Anxiety and injustice: the anatomy of contemporary English nationalism*

Abstract

An explicit and politically mobilised English nationalism has been remarkable because of its absence from deliberation on constitutional change in the United Kingdom. In short, it remains a mood and not a movement. This article explores the mood and explains why that mood has not become, as yet, a movement. It examines three related aspects of the English nationalist mood. First, it considers anxieties about the condition of contemporary England which can be found in the work of intellectuals and artists. Second, it identifies the sense of injustice which animates the lobby group the Campaign for an English Parliament. Finally, it looks at how mainstream party politics responds to these national anxieties and that sense of national injustice. KEYWORDS: anxiety; Britishness; Campaign for an English Parliament; Englishness; injustice; nationalism This article considers contemporary English nationalism from three related perspectives. The first is from the perspective of political and cultural anxieties found mainly in the arguments of writers and journalists. These anxieties have their own historical lineage but it is their novel character that warrants discussion. Their significance lies in the mood they convey. The second is from the particular perspective of the Campaign for an English Parliament (CEP), a lobby that shares these anxieties and argues that an English Parliament is necessary either to redress the peculiar asymmetry of post-devolution Britain or to pave the way for English independence. Its significance is the movement it tries to encourage. The third perspective is from the potential intersection of these anxieties and that perspective in English party politics. For without major party mobilisation of these anxieties and the promotion of an English Parliament, English nationalism is likely to remain a mood not a movement. English anxietiesFor most English people, these anxieties may be nothing more than what H. V. Morton called a 'vague mental toothache', a disquiet based on the feeling that the English should feel anxious rather than the state of actually being anxious (Morton 1927: 46). And there is always a popular constituency

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