Article in the Quarterly Review, Volume 6, No. 2, Summer 2012
S F Bush
In 1986 a journalist, John Gaskell, asked rhetorically in the Sunday Telegraph, “Who are the English?”[1] His meaning was clear: the English had disappeared into the melting pot of the word “British”. Other nations in the United Kingdom could proclaim their identities while enjoying the privilege of Britishness, but we, the English, could not.
Fortunately a sympathetic letters editor allowed me to reply to Gaskell the following week and at the risk of sounding too self-referential, it is perhaps pertinent to my theme to recall what I said[1]:
“The English are the race after whom England is known. They were first mentioned (as the Anglii) by Tacitus in AD98. They are the subject of the History of the English Church and People by Bede, written around AD730 – the greatest historical work written anywhere in Christendom in the 1000 years after Tacitus, and ordered to be translated into Old English by Alfred the Great himself. They are known the world over in every language as the natural owners of the land of England.
There are about 42 million of the historic English people living in England (out of about 50 million now living in England). There are probably twice this number of people of English descent in the other Anglo-Saxon countries.
Place of birth has nothing to do with being English. The Duke of Wellington, when asked if the fact of his having been born in Ireland didn’t make him an Irishman, replied to his questioner: “If you had been born in a stable, would that have made you a donkey?”
Many people wrote and telephoned me about that letter, revealing the depth of unhappiness about what was happening to our native land. Typical and touching was the letter from Mrs J Fothergill of Kent, who wrote: “As a very ordinary Englishwoman, but nevertheless very proud to be so, may I take this opportunity of saying ‘Thank you’ for stating so succinctly the definition of true Englishness I shall cut out your letter and carry it in my wallet.”
The concepts of Englishness and of England have been under attack since the 1970s, during which decade Britain joined the EEC, the Scottish Nationalists gained 5 seats in Westminster, the IRA-led insurrection in Northern Ireland was at its most intense, parts of British industry slid into anarchy under attack from militant trades unions, and the effects of mass Afro-Asian immigration were signalled by the passing of the Race Relations Act 1976, the third such in 11 years.
It might be thought that all five of these developments concerned the British State as a whole, which to an extent is correct of course. Yet the left wing of English journalism and the sociology parts of English academia have used the atmosphere of crisis in attacks on the British Empire and the supposed class-ridden English society, which was allegedly responsible for the decline of British power and influence.
My purpose in writing this article is to see how these five developments have been built on during the last 30 years to attempt the deconstruction – even abolition – of the very idea of the English people and with it the concept of the English nation. Such an attempt would have seemed absurd, preposterous even, before about 1970. Until about then, Continental governments and their peoples would customarily refer to Britain as England, or Angleterre, Inglaterra, Engeland, and more widely in Arabic and Asian languages, Britain is still rendered as Inglesi or similar. President de Gaulle who died in 1969 almost invariably referred to l’Angleterre in discussions and speeches. President Johnson of the USA was in the habit of referring to “Mother England”, and so on.