I ATTENDED AN ordinary English state school in the late 1950s.
In our history lessons we were taught that England is the heart of
Great Britain, that Great Britain is the heart of an Empire, and
that, thanks to this Empire, ideas of law, freedom, and democratic
government had spread around the globe. We were therefore proud of
the Empire, which we described as British, not English, and thought
of it as proof of our national virtues and a contribution to the
advancement of mankind. Our flag was the Union Jack, a striking
synthesis of the emblems of our constituent peoples, and we
believed that this flag represented a peaceful union, rather than
the triumph of one nation over others. We sang “Rule Britannia,”
the rousing chorus of which declares that “Britons never never
never shall be slaves!”
We had no difficulty in reconciling our attachment to the
English Crown, the English law, the Church of England, and the
English language with the view that we were British, and no more
British than the Welsh or the Scots. In those days there seemed to
be no contradiction in our composite national identity, and we
could identify ourselves for some purposes as English, for others
as British, without divided loyalties. The turning point of the
war, when London was saved by the Royal Air Force, was called the
“Battle of Britain,” and postwar spirits were raised by a “Festival
of Britain,” located in the English capital. And when England
played football against France, we waved the Union Jack in support
of our countrymen.
Our identity, in other words, was defined in terms of what it
included, not what it excluded. It was not belligerently
xenophobic, nor was it founded on myths of racial purity or tribal
kinship. But it was a genuinely national identity all the
same, and we thought of ourselves (Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish
included) as a single “island nation,” containing other nations as
parts.
Jeremy Rabkin persuasively argues that the nation-state is a
natural home of political freedom. But we must also recognize that
European nationalism has often been the enemy of freedom and that
national identity and nationalism are two quite different things.
The “nation” that was to rescue the revolutionary French from their
feudal masters became a new form of feudal master, though one which
could never be held to account for its misdeeds. It wielded
power over its subjects beyond anything imagined by Louis XIV when
he declared that “l’état, c’est moi.” The worship of the
nation, introduced by the Revolutionaries and given its liturgical
trappings by Robespierre and his faction, culminated in Napoleon’s
campaigns, which devastated Europe and ruined France. In reaction
to Napoleon’s destruction of their country, the Germans too became
nationalists. And the rival nationalisms of Germany and France
dominated the European scene until the final defeat of Germany in
1945. In light of this history it is hardly surprising if the
European Union, which grew from the debris of the 20th-century
conflicts, should announce itself as an alternative to the
nation-state.
BUT THE EU’s understandable hostility to the criminal use of the
national idea, which ought to be directed primarily at France and
Germany, has been almost exclusively directed at England—the one
European nation to be entirely untainted by nationalism. The most
striking feature of the EU’s attitude to my country has been the
concerted attempt to remove it from the map. The official map of
the Union, which was projected long before the United Kingdom was
admitted as a member, mentions Scotland and Wales as autonomous
regions, and allows France, Germany, Italy, and the rest to retain
their traditional names, even if divided into Länder or
départements. But the name “England” does not appear on
this map. All that the English are granted is four “regions,”
defined geographically. It seems that this corresponds to a
long-term policy— one so deeply buried in the aims and projects of
the European Union that it has never, to my knowledge, been openly
debated. This is the policy of dividing England in something like
the way that the colonial powers divided Africa, and then creating
“regional assemblies” to administer the arbitrary fragments.
This policy appeals to the Labour Party, which has already
granted national assemblies to Scotland and Wales. For the last
thing the Labour Party wants is an English Parliament, in which it
could never hope to form a government. The Labour Party can rule
over the English only with the help of its Welsh and Scottish MPs.
Under its jurisdiction our nation has ceased to be the single
nation that we were taught to believe in, and has become
three—maybe four— nations instead. There are Scotland and Wales,
with their own legislatures; and there is England, ruled over by a
legislature dominated by MPs from Scotland and Wales. Northern
Ireland, meanwhile, hovers uncertainly on the perimeter. As for the
EU’s “regional assemblies,” the Labour Party is proceeding to
impose them upon us, even though the scheme has been decisively
rejected in referendums and opinion polls.
In short, we are seeing the first moves toward the abolition of
England. The core nation in our syncretic national identity, the
one from which the idea of “Britishness” derives, the one
celebrated in our patriotic literature down the centuries and
identified with our common language and culture, has been
forbidden.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has therefore made a point of
extolling a new kind of national loyalty, one which is compatible
with the disappearance of England. He reminds us of the “core
values” of Britishness, which include freedom, toleration,
compassion, social responsibility, and other qualities that can be
read in ways favorable to the socialist state. But he has little
time for the core values of Englishness: the stiff upper
lip, the well-spoken accent, the ethic of fair play, and the code
of the gentleman. These he is happy to denigrate as imperial
hangovers and symbols of a privileged caste.
In its 11 years in office, the Labour Party has granted
legislatures to the Welsh and the Scots; begun, through the
regional assemblies, to deprive the English of a Parliament;
removed the hard-won protections of the English countryside; and
abolished the old House of Lords. It has attacked and penalized the
Public Schools and the old Universities, banned hunting with hounds
(that quintessential symbol of old England), and encouraged the
mass immigration of potentially disloyal minorities into the
English cities. All this fits easily into the EU’s broader agenda
and prepares the way for that final abolition of England, which
will be achieved because almost nobody has noticed it.
ONE INTERESTING RESULT of this is that people are losing the
sense of British identity. The Scots and Welsh have their patriotic
songs, their heroes and legends, all of which are celebrated in
their history lessons. But they are rapidly forgetting that they
are part of a larger national entity, with an imperial legacy and a
shared culture across permeable borders. At football matches nobody
now waves the Union Jack: the separate national flags are all that
can be seen, and if any Englishman raises a flag outside his house
it is the cross of St. George, the flag of England. Apart from this
symbol, however, the English are allowed precious few reminders of
their identity. Our heroes have been effectively excised from the
curriculum or recycled as villains, like Clive of India,
Wellington, Captain Cook—even Churchill, now painted as the leader
responsible for the Second World War. Our legends and patriotic
stories are given no airtime on the BBC, and the Arts Council,
which distributes taxpayer money to cultural enterprises, and
warmly encourages applications from ethnic minorities, refuses to
fund an “English Music Festival,” on the grounds that such a
jingoist enterprise would offend the multicultural orthodoxies of
New Britain.
Americans should not view the forbidding of England with
complacency. Although many Americans have Irish and Scottish
ancestors, who came to this country as refugees from the English,
the fact is that America was made in England. Its constitution was
inspired by the reflections of Locke, Montesquieu, and Harrison on
the constitution of England; it was made possible by the
inheritance of English common law, and by the extraordinary way in
which that law has granted freedom to the subject and protected
this freedom from oppressive power. The underlying law of the
United States is not Roman law, Scots law, or Napoleonic law: it is
English law, which has been the guarantee of freedom in every place
where it has taken root.
The common law of England is not imposed from above by sovereign
powers that hope to control us, but is built from below by judges
striving to resolve our conflicts. It is a bottom-up form of legal
order, a legal order designed to protect the subject from his
oppressors. It is this law that is responsible for the freedom of
England, and which was brought to America by the early colonists,
there to take root in the fertile soil of a pioneering community.
But we should not believe that the common law is a permanent
possession. Indeed, it has been the most important casualty of the
EU’s relentless dictatorship, which has been concerned at every
step to create centralized legislation and courts empowered to
enforce it.
At every point, now, our judges find themselves hampered by
regulations, by vast tomes of dictatorial edicts, and by a European
court of “justice,” staffed by judges raised on the Code
Napoléon, whose duty is to enforce the top-down decisions of
the Eurocrats, rather than the rights of the individual subject.
Once England has been abolished, the hostility of the EU elites
will target America as the most important surviving example of a
legal order devoted to individual freedom rather than state
control. The anti-Americanism that we witness today among the
European elites will be nothing beside the anti-Americanism that we
are sure to witness then. The pity is that England will no longer
be around to sympathize.
Roger Scruton, the writer and philosopher,
is most recently the author of Culture Counts: Faith
and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter Books).
