Escaping England
In the aftermath of the summer riots, George Evans re-reads Tom Nairn in order to examine the possibilities of a progressive left English nationalism in the face of the Far Right, asking whether it is possible, or desirable, to escape from England.
Tom Nairn understood the progressive potential of English nationalism, an insight that becomes more not less relevant in the context of the recent far-right riots. Nationalism, for Nairn, was double-faced: potentially reactionary and potentially progressive, sometimes authoritarian and sometimes democratic, inherently exclusionary and always popular; a two-horned historical dilemma that must be grasped politically, what he called ‘the modern Janus’.
Collected in the The Break-Up of Britain from 1977, Nairn’s analysis formed part of the broader thesis developed with Perry Anderson in the New Left Review throughout the 1960s and 1970s. For them, in the seventeenth century, the emerging British bourgeoisie had been caught in an aristocratic embrace, fusing with the landed class, leading to a capitalism dominated by finance rather than industry, an imperialism that served the needs of home counties gentleman capitalists, and an archaic imperial state, not a modern British nation, that was incapable of reversing economic decline.
One consequence of this settlement, for Nairn, was that English identity was mostly subsumed into the conservative, patrician and decidedly non-populist ideology of the imperial UK state. Pre-modern and pre-nationalist, this Anglo-British ideology, that is to say the ideology of an imperial, backward UK dominated by England, was based on imperialism abroad and political sclerosis combined with the veneration of relics such as the Crown-in-parliament at home. There was little opposition from a Labourist Labour Party content to work within the system.
What was mostly missing, in Nairn’s view, was what he called the ‘populist side of nationalism’. The ‘mobilizing myth of nationalism is an idea of the people’ and nearly ‘all the modern nations have such a myth, the key to their ‘nationalism’’. Yet, Nairn thought, ‘England does not possess one.’ There was no ‘sufficiently accessible and popular myth-identity where mass discontents can find a vehicle’; no nationalism that involved the self-mobilisation of the English people or demos, perhaps against the UK state, just as Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalisms were based partly on an invoked popular opposition to the UK.
At the root of Nairn’s understanding was a perception of August 1914, not October 1917, as the decisive moment for the global left. The collapse of the Second International was not simply the product of the betrayal by its cowardly leaders. Thinking so was an idealist distraction. The proletariat did not become nationalised because of bad ideas, but because if class shaped nation then the nations that class shaped were more powerful than class itself: material national existence before class essence, or nation-over-class, as Nairn occasionally put it. If the implications undermined historical materialism, so be it. Nairn wanted a materialism that could account for the place of nations in global history since 1914.
Influenced by the work of Ernest Gellner, Nairn advanced a theory of the nation centred on the uneven development of capitalism. For Nairn, some societies developed first, gaining early access to the political, economic and military means of domination over other societies. Elites in less developed societies wanted the trappings of ‘progress’ – factories, parliaments, technologies, and so on. But they did not want them at the price of subordination to dominant powers. They wanted them for themselves.
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This required mass mobilisation, which in turn required nationalism. Nairn saw inter-class communities as developing from the nineteenth century, based around an imputed national unity that defined itself against an oppressing or competing power. Nationalisms aimed to graft forward-facing development onto local traditions and history, stories of the new-old nation, modern myths of historic peoples. Nationalist ideology was not purely atavistic, but rather turned to the past to leverage the nation into the future. ‘The people’, Nairn argued, were mobilised by nationalists against powerful opponents, sometimes, as with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, for the purposes of catching-up and replacing dominant imperialisms with a new national-imperialism; and sometimes to secure national autonomy, as with the ‘Greek and Latin-American independence wars’ of the early nineteenth century or the Vietnamese struggle of Nairn’s own era.
For Nairn, a key reason for England’s lack of populist nationalism was that England had developed first, which meant English nationalism developed last. England had imposed itself on the world, first on Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and then, as the dominant component of the imperial UK state, many places else. This stimulated, by a meandering, halting process, nationalisms everywhere, because ‘everywhere else was compelled to somehow react against the successful offensive of English commerce and empire (and later on, against the crusades of her imperialist rivals)’. But the nationalist principle, Nairn argued, might well ‘return to England, after this prolonged global detour and development’.
If this ever happened, the UK would be finished. Nationalisms were powerful enough to break apart the reactionary Anglo-British state. A pre-modern antique would be replaced by a collection of modern English, Scottish and Welsh nations – the ‘terrible dilemma’ of Northern Ireland, for Nairn, was a more complex case.
II
How does Nairn’s ambitious analysis, which he himself updated, particularly in his 2000 After Britain, while more or less doubling down on its essentials, stand up in 2024? Many today would be suspicious of arguments founded on notions like ‘progress’ and ‘development’, or indeed of Nairn’s unembarrassed placing of England at the centre of global history. The historian David Edgerton has also directly challenged the Nairn-Anderson thesis. Unlike Nairn-Anderson and their claim that the British nation is impossible, Edgerton argues that it did in fact exist between the 1940s and 1970s. Others, from the right, have sneered over the much-delayed British break-up. Nairn’s ideas, however, are not an attempt at fortune-telling that loses any value if Britain does not break-up by one date or another. Nor are they a garden variety historical analysis, which borrows a verisimilitude derived partly from the assumptions of a contemporary conjuncture before being surpassed or forgotten once fashions move on. They are, and have been used, as a durable stimulus for fresh thought, and if the historical answers Nairn put forward are contestable, and should be contested, his questions, especially about Englishness, remain.
Others have indeed sought to take Nairn’s insight into Englishness in new directions. Notable here is the work of the literary scholar Alex Niven. Citing Nairn-Anderson, Niven’s 2019 New Model Island saw English nationhood as non-existent, except in largely irredeemable, conservative and pastoral forms. Arguing for a socialist regionalism, Niven suggested that England should be broken into nine separate regions, split into two larger groups of regions (North West and South East) to balance London’s dominance.
Niven’s 2023 follow up, The North Will Rise Again, brilliantly developed this analysis. Softening his earlier assertion that ‘socialism should always be anti-nationalist in essence’, Niven now saw a northern identity, carefully delineated as non-essentialist, inclusive, and very much incipient, as the potential means for escaping England. The north – defined as stretching from the Scottish border to south Cheshire, the Trent-ish cities of Derby, Stoke and Nottingham, and north Lincolnshire – was politically and economically subjugated by the south, a process that, Niven holds, goes far back into the mists of national time, to the Norman Conquest.
This subordination stimulated a distinct northern proto-national consciousness. Niven argues for a northern identity that is broadly progressive, modern and modernist principally because it defines itself against the Englishness sourced from the traditionalism of the south. This northern identity, for Niven, is epitomised by such things as the modernist poetry of the Northumbrian regionalist-separatist Basil Bunting, the holy island of Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumberland, ‘a place only someone with no heart could possibly feel to be anything other sacred’, and the post-punk music produced by Manchester’s Situationist-inspired Factory Records – a historical-modern northern identity bricolage to counter the suffocating warm beer, long shadows on cricket grounds and invincible green suburbs of traditionalist Englishness or Anglo-Britishness.
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For Niven, northern nationalism is a minority taste, and a separatist solution remains unlikely, but the Northern Independence Party (NIP) offers a potential vehicle for an independent north. This separatist, socialist party advocates for an independent northern state, inclusive of ‘North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, and High Peak’. It seeks, in archetypal nationalist fashion, to mobilise the people of the north against Britain’s unevenness, claiming, for example, that between ‘2010 and 2018 £3.6 billion was cut from public spending in the North’, while ‘£4.7 billion was added to public spending in the South during the same period.’ Niven is sympathetic, while also well-aware of NIP’s limitations: the party stood no candidates in the 2024 general election.
Niven’s analysis underplays many things. Not all southerners fetishize the pastoral. And what about progressive London? To make too much of this, however, is to miss the point. Nations usually define themselves against an alien power or powers, in this case southern England, the image of which will be part truth, part myth. This is a basically left nationalist intervention with a certain historical basis, that should be handled critically, but for what it is, which is not a textbook on English history. A better criticism is that this dazzling attempt to escape England writes off the possibility of an equivalent myth of a historical, modern Englishness as a progressive force.
III
This is where returning to one of Nairn’s underappreciated insights is worthwhile. Nairn saw popular English nationalism as undeveloped, but not impossible. There was indeed an English left proto-nationalism gestating from the 1950s. In Break-Up, Nairn identified a ‘gathering movement of historical revision and socialist culture’, stretching from parts of ‘Labour and even Young Liberalism’ to Communist parties and non-aligned intellectuals like E.P. Thompson. More ecumenical than sectarian Marxism, and opposed to the ‘non-populist structure’ of the Anglo-British state, this movement ‘necessarily lean[ed] very hard in the contrary direction’, taking its inspiration from analyses of British popular movements: a ‘history from below’, which amounted to ‘something like a collective, endless ‘epic poem’ of popular and radical achievement’. It was usually characterised as populist socialism. Yet:
“it is not difficult to perceive it in another perspective, deriving from the comparative history of national movements. All such movements have adopted analogous populist aims, and sought in a similar way to ascribe the nation’s real or hidden history to folk initiative.”
Any left proto-English nationalism could not oppose an alien oppressor of England. None existed. Instead, it challenged the ‘established conservative state and culture.’ True, this movement was mostly articulated via a ‘rather undefined socialism’, not ‘ideas of England’, but it was an ‘English phenomenon’ engendered by the UK’s decline ‘every bit as much as Scottish or Welsh nationalism.’ It had part of ‘what corresponds to the usual model of nationalist revival’, the ‘attempt to find strength for a better, more democratic future by re-examining (on occasion re-inventing) a mythic past’ – Nairn here would have done better to speak of a common model of nationalist revival, as nationalism is often, but not always, democratic. Nairn realised his argument would sound strange, and that English peculiarities meant this proto-nationalism was different to nationalisms elsewhere. He was ultimately unequivocal: ‘Odd as it may seem, the deformation of Englishness by her state-history has generated a late but unmistakeable variety of left-nationalist popular culture’.
What happened to this movement? One place it mutated towards, in academia and increasingly popular history, was the study of race and empire, with Stuart Hall providing a link between the old New Left and the new interest in imperialism that arose among historians especially from the 1990s. From a Nairnian perspective, a continued proto-nationalist element is present in these later analyses. If an anti-imperialist nationalism involves the assertion of an external coloniser encroaching upon the nation, for these later historians it is England’s (or more often Britain’s) ‘overseas empire’, in other words an empire outside the nation, often expressed in terms of ‘Britain and its empire’, that profoundly impacted upon and indeed damaged or held back the nation, by contributing to economic problems, racism, jingoism, and so on.
Many historians or theorists focus on identity, with the implicit political aim of using historical analysis to establish a more inclusive sense of nationhood. The Jamaica-born Hall, for example, described himself as the sugar in an English cup of tea, noting that ‘People like me who came to England in the 1950s’ had ‘symbolically’ been in England ‘for centuries.’ One recent intervention has argued that ‘if we are ever going to understand what it actually means to be British’ the full story of Britain and empire must be told.
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Students of global nationalism will spot the significance. Gellner, Nairn’s colleague, saw the most important word in the nationalist universe as ‘awakening’ – nationalists often argue that ‘Man’ must be awakened to ‘his national identity and the political imperatives implicit in it’. A preoccupation with articulating the hidden meaning of national identity, before making the nation aware, is archetypally nationalist. Making or remaking national identity for particular, often anti-imperial, political purposes is at the core of nationalism, as Nairn himself effectively recognised.
There are obviously significant differences between this English historical imaginary and the nineteenth century-style nationalists Gellner focused on in his work. Gellner’s nationalists wanted to awaken the nation to the need to create a state that would protect the national culture from foreigners who wanted to ‘destroy and debase’ it.
There is clearly not an unrecognised, unchanged nineteenth century-style nationalism on the left. There are quite clearly left politico-historical analyses that have some features that one would expect from an English or British anti-imperialist nationalism. Perhaps it is best to say particular analyses exist where left anti-imperialist English nationalism might otherwise be. This is not a criticism. If the identity project of the imperial historians helped create an anti-racist, progressive English nationalism, just as Scottish nationalism is often officially anti-racist, this would be a Good Thing, the forward-looking face of Janus.
A form of this English left proto-nationalism has found political expression. One example is Jeremy Corbyn. This might seem odd; Corbyn is defined by his opponents as the anti-nation. But the nation he is constructed as hating is fundamentally the UK (sometimes glossed as ‘Britain’ by those who don’t count Northern Ireland) not England: it is UK/Britain that is part of NATO; UK/Britain that invaded Iraq and UK/Britain that supports Israel. The monarchy is British, as is Trident. Corbyn was mauled by a media class that identifies as Westminster-British; England being too small for its parochial cosmopolitanism. The sturdy folk of ‘Middle England’ that this Shropshire-raised man was supposedly alien from were, in part, a metropolitan construct obscuring the British basis of West-British opposition.
It is true that Labour under Corbyn was most popular with voters who identified as British more than or equally to English. As Labour leader his vision was also partly about taking over the electorally granted dictatorial powers of the British state before using them. Of course he often spoke of ‘Britain’, occasionally ‘British values’.
But there is a definite English component to Corbyn’s politics. Corbyn acknowledges that he was ‘brought up’ on the books of E.P. Thompson, a key figure in the English left proto-nationalist movement identified by Nairn, and he had links to the long tradition of English radicalism. In an interview with the New Statesman, Corbyn suggested that John Lilburne, the 17th century Leveller who argued for the rights of ‘free-born Englishmen’, was the historical figure he most admired.
There is also a constitutional dimension to the English element of Corbyn’s politics, even if this is not necessarily central. Corbyn supported Tony Benn’s 1990s Commonwealth of Britain Bill, which would have terminated British rule in Northern Ireland and established three national legislatures, including English, under a Commonwealth parliament. As Labour leader, he commissioned a report that argued for measures to ensure ‘England is given a strong distinct voice at Westminster’, in the context of a reformed, federal UK, and a Minister for England. The 2017 Labour manifesto proposed creating a Minister of England, although this was dropped in 2019.
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To this, it might be objected that Corbyn is not a left nationalist but an internationalist. Yet, as Nairn understood, internationalism is manifest in national contexts, even as it professes loyalty to abstract universalism: there are English internationalisms and French internationalisms. For Nairn, the national internationalism of the Labour left was derived partly from dissident Christianity. Methodism provided a universalising moralism to rival Marxism’s proletarian internationalism. This in turn contributed to a national egoism, whereby even socialists spoke as if England/Britain would save the world. From this perspective, Corbyn’s internationalism is the outward-face of a peculiarly English radicalism.
The bizarre notion, found on the left in England, that internationalism is necessarily antithetical to nationalism, is telling evidence favouring Nairn’s notion of English inarticulacy about their nation. Internationalism is positioned from the left as opposed to Englishness, with little sense that some forms of Englishness might be a particular expression of internationalism. In England, an Irish politician who combines socialism with dislike of British imperialism and the British monarchy, demands for Irish national institutions and a stronger Irish national voice, and veneration of Irish national-popular struggles, would be seen as a left nationalist or republican socialist, especially if they cared about Palestine and Chile.
IV
There is now overwhelming evidence that the English question is growing in political salience. Already in 2012, the proportion of the English population who prioritised their English identity over their British was over twice as high as those who prioritised Britishness over Englishness. Anthony Barnett, of New Left origins, has argued that Brexit was the revolt of England-without-London, a lashing out at a remote authority, the EU, as a substitute for ending the powerlessness caused by the lack of English institutions, such as an English parliament. The Scottish and Northern Irish, with their parliament and assembly, voted Remain; the Welsh majority for Leave was possibly delivered by England-born residents of Wales.
The growth of ‘political Englishness’ between 2001 and 2019 broadly favoured the Conservatives. In 2024, Starmer’s authoritarian-austerian Labour Party in England seemingly won a plurality of votes among both those who identified as English not British and more English than British, while polling highest among those who prioritised Britishness.
There have also been more reactionary expressions of Englishness, particularly the recent racist riots; rioters carried England flags (also Union Jacks) and chanted ‘England till I die’. Racism expressed via forms of Englishness was clearly present, reflecting far-right ideas that are now part of mainstream discourse; rioters adopted the Sunakian slogan ‘stop the boats’; Robert Jenrick recently linked the riots to the supposed threat to English identity created by immigration.
One should not, then, paint nationalism red, the accusation thrown at Nairn by Eric Hobsbawm. But ignoring the dilemmas posed by nationalism does not make them go away. Even Hobsbawm conceded that nationalism has ‘enormous force, which must be harnessed for progress if possible.’
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Nationalism is inherently exclusionary. Progressive exclusion is possible: Labour’s historic critique of the Conservatives as the party of sectional propertied interests rather than that of the British nation is one example. The (very difficult) task of any left English nationalism would be to ensure those excluded from Englishness are the racists, reactionaries and exploiters rather than anyone else, not because they betray eternal English values, but because they do not reflect what the English demos wants or thinks. One 2021 study, for example, found that 77% of white people in England and 68% of ethnic minority citizens agreed that Englishness is open to people of different ethnic backgrounds. These figures themselves show that racism remains very powerful, but racists spouting about ethnic Englishness are a genuine minority. An inclusive Englishness has recently been embodied by the England men’s football team, a phenomenon labelled ‘Southgatism’ by Niven, who sees it as a rare progressive Englishness, with the former manager Gareth Southgate’s Dear England letter emphasising equality and inclusivity.
The case for the left having something to say about England is not that doing so would transform its prospects, but that not doing so ignores reality. A fresh myth of a modern, historical, progressive England could easily be constructed from English history. The problem, indeed, with the old New Left claim that there is no republican left English tradition is that they themselves, and those they influenced, are part of this tradition, notwithstanding Nairn’s Scottish origins. Their existence abolishes their argument, a beautiful, Janus-faced testimony.
There are instrumental reasons to support England breaking-up Britain. Deluded foreign policy would be undermined. Global England does not sound as good as Global Britain.
The fundamental point is a democratic, internationalist one. True internationalism recognises particularity, including its own. If the English, that is to say everyone who lives England, can be persuaded of the need for greater national autonomy then they should get it, just as would be true for any nation. This is a democratic demand, taking its place alongside abolition of the monarchy, an elected second chamber and proportional representation. Nairn was probably right that Britain in its current form will ultimately break-up, whether in 20, 50 or 200 years. In the long run, there’s no exit from England.
George Evans is a historian at the University of Edinburgh, interested in the relationship between imperialism and national identities in twentieth century British and Irish history.
