The ‘nations and regions’ model of the UK enshrines division and inequality

Some of us hoped that Gordon Brown’s demise would have seen his beloved ‘nations and regions’ travesty of the UK put to bed: the idea that Britain / the UK is comprised of (devolved) nations and (British) regions, with no place for an English nation. But it seems this idea is too deeply embedded in the British-establishment consciousness to fade away along with its biggest fan.

One of the reasons why this concept won’t simply disappear relates to one of the ways in which it in fact perpetuates a divided and unequal vision of the UK. There are two main aspects to this:

1. The nations and regions idea re-works the old Anglo-British conflation of England with Britain / the UK. The language and the thinking have changed significantly, but the underlying structure is the same. Previously, because the identities of England and Great Britain were so profoundly fused in the mind of the establishment, and of many ordinary English people, it used to seem perfectly normal and acceptable in England to say ‘England’ when you really meant Britain, and vice-versa. Now, that’s reversed: the politically correct thing is to say ‘the UK’, ‘Britain’ or ‘the country’ irrespective of whether you do actually mean the UK, Great Britain or England. But there’s still fundamentally the same conflation of England with the UK, except now you can’t overtly express it. Hence, the total taboo on saying ‘England’.
2. Even within the logic of the nations and region concept, there is an implied inequality and demarcation between the regions and nations, which is perhaps even more divisive than the previous careless projection of Englishness beyond England’s borders. That is, what is effectively England – historically and territorially – is viewed as more ‘properly’ British and as the ‘core’ of Britain; whereas the ‘nations’ are by definition somewhat other than Britain and not viewed as an integral part of it. In other words, instead of four equal but distinct ‘home nations’ joined together in a shared Britain and Britishness (seen as both a political union, and common cultural and national heritage), only England is truly Britain (except, of course, you can’t call England ‘England’ any more, but only ‘Britain’). You end up with a nation of Britain whose heartland is effectively England but is divided up into regions surrounded by other merely affiliated, and not integrally British, nations.

So the ‘nations and regions’ model of Britain / the UK is deeply divisive, and in fact fosters and enshrines a Dis-United Kingdom: it denies the distinct identity of England while also denying full British status to the non-English nations. Ultimately, it’s designed to prevent the emergence of a different, federal model for the UK in which four nations (or five if you include Cornwall) can be joined together in an equal political union without suppressing either their distinct national identities or their shared Britishness.

Party leaders’ debates: any chance of a reference to England?

On Monday of this week, I finally received a reply from the BBC Complaints department to an email I sent them just after Christmas referring to my open letter to the broadcasters about the proposed (English) party leaders’ debates at the forthcoming election. One day later and this reply would have been too late. As Ms McAleer (yet another ‘Celtic’ name in the Complaints Department!) wrote: “We appreciate your thoughts on the structure and content of the debates but the details of them – both of the BBC’s UK-wide debate and those in each of the nations – have yet to be agreed.”

On Tuesday, those details were released. So, being pedantic about it, the agreement must have been reached by the time of Ms McAleer’s email, just not released. I note in passing the same familiar BBC / establishment thought structure: impartiality is to be ensured by arranging separate, additional and more locally focused debates in each of “the nations” – meaning Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, of course, not England, which is supposed to be adequately catered for by the “UK-wide debate”.

This completely ignores the main point I made in my open letter, which was that there was only really a need for a separate debate in England – about the parties’ England-specific policies – whereas the interests of Scottish and Welsh voters would be adequately served by genuinely UK-specific debates: those dealing with reserved areas of policy, which are the only ones their MPs can influence on behalf of their constituents. Admittedly, that would mean that the leaders of the SNP and Plaid Cymru would also need to be invited to the show. But as those parties may well hold the balance of power in the next parliament – and as they are entitled to vote on English laws, though choosing not to at present – it would be appropriate for viewers across the UK to find out what their policies actually are.

As it turns out, it appears that the themes chosen for the debates do make something of a distinction between reserved and devolved matters. Quote from the press release:

“The first debate will be screened on ITV1. Its themed section will be on domestic affairs.  This programme will come from the North West of England. It will be moderated by Alastair Stewart.

“The second debate will be screened on Sky News. Its themed section will be on international affairs.  Adam Boulton will be the moderator, and it will come from the South West.

“The final debate will be screened on BBC One. David Dimbleby will be the moderator, and its themed section will be on economic affairs. The programme will be based in the Midlands.”

In other words, the themed bit of the ITV debate will be devoted to devolved matters such as education, health, policing and justice, etc. – but also some reserved issues such as immigration, civil rights and political reform. The Sky and BBC debates will, however, be devoted to exclusively reserved matters. In this way, the BBC and Sky are absolved of the requirement to deal with the issues I raised, at least with respect to the main part of their debates; although some England-specific matters will be discussed in the remainder of those debates.

So the responsibility for ensuring that the great British public is correctly informed about the England-specific ambit of many of the parties’ ‘domestic’ policies falls to ITV, which has hitherto steadfastly ignored any of my correspondence on the subject, in contrast to the BBC and Sky, which have at least replied even if not satisfactorily.

The omens are not good. I note, for instance, that the only mention of ‘England’ in the press release occurs in the passage quoted above referring to the locations from which the debates will be broadcast but not the topics discussed. This is, however, tantamount to an admission that these supposed national-UK debates are in reality English-national debates, even the ones on reserved matters. Otherwise, why would there be any need for separate Scottish and Welsh debates (apart from the addition of the nationalist parties for those countries), given that the only issues Scottish and Welsh voters should be basing their choice of parties on are reserved, UK matters?

But I’ve decided there’s no point pushing this sort of England-focused argument, as the establishment broadcasters just don’t, and won’t, get it. Instead, my email to the ITV spokesperson referred to in the press release – James MacLeod (!!) – tried to pique the Celtic positive-discrimination consciences of the ITV news editors, in the following terms:

Dear Mr MacLeod,

I note from Tuesday’s announcement that ITV will be airing the party leaders’ debate dealing with ‘domestic affairs’. These include devolved matters such as education, the NHS, and policing and justice alongside reserved matters such as immigration and political reform, etc.

I was wondering whether it is ITV’s policy for the debate to ensure that viewers are aware when policy discussions relate to devolved matters and therefore concern England only (plus Wales in the case of justice matters).

I feel sure that ITV would regard it as a matter of ensuring the basic impartiality and accuracy of the broadcast to make viewers across the UK aware of where and how the parties’ domestic policies may actually affect them. This is of particular importance for people watching the broadcast in Scotland and Wales, in two ways:

1. Parties will be canvassing the support of voters in those countries, including through their policies on health, education and other devolved matters. However, MPs elected in Scotland and Wales will not be empowered to implement those policies for their constituents, who need to be aware of this fact: their MPs can implement their parties’ policies in these areas only in England
2. The exclusion from the debates of the leaders of the SNP and Plaid Cymru means that the distinct Scottish and Welsh perspective on these issues cannot be put across to the viewers. However, by making clear that many – perhaps the majority – of the issues discussed do not in fact concern Scottish and Welsh voters, this lessens the charge of political bias that could be made towards ITV by the decision to exclude the SNP and Plaid Cymru. It could be argued they do not need to be present, as their parties have the policy of not voting in Parliament on any of the England-only matters discussed. Any specifically Scottish or Welsh concerns about the implications for people in those countries of government policies and legislation for England could then be expressed in the separate debates to be held in those countries.

   I trust you agree that it is important to ensure that voters are aware which policies discussed in the debate affect them and which do not. This will help ensure that the debate indeed has the positive, democracy-enhancing effect we are all hoping for.

   Yours sincerely,

   David Rickard

Let’s see if the Scottish-sounding Mr MacLeod agrees that the people of Scotland (and, incidentally, those in England and Wales) deserve to be shown the naked English truth that the would-be PMs would rather cover up with their new British Emperor’s clothes.

England: the unstated ‘real’ name of the British state

What follows is something of a ‘thought experiment’, as trendy ‘critical-theory’ lecturers might call it. It’s an attempt to logically think through some of the paradoxes of the British establishment’s present ways of describing itself and referring to its affairs. This is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis, by any means; just an attempt to expose an underlying structure and get inside the establishment mindset.

Case 1: the infamous conception of Britain / the UK as a ‘Britain of nations and regions’. This is obviously closely associated with Gordon Brown, who coined it. But it’s still for many the guiding template for the ‘new Britain’ of the post-devolution era, which requires further constitutional and political reform, including regional / local ‘devolution’ in England. And it even seems to have transformed the way in which ‘the Conservative Party of Britain’, as Gordon Brown erroneously but revealingly referred to it last week (technically, it’s the Conservative and Unionist Party), thinks about the Union, if the participants in that party’s debate on the Union or its proposed ‘Council of the Isles’ are anything to go by: representatives from all the (devolved) nations and from (the Conservative Party of) Britain, but not from England.

The limited question I want to ask here is this: if this new ‘Britain’ is composed of nations (Scotland and Wales, for sure; and more controversially, Northern Ireland) and of regions, what sort of entity is this Britain itself? This is intended as a purely logical question, in the first instance: what is the name for a territory, jurisdiction or sovereign state that has two sorts of subdivisions – nations and regions? A ‘union’ or grouping of nations into a single state tends to be designated as a federation or confederation. As examples of such a union, you can’t really count federal or confederal ‘nation-states’ such as the US or Switzerland respectively, since their subdivisions aren’t nations as such. You’d have to take discontinued states such as the USSR or Yugoslavia, whose subdivisions comprised formerly distinct (though historically variable) national territories that subsequently reaffirmed their status as nation states when the union-states of which they had been a part broke down. The prospective Federal EU that some dream of would be another example.

The USSR is quite a useful example. When it was still in existence, we tended informally to call it just ‘Russia’, because Russia was by far the largest and most dominant nation within the Union. After the break-up of the USSR, Russia itself is now formally known as the ‘Russian Federation’: a Union of many federal states or regions. Applying this analogy to ‘Britain’, it is also the case that throughout most of its history prior to devolution, the United Kingdom was often informally referred to – by English people and foreigners alike – as ‘England’, for similar reasons to those for calling the USSR ‘Russia’. Now, post-devolution, the national territories that had been assimilated into a unitary state (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) have reasserted a status as ‘nations’, albeit not fully sovereign nation-states like the former Soviet Republics.

On this analogy, then, the residual ‘British regions’ would be like the Russian Federation (i.e. effectively, English regions) but without reasserting their identity as a distinct nation as Russia has done. Applying the British model to the USSR (or however it would be renamed), it would be as if the Russian Federation had continued to be called the USSR, and the break-away Republics continued to be affiliated to the USSR but with recognition of their distinct nation status. The ‘new USSR’ would effectively be a ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Nations and Regions’. Such a state would be a ‘multi-national confederation’: a union of nations and subdivisions of nations (regions) having different relationships to the central state and each other, and so therefore not qualifying as a federal nation-state, in which each of the subdivisions would be equal to one another under the constitution.

If such a state had been formed (and the short-lived ‘CIS’, or ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’, was a prototype of something similar), it would doubtless have been imagined by the Soviet-Russian establishment as the means for Russia to maintain control and sovereignty over ‘its’ satellite nations within a single political structure without appearing to do so. But as a condition of achieving this, Russia itself would have had to forego the right to call and run itself as a separate nation, which would have lain bare the realpolitik behind the creation of the new USSR: that it was a means for one nation – Russia – to continue to dominate a number of dependent nations. Instead, officially, the name and nation status of ‘Russia’ would have had to disappear altogether, becoming merely a collection of ‘Soviet regions’ run directly by Moscow and the central-Soviet state, while the ‘nations’ enjoyed a degree of autonomous self-rule.

But what kind of thing would such a state of affairs, or affairs of a state, make the USSR? A ‘multi-national confederation’, yes. But the ‘regions’ within that confederation (i.e. the Russian regions) would actually also be the USSR: run by the state in a fully direct, unitary way; and identified with it, both formally (being called the ‘USSR’) and informally, in that the Russian population would be encouraged to transfer their identification with and allegiance to Russia to the new USSR, which would be the instrument and vehicle for the continuation of a powerful, imperial Russia under another guise.

In other words, the way in which a nation that has previously dominated a number of other nations through a supposedly equal, unitary political system can imagine that its unitary control continues to prevail once those nations start to break away is to re-group those nations into a new unity (new USSR or new ‘Britain’) with which it itself identifies. The former real unitary state (the USSR or Great Britain / the UK) that was often given the name of the dominant nation (Russia or England) becomes a confederation (no longer one nation but multiple nations) the unity of which is maintained in the mind of that dominant nation by a form of mental sleight of hand or fantasy denial of reality: the dominant nation identifies with the confederal state itself – thereby mentally transferring its own identity and personality as a united nation on to the confederal state. A union of multiple nations within a self-identical, homogeneous ‘nation-state’ is replaced by the identification of the leading nation with the new multi-national state. But in that process, the original dominant nation loses sight of its own distinct identity.

Hence, for the British establishment in the post-devolution world, England has become simply ‘Britain’: a Britain imagined as identical to – or co-terminous with – the devolved nations and the state itself. The ‘Britain of nations and regions’, therefore, is a UK [Britain] of [British] nations and English [British] regions: the state, the nations and the regions united in a single identity (Britain) whose ‘existence’ for the English is constituted by a process of identification – transferring English identity, nationhood, values, culture, history, tradition, etc. over to ‘Britain’. In reality, Britain is no longer a unitary state dominated by, and often designated as, England. But the way the establishment has reacted to the loss of the former English-British political union is to replace it with a psychological, existential union (i.e. a ‘union of identity’) between England and the new confederal Britain. But to be considered as a single entity, such a union can have only one name; and ‘Britain’ is the single name adopted for this new confederal structure into which England has been absorbed: disappearing in the process of becoming one-with-Britain, and thereby being the imaginary place in which Britain remains one.

But am I any nearer to answering my original question: what sort of entity is the ‘Britain’ that is subdivided into nations and regions? There’s no real logical answer to that question: you can’t easily call this Britain a ‘nation’, because then you’d have a ‘nation of nations and regions’, and you’d have all sorts of difficult questions about what the relationship was between the ‘mother nation’ Britain, and her national and regional children; and you’d have to explicitly acknowledge the non-inclusion of England as such within the system. But in addition to this logical and political dilemma, the reason why no one can satisfactorily answer this question is the same as the reason why the British establishment is incapable of referring to England as an entity distinct from itself: it’s because what this new Britain ‘really’ is, is England. On the analogy with the imaginary ‘continuity-USSR’ discussed above, England has been identified with the new effectively confederal British state (England ‘becoming’ Britain-as-the-UK; Russia becoming the new USSR) at the same time as that state is a sovereign body conferring a distinct national identity on its other parts, which thereby remain semi-autonomous parts of ‘Britain’. So the new ‘Britain’ is the way an essentially English perception of the former unitary UK as an extension of itself (as ‘Greater England’) is re-imagined as a new multi-national union with which England itself is identified – thereby preserving in imagination the old unity of England and Britain, and the ‘ownership’ of Britain by England; though at the expense of calling England ‘Britain’.

In this sense, England exists (or perhaps ‘subsists’ or ‘persists’ would be better) within the Britain of nations and regions not as an ‘object’ that can be described in rational, realistic terms (i.e. as a ‘nation’ or the collective name for a group of regions) but as its subject: it’s the hidden, nameless ‘national’ personality of the trans-national, confederal state – its inner psychological identity. England is in the mind of those English people – politicians or ordinary citizens – that have lived out the state’s identification of England with itself psychologically: in terms of their own personal sense of identity. ‘England’ is the unnamed, suppressed, subjective national identity of those English people who now explicitly identify as British first and foremost: who are content to regard the ‘Britain of nations and regions’ as a description of their ‘country’ and nation. It is, and can only be, English people who identify with the ‘nation’ of ‘Britain’ from which they are content to recognise that three other ‘nations’ have branched out (i.e. separated themselves from English control) and who also recognise that the ‘regions’ in question are regions of ‘their country’: in a more intimate and direct relationship with their country than that with the nations – because they are English regions (regions of their country England) even though it is not permitted to refer to them as such. The whole system only makes sense as an articulation of an ‘English’ point of view: the English ‘I’ (and eye) as it views the new British landscape – nations that are still really ‘ours’ (i.e. British) and regions that are even more so (i.e. English). England is the ‘we’ of Britain; but this fact must not and cannot ever be acknowledged, because then the realpolitik of the new Britain would be blown apart and exposed as an attempt by an England-centric establishment to retain power over a group of ‘other’ nations by re-imagining itself and them as a single entity known as Britain.

This relates to case 2, which I (mercifully) will not have time to explore in such depth: the articulation by national politicians of English matters as British. It is a cause of considerable exasperation to myself and many others that politicians whose ministerial portfolio or responsibilities are relevant to England only, because of devolution, continue to talk as if their policies and actions related to the whole of ‘Britain’. We’ve witnessed this tendency time and time again in this year’s party-conference season: none of the three established parties seems willing or able to refer to English matters as English matters. While it is true that this is a deliberate attempt to blind English people to the differences between English and devolved governance and policies, it is not enough in my view simply to hammer on endlessly about wilful deceit and insulting ignoring of England – which I’ve done frequently enough myself in these pages.

At one level, the fact that politicians and the media refer to English matters as British also reflects the fact that they genuinely don’t perceive the difference. And this is not even the same as saying that they are simply ignorant about devolution: of course, journalists and politicians are rational human beings (relatively so, perhaps!), and they’re aware about devolution in the part of their brains that deals with reality and facts. But rationality and realism are not what’s going on here because, quite simply, carrying on as if matters that relate to just one part of the Union related to all of it is irrational and at times not a little mad – like the recent row over parties’ commitments to the NHS, which was all about the English NHS, in practical terms, despite the fact that not a single item of commentary that I saw referred to England.

No, what’s going on – in addition to deliberate deception – is this process of psychological identification of England with Britain, predominantly by English people. If the politicians and media in question don’t properly make the distinction between England and Britain, it’s because they actually don’t see it (in) themselves: they’ve bought into, and completed in their own subjective minds, the state’s assimilation of England to ‘Britain’. They’re rather like the women in the film The Stepford Wives, who get replaced by identical, obedient automatons that are mechanical apart from one detail: the eyes are taken from the real women. In other words, these politicians and citizens have completed the process of national transformation and now answer only to the name ‘Britain’; except that this Britain is a re-working of an English ‘eye’ / I: a traditional English subjective perspective on the Union.

On this level, it actually doesn’t matter if the politician concerned knows that his portfolio extends only to England, and that when he’s referring to ‘Britain’ or ‘the country’ he actually means England. This is not only or always deceit, which involves passing one thing (England) off as another (Britain), because, in the politician’s mind, they’re not actually two different things: for them, there is only Britain; it’s just that in their particular case (e.g. education or health), their ‘British’ responsibilities stop at the borders with Scotland and Wales. So, in their minds, they’re actually ‘correct’ in referring to the country affected by their policies as ‘Britain’, because that’s how they genuinely see it. But then, of course, if the Britain involved in such cases does not extend to the ‘other’ UK nations, this is another way in which the ‘real’ name for ‘Britain’ is in fact England.

And this is why I believe that a self-governing England, with a distinct national identity, will emerge only when English people – including the English people who by and large still run the British state – are able to disentangle their English subjectivity from the objective reality that is known as Britain. After all, self-government implies that one knows who and what one’s ‘self’ actually is; and until English people can accept themselves as English, they will continue to be suppressed ‘subjects’ of the British state. Freeing ourselves politically as English citizens, therefore, will follow from freeing our minds to be English.

Britain: The Self-Undermining Nation-State

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.

Naming ‘the country’, or do Scots take holidays in England?

For the avoidance of doubt, I like Scotland and Wales. As a matter of fact, I love Wales, having Welsh family and friends, and having spent many a happy holiday there. I’ve also enjoyed trips up to Scotland to stay with friends in Glasgow and Edinburgh, which are really fine cities, and to go walking in the lochs. But, I wonder, would Scottish and Welsh people say the same thing about England? ‘I like / love England’ or ‘I’m looking forward to my holiday in England’? These are not statements that somehow ring true, even if they were true! Do Scottish people actually talk of taking holidays in England, even if they do? And if they don’t, does this betray an ambivalence towards a country containing holiday destinations that the Scottish people in question might in fact love?

I suppose the reluctance of Scottish people to talk about their holidays ‘in England’, and to profess to having enjoyed their stay in ‘the country’, is not always the product of a dislike of the English similar to English people’s mixed feelings about the French when they say that France is too good for the French – not that the Scots would be likely to admit that England was ‘too good’ for anyone! No, for Scots and Welsh people, saying they’ve been on holiday in England is a bit like English people saying they’ve been on holiday in England: it doesn’t exactly convey much information and it naturally begs the question, ‘oh, whereabouts in England?’ Accordingly, you tend to hear statements like, ‘we went to Yorkshire this year’ or, like the PM, ‘we stayed in Norfolk for a couple of weeks’. In other words, Scots and Welsh people would normally refer to the part of England – county or ‘region’ – they stayed in, without the name for that part of England necessarily having to contain the word ‘England’ itself; unless it were something generic such as ‘the North of England’.

And yet, the fact that, for the Scots and Welsh, saying they’ve been on holiday in England is like English people saying the same thing; and the fact that they can talk about travelling to Yorkshire or East Anglia with the familiarity and assumed shared knowledge of people for whom those places are a part of their own country, does indicate an ambiguous, and ambivalent, relationship towards ‘the country’ that is England. It is, in fact, as if England were the country: the heartland and existential core of that other country, Britain, of which Scotland and Wales are – now, at least – semi-detached parts or sub-countries. It is as if, for Scots and Welsh people, England is in some sense their country – ‘their’ England – in the same way that English people have tended to nurture proprietorial feelings about Scotland and Wales: that, even though they recognised that the locals felt a proud sense of separate nationhood, those countries ultimately belonged to England and were part of the English ‘domain’ that was otherwise known as Britain.

These are very delicate issues that Scots and Welsh people won’t readily admit to. That is why they won’t name as England ‘the country’ that they feel in some sense belongs to them – and to which they belong – but will refer only to the county or region of England they’ve been to; and, if they do name that mutual sense of national belonging, they’ll call it ‘the country’ or ‘Britain’: not ‘we love England, to which we feel Scotland and Wales somehow still belong – and of which we, as Scots and Welsh people, also feel a sense of shared ownership’, but ‘we love Yorkshire’ or ‘we love East Anglia’; and ‘we feel that we have a stake in England, along with the English themselves, because we are all part of “the country” that is Britain’.

From these sorts of responses flow two alternative contemporary models for the relationship between the different nations that form part(s) of ‘the country’ that is Britain. One of these, which I would contend is very close to the hearts of many Scottish and Welsh people, but which they naturally find it hard to admit to, is a feeling of belonging to a national whole of which the core identity, culture and society are those of England: Scotland and Wales (and, insofar as it is included as an integral part of ‘Britain’, Northern Ireland; leaving aside the Cornish question for now . . .) as effectively peripheral, semi-autonomous nation-regions of ‘the country’ that is England-Britain: on the one hand, England and, on the other, the two (three / four) nations of ‘Greater Britain’, as one might say. England as the heartland of Britain (traditionally having merged its identity with that of Britain), with Scotland and Wales (and N. Ireland and Cornwall) making up the extended English-British domain beyond England; hence ‘Greater Britain’.

The other model is the New Labour, politically expedient and politically correct suppression of the embarrassing and increasingly humiliating psychological, political and cultural truth that Scotland and Wales have been effectively dependent ‘regions’ of a Britain that was in essence another name for England. So, just as Scottish and Welsh people can’t admit to their feelings of loving and belonging to an integral nation whose heart is England – and so will talk only of regions, ‘the country’ and ‘Britain’ – so now, Scotland and Wales are to be viewed as sub-nations of a Britain that is otherwise sub-divided only into regions, counties and cities. It seems that, in order to assert not only their political but also their emotional independence from England, the very existence of an England to which Scotland and Wales have traditionally felt they belonged must be denied and a new, more dignified, equal set of relationships asserted: Scotland and Wales not as regions but as small nations of equal stature and status to – ironically – a number of ‘other’ similarly-sized ‘British regions’ occupying ‘the country’ formerly known and loved as England but now referred to only as ‘Britain’. Psychologically, you could say that this is one way of dealing with the pain of separation: Scotland and Wales find themselves surprisingly missing their organic connection to England-Britain; so this pain and grief is creatively re-worked into a Britain that is ‘missing England’ in the other sense. In this way, the would-be wishing of England into non-existence is in fact the other side of a grieving for their union with England that it is not acceptable for proud Scottish and Welsh nationalists to articulate. Hence, the most effective way psychologically to deny that you are missing England is for England to go missing: for it no longer to exist.

This is perhaps another way to configure the bizarre would-be re-crafting of a Britain without England that has taken place in the wake of devolution. It’s a symptom of psychological fissure and splitting, which manifests itself in different ways from either side of the equation, and either side of the border. For the Scots and the Welsh – particularly, the Scots – there’s the pain and regret that dare not speak its name: that England is no longer their England – part of what it has meant to be Scottish for 300 years, if only on occasions by negative self-definition; and, conversely, that they are no longer integrally part of England, in either the geopolitical or emotional sense. The project to create a ‘New Britain’ of which Scotland is a semi-autonomous sub-nation is, as I’ve said, in part an attempt to deny that pain; and it is also an effort to imagine how to re-connect Scotland organically to a greater Britain of which it was once a part through England – only this time without England, from which the decision has been taken to separate Scotland’s identity.

Yes, this stratagem is also one that enables Labour to make out that it has a mandate to govern England through the inflated majority that its Scottish and Welsh MPs give it; and it enables Gordon Brown to posture as an elected leader for England, even though he represents a Scottish constituency: by denying that England exists and by affirming that – in ‘England’ only – there is only the UK, so that all UK MPs should participate in its governance. But this is also the expression of the torn loyalties of Scottish ‘nationalist-unionists’ who want to belong to a greater Britain without that Britain being fundamentally England.

From the English side of the equation, articulating everything as British only even when the matters at hand relate to England only is a way to deny the splitting up of the Union that has already occurred: it’s playing on that old organic non-distinction between England and Britain in the minds of English people that used to correspond to the political reality – when there was unitary (English) governance over the whole of Great Britain. Again, the political advantage of perpetuating the illusion that nothing has changed is clear: if people are unaware that what’s being talked and decided about relates to England only, they won’t start questioning why Scottish and Welsh MPs are getting involved in the process. However, at a deeper level, it’s about an unwillingness to give up that organic unity with Scotland and Wales that made English people feel those countries were part of themselves; indeed, part of England. We don’t want to wake up to the reality that our beloved country has split up and our children have left us: we want to still be part of one big English-British family.

Where does that leave us now, though? We’re in an intermediate, transitional state: not quite separate from one another but no longer joined at the hip. No longer a unitary Great Britain of which England was the foundation; but still a Union – in name only – that forces England to be effectively the place of a Britain that is dependent for the continuing participation of the Scots on its not being England. ‘This country’ of ours could be named, according to the first of my above models for post-devolution Britain, the ‘Disunited Kingdom of England and Greater Britain’ – the latter term being one that could also encompass Northern Ireland if that province is construed as another part of the greater British dominion of which England is the now partially dis-associated centre. And we – England – are no longer Great Britain but not yet willing and courageous enough to be only England – England alone.

But the separation must come: it must be completed, rather, because once it got started, there was no turning back the clock – like a spouse that can no longer go back to the union that once existed as soon as she has started to think of herself as a separate person before actually making the divorce final. The Scots have decided to be Scots first and foremost, and to break their organic union with England. England, too, must learn to let go. Then perhaps we can begin to find true greatness in ourselves and not in dominion; and not in Britain.

And then, perhaps, the Scots, too, might be able to confess to loving their holidays in England: a foreign country of which one can say ‘I’m going to England’, rather than one’s own country of which one would say ‘I am going to region x or county y’. An England that is no longer the mirror of Scotland’s own national humiliation and the object of unspoken, guilty, unrequited love. An England that is its own nation and need no longer be merely ‘the country’ for Britain’s sake.

A TV Of Nations and Regions

The media and telecoms regulator Ofcom today published the second phase of its Public Service Broadcasting Review. This looks at a number of alternative new funding models for public-service TV broadcasting in the era following the digital switch-over and beyond. The report questions some of the assumptions behind PSB funding in the present and explores different combinations of public and commercial funding for such services, and models of competition to obtain such funding and broadcasting licences.

One assumption that is not challenged in the report – or at least, its Executive Summary – is that there is both strong consumer demand and a public-service obligation to provide ‘nations and regions’ programming, both news and non-news. The phrase crops up all over the eight-page summary, particularly in relation to two of the proposed new models for ITV services and funding, e.g.:

• The ‘enhanced Evolution model’: “ITV1 could become a network of nations-based licences, or a single UK licence, with obligations only for UK origination, UK and international news, and potentially news for the devolved nations and the English regions”.
• The ‘refined BBC / Channel 4 model’: “Channel 3 licensees would have no ongoing public service benefits or obligations, but could compete for funding to provide nations and regions news,
  alongside others”.

Then, under the rubric “Provision of news and information for the devolved nations is an essential
requirement for any future model, and is likely to need replacement funding”, a number of options for securing this laudable aim are mapped out, which include:

• “Provide new public funding for Channel 3 licensees in the nations and regions;
• Introduce competitive funding for services in the nations and regions to enable
  other providers to bid, potentially enabling the creation of cross-media services in
  Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; or
• Fund the creation of dedicated channels for the devolved nations, such as that
  proposed by the Scottish Broadcasting Commission.”

One suspects that the demand for ‘nations’ services in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland might be somewhat greater than demand for services focused on the (English) regions! Perhaps they should have consulted on the question of whether broadcasters felt there would be demand for a channel or services dedicated to the English nation. One suspects that the commercial potential for such a service, particularly if it was based on a public-service remit, would be quite high. Maybe it’s just the political will to provide public funding for a national English TV service that is lacking!

The absence of real demand for [English] regional programming seems reflected in the reports main proposals for ITV:

• “retained nations and regions news, but a modest reduction in the minimum
  requirement for news minutage, reflecting removal of some daytime bulletins;
• reduced minimum requirements for nations and regions non-news programming,
  to 15 minutes in England and from 3 to 1.5 hours in Wales, Scotland and
  Northern Ireland”.

For the avoidance of doubt, that’s 15 minutes of non-news factual programming for the English regions per week, as the more detailed discussion of this proposal in the body of the report makes clear: “in England, the requirement for a quota for ‘other’ non-news programmes in the English regions to be met through an average 15 minutes per week of current affairs and other factual elements from 2009, which may be delivered within news slots”. That’s 15 minutes for each of the English regions, compared with 1.5 hours for the ‘nations’ of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. So clearly, they’re not anticipating much interest in this regional fare! However, if there were quality programming dealing with national English stories – political, social and cultural – I’m sure the broadcasters would have a job to limit it to the 1.5 hours allotted to the smaller nations! But they wouldn’t want so much attention to be drawn to the failings (or absence) of English governance, the economic and social problems of our cities and rural areas, or the decline of so many local and national traditions, would they?

So it seems as though the regional model is all we in England are going to be offered, even to the extent that Ofcom has given its approval to a rationalisation of ITV’s English ‘regional’ news desks from 17 to nine: neatly mapping on to the nine regions the government has divided England up into through its unelected Regional Assemblies and Ministers for the Regions – apart from poor old Borders TV, which does now look as though it will be merged with Tyne Tees: welcome to England, chaps!

Ofcom seems unable to think outside the nations and regions TV box; or perhaps it’s just prevented or intimidated from doing so by its political masters. The nations and regions model of broadcasting – and the nations and regions model for Britain it rests on – is based on a conflation of England with Britain, the political rationale for which is well known: to deny nation status to England but not to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; and so to legitimise and perpetuate the sovereignty and domination of the unrepresentative UK parliament over English affairs, thereby withholding from English people the democratic choices and national self-determination accorded to the devolved ‘nations’. Ofcom can’t get beyond this rigid, pre-imposed model for the UK: [English] regions and devolved nations of equivalent size or less.

But surely, redesigning the funding and licensing models for public-service broadcasting is an ideal opportunity to, as it were, recast this model not remain hide-bound to it. Instead of an essentially two- or three-tier model for broadcast content and organisations (international and national-UK; regional-national; and genuinely local: down to the local community or even neighbourhood level), why can’t we work at developing a three- (or four-) tiered model: yes, international and truly UK-wide news and general programming; then properly national news, with a Scottish Six (BBC Scotland Six O’Clock News) matched by equivalent English Six and Welsh Six news programmes, for instance; and then truly local and regional news with, in the English context, programming at the level of shire counties or more authentic regional groupings of counties, such as an ‘Anglia’ region that combined Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk rather than the present ‘super-Anglia’ region that also includes Essex, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire; or say, a ‘Yorkshire’ region that reincorporated Humberside and Teeside?

This wouldn’t in fact necessitate the creation of a ‘BBC England’ paralleling the present BBC Scotland or BBC Wales. All you need do is restructure the organisation and funding of public-service broadcasters so that they can actually deliver programming that reflects the range of topics (international, national, regional-local) that people are genuinely interested in, and which fulfils the duty of news coverage to report the facts accurately, clearly and intelligently. So, for instance, instead of the main network news broadcasts being divided into international and supposedly UK / national stories (with the latter really being almost exclusively England-only while being misleadingly passed off as British, to the considerable annoyance of informed viewers in all four nations of the UK) followed by ‘regional’ news, you could divide them into three parts: international and properly UK-wide stories, for instance dealing with the economy, taxation, immigration or national security; then properly national-level stories, i.e. dealing with those levels of politics and society that are governed by the devolved institutions (or not, in England’s case); and then the local-regional news.

I’m sure there would be just as much demand and interest in Scotland and Wales for national-Scottish and national-Welsh news stories (albeit that these might seem parochial to an English audience) as there would be enthusiasm in England for properly English stories that are currently made out to be British, e.g. stories about education, transport, planning, crime and justice, and other social issues. While satisfying the English appetite to see England treated explicitly and fairly as a nation in its own right, and achieving a more accurate depiction of the range of governance across the UK following devolution (in line with the recommendations of a recent BBC report also commented in this blog), this would also free Scottish and Welsh viewers from being bombarded with entirely England-focused news masquerading as British. And I’m equally sure there would be plenty of interest in ‘regional’-Scottish and ‘regional’-Welsh broadcasting, reflecting the considerable cultural and economic diversity of the different parts of those countries, to match the local, county or regional-level concerns of English viewers.

But a restructuring of this sort would go completely against the grain of the present policies of denying England any representation as a nation: whether politically or on TV. And that’s why, in the consultation questions asked at the end of the report’s Executive Summary, there’s no thought of asking whether broadcasters consider there might be demand for national-English programming. No, it’s just nations and regions again:

1. “Do you agree with our findings that nations and regions news continues to have an important role and that additional funding should be provided to sustain it?
2. Which of the three refined models do you think is most appropriate in the devolved nations?
3. Do you agree with our analysis of the future potential for local content services?”

Well, my answer to No.’s 1 and 2 is yes: but only if you’re counting England as a nation. But something tells me I could be regions away from the truth.

And finally, yet another plug: please sign the ‘England Nation’ petition. Thank you.