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Driving home from the Lake District to London over the bank holiday weekend, it was impossible to ignore the St George’s flags dangling over the motorway from the bridges above. Flags like these have been popping up all over England in the past week as part of what is being called “raise the colours” activism. I was able to explain to my American companion what the difference was between this flag and the Union Jack but what I couldn’t seem to find the words to describe was why these English flags had been strung up instead of the British national flag – or what the people who put them there were really trying to say.
The nature of English identity is becoming an increasingly pressing matter in our national politics. The flags are the most obvious and recent sign but there are other, less visible developments. In rightwing circles, there is talk of Britishness being an identity but Englishness an ethnicity. It was in England where last summer’s rioting really took hold.
Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones have studied English identity for over a decade and in an article published this morning, they reveal how English grievance germinated in post-devolution Britain. They show how successive governments have (half-heartedly) tried and failed to resolve the problem. Now, Nigel Farage and Reform are capitalising on their inability to give England what it really wants.
In a speech on Tuesday, Farage proposed the deportation of 600,000 migrants and asylum seekers as well as the suspension of various international conventions on torture and human rights. Farage has been complaining about the burden of being part of the European Convention on Human Rights for years, but what he never seems to mention is the protections the convention offers everyone else in the UK as well as those seeking asylum. The families of those killed in the Hillsborough disaster, for example, were protected by the ECHR, as are children escaping abuse. It is the ECHR that gives us the freedom of speech that Farage claims to hold so
dear. So while legal scholars wouldn’t suggest the convention is perfect or in no need of reform, anyone proposing themselves as a future prime minister should probably have a bit more to say about what we can expect by way of protection in a post-ECHR world rather than merely why it’s got to go.
And in a sad trip to the seaside, researchers found out what life is like for young people living in coastal towns – places that are also fertile ground for Reform. These areas offer less and less opportunity and more and more reasons to stray to the wrong side of the tracks. So is it time a dedicated government minister was appointed to address their problems?
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