Joyce McMillan: Rulers ill at ease with Engerland

RULING metropolitan elite are not only out of touch with the ‘provinces’, but find Englishness alarming too

IT HAPPENED again, one evening last week. I’m in a bar in Edinburgh, chatting to a high-powered, Left-leaning woman from London about life and politics; the conversation turns towards Scotland’s independence referendum, and she begins to tell me that she is “not really English”.

That she is English doesn’t seem in much doubt, to me; she was born there, she lives there, she has an English accent. Yet among the English people I meet – mostly, I suppose, creative or academic types on the centre-left of the political spectrum – this denial of the word “English” is so common as to be almost universal. As soon as the issue of identity comes up, they start talking about the Scottish granny, the Welsh roots, the Irish or Caribbean migrants a few generations back; it seems they have lived all their lives in England, without ever acknowledging to themselves that they belong there.

So it’s hardly surprising that when they hear talk of the break-up of Britain, they experience it as a huge existential threat; it’s as if they were suddenly being forced to take up residence not in the vague borderless Britain of their minds, but in some “Engerland” that they would rather not think about, full of face-painted football fans with dodgy views on race.

“Don’t leave us,” pleaded the woman in the bar, towards the end of the conversation. “We’ll be governed by the Tories for ever!” And when I protested that the English people, given their history, would hardly put up with an eternity of one-party rule, she shook her head sadly, as if my confidence was woefully misplaced.

And all of this matters – as the UK goes to the polls to elect new local authorities, across three nations – because this intensely negative and fearful response reveals so much about the character of politics in the UK, and about the likely outcome of the evolving independence debate. In the first place, it speaks volumes about the growing sense of disconnection between England as a nation, and London as city which now functions more as a successful global metropolis than a national capital. Last week in the New York Times, the journalist AA Gill published an extraordinary hymn of praise to his home city, arguing that “in half my lifetime, this city has become a homogenous, integrated, international place of choice, rather than of birth; not without grit and friction, but amazingly polyglot and variegated – the most successful mongrel casserole anywhere”.

It’s this uniquely successful London cosmopolitanism, though, that makes it so difficult to achieve any progress in the debate on England’s future; essentially, the nation’s capital, and its main media centres, are full of people who know where they came from, and who may now see themselves as Londoners, but who often do not think of themselves as being “in England” at all. And this disconnection between London and the rest of England has a profound effect on its opinion-forming elites, of both Right and Left; for example, it forges a strange alliance of surly rejectionism, on the subject of Scottish independence, between right-wing Tories who think of Scotland as an uppity colony, and left-wing Unionists who see the continuing presence of Scotland and Wales in the UK as the only bulwark against a popular Englishness which they instinctively fear and reject.

And this rejection of “Englishness” by key elements in British society casts light on two more enduring characteristics of the political scene. The first is the essential elitism and centralism of our political system, over which London presides as a capital which neither knows nor trusts most other parts of the country over which it rules. The consequence – glaringly obvious today, despite the superficial fuss over the growing trend towards directly-elected mayors – is that our local government, both north and south of the Border, is weak and, by international standards, shockingly distant from the people; it raises almost none of the money it spends, is widely treated as a mere delivery mechanism for the policies of central government, and often struggles to attract the votes of more than 30 per cent of the electorate.

And finally, it emphasises once again the extent to which the debates on national identity in Scotland and Wales on one hand, and England on the other, are completely out of phase.

A fascinating study of public attitudes published last month by the YouGov polling organisation vividly demonstrated this gulf, with huge majorities of Scots and Welsh people moving forward into a 21st-century model of national identity based on self-identification and cultural achievement rather than history or ethnicity, while English respondents were still more inclined to cling to traditional symbols of identity like the monarchy, and a “white” ethnic background. A total of 58 per cent of Scots saw the Saltire as the symbol of a modern nation, for example, compared with only 24 per cent of English people who felt the same about the cross of St George.

All of which suggests that, for all the pleas of liberal England not to be left stranded forever in a land of Tories, the intensifying debate about Scotland’s constitutional future can only further expose the extent of the divergence between the two national conversations. For most people, of course, the politics of identity and nationhood is only part of a much wider and more important debate, about resources and opportunity, social justice and sustainability.

Yet in the end, the cultural deafness of Britain’s metropolitan elites – their assumption that their identity is “normal”, and that all others are in some way irritating or suspect – is part of a much bigger picture of contempt for ordinary people in all their local diversity, and of sheer presumption that Westminster and Whitehall know best. It’s against that culture of contempt, and of arrogant government collusion with the self-interest of an overweening economic elite, that all the peoples of Britain now need to begin a long, democratic rebellion.

And along with the continuing debate on Scottish independence, the redefinition of England as the rich, beautiful and infinitely diverse modern nation it now is will be an inevitable part of that process; not to be avoided or denied, but to be lived through, struggled with, and enjoyed.