Multicultural anxieties have contributed to the resurrection of a deeper Englishness
What do you remember of the summer when the English awoke? The summer of arguments over what “English” means, hotel protests, and of “flagging”. Overnight the England flag was everywhere. On lampposts, on bridges over motorways, and even painted on roundabouts, the St George’s cross appeared, as a challenge to the old regime, and a threat, or promise, of something new.
For this is new, make no mistake. In my lifetime, England’s flag has only been seen in force during football tournaments and at the rugby. Political figures of the left have seized upon this novelty as they have tried to resist the challenge. The Green Party leadership candidate Ellie Chowns insisted that “it’s traditionally not part of British culture to hang flags”, while Zack Polanski, the party’s new leader, said he wouldn’t fly the flag outside of football tournaments because “of what it represents to people who worry about that problematic history”, before going on to say he’s “worried that we’re importing fascism”. Meanwhile John McTernan, former advisor to Tony Blair insisted that flag flying isn’t an expression of “national pride”, but rather “being used to other people” (my italics).
Notionally sensible centrists, The News Agents suggested that the flag should be redefined as representing “tolerance, liberalism, democracy and Shakespeare” and that would deter “right-wing thugs” from using it. The propagandists of the regime recognise that it is in danger, and seem to believe that “British Values” are enough to hold back the tide.
York Council went ever further, saying that flagging has “coincided with a rise in racist incidents” and have decided to remove hundreds of England and Union flags, to which York’s “Flag Force” responded by announcing they would promptly replace every flag which was removed.
England’s flag was everywhere at the hotel protests too — standing for resistance against a Westminster regime that continues to force migrants upon communities which do not want them.
At the end of the summer, as the Last Night of the Proms coincided with the “Unite the Kingdom” march, the flag divide could not have been wider. On the streets of London that Saturday a sea of Union and St George flags, while at the Albert Hall it seemed one could wave any nation’s flag but England’s.
A Times cartoon from July caught the year’s mood. It depicted a group of unthreatening families protesting, holding signs saying We’re not far right – we’re worried about our kids and Deport Foreign Criminals. Beneath them, buried in the earth lurks a bald, beefy man with H A T E tattooed on his knuckles, and Made in England alongside the red cross of St George tattooed on his shoulder. Here, in the favoured paper of the British establishment, we see their fear that a deeper, more dangerous Englishness threatens to rise up, and threaten, or even destroy their order.
These tensions broke into angry words in June at the Now and England conference organised by Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation. Organised to explore England’s past and future, the conference sold out, and was mostly attended by young, middle-class English people. As others, including Connor Tomlinson and Laurie Wastell have written, Now and England revealed a “new dividing line” between those who, like Robert Tombs, say that being English is “something we all learn”, and those who believe that we are an ethnos — a people, grounded in ancestry and the land.
Broadly, the divide was generational. The Boomer and Gen X attendees favoured an Englishness which people can put on like a set of clothes, while the younger people saw the English as an ethnos. Many have reacted in horror at the very idea that Englishness might be defined by ethnicity and ancestry. John McTernan tweeted that the “concept of ethnic English is truly evil”, sparking much angry debate. This peculiar English exceptionalism seems to allow expressions of ethnicity and nationhood from anyone but the English. For many years we have not been able to speak of ourselves as a people. It seems that is changing.
The English have changed too. More and more English people I encounter, in pubs, at sports grounds, and in private conversations are thinking, and speaking of themselves as a people, an ethnos, in a way which is both entirely new and ancient. The conversations which take place when there are only English people around take on a different quality. In those spaces the English are sharing opinions on migration, crime and the future of our country which were unsayable a short while ago.
In all this I discern hints of, not an ethnogenesis, for the English have been a people for a very long time, but rather an ethnoegersis, an awakening, or resurrection of the English ethnos.
What other signs could there be of such an awakening?
An interest in folk music might be one. In the summer I had dinner with a Danish academic who described a similar awakening in her homeland. She told me that young Danes are showing a sudden interest in the folk music of their people. It turns out that something similar is happening here. According to Spotify, since 2020, there has been a 554 per cent increase in monthly plays by UK accounts for “British folk music” (they do not separately measure Scottish, English and Welsh folk).
Similarly, the 1,100th anniversary of Athelstan’s coronation attracted great attention, with the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames running months of events to commemorate our first king, and the historian Tom Holland naming a train after him.
Athelstan, of course, is one of our most notable monarchs. England might not exist without him. Within two years of his coronation Athelstan unified the nation in a form close to its modern borders. He went on to secure his new kingdom by defeating an attempted invasion by Scots, Welsh and Danes. His realm, our nation, will be 1,100 years old in 2027. How much more will the English have awoken by then?
We are facing demographic decline, cultural anxieties and a dysfunctional state
Perhaps this was inevitable. For a very long time the English have not had to worry about identity. We have been secure and safe for centuries. But something has changed. We are facing demographic decline, cultural anxieties and a dysfunctional state. It is no surprise that the English have begun to identify as a people.
Whatever politicians tell us, England isn’t defined — or, at least, isn’t solely defined — by values, sport, tea or even parliamentary democracy. England is far older, and deeper than all those things. The English people had already named themselves when Augustine came here, decades before the death of Mohammed. We formed our nation before the schism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
Now that ancient nation hears the cry of the old folk song; “Awake, awake sweet England”, and begins to stir.
