It is rather striking that much of the literature on Englishness in the last few decades has assumed a peculiar lack, and what is thought to be lacking is a politically significant national identity. At the centre of Englishness there seems to be a void and only when national sentiment becomes visible in public displays of the Cross of St George – and these certainly have become more frequent since the 1990s – is it thought that the void is being filled. There is something deeply unsatisfactory, indeed rather superficial, about that assumption. In short, it suggests a misreading. This...

InThe English InheritanceGeorge Kitson Clark presented a very different assessment of the institutions of the country than one of unchanging constancy. Here ‘the constitution which our forefathers so earnestly believed in, toasted after so many dinners, celebrated with such pompous oratory and called the palladium of their liberties, has been reformed out of all knowledge’. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it had been replaced by democracy and in practice this meant ‘the concentration of power’ (1950: 40). Despite the Christian seriousness of Kitson Clark’s study, there were also traces of that playful humour we...

Chapter 1 began by noting that a major theme of many recent studies in political Englishness has been the notion of a ‘lack’. This chapter examines the most politically influential expression of that notion and traces its influence in the debate about English identity. It is an expression that anticipated the conclusion of Kumar’s study and was a powerful revision of the legend of civic patriotism, one which inverted (but did not completely subvert) the English/British exemplary exception. In this reading England was indeed exceptional but it was exceptional only in its backwardness and if England was exemplary, it was...

Jeremy Paxman began his popular bookThe English: A Portrait of a Peoplewith the line: ‘Once upon a time the English knew who they were’ (1998: 1). This knowledge had been the efficient secret of the country’s success and the hidden reservoir from which all the distinctive characteristics of the English people were drawn. However, Paxman’s use of the fairytale expression ‘once upon a time’ was perhaps significant because such confident self-knowledge is, as the expression implies, mythological. After Borges, it is yet another mask and not a mirror. ‘Once upon a time’ is not even the remotest of...

In 1999, Richard Weight announced that the ‘English left has a great opportunity: to become, for the first time in half a century, the party of patriotism’ and if they were only to raise their heads from theory and to look more sympathetically at their own people ‘liberals and socialists might see that the development of a radical patriotism is still possible in England’ (1999: 26). The task was one of recoveryandmodernisation, a task which the left once thought it had achieved in 1945 (see Ward 1998). Yet this positive case for Englishness derived from familiar concerns. In...

Conservatives assumed, for most of the twentieth century, that they were in tune with the patriotic spirit of the country. Conservatives claimed to understand best the public interest because their instincts were naturally part of the fabric of national character. Harold Begbie once described conservatism as ‘the very breath of English history’ and ‘an element in every Englishman’s patriotism’ (1924: 9). Lord Hailsham argued that conservatives believed in ‘the underlying unity of all classes of Englishmen’ and that unity of the nation was at the base of all their political thinking (1959: 35–6). The solidity of England was the...

During the debates of the 1970s Enoch Powell argued that at the heart of the devolution question was neither Scotland nor Wales and certainly not Northern Ireland but the question of England (Heffer 1998: 746) and it has been a point made subsequently by all serious commentators on constitutional change in the United Kingdom. Vernon Bogdanor, for example, observed that England was hardly mentioned in Labour’s devolution legislation though it was probably the key to success of the enterprise (1999: 264). Why England was the key was ‘for simple demographic and therefore democratic reasons’ (Taylor 1997: 769) and it remained,...

In his collection of cartoonsRound the Bend(1948), the Canadian Russell Brockbank included in one of his drawings a newspaper placard with the headline ‘Fog in Channel – Continent Isolated’. Of course, this was a joke but it would not have been funny if it had not struck a chord, confirming Alan Bennett’s view that English humour is joking but not joking, serious but not serious. It was a ‘chipper’ attitude, recognisable, perhaps even considered indulgently, but also thought to be rather ridiculous if taken earnestly and it was an attitude brilliantly captured – also in jest – by...

In September 2002 the then Home Secretary David Blunkett appointed Professor Sir Bernard Crick to a post which the BBC, in tabloid style, referred to as ‘Britishness chief’. Crick had actually been selected to chair a committee to advise the Home Secretary on the design of a citizenship syllabus for those seeking full British citizenship. This involved the provision of language skills and practical information about Britain such as the National Health Service, schooling, political institutions and the values that inform them. When called upon to comment on the character of Britishness, Crick’s initial response implied a strictly formal understanding....

Academics spend a lot of their time worrying professionally about the identity of others and this book has worried at length about the English and their Englishness. It was the shock of experiencing the ubiquitous display of the Cross of St George on a visit to the North-West of England in the early summer of World Cup 2002 that provoked the interest in addressing the subject. The shock was a mix of the familiar and the unexpected. The public display of flags is familiar to anyone from Northern Ireland but it was unexpected to encounter them so prominently in England....