‘Englishness’ was never enough to build a nation on

During his brief tenure as prime minister, Boris Johnson has flaunted his disregard for the tenets of Tory traditionalism. In an eventful few months, he has misled the monarchy and belittled the judiciary. But the bigger surprise has been his indifference to Conservative unionism. While Theresa May’s Brexit strategy faltered partly because she believed in the inviolability of the United Kingdom, Johnson seems relatively relaxed about the prospect of his party surrendering nearly all its seats in Scotland – and, in theory at least, about sacrificing some of Northern Ireland’s statutory Britishness if it will smooth the passage of a Brexit deal.

All of this suggests that Johnson’s vision for government, if it can be called that, is a specifically English one. There is underlying logic here. With Scottish independence and Irish reunification now looming somewhere in the middle distance, it makes sense for Johnson to view unionism as a hopeless cause, and to think about ways of governing England after the United Kingdom crumbles.

In fact, this narrowing of Tory strategy is the natural byproduct of an anxiety that has haunted 21st-century culture and politics. Precisely because England is such an ill-defined entity, there have been increasing worries since the millennium about what will be left when imperial “Great Britain” finally gives up the ghost.

One result has been a sometimes neurotic obsession with defining English identity. While politicians on the left and centre have scrambled to mimic the right’s emphasis on “family, faith and the flag”, Englishness has become a rallying point for liberals keen to rediscover a sense of patriotism – and, relatedly, a cloak of “working-class” authenticity, as the critic Joe Kennedy argued in his 2018 polemic Authentocrats. “Englishness is found,” Kennedy writes, “in the way national identity has in recent years been aestheticised and made tasteful by a middle-class, basically middlebrow culture.”

Hence the many broadsheet articles about the need to forge a Positive English Identity, a publishing vogue for books that make plain “what it means to be English”, and cultural specimens like Jeremy Deller’s art exhibition English Magic and Jez Butterworth’s hit play Jerusalem, both of which hinted at the possibility of a new English folk culture.

As these last examples underline, there are interesting things to be said about Englishness. But the quest for an authentic national culture is in one sense a form of compensation for the elusiveness of the English nation state. For a host of historical and political reasons – largely the fact that the British empire was an amorphous entity based on transnational trade and government – England simply does not have a strong enough cultural imaginary to meaningfully define itself in the globalised, precarious 21st century. Having sacrificed its sense of self – first, to the surrounding nations of the British Isles, and then to the wider empire – England renounced its entitlement, perhaps once and for all, to a coherent national identity.

For some, the very nebulousness of Englishness highlights the need to empower England and its citizens. While Conservatives lean toward rejecting unionism in favour of a more limited nationalist strategy, soft-left figures, such as the openDemocracy co-founder Anthony Barnett, have argued persuasively for a more enlightened English revival. For Barnett, the only way to halt the rise of rightwing nationalism is to steal its thunder: by redirecting English identity towards progressive ends, and establishing a new English parliament to parallel Scottish, Welsh and Irish forms of self-government.

But if the UK continues down the path to its own dissolution, we should have the courage to imagine far more radical ways of restructuring these islands than an automatic reboot of the four medieval nationalisms. While there are convincing arguments for greater Scottish, Irish and Welsh autonomy, the so-called problem of England is too complex to be solved by way of an “English assembly” resembling the devolved governments in the peripheral nations.

Even aside from the hollowness of the whole notion of Englishness (try telling a call-centre worker in Newcastle and a stockbroker in Surrey that “English identity” is what unites them), the most profound divide on the islands is not the separation between nations. Rather, it is the huge disparity between the global mega-city of London with its south-eastern hinterland, and almost all other parts of the British Isles.

The only way to counteract the geographical inequalities of the London-dominated capitalist state is by building up the English regions – not continuing the quest for an artificial, unitary Englishness. A revival of the post-millennium movement for regional devolution – on hold since a Dominic Cummings-assisted campaign defeated the yes vote in the 2004 north-east England devolution referendum – would be a very good starting point.

But, alongside the regionalist cause, we should also explore ways of connecting the English regions and the non-English nations, so that the boundary lines of our imagined national communities are transcended rather than reinforced.

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There are many practical ways this project might be embarked on. Extending high-speed rail systems such as the putative northern powerhouse rail scheme, so that northern and western cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle are brought closer to Scottish areas, would be one way to foster the development of an alternative economic sphere to London and the south-east. Another would be the wholesale relocation of London institutions and infrastructure northward, perhaps – to apply a dash of sci-fi idealism – to a wholly new “soft capital” on or near the Anglo-Scottish border, with a quick sea link to Ireland.

The outline of a post-UK arrangement will need careful thought. But whatever emerges from the constitutional churn of the present moment, we must ensure that the diversity of our vast population is not constrained by myths of Englishness that will ultimately always sustain the dominance of London and its conservative establishment. Truly radical reform must consider a new model beyond nationalism – one that overturns our south-east-versus-the-rest dynamic once and for all.

• Alex Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and the author of New Model Island