Part of a series of four lectures covering Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England; in which Mr Blunkett discusses Englishness, citizenship and identity and the implications of current and past political thinking for the English nation
It will shortly be a hundred years since the Encyclopaedia Britannica made the most terrible faux pas. Scholars who looked up Wales were greeted simply with the injunction: “See England”.
Those days have long gone. Wales now has its own National Assembly, has revitalised the Welsh language and has long put behind it the burning of cottages and the bitterness from a handful of zealots against the ‘incomers’. It also has – at least temporarily – the most senior Labour politician in office in the UK in the form of the First Minister, Carwyn Jones – in coalition with Plaid Cymru, of all things, which could never have been envisaged 20 years ago.
In this lecture, I want to examine those things which we have and still hold in common between Wales and England and Wales and Yorkshire – particularly here in South Yorkshire and my home city of Sheffield.
I want to identify the particular nature of Englishness. I wish to examine the political differences which exist in England compared with the rest of the United Kingdom; and why Labour has some historic and continuing lessons to learn about the innate conservatism of very substantial parts of England.
In addition, there are ramifications for Yorkshire which form an interesting backcloth – and I shall ask the question, perhaps tongue in cheek, of whether it is time for Yorkshire to consider its own ‘independence’ – or, more accurately, devolution – whilst remaining a key part of the UK!
Finally, I shall explore why the present Government and their economic policies, their ideology and what for some is a ‘scorched earth’ approach to our public services could undermine the union of the UK and, at the same time, fracture the nation of England. I will highlight the inherent London-centric nature of decision-taking and the differential impact of policy which retains power at the centre and decentralises the pain.
There are some clear and obvious areas, particularly between South Wales and South Yorkshire, that are common to the recent history of our people: the emphasis on steel and mining; the propensity to grumble – particularly about London and southern England; and an undeserved reputation for penny-pinching. We even have strange dialects which are different between the north and south of both Wales and Yorkshire; and, if we don’t quite have a language, then for some south of Nottingham, it’s difficult to always understand broad Yorkshire!
In North Yorkshire and North Wales we have the rural beauty; the hills – in Yorkshire’s case, the Dales – to walk in; the special things to eat; and the rawness of the coastline. In Yorkshire as a whole, as with Wales, we have the poetry, the music and, yes, the folk heritage to draw down on – everyone from Ian McMillan and Simon Armitage to Alan Bennett and the music of Delius, not to mention the historic ballads and brass bands from the mining and wool industries of the past.
In substantial part, we also have solidarity and a sense of mutuality. We have a pride in being different which can sometimes be irritating to others and can appear aloof or even arrogant; but, even with the Yorkshire tendency not to suffer fools gladly, it adds up to being something different to the Anglo-Saxon individualism which is the hallmark of England as a whole.
Englishness
The English are more difficult to define. As I spelt out in an essay I wrote for the ippr in March 2005, there is a mixture of confidence and internationalism borne of the outreach of the English language; the development of empire; the reliance on trade; and the stability of being part of ‘this island race’. There is, too, the self-belief that comes from a thousand years of defending Britain from invasion and our overseas military successes; and the endurance of institutions like the Anglican Church, the ‘Church of England’, which, whilst in attendance it may not have the significance of years gone by, still remains a symbol of the cultural differences that can be seen within the UK.
There is also, of course, a pessimism that ensures that certain branches of the English media will jump immediately on bad news. Take the recently-published ‘Prosperity Index’, which hardly anybody had heard of until it told us that we had ‘slipped’ to 13th in the so-called ‘league of happiness’! This is, of course, reflected in the headlines of the London-based newspapers on a daily basis.
Today, the benefits of the English language and the historic outreach of trade are reflected in new forms of communication, from satellite and the internet to mobile phones – and the consequent downplaying of the need to adopt and understand other languages and cultures.
This form of internationalism has both pluses and minuses. Free trade has been a feature of the ‘English’ political debate for 300 years. This has inevitably created a different sense of identity and of our place in the world, which has both reinforced that arrogant self-confidence on the one hand and diluted a sense of identity and belonging on the other.
Inward migration has both benefited and disquieted the English – more so than in Scotland or in Wales – and is now the subject, once again, of political controversy. What Daniel Defoe described four centuries ago as ‘this mongrel race’ likes to think of itself as anything but!
Individualism, philosophically and instinctively, is much more an English trait than it is Welsh or Scots. Rousseau and David Hume may have walked the hills of South Derbyshire and North Staffordshire, but it was John Stuart Mill who articulated and affected the psyche of the English.
Roger Scruton and David Starkey believe that Englishness is dead. But theirs is an Englishness of a bygone, ‘Wessex’ version of the English nation.
The Scots may cry in their whisky, the Irish may grow melancholic over Guinness, the Welsh may sip at their Under Milk Wood beer; the English simply love to wallow in a nostalgia for a never-present lost era as they sip an indifferent Bordeaux borne of Aquitaine, rather than the missed opportunity of an alliance with the Burgundians.
For some, therefore, the John Major, 1993-version of Orwell’s reminiscences of a mythical English scene constitute the backcloth from which the world is viewed. Linda Colley, with her interesting reflections on nationhood and identity, looks at changes towards the end of the 18th and early 19th centuries, with the retreat of Bonnie Prince Charley and the paranoia invoked by Napoleon. Somehow, the concept of Britishness and an emerging English identity started to emerge.
Others – including Krishan Kumar – believe that it was at the turn of the 19th and early 20th centuries, prior to the appalling experiences of young men in the First World War – men who had previously never been further than the local market town – that created a particular version of Englishness. This is underpinned by the endearing reflections latterly in Upstairs, Downstairs and currently in Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey on ITV.
By contrast, the Welsh had a cultural sense of identity – as well as grievance – going back to medieval times, when their own moral and legal code was retained whilst their bigger and more militaristic neighbour sought to suppress their independence. Scotland, with its own legal and judicial system and with its own connections and contact with the continent, was able to retain a much greater sense of its own identity – but a greater bitterness towards the English.
Sharing a sense of belonging, of shared identity, at local level and through nationhood, matters more at a time of flux and change than in periods of economic prosperity and peace. Aneurin Bevan – an example of the Welsh predilection for the use of language to invoke emotion – rightly described that what we had to fear was fear itself. Yet for a nation to be outward-looking, inclusive and internationalist, it is necessary to reinforce that sense of security through a strong individual and collective sense of ourselves, our history and our current place in the world.
That is why, as so often, the opportunity to debate these issues as part of the development of the so-called Defence Review and military expenditure has once again been missed.
It is fair to say that Englishness has been welcoming, avoided the worst of bigotry and has been strong and certain, not weak, defensive and prejudiced. The English have been outward-looking as a naval power and a trading nation, which is why the use of fear and prejudice by the British National Party and the English Defence League are so worrying.
That kind of nationalism is equated with the far-right, with resentment, deep-seated fear of change and a particular form of individualism which has a dangerous attraction – as can be seen from the election of the English Democrat Mayor of Doncaster and his son, the right-wing Conservative MP for Shipley, Philip Davies. The economic meltdown and the Government’s response reinforce the political view that, far from ‘all being in it together’, we fend for ourselves, we reject the social wage, we undermine that feeling of solidarity which comes ‘from each according to his means, to each according to their need’.
Of course, change brings instability. Rapid change brings gross uncertainty and worry; and that brings the desire for something to hold on to – a rock, a shelter, some certainty in a world of insecurity. This can pose its own dangers, undermining any sense of wider place; of city, county or regional identity. The danger, therefore, is of evoking a reaction from the little Englanders who, in running our country today, have transformed one-nation Conservatism into a reflection of just one nation – or rather, just a part of one nation – of the union of the United Kingdom.
This raises the danger of a new form of English colonialism, with power drawn to the centre, with the abolition of regional development agencies and regional government offices, with the power of local government to raise its own finance restricted still further and with the distributive nature of public expenditure curtailed.
More of that shortly, for I want first to explore the disconnection between my own party and the individualism, the small ‘c’ conservatism, which makes up part of the English nation.
Labour
Please indulge me for a moment. I need to explore how social democratic politics responds to the nature of a specifically English nuance, a voting pattern which has historically been small ‘c’ conservative.
There are exceptions across England; places where mutuality and solidarity are seen as part of a local culture, mirroring that of Scotland and Wales. It is reflected at times in the history of our northern cities and towns and, of course, in our mining communities; and yet, within them, we see the seeds of the artificial disconnect between reciprocity on the one hand and mercantile enterprise, innovation and entrepreneurship on the other.
We delude ourselves if we forget that, until recently, Liverpool was controlled by the Liberal Democrats, Leeds and Bradford often revolved into Conservative/Liberal administration, Newcastle is under the control of the Lib Dems and, of course, currently – but not for long – so is the city of Sheffield.
But through the Midlands, the south, the east and south-west, the ‘anti-state’ nature of individualism and that innate conservatism I have spoken about is a powerful force. In large cities such as Birmingham and Bristol, Labour has struggled over the decades to hold the hegemony which popular myth within the party would have us believe exists across the major urban conurbations of England.
Outside the culturally diverse and cosmopolitan city of London, the south and east returned just ten Labour Members of Parliament out of over 200 constituencies on 6 May this year. Current opinion polling shows voters broadly still in support of the draconian cuts in public expenditure.
Yet self-reliance, entrepreneurship, enterprise and innovation are a feature of Britain as a whole and of those areas of England where solidarity has remained from time immemorial. Sheffield is an example of the tremendous gains that have been made in research, in hands-on and imaginative industrial and craft skills. Still, the city historically has had a reputation for left-of-centre politics.
So what conclusions can we draw? At least in part, that England and Englishness has an overriding suspicion of big government – an Anglo-Saxon aversion to being herded or being told what to do. At the same time, it has a natural caring and generous spirit, which nevertheless is not automatically turned into socialised or collective generosity. As can be seen in many of the right-wing states of the US, a willingness to give, to support, to be a good neighbour is not always translated into voting for reciprocity writ large or mutuality in political institutions.
How, therefore, to convert this innate and instinctive decency into a social and political reciprocity has to be the question for the English – or at least for those of us on the social democratic left, if we ever hope to return to government in Westminster and to build a politics in England which would draw on the earned entitlement, the ‘something-for-something’ attitude, which the New Labour era endeavoured to inculcate into Labour thinking.
This brings me to Yorkshire.
Yorkshire
In Yorkshire, we represent a mix of both the mutual and the stolid ‘no nonsense’ type of individualism. Yes, an emphasis on self-reliance, on knowing what’s best; but then being prepared to join in moving from individual caring to collective action.
In political terms, this is almost a mix of the more ‘English’, anti-authority conservatism and the more collective reciprocal commitment to each other.
Economically, we are innovative, inventive and hard-working. But a century ago it was the workers of Sheffield who gave their pennies to create a major contribution to the development of this university, with what in today’s money would be £15 million, literally volunteered from the weekly wage packet of Sheffield workers.
But unlike Scotland and Wales, we are not self-determining in our political structures. Our own destiny does not lie in Yorkshire. We cannot deal with the spending reductions, the social consequences and the reinvestment of growth in our own way.
The population of Wales is 3 million, Scotland’s just over 5 million and Yorkshire’s 5.2 million. Using what is known as the Barnett formula for distributing UK-wide government income, we could expect a tremendous advantage in having what in Wales is known as the Central Fund and in Scotland the Block Grant. Wales – the best comparator – will receive £14.5 billion for Assembly purposes in 2011-12. Rounded up for Yorkshire, this would be £24 billion.
Like London, we could then have our own development agency; draw down on and match European funding; ensure that we were able to reach out for inward investment and build up the capacity for our own knowledge-based economy. We could set our priorities, share across departmental budgets and charge others for the use of our facilities.
It may well be tongue in cheek; but, instead of a projected 82,000 job losses, independence for Yorkshire could have ensured the raising of loans for Sheffield Forgemasters, using all the resources of that part of HBOS which used to be the Halifax and taking our share of the Higher Education Funding Council money to make our priorities work for the people of our area.
Above all, we could reinforce our identity, develop the pride and motivation needed, restore our own form of Englishness and assert that important combination of bluff independence with caring mutuality.
We could include parts of the North Midlands, if they chose to do so. With the power stations, the military installations from RAF Menwith Hill to Catterick Garrison and with nine members of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet – including the Leader of the Opposition – Yorkshire would be well-placed to be the driving force of economic recovery outside the south-east of England!
Even better, we wouldn’t have to put up with the Deputy Prime Minister – the man who, on 19 March in a question and answer session organised by the Yorkshire Post, let it be known that he was horrified by the idea of a Conservative Government who would “slash public spending by a third”. Nor would we need a Prime Minister who on the one hand cuts investment to companies involved with the Advanced Manufacturing Park and describes the centre and the work done from this university with the private sector as cutting edge – while at the same time pulling the plug on the innovation and enterprise that goes alongside it.
The union
So, back to immediate reality!
What are the political voices of the south of England doing to the union? What is happening to our sense of ourselves – to our identity? Are we really going back to the ‘I’m alright, Jack’ or ‘It’s down to you’ view of the 1980s – overlaid by the so-called ‘Big Society’, when it is literally ‘down to you’?
From a governmental point of view, it’s very clever. If the State does not accept responsibility for the actions it is taking, how can it then accept the blame?
If we don’t respond adequately, if we don’t deal with our own problems in our own way, if we don’t play our part in the Big Society … it becomes our fault.
The actions that the Government have taken are making it more difficult to reinforce that sense of belonging which, even in the face of draconian cuts in essential services, can hold the fabric of society together. It is the fracturing, the tearing of that fabric, that concerns me most. The fact that we are likely to see a disintegration of the acceptance of responsibility, of the obligations and duties we owe to each other, as well as the imperative of fending for ourselves.
Examples are stark. Some of them are very small, but important.
The abolition of the Migrant Impact Fund reduces the chance of ensuring proper integration and building on the citizenship programmes and the teaching of the English language which has been so important to me over the years.
The demolition of specific funding for special and deep-seated needs – the Area Based Grant to local government and other ring-fenced funding – is deeply damaging. It is paraded as giving ‘freedom’ to decide. In reality, the decision already made – to change and to withdraw funding specifically directed to the most disadvantaged – is of course to take that money away from those very people.
Self-evidently, you have the choice of spreading the resources away from the greatest need and hence to protect the not-so-unfortunate from the impact of cuts. Sheffield City Council, under the Liberal Democrats, practices this policy already with devastating results – as shown by Professor Danny Dorling and his colleagues at the Department of Human Geography right here at this university.
Both the spending cuts themselves and the architecture of the British constitutional settlement now set London and the devolved administrations apart from England. The Balkanised nature of England affects us economically, in terms of determining our infrastructure and planning. Local Enterprise Partnerships – all 40 of them – cut regions into pieces, funding streams into smaller and less viable applications. Funding cut by two-thirds already is then fragmented even further; and, with the centralised governmental structures and the abolition of what is dismissively described as ‘quangos’, the influence over real decision-taking has been dramatically centralised.
Even in budgets that are superficially protected – the core schools budget and health – top-slicing means that demographic expansion will put more, not less, money into the south-east of England.
The denial that there is such a thing as regional identity and the failure to continue the previous Government’s emphasis on Core City development pulls the centrifugal force of England into London and alienates those who are hardest hit by the cuts. London retains a development agency and demands more resources – and in capital funding, gets it – as the scarce resources available are pulled like a magnet into the developments for and around the Olympic Games.
Preaching decentralisation and practicing metropolitan hegemony is undermining the union of the UK and a common sense of belonging and identity for England itself. Given the disparity of expenditure and the lack of flexibility within England, it is quite likely that Scotland and Wales – as well as Northern Ireland – will be able to protect services to a degree that will prove impossible in fragmented England. The improvements that have been wrought in public services could easily slip backwards as they are forced to make cuts and to switch services into an increasingly uncertain marketplace – just at the time when stability and reforms were beginning to bear fruit.
What’s more, our civil society – the glue that holds us together and the driving force for being able to assist each other in times of need – will be unable to respond as the years go by. Self-help is only possible when we pull together and support each other at times of greatest need.
Conclusion
Historically, a fear of patriotism as being jingoistic has run through thinking from the Stoics, Kant and Marx to modern thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum. Particularly on the left of politics in England, celebrating and applauding other people’s heritage and national pride – particularly the Irish – has been much more acceptable than identifying with and developing a sense of belonging from our own, English roots.
That is why I spent so much energy developing citizenship in schools. The Government’s proposals to abolish the curriculum will take us back to a belief that acquiring information without acquiring the means to use it will be sufficient for the future. Uniquely within the Midlands and the south of England, the politics of the right have asserted a narrow definition – a Home Counties view – of thinking in relation to Englishness, at once patronising and pessimistic at the same time.
Of course, some have said that ‘Britishness’ was invented by the English to assert cultural dominance throughout the UK. Well, it clearly hasn’t worked – but the English are still wary of the Scots, Welsh and Irish. Neil Kinnock and Gordon Brown can attest to this.
So I am advocating today that we rebuild confidence. Not in nationalism built on grievance; but on embracing an inclusive form of togetherness.
In our civil society and in helping each other to survive the years ahead, we will need to reinforce that reciprocity. We will need to ensure that people feel that independence of spirit, self-determination in daily life and self-reliance in economic survival can come together with that care and compassion that builds from the family into the neighbourhood and community. We can reunite our nation by acting collaboratively and collectively.
Today we are more mobile, we communicate more, we absorb through the immediacy of satellite television what is happening across the world. The fear of terrorism, the shock of conflict, the globalisation of economic activity – all bring an underlying sense of change, rapid change which is out of our hands and out of our control.
Rooting back into community and into nationhood a sense of ourselves can help us to find a way forward in what will be the uncertain world of the decades ahead.
It is not Little Englanders who are 'running our country today' but Greater Englanders. Little Englanders do not wish to rule over other peoples (nor to be ruled over by them). Greater Engianders (usually Unionist 'Brits') seek to maintain the English empire in the British Isles, devolving limited home rule to Scotland, Wales and N Ireland. Scotland was given primary law-making powers under devolution. Wales was not as it was said to be 'not ready yet' for such challenging freedom. Where have we heard that phrase before??
Don't blame the Little Englanders. Blame the Greater Englanders who cannot bear the thought that the people of England too might like home rule to govern themselves.
Posted by: Ian Campbell | 10/31/2010 at 10:46 AM
Aside from the muddled and bewildering structure, I wonder if Mr Blunkett consulted any historical literature of any value prior to embarking on this article. It would appear he had not. Aside from all the needless snipes at a now unidentifiable (and therefore defenceless) Anglo-Saxon subgroup, he seems to neglect to mention the fact that England was a nation before 1707's Act of Union. It is interesting to note that much like his colleague, Miliband the Elder, Mr Blunkett has here co-opted England into his own political schema with little concern for reality or the people of the nation of England. This is a dangerous approach to take.
This piece is an idle damning of everything English, historical and contemporary, with little concern for its effects.
Perhaps Mr Blunkett would be wise to note that his colleague, Jack Straw, was the one who awoke a sense of English identity with his casually xenophobic claims that the English were "potentially very aggressive, very violent" and will "increasingly articulate their Englishness following devolution". He was not wrong. He should note that the English do not like having their identity dictated to them, particularly by self-regarding leftists.
Posted by: Byrnsweord | 10/31/2010 at 10:48 AM
Mr Blunkett this is what the Encyclopaedia Britannica says about England today:
"Despite the political, economic, and cultural legacy that has perpetuated its name (under which a number of Great Britain’s national sports teams still compete), England no longer exists as a governmental or political unit within the United Kingdom."
England has been wiped off the map - but no-one ever asked the English.
This explains the rise in English nationalism. We're sick of having no recognition beyond sport and no voice. We're sick of getting the least per person funding and as a consequence the worst services.
Above all it's an insult to every English person that our country that did more than any other to create parliamentary democracy is now one of the only nations in the world without its own parliament.
Now we fight to have our nation back.
Posted by: Wyrdtimes | 10/31/2010 at 09:40 PM
As is usual for such Anglo-centric commentators Cornwall and its desire for devolution get forgotten. It seem no matter whether these Anglo-brits are for or against an English parliament their hostility to Cornwall's right to greater self-determination and national recognition is boundless.
50,000 people signed a petition calling for a Cornish assembly whilst at the same time totally rejecting the then Labour governments artificial South West region.
37% of School children in Cornwall prefer Cornish to either English or British or any other combination when asked about their ethnic identity.
Cornwall has a unique constitutional status as a Duchy and is not part of shire county England.
The arguments go on so why do our English rulers in London continue to ignore our rights?
Posted by: Philip R Hosking | 11/01/2010 at 09:45 AM
'The English are wary of Scots Gordon Brown can attest to this' Besides his utter incompetence, your Government gave us an asymmetrical devolution act which discriminates against the English. He was voted in by the Scots but being crowned PM of the UK Parliament, most of what he did only applied to England only as 70% of Scottish matters are devolved. New Labour deliberately and shamefully left England out of devolution because it needed the Scottish vote to push through bills which applied to England only such as tuition fees which Brown and his fellow Scottish MPs wouldn't countenace for their own constituents, that's if they had any say in Scotland which ironically Brown and Scottish Westminster MPs don't on devolved matters so they interfere in English ones instead. As an English MP, you let this happen, you should be ashamed of yourself Mr. Blunkett. Who is speaking up for England as a country. Why are you and your Labour comrades determined to break England up into regions rather than see England have the same status as the rest of the UK. i.e. recognisition as a country in it's own right with only English MPs voting on English only matters. By the way, sorry to disappoint but I am Cornish and I definately see myself as English first. I used to be British but not since your Government relegated us to second class citizens.
Posted by: Julie Bryce | 11/01/2010 at 05:41 PM
Take your word for it Julie. 37% of Cornish school kids feel differently though and describe their identity as Cornish rather than English, British or any other combination.
Posted by: Philip R Hosking | 11/05/2010 at 05:43 PM
Some of my thoughts on Labour and Cornish devolution can be found here on the Cornish Republican: Why is Labour so hostile to Cornish devolution: http://thecornishdemocrat.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-is-labour-so-hostile-to-cornish.html
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