The scale of the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) victory in Scotland virtually compels all the United Kingdom-wide political parties to start centring themselves on a place called England. Whether one gets English votes for English laws in the Commons, or power devolved to the English regions, depends on how big a priority the Conservatives make them. Labour, almost certainly, will have to create a federal structure and an English party organisation to mirror its Scots and Welsh ones. But as an English person, I would like to declare up front: I do not want to be English.
I am the grandson of a Lithuanian Jew on one side and some miners and weavers whose roots go back for centuries in the same square kilometre off the East Lancs Road. Neither side of this genealogy makes me feel particularly enamoured with the concept of England.
It is not about the St George cross. The glorious summer of Euro 96 arguably took it back from the racists. And the influx of working-class children means I can now support the England rugby union team without feeling my class identity besmirched. But beyond sport, in large swaths of public life, there is almost no requirement whatsoever for an English person to self-identify as English. And that is because — as for no other nation on these islands — what it means to be English is completely subordinate to class, region, ethnicity and local culture. On each of these measures, if I examine my own gut feelings, I still have more in common with the Celtic cultures of Britain than with an Englishness defined around public schools and the officer class.
In terms of place, I have always been pulled towards high mountains, craggy coastlines and wild, western seas. There are none of the above in Thanet, but plenty in Wales where I go surfing, and in Cornwall where I spent every summer of my childhood.
When it comes to cities, I only feel at home when they are built of brick and hard stone, and where the dominant culture is working class. Thus, while Manchester feels like home, so does Dublin, and so did Glasgow — even when the ‘Yes’ campaign’s Jacobin wing were surrounding English broadcasters with hostility and chanting during the referendum campaign. By contrast, almost everywhere in southern England — above all the tennis club belt around London — produces in me a sense of cultural alienation.
When it comes to class, there is no other nation in Britain where the cultural divides are so pronounced and so persistent as they are among the English. The Scots have lairds alongside poverty-stricken youth; the Welsh have their foxhunting set; but there are strong cultural signifiers the rich and poor share in these countries, which just don’t exist in England.
Because of the election result, and the English institutions it could call forth, sooner or later, somebody is going to try and foist an “Englishness” narrative on us. Even on the left, the idea is gaining traction: Irvine Welsh has suggested the working-class, northern half of England might have to start playing the game of English nationalism, to prevent the upper-class southerners monopolising it.
But I do not think it is going to happen. And that is because, at the centre of English culture lies neither institutions, nor customs, nor sports teams, but a global language. This global language, whose base layer is a medieval mixture of Latin and German, has acted like a sponge, drawing foreign cultural influences so deep into our brains that they have taken root in our identity.
My English is not just the language of Dickens, Keats and Milton. It is the English of Tolstoy, Orhan Pamuk and Flaubert in translation. It is the language of Thomas Pynchon, Peter Carey and Arundhati Roy — American English, Aussie English, Indian English. Because it is global, the English language is infinitely capable of ethnic and class inflexions. Those who took Ed Miliband to task for getting sucked into Russell Brand’s vortex of glottal stops miss the point that, for all of us, our spoken language morphs radically depending upon whether we are in the kebab shop, the business meeting, the TV studio or the pub.
If an English national identity stubbornly refuses to emerge as the result of the Scottish shock, it will be because of the class and cultural divides within England and because our linguistic identity is so full of free gifts from the rest of the world. This, of course, is a legacy of empire. But the empire itself was born out of trade and sailing — two activities whose centrality to English identity explains why it is so difficult to pin down.
If you were to run English history since the Roman empire on fast forward, you would see wave after wave of invaders arriving by ship, depositing new words into the language and new hair colours into the gene pool — but barely settling before they embark on new ships to go and find new places to colonise and trade with.
So I predict all attempts to create an Englishness that can encompass Wigan and Henley will fail, for the same reasons that former prime minister Gordon Brown’s “Britishness” initiatives failed. One person’s Englishness is another’s racism.
Because of what has happened in Scotland, we are certainly going to get more political control and new institutions, for England and its regions. But please do not try to burden me with yet another layer of bogus identity politics. The only identity I need can be created by speaking and writing in the most malleable language on earth.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@paulmasonnews
