The Politics of Englishness PDF
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The politics of Englishness The politics of Englishness Arthur Aughey Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Copyright © Arthur Aughey 2007 The right of Arthur Aughey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published byManchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK andRoom 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 6872 0 hardback ISBN 978 0 7190 6873 7 paperback First published 2007 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn Contents Preface and acknowledgements page vii 1 Put out more flags 1 Part I Legends of Englishness 2 An absorptive patria 19 3 The English idiom 42 4 Dead centre of inertia 62 Part II Anxieties of Englishness 5 English before they were British 83 6 England.co.uk 101 7 Slow alchemy of centuries 121 Part III Locations of Englishness 8 Region: resources of identity 143 9 Europe: a necessary context 163 10 England: a British relationship 183 11 Put out even more flags 203 References 215 Index 249 Preface and acknowledgements The idea for this book began during England’s football World Cup campaign in 2002 and so perhaps it is fitting that its completion should coincide with England’s exit from the World Cup competition of 2006. The question of support for the English team became a polit- ical issue in 2006, an (erroneous) touchstone of Britishness for those who either ought to know better or who were intent on making mischief. If the tone of a book is to be measured by sporting affiliation then this writer did support the English team both for the positive reason of wishing it well and for the negative reason of taking pleas- ure in the discomfort of those who take pleasure in the discomfort of England. Schadenfreudeis a satisfaction best doubled and when pleas- ure is replaced by sorrow, it is a sorrow halved. That may be a view peculiar to this side of the Irish Sea but perhaps it is a view sufficiently sympathetic to the subject of study yet sufficiently distant from it to provide a useful perspective on Englishness. One justification for this book is that it does. Its writing was assisted by the positive attitude to research of the University of Ulster which provided support along the way and at all levels from the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Richard Barnett, and Pro Vice-Chancellor Research, Professor Bernie Hannigan, to the Dean of Social Sciences, Professor Anne Moran, the Director of the Social and Policy Research Institute, Professor Bob Osborne and the Head of School of Economics and Politics, Carmel Roulston, and to my colleagues in the School, especially Professor Henry Patterson and Dr Fidelma Ashe. Graduate students in the Faculty – Carol-Ann Barnes, Lyndsey Harris and Sean Swan – were prepared to relieve me of some of the burden of undergraduate teaching for which I am very grateful. All members of the secretarial staff were unfailingly helpful and partic- ular mention should be made of Hazel Henderson who devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to make the manuscript (as the jargon now has it) ‘fit for purpose’. Dr Karyn Stapleton assisted me viii Preface and acknowledgements in some of the initial research and was absolutely essential in rectify- ing my incompetence in keeping proper track of references. I owe her a large debt. My understanding of Englishness was significantly enhanced by collaboration with the Constitution Unit at University College London, a collaboration which enabled me to benefit directly from the wisdom of all those scholars involved in the edited book The English Question (2006), scholars whose knowledge is far greater than my own. My special thanks goes to Professor Robert Hazell who was kind enough to include me in that project and who has been exceptionally generous in his support ever since. Dr Christine Berberich of the University of Derby helped me think through some of the literary aspects of the subject and her comments on my ideas were always insightful and stimulating. My greatest intellectual debt is owed to Dr Julia Stapleton of the University of Durham who gave so much of her precious time to read and comment on the manuscript in the course of its writing. Where there was doubt she provided belief and where there was confusion she provided clarity. I am forever grateful to her and hope that this book does some justice to the sugges- tions she made. And thanks are due to Tony Mason at Manchester University Press for his encouragement and support. Of course, all the errors and failings are mine alone. Finally, I would like to thank my daughter Sky for being such a bright star and I dedicate this book to her. 1 Put out more flags According to Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse in England began in the annus mirabilis of 1963, some time between the ending of the ban on Lady Chatterley and the Beatles’ first LP. What had formerly been a rather shameful thing had now become an unlosable game in which everyone felt the same – though it had come too late for Larkin (2003: 146). According to many accounts something similar appears to have happened to English national identity in the annus mirabilis of 1996, some time between New Year and football’s Euro96. What had also been formerly a rather shameful thing had now become an unlosable game in which everyone could share. It also seemed to have had a comparably erotic impact. The English had come out of the national closet and declared a patriotic love that could now speak its name. It was better late than never. How often was one to read or to hear subsequently the couplet from G. K. Chesterton’s The Secret People, ‘Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget. For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.’ The people were secret no longer and were prepared to speak openly about what England meant to them with all the fervour of a new affair. As la Rochefoucauld observed, lovers enjoy each other’s company because they are always talking about themselves. The heralds of this new ‘soccer fan Republic of St George’, as one critic called it, had certainly fallen in love with England and they could not stop telling themselves about it (Pocock 2000). 1963 helped to dispel the myth of the English preferring the comfort of a hot water bottle and a cup of cocoa at night to the delights of sexual pleasure. 1996 helped to dispel the myth of the English being reserved and reluctant to engage in collective celebration. One observer, who was later to write a large book that attempted to make historical sense of the annus mirabilis of 1996, argued that something ‘has changed in the English national landscape’. What had changed, he proposed, was that the supposedly undemonstrative (Sir Ernest Barker once called them the ‘never reflec- 2 The Politics of Englishness tive’) English, were now insistent on coming out and flaunting their nationalism: ‘The flag of St George, for centuries confined largely to the spires of rural parish churches, flew from cars, pubs and shops’ (Weight 1999: 25). If the particular occasion was support for the national football team, the political significance was the extraction of the English cross from the Union flag. Popular flag waving meant that the English were ‘gaining a deeper awareness of their own nationhood’ and England was in the process of becoming a nation once again. What the old Union flag represented ‘is becoming a foreign country’ to most English people (1999: 25). Here was the condition for a new Podsnap who, if not so bombastic as Dickens’s character, would know again what England is(see Heathorn 1996 for a summary of the texts). For all the hyperbole of the moment, in recenthistorical terms at least, the change was quite striking and was also remarked upon by those who did not share unequivocally such enthusiasm for either football or for English patriotism. The historian Hugh Kearney, for example, noted how interest in England and Englishness had now become commonplace while all but a few decades earlier it would have seemed bizarre (2003: 251). And it is interesting to note just how bizarre the flag waving would have appeared. Consider, for example, one of the standard texts on the politics of nationalism in the United Kingdom, A. H. Birch’s Political Integration and Disintegration in the British Isles (1977). Writing at a time when the Labour Government had introduced proposals for devolution to Scotland and Wales, when the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland were at their height and concern about the ‘break-up of Britain’ was the topic of the moment, Birch wrote of England: ‘It should also be noted that the English pay little attention to national symbols apart from those which relate to the United Kingdom.’ They did not celebrate St George’s Day and left that sort of thing to the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. Significantly, they ‘rarely fly the English flag and it is not certain that most Englishmen would even recognise it’ (Birch 1977: 142). To emphasise his point about English inattentiveness to national symbol- ism, Birch used not football, as the post-96ers were to do, but boxing. He reminded his readers that when ‘that super-patriotic boxer John H. Stracey defended his world championship in 1976, he entered the ring carrying a Union Jack and celebrated his victory by leading the audi- ence in a rousing chorus of the only nationalistic song that could come easily to their lips, namely Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’. It is a measure of how times have changed that Birch’s comments read now like a report from another country about another people. For some patriotic Scottish intellectuals, this lack of explicitly
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