November 18, 2005
The English rod
Gisela Stuart over at openDemocracy is worried and the focus of this worry are the usual suspects:
Yet it has only been in the last five years or so that I have heard people in my constituency telling me, “I am not British – I am English”. That worries me. British identity is based on and anchored in its political and legal institutions and this enables it to take in new entrants more easily than it would be if being a member of a nation were to be defined by blood. But a democratic polity will only work if citizens’ identification is with the community as a whole, or at least with the shared process, which overrides their loyalty to a segment.I wonder how worried Gisela would be if English identity was also anchored in its political and legal institutions? And that, after all, is the problem. A problem highlighted so well by Gareth’s essay on English Civic Nationalism. Gareth asked me if I thought that the Government ”created a rod for its own back in refusing to recognise or build a civic national identity for England”. It was a question that I hadn’t considered before and I had to re-evaluate my answer to that question after I had read his essay. Now we see, in Gisela’s concern, the actual rod that Gareth was talking about. There is no real focus for the English other than ethnicity and that is due entirely to the appropriation by the state of England’s cultural and civic institutions. As Gareth said:
”We English have no collective political representation that allows for an expression of our collective political will, and many or most of our cultural and civic institutions have been appropriated for Britain.”So where does the rise in English Nationalism, self awareness and self assertion go from here? The answer to that is in the hands of the government. To avoid fanning the flames of English nationalism is one thing. To prevent the expression of this rising phenomenon by ignoring calls for English political institutions (which are a prerequisite for recognised civic institutions) is to attempt to put a cork back into an increasingly agitated bottle of bubbly.
Via Hotspur at the Cross of St. George forums.
