englishness and the union in contemporary conservative thought

Richard English, Richard Hayton andMichael Kenny1

Englishness and the Union inContemporary Conservative Thoughtgoop_1292 343..365

ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING DEVELOPMENTS IN CONTEMPORARY

British politics has been the re-emergence into prominence of the‘English question’. This phrase signals both the complexity of con-stitutional issues raised by the post-1997 devolutionary arrangementsintroduced in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and also therecent trend towards re-examining and celebrating the specific heri-tage and character of the English. The contemporary growth andprominence of English cultural identity have been widely discussed inscholarship and journalism during the late 1990s and early 2000s.2

Central to these discussions are institutional questions regarding thefiscal burden that the UK places upon England, the issue of whether

1 The authors are grateful to the Nuffield Foundation for funding the researchbehind this paper, and also to the UK Political Studies Association, which sponsoredour presentation of a version of this paper at the 2008 American Political ScienceAssociation Annual Meeting in Boston. We would also like to thank those who helpfullycommented on an earlier draft of the piece, including Arthur Aughey, James Cronin,Andrew Gamble, Krishan Kumar, Guy Lodge and James Mitchell.

2 See, for example, Arthur Aughey, The Politics of Englishness, Manchester, Man-chester University Press, 2007; Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People,London, Michael Joseph, 1998; Simon Heffer, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention ofEngland, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999; Selina Chen and Tony Wright (eds),The English Question, London, Fabian Society, 2000; Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy,London, Pimlico, 2001; Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000,London, Macmillan, 2002; Robert Hazell (ed.), The English Question, Manchester,Manchester University Press, 2006; Billy Bragg, The Progressive Patriot: A Search forBelonging, London, Black Swan, 2006; Krishan Kumar, The Making of English NationalIdentity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Peter Mandler, The EnglishNational Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, New Haven,CT, and London, Yale University Press, 2006; and Mark Perryman (ed.), ImaginedNation: England After Britain, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 2008.

Government and Opposition, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 343–365, 2009doi:10.1111/j.1477-7053.2009.01292.x

© The Authors 2009. Journal compilation © 2009 Government and Opposition LtdPublished by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 MainStreet, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

or not devolution represents a step towards an independent Scot-land, and the matter of whether the multination UK state has a viablefuture in the context of pressures towards further European integra-tion. For conservatives, these interwoven cultural and institutionaldimensions of the English question pose difficult challenges. Theright might be considered the natural home for many who reasserta distinctively English cultural, national pride; yet conservativeshave traditionally defined themselves according to a broader Britishpatriotism and an attachment to revered institutions, such as Crownand Parliament, which have transcended Englishness.3

In this article, we examine the arguments of three commentatorsassociated with the political right – Simon Heffer, Peter Hitchens andRoger Scruton – with a view to illuminating the different paths thatconservative thinking has taken in relation to the English questionand the contemporary Union. The three figures under scrutiny havebeen chosen for several reasons. Their arguments reflect the diversityof conservative responses to the English (and British) question, andthe deep divisions present on the political right within such debates.Their writings on the relation between Englishness and Britishnesshave been presented to a broad set of audiences: this forces recog-nition that the discomfort caused by the English–British questionextends far beyond the academic intellectual or party politicalrealms. These three figures’ varying concerns and arguments provideclarifying lenses through which to read very important politicalsubjects – subjects sometimes obscured from academic debatebecause of too narrow a focus on party political or intra-academicpositions. Furthermore, this analysis can be located in relation to abroader field of academic inquiry into the degree to which intel-lectual thinking has changed during recent decades in Britain.4

Heffer and Hitchens fit conventional notions of what constitutesan ‘intellectual’ in the loosest sense only, although a case can cer-tainly be made for Roger Scruton being considered as one.5 But

3 Philip Norton, ‘The Constitution’, in Kevin Hickson (ed.), The Political Thoughtof the Conservative Party Since 1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 93.

4 Julia Stapleton, Political Identities and Public Intellectuals in Britain since 1850,Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001, p. 189.

5 He certainly fits the definition developed in a major recent study of intellectualsin Britain: Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Modern Britain, Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press, 2007.

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© The Authors 2009. Journal compilation © 2009 Government and Opposition Ltd

even as opinionated members of the ‘commentariat’, Heffer andHitchens are illustrative of broader trends and developments innational intellectual culture and conservative thinking in particular.Heffer has authored a well-regarded biographical study of EnochPowell.6 He and Hitchens are also authors of widely read books aboutnational identity and public morality that are addressed at a broadreading public.7 They are important shapers of opinion on the politi-cal right. Our assessment of them does not turn upon any assumptionabout their decisive political or academic influence, but aims todemonstrate that their thinking deserves serious critical scrutinybecause of their salience and popular resonance in an area ofprofound political significance.

SIMON HEFFER: TORY ENGLISHNESS

Prominent among those influentially engaging with the re-emergentEnglish question is the leading right-wing commentator SimonHeffer, who has expressed his disaffection regarding post-1997 devo-lution in typically crisp terms:

No one had said, ‘Do you want an English Parliament?’ No one had said, ‘Doyou want a special forum in which Englishness can be a big part of the debateand could be the sole consideration?’ That didn’t happen. . . . I felt not justthat I was being denied an identity. I felt that I was being denied properparticipation in what was now a reconstituted democracy of these islands.That the Scots had a Parliament and they sent people to Westminster tointerfere in our domestic arrangements; and the Welsh had an Assembly –ditto. I realized I didn’t mind not having a say in what was happening inScotland, but there had to be a quid pro quo for that, and that meant that theScots didn’t have a say in what went on here.8

Part of Heffer’s argument here relies on an English pride andconfidence, based in turn on a recognition that Englishness is thedominant strain within Britain: ‘Englishness is probably, should be,

6 Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London, Weidenfeld &Nicolson, 1998.

7 Heffer, Nor Shall My Sword; Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From WinstonChurchill to Princess Diana, London, Quartet Books, 2000.

8 Simon Heffer, interviewed by Richard English and Michael Kenny, London, 5March 2007. See also Simon Heffer, ‘A Tory Answer to the West Lothian Question’,Daily Telegraph, 30 November 2005.

345ENGLISHNESS AND THE UNION


85 percent of Britishness’.9 But an important aspect of Heffer’s ownargument lies in the very personalized form of cultural awakening inwhich he has been involved since the later 1990s:

I became interested in this question in the summer of 1996. I’m not inter-ested at all in football, but that was the year when England was supposedto win some sort of European Championship [Euro ’96]. And I suddenlynoticed as I went around England, particularly around the South East, theflag of St. George, which I had only seen in my lifetime on church towers, wassuddenly appearing all over the place as a badge. And a lot of people felt veryuneasy about this, and I realized that they associated Englishness with oppres-sion. Because we are the majority people in these islands – I think we are 85percent of the population of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – becauseof that we are forced as English people into a constant position of defensive-ness about the way we have allegedly imposed our will and our values oneverybody else. And when I started to talk to people – friends of mine whoare interested in football, who understand football – a lot of them said, ‘Youknow, it’s not just that we want the English football team to win. It’s that if youthink about our friends who are Scottish or Welsh . . . they seem to have noproblem in being Scottish or Welsh. But we have a bit of a problem in beingEnglish, or thinking of ourselves as English.’ And I suddenly realized – I hada sort of Kierkegaardian revelation – that actually my identity as a citizen wasnot a British identity: it was an English identity. And I am very English. Myfamily is English on both sides as far back as you can go . . . I began to realizethat I was very English.10

Such a position inevitably influences Heffer’s attitude towards thebroader cultural shape of Britain: ‘We are not a multicultural society.We are a monocultural one tolerant of other cultures.’11 It is alsoself-evidently based on a profoundly historical conception of Englishculture and identity. In particular, Heffer has drawn heavily in hiswritings on cultural portraits, for example in his study of the ‘delib-erately’ English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams – a study thatpresents its subject explicitly as a cultural nationalist, and which

9 Heffer, interviewed by English and Kenny. Scholarly opinion reinforces such aview. The English, observes Krishan Kumar, ‘always remained the dominant group inthe making and the maintenance of the empire (as of the United Kingdom). Hencethey could think of it, rightly or wrongly, as “their” empire – or, at least, they could takepride in what they could consider a predominantly English creation, in the sense thatit was mainly English culture that was spread worldwide through the empire’ (KrishanKumar to Richard Hayton and Michael Kenny, April 2007). Cf. ‘The other Britishnations clung to their national identities as a kind of compensation for, or counter-weight against, the predominant role of the English in the United Kingdom’ (Kumar,The Making of English National Identity, p. 187).

10 Heffer, interviewed by English and Kenny.11 Simon Heffer, ‘Britain is an Old Country and our Ways Deserve Respect’, Daily

Telegraph, 7 June 2006.



emphasizes the importance of the cultural dimensions of English-ness, whether Anglican Protestantism, folk song, rural landscape,history or heritage.12 Heffer has also made significant contributionsto the scholarly understanding of modern conservative thinkingand British elite culture.13 Such interventions have helped himprovide an historical inflection to the anti-liberal hostility of theright-wing newspapers for which he writes. And, for Heffer, nationaldecline can be directly linked to the spread of liberal orthodoxies:‘The seeds of Britain’s decline were propagated in England, not leastby English liberals of the twentieth century . . . whose guilt complexesand underdeveloped thought processes brought a welfare state andnumerous other forms of crippling self-indulgence’.14

As a well-known right-wing political journalist and polemicist,15

Heffer has repeatedly expressed profound disaffection with the direc-tion pursued by the Conservative Party leadership since MargaretThatcher’s resignation as prime minister, and it is in this context thathis arguments about Englishness and Britishness are especially reveal-ing. For Heffer’s assertions have at times been stark in relation to theUK, as with his comments in 2007 concerning the end of the Union:‘The Union is over, morally at least. When Scotland voted for devo-lution in 1997 the Union fell into a coma . . . England and Scotlandwill only ever be happy together if they are politically apart.’16

Heffer first made his call to break the Union in 1999, eloquentlystated in Nor Shall My Sword – an attempt to rouse the English fromtheir slumbers, and to accentuate a newly rising tide of Englishness.Heffer is adamant that the revival of the latter is integrally connectedto, and perhaps propelled by, the likelihood of further radicalconstitutional change. He therefore provides a forceful justification

12 Simon Heffer, Vaughan Williams, Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2001,pp. 1, 7, 16, 23, 30–1, 65, 98, 143, 148.

13 Simon Heffer, Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle, London, Weidenfeld &Nicolson, 1995; Simon Heffer, Power and Place: The Political Consequences of King EdwardVII, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998; Heffer, Like the Roman.

14 Heffer, Nor Shall My Sword, p. 52.15 He joined the Daily Telegraph in 1986, and then was appointed in 1991 as deputy

editor and political correspondent of the Spectator. He subsequently became a colum-nist for both the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail. From 1994–5 he became deputyeditor of the Daily Telegraph and one of its leading columnists.

16 Simon Heffer, ‘End the Pretence: The Union of England and Scotland is Over’,Daily Telegraph, 14 November 2007.



for a programme of cultural Anglicization, in preparation for such aneventuality. In one sense, he expresses contemporary conservativehostility to the devolutionist constitutional arrangements establishedby post-1997 Labour administrations. But he also embodies a strikingdeparture from traditional conservative positions in his argumentthat the break-up of the Union is both inevitable and, in variousrespects, necessary for England’s revival.

Nor Shall My Sword argues that England represents a perfectlyviable independent territorial and political entity. Throughout thebook Heffer bewails various blocks to the recognition of this fact, andoutlines the mental reconfiguration that is required for those whoinhabit England to embrace and deepen their cultural (and indeedethnic) sense of Englishness. Frustratingly for him, ‘many in Englandinstinctively persist in the notion that the English nation would insome sense be inadequate alone’, and he seeks to disabuse them ofthis deep-seated notion.17 Consequently the Union of England withScotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – a Union that has for so longbeen seen by its critics as a bulwark for English hegemony, and forEngland’s values and interests – is strikingly re-presented here asthe source of the latter’s problems. Rather than fearing the demiseof Britain, the English should wake up to this prospect and embracethe possibilities it presents. However, for England to work as apolitical society and sovereign territorial state, there needs to be aconscious attempt to promote and deepen a sense of pride andself-consciousness among its people.

PETER HITCHENS: THE BRITISH DEMISE

A very different brand of right-wing argument concerning English-ness, Britishness and the UK has been propounded in forthrightterms by the writer and broadcaster Peter Hitchens.18 In his news-paper columns and books in recent years, Hitchens has been pre-occupied with what he considers the profound decline of morality inmodern Britain. He reads this as a phenomenon of huge importanceduring the past half-century, but one with much older origins:

17 Heffer, Nor Shall My Sword, p. 57.18 For many years a regular columnist at the Daily Express, Hitchens currently writes

for the Mail on Sunday and appears frequently on the broadcast media.



I think it has its roots in the religious doubts of the nineteenth century whichspread from the intellectual and university-educated classes to become muchmore widespread, and of course which were enormously increased by theFirst World War, which destroyed almost everybody’s faith in almost every-thing they had believed in before. And when people don’t have an ethicthat they can believe in that restrains them, or gives them any reason torestrain themselves from self-centred behaviour, then self-centred behaviourbecomes more common.19

According to Hitchens, moral decay lies at the heart of the pro-cesses shaping Britain’s more general demise. In a widely publicizedpolemic against the modernization of cultural and social life, hepinpoints ‘a deep shift in the way the British people view themselves,their past and their future. Fewer each day now consider themselvesto be British.’20 There are echoes here of some scholarly arguments ofrecent years, about broad trends in popular opinion and nationalself-understanding.21 But Hitchens’s argument has a particularly dis-affected and polemical tone. He contrasts the fading of the imperialage (symbolized by the funeral of Winston Churchill) with an eventthat he takes to be emblematic of all the mistaken modernity ofcontemporary cultural life (the ersatz public mourning for Diana,Princess of Wales).

Unlike Simon Heffer, Hitchens laments the fact that the future ofBritishness appears gloomy: ‘It grows increasingly difficult to see howBritishness could be saved. Nonetheless, I think that it’s importantthat we should regret its passing.’ Why? Because the identities of theconstituent nations of the UK prosper best together:

They’re complementary parts of the same organism, and Britain has beenseverely lacking in certain important qualities since the Republic of Irelandbroke away, and particularly since the European Union made what had upuntil then been a symbolic departure a real departure, and it is a loss. I alsothink that the highpoint of this country’s political development took placewhen the two islands were entirely united.22

This clearly has significance for conservative politics itself. ‘I thinkconservatism is Unionist or it is nothing . . . Once the Conservatives

19 Peter Hitchens, interviewed by Richard English and Michael Kenny, London,5 March 2007.

20 Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain, p. v.21 Weight, Patriots, pp. 1, 10; Arthur Aughey, Nationalism, Devolution and the

Challenge to the United Kingdom State, London, Pluto Press, 2001, p. vii.22 Hitchens, interviewed by English and Kenny.



ceased to be a powerful Unionist force in Scotland, they becameirrelevant, likewise in Wales . . . But also I just think that Scotland,Wales and Ireland bring important things to the country.’23 So, againin contrast to Heffer, Hitchens is uneasy about the renewed emphasisupon the distinct nations and national identities that co-exist withinBritain: he regards the turn towards the ‘narrower loyalties of theUK’s smaller nations’ as entirely regrettable.24 Simultaneously,however, he slips unselfconsciously between references to Britainand English values when propounding his nostalgic account of thenation’s lost heritage. In his mind, emphasis upon England is merelyone more unfortunate instance of the profound transformation inthe national self-understandings and moral character of the peopleswho inhabit Britain.25

There is no doubting Hitchens’s reluctance to enthuse over aresurgent sense of English pride as such. Of Englishness itself, hecomments:

Well, I feel it and to some extent also I fear it, because it’s more exclusive.Britishness, by being multi-national, is actually accessible. An immigrantperson can come here and become British . . . Englishness – you’ve eithergot it or you haven’t got it, it seems to me. It’s more exclusive. I think there’sa danger that in encouraging Englishness, you encourage nationalism ratherthan patriotism.26

Is it his view that Englishness possesses a more chauvinisticdimension? ‘Well, it has that capacity because it’s visceral, whereasBritishness is more thoughtful, it seems to me. Britishness containseverything that Englishness contains.’27

There is an unshakeable air of gloom about Hitchens’s analysis, ashe laments growing criminality and moral permissiveness alike.28 Heseems determined to be a Cassandra-like figure: a prophet of disasterwhom readers enjoy hearing without necessarily heeding. His de-clinist stance shows no particular hope of redemptive recovery, givenhis totalizing critique of the state of the current Conservative Partyand his deeply pessimistic analysis of contemporary political morality.

23 Ibid.24 Hitchens, Abolition of Britain, p. xxii.25 Ibid., p. vi.26 Hitchens, interviewed by English and Kenny.27 Ibid.28 Peter Hitchens, A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in

England, London, Atlantic Books, 2003.



However, Hitchens does fit a familiar pattern of declinist writerson the politics of nationhood,29 his fears for contemporary Britainreflecting an exceptionalist view of English/British developmentdrenched with longing for a return to a lost golden age, and infusedwith the fear that the trajectory of social change is moving inexorablyaway from a traditionally defined morality.

Hitchens is in some ways an atypical figure: an idiosyncraticblend of former Trotskyite, British patriot, rural romantic and1950s moralist (his support for the conservative moral orthodoxiesof yesteryear, including capital and corporal punishment, make hima favourite of TV and radio producers). Yet he can also be placedwithin the cantankerous family of anti-liberal declinist commenta-tors, an assembly of figures who throughout the twentieth centuryhave proclaimed the demise of the nation. Not untypically amongsuch commentators, he despairs of nearly all the conventional rem-edies offered for the social problems he dissects in garish detail.30

ROGER SCRUTON: AN ELEGY FOR ENGLISHNESS

Roger Scruton is one of England’s most prominent public intellec-tuals.31 A central theme within his scholarly and public writings hasbeen the cultural basis and political character of Englishness. He issceptical about the cultural state of Britishness (‘things had moved onso much that the whole concept of Britain had been thrown intodisarray. It had become quite apparent that there is no such culturalentity any more’32); but his thoughtful writings on Englishness reflecta dual sense that this is both a phenomenon worthy of celebration,and also one which has now been substantially destroyed: hence hiselegiac portrait.33

29 Richard English and Michael Kenny, ‘Public Intellectuals and the Question ofBritish Decline’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3 (2001), pp. 259–83.

30 For an analysis of this genre, see English and Kenny, ‘Public Intellectuals’,pp. 270–6.

31 Born in 1944, Scruton was formerly a professor at Birkbeck College, London;but he has established his position as a leading philosopher in tandem with the rolesof novelist and composer, while his frequent BBC appearances have reflected andreinforced his commitment to wide-ranging cultural and political comment.

32 Roger Scruton, interviewed by Richard English and Richard Hayton, London,25 June 2008.

33 Scruton, England: An Elegy.



An attachment to the idea of England has always been at theheart of English/British conservatism. As Scruton commented, ‘Idon’t think you can be a conservative in the end without being somekind of nationalist. You are always going to have in the back of yourmind a conception of the community whose structure you are tryingto retain.’34 Scruton’s conservative philosophy draws upon Burke,Hegel, Oakeshott and Hayek, rejecting universalism and preferringinstead a politics based on human instinct. In a Burkean compactbetween the living, the dead and the unborn, trust is placed in ourcollective inheritance, particularly in the form of societal organiza-tions, practices and traditions, the law and the constitution. A senseof place and territorial loyalty is therefore central to identity. ForScruton, that place and identity is England, which is ‘shared not asa reality so much as an ideal which constantly impacts on reality’.35

Central to this ideal is the countryside, which has defined theEnglish sense of home and belonging. Scruton eulogizes this lost idylland bemoans the commensurate erosion of identity, but also detectspockets of resistance: ‘rumours of the death of the countryside areexaggerated, but it is certainly changing in character and there arelots and lots of pressures on it’.36 Echoing Heffer and Hitchens, heargues that some of England’s worst enemies can be found within –namely the liberal left and the Labour Party. New Labour, he com-ments, ‘inherits from Old Labour an anti-English stance’, epitomizedby the ban on fox-hunting. As he commented on the ban:

Primarily it was regarded as a way of attacking the old English settlement, onthe understanding that fox-hunting is first of all an English pursuit; secondlythat it is absolutely integral to the country way of life; and thirdly largelysupported by the upper class. You can put together a picture which makes ita target of those kinds of attitude. But the very reason that it was a targetsuggests that indeed the English are not that dead – why should people targetsomething that doesn’t exist?37

Immigration has similarly been used ‘as a foil against the Englishby their enemies’, particularly by ‘the Ken Livingstone types who livein a culture of repudiation towards the English idea’. Immigration,Scruton argues, ‘provides them with a very interesting way of

34 Roger Scruton, interviewed by Richard English and Richard Hayton, London,25 June 2008.

35 Ibid.36 Ibid.37 Ibid.



delegitimizing England: the idea that it should be multicultural notmonocultural, and it’s not because of the intrinsic racism of theEnglish’. The cultural shift wrought by immigration has played animportant part in undermining the viability of his cherished visionof England. Yet it also has had a role in heightening awareness ofthe idea: ‘as people have been waking up to the problems of a largeIslamic minority it has become even more in people’s minds thatthis is not something that is easily reconcilable with our inheritedway of doing things’. The political process of devolution is alsocentral to the growing public sense of Englishness, even though ittoo constitutes a harmful assault. Behind the politics of devolution,Scruton argues, ‘there was also a whole culture of devolution’ basedon Celtic resentment. ‘That process I think awoke people to theidea of England, for how do we explain this political process withoutthis idea?’38

The effect of devolution is to lay bare the interdependent relation-ship between Englishness and Britishness. Differing markedly from atendency in academic analysis to emphasize the accommodating andunderdeveloped character of Englishness in relation to the Britishimperial ideal,39 Scruton argues that Britishness and the empire wereultimately projections of a prior sense of Englishness:

I think under the British Empire it wasn’t so much that Englishness gotreplaced by Britishness, but that it got adopted by other people – in par-ticular by the Northern Irish, and by the Scots and the Welsh too. Theimperial enterprise brought them all under the same banner, very muchlike the idea of Rome in the Roman Empire. It wasn’t a multicultural ideaat all, it was a monocultural ideal, focused on the imperial city and theculture that prevailed there. I think that is one of the misunderstandings,partly due to the domination of the discussion of all of this by people onthe left. The anti-imperial impetus behind it has led people not to see thatactually empires offer something to the people that join them, namely anidentity that they might not otherwise have had, and that identity, I think,was England.40

Britishness cannot therefore contain the multiple nationalisms ofthe English and revanchist Celts, making the prospect of an accom-modation of Englishness within Britain almost impossible. Sover-eignty has also been ceded to the European Union, to the extentthat ‘the English are no longer a sovereign people, and their law is

38 Ibid.39 For example Kumar, English National Identity.40 Scruton, interviewed by English and Hayton.



no longer their own’.41 Globalization and urbanization have sub-verted the established order in which locality defined allegiance.The cardinal place of the Church of England – ‘the operative wordthere is not Church, but England’42 – has withered; with it, the unityof nationality, religion and the English language has been lost.Sovereignty, unity, Anglicanism, countryside, locality, culturalgentleness, legal responsibility and freedom, parliamentary repre-sentation, serious culture: all have been eroded. So Scruton’s argu-ment demonstrates the way in which discussion of Englishness canbecome a vehicle for the expression of attachment to a broader setof conservative political values. In this respect, there are clear con-tinuities between the styles of conservative argument of such figuresas John Betjeman and Arthur Bryant in the inter-war years, and afigure such as Scruton.43

Scruton’s projection of England does not sit easily with hisdefence of the nation-state more generally. He has the problem –perhaps generic to the new Anglo-conservatism – that positing anindependent culture of Englishness and calling for a new politicalsettlement in the United Kingdom invariably means a radical adjust-ment of the constitutional order associated with the unitary Britishstate, which has remained a fixity within conservative thinking forwell over a century. Scruton needs to locate and defend a plausibledistinction between what is English and what is British, both cultur-ally and in terms of state architecture. His frequent invocationsof the Irish-born Burke and Wilde, in order to exemplify somedeeply English characteristic, hints tellingly at this problem. Simi-larly, while the Westminster Parliament is in England, it was – andindeed remains – a UK rather than an English institution. Againand again, the phenomena celebrated by Scruton as key compo-nents of Englishness turn out to possess a clear British dimension.Scruton’s dream of detaching a pristine English culture fromBritish traditions and its other national cultures ultimately foundersupon the historical complexity shaping the relationship betweenEngland and Britain.

41 Scruton, England: An Elegy, p. 251.42 Scruton, interviewed by English and Hayton.43 Julia Stapleton, ‘Cultural Conservatism and the Public Intellectual in Britain,

1930–70’, European Legacy, 5 (2000), pp. 795–814.



CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATISM AND THE UNION

Four main points emerge from consideration of Heffer’s, Hitchens’sand Scruton’s arguments about Englishness and Britishness. First,their sustained, highly visible and resonant engagement with thiscomplex problem highlights and reinforces its growing significancein UK politics: the disaffection of many with England’s place in areconfigured Union, and the particular difficulty this causes for thoseon the traditionally Unionist right. Opinion poll evidence atteststo the existence of popular disaffection,44 but the arguments ofthe three commentators under scrutiny in this article illuminate itscomplex texture and the diverse nature of responses on the right.Asymmetrical devolution has brought with it renewed controversyabout the West Lothian question, and also about the differential sumsof public money spent in the constituent parts of the UK.45 Forconservatives, in particular, the fraying of a traditionally harmoniousEnglish/British relationship has been disconcerting, threatening tounravel the understanding of the state upon which their politicalthinking has traditionally been based.

As the self-proclaimed national party, the Conservative Party hastraditionally defended the Union and opposed devolution, as ‘formuch of the last three centuries, belief in nation was synonymouswith a belief in the Union’.46 The patriotic Britishness with whichConservatives identified ‘drew heavily upon English traditions,notably the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and a Whig historyof progress and exceptionalism, plus the values and interests of anAnglicized elite’.47 Now, as the model of a sovereign unitary state anda monocultural society wanes, the Conservatives face a conundrum.Confronted with cultural and constitutional challenges, should theyseek to extricate English identity from a Britishness with which theyhave traditionally associated, thereby damaging the Union that

44 See John Curtice, Where Stands the Union Now? London, Institute for Public PolicyResearch, 2008.

45 See Iain McLean, Guy Lodge and Katie Schmuecker, Fair Shares? Barnett andthe Politics of Public Expenditure, London, Institute for Public Policy Research, 2008.

46 Simon Heffer, ‘Traditional Toryism’, in Hickson, The Political Thought of theConservative Party Since 1945, p. 200.

47 Philip Lynch, The Politics of Nationhood: Sovereignty, Britishness and ConservativePolitics, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999, p. 2.



they for so long sought to defend? Or should they aim to preserve anasymmetrical Union and risk being positioned as the opponent ofa rising current of English populism? Here, the answers offered byHeffer, Hitchens and Scruton vary, demonstrating the diversity ofright-wing reactions to this problem. Seen positively, this highlightsthe existence on the right of vibrant reflection upon a centralproblem; seen more negatively, it attests to the difficulty of findingshared ground in response to a genuine difficulty.

Indeed, the second point to emerge from our analysis is that thesevery prominent commentators on the English–British relationshipare more effective at articulating the nature of the problem, than atproducing effective and practically influential remedies for it. Theirarguments have only a limited purchase upon and influence overpolitical power and policy. All three – and the arguments theyespouse – currently occupy maverick positions even in relation toright-wing centres of power and policy-making authority. NeitherHeffer’s populist English anti-Unionism, nor Hitchens’s enthusiasticUnionism and suspicion of English populism, nor Scruton’s Edwar-dian Englishness, are anywhere near to the core of current Con-servative Party politics. And, while some on the left have expressedanxiety that the Conservatives could play the English card to goodeffect, and that the party might channel English disaffection andgrievance, there are reasons for doubting that this will occur. For onething, few mainstream figures have been keen to associate themselveswith the politics of English resentment.48 Some senior figures and anumber of backbenchers may privately have aired more pronouncedsentiments about the current position of England within the Union,but they have had negligible impact on frontbench thinking as awhole.49 The Conservative Party has been reluctant to engage seri-ously with proponents of an English Parliament, and the party leader,David Cameron, has been keen to emphasize his own Unionist cre-dentials.50 For Cameron, the risks to his project to modernize the

48 Michael Kenny, Richard English and Richard Hayton, Beyond the Constitution:Englishness in a Post-Devolved Britain, London, Institute for Public Policy Research, 2008.

49 Iain Dale, interviewed by Michael Kenny and Guy Lodge, London, 12 November2008.

50 See David Cameron’s speech to the Scottish Conservatives, 23 May 2008;available at: http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=webcameron.story.page&obj_id=144993&speeches=1



Conservative Party are clear: embracing a populist English nationalistposition would run counter to his strategy of softening the party’simage and occupying the political centre-ground.51 The shrill toneof Heffer’s high-cultural Englishness, or the baleful lament ofScruton’s hardly fit the impression of a party at ease with contem-porary British society that Cameron has sought to cultivate. Indeed,a good deal of the potential appeal of these arguments has drainedaway in the context first of the economic prosperity overseen bysuccessive Labour administrations since 1997 and, latterly, followingthe political resurgence of the Tories.

Moreover, after a decade of devolution and five decades of adeclining vote share in Scotland, what Scruton labelled the ‘emo-tional pull’ of Unionism remains strong.52 For the former Conser-vative secretary of state for Scotland, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, ‘theConservative Party remains overwhelmingly a Unionist party, totallycommitted to the Union’.53 According to this view, devolution doesnot represent an absolute transformation of relations betweenEngland and Scotland, as it is a misreading of history to assume thatthere was ever a pre-devolution situation in which the two nationswere fully unified as one. As Rifkind highlights, the nature of the UKhas always been diverse, with different legal and legislative require-ments, different churches, and different education systems:

As early as the 1880s, so different were the Scottish parliamentary and legis-lative requirements that the job of secretary of state for Scotland had to becreated to handle the government’s business in Scotland. So ever since theAct of Union, the Union was not as incorporating as is often assumed. Therewere institutional requirements because of the separate Scottish legal system,church and educational system. So devolution did not bring for the first timethe need for separate Scottish legislation. The reason why it is much morecontroversial today is because it is much more visible today south of theborder.54

Rifkind acknowledges that since devolution to Scotland, English-ness has re-emerged. He also recognizes that ‘the Labour Party has a

51 Richard Hayton, ‘Conservative Party Leadership Strategy and the Legacyof Thatcherite Conservatism, 1997–2005’, unpublished PhD thesis, University ofSheffield, pp. 161–7.

52 Scruton, interviewed by English and Hayton.53 Malcolm Rifkind, interviewed by Richard Hayton and Michael Kenny, 29 January

2008.54 Ibid.



much greater party political interest in Scotland, and the Tory Partyhas a much greater party political interest in England. That’s simplywhere our strengths are.’55 However, the debate within the party overhow to respond the West Lothian question, including Rifkind’s ownproposals for an English Grand Committee, has largely been con-ducted within a discourse aimed at preserving the Union, with theobjective being to stem rather than to exploit English resentmentabout the asymmetries of devolution.

Again, the Conservative policy objective expressed by the chair ofDavid Cameron’s recent Democracy Taskforce, Kenneth Clarke, todevise ‘some sensible constitutional minor change, in my opinion, tofinish the business of devolution’ and tackle the ‘niggle that some-times English matters are settled against the majority votes of theEnglish MPs’,56 seems to be more attuned to the mainstream ofpublic sentiment than the polemics of our three commentators. Thesometimes-feverish talk of Heffer, Hitchens and Scruton fails to reso-nate to a sufficient degree with even Conservatives among the Englishelectorate, and so a radical policy shift seems unlikely. According tothe analysis of various polling data conducted by the psephologistJohn Curtice, there has been no dramatic or continuous shift inpopular feeling towards a sense of Englishness at the expense of British-ness in the last decade. A small shift did occur in the wake of thechanges associated with devolution, but no further significant changein grassroots sentiment can, he argues, be detected from availabledata.57

Indeed, a third point emerging from our case studies is one thathelps to explain the difficulty there would be for English separatiststo gain political momentum or practical change: the fact that Eng-lishness and Britishness are so incredibly difficult to disentangle cul-turally and historically in any credible fashion. This near-impossibility

55 Ibid.56 HC 75, Devolution: A Decade On, Minutes of Evidence, Justice Committee, Session

2007/08, London, Stationery Office, 2008.57 This finding is in marked contrast to the results of a smattering of commercial

polls over the last few years that report dramatic movements of opinion in favour of, forinstance, an English Parliament. Such results, he argues, are very probably the productof the nature of the questions posed by these organizations; see John Curtice, ‘HasEngland Had Enough? Public Opinion and the Future of the Union’, London,NatCen, 2008.



of decoupling Englishness from Britishness represents an acuteproblem for Heffer and Scruton. Even such articulate advocates asthese of a historically rooted English cultural case have acknowledgedthat much of what they draw upon is British, rather than merelyEnglish. Both Scruton58 and Heffer have conceded this problem ofthe cultural complexity of identity:

Britishness is common to all of us and has a mixture of Englishness. By thesame token, much of what we regard as Englishness borrows from main-stream western Christian European culture as well. When I walk aroundEngland and see our cathedrals, I’m reminded very much of those in France.If you go to the cathedral in Bordeaux, for example, it could be in anyEnglish cathedral town you want. Our language borrows heavily, obviouslyfrom German, also from Latin and from French. So none of these cultures is,if you like, compartmentalized. They all borrow from somewhere else. Andthat’s what makes it so hard to talk about what is the difference between‘Englishness’ and ‘Britishness’.59

This problem has long historical roots. As Robert Colls demon-strates, Englishness until the mid-nineteenth century provided thedominant register through which a sense of British nationhood wasexpressed – even in non-English regions.60 The very fact of England’slong-standing hegemony in terms of the British state and its widerculture hampers current conservative attempts to locate and dissemi-nate a pure Englishness. ‘England’ requires an active (and ideologi-cal) process of ‘invention’, not a straightforward act of historicalrecovery.

Fourth, the sense of crisis implicit within these figures’ declinistarguments is out of kilter with the majority of popular sentiment.It is far from clear that the moral breakdown identified by PeterHitchens has impacted in any significant way on contemporarypolitics, and his concerns are, in this sense, sectional and sometimesidiosyncratic (for instance his support for capital and corporalpunishment). His gloomy assessment links the passing of the impe-rial age with a declining sense of Britishness and – his greatestconcern – the moral degeneration of the nation.61 But the apocalyp-tic manner in which he frames his anxieties, for example his worrythat English identity has been tarred by the ‘mobs of fat, beery men’

58 Scruton, England: An Elegy, pp. 201, 204.59 Heffer, interviewed by English and Kenny.60 Robert Colls, Identity of England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002.61 Hitchens, Abolition of Britain.



who wave St George’s flags at England football matches,62 closes himoff from political influence even when a discourse of social break-down and concern about violence and moral decline have becomecentral to political debate. On the broader ‘crisis’ of British identity,again there are reasons for doubting that the problem is sufficientlygrave to necessitate the kind of dramatic reordering of politicssought by someone like Simon Heffer. Even within the community ofopinion around the Daily Telegraph, he is far from uniformly reflec-tive of opinion. For a pro-UK, pro-Britain line runs alongside his ownand is reflected in the paper’s editorial position: ‘We should makethe contemporary case for Britain as a cultural, economic and mili-tary force for good’.63

It might be true that the notion of a comfortably consensualBritishness faces serious problems. But it might also be argued thatanxiety about a supposed crisis of Britishness involves an exaggera-tion of actual threats, and that such anxiety might be read as a furthersymptom of the declinist mentality which the British political elitehas tended to adopt since the late 1960s, rather than a reflection ofpervasive and urgent popular opinion.64 Put another way, given thatEnglish concerns and interests clearly dominate the agenda of theUK Parliament, will most English people simply fail to be sufficientlybothered about the kind of issues so important to Simon Hefferand Roger Scruton? Will inertia and a disinclination to deal withthe complexities and challenges that disentangling the Union wouldinvolve inhibit English nationalism? In answer to the question,‘Where does England fit into the reconfiguration of Britain?’65 itis possible to argue that the realities of English size and economiccentrality take the heat out of the supposed English problem inrelation to Britishness. As Andrew Marr has pointed out:

We have to start with the question of scale. England overwhelms Scotlandand Wales as much today as in the past. Thus, whatever ‘Englishness’ is, it willprove to be surprisingly similar to Britishness – the British oak with branches

62 Peter Hitchens, ‘Why I Can’t Wait for it to be All Over for England’, Mail onSunday, 2 June 2002.

63 Iain Martin, ‘Ending the Union Would Cost Britain Dear’, Daily Telegraph, 15November 2007.

64 Richard English and Michael Kenny (eds), Rethinking British Decline, Basingstoke,Macmillan, 2000.

65 Tony Wright, ‘England, Whose England?’, in Chen and Wright, The EnglishQuestion, p. 7.



lopped off, not a new tree. The biggest challenges to the traditional notionof English identity, as with British identity, are not from within the UK. Justas the creation of the Irish Free State had virtually no impact on Britishidentity, so Scottish independence, should it happen, will have little impacton English identity. Nor has the arrival of the EU in British affairs touchedidentity, as opposed to the constitution, nearly as strongly as many observerssuggested it would . . . No, the bigger challenges are globalization, particu-larly as experienced through global brands, and through immigration, andalso Americanized culture.66

Indeed, despite the declinist concerns variously articulated byHeffer, Hitchens and Scruton, there might yet remain more lifein the Union than is sometimes assumed. As Arthur Aughey hasexpressed it, ‘The existence of nationalism has never predeterminedits victory over multinational Britishness’.67 Indeed, the lesson of themost sharp-edged recent battle of all between separatist nationalismand Britishness – that witnessed in Northern Ireland during the past40 years – itself rather points in this direction. Scottish, Welsh andEnglish separatism have not begun to approach the violence, orga-nization or commitment of the anti-UK campaign waged in the pastgeneration by Irish Republicans who sought that the six countiesof Northern Ireland should be removed from the UK. But even thismost famous, durable, aggressive and formidable anti-UK nation-alism has now, it appears, settled for something well short of sepa-ratism. The Belfast Agreement of 1998 and subsequent politicalarrangements have seen Irish Republicans accept for the foreseeablefuture a reformed Northern Ireland within the UK, rather thansecession from it.68 Moreover, nowhere in the UK was Britishnessmore dependent than among Ulster Unionists upon monarchy, Pro-testantism, industrialism and empire. Yet the decline of each of theseelements of British identity has caused not the ending of UlsterUnionist Britishness, but rather its reformulation in different butequally committed form. There are no inevitable lessons here for therest of the UK, but the Northern Irish case certainly does not pointto any inevitable disintegration of Britishness, or any imminent deathof the UK.

Might there be a broader, suggestive pattern here? Again,Aughey’s observations are pertinent: ‘That one sort of Britain is

66 Andrew Marr to Richard English, 4 July 2007.67 Aughey, Nationalism, p. 17.68 Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA, London, Macmillan, 2003,

pp. 285–389.



dead, the Britain of the Raj, cannot be doubted. That does not mean,necessarily, the death of Britain itself.’69 And James Mitchell’sauthoritative recent study of UK devolution has concluded that ‘everlooser union’, rather than the end of the Union, seems a reasonableprediction.70 So if there is to be a serious redefinition of ConservativeParty politics in relation to national identity, then the challengemight yet be one of redefining a more relevant Britishness, ratherthan opting for political or cultural English separatism. This suggeststhat neither Heffer’s separatist hopes, nor Scruton’s lament, norHitchens’s gloom might quite be fully justified.

National challenges to Britishness from within are, of course, veryold. But again this perhaps suggests British resilience rather thanfragility. Richard Weight acknowledges the practical ties that hold theconstituent parts of the UK together, and counter-balance nationalistforces.71 In Scotland there was historically a profound engagementwith British Empire, and an economically based enthusiasm for theUnion.72 But neither the end of empire nor subsequent economicdynamics have necessarily turned Scottish opinion decisively againstmembership of the UK.73 Indeed, while emotional attachment to theUK may have declined, opinion over the economic benefits is largelymore positive. Andrew Gamble has highlighted how for GordonBrown the need to compete successfully in the global economy is acentral justification for his Unionism.74 This was epitomized by hisclaim that the government’s moves to recapitalize the banking sector(including the two major Scottish banks) were only possible becauseof the strength of the Union.75

69 Aughey, Nationalism, p. 48.70 James Mitchell, Devolution in the UK, Manchester, Manchester University Press,

2009, pp. 225–6.71 Weight, Patriots, p. 730.72 Tom M. Devine, ‘The Break-Up of Britain? Scotland and the End of Empire’,

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 16 (2006), pp. 163–80.73 Tom Nairn, After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland, London, Granta

Books, 2000.74 Andrew Gamble, ‘Gordon Brown and the Reinvention of Britishness’, paper

presented to the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Boston, 29August 2008.

75 Gerri Peev, ‘Brown: Banking Crisis Has Proved Case for Union’, Scotsman, 15October 2008, at http://heritage.scotsman.com/labourparty/Brown-Banking-crisis-has-proved.4591680.jp



CONCLUSION

Julia Stapleton has recently pointed out that, at least since the latterpart of the nineteenth century, there have been significant advocatesof England and Englishness as distinct from Britain and Britishness,but that this advocacy has existed within a recognized context of theinterdependence between England and Britain.76 The question ofhow dependent Englishness is upon Britishness is an issue that haselicited disagreement in political circles for at least a century.

The thinking of the figures considered here is distinctive inrelation to this long-standing tradition in part because of its acutecommitment to the idea of national decline. While this is a cause oflament for Hitchens, Heffer perceives current woes as an opportunityto reinvent and celebrate a deeper English identity, and to invigorateit with a political edge. For Scruton the crisis is not merely one ofBritishness but of the Englishness upon which it was built. As such,Hitchens’s notice of the abolition of Britain might seem misdirected– his story, Scruton argues, is ‘specifically English’.77 Scruton wishesto mark the passing of ‘Old England’, and his text has a deliberatelyelegiac quality.78 He hopes his work ‘might have some long-termeffect on the way people conceptualize England’ but acknowledgesthat ‘it won’t have any immediate political impact’.79 By contrast,Hitchens and Heffer strike an urgent tone and clamour for action,although where Heffer sees possibilities, the hope of nationalredemption for Hitchens is forlorn.

Each of the authors examined here can be considered significantin their own right in this recent period, and have gained a hearingamong a fairly broad public. A key source of this influence in thecases of Hitchens and Heffer stems from their position as keymembers of a high-profile band of public commentators who form acaste of quasi-celebrity pundits in the London-based press. As such,they enjoy a stable and fairly determinate audience, though this isimportantly supplemented by the activities of both in the right-wing

76 Julia Stapleton, ‘England and Englishness’, in Matthew Flinders, AndrewGamble, Colin Hay and Michael Kenny (eds), The Oxford Handbook of British Politics,Oxford, Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2009.

77 Scruton, England: An Elegy, p. 248.78 Ibid., p. viii.79 Scruton, interviewed by English and Hayton.



blogosphere. Through books, newspaper writings and BBC appear-ances, Roger Scruton also commands frequent public attention.

All three figures draw tellingly on established traditions of think-ing, and in two of our cases, a particular intellectual figure, as aforgotten lodestar for contemporary conservatives. Thus, Heffer’scontinuing attachment to the legacy of Enoch Powell, Scruton’sdeployment of Edwardian ruralist images of (southern) England andHitchens’s revival of nineteenth-century moralism are importantindications of the degree to which current streams of conservativethinking still flow from long-established intellectual rivers. That theyare all some way out of kilter with the policy thinking of the party’scurrent leadership is revealing of an emergent tension between thestrategic imperatives being pursued by politicians of the right andsome of the party’s most powerful and established intellectual roots.80

Our argument suggests, above all, that conventional politicalanalysis would do well to pay more heed to thinking and commentarythat circulate on the margins of mainstream politics on touchstoneissues of national identity, culture and history. This is not to exagger-ate the impact of these figures. But it is certainly possible that ourthree writers do indeed signify a shifting mood in political argument,attachment and orientation. We need to assess the different audi-ences for whom such figures are writing, and give more weightto endeavours to shift the climate of opinion on such issues as ‘theEnglish question’, as opposed to persuading frontbenchers of themerits of a particular policy. As we have suggested, these three com-mentators perhaps reflect and refract wider concerns about the rela-tionship between Englishness and Britishness, but without exertingparticular political influence over policy, or resolving the problem forEnglish enthusiasts that Englishness is so interwoven with Britishness;moreover, in each case, there is arguably an exaggerated sense ofcrisis to the declinism so ably articulated. As opinionated columnists,book-writers and high-profile pundits, Heffer, Hitchens and Scrutonhave played an important role in challenging, shaping and outragingthe communities of opinion that circulate around the ConservativeParty. While they have had little impact on the policy debates animat-ing the Tory frontbench on these issues, there is every possibility thatHeffer and Scruton may be contributing to a changing mindset on

80 For a fuller analysis of this tension see Michael Kenny, ‘Commentary: Taking theTemperature of the UK’s Political Elite’, Parliamentary Affairs, 62 (2009), pp. 149–61.



the centre right about the need to address England’s political andcultural position a decade after devolution. Questions about nationalidentity, culture and mission continue to provide opportunities, itwould seem, for intellectuals and commentators who are one stepremoved from the crucible of politics to gain a hearing and exert adegree of influence.



englishness and the union in contemporary conservative thought

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