What does it really mean to feel English?

Referring to the precarious future of the Union of England and Scotland, the authors of Englishness: The Political Force Transforming Britain conclude their book with the observation that ‘it is hard to imagine that any break-up would not be the source of regret and recrimination’. I imagine our present prime minister, even though he has a pandemic to handle, thinks of this with increasing force. There would be few faster routes from office for him than to awake one morning to find he had presided over the end of the Union. We are weeks away from elections in Scotland that seem certain to bring another SNP victory, and calls from its Maoist leadership for another referendum. If Boris Johnson refuses one, he risks aggrieving Scotland, as Ireland was aggrieved until the creation of the Free State; but if he agrees, he risks, given his and his administration’s deep unpopularity in Scotland, wrecking the United Kingdom.

But how far that would be the fault of English nationalism is another matter, and it is not entirely clear whether it is the book’s purpose to argue it. The authors try to answer the old question about what Englishness actually is; and with the aid of the Future of England Survey, and the numerous questions it has posed, it probes an issue increasingly pressing in recent years: the changing balance between a sense of Englishness and a sense of Britishness. They conclude that the growing sense of Englishness is not a rejection of Britishness by the English: it is an affirmation of a national identity that the English, first, willingly allowed to be subsumed into Britishness, and have now only retrieved, prompted by Scottish nationalism, with a reluctance fed by the association by the ignorant and mischievous of English nationalism with racism and the shaven-headed, brutal far right.