Taking the Cure

Despite the best efforts of Irish, Welsh and Scottish nationalists, the process of Breaking Up the Union of Great Britain and Ireland is a job for the English, and always has been ever since the process really got started  in Dublin in 1916. Now, by an irony of history, it turns out that our shared membership of the EU across these islands was not only the essential underpinning of the Good Friday Agreement, it was the last glue that held together the devolved Union within the island of Great Britain as well. One of the battles yet to be properly fought is over the respective roles of the devolved Parliaments in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast. Meanwhile, it is of totemic importance to the DUP’s ongoing dance of glee and grievance that the Assembly in Stormont is currently shut.  That the Parliament in Holyrood has been effectively sidelined by…well, what shall we call it nowadays…the Imperial Parliament?...in London, is essential to what is laughingly still referred to as a “smooth” Brexit.

The discomfort of calling Westminster either the Imperial Parliament (of the past) or indeed the English Parliament (of the future?) points to the structural dysfunction that Brexit is newly and ruthlessly exposing. The centre, to quote Ireland’s poet of 1916, cannot hold. To misquote England’s great poet, there’s quite a lot in a name. The names we call things are what all this boorach is about.

What is as old as the hills, or as Sherwood Forest, is the insouciant ease with which the words “England” and “Britain” or “English” and “British” are still apparently regarded as comfortably interchangeable, as, unfortunately, they still are in an essay on the English roots of Brexit published last week in the London Review of Books. This lazy identification has never been possible in any of the other constituents of the Union of British Nations. For one thing, we’ve always had our own patron saints and emblematic outlaws over and above St George and Robin Hood, potent though those symbols of Englishness are. My own profoundly loyal North British grandparents were wearily familiar with the phenomenon, and always regarded a hybrid identity as both Scots and British as being intrinsic to who they were – they regarded the Scots as the Best of British - whereas George Orwell, for example, in his justly famous panegyric on Englishness, The Lion and the Unicorn, acknowledged awareness of the uncomfortableness of the identification of the English and the British for his Scottish, Welsh and Irish readers in a rather irritated footnote.

No exploration of the very English roots (and likely destination) of Brexit can even remotely come to terms with any of it actually means if it doesn’t start with the insight that all four nations are going to have to learn how to name things all over again. No matter how irritating it is that the Scots, Irish, Scots-Irish and Welsh have got a head start in adapting to a new world of multiple rather than subsumed identities.

Unionism, for example, cannot be understood unless it is understood that the same word means subtly different things in all four nations that make up that union. And that hybrid rather than merged identity has always been the syntactic rule in three of them. Englishness needs to learn how to speak its name if it is to face the world with confidence. As Antony Barnett has argued in his excellent book “The Lure of Greatness”, it is only as the European English that the English will find a future.

Britishness, like every other national identity, was a series of projects, not an essence. Starting as a Protestant bulwark against dynastic Catholic Europe, it successively evolved into a commercial Empire and a Welfare State. When it ceased to be any of these three things then it ceased being a useful way to think about what it means to live on these islands. It became a distorting mirror in which to see ourselves.

But just as in 2014, the status quo, despite appearances, is not an option on the ballot paper. Just as there was no way “back to normal” in a No vote in the Scottish referendum, the events of the past few years have permanently let the English genie out of the British Bottle.  The Brexit process, like the process of the referendum in Scotland, has shone a ruthless light on tectonic change. There is no way back to the relationship with the EU that the UK used to have, and there is no way back to what Britishness, civic or civilising, used to mean.

Brexit is only the symptom. “Britain” is now the disease that awaits a cure.