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

by Gavin Esler

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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