier and structure of governance. That’s to say, this is regional governance effectively within the context of a new integral Nation of Britain. To complete this structural transformation, ‘Britain’ is promoted from its position as England’s ‘dominion’ within the imperial set up (the territory over which England exercised sovereignty and which England ‘possessed’) to the position as the sovereign national power in its own right. Accordingly, England is demoted to the status of a mere territory over which the central British government exercises sovereignty and which it ‘possesses’ as its own; to the extent that it feels entitled to dispose over – indeed, dispose of – the English territory as it chooses by parcelling it up into smaller administrative units.

But this also means that ‘Britain’ governs the UK in England’s place. In other words, Britain both takes England’s place as the sovereign and central power within the structure, and represents (indeed, re-presents) England within the continuing inter-national aspects of the system. Or, putting it another way, ‘Britain’ in the new structure continues to also be effectively England: it rests on the British national identity of the English, or the identification of England with Britain; and it exercises and takes forward England’s historic role and responsibility of governance over itself (i.e., in this instance, over the ‘regions’) and over the other British nations. This is still effectively governance from the English centre, albeit that this cannot be acknowledged, as it is supposed to be a unitary system of British governance, with British nations and British regions standing in a relation of equality towards one another within an all-embracing Britishness.

Conclusion

So the Britishness is really just an overlay over a much more long-standing structure, with Britain taking over and taking forward England’s historic role as the power in the land. This system, as it stands, is dependent on ‘Britain’ both being and not being England. Firstly, for Britain to have a ‘national identity’ in its right requires that the people of England (continue to) identify as British / identify with Britain, providing a[n English] core of Britishness that the other nations of Britain can both see themselves as sharing and uniting with in a profound way (as it and they are both British), while differentiating themselves from it in a manner that defines their own national identities as being distinct from that of England / English Britishness.

This is the core problem with Brown’s Britishness agenda: the non-existence, precisely, of a core Britishness. ‘Britain’ is incapable of grounding its identity as a ‘nation’ within itself because it has always been, and continues to be, essentially a system of governance unifying a collection of distinct nations – now even more than ever, in fact, as the second of my above two diagrams illustrates: ‘Britain’ / the UK is just a hierarchical system of governance and a set of relationships between its constituent parts, not an integral nation in itself. This is why Brown and New Labour can define ‘core Britishness’ only in terms of a set of general moral and political values that themselves relate to the processes of governance and civic society: liberty, tolerance, democracy, justice, the rule of law, etc.

The reality is that the ‘core identity’ of Britain is the [only in part British] national identity of the English. And this is made up of a much deeper, broader, more concrete and personal set of characteristics, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours that can ever be encapsulated by a mere set of philosophical and political abstractions. It is of these things – the character, culture, society, history and traditions of a whole national community – that real ‘national identity’ is made. England has and is all of these things; Britain ‘of itself’ does and is not. So in order to be a nation, ‘Britain’ has to appropriate the national identity of England to itself (another way of saying it has to ensure that English people [continue to] see all of their English characteristics and values as essentially British). But Brown cannot engage with the question at this level, because if he did, he’d be forced to acknowledge that his British national identity is, at its core, none other than England’s by another name. And so, because he cannot acknowledge the concrete reality of the English people and identity as the real core of, and dominant culture and nation within, the UK (as it always has been), his Britishness can be articulated only at the level of abstract ’shared British values’.

And secondly – and this is perhaps even more determining for the future of a continuing Britain – the other British nations also need this core Britishness and centre of Britain to be Britain-but-not-England and to still be England all the same. On the one hand, they need this, as I described above, to feel connected to a common Britishness (of which ‘England’ is the guarantor and foundation) that is the place of an authentic and equal Union between the nations of the UK, rather than being in fact just another name for a separate England of which they have historically been subordinate British-imperial ‘possessions’. And, on the other hand, the fact that this ‘British centre’ is also still England is necessary for them to define their own national identity as distinct [from England] through devolution.

In other words, the other British nations define themselves as nations through differentiation from the English centre of Britain; but they need that English centre to be British first and foremost in order to continue to feel anchored in a common Britishness. If, on the other hand, that Englishness of the British centre were somehow to be effaced altogether, then the other British nations would ironically lose the basis for their own distinct national identities, at least as contained within the British framework. They need England to exist in order not to be English; and they need England to be Britain in order to be British. Pull England out of the whole system – create a Britain ‘without England’ at its centre – and the national identities of the other British nations, and their sense of belonging to a ‘national-British’ community of any description, would be completely stripped of their present anchoring, and the constituent parts of what we now know as Britain would spin off into a chaotic existential abyss.

All of which doesn’t exactly make it easy to see what the way forward might be. But although the present system does shore up some sort of unitary structure for UK governance within the context of devolution – and while it does create a British anchor for the diverging and increasingly autonomous identities of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – it is hardly a sustainable, rational or fair set up for England, which is condemned to a limbo land of being and not being a nation, and being the prop upon which the whole UK edifice and its other nations depend for their present existence.

And the point is, if this is not sustainable for England, then it cannot be a sustainable basis for a continuing United Kingdom, either. That is because England is the core national identity of the UK; but a UK that seeks both to deny that fact and yet relies on it is an edifice built on a foundation that undermines itself.

I first came across this story on the BBC News website on Wednesday morning last week. According to the report: “The number of stillbirths and deaths shortly after birth remains stubbornly high, claiming 17 babies every day on average in the UK, a report reveals. Every year in the UK nearly 4,000 babies are stillborn and another 2,500 die within four weeks. The stillbirth rate has not changed for a decade.”

The article then went on to quote a comment from the “Department of Health in England”, saying “there had been an increase in midwives and consultant obstetricians, and increased investment in the field”. This combination of statistics supposedly relating to ‘the UK’ and reaction from the DoH England [give them their due, the BBC do now more consistently make it clear when a UK government department has England-only responsibilities] immediately registered on my Britology radar: ‘are these UK figures actually England-only figures?’, I asked myself. Otherwise, why gauge reaction only from the English department concerned without any further comment relating to the rest of the UK? Such a practice usually is code for England-only information passing under the generic UK / Britain label.

The report about stillbirths and neonatal deaths was produced by the charitable society of the same name, the Stillbirths and Neonatal Deaths Society, or ‘Sands’. In fact, the document was due to be launched at the House of Commons later the same day, so it was not yet available for download. I scoured the Sands website in vain for information about whether the research and the activities of the charity were focused on England only or on the whole of the UK. The website talked only of UK-wide facts and figures, and in fact, it did not mention the word ‘England’ once anywhere. After more extended web research, I did manage to confirm that Sands is the established UK-wide charity organising emotional support and raising funds for research on the topic.

Later on in the day, I caught the BBC1 lunchtime news, where there was a more extended version of the report than had appeared on the BBC News website. This was an absolute masterpiece of ambiguity, which managed to completely avoid mentioning whether the Sands report related to England or to the whole of the UK, failing to (or perhaps succeeding in not) utter(ing) any of the words ‘England / English’, ‘Britain / Britain’ or ‘UK’. Any casual viewer would undoubtedly have been left with the impression that the information related to the whole of the UK; but this was never explicitly stated, even though Sands was calling for a ‘national’ [by implication, UK-wide] action plan to reduce the number of stillbirths and deaths in early infancy.

By now, I was getting really intrigued, and really frustrated. ‘Does the Sands report relate to England only or not; and if it does, why do they seem to want to suppress this fact rather than drawing comparisons between the situation in England and elsewhere in the UK, which would almost certainly be more embarrassing to the government?’, I wondered. I checked the Sands website in the evening – and still no report available to download. I was so irritated that I fired off the following email to the organisation:

“Dear Ms Duff [Sands' Communications Officer],

“I followed with interest the press coverage today surrounding the launch of your Saving Babies’ Lives report. Will this report be available for download from your website soon?

“I am also interested to know whether its findings and recommendations relate to the whole of the UK or to England only, as the UK government and the Department of Health are responsible for healthcare and the NHS in England only. The media coverage (e.g. on the BBC1 lunchtime news) was somewhat unclear on this point. On your own website, you call for a nationally co-ordinated action plan (implying across the UK). But clearly, the government can only really co-ordinate all the measures required to reduce the number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths in England – unless your report recommends some sort of high-level, UK-wide co-ordination involving the participation of the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

“I look forward to your reply.”

I don’t know whether this letter was viewed as a nuisance or irrelevance, or whether they were just plain too busy, but I haven’t yet received a response. In fact, it may well have been too close to the bone, as became evident when the report did finally appear on the website on Thursday and I was able to download it.

This is where I have to throw in a disclaimer. In some respects, I’m reluctant to critique this report, which is full of heart-breaking pictures of would-have-been parents cradling their stillborn infants, and desperate accounts of the devastating effect that stillbirths and neonatal deaths have on individuals and families. I’m not blaming Sands for the approach they’re taking, which is completely consistent and conscientious. I blame the UK-cum-de facto-English government and the effects of poorly managed, asymmetric devolution. So, as they say, the views expressed in this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Sands.

Apart from all the detailed data on stillbirths and mortality in early infancy, and the recommendations for alleviating the situation, a clear underlying message that emerges from the Sands report, for me, is that the failure to reduce the incidence of these traumatic events is closely connected with asymmetric devolution. Sands don’t spell this out because they want to encourage government to develop a co-ordinated cross-UK strategy and set of policies that strongly prioritise the issue. Hence, their tactic appears to be that of taking the moral high ground and arguing that this is such a critical social issue (responsible for far more deaths, for instance, than road accidents or cot death) that the government should rise above the political obstacles and start dealing with it.

But the political barriers are evidently key. As the report itself says:

“In the UK a combination of problems means we fail to identify many babies who are at risk, and to ensure their best possible chance of life:

• We lack knowledge, data and research into why babies die.

• We have no reliable way to predict which pregnancies are at risk of stillbirth or death early in life.

• There is little awareness of the extent of the problem or what the risks are.

• We don’t have the resources in maternity care to ensure optimal care for every baby.

Above all there is no political will to make things change [my emphasis].”

Why is there no political will to make things change? The problem, it seems to me, is twofold:

1. The UK government – which is the primary intended audience for this report – lacks the political will and, more importantly, the political muscle and power to co-ordinate and implement a UK-wide strategy in this area. Post-devolution, the remit of the UK Department of Health stops at the borders between England and Scotland, and England and Wales. And there’s been a failure, precisely, to develop mechanisms to co-ordinate strategy, share knowledge and implement best practice in areas of social policy, including healthcare and the (four) NHS(’s), across the four nations of the UK. (See my discussion of this elsewhere.) And this sort of co-ordination is especially critical with respect to stillbirths and neonatal deaths, according to the Sands report.
2. The UK government has even been unwilling to own and embrace its responsibilities to formulate priorities and develop social policies for England as England, and has tended to wash its hands of its duties as the de facto English government by passing on or outsourcing the setting of healthcare priorities to Primary Care Trusts and an increasingly marketised healthcare sector. This has also resulted in a failure to set adequate priorities and co-ordinate measures to deal with stillbirths and deaths in early infancy, as emerges from the report; although Sands does not link this explicitly to the contrast between the situation in England and the devolved UK nations.

One area where the government could co-ordinate action at a UK-wide level, and which is vital according to Sands, is in research into the causes of stillbirths and neonatal deaths. As the report says, “A serious lack of direct funding for scientific research to understand and prevent stillbirths is holding back progress that could be made in reducing the numbers of deaths”. Scientific research is a reserved power, so the UK government could directly fund research in this area; and Sands is calling on the government to match the £3 million it is raising for this purpose. £3 million: absolute peanuts compared with the billions the government is pumping into the banking sector. But, as I said in that previous discussion, as the UK government has retained the responsibility for managing the economy but not the ability to formulate joined-up social policy throughout the UK, it tends to prioritise the economic over the social: in England, that is, as the devolved administrations do have a social vision for their respective nations.

Indeed, one of the problems about a direct-funded research programme is that it has to be underpinned by co-ordinated cross-UK data gathering. As the Sands report says in its next recommendation: “Data collection on pregnancies is limited in the UK, the exception being in Scotland. We need nationally collated, detailed and standardised data about all pregnancies and outcomes on which to base research”. Well, yes, that says it all, doesn’t it? In fact, before devolution, there was a ‘national’ (i.e. UK-wide) programme for gathering data on the issue, called CESDI: Confidential Enquiry into Stillbirth and Deaths in Infancy. But, as the report indicates, “these enquiries have stopped since the formation of the Confidential Enquiries into Maternal and Child Health (CEMACH) which has less funding to cover a far wider remit of work. We would like to see resources to enable a return to enquiries into all stillbirths, in particular those which are unexplained”.

The last CESDI report was published in 2001; and from 2003, its work was taken over by CEMACH, which looks into maternal and childhood deaths (up to the age of 16) alongside perinatal and neonatal mortality – and does in fact have a much smaller budget than did CESDI alone. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, that is. In Scotland, on the other hand, as the report reiterates elsewhere, “detailed information about pregnancies and outcomes is available”. Why? Because the CEMACH work in Scotland is separately funded by a body known as NHS Quality Improvement Scotland (NHS QIS), which in fact will be taking over the whole CEMACH survey in Scotland from October of this year. (I add that this particular gem of information is not contained in the Sands report; I trawled it up from the CEMACH website.)

So let’s summarise. Research in Scotland is still focused on the specific problems of stillbirth and neonatal deaths; it enjoys superior funding to England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which are dependent on the CEMACH process; and until as recently as 2007, the CEMACH survey was also using a flawed methodology. As Sands informs us: “From 2007 CEMACH has adapted [the Wigglesworth] classification system to address its widely recognised limitations, particularly in gathering information about conditions associated with a death”. On top of this, the Scottish NHS is abandoning the CEMACH process altogether from later this year. And no political will exists to sort out these disparities and ensure that rigorous data gathering of the kind that still takes place in Scotland is co-ordinated across the UK. Surprise, surprise.

A similar lack of political will seems to prevail with respect to ensuring the dissemination of best clinical practice. For example, the report states: “The Royal College of Nursing and other stakeholders are currently working on a UK-wide framework for the education and training of neonatal nurses. But this framework must be adopted in order to be effective”. Well, clearly, there has to be the ‘political will’ to standardise processes and share knowledge across the four national NHS organisations. And there would have to be a commitment to make the necessary investments to raise standards, which would be particularly costly throughout England, whereas this is easier to achieve in Scotland owing to its smaller scale and higher per-capita level of public expenditure, guaranteed through the Barnett Formula. I’m reading between the lines here; but it stands to reason that if there were enough political will to introduce the improved training framework in England, then there would be no problem about standardising it across the other UK countries owing to their higher proportionate share of the public finances. So the issue must be that the government is unwilling to spend the extra money in England (with the Barnett consequential of even greater expenditure in the other countries), while the devolved administrations presently do have the financial and political latitude to roll out improvements in this area.

And evidently, to judge from the Sands report, these improvements are desperately needed. At times, the report reads like a catalogue of failure to learn from avoidable mistakes in antenatal care, childbirth and neonatal intensive care, resulting in babies continuing to die unnecessarily from the same causes. And there is not just a failure to disseminate best practice, share knowledge and prioritise the issue but also a lack of resources: insufficient antenatal healthcare personnel, such as midwives and other specialists, who might be able to help detect problems earlier on in pregnancy; inadequate staffing levels in intensive-care units for premature babies, such that only 14 out of 50 of such units ‘in the UK’ are able to provide the one-to-one nursing care that the British Association of Perinatal Medicine (BAPM) regards as a minimum standard.

The fact that the statistics are aggregated across the whole of the UK in this way is one of the shortcomings of the Sands report. This prevents one from being able to gauge whether the problems are significantly worse in England than in the other UK countries, which would be linked to the funding inequalities and strategic issues (lack of UK-government focus on this as a serious social issue in England) resulting from asymmetric devolution. I have no way of knowing how many of those 14 under-resourced intensive-care units are located in England; but I’d be willing to bet that none of them are in Scotland. It has to be said that all the specific examples of bad practice and inadequate resourcing, and all of the references in the body of the report to comments from clinical experts or to other reports on the issue, are drawn from England.

Another aspect of this topic that is exclusive to England is the way that the processes of funding the NHS contribute to the inadequate priority and insufficient resourcing that are given to stillbirths and neonatal deaths. These are described by the report as follows:

“Newly implemented commissioning structures between the Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) and hospital trusts have been evolving to meet new government structures. While this brings more focus to what is required from maternity services in each hospital, contracts may omit any proactive remit to reduce perinatal deaths. An issue that is not highlighted in a contract for funds is less likely to attract specific focus or resources.

“As the contracts come into place hospitals can negotiate additional funds for posts or for focus as they see fit. However, many hospitals see contract negotiations as being driven by the PCTs and only a few have seen the opportunities provided by being able to focus on local issues.

Tariffs

“It is unclear what is or is not included in the tariffs paid to trusts for obstetric services, with a great deal of room for interpretation on whether or not tariffs have been adjusted to allow for the funding of quality improvements. For neonatal care there is no nationally mandated funding system and health economies are left to make their own local arrangements which leads to an inevitable variability in the level of care provided.”

What the report doesn’t state explicitly at this point is that these funding mechanisms that have evolved to meet ‘new government structures’ and this lack of a ‘nationally mandated funding system’ for neonatal care exist in England only; as it is only in England that the government is still calling the shots when it comes to NHS funding and healthcare priorities. The system described above has been developed deliberately to allow a greater role for market forces, with individual hospital trusts competing for funding from PCTs based on their proven record to meet government targets and treat larger numbers of patients with different types of medical need. What this leads to is the creation of centres of excellence and a concentration of investment in particular ‘generic’ areas (such as maternity services, as described here), which can then more successfully bid for funding. But this means that certain specialisations within those generic areas (such as neonatal care) are not prioritised in a strategic way, as the focus is more on generating a critical mass in more ‘fashionable’, headline-grabbing areas of care that can attract funding in a bidding war, rather than on actual clinical and social need: in this case, more resources for preventing and dealing with stillbirths and neonatal deaths. By contrast, as is evident from the dedicated resources allocated to the issue at a national level through NHS Quality Improvement Scotland (referred to above), stillbirths and neonatal deaths are a nation-wide NHS priority in Scotland.

Conclusion

For me, one of the things that emerges clearly from the picture of failure painted by the Sands report is a demonstration of the harmful consequences of asymmetric devolution. No progress has been made in improving clinical outcomes in ten years: the ten years during which devolution of healthcare has been in place, with different systems, and levels and mechanisms of funding, in place in each of the UK’s four nations. This has led to an absence of strategic UK-wide focus on stillbirths and neonatal deaths, with the consequence that there has been inadequate funding of scientific research, and a failure to disseminate best practice and drive through better training of specialist nursing staff. This is clearly linked to the funding inequalities built in to the asymmetric devolution settlement. The report cites Scotland as the only example of adequate data gathering on the causes of stillbirths and neonatal deaths, after the successful pre-devolution information-gathering process (CESDI) was abandoned in favour of a more poorly funded and less specifically focused system (CEMACH) in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (but not Scotland) under the auspices of the infamous NICE (National – e.g. English – Institute for Clinical Excellence).

Meanwhile, there has been a lack of strategic focus on the issue in England, which in my view is linked to a general unwillingness on the part of the UK government to assume its responsibilities as the de facto English government in most areas of social policy, including the NHS. Instead, funding and prioritisation in England has been left in the hands of PCTs as part of a process designed to foster the development of a competitive healthcare market within the NHS. But, as we know, markets lead to winners and losers, and stillbirths and neonatal deaths have lost out to more market-friendly areas of obstetric and paediatric medicine where it is easier to demonstrate a return (improved patient outcomes) on investment, compared with the difficulties in making gains in stillbirths and neonatal deaths, where the causes of mortality are still often a mystery. But unless the resources are devoted to greater research and improved clinical care in this area, no improvements will ever take place.

Where I take issue with the Sands report is with its tactic of treating the issue purely at a UK-wide level, without differentiating between the nation-specific circumstances that are contributing to the ‘postcode lottery’ of varying standards of care and prioritisation throughout the UK. The report correctly identifies that the political dimension is key. And one absolutely fundamental aspect of this is that the UK government, in this area as in so many other aspects of healthcare, is unwilling to commit the levels of investment and to prioritise the issue at a national level (that is, an England- and hence UK-wide level) in the same way that it is prepared to enable the devolved governments to do so on a more limited scale. The pattern is: cut expenditure in England, and hand the thing over to the market as a supposedly more efficient way to deliver healthcare in line with patient customer demand, in order to release higher levels of funding on a smaller scale for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Until these structural and national inequalities are removed, there can be no integrated UK-wide strategy for beginning to reduce the number of stillbirths and neonatal deaths. Perhaps we may never be able to reinstate a coherent UK-wide strategy in this area given the lack of political will to reform the present asymmetric devolution settlement. But the government at least has a duty to drive a strategy on stillbirths and neonatal deaths for England. However, I doubt this will ever happen until there is a proper elected English government, genuinely accountable to the English people.

OK, not even I can keep up the 3,000-word essay format every time I put up a post! So I’m going to start a new series of ’shorts’: snapshots of my Britological encounters on the WWW and other media.

Here’s one to kick off the series: a post entitled “English literature: The Essence of Great Britain”. My readers will appreciate the wry, ironic smile that such an alluring title induced in me! As it happens, there wasn’t much else to this post other than this aperçu. So I added a lengthy(‘ish) comment to beef it up and put the other point of view. It’s still awaiting ‘moderation’ as I write; but as I am the soul of moderation (…), I’d be surprised if it didn’t pass.However, just in case, here it is:

“Don’t you mean English literature embodies the essence of England, and English history, culture, etc? Just as Scottish literature evokes the Scottish experience, and Irish literature conveys the Irish spirit and history, etc. The very fact that we call it ‘English literature’ should tell you something: that it’s ultimately an expression of the English culture and character. There’s no such thing as ‘British literature’ (even less ‘Great British literature’) other than as the sum of the separate canons of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish literature.

“It’s true, however, that in the past, the national and political identities of England and Great Britain have been merged. But that’s never been the case for its literature or other art forms. And it’s even less so now that the political and formal identities of Britain and England are increasingly parting company.”

You might want to check the post out and add suitably de-britologising comments of your own. But go easy on the author: he’s intelligent and well-meaning but just needs to have gently pointed out to him that England and Britain are not one and the same. Witness his interesting analysis of NHS deficiencies, which just needs to have one extra thing mentioned to complete the picture: the fact that what he describes is taking place in England only and that there is no such thing as the ‘British NHS’ any more. Perhaps leave him a comment there, instead.

That’s really all for now, folks! But don’t worry, it won’t be too long before the next dissertation hits a screen near you!

I was in London on business on the day of the English and British Olympics victory parade a week and a bit ago. In fact, my meeting was at a location right on the route of the parade; and, as luck would have it, the meeting finished just moments before the procession came past. So I duly lined up to greet our victorious Olympians as they rode along.

Where I stood was at a relatively ‘quiet’ part of the route compared with Trafalgar Square and its environs. So there were a few Union Jacks and silly Lotto giant hands being waved about; but the atmosphere was not especially jingoistic. I looked around but didn’t spot any Flags of St. George; although I couldn’t exactly say they were ‘banned’ – but as I hadn’t come prepared, I couldn’t put this to the test! Nor were there any busy officials distributing Union Flags by the dozen to the naively enthusiastic masses; just one street vendor pushing a cart along the route and doing a brisk trade: a nice bit of English-British entrepreneurship, I thought!

As for the procession itself, I actually enjoyed it. There was surprisingly little tasteless British patriotism involved. I’d expected open-topped buses bedecked with Union Flags and slogans proudly proclaiming the ‘Great British’ team. But no, the single-decker floats were pretty plain, and all you saw were the athletes themselves: fit, healthy young people with beaming faces, clearly somewhat overwhelmed and delighted by the acclaim (including from myself, I have to say) they were being greeted by. There was something almost innocent about it: the people expressing their delight at these young persons’ individual triumphs, and the athletes in their turn showing pleasure at the joy they had brought.

I am sure that one of the reasons why the floats were so devoid of patriotic symbols was to avoid offending the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish athletes – and viewing public – who had already been treated to their own ‘national’ celebrations immediately on their return from the Games. And maybe also, it was to avoid offending the many English people who feel there should have been a separate opportunity to celebrate the successes of the English athletes. I suppose the last thing the organisers wanted was angry shouts from St. George’s Flag-waving protesters attempting to rip off the British flags and banners from the floats. Well, one can but dream!

Maybe the organisers had more sense than the politicians who couldn’t resist making capital out of our athletes’ triumphs at the time by saying how it proved that ‘Great Britain’ was still something we could all take pride in; and then further rubbing our noses in it by trying to seize the moment and push through a football Team GB: something which – in a sense, with fitting irony – may still be realised even if it ends up being just a Team England in disguise.

But what of the question as to whether England should have had its own Olympics victory parade? I myself went on record at the time to say that I didn’t think it was realistic or sensible to demand one, even if I agreed that it would have been both a fair and popular thing to do given that the other nations of the UK had organised their own celebrations. As with so many illustrations of the ambiguous inter-relationships between Englishness and Britishness, the question is complex.

I think it’s important to differentiate between what you would like to eventually see happening – i.e. English-national civic institutions, sporting teams and celebrations – and what is realistic or practical in the present day. But, at the same time, it’s also important to find a language in which to describe what goes on in the present that more accurately and fairly reflects its variable dual English and British character.

This relates to why I called it the ‘English and British’ Olympics victory parade at the start of this post. The parade was effectively doing double duty as both the ‘British’ and English victory celebration. This was the case not just out of political expedience and logistical practicality, but also for the reason that, as an England-only event would need to be on the same scale – if not greater – than a British parade, holding a British procession after an English celebration would come to seem embarrassingly redundant and also, ironically, a duplication of the English event. And this is because a celebration of ‘British’ achievements of this sort is already primarily an expression of English patriotism, albeit articulated in terms of Great Britain and Britishness.

It’s important to be precise in these matters to avoid misunderstanding. I’m not saying that a British celebration of this sort is somehow ’sufficient’ to allow English people an outlet to express their national pride and that an England-only event is therefore on principle unnecessary. Such a position would effectively involve conspiring with the present behaviour and attitude of the British establishment, which actively seeks to suppress any form of expression of English-national identity and pride – indeed, to deny the very existence of England as a nation – and to put ‘Britain’ literally in England’s place.

But you have to distinguish, I think, between at least two forms of Britishness, from the English perspective: there’s an objective – institutional and, as it were, ‘instrumental’ – Britishness; and then there’s a subjective – emotional, personal and ‘existential’ – Britishness. The objective Britain basically comprises the establishment: the institutions of government, law, civic society, and formal ‘national’ identity, media and culture. In relation to these things in isolation, you could say that – for the time being, at least – there is no such thing as England. The formal Britain – the UK government and establishment – reduces England to a mere territory over which it has jurisdiction: no English-national governance; English Law, yes, but this is also the law of Wales and it’s decided on by the UK parliament; only British-national media (e.g. the BBC) and their Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish subdivisions, but no English-national channels, newspapers; etc, etc.

At this point, some people (e.g. Cornish nationalists) might pull me up and say that there are plenty of English-national institutions, e.g. the Bank of England; the Church of England; the English language as the official language of Britain; English Heritage; English National Opera; the English National Ballet; English sporting teams; etc. But then these examples neatly illustrate my point. Some of these things are English only in name, rather like English Law. The Bank of England, for instance, is the central bank for the UK as a whole, and it’s only a historical anomaly that it still has ‘England’ in its title and hasn’t – yet – been re-named the ‘Bank of Britain’. Most of the other examples are not what you would call exclusively and objectively English institutions other than in the sense that, post-devolution, some aspects of UK government power relate to England only, such as heritage, culture and sport. But there’s no English national political control as such, at government level, over these organisations; nor do institutions such as the English National Opera see it as a particular part of their remit to celebrate English culture. The main exception here is the Church of England, which does have both a formal role and status within the UK establishment, and is an England-only institution in more than just name – which is one reason why I’m opposed to its disestablishment, at least until there are some properly England-only government bodies or formal recognition of England’s nation status. Otherwise, disestablishing the Church would mean there would no longer be any aspects of British governance that need make any reference to – or were in any form answerable to – England as a nation.

As for English sporting teams, these relate to the other type of national identity I set out above: the subjective, personal and ‘existential’. There is no sense in which the existence of England teams necessarily equates to the existence of England as an objective, formally established nation; but they do indicate that people living in England identify with England as their nation, subjectively and emotionally. That’s why I call this form of nationhood ‘existential’: England may not exist formally and objectively, but it does exist in the sense that people’s subjective identifications confer existence on it. ‘England exists because I am English, and many millions of my fellow countrymen also feel they are English’. Incidentally, this is the same basis on which a Cornish nation can be said to exist.

And the same could also be said of Britain. As I stated above, Britain, too, possesses this subjective character as a nation alongside its objective, institutional existence. For instance, there are many people living in England – possibly now in the minority – who feel and identify as British more than, or even to the exclusion of, English. This is just a fact, which those of us of the English-nationalist persuasion just have to accept, whether we like it or not: some English people claim they don’t feel any sense of Englishness at all but see themselves – if they see themselves as anything in national terms – as British first and foremost, or even British only. But, of course, a statement like this is deliberately paradoxical: it’s English people who tend to feel British rather than English; whereas feeling one was British to the exclusion of being Scottish or Welsh would be an almost incomprehensible attitude on the part of persons native to Scotland or Wales.

In other words, this form of Britishness is an English phenomenon. Traditionally, in fact, the British and English identities, at this subjective level, have tended to be inseparably intertwined, with the terms and symbols of Britishness and Englishness being seen as interchangeable – in England, that is. And, for many, this is still the case. In other words, the British and English identities are so indissociable for many English people that their feelings of patriotic pride, and the nation they felt they were celebrating, would be the same whether they were attending an Olympic Team GB victory parade or the English Ashes triumphal procession of a few years back. Therefore, in both this subjective sense and the objective, practical sense, the Olympics victory parade was indeed both an English and British celebration, as I wrote at the start of this piece. One iconographic acknowledgement of this I noticed were the billboards for that day’s London Evening Standard, which I glimpsed only in passing. What I thought it depicted was a group of Union Flag-waving Olympians (or perhaps they were just spectators) set in relief against a massive Flag of St. George. Don’t get too excited, though: this was one of those photo-editing jobbies, where one image is superimposed on another – the English flag wasn’t there in reality. However, this seemed to me to exemplify the old happy balance whereby the British and English national identities were fused and celebrated together.

Of course, there are many for whom this was never a ‘happy balance’ – particularly, those in the other nations of the UK. The Scots have always regarded the objectively ‘British’ character of the Union state as really just a front for England and English power; and the subjective merging of the English and British identities was adduced as evidence for this: when English people talked of Britain and British governance as supposedly inclusive terms that also incorporated Scotland, what they really meant – and what was in fact the objective political reality – was English dominance over Scottish affairs. And, indeed, English people did use to think of the British state and government as ‘theirs’, based on their subjective blending of the English and British national identities: the British state was the objective correlative and institutional expression of a British national identity that was essentially English in its subjective and emotional character, and its cultural manifestations.

Many Scottish people seem to think that this state of affairs still prevails, which is one of the reasons why they just don’t get English nationalism. In my terms, they think that the ‘instrumental’ and ‘existential’ British identities are still in harmony with one another. In other words, they see the UK state and its institutions as essentially the instrument of English power, propped up by the unthinking, subjective identification of English people with Britain. But, in fact, instrumental and existential Britishness are increasingly diverging, a process greatly accelerated by devolution. What this means is that the British and English identities are separating out and becoming dissociated from one another. English people are identifying increasingly as English in the first instance, at the subjective, emotional and existential level. And this means that Britishness is defined more and more in relation merely to the institutional and instrumental aspects of public and civic life: British governance, its traditions and the civic values that underpin them.

The whole Britishness agenda of the British establishment could be described as an attempt to rekindle English people’s identification with Britain, and as British. But because, post-devolution, that Britishness can no longer truly be the explicit expression of English national pride and political power, it ends up having to be a new form of Britishness: a Britishness that deliberately evacuates any overt acknowledgement or expression of the English subjective and national identity that has traditionally underpinned it. And this, ironically, condemns the new Britishness to being something of an empty shell: expressed in terms of civic, political, institutional and philosophical ideals without reference to the English national character, people, and sense of mission that once animated it. This is one of the reasons why the Olympics, which is one of the few sporting occasions where ‘the country’ is represented by a British team, constitutes such a powerful vehicle for the ‘Britologists’ (the would-be architects of the new Britain) to try and reconnect English national fervour and identity with Britain.

But then again, the pride in being British that English people feel in connection with Team GB’s Olympic successes is precisely that: the traditional pride of English people in ‘their’ Great Britain, or – another way of saying the same thing – pride in the greatness of England that is Great Britain. If politicians want English people to feel pride about Britain and her achievements, then there’s no escaping from the fact that that pride is essentially an English feeling and part of the subjective British identity that is an English phenomenon, and is based on a blurring of any distinction between Englishness and Britishness.

But what of those ‘English’ people who say they feel British only, and not English? It’s dangerous to generalise, and there are many different ‘types’ of people who might describe themselves in this way. But I can’t help feeling that the great majority of them still are ‘British only’ in a highly English way. This could be said for instance of Richard Morrison writing in last Wednesday’s Times. The author claims that “We [i.e. the English] are now a nation with a history but no destiny. We exist; we have needs, but no sense of self”. In support of this thesis, he points to all the things we tend to think of as typically English that are in reality of foreign origin. And yet, at the same time, this openness to a cosmopolitan array of overseas influences and newcomers is itself seen as something typical of England. But all the same, the author goes on to state: “I can’t recall a time when so many people living in England, people of all colours and creeds, are so obviously unsettled by the feeling that we no longer have control of our future, no ideal of what we want to be”. Well surely this is because the establishment keeps telling us – the English – that there is no future for us as England; that we are, and can only be, British; and that one of the defining characteristics of Britain is precisely the kind of openness to global influences, trade and migration that the author observes. But no one is saying that such phenomena are leading to a dilution of Britishness: and that’s precisely because Britain – the new Britain – is a nation-less (supra-national, global) concept that is dependent on stripping out Englishness and the English national identity from its core. And it’s this that leads to the alienation Richard Morrison describes.

So what I’m saying is that a ‘British-only national identity’ (itself something of a non-sequitur, as the new Britishness is something that points beyond nationhood, whereas traditional Britishness sat comfortably with complementary English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish identities), when it is felt by English people, partakes of a very English alienation from what it means to be English; precisely because Englishness, for those people, has more than ever lost itself in Britishness.

And this brings me back round to one of the issues I raised at the start of this piece: the problem of naming and describing the national-existential crisis we are going through. I think it can be a very powerful means of resistance against the establishment’s attempts to banish England from public discourse, and hence from the national consciousness, to reintroduce the terms ‘England’ and ‘English’ wherever appropriate, or even inappropriate. On the one hand, this is a political tactic; but, on the other hand, it’s also an attempt at describing things more accurately and honestly than the establishment, which deceitfully omits and suppresses references to England, even when what’s being discussed is either exclusively or at least partially English. It’s a case of subverting the official language in a way that points up what they don’t want you to notice.

In my example of the Olympic victory parade, officially, this is indeed correctly described as the British Olympics victory celebration. However, in reality, as I explained above, it was also the English victory parade, in more ways than one. Therefore, it is correct in another sense to call this the ‘English and British’ celebration. This approach can be extended to many other aspects of public life, particularly the language used about national government. For instance, it would be both subversive and, in my sense, accurate to describe the UK government as the ‘British and English government’ – since, in matters otherwise devolved to the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish government, the British government is a de facto government for England only. Similarly, the prime minister is accurately described as the British and English prime minister or, when talking about England-only areas of government, the ‘unelected English First Minister’ – my favourite designation! UK government departments with responsibilities for England only should also be referred to as, for instance, the ‘English Department for Culture, Media and Sport’ or the ‘Department of Health for England’.

In the case of government departments, neither the England-only ministries nor those with a genuine UK-wide remit tend to include ‘UK’ or ‘British’ in their title, as it is just a given that they are UK-wide bodies even when they’re not. Hence, adding ‘England’ or ‘English’ to them could even be regarded as a helpful aide-mémoire to ensure that people remember when some aspect of the government’s responsibilities is limited to England. But what of the many instances of when things are called ‘British’ when they are actually English or, more subtly, the media’s constant efforts to shape and articulate a common Britishness even when many of the cultural expressions of that Britishness are primarily, if not exclusively, English?

An example of the former is the large supermarkets’ and food producers’ growing tendency to (re-)label English produce, such as meat or fruit, as ‘British’. If you can establish that a given item is in fact English (as the labels often indicate which county they were produced in), then I think you should resolutely refuse to call it British, for instance, in conversation with your family as you go round the supermarket or when you refer to it at the tills. But should you boycott produce of this sort altogether out of protest against the suppression of the England tag or, indeed, the England flag from the labels? It’s a matter of individual choice; but I think that, if you can be sure that an item is English, far from boycotting the English produce, you should boycott any goods in the store in question that are labelled as Scottish or Welsh as a mark of protest against the discrimination against England that is being carried out. English farmers and food producers need all the help they can get, especially amid a recession; and it’s not their fault if the supermarkets decide to mis-label their goods.

You should also try to find opportunities to explain to the store why you’re buying ‘British’-labelled produce, and not Scottish- and Welsh-labelled items. For instance, you could say that you might buy Scottish and Welsh items if the English items were labelled as English (which would be fair and non-discriminatory) or if those Scottish and Welsh items were labelled as British, which is, after all, a term that is supposed to apply to Scotland and Wales, and not just England. One convenient opportunity to have this conversation is when a ‘British’-labelled item does not indicate explicitly whether it comes from England. You can simply then go to the Customer Service desk and ask them to find out for you whether it is English or not; and casually toss in the observation that you assume it is because the Scottish and Welsh items are labelled as Scottish and Welsh, and only the English items don’t appear to be correctly packaged!

Well, anyway, that’s what I’m going to try to do from now on. But what of the plethora of TV programmes that try to foster the idea of Britain as a ‘nation’, ranging from the sublime (such as BBC’s Coast – predicated on the clever idea of a Britain that is ‘one’ nation because it shares a common coastline and maritime heritage; and which, of course, just had to be presented by a Scot) to the ridiculous, such as ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent? Here, on one level, the ‘nation’ that such programmes refer to is correctly described as Britain, in the sense that they deal with people and places from all over the UK. But, insofar as these programmes are part of an establishment agenda to set Britain up as ‘the nation’ – for English people only, that is – I tend to favour the deliberately politically incorrect and derisive approach of re-labelling such programmes as English, especially as most of what they relate to is English. So: ‘that programme about the coast of England’ works well – aptly re-evoking England’s proud seafaring tradition and maritime culture; or ‘England’s Got Talent’. The ‘England Olympics team’ also gets people’s hackles up quite nicely, I find, too; although, if you want to be less sarcastic and more fair-minded – in a rather English manner – my choice of the ‘English and British Olympics team / victory parade’ perhaps gets you more of an audience. And if you’ve followed me till now, thank you.

The point about such linguistic acts of subversion, however petty they may seem, is that they are both a private and public act of revolt against the suppression of England from public discourse and, ultimately, from the identity and governance of ‘the nation’ as a whole. England exists and I exist as an Englishman. So long as we keep saying that, then they won’t get away with abolishing our nation.

What is the ‘item’ in question? Nick Clegg’s speech yesterday to the Lib Dem conference, as a footnote describes it on the Lib Dem website. I thought I’d just do a ‘Brit’ check and an ‘Engl’ check on the old word counter to see if, by any chance, the grandson of a Russian émigrée has any concept of England. I wasn’t – or rather was – disappointed: 39 instances of ‘Britain’ or ‘British’, and none of England (no, not a dicky bird); and also none of Scotland / Scottish, Wales / Welsh, or Northern Ireland / Irish, by the way. (Actually, there is a reference to Cornwall; but only to a single mum whose personal situation is meant to be illustrative of the difficulties faced by the people of ‘Britain’ as a whole.) Well, if they can refer to England in a footnote, such as the one in the title to this post, only as a ’section of the UK’, I suppose this absence of mentions throughout the speech was only to be expected.

But there was I, going through all the references to ‘Britain’ and ‘British’, and noting all the places where these terms are used to refer to areas of policy that relate to England only as far as Westminster government is concerned. I.e. education: “We can have a better education system, and through it a better Britain”. Or health: “The NHS is a great national institution” (no: it’s four great national institutions). Or even the environment: “Education, health and crime. The top three concerns of the British people. They have been for decades. But I want us to get the environment up there too”.

I was thinking great: here’s a nice little opportunity for another critique of the way the main parties brush the democratic deficit and public-spending inequalities towards England resulting from devolution under the carpet by pretending that everything Westminster politicians do relates to the whole of the UK. And that is indeed a valid critique of Nick Clegg’s speech. As I’ve noted before in this blog, the Lib Dem leader appears to have no concept of England as an entity distinct from Britain, as his whole focus is on Britain and Britain-wide governance even when – as we have seen – those policies would in practice be implemented in England only. He even, like Gordon Brown, appears to view Britain as a / the only real ‘nation’ in these isles: “they found a home in Britain because ours is a nation of tolerance, of freedom, and of compassion”.

This ‘britification’ of England – so typical of the main parties – is in itself enough to make an English patriot’s blood boil. But then the footnote. I really couldn’t believe it at first. Not only the speech without a single passing reference to the largest actual nation of these isles. Not only the false impression it creates that, if in government, the Lib Dems would be making laws for the whole of the UK and not in fact for England only in most cases. And not only the complete failure to acknowledge the existence of England and her people as any kind of meaningful entity or constituency that the Lib Dems need to address. But then, to top it all, this insulting footnote: as if this easy-to-miss disclaimer were enough to counteract the deliberate Britain-only focus of the whole speech.

This is as bad as the disclaimers you get at the bottom of some ministerial press releases, where they say: “This notice relates only to ‘England’” (with ‘England’ indeed in apostrophes, revealing that it’s only a convenient name for a territorial jurisdiction not, in the government’s view, a nation). In fact, it’s worse; because even in the footnote, England is not mentioned but is referred to in the catch-all phrase “section of the UK”. I’m surprised and appalled the Lib Dems could replicate such an offensive practice. Perhaps I shouldn’t be.

Admittedly, in the speech, Nick Clegg calls for a comprehensive constitutional convention that could lead to “a new constitutional settlement”. But then, can one have any confidence that this convention would truly re-examine the devolution settlement as it affects England, and come up with proposals for a new settlement that is equitable to all the nations of the UK? Indeed, can one be confident that such a convention would actually be a UK-wide convention at all, despite the fact that the speech dresses it up as such, and not just a means to perpetuate and even deepen the suppression of England’s identity and distinctness as a national political entity? The reason I say this is that the only reference the speech makes to devolution – apart from the derisive footnote – is as follows: “We need to . . . . devolve control to councils, communities, families, parents, patients and pupils”. This is local devolution: the devolving of democratic decision making to every area of civic society where decisions are best taken at that level. But local government, communities and education are devolved parts of national government. In other words, if a Lib Dem government were to pursue such a process of local devolution, it would apply to England only. In addition, previously, the Lib Dem leader has gone on record to advocate devolution to the ‘regional’ as well as ‘local’ level – again, of course, only in England, though presented as if the policy would or could be applied across the whole of the UK. So one is left with the impression that the Lib Dem’s ‘British’ constitutional convention – like so many of their other ‘British’ policies – would in fact be an England-only constitutional convention. One through which the Lib Dems would be hoping to drive a regionalisation and localisation of governance in England only; and with not the slightest hint of ‘national’ devolution for England, as if that whole concept were a non-sequitur.

Naturally, one would expect any Lib Dem programme of constitutional reform to involve PR. But this is not in fact mentioned in the speech. And without addressing the unfairness of the asymmetric devolution settlement, even PR would not be sufficient to rectify the English democratic deficit. This is because Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish people would be able to elect representatives to govern them in devolved matters; but English people would still be governed in these areas by the UK parliament, including by MPs and ministers not accountable to any English voter. But I suppose making up-front noises about a constitutional convention is a convenient means not to have to go into these matters before an election and to pretend they will all be dealt with in a fair and non-partisan way once a Lib Dem government is in place.

But that doesn’t prevent Clegg from perpetuating the illusion that such a government’s remit would be UK-wide in a unitary way, which it wouldn’t be. But at least he’s being honest in another way: that, in fact, England is just a ’section of the UK’ as far as government is concerned. We have no distinct constitutional, political or legal status as a nation. And Britology Clegg, it seems, wants to keep it that way.

I can confirm that I am not Professor Anthony King, the author of an independent report commissioned by the BBC Trust, which appeared yesterday. I feel I need to point this out, as so much of the report could have been lifted directly from the analyses in this blog – particularly, this Campaign For Plain England series – of the way news reporting frequently describes the England-only decisions and statements of government as if they related to the whole of the UK.

So much of my analysis is there:

• the way in which the TV or radio audience is often not “made aware by clear labelling which facts relate to which nations of the UK”
• the way in which this leads viewers or listeners to assume that “the story applied to the whole UK when it did not”
• the “common practice for presenters and newsreaders to mention at the top of a story that the story related only to England but then never to mention that fact again, even in the course of a lengthy programme”
• the fact that “it was extremely rare for an attempt to be made to compare and contrast an event or development in England with a comparable event or development in one of the devolved nations”
• the fact that in the Radio Four Today programme’s coverage of GB’s [Gordon Brown's] commitment to train British workers for British jobs (which in reality meant only English workers and training), “the words ‘England’ and ‘English’ were used only three times in the course of six items; the words ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ were used 46 times, and there were two unexplained references to the UK and ‘the country’”
• and the fact that this lack of clarity was very much reflected in the government’s own communications, as exemplified by a press release that left it to a footnote at the end to make clear that “this press notice relates to England only”. Actually, in my experience, the wording is usually even more insulting: “This press notice relates to ‘England’ [in quotation marks] only”.

The focus of Professor King’s report is somewhat broader than my analyses. As he puts it, “the BBC Trust . . . asked us, in essence, a single question: in recent years, has the BBC’s UK-wide network news, current-affairs and factual programming kept pace with – and responded adequately and appropriately to – the United Kingdom’s changing political, social, economic and cultural architecture?” His answer to this question is an emphatic ‘no’. Specifically, he criticises not only the way England-only stories are misleadingly presented as UK or ‘British’ ones; but also the failure to report adequately, in national UK news, on politics and government in the devolved nations, which would properly inform people (particularly, English people) about the different ways the nations are governed, allowing them to make informed comparisons of the very divergent policies being pursued by each national government. The two failings are obviously interdependent: if England-specific news is presented as if it were UK-wide, then it would be rather inconsistent to make a big effort to point out how differently things are being done in the other UK countries.

Well, it’s nice to be able to say ‘I told you so’ once in a while! Where I take issue with Professor King is in two minor but significant areas. First, he refers to the fact that media present England-only stories as if they applied to the whole of the UK as exhibiting “a general bias in favour of stories about England or telling stories from an England perspective” and as “Anglocentric”. This is despite the fact that he also makes clear – as in one of the examples I refer to above – that ‘England’ is often hardly mentioned explicitly in such reports, and everything is described as relating to ‘Britain’ and ‘the country’. It scarcely seems fair to call this ‘Anglocentric’. It’s only Anglocentric insofar as England precisely is not differentiated from the UK (and hence English politics is not differentiated from Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish politics). In other words, such stories articulate an assimilation of England to the UK / Britain, such that it amounts to a replacement of ‘England’ by ‘Britain’: when politicians and media reports really mean England, they say Britain.

This relates to my second point of divergence from Prof. King: his diagnosis of why this ignoring of the differences in the politics of the UK nations has occurred, even on the part of the BBC with its public-service remit. The Professor identifies this as reflecting the London- and Westminster-centric mindset of the national media, and their being “accustomed to a nation in which almost everything that really matters – politically, culturally, socially, financially – happens in or near London”. There is also a “symbiosis between BBC journalists and Westminster politicians. . . . They have a shared professional interest in convincing themselves – thereby perhaps unwittingly convincing
others – that nothing has changed, that God is still in his heaven and that power, real
power, is still located uniquely in the Palace of Westminster”.

It’s with this ‘perhaps unwittingly’ that I disagree. The failings in the BBC’s news reporting are so completely consistent with government practice that it is hard not to come to the conclusion that there is deliberate collusion between Westminster politicians and BBC journalists. The piece that is missing from Professor King’s analysis – in fairness, it wasn’t part of his brief – is a study of how government has practiced to deceive in exactly the same way: referring systematically to ‘Britain’ and ‘the country’ where England is really intended.

Professor King is pointing to a traditional mindset that did, and still does, exist: the identification between England and Britain, reflecting the fact that England was the centre of power of a unitary UK that no longer exists. But, overlaying this under New Labour in the post-devolution world, has been a more sinister and deliberate refusal to acknowledge that so much of the work of the UK government applies to England alone. And the reason why this has been done is that the establishment (and this includes the opposition parties, which carry on exactly the same deceit) doesn’t want the English public to be aware of the anomaly that England is the only UK country that doesn’t have a devolved national parliament to deal with its nation-specific affairs. Hence, playing on English people’s traditional identification of England with the UK, and bolstering the illusion by plentiful references to ‘Britain’ and ‘the country’ when the subject matter being discussed involves England only, is a deliberate tactic to prevent English people from grasping the realities of devolution and so demanding a piece of the action for themselves.

Professor King gets very close to this, to me, totally obvious inference; perhaps he realises this is what is going on but doesn’t say so, as his remit is to analyse only what the BBC has been doing, not to make assertions – however well backed up by abundant circumstantial evidence – as to the political motivations. The Professor talks about the benefits that would result from the BBC reporting much more clearly and accurately about the differences in governance between the UK nations. He writes: “we have been struck by the network’s apparent reluctance to explore or even take note of the UK’s emerging institutional variety, even when that variety is of UK-wide political significance and may ultimately impact upon the future of the UK itself”. Well, precisely: the BBC, in common with the UK government, doesn’t want this particular can of worms to be opened up.

Again: “the union’s variety, the state of the union and the future of the union should be threads running throughout the network’s output”. Of course, this is what should happen; and the fact that it hasn’t is precisely because the powers that be wanted to pretend that it was Westminster business as usual and that the ‘future of the union’ was unquestionable. And again: “Even when mention was made of the fact that a news item related only to England, it was extremely rare for an attempt to be made to compare and contrast an event or development in England with a comparable event or development in one of the devolved nations”. Well, exactly: the government doesn’t want people in England to make such comparisons because then they’ll realise there are alternatives to unpopular England-only policies being pursued by an unrepresentative UK government, which they could get if they had an English parliament elected under PR like those of Scotland and Wales.

All the same, Professor King’s report makes refreshing reading: it’s a breath of fresh air when an impartial person with the authority to call the BBC to account makes very similar observations to one’s own concerning the inadequacies of the media to ’say England’ (and, indeed, ‘Scotland’, ‘Wales’ and ‘Northern Ireland’) when that’s what they mean.

The number’s up on the cosy collusion between the national media and the Westminster political class. Let’s hope the BBC puts its house in order even if the House of Commons won’t!