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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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