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Mark Perryman
© Mark Perryman 2008
To a much greater extent than arguments over Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish
identity, debates about Englishness are dominated by the question of race.
Immigration, for the right, is their frontline in any defence of Britishness.
A.N. Wilson in the Daily Mail marked the Queen’s birthday with these
regrets: ‘It would be a bold person who stood up and said that the reign
of Elizabeth had been Britain’s most glorious period. For it is my sad
belief that her reign is the one in which Britain effectively stopped being
British. The chief reason for this is mass immigration on a scale that has
utterly transformed our nation.’ As the break-up of Britain develops
there will undoubtedly be powerful tendencies towards defining Englishness
against immigration and Europe. Yet to presume that there is an unstoppable
shift towards exclusion instead of inclusion suggests a profound lack of confidence
on the part of an emergent English progressive patriotism. The combination
of Englishness and migration is virtually indivisible; driving a wedge between
the two would therefore be immensely difficult for the right if the left could
only engage with both parts of the mix.
Recent large-scale migration has largely been from within the EU, and some
Eastern Europeans have begun to suffer from prejudices similar to those endured
by their predecessors from the old British Empire. This is linked to the wider
little England rejection of English identity as European. Those who demonise
the recent arrivals from Poland and elsewhere usually connect this to a more
old-fashioned form of racism. They long for the days when England could be
imagined as not only nothing to do with Europe but all-white too. However
it is now almost impossible to imagine England without black and Asian people
as an integral part. From pop to politics, cuisine to music, fashion to business,
the black experience is now intimately interwoven into the fabric of English
daily life, in a way that is not so obviously the case in Scotland or Wales.
Attempt to remove black people from England’s racial landscape and you
remove one third of the capital, between a fifth and a third of the football
team, most high street restaurants and a huge number of successful businesses.
The overwhelming proportion of all people of black or ethnic minority origin
in Britain live in England. Forty-five per cent in London, and the next highest
concentration the West Midlands, where it is 13 per cent. A little over nine
per cent of England’s population is of black or ethnic minority origin,
compared to 2.2 per cent in Wales, 2.1 per cent in Scotland and just 0.75
per cent in Northern Ireland. This is a significant differential, and one
whose representation should be another subject of contestation. When we track
the emergent popularity of the St George Cross flag as a potential symbol
of our multicultural Englishness, this is the contest we are observing. A
team, flag and nation for all, or only for some? There are those who parade
their Englishness as a barrier to a new nation. And those who celebrate inclusion
as a core value of the England that we seek to build – not in denial
of our imperial and martial past but in recognition of, and opposition to,
its worst excesses. In this sense the flags we fly, the shirts we pull on
and the teams we cheer for are part of our interpretation, as individuals
and communities, of the connections that bind and separate us. These are complex
and contradictory, rarely uniform. As a shift away from insularity gathers
pace, an opposition that resists such a process also emerges. But it is remarkable
that this period of an unfolding emergence of Englishness as an identity has
been accompanied by ever-increasing numbers of black and Asian football fans
identifying with England. Does that mean an end to racist discrimination,
abuse and assaults? No – and who in their right mind would make such
a claim? But it does indicate that in our imagined England inclusion and identity
are not the polar opposites that some presume. A place we can call multicultural
England is emerging, with a pride in what makes us different – without
that there’s no basis of nationhood – but proud, too, of our differences.
Stuart Hall has pinpointed the competing pressures that globalisation exerts
on nationhood, arguing that there is a tension between capitalism’s
transnational imperatives and its tendency to develop the nation-state and
national cultures. He sees this as ‘a contradiction at the heart of
modernity’, one that has given nationalism and its particularisms ‘a
peculiar significance and force at the centre of the so-called new transnational
global order’.
This ‘peculiar significance’ is constantly ignored or underestimated
by those politicians and commentators who treat the global imperative in shaping
politics and economics in isolation from the rising appeal of the local. Opposition
to the effects of market-led globalisation is frequently underpinned by values
that combine locality and environmentalism: not necessarily exclusively ‘English’
values, but ones that may have particular English expressions. A sense of
place and identity can anchor the connections between local and the global.
We can be friends of the earth our home is built on, the park where our kids
play, the fields where we’d like our food to be grown, and the hills
where we walk the dog. But Friends of the Earth too, living as we do in a
planet under threat of environmental destruction and the impending devastation
of climate change. A nationhood grounded in particularity suggests neither
a hierarchy of difference nor the classification of those that do or do not
belong. Instead we value what made England and recognise that this is an unfinished
process, a work-in-progress. Sue Clifford and Angela King have pioneered a
new way of thinking through and acting out this commitment to English particularism:
‘the forces of homogenisation rob us of both tangible and invisible
things that have meaning to us; they erase the fragments from which we piece
together stories of nature and history; they stunt our sensibilities and starve
our imaginations.’ As we piece this imagined nation called England together
out of the wreckage of broken-up Britain there could be a temptation to retreat
into an unchanging past, a theme park for an old country. Of course it is
the processes of history that have shaped our particularities of custom and
culture, landscape and diet, sense of place and faces we recognise as our
own. But history isn’t just about the past. It has a present and future
too. A new England will take shape out of a modern separation as well as ancient
origins. In our contestation with those who see this process as justifying
brutish exclusion and the codification of authenticity, we would do well to
incorporate Blake’s vision of a green and pleasant England. Blake’s
Jerusalem was both unmistakably English and universal in the ambition of its
values – and it’s not a bad tune for an anthem either.
Does England only exist in our imagination? Only if we believe that politics
is founded solely on reality. Extinguish ideals and vision from political
discourse – as the ten years of Blair-Brown have threatened to do –
and imagining a new country becomes something with little or no purchase on
the mainstream politics. This, in large measure, is why the main political
parties are so incapable of engaging with this debate.
There needs to be a space in which England can establish some kind of common
purpose as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland take their leave. A purpose
that combines all our yesterdays with some of our tomorrows, drenched in symbolism,
entirely dependent on popular identification. Our imagined community has its
eleven named people, and millions more too. The process of imagining all of
this as a nation has begun. It is an irreversible process, but with uncertain
outcomes. Welcome to England.
Mark Perryman is the editor of Imagined Nation: England
after Britain, published by Lawrence & Wishart..
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