Unit 6B: Ideological Development in the UK Rodney Barker Professor at Government Department of the London School of Economics writes for BBC Parliament

The Knight's Tale: What is it to be English?

Nationalism as a doctrine playing a major part in political thinking in the United Kingdom is relatively recent.

There were those throughout the twentieth century who made claims on behalf of the nations of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

But only in Ireland did the argument play a major part in politics.

The creation of an independent Irish state in 1922 removed the idea from mainstream United Kingdom politics for half a century.

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But from the 1970s onwards nationalism became an important, if minor, theme in the politics of the United Kingdom.

The creation of a Scottish Parliament and Executive, and a Welsh Assembly, and the re-establishment of a devolved assembly and government in Northern Ireland in 1999 set the United Kingdom on a path away from the unitary state model which had up until then increasingly dominated its government.

Impact of devolution

For many nationalists, devolution, where central government 'lends' power to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland is no more than an acceptable compromise between the demand for full national independence, and the limitations of immediate political circumstances.

For believers in the unitary state, on the other hand, even the present system is flawed, and potentially one step closer, if not to the break up of the United Kingdom, then to a federal state.

Here, the powers of the various nations would be constitutionally entrenched, the supremacy of Parliament limited by a written constitution, and the relations between the new nations and the centre regulated in part by some form of constitutional court.

Disagreements on these issues have cut across the old divisions between liberals, socialists, and conservatives, providing one more instance of the declining relevance of these ideologies, and of socialism and conservatism in particular.

Some socialists see greater distribution of power within the United Kingdom as giving more power to the people and a greater possibility of pursuing new and radical policies.

Others see it as threatening the ability of government to act on behalf of the people to challenge vested interests and redistribute opportunity.

Similarly, amongst conservatives, many are suspicious of what they see as a break with a hitherto unbroken constitutional tradition, whilst others value the enhancement of local, or regional, identities and see it as a potential check on central government.

Impact of the EU membership

The nationalist cause in the United Kingdom has been assisted by British membership of the European Union, with its shift from an exclusive concentration on the sovereign nation state.

If power can be shared upwards, it can be shared outwards and downwards too, whilst the nations of the United Kingdom gain sustenance from forming their own links with each other and with the rest of Europe, rather than channelling all their dealings through London.

One consequence of the rise of nationalisms within the United Kingdom has been a tentative articulation of English nationalism.

So long as England and Britain could be considered more or less synonymous, there was no need to describe a distinctive English identity.

With the growing awareness that England is part of the United Kingdom, not the whole of it, English identity is slowly being uncovered.

� Rodney Barker 2004
Department of Government
London School of Economics & Political Science