[LINK] "Britain and England: A Case Of Split Identity"

[rfmcdonald]

David Rickard's Open Democracy essay makes for interesting reading, not least because of its parallels with the Canadian situation: Québécois regularly talk about their nation and English Canada being partners within Canada, but English Canadians tend to identify themselves simply as Canadians. It's not as if there is an English Canadian identity comparable to the English, mind, but there you go. Devolution, it seems, has had huge consequences.

It was a definitive refutation of the ‘absolute' character of the Union, in both senses: not only the unitary character of the British polity but the ‘union' (merger, (con)fusion) within the English national identity between England and Great Britain. It was this cultural and psychological union that had sustained the political Union throughout its history, as it secured the loyalty and ‘ownership' of the greater part of the UK, which viewed Great Britain as ‘our nation' and the UK as "one of the great creations of this country", to quote Vince Cable's words at this week's Liberal Democrats' conference (The unconscious irony in Vince Cable's statement is that the UK is supposed to be ‘this country' not something that ‘this country' (England) has created!).

But as a result of devolution, it became possible, indeed necessary, to see the UK no longer as the seamless extension of English parliamentary democracy, nationhood and power. And, more fundamentally still, the English could begin to separate their English and British national identities at a subjective and psychological level, precisely because those identities had also been split apart at the objective, political level - with ‘great(er) Britishness' no longer being defined as a continuation and extension of Englishness but as a set of different national identities from which the English identity, too, was differentiated and distinct.

In some respects, this breaking up of (English) Great Britain, and break-down of the Anglo-British mentality, was highly desirable and long overdue, and commanded the support of most ‘progressive' political opinion at the time when devolution went through. The old Great Britain had been the fundamental vector - driving force and instrument - of British (and, by definition, English) imperial power: the drive to incorporate multiple different nations within a single polity ‘owned' by the English and identified with by the English.

However, this splitting of the English and British identities presented, and continues to present, a huge problem for the British state - again, in two key respects: political and national-cultural. In the former area, as is now widely recognised, asymmetric devolution as implemented by New Labour has resulted in the British government's and parliament's competency in many policy areas being limited to England. Notwithstanding this, all of the members of the UK parliament, including those from the devolved countries, have retained the power to introduce and vote on legislation affecting England only (the West Lothian Question). Understandably, this has led to many questioning the legitimacy of the UK parliament to serve as the legislative body for England, based on the fundamental democratic principle that no MP should make laws affecting citizens that have not voted for that MP and cannot vote them out.