Beyond Comprehension
It would appear that 14th March 2005 was National Identity Day
Madeleine Bunting sets the scene with an article in the Guardian “Beyond Englishnessâ€
“Our national identity has always been taken for granted, but now it is being sidelined by new local bonds,
says Madeleine Buntingâ€
Six hundred kids in schools in four English towns were asked about their identity in a Joseph Rowntree Foundation study to be published on Wednesday. Those from ethnic minorities didn’t hesitate with their answers - black, Pakistani Muslim, Muslim, Asian - while the white majority were left stumbling. “I’m sort of tanned,” said one. “I’ve aquamarine eyes,” said another. Some of the white kids could describe their heritage - “I’m a quarter Scottish” or “I’m an eighth Japanese” - but they couldn’t label the identity it gave them. Being “English” meant nothing to them.
Does it matter that Englishness has so little pull on these children? Ask yourself, when was the last time you described yourself as English?
One school of thought argues that the whole discussion of identity is so much navel fluff - vague and pointless. That position usually reflects a secure, unchallenged sense of identity, and it is the fate that has afflicted Englishness. Because England has dominated Britain, it has never had to explain itself in the way that Scottish or Welsh identity has had to, or that black people and Muslims are continually being asked to do. The hard graft of developing and interrogating a collective identity is something the English have historically shrugged off, imperiously assuming recognition without ever believing it required explanation.
But there is a growing school which argues that questions of identity are critical, and the “doughnut” problem - the absence of a strong, meaningful sense of Englishness - is a real handicap.
Then a returning David Blunkett makes a speech, in which he argues that the left’s skepticism about nationalism has left an open door that can be used by a rightwing racialist agenda with dangerous consequences for mutual agreement and foreign policy.
Commenting on the speech Madeleine Bunting says “Anxieties about identity get swiftly projected on to issues such as immigration and asylum seekers. Neal Lawson in the recent Compass pamphlet, Dare More Democracy, quotes focus-group participants who again and again insisted on returning to the subject of immigration and asylum and complained about “foreigners” benefiting from health, welfare and education resources that “should be going to the people who paid into the system”. They said that Blair is “anti-English and supports any country and religion except the English… and is ruining our country - England”. Lawson concluded that this issue animated the focus groups more than any other.
What is driving this defensive sense of Englishness? One of many projects funded by a big Economic and Social Research Council programme on identities, to be launched next month, is looking at Englishness in predominantly white housing estates in Plymouth and Bristol. The sociologist Steve Garner has found in both cities, in these relatively well-off middle England neighbourhoods, a profound sense of insecurity and loss. The latter was described as the loss of a sense of village-scale community where people knew and helped each other. The causes could be the kind of economic change that kills off small independent shops and closes local post offices, but there are rarely faces and names on which to pin the blame. It’s easy to see how that loss of Englishness could use a visible minority as a scapegoat.
Questions of identity are not just abstract concepts, but act as organising principles for a gamut of domestic and foreign policies, from levels of taxation to community cohesion and Europeâ€.
David Blunkett later appeared on BBC Newsnight in the company of LibDem and Conservative spokesmen who were called in to comment on the short film portraying Gordon Browns reflections on the meaning of a British National Identity.
Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian suggested that this insecurity is the elephant in the room in the identity debate. It is driven at the macro level by an intensely competitive globalisation that has put most of the country’s economic life beyond the power of the nation state, and at a micro level by individual economic welfare built on debt and a precarious jobs lottery. The Elephant in the room was also used by the BBC (who said this organisation was not biased towards the Guardian view of the world) to describe the same problem.
But the real Elephant in the room was hardly mentioned, that is for the past thirty years we in the UK have seen our own powers of self determination being suppressed on the altar of the European Union. As a passing parade of petty politicians have removed our right to elect those who make our laws, whilst at the same time they have been undermining everything that we once took for granted, increasingly imposing the will of the unelected assembly in Brussels to align Britain with the Continental norms to more easily install Britain into the United States of Europe.
Is it any wonder why a public who have been constantly bombarded with the view that to even think of ones self as either English or British is tantamount to xenophobia and is at the very least racism, should now be floundering about wondering where the next blow is coming from.
So what is all this about? A very big clue can be gleaned from the Guardian “The best we can hope for is several, possibly even conflicting, accounts of English identity around our ways of life. The sense of solidarity and belonging at a national level can only occur intermittently - football matches, the Olympics, royal funerals - although it is never fully inclusive. For the rest of the time, local identities around cities and regions are a more powerful connection point, more vivid in people’s everyday lives. They have more impact on that elephant in the room - their deep sense of insecurity.â€
It should be remembered at this point that National Identity is not National Power these are two distinct and separate concepts, what is being attempted is the imposition of a false sense of national identity to replace the power we used to posses as a basic right, and that is to live under the rules and laws that we accept under a government that we elect, that was the basic cement which defined us all as British subjects we knew that no matter what, we could all take part in the very fabric of our Nation it was our Government they were our Judges and it was our Law. These belifes have increasingly come under attack from within as well as from the EU and this is the major contributing factor to the malaise in which we now find ourselves, when we no longer believe that our own prime minister will protect the nation. The guardian commented that the issue that animated the focus groups more than any other was that “Blair is “anti-English and supports any country and religion except the English… and is ruining our country†They should have said not English but United Kingdom.
The only thing I find beyond comprehension about all this is why we do not fully understand that all of this has been set out, that everything that is happening today was foreseen, well before Edward Heath took this Country into the Union.
FCO paper 1971
SOVEREIGNTY AND THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES
The transfer of major executive responsibilities to the bureaucratic Commission in Brussels will exacerbate popular feeling of alienation from government. To counter this feeling, strengthened local and regional democratic processes within the member states and effective Community regional economic and social policies will be essential.
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