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Acknowledgements
We have incurred many debts during the course of this project. The most significant is to Charlie Jeffery and Dan Wincott, friends and colleagues with whom we have cooperated for many years on the Future of England Survey and associated publications. We are hugely grateful to them for so many insightful conversations, as well as general support and unrivalled camaraderie.
The Future of England Survey has lived a hand-to-mouth existence, with only one iteration—the 2014 Survey—receiving financial support from a conventional funding agency. So, while warmly acknowledging the support of Michael Keating and the Economic and Social Research Council for the 2014 survey, we would also like to offer our particular thanks to Cardiff and Edinburgh universities for their support in the other years. Daniel Wincott and Claire Sanders at Cardiff were instrumental in conjuring up support when all other avenues appeared closed.
We are also deeply conscious of and grateful for all the support we have received from our colleagues at YouGov—a level of support that has gone well beyond the call of duty. Not only have they been consummate professionals in conducting the surveys; they have also been patient and flexible during the planning stages. All the YouGov staff with whom we have worked have been hugely helpful in their different ways, but we are sure that they will not object if we make special mention of Adam McDonnell, as well as their now former colleague Laurence Janta-Lipinski, on whom we relied so much for support and sage advice.
The book has also benefited significantly from the fact that analysis of data from our three initial surveys was published in report form—of the first two by the IPPR and the third by the ESRC’s ‘Future of UK and Scotland’ programme. All three reports sparked considerable interest and debate in the media and among policymakers, as well as among our fellow academics. These debates helped us both hone our existing arguments and develop our analysis in new directions. We are grateful to the IPPR (supported in this case by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust) and the Future of UK and Scotland programme for publishing these papers and, of course, to our co-authors on these works and other articles.
Debate surrounding the publication of these papers also led to a series of invitations to present our arguments in all kinds of other fora, ranging from literary festivals to party conferences, as well as to academic conferences across the UK and further afield. We have also been invited to conduct seminars with senior civil servants and to present our findings to various committees and meetings of politicians and their advisers in London, Edinburgh, and Cardiff. We will not try to list all of these various events; suffice it to say that we are extremely grateful to all of the organizers and to all those present who have engaged with our ideas. This book is much the richer for their interest and contribution.
During the preparation of this book a Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh allowed Richard Wyn Jones to spend a term in Edinburgh. We are grateful to the institute for its generosity, as well as to Cardiff University for supporting a period of study leave.
In addition, we are especially grateful to all those who contributed by reading part or all of the typescript, or by otherwise providing support and encouragement. They are Nick Bibby, Adam Evans, Rob Ford, Lucy Hammond, Jerry Hunter, Guto Ifan, Charlie Jeffery, Rob Johns, Jac Larner, Alex Massie, James Mitchell, Jesús Rodríquez Moreno, Ed Gareth Poole, Cian Siôn, Eli Stamnes, Lisa Turnbull, and Dan Wincott. Finally, we would also like to extend our grateful thanks to Dominic Byatt at Oxford University Press, as well as the typescript reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. All errors remain our responsibility.
2.1. ‘Forced-choice’
5.1.
5.2.
5.3. Devo-anxiety, Euroscepticism,
6.1.
2.1.
2.4.
2.5.
2.6.
3.1.
3.5.
3.6.
3.7.
3.8.
3.10.
3.11.
3.12.
3.13.
3.14.
4.1.
4.3.
4.4.
4.5.
4.6.
List of Tables
5.1. Attitudes towards England’s two unions
5.2. Modelling devo-anxiety and Euroscepticism
5.3. The dimensions of an English world view
5.4. Who holds the English world view?
6.1. National identity (Moreno) in Scotland, Wales, and England
6.2. Predictors of Britishness and sub-state identity in Scotland, Wales, and England
6.3. Relative territorial identities in Scotland, Wales, and England
6.4. Attitudes to Britain’s two unions?
6.5. National identity and political attitudes
6.6. National identity and attitudes to Europe
6.7. Euroscepticism by vote intention (F=ANOVA by Euro vote intention)
6.8. Territorial grievance in Scotland, Wales, and England
7.1. The governance of England in party manifestos, 1997–2019
7.2. Regional-level governance in England since 1997—Timeline
Introduction
Englishness and the New British Politics
There is a forgotten, nay almost forbidden word, which means more to me than any other. That word is England. Once we flaunted it in the face of the whole world like a banner. It was a word of power. It humbled the pride of the tyrant, and brought hope and succour to the oppressed. To the lover of freedom it was the one sure rock amid shifting sand. But today we are scarcely allowed to mention the name of our country.
Winston Churchill (1974)
This is a blessed nation. The British are special. The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth.
Tony Blair (2007)
In the aftermath of the referendum vote to Leave the European Union on 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was plunged into political crisis. During the protracted period of disruption that followed, any talk of those traits that were once thought to characterize British politics—stability, continuity, moderation—came to appear hubristic at best. Rather, parliamentary gridlock and an almost unprecedented breakdown of party discipline intersected with an ever-more voracious media cycle to generate a succession of ‘decisive’ moments, none of which seemed to change much if anything at all. Multiple ministerial resignations, open dissent within the cabinet, and a parliament seeking to seize control of the legislative programme and timetable from the executive—any of which before the referendum would have been regarded as shocking—seemed to pass with little more than a shrug of the collective shoulders. It was a political system that combined febrile, feverish activity with almost complete paralysis—a negative dialectic that, all sides seem to agree, served to diminish the country’s much vaunted global reputation.
But this may have been one of the few things that did unite across a bitterly divided political landscape. For, in the wake of the referendum, a chasm opened up between two blocs, each regarding the other with mutual incomprehension leavened with no little distain. Members of these opposing blocs seemed to understand the world around them in fundamentally different ways. In such a context, ‘losers’ consent’ proved to be as rare and elusive as ‘Bregret’. Rather, questioning the patriotism (certainly) and even the sanity of the opposite side not only become commonplace but even socially acceptable. ‘Remoaners’ versus ‘Gammon’; ‘Saboteurs’ versus ‘Little Englanders’: it is perhaps not surprising that psychologists reported an uptick in Brexit-related referrals (Lockett 2016; Watts 2016; Kinder 2019; cf. Degerman 2019). Meanwhile, at the geopolitical level, the referendum result raised (and continues to raise) real questions about the very future of the state as a union of four constituent parts. A border poll in Northern Ireland and a second independence referendum in Scotland have come to be increasingly regarded as among the inevitable, if unintended, aftershocks of the seismic constitutional change brought about by Brexit.
Having largely failed to foresee the result of the Brexit referendum, commentators in both the media and the academy struggled to understand its aftermath, despite no lack of effort on their part. Quite the opposite, in fact. Old and new media outlets competed to provide microscopically detailed accounts of the latest developments across multiple different platforms. This was accompanied by an ever-burgeoning literature on the underlying causes of the referendum result itself, with multiple factors being identified as playing a key role, including: a rejection of austerity; the frustration of those ‘left behind’ by globalization; inherent racism and xenophobia; a sepia-tinted longing for Empire; diffuse nostalgia for the past among an older generation; opposition to mutual interdependence and concern for parliamentary sovereignty; and objections to the EU as a protectionist cabal. Yet, because 2016 and its aftermath seem to offer such a fundamental challenge to the established paradigms for understanding British politics, there remained a great deal of bafflement—and in many cases, anger—at what had occurred. Understanding remained incomplete and inchoate.
In this book, we offer a new perspective on the current remaking of British politics by focusing on what we regard as the motor force behind it—namely, Englishness. This perspective remains every bit as relevant in the aftermath of the UK general election of December 2019 as it was before it, not least because the Conservative Party’s decisive victory served to highlight the political divisions that exist across the four territories of the union. Even as
they inflicted a humiliating defeat on Labour in England, the Tories lost more than half of their own seats in Scotland, while Labour remained by some distance the largest party in Wales. In addition, the contrast between the Conservatives startling advance in the so-called red-wall seats in England profonde and Labour’s continuing strong performance in London, in particular, serves to underline the differences within England that we explore in the following pages. Furthermore, although the Conservative Party’s election slogan ‘get Brexit done’ served to secure a comfortable majority and hence end the parliamentary impasse, most if not all of the major questions around Britain’s future place in the world remain unanswered. As such, the fundamental differences in identities and related values and world views that drove the referendum result retain their defining importance.
Even if we have been pointing to the relationship between Englishness and Eurosceptic sentiment for longer than most, we are certainly not alone in making this link. Indeed, since 2016, the argument that English nationalism is somehow at the heart of the decision to leave the European Union has been heard relatively frequently. Yet the relationship remains contested and poorly understood, in part owing to the multiple ways in which the whole notion of English nationalism challenges prevailing assumptions.
Commentators on British politics have long assumed that there were no politically salient differences related to national identity within the English core of the United Kingdom. In England, choosing to describe oneself as British or English was generally regarded as being a matter of taste or, in particular, of context, rather than a matter of political consequence. So, while there has certainly been recognition that England is divided on the basis of class—indeed it was for many decades a staple of academic studies of electoral behaviour—little thought has been given to the possibility that there might be or might have developed national-identity-related differences too. To the extent that nationalism was considered at all, it was as a feature of political life in the state’s periphery—that is, in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. England and the English were different.
Not only that, but even when there has been a willingness to concede that English nationalism might exist, the specific nature and character of English nationalism has been poorly understood. This, arguably, is because for most observers it is precisely the nationalisms of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland that provide the natural point of reference and comparison. But, in their contemporary manifestations, at least, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh nationalists tend to reject Britain and Britishness. This is emphatically not the case for English
nationalism. As will become clear in the remainder of this book, English nationalism combines both concern about England’s place within the United Kingdom as well as fierce commitments to a particular vision of Britain’s past, present, and future. So, returning to the quotations at head of this Introduction, it combines a sense that England has been ‘forgotten’ and unfairly submerged, with the belief that Britain, self-evidently, is or should be ‘the greatest nation on earth’. Understanding its Janus-faced nature—both Churchill and Blair, as it were—is key not only to understanding English nationalism, but also to understanding the way that English nationalism is transforming British politics.
Until relatively recently, another barrier to understanding English nationalism has been the lack of available data with which to explore and elucidate the nature of English nationalist sentiment. For scholars such as ourselves, whose work makes extensive use of data from social attitudes surveys, this problem is especially acute. Such surveys are expensive undertakings and almost always reliant on external funding, funding that is, understandably enough, directed towards questions or issues that are deemed by funding organizations (and their academic advisers) to be of particular relevance or salience. Given that national identity was not considered a salient political cleavage within England, apart from a brief period around the advent of political devolution when some work sought to detect an ‘English backlash’ to constitutional change in the rest of the UK, there have been relatively few survey datasets available that might allow scholars to bring English nationalism into sharper focus.
This book draws on data from a survey vehicle established to facilitate an exploration of patterns of national identity in England and any relationship that might exist between those patterns and political and, in particular, constitutional attitudes. Working alongside our main collaborators, Charlie Jeffery and Dan Wincott, we fielded the first Future of England Survey (FoES) in 2011 and have repeated the exercise eight times since. The first three outings led to reports that were widely cited in the press and by political parties: The Dog that Finally Barked: England as an Emerging Political Community (Wyn Jones et al. 2012); England and its Two Unions: The Anatomy of a Nation and its Discontents (Wyn Jones et al. 2013); Taking England Seriously: The New English Politics (Jeffery et al. 2014). Since then, we have explored how Englishness helps us to understand developments in domestic politics as well as attitudes to Brexit (Henderson et al. 2016, 2017, 2020; Jeffery et al. 2016). Our goal here is larger. Using data from successive rounds of the FoES, we outline what we know about England and Englishness (and Britishness) and
how it is reshaping politics in Britain. Where relevant, we supplement our data with those from other surveys—for example, to show trends over time or to show how we depart from other survey vehicles.
The book’s argument is organized into eight chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the campaigns that preceded the 2015 UK General Election and the 2016 EU Referendum. In part this is because these two electoral events were clearly linked: it was the Conservatives’ unexpected victory in the former that paved the way for the latter. But both campaigns also highlight different aspects of the English nationalism that is discussed in the remainder of the book. In 2015, the Conservative campaign successfully mobilized English suspicion at the prospect of the influence of the Scottish National Party (SNP) over a minority Labour government—a suspicion rooted in a deep sense of English grievance about Scotland’s alleged unfairly privileged position within the union. Only a year later, England was hardly mentioned by the Leave campaign. Yet, as we shall see, in England, its vision of and for Britain appealed overwhelmingly to those with a strong sense of English identity but not, perhaps ironically, to those who feel exclusively or predominantly British.
In Chapter 2 we ask who are the English and where might they be found? Using different survey measures, we show that, even if English identity has strengthened since the early 1990s, those who view themselves as strongly English remain deeply attached to Britishness. We also demonstrate that, with the partial exception of London, there is very little regional variation in terms of patterns of national identity. There are, however, socio-economic and demographic differences. Older people, Anglicans, those in social class DE, and those born in England are all more likely to feel strongly or exclusively English. By contrast, younger voters, ‘non-white British’, and those born outside England are more likely to identify themselves as British.
Chapter 3 explores English attitudes to England and its place within the United Kingdom, attitudes that are strikingly different from those held by that proportion of England’s population that views itself in primarily or exclusively British terms. English identity is strongly linked to what we term devo-anxiety—namely, a belief that England is not treated fairly in the union as currently constructed, as well as support for the recognition of England as a unit within the UK state. In Chapter 4 we turn our attention to the other side of the English nationalist coin—namely, English views of Britain and its place in the world. We show how Euroscepticism and negative attitudes towards immigration are both prevalent among those who feel exclusively or predominantly English, as well as a strong sense of kinship with (some) of the nations of the so-called Anglosphere.
Linking together the analysis in the previous three chapters, Chapter 5 delineates what we term the ‘English world view’. Our argument is that English attitudes towards England’s place in the union and Britain’s place in the world are underpinned by a distinctive understanding of what constitutes legitimate government and that devolution and European integration offend, in part at least, because they offend against it. There is a clear sense among English identifiers that they no longer live in a state that is interested in them or acts on their behalves. We go on to demarcate more clearly those parts of England’s population that hold this world view.
The subsequent chapter, Chapter 6, shifts our focus beyond England and compares the attitudes found in England to the attitudes of other identity groups across Britain. We show that many of the attitudes that attach to Englishness in England attach to Britishness in Scotland and Wales. This serves to underline the key point that Britishness means different things in different parts of Britain. The views of the predominantly or exclusively British in England do not align with those of the predominantly or exclusively British in Scotland and Wales. At least on some of the issues explored in this book, they are in fact closer to the views of those in both countries who feel predominantly or exclusively Scottish and Welsh.
Following from these primarily data-driven chapters, Chapter 7 assesses the political challenges that arise in the context of the rise of English nationalism. In particular, we discuss the ways in which three constraints— the pattern of public attitudes in England, the institutional fusion of English and all-UK institutions, as well as the overwhelming size of England relative to the other constituent territories of the union—all serve to shape, limit, or undermine attempts to accommodate England within the postdevolution UK.
Finally, Chapter 8 focuses on the analytical challenges posed by English nationalism. We explore how the academic literature on nationalism helps us better to understand the politicized English identity that has been the subject of the previous chapters, including the relationship between English and British nationalism. We also outline methodological and, for want of a better term, infrastructural implications of our findings for the future study of ‘British politics’ if we are, indeed, to take England and Englishness seriously.
It has become commonplace—a cliché, even—for discussions of England and the political implications of Englishness to repeat the opening stanza of G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Secret People’ (1907):
Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget; For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.
Doing so again here serves to underline from the outset how our discussion is different from previous treatments of the subject. For Chesterton and most of those who cite these lines, Englishness is conceived of as a potential but not (yet) actual force in political life. The starting point for this book, by contrast, is the contention that England is speaking. Indeed, such is the power of this voice that British politics is currently being transformed as a result of its intervention. As such, it is not Chesterton’s words but rather those of another, altogether more significant poet that that now appear most relevant. In his Little Gidding, T. S. Eliot ([1942] 1971) says,
History is now and England.
1
England Speaks
The 2015 UK General Election and the 2016 EU Referendum
The moment at which England and, in particular, distinctively English attitudes towards the government and governance of their country were launched onto the mainstream British political agenda can be traced with unusual precision. At 7.00 a.m. on the morning of 19 September 2014, Prime Minister David Cameron emerged from the front door of 10 Downing Street to greet the result of Scotland’s independence referendum. After informing the world’s media that the future of Scotland’s relationship had been resolved, he went on to say this:
I have long believed that a crucial part missing from this national discussion is England. We have heard the voice of Scotland—and now the millions of voices of England must also be heard. The question of English votes for English laws [EVEL]—the so-called West Lothian question—requires a decisive answer. (Cameron 2016)
Scotland had had its moment in limelight; now it was to be England’s turn. Cameron’s decision to respond to the ostensible resolution of Scotland’s constitutional relationship with the United Kingdom by raising the issue of England’s governance was greeted with fury by Scottish unionists. Alistair Darling’s immediate reaction on being told by Cameron of his plans to use his post-referendum remarks to argue that moves to give Scotland more powers needed to be ‘balanced’ with a move to EVEL was to turn to his wife and proclaim: ‘He’s going to fuck it up’ (cited Pike 2015: 159). Gordon Brown’s assessment of ‘this most ill-judged of interventions’ and ‘political manoeuvring’ was less colourfully phrased but just as damning: ‘the Prime Minister’s statement was not a proposal for greater English rights, but for fewer Scottish rights . . . he lit a fuse that to this day still threatens the integrity of the United Kingdom’ (Brown 2015: 328). Scottish unionists’ sense of
resentment and even betrayal has continued to reverberate. During the 2016 EU referendum campaign, Brown refused to participate in a joint appearance of all living former UK prime ministers to champion a Remain vote because he was still so ‘bitter’ at Cameron’s decision to press the case for EVEL in the immediate aftermath of the Scottish referendum (Shipman 2016: 359).
Scottish unionists had many reasons to resent Cameron’s decision to greet the independence referendum result by raising the spectre of England. Timing was clearly one of them. The anomaly that lies at the heart of the West Lothian question had been identified as long ago as the debates over Irish home rule in the nineteenth century and had been endured in practice since the introduction of devolution in 1999. In this context, the prime minister’s decision to focus on it at the very moment of Scottish unionism’s referendum triumph appeared gratuitous. The substance of his position served only to add insult to injury. Following a campaign that had proven to be much more challenging and closely fought than most had expected, the Scottish politicians that had led the ‘Better Together’ anti-independence campaign were now confronted with the sight of a UK prime minister vocally championing a policy that they regarded as diminishing their own status at Westminster (Brown 2015: 329). The limitations of the argument dear to some No campaigners, that the rest of the UK would be so grateful if Scotland chose to remain in the union that it would be allowed to ‘dictate [the] terms’ of its future relationship, could hardly have been more immediately or brutally exposed (Rowling 2014).
But it is also hard not to detect a sense that Cameron was, in effect, highlighting a problem that did not really exist and doing so for the basest of motives. Many unionist politicians in Scotland and, indeed, Wales—especially those on the centre left—have been loath to accept that the English might wish to see a distinctive, all-England approach to territorial governance within the UK. They have been even more resistant to the idea that this might be a reasonable or legitimate political position. Rather they have viewed proposals for EVEL—the pronunciation of the acronym is evocative—as a crude attempt to bolster the position of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons. From this perspective, Cameron’s post-referendum statement on England was not only poorly timed, but entirely unnecessary and nakedly partisan (see Pike 2015: 158–66).
From the perspective of David Cameron and his advisers, however, it all appeared very different. During the fraught final weeks of the campaign, unionists had sought to counter apparent pro-Yes momentum by making ever more lavish rhetorical promises to the Scottish electorate about what an
alternative to independence within the UK might look like. Scotland, claimed Gordon Brown, would be left in a position ‘as near to federalism as is possible’ (cited in Macwhirter 2014: 124). This rhetoric was buttressed by the Brown-inspired ‘Vow’ printed on the front page of the tabloid Daily Record, which, inter alia, appeared to guarantee to Scotland in perpetuity relatively high levels of public spending compared to England, in particular. Notwithstanding their questionable impact in Scotland, this language and accompanying commitments generated substantial disquiet south of the border, particularly though far from exclusively among Conservative backbenchers. In their view, these promises had not been shared with let alone sanctioned by the English electorate, and they, as their parliamentary representatives, certainly did not agree with them.1
Given that speaking out at such a sensitive juncture would have been such an obvious gift to independence campaigners, self-discipline could be relied upon to ensure that this disquiet would be relatively muted during the referendum campaign itself. Downing Street was well aware, however, that it was set to spill out into the public realm once the union had been secured. In particular, Conservative backbenchers and their right-wing media allies were likely to use the apparent capitulation to ‘Better Together’—in many respects, the Brown government redux—as yet another stick with which to beat the prime minister. Indeed, such was the level of backbench disquiet that Cameron was threatened with ‘a rebellion to dwarf the past Commons revolts . . . over Europe’ (see Ross 2015: 142; also Laws 2017: 447; Cameron 2019: 555). It is important to note, in this regard, that the war inside the Conservative Party over Europe had not abated during the referendum campaign, and this despite the existential threat to England’s other union.
Barely three weeks before referendum day, the Conservative MP for Clacton, Douglas Carswell, had defected to UKIP and triggered a by-election.2 Rumours abounded that other defections were imminent (in the event, Mark Reckless would follow Carswell’s lead nine days after referendum day). Given that his more Eurosceptic backbenchers also tended to be among those most exercised at the way that England was (in their view) being ignored and even disadvantaged by the flurry of hurried concessions to Scotland, a failure by the prime minister to stand up for English interests was almost certain to be portrayed as yet another betrayal. But, by making it clear, immediately and in
1 Cf. Gordon Brown’s complaints (2015: 329) that Cameron’s proposals for EVEL had not been shared with the Scottish electorate before the independence referendum vote.
2 Carswell describes his politics as being ‘rooted in the tradition of English radicalism’, but his defection was apparently unrelated to what we term ‘devo-anxiety’ (Goodwin and Milazzo 2017: 126).
the highest profile of circumstances, that more powers for Scotland had to be balanced with the recognition of English aspirations—‘balance’ was the key word in his post-referendum remarks—Cameron would have hoped to close down one line of attack. At the same time he could also hope (perhaps optimistically) to contain any damage to the union that might result from less-measured attempts from his party colleagues to articulate English grievance.
There were other potential benefits to be gleaned from (metaphorically) waving the St George’s cross. Downing Street was already conscious of the link between English national identification and UKIP support.3 Demonstrating that the Conservatives, too, ‘got’ English disquiet might help shore up one flank at a time in which there was a real danger (from a Conservative perspective) of UKIP developing further momentum after gaining most votes in England in the European elections earlier in the year. On the other flank, speaking out in the name of English sentiment was also a way of differentiating the Tories from their Liberal Democrat coalition partners. It was, after all, the Liberal Democrats—more precisely, the vehement opposition of Scottish Liberal Democrat MPs—that had blocked the McKay Commission’s 2013 proposals for a form of EVEL.4 Labour was also vulnerable, given that party’s tortuously convoluted attitude towards England and Englishness. By claiming to amplify the ‘millions of voices of England’, Cameron (2016) could reasonably hope to reinforce his party’s position as the dominant electoral force in the union’s largest constituent nation.
Controversy about the motivations for and the appropriateness of the then prime minister’s decision to respond to the Scottish referendum result by linking the promise of more powers to Scotland with the recognition of English aspirations will, doubtless, continue to rage—north of the border, at least.5 But what is surely beyond doubt is that, by making this link, David
3 Not least because some of the prime minister’s advisers had been taking a close interest in data from the Future of England Survey (FoES), with members of the research team invited to provide briefings on our findings on several occasions in the run-up to the 2014 referendum.
4 The Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party’s meeting to discuss the McKay recommendations has been described as the ‘most difficult’ of its time in coalition, with Scottish Liberal Democrat MPs attending en masse to express their very strong opposition to any form of EVEL. (Interview with Joanne Foster, Deputy Chief of Staff to the Deputy Prime Minister, 2011–14.)
5 In his excupatory account of his time as prime minister, David Cameron (2019: 555) expresses qualified regret at his decision to raise the prospect of EVEL on the morning after the referendum: ‘The idea that I could have ignored the issue altogether is nonsense, but I now wish I’d left it until the party conference.’ But, given that the party conference to which he refers started only nine days later, it is far from clear that any such delay would have done much to placate the hostility of Scottish Unionists, some of whom—as we have seen—regard the very principle of EVEL as abhorrent.
Cameron was signalling his belief that a distinctive English sense of grievance about how England is governed was not only politically salient, but also (potentially) mobilizable. This assessment was essentially correct, as was to be amply demonstrated during the course of the general election campaign that would commence almost as soon as the votes of the Scottish independence referendum had been counted.
England and the 2015 UK General Election
When the serious academic study of voting behaviour in UK elections commenced around the 1964 general election, in political terms at least the United Kingdom could be viewed as forming ‘one nation’—one nation with two dominant political parties, each deeply entrenched on either side of a class divide and enjoying the loyal support of most members of ‘their’ respective classes (Butler and Stokes 1971). While a token smattering of Liberal holdouts representing peripheral, rural constituencies leavened the mix in the House of Commons, those seeking an understanding of electoral behaviour could largely ignore their supporters.6 Rather, in this world of ‘two-party politics’ and ‘uniform national swings’, studies could focus on class voting and its obverse, ‘class deviance’ (sic), confident that this captured by far the most important dimensions of electoral competition.
Territorial differences across the UK hardly featured at all. Even where they existed—and note, for example, that relative Conservative weakness in Scotland (compared to England) emerges at this time and in Wales long predates 1964—they had little impact on the overall ‘national result’ elections and could again be largely ignored (Wyn Jones et al. 2002; Wyn Jones and Scully 2015). Northern Ireland provided the only real exception, and indeed voters there were not asked to participate in the pioneering 1964 election study ‘mainly because [Northern Ireland] lies outside the mainstream of British party competition’ (Butler and Stokes 1971: 537). But, for those of a less rigorous bent than these early academic psephologists, even Northern Ireland could be viewed as part of the two-party system to an extent that is now barely imaginable. After all, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP)— which won all twelve northern Irish constituencies in the 1964 general
6 The Liberals returned nine MPs at the 1964 general election, eight of whom represented constituencies located either in or off the far north of Scotland (party leader, Jo Grimond, represented Orkney and Shetland), in mid-Wales, or in the south-west of England.
election—was umbilically linked to the Conservatives at Westminster (Walker and Mulvenna 2015). So, even though the UUP’s dominance of the six counties of Ulster reflected the influence of a very different social cleavage from that holding sway across (most) of the rest of the union, the territory was nonetheless fully integrated into the UK’s party system.
In retrospect, however, it appears that the 1964 general election took place around the high-water mark of this particular period in UK electoral history. Signs of the ebbing were already apparent. The one non-rural seat to return a Liberal MP in 1964, Orpington, located in London’s suburbia, had been gained by the party in a remarkable by-election coup two years previously—a moment now widely regarded, in retrospect, as having heralded the start of the Liberal revival and the rise of three-party politics in England. The tide was subsequently to recede with remarkable rapidity. In 1966, Labour secured a scarcely credible 60.7 per cent of the votes cast in Wales in the May general election, returning thirty-two out of thirty-six MPs. Yet only two months later the party went on to lose the Carmarthen by-election to Plaid Cymru, signalling an abrupt change in the electoral fortunes of Welsh and then—after the 1967 Hamilton by-election—Scottish nationalism. By October 1974, the SNP, now securing 30.4 per cent of the popular vote in Scotland, was winning in constituencies where, only a decade before, it could not even muster a candidate. The same election offered graphic evidence of the depth of the rupture between the Conservatives and their erstwhile Ulster Unionist allies when Enoch Powell was elected as the UUP MP for South Down, Powell having previously left the Conservatives and even advocated a vote for Labour because of his former party’s (then) pro-Common Market stance—a harbinger, perhaps, of future Conservative agonies over ‘Europe’.
To compare the results of the 1964 and 2015 general elections is to underline just how much electoral politics in the UK has changed over the previous half century and in particular how one ‘national’ electorate had become four national electorates. In 2015, for the first time in the UK’s democratic history (but repeated twice since), four different parties topped the polls in the state’s four different constituent territories. These results were presaged by campaigns that were not only nationally distinctive to an extent that had also not been seen before, but also based on stressing national divisions.
Territorial differentiation is, of course, part and parcel of general-election campaigning in the UK. The first-past-the-post (or single member plurality) system used to elect members of the House of Commons encourages a ‘target-seat’ approach, whereby certain constituencies are accorded significantly higher priority by political parties than other, non-target seats. Campaigners
