How Britain Ends: English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations

by Gavin Esler

As a post-Brexit joke puts it: ‘An Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman walk into a bar. The Englishman wants to go home – so everyone else has to leave.’

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Britain has never felt the need to have a written constitution, despite the fact that British experts have written or helped write such documents for at least seventy former colonies and dominions, and also postwar Germany, twenty-first century Iraq and the nineteenth-century Ottoman empire. Apologists for the United Kingdom system

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what changed?’ ‘What changed,’ he replied, ‘is that in 2014 we were told that voting No to independence meant Scotland would stay in the European Union. Well, that’s not true, is it? F*** them.’ My friend worked for many years in

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In 2019 the British home secretary and Conservative politician Priti Patel suggested using food as a weapon against Ireland in future Brexit negotiations. The anger and astonishment in Ireland at her insensitivity and ignorance was profound. About a million Irish men and women died in the Great Famine. Another million or more emigrated. I blundered into this historical morass many years ago. Working as an inexperienced correspondent for the BBC in Northern Ireland, I found myself in Buswell’s pub in Dublin, just across from Dáil Éireann, the Irish parliament, spending a delightful evening

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drinking Guinness and whiskey with a group of Irish politicians. One of them was the then Irish foreign minister, the affable Brian Lenihan. We discussed how historical events could achieve mythical significance way beyond the facts – the 1745 Jacobite rebellion in Scotland, Crécy, Agincourt and Ireland’s Great Famine. Very unwisely I tried to put the Famine ‘into context’ by pointing out that Ireland was not alone in suffering in the 1840s. Across Europe these years were known as the ‘Hungry Forties’. France was hit by several famines. The 1840s of Dickens’s London was a far from pleasant place. My drinking companions went silent. Brian Lenihan patiently and politely ‘had a word with me’. I was in my early twenties and ignorant. He generously forgave my bad manners. I learned something and apologized. Ms Patel, a senior British government minister, hasn’t and didn’t.

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Worrying about some phantom dilution of a national identity within the EU is not a Scottish

Boris Johnson is not a ‘One Nation’ Conservative but a ‘One Notion’ Conservative. His One Notion has always been to do whatever is best for Boris Johnson. After all, he is the politician who wrote two versions of his newspaper column – one for and the other against Brexit. Then he had two versions of Northern Ireland – one with a border on the island of Ireland, one with a border in the sea between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. And at least two versions of what to do about coronavirus – seeking ‘herd immunity’, then a lockdown and then using ‘good British common sense’. Johnson is consistent only in choosing what appears best for Johnson, and certainly not best for traditional unionism in Northern Ireland. In Ulster 2020 rather than Ulster 1912, unionists may again have need to recall Kipling’s words: The traitor claims his price. What need of further lies? We are the sacrifice. The Daily Telegraph paid Mr Johnson a quarter of a million pounds a year to write for the newspaper along with his part-time jobs as mayor

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it is the British who have changed the question. Just when relations between Ireland and Britain had reached an unprecedented equilibrium, Brexit makes everything deeply unsettled again. When James Joyce’s alter ego Stephen Dedalus claims in Ulysses that ‘History… is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’, it is surely Irish history he has in mind. But now the Irish have to awake to the living nightmare of British – perhaps we should say English – history.6

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States, obsessed with America First and building a ‘big, beautiful wall’, most of the problems we need to worry about in the twenty-first century turn out to be a bit like coronavirus. They do not recognize borders. They are global rather than national and include HIV, cancer, other potentially more lethal viruses that will leap from animals to humans, global warming, mass migration, extreme weather events, trade policies, a massive run on stock markets, poverty, war, terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and the explosion of fakery on social media. Since the ‘herd’ affected by all these phenomena is global rather than national, what one national government does – even in a relatively rich and prosperous country like Britain – only works if there is coordination with neighbours. The threat from a new disease in any one place turns out to be a threat everywhere. John Donne’s often quoted observation that ‘no man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main’ has never seemed more apt than in a world where popular culture, the economy, technology, social media, disease, terrorism and crime are

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With Brexit we are enduring systemic failure and almost comic incompetence caused by reverence for a system of governance mired in the Victorian past and incapable of dealing with the structural failures that English nationalism and Brexit have exposed. This systemic failure has been noticed by those who fret about the United Kingdom’s reputation in the world. In November 2017, Simon Fraser, the

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His ‘world leading’ coronavirus test and trace system and ‘oven ready’ Brexit deal simply did not exist. Even so, Johnson’s nostalgic optimism hits exactly the note that chimes with the nostalgic pessimists of English nationalism. Nostalgic pessimists do not truly expect things to get better, and therefore they can rarely be disappointed by Johnson’s failures. They do not even expect the truth, especially from politicians, but they are willing to be entertained, and Mr Johnson is the nation’s crooner and stand-up comedian at the top of the bill. Voters were well aware that the Johnson

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My history teacher at the time, the estimable Mr Hogg, pointed out to us the strange paradox that the British way of governance was regarded as so successful that nobody else in the entire world wanted to copy it, not even those formerly British Yankee rebels who met in Philadelphia and came up with a very different set of rules for governing themselves. The House of Lords: Ourselves Alone – Again

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Our continuing rule by a narrow, nationalist elite means that we are following incompetent leaders to an unexplained future based on impossible promises to choruses marking the end of another old song. Through such carelessness is How Britain Ends.

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