In contrast, the survey research presented in thorough and convincing detail by Henderson and Wyn Jones shows that it was self-described English people who most strongly wanted to leave the European Union. (‘Eng-exit’ would have been a more appropriate name, but was even uglier than ‘Brexit’, so the latter stood.) This Englishness maps onto other forms of political discontent that include resentment towards Scotland, anti-immigration attitudes, and negative views of the British state. Thus, the type of European disintegration we saw from 2016 to 2020 was itself a product of British disintegration.

Leave Means Leave Rally on the day the UK was supposed to leave the European Union, 29 March 2019 (Paul Smyth/Alamy)

The authors provide a convincing and eloquent explanation of this politicisation of Englishness, which was for a long time conceptualised as an absence: a political void where something ought to be, but wasn’t. But this was because Englishness was merged with narratives and symbols of Britishness. As the authors rightly point out in their research on the ‘English world view’, English identifiers link their identity to ‘British’ institutions (the National Health Service, the monarchy), ‘British’ narratives of the past (World War II, the empire), and a British ‘kith and kin’ hierarchy of which nationalities make the least offensive immigrants (Australia comes out quite well in this world view and gets a guernsey as a ‘natural’ friend and ally of post-Brexit Britain).

This starts to explain the nostalgia that many commentators noted was a salient element of post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’. For Henderson and Wyn Jones, Englishness is a radical conservativism that seeks to change constitutional orders in order to preserve a particular world view. The authors cite Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s succinct expression of conservatism to explain this phenomenon: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’

The percentage of people who see themselves as ‘more English than British’ or ‘English, not British’ has risen notably since the 1990s: from thirty-one per cent in 1992 to forty-one per cent in 2016. But something else significant has happened too: Henderson and Wyn Jones found that the number of people identifying as exclusively British trended downwards in England from sixty-three per cent in 1992 to forty-nine per cent in 2016. This downward shift matters because the historical records tell us that when polities disintegrate it is the core that drives this disintegration, rather than the periphery. The USSR collapsed not when Estonia declared independence but when the Russians stopped believing in the USSR. Similarly, the Ottoman Empire was not felled by external invasion and internal uprising from the peripheries, but when Turkish élites abandoned it.

This decline in feeling British is in inverse proportion to the language of Britishness that comes from the UK government. Therefore, the official rhetoric requires some decoding. Brexit was not just about leaving the EU; it involved attempts to keep the United Kingdom united when the four nations’ differing votes to remain suggested disintegration. The current rhetoric of Britishness is best seen as a discursive attempt to reunite the kingdoms, particularly in relation to the renewed push for Scottish independence and the possibility of Irish reunification. This discursive integration leaves us with a historic inversion: people used to say ‘England’ when they meant ‘Britain’; now they say ‘Britain’ when they mean ‘England’.

But there is a significant caveat to this: Britain and Britishness no longer mean the same thing across the United Kingdom. As the authors note, ‘It may well be that a unified understanding of Britain and Britishness has disintegrated.’ While identifying as British in England was code for a pluralist, pro-Remain identity, in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland the opposite tended to be the case.

The idea that national identity is the cause of political change is a corrective to dominant political science explanations that see a strangely disembodied ‘identity politics’ at the root of this political upheaval. It cannot be denied that the 2010s were a turbulent time in British politics, as elsewhere. Voter disengagement, de-alignment, re-engagement, and re-alignment were notable drivers of the political shifts that resulted in Brexit. But the question remains: what was driving these changes? It is notable that since 2010 there have been different parties in government in all four nations of the United Kingdom: the Conservatives and LibDems in England, the Scottish National Party in Scotland, Labour-led coalitions in Wales, and Unionist-Nationalist power-sharing administrations in Northern Ireland. The Labour Party has not won a general election in England since 2001, raising the question of whom it represents: socially conservative blue-collar working families or more progressive tertiary-educated urban dwellers? Although the Conservatives pulled a rabbit out of the Brexit hat, this victory papers over an important internal division: the grassroots gave up on the United Kingdom a long time ago, whereas the parliamentary party and England’s right-wing media are rhetorically more British than ever, despite a weakening attachment to the Unionist community in Northern Ireland.

The data presented was drawn from 2015 and 2016, so it would be useful to follow the analysis through to 2017 and 2019 and after, especially England during the pandemic. Readers will have to make their own inferences about this period. However, the main argument holds: a politicised English national identity is transforming British politics and with it the United Kingdom. It puts to bed the idea that English nationalism does not exist while providing a cautionary tale about ignoring majority national sentiment and allowing political entrepreneurs to fill the space. Englishness can be hard to spot because it has to negotiate its symbolic repertoire with other nations and the institutions of the British state. By focusing on England as an extant political community, this is a piece of analysis that doesn’t miss the English wood for the British trees.