Richard English, Richard Hayton and Michael Kenny1 Englishness ...

Government and Opposition, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 343–365, 2009 

doi:10.1111/j.1477-7053.2009.01292.x 

Richard English, Richard Hayton and 

Michael Kenny 1 

Englishness and the Union in 

Contemporary Conservative Thoughtgoop_1292 343..365 

ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING DEVELOPMENTS IN CONTEMPORARY 

British politics has been the re-emergence into prominence of the 

‘English question’. This phrase signals both the complexity of constitutional 

issues raised by the post-1997 devolutionary arrangements 

introduced in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and also the 

recent trend towards re-examining and celebrating the specific heritage 

and character of the English. The contemporary growth and 

prominence of English cultural identity have been widely discussed in 

scholarship and journalism during the late 1990s and early 2000s. 2 

Central to these discussions are institutional questions regarding the 

fiscal burden that the UK places upon England, the issue of whether 

1 The authors are grateful to the Nuffield Foundation for funding the research 

behind this paper, and also to the UK Political Studies Association, which sponsored 

our presentation of a version of this paper at the 2008 American Political Science 

Association Annual Meeting in Boston. We would also like to thank those who helpfully 

commented on an earlier draft of the piece, including Arthur Aughey, James Cronin, 

Andrew Gamble, Krishan Kumar, Guy Lodge and James Mitchell. 

2 See, for example, Arthur Aughey, The Politics of Englishness, Manchester, Manchester 

University Press, 2007; Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People, 

London, Michael Joseph, 1998; Simon Heffer, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of 

England, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999; Selina Chen and Tony Wright (eds), 

The English Question, London, Fabian Society, 2000; Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy, 

London, Pimlico, 2001; Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000, 

London, Macmillan, 2002; Robert Hazell (ed.), The English Question, Manchester, 

Manchester University Press, 2006; Billy Bragg, The Progressive Patriot: A Search for 

Belonging, London, Black Swan, 2006; Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National 

Identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Peter Mandler, The English 

National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, New Haven, 

CT, and London, Yale University Press, 2006; and Mark Perryman (ed.), Imagined 

Nation: England After Britain, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 2008. 

© The Authors 2009. Journal compilation © 2009 Government and Opposition Ltd 

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main 

Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

344 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION 

or not devolution represents a step towards an independent Scotland, 

and the matter of whether the multination UK state has a viable 

future in the context of pressures towards further European integration. 

For conservatives, these interwoven cultural and institutional 

dimensions of the English question pose difficult challenges. The 

right might be considered the natural home for many who reassert 

a distinctively English cultural, national pride; yet conservatives 

have traditionally defined themselves according to a broader British 

patriotism and an attachment to revered institutions, such as Crown 

and Parliament, which have transcended Englishness. 3 

In this article, we examine the arguments of three commentators 

associated with the political right – Simon Heffer, Peter Hitchens and 

Roger Scruton – with a view to illuminating the different paths that 

conservative thinking has taken in relation to the English question 

and the contemporary Union. The three figures under scrutiny have 

been chosen for several reasons. Their arguments reflect the diversity 

of conservative responses to the English (and British) question, and 

the deep divisions present on the political right within such debates. 

Their writings on the relation between Englishness and Britishness 

have been presented to a broad set of audiences: this forces recognition 

that the discomfort caused by the English–British question 

extends far beyond the academic intellectual or party political 

realms. These three figures’ varying concerns and arguments provide 

clarifying lenses through which to read very important political 

subjects – subjects sometimes obscured from academic debate 

because of too narrow a focus on party political or intra-academic 

positions. Furthermore, this analysis can be located in relation to a 

broader field of academic inquiry into the degree to which intellectual 

thinking has changed during recent decades in Britain. 4 

Heffer and Hitchens fit conventional notions of what constitutes 

an ‘intellectual’ in the loosest sense only, although a case can certainly 

be made for Roger Scruton being considered as one. 5 But 

3 Philip Norton, ‘The Constitution’, in Kevin Hickson (ed.), The Political Thought 

of the Conservative Party Since 1945, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 93. 

4 Julia Stapleton, Political Identities and Public Intellectuals in Britain since 1850, 

Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001, p. 189. 

5 He certainly fits the definition developed in a major recent study of intellectuals 

in Britain: Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Modern Britain, Oxford, Oxford 

University Press, 2007. 

© The Authors 2009. Journal compilation © 2009 Government and Opposition Ltd

ENGLISHNESS AND THE UNION 

even as opinionated members of the ‘commentariat’, Heffer and 

Hitchens are illustrative of broader trends and developments in 

national intellectual culture and conservative thinking in particular. 

Heffer has authored a well-regarded biographical study of Enoch 

Powell. 6 He and Hitchens are also authors of widely read books about 

national identity and public morality that are addressed at a broad 

reading public. 7 They are important shapers of opinion on the political 

right. Our assessment of them does not turn upon any assumption 

about their decisive political or academic influence, but aims to 

demonstrate that their thinking deserves serious critical scrutiny 

because of their salience and popular resonance in an area of 

profound political significance. 

SIMON HEFFER: TORY ENGLISHNESS 

345 

Prominent among those influentially engaging with the re-emergent 

English question is the leading right-wing commentator Simon 

Heffer, who has expressed his disaffection regarding post-1997 devolution 

in typically crisp terms: 

No one had said, ‘Do you want an English Parliament?’ No one had said, ‘Do 

you want a special forum in which Englishness can be a big part of the debate 

and could be the sole consideration?’ That didn’t happen. ...Ifelt not just 

that I was being denied an identity. I felt that I was being denied proper 

participation in what was now a reconstituted democracy of these islands. 

That the Scots had a Parliament and they sent people to Westminster to 

interfere in our domestic arrangements; and the Welsh had an Assembly – 

ditto. I realized I didn’t mind not having a say in what was happening in 

Scotland, but there had to be a quid pro quo for that, and that meant that the 

Scots didn’t have a say in what went on here. 8 

Part of Heffer’s argument here relies on an English pride and 

confidence, based in turn on a recognition that Englishness is the 

dominant strain within Britain: ‘Englishness is probably, should be, 

6 Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London, Weidenfeld & 

Nicolson, 1998. 

7 Heffer, Nor Shall My Sword; Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: From Winston 

Churchill to Princess Diana, London, Quartet Books, 2000. 

8 Simon Heffer, interviewed by Richard English and Michael Kenny, London, 5 

March 2007. See also Simon Heffer, ‘A Tory Answer to the West Lothian Question’, 

Daily Telegraph, 30 November 2005. 



85 percent of Britishness’. 9 But an important aspect of Heffer’s own 

argument lies in the very personalized form of cultural awakening in 

which he has been involved since the later 1990s: 

I became interested in this question in the summer of 1996. I’m not interested 

at all in football, but that was the year when England was supposed 

to win some sort of European Championship [Euro ’96]. And I suddenly 

noticed as I went around England, particularly around the South East, the 

flag of St. George, which I had only seen in my lifetime on church towers, was 

suddenly appearing all over the place as a badge. And a lot of people felt very 

uneasy about this, and I realized that they associated Englishness with oppression. 

Because we are the majority people in these islands – I think we are 85 

percent of the population of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – because 

of that we are forced as English people into a constant position of defensiveness 

about the way we have allegedly imposed our will and our values on 

everybody else. And when I started to talk to people – friends of mine who 

are interested in football, who understand football – a lot of them said, ‘You 

know, it’s not just that we want the English football team to win. It’s that if you 

think about our friends who are Scottish or Welsh . . . they seem to have no 

problem in being Scottish or Welsh. But we have a bit of a problem in being 

English, or thinking of ourselves as English.’ And I suddenly realized –Ihad 

a sort of Kierkegaardian revelation – that actually my identity as a citizen was 

not a British identity: it was an English identity. And I am very English. My 

family is English on both sides as far back as you can go ...Ibegan to realize 

that I was very English. 10 

Such a position inevitably influences Heffer’s attitude towards the 

broader cultural shape of Britain: ‘We are not a multicultural society. 

We are a monocultural one tolerant of other cultures.’ 11 It is also 

self-evidently based on a profoundly historical conception of English 

culture and identity. In particular, Heffer has drawn heavily in his 

writings on cultural portraits, for example in his study of the ‘deliberately’ 

English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams – a study that 

presents its subject explicitly as a cultural nationalist, and which 

9 Heffer, interviewed by English and Kenny. Scholarly opinion reinforces such a 

view. The English, observes Krishan Kumar, ‘always remained the dominant group in 

the making and the maintenance of the empire (as of the United Kingdom). Hence 

they could think of it, rightly or wrongly, as “their” empire – or, at least, they could take 

pride in what they could consider a predominantly English creation, in the sense that 

it was mainly English culture that was spread worldwide through the empire’ (Krishan 

Kumar to Richard Hayton and Michael Kenny, April 2007). Cf. ‘The other British 

nations clung to their national identities as a kind of compensation for, or counterweight 

against, the predominant role of the English in the United Kingdom’ (Kumar, 

The Making of English National Identity, p. 187). 

10 Heffer, interviewed by English and Kenny. 

11 Simon Heffer, ‘Britain is an Old Country and our Ways Deserve Respect’, Daily 

Telegraph, 7 June 2006. 



347 

emphasizes the importance of the cultural dimensions of Englishness, 

whether Anglican Protestantism, folk song, rural landscape, 

history or heritage. 12 Heffer has also made significant contributions 

to the scholarly understanding of modern conservative thinking 

and British elite culture. 13 Such interventions have helped him 

provide an historical inflection to the anti-liberal hostility of the 

right-wing newspapers for which he writes. And, for Heffer, national 

decline can be directly linked to the spread of liberal orthodoxies: 

‘The seeds of Britain’s decline were propagated in England, not least 

by English liberals of the twentieth century ...whose guilt complexes 

and underdeveloped thought processes brought a welfare state and 

numerous other forms of crippling self-indulgence’. 14 

As a well-known right-wing political journalist and polemicist, 15 

Heffer has repeatedly expressed profound disaffection with the direction 

pursued by the Conservative Party leadership since Margaret 

Thatcher’s resignation as prime minister, and it is in this context that 

his arguments about Englishness and Britishness are especially revealing. 

For Heffer’s assertions have at times been stark in relation to the 

UK, as with his comments in 2007 concerning the end of the Union: 

‘The Union is over, morally at least. When Scotland voted for devolution 

in 1997 the Union fell into a coma ...England and Scotland 

will only ever be happy together if they are politically apart.’ 16 

Heffer first made his call to break the Union in 1999, eloquently 

stated in Nor Shall My Sword – an attempt to rouse the English from 

their slumbers, and to accentuate a newly rising tide of Englishness. 

Heffer is adamant that the revival of the latter is integrally connected 

to, and perhaps propelled by, the likelihood of further radical 

constitutional change. He therefore provides a forceful justification 

12 Simon Heffer, Vaughan Williams, Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2001, 

pp. 1, 7, 16, 23, 30–1, 65, 98, 143, 148. 

13 Simon Heffer, Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle, London, Weidenfeld & 

Nicolson, 1995; Simon Heffer, Power and Place: The Political Consequences of King Edward 

VII, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998; Heffer, Like the Roman. 

14 Heffer, Nor Shall My Sword, p.52. 

15 He joined the Daily Telegraph in 1986, and then was appointed in 1991 as deputy 

editor and political correspondent of the Spectator. He subsequently became a columnist 

for both the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail. From 1994–5 he became deputy 

editoroftheDaily Telegraph and one of its leading columnists. 

16 Simon Heffer, ‘End the Pretence: The Union of England and Scotland is Over’, 

Daily Telegraph, 14 November 2007. 



for a programme of cultural Anglicization, in preparation for such an 

eventuality. In one sense, he expresses contemporary conservative 

hostility to the devolutionist constitutional arrangements established 

by post-1997 Labour administrations. But he also embodies a striking 

departure from traditional conservative positions in his argument 

that the break-up of the Union is both inevitable and, in various 

respects, necessary for England’s revival. 

Nor Shall My Sword argues that England represents a perfectly 

viable independent territorial and political entity. Throughout the 

book Heffer bewails various blocks to the recognition of this fact, and 

outlines the mental reconfiguration that is required for those who 

inhabit England to embrace and deepen their cultural (and indeed 

ethnic) sense of Englishness. Frustratingly for him, ‘many in England 

instinctively persist in the notion that the English nation would in 

some sense be inadequate alone’, and he seeks to disabuse them of 

this deep-seated notion. 17 Consequently the Union of England with 

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – a Union that has for so long 

been seen by its critics as a bulwark for English hegemony, and for 

England’s values and interests – is strikingly re-presented here as 

the source of the latter’s problems. Rather than fearing the demise 

of Britain, the English should wake up to this prospect and embrace 

the possibilities it presents. However, for England to work as a 

political society and sovereign territorial state, there needs to be a 

conscious attempt to promote and deepen a sense of pride and 

self-consciousness among its people. 

PETER HITCHENS: THE BRITISH DEMISE 

A very different brand of right-wing argument concerning Englishness, 

Britishness and the UK has been propounded in forthright 

terms by the writer and broadcaster Peter Hitchens. 18 In his newspaper 

columns and books in recent years, Hitchens has been preoccupied 

with what he considers the profound decline of morality in 

modern Britain. He reads this as a phenomenon of huge importance 

during the past half-century, but one with much older origins: 

17 Heffer, Nor Shall My Sword, p.57. 

18 For many years a regular columnist at the Daily Express, Hitchens currently writes 

for the Mail on Sunday and appears frequently on the broadcast media. 



349 

I think it has its roots in the religious doubts of the nineteenth century which 

spread from the intellectual and university-educated classes to become much 

more widespread, and of course which were enormously increased by the 

First World War, which destroyed almost everybody’s faith in almost everything 

they had believed in before. And when people don’t have an ethic 

that they can believe in that restrains them, or gives them any reason to 

restrain themselves from self-centred behaviour, then self-centred behaviour 

becomes more common. 19 

According to Hitchens, moral decay lies at the heart of the processes 

shaping Britain’s more general demise. In a widely publicized 

polemic against the modernization of cultural and social life, he 

pinpoints ‘a deep shift in the way the British people view themselves, 

their past and their future. Fewer each day now consider themselves 

to be British.’ 20 There are echoes here of some scholarly arguments of 

recent years, about broad trends in popular opinion and national 

self-understanding. 21 But Hitchens’s argument has a particularly disaffected 

and polemical tone. He contrasts the fading of the imperial 

age (symbolized by the funeral of Winston Churchill) with an event 

that he takes to be emblematic of all the mistaken modernity of 

contemporary cultural life (the ersatz public mourning for Diana, 

Princess of Wales). 

Unlike Simon Heffer, Hitchens laments the fact that the future of 

Britishness appears gloomy: ‘It grows increasingly difficult to see how 

Britishness could be saved. Nonetheless, I think that it’s important 

that we should regret its passing.’ Why? Because the identities of the 

constituent nations of the UK prosper best together: 

They’re complementary parts of the same organism, and Britain has been 

severely lacking in certain important qualities since the Republic of Ireland 

broke away, and particularly since the European Union made what had up 

until then been a symbolic departure a real departure, and it is a loss. I also 

think that the highpoint of this country’s political development took place 

when the two islands were entirely united. 22 

This clearly has significance for conservative politics itself. ‘I think 

conservatism is Unionist or it is nothing ...Once the Conservatives 

19 Peter Hitchens, interviewed by Richard English and Michael Kenny, London, 

5 March 2007. 

20 Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain, p.v. 

21 Weight, Patriots, pp. 1, 10; Arthur Aughey, Nationalism, Devolution and the 

Challenge to the United Kingdom State, London, Pluto Press, 2001, p. vii. 

22 Hitchens, interviewed by English and Kenny. 



ceased to be a powerful Unionist force in Scotland, they became 

irrelevant, likewise in Wales ...Butalso I just think that Scotland, 

Wales and Ireland bring important things to the country.’ 23 So, again 

in contrast to Heffer, Hitchens is uneasy about the renewed emphasis 

upon the distinct nations and national identities that co-exist within 

Britain: he regards the turn towards the ‘narrower loyalties of the 

UK’s smaller nations’ as entirely regrettable. 24 Simultaneously, 

however, he slips unselfconsciously between references to Britain 

and English values when propounding his nostalgic account of the 

nation’s lost heritage. In his mind, emphasis upon England is merely 

one more unfortunate instance of the profound transformation in 

the national self-understandings and moral character of the peoples 

who inhabit Britain. 25 

There is no doubting Hitchens’s reluctance to enthuse over a 

resurgent sense of English pride as such. Of Englishness itself, he 

comments: 

Well, I feel it and to some extent also I fear it, because it’s more exclusive. 

Britishness, by being multi-national, is actually accessible. An immigrant 

person can come here and become British . . . Englishness – you’ve either 

got it or you haven’t got it, it seems to me. It’s more exclusive. I think there’s 

a danger that in encouraging Englishness, you encourage nationalism rather 

than patriotism. 26 

Is it his view that Englishness possesses a more chauvinistic 

dimension? ‘Well, it has that capacity because it’s visceral, whereas 

Britishness is more thoughtful, it seems to me. Britishness contains 

everything that Englishness contains.’ 27 

There is an unshakeable air of gloom about Hitchens’s analysis, as 

he laments growing criminality and moral permissiveness alike. 28 He 

seems determined to be a Cassandra-like figure: a prophet of disaster 

whom readers enjoy hearing without necessarily heeding. His declinist 

stance shows no particular hope of redemptive recovery, given 

his totalizing critique of the state of the current Conservative Party 

and his deeply pessimistic analysis of contemporary political morality. 

23 Ibid. 

24 Hitchens, Abolition of Britain, p.xxii. 

25 Ibid., p. vi. 

26 Hitchens, interviewed by English and Kenny. 

27 Ibid. 

28 Peter Hitchens, A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in 

England, London, Atlantic Books, 2003. 



However, Hitchens does fit a familiar pattern of declinist writers 

on the politics of nationhood, 29 his fears for contemporary Britain 

reflecting an exceptionalist view of English/British development 

drenched with longing for a return to a lost golden age, and infused 

with the fear that the trajectory of social change is moving inexorably 

away from a traditionally defined morality. 

Hitchens is in some ways an atypical figure: an idiosyncratic 

blend of former Trotskyite, British patriot, rural romantic and 

1950s moralist (his support for the conservative moral orthodoxies 

of yesteryear, including capital and corporal punishment, make him 

a favourite of TV and radio producers). Yet he can also be placed 

within the cantankerous family of anti-liberal declinist commentators, 

an assembly of figures who throughout the twentieth century 

have proclaimed the demise of the nation. Not untypically among 

such commentators, he despairs of nearly all the conventional remedies 

offered for the social problems he dissects in garish detail. 30 

ROGER SCRUTON: AN ELEGY FOR ENGLISHNESS 

351 

Roger Scruton is one of England’s most prominent public intellectuals. 

31 A central theme within his scholarly and public writings has 

been the cultural basis and political character of Englishness. He is 

sceptical about the cultural state of Britishness (‘things had moved on 

so much that the whole concept of Britain had been thrown into 

disarray. It had become quite apparent that there is no such cultural 

entity any more’ 32 ); but his thoughtful writings on Englishness reflect 

a dual sense that this is both a phenomenon worthy of celebration, 

and also one which has now been substantially destroyed: hence his 

elegiac portrait. 33 

29 Richard English and Michael Kenny, ‘Public Intellectuals and the Question of 

British Decline’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3 (2001), pp. 259–83. 

30 For an analysis of this genre, see English and Kenny, ‘Public Intellectuals’, 

pp. 270–6. 

31 Born in 1944, Scruton was formerly a professor at Birkbeck College, London; 

but he has established his position as a leading philosopher in tandem with the roles 

of novelist and composer, while his frequent BBC appearances have reflected and 

reinforced his commitment to wide-ranging cultural and political comment. 

32 Roger Scruton, interviewed by Richard English and Richard Hayton, London, 

25 June 2008. 

33 Scruton, England: An Elegy. 



An attachment to the idea of England has always been at the 

heart of English/British conservatism. As Scruton commented, ‘I 

don’t think you can be a conservative in the end without being some 

kind of nationalist. You are always going to have in the back of your 

mind a conception of the community whose structure you are trying 

to retain.’ 34 Scruton’s conservative philosophy draws upon Burke, 

Hegel, Oakeshott and Hayek, rejecting universalism and preferring 

instead a politics based on human instinct. In a Burkean compact 

between the living, the dead and the unborn, trust is placed in our 

collective inheritance, particularly in the form of societal organizations, 

practices and traditions, the law and the constitution. A sense 

of place and territorial loyalty is therefore central to identity. For 

Scruton, that place and identity is England, which is ‘shared not as 

a reality so much as an ideal which constantly impacts on reality’. 35 

Central to this ideal is the countryside, which has defined the 

English sense of home and belonging. Scruton eulogizes this lost idyll 

and bemoans the commensurate erosion of identity, but also detects 

pockets of resistance: ‘rumours of the death of the countryside are 

exaggerated, but it is certainly changing in character and there are 

lots and lots of pressures on it’. 36 Echoing Heffer and Hitchens, he 

argues that some of England’s worst enemies can be found within – 

namely the liberal left and the Labour Party. New Labour, he comments, 

‘inherits from Old Labour an anti-English stance’, epitomized 

by the ban on fox-hunting. As he commented on the ban: 

Primarily it was regarded as a way of attacking the old English settlement, on 

the understanding that fox-hunting is first of all an English pursuit; secondly 

that it is absolutely integral to the country way of life; and thirdly largely 

supported by the upper class. You can put together a picture which makes it 

a target of those kinds of attitude. But the very reason that it was a target 

suggests that indeed the English are not that dead – why should people target 

something that doesn’t exist? 37 

Immigration has similarly been used ‘as a foil against the English 

by their enemies’, particularly by ‘the Ken Livingstone types who live 

in a culture of repudiation towards the English idea’. Immigration, 

Scruton argues, ‘provides them with a very interesting way of 

34 Roger Scruton, interviewed by Richard English and Richard Hayton, London, 

25 June 2008. 

35 Ibid. 

36 Ibid. 

37 Ibid. 



delegitimizing England: the idea that it should be multicultural not 

monocultural, and it’s not because of the intrinsic racism of the 

English’. The cultural shift wrought by immigration has played an 

important part in undermining the viability of his cherished vision 

of England. Yet it also has had a role in heightening awareness of 

the idea: ‘as people have been waking up to the problems of a large 

Islamic minority it has become even more in people’s minds that 

this is not something that is easily reconcilable with our inherited 

way of doing things’. The political process of devolution is also 

central to the growing public sense of Englishness, even though it 

too constitutes a harmful assault. Behind the politics of devolution, 

Scruton argues, ‘there was also a whole culture of devolution’ based 

on Celtic resentment. ‘That process I think awoke people to the 

idea of England, for how do we explain this political process without 

this idea?’ 38 

The effect of devolution is to lay bare the interdependent relationship 

between Englishness and Britishness. Differing markedly from a 

tendency in academic analysis to emphasize the accommodating and 

underdeveloped character of Englishness in relation to the British 

imperial ideal, 39 Scruton argues that Britishness and the empire were 

ultimately projections of a prior sense of Englishness: 

I think under the British Empire it wasn’t so much that Englishness got 

replaced by Britishness, but that it got adopted by other people – in particular 

by the Northern Irish, and by the Scots and the Welsh too. The 

imperial enterprise brought them all under the same banner, very much 

like the idea of Rome in the Roman Empire. It wasn’t a multicultural idea 

at all, it was a monocultural ideal, focused on the imperial city and the 

culture that prevailed there. I think that is one of the misunderstandings, 

partly due to the domination of the discussion of all of this by people on 

the left. The anti-imperial impetus behind it has led people not to see that 

actually empires offer something to the people that join them, namely an 

identity that they might not otherwise have had, and that identity, I think, 

was England. 40 

Britishness cannot therefore contain the multiple nationalisms of 

the English and revanchist Celts, making the prospect of an accommodation 

of Englishness within Britain almost impossible. Sovereignty 

has also been ceded to the European Union, to the extent 

that ‘the English are no longer a sovereign people, and their law is 

38 Ibid. 

39 For example Kumar, English National Identity. 

40 Scruton, interviewed by English and Hayton. 

353 



no longer their own’. 41 Globalization and urbanization have subverted 

the established order in which locality defined allegiance. 

The cardinal place of the Church of England – ‘the operative word 

there is not Church, but England’ 42 – has withered; with it, the unity 

of nationality, religion and the English language has been lost. 

Sovereignty, unity, Anglicanism, countryside, locality, cultural 

gentleness, legal responsibility and freedom, parliamentary representation, 

serious culture: all have been eroded. So Scruton’s argument 

demonstrates the way in which discussion of Englishness can 

become a vehicle for the expression of attachment to a broader set 

of conservative political values. In this respect, there are clear continuities 

between the styles of conservative argument of such figures 

as John Betjeman and Arthur Bryant in the inter-war years, and a 

figure such as Scruton. 43 

Scruton’s projection of England does not sit easily with his 

defence of the nation-state more generally. He has the problem – 

perhaps generic to the new Anglo-conservatism – that positing an 

independent culture of Englishness and calling for a new political 

settlement in the United Kingdom invariably means a radical adjustment 

of the constitutional order associated with the unitary British 

state, which has remained a fixity within conservative thinking for 

well over a century. Scruton needs to locate and defend a plausible 

distinction between what is English and what is British, both culturally 

and in terms of state architecture. His frequent invocations 

of the Irish-born Burke and Wilde, in order to exemplify some 

deeply English characteristic, hints tellingly at this problem. Similarly, 

while the Westminster Parliament is in England, it was – and 

indeed remains –aUKrather than an English institution. Again 

and again, the phenomena celebrated by Scruton as key components 

of Englishness turn out to possess a clear British dimension. 

Scruton’s dream of detaching a pristine English culture from 

British traditions and its other national cultures ultimately founders 

upon the historical complexity shaping the relationship between 

England and Britain. 

41 Scruton, England: An Elegy, p. 251. 


43 Julia Stapleton, ‘Cultural Conservatism and the Public Intellectual in Britain, 

1930–70’, European Legacy, 5 (2000), pp. 795–814. 



CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATISM AND THE UNION 

355 

Four main points emerge from consideration of Heffer’s, Hitchens’s 

and Scruton’s arguments about Englishness and Britishness. First, 

their sustained, highly visible and resonant engagement with this 

complex problem highlights and reinforces its growing significance 

in UK politics: the disaffection of many with England’s place in a 

reconfigured Union, and the particular difficulty this causes for those 

on the traditionally Unionist right. Opinion poll evidence attests 

to the existence of popular disaffection, 44 but the arguments of 

the three commentators under scrutiny in this article illuminate its 

complex texture and the diverse nature of responses on the right. 

Asymmetrical devolution has brought with it renewed controversy 

about the West Lothian question, and also about the differential sums 

of public money spent in the constituent parts of the UK. 45 For 

conservatives, in particular, the fraying of a traditionally harmonious 

English/British relationship has been disconcerting, threatening to 

unravel the understanding of the state upon which their political 

thinking has traditionally been based. 

As the self-proclaimed national party, the Conservative Party has 

traditionally defended the Union and opposed devolution, as ‘for 

much of the last three centuries, belief in nation was synonymous 

with a belief in the Union’. 46 The patriotic Britishness with which 

Conservatives identified ‘drew heavily upon English traditions, 

notably the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and a Whig history 

of progress and exceptionalism, plus the values and interests of an 

Anglicized elite’. 47 Now, as the model of a sovereign unitary state and 

a monocultural society wanes, the Conservatives face a conundrum. 

Confronted with cultural and constitutional challenges, should they 

seek to extricate English identity from a Britishness with which they 

have traditionally associated, thereby damaging the Union that 

44 See John Curtice, Where Stands the Union Now? London, Institute for Public Policy 

Research, 2008. 

45 See Iain McLean, Guy Lodge and Katie Schmuecker, Fair Shares? Barnett and 

the Politics of Public Expenditure, London, Institute for Public Policy Research, 2008. 

46 Simon Heffer, ‘Traditional Toryism’, in Hickson, The Political Thought of the 

Conservative Party Since 1945, p. 200. 

47 Philip Lynch, The Politics of Nationhood: Sovereignty, Britishness and Conservative 

Politics, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999, p. 2. 



they for so long sought to defend? Or should they aim to preserve an 

asymmetrical Union and risk being positioned as the opponent of 

a rising current of English populism? Here, the answers offered by 

Heffer, Hitchens and Scruton vary, demonstrating the diversity of 

right-wing reactions to this problem. Seen positively, this highlights 

the existence on the right of vibrant reflection upon a central 

problem; seen more negatively, it attests to the difficulty of finding 

shared ground in response to a genuine difficulty. 

Indeed, the second point to emerge from our analysis is that these 

very prominent commentators on the English–British relationship 

are more effective at articulating the nature of the problem, than at 

producing effective and practically influential remedies for it. Their 

arguments have only a limited purchase upon and influence over 

political power and policy. All three – and the arguments they 

espouse – currently occupy maverick positions even in relation to 

right-wing centres of power and policy-making authority. Neither 

Heffer’s populist English anti-Unionism, nor Hitchens’s enthusiastic 

Unionism and suspicion of English populism, nor Scruton’s Edwardian 

Englishness, are anywhere near to the core of current Conservative 

Party politics. And, while some on the left have expressed 

anxiety that the Conservatives could play the English card to good 

effect, and that the party might channel English disaffection and 

grievance, there are reasons for doubting that this will occur. For one 

thing, few mainstream figures have been keen to associate themselves 

with the politics of English resentment. 48 Some senior figures and a 

number of backbenchers may privately have aired more pronounced 

sentiments about the current position of England within the Union, 

but they have had negligible impact on frontbench thinking as a 

whole. 49 The Conservative Party has been reluctant to engage seriously 

with proponents of an English Parliament, and the party leader, 

David Cameron, has been keen to emphasize his own Unionist credentials. 

50 For Cameron, the risks to his project to modernize the 

48 Michael Kenny, Richard English and Richard Hayton, Beyond the Constitution: 

Englishness in a Post-Devolved Britain, London, Institute for Public Policy Research, 2008. 

49 Iain Dale, interviewed by Michael Kenny and Guy Lodge, London, 12 November 

2008. 

50 See David Cameron’s speech to the Scottish Conservatives, 23 May 2008; 

available at: http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=webcameron.story.page&obj_ 

id=144993&speeches=1 



357 

Conservative Party are clear: embracing a populist English nationalist 

position would run counter to his strategy of softening the party’s 

image and occupying the political centre-ground. 51 The shrill tone 

of Heffer’s high-cultural Englishness, or the baleful lament of 

Scruton’s hardly fit the impression of a party at ease with contemporary 

British society that Cameron has sought to cultivate. Indeed, 

a good deal of the potential appeal of these arguments has drained 

away in the context first of the economic prosperity overseen by 

successive Labour administrations since 1997 and, latterly, following 

the political resurgence of the Tories. 

Moreover, after a decade of devolution and five decades of a 

declining vote share in Scotland, what Scruton labelled the ‘emotional 

pull’ of Unionism remains strong. 52 For the former Conservative 

secretary of state for Scotland, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, ‘the 

Conservative Party remains overwhelmingly a Unionist party, totally 

committed to the Union’. 53 According to this view, devolution does 

not represent an absolute transformation of relations between 

England and Scotland, as it is a misreading of history to assume that 

there was ever a pre-devolution situation in which the two nations 

were fully unified as one. As Rifkind highlights, the nature of the UK 

has always been diverse, with different legal and legislative requirements, 

different churches, and different education systems: 

As early as the 1880s, so different were the Scottish parliamentary and legislative 

requirements that the job of secretary of state for Scotland had to be 

created to handle the government’s business in Scotland. So ever since the 

Act of Union, the Union was not as incorporating as is often assumed. There 

were institutional requirements because of the separate Scottish legal system, 

church and educational system. So devolution did not bring for the first time 

the need for separate Scottish legislation. The reason why it is much more 

controversial today is because it is much more visible today south of the 

border. 54 

Rifkind acknowledges that since devolution to Scotland, Englishness 

has re-emerged. He also recognizes that ‘the Labour Party has a 

51 Richard Hayton, ‘Conservative Party Leadership Strategy and the Legacy 

of Thatcherite Conservatism, 1997–2005’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of 

Sheffield, pp. 161–7. 


53 Malcolm Rifkind, interviewed by Richard Hayton and Michael Kenny, 29 January 

2008. 

54 Ibid. 



much greater party political interest in Scotland, and the Tory Party 

has a much greater party political interest in England. That’s simply 

where our strengths are.’ 55 However, the debate within the party over 

how to respond the West Lothian question, including Rifkind’s own 

proposals for an English Grand Committee, has largely been conducted 

within a discourse aimed at preserving the Union, with the 

objective being to stem rather than to exploit English resentment 

about the asymmetries of devolution. 

Again, the Conservative policy objective expressed by the chair of 

David Cameron’s recent Democracy Taskforce, Kenneth Clarke, to 

devise ‘some sensible constitutional minor change, in my opinion, to 

finish the business of devolution’ and tackle the ‘niggle that sometimes 

English matters are settled against the majority votes of the 

English MPs’, 56 seems to be more attuned to the mainstream of 

public sentiment than the polemics of our three commentators. The 

sometimes-feverish talk of Heffer, Hitchens and Scruton fails to resonate 

to a sufficient degree with even Conservatives among the English 

electorate, and so a radical policy shift seems unlikely. According to 

the analysis of various polling data conducted by the psephologist 

John Curtice, there has been no dramatic or continuous shift in 

popular feeling towards a sense of Englishness at the expense of Britishness 

in the last decade. A small shift did occur in the wake of the 

changes associated with devolution, but no further significant change 

in grassroots sentiment can, he argues, be detected from available 

data. 57 

Indeed, a third point emerging from our case studies is one that 

helps to explain the difficulty there would be for English separatists 

to gain political momentum or practical change: the fact that Englishness 

and Britishness are so incredibly difficult to disentangle culturally 

and historically in any credible fashion. This near-impossibility 

55 Ibid. 

56 HC 75, Devolution: A Decade On, Minutes of Evidence, Justice Committee, Session 

2007/08, London, Stationery Office, 2008. 

57 This finding is in marked contrast to the results of a smattering of commercial 

polls over the last few years that report dramatic movements of opinion in favour of, for 

instance, an English Parliament. Such results, he argues, are very probably the product 

of the nature of the questions posed by these organizations; see John Curtice, ‘Has 

England Had Enough? Public Opinion and the Future of the Union’, London, 

NatCen, 2008. 


of decoupling Englishness from Britishness represents an acute 

problem for Heffer and Scruton. Even such articulate advocates as 

these of a historically rooted English cultural case have acknowledged 

that much of what they draw upon is British, rather than merely 

English. Both Scruton58 and Heffer have conceded this problem of 

the cultural complexity of identity: 

Britishness is common to all of us and has a mixture of Englishness. By the 

same token, much of what we regard as Englishness borrows from mainstream 

western Christian European culture as well. When I walk around 

England and see our cathedrals, I’m reminded very much of those in France. 

If you go to the cathedral in Bordeaux, for example, it could be in any 

English cathedral town you want. Our language borrows heavily, obviously 

from German, also from Latin and from French. So none of these cultures is, 

if you like, compartmentalized. They all borrow from somewhere else. And 

that’s what makes it so hard to talk about what is the difference between 

‘Englishness’ and ‘Britishness’. 59 

This problem has long historical roots. As Robert Colls demonstrates, 

Englishness until the mid-nineteenth century provided the 

dominant register through which a sense of British nationhood was 

expressed – even in non-English regions. 60 The very fact of England’s 

long-standing hegemony in terms of the British state and its wider 

culture hampers current conservative attempts to locate and disseminate 

a pure Englishness. ‘England’ requires an active (and ideological) 

process of ‘invention’, not a straightforward act of historical 

recovery. 

Fourth, the sense of crisis implicit within these figures’ declinist 

arguments is out of kilter with the majority of popular sentiment. 

It is far from clear that the moral breakdown identified by Peter 

Hitchens has impacted in any significant way on contemporary 

politics, and his concerns are, in this sense, sectional and sometimes 

idiosyncratic (for instance his support for capital and corporal 

punishment). His gloomy assessment links the passing of the imperial 

age with a declining sense of Britishness and – his greatest 

concern – the moral degeneration of the nation. 61 But the apocalyptic 

manner in which he frames his anxieties, for example his worry 

that English identity has been tarred by the ‘mobs of fat, beery men’ 

58 Scruton, England: An Elegy, pp. 201, 204. 

59 Heffer, interviewed by English and Kenny. 

60 Robert Colls, Identity of England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002. 

61 Hitchens, Abolition of Britain. 


359 



who wave St George’s flags at England football matches, 62 closes him 

off from political influence even when a discourse of social breakdown 

and concern about violence and moral decline have become 

central to political debate. On the broader ‘crisis’ of British identity, 

again there are reasons for doubting that the problem is sufficiently 

grave to necessitate the kind of dramatic reordering of politics 

sought by someone like Simon Heffer. Even within the community of 

opinion around the Daily Telegraph, he is far from uniformly reflective 

of opinion. For a pro-UK, pro-Britain line runs alongside his own 

and is reflected in the paper’s editorial position: ‘We should make 

the contemporary case for Britain as a cultural, economic and military 

force for good’. 63 

It might be true that the notion of a comfortably consensual 

Britishness faces serious problems. But it might also be argued that 

anxiety about a supposed crisis of Britishness involves an exaggeration 

of actual threats, and that such anxiety might be read as a further 

symptom of the declinist mentality which the British political elite 

has tended to adopt since the late 1960s, rather than a reflection of 

pervasive and urgent popular opinion. 64 Put another way, given that 

English concerns and interests clearly dominate the agenda of the 

UK Parliament, will most English people simply fail to be sufficiently 

bothered about the kind of issues so important to Simon Heffer 

and Roger Scruton? Will inertia and a disinclination to deal with 

the complexities and challenges that disentangling the Union would 

involve inhibit English nationalism? In answer to the question, 

‘Where does England fit into the reconfiguration of Britain?’ 65 it 

is possible to argue that the realities of English size and economic 

centrality take the heat out of the supposed English problem in 

relation to Britishness. As Andrew Marr has pointed out: 

We have to start with the question of scale. England overwhelms Scotland 

and Wales as much today as in the past. Thus, whatever ‘Englishness’ is, it will 

prove to be surprisingly similar to Britishness – the British oak with branches 

62 Peter Hitchens, ‘Why I Can’t Wait for it to be All Over for England’, Mail on 

Sunday, 2 June 2002. 

63 Iain Martin, ‘Ending the Union Would Cost Britain Dear’, Daily Telegraph, 15 

November 2007. 

64 Richard English and Michael Kenny (eds), Rethinking British Decline, Basingstoke, 

Macmillan, 2000. 

65 Tony Wright, ‘England, Whose England?’, in Chen and Wright, The English 

Question, p.7. 



361 

lopped off, not a new tree. The biggest challenges to the traditional notion 

of English identity, as with British identity, are not from within the UK. Just 

as the creation of the Irish Free State had virtually no impact on British 

identity, so Scottish independence, should it happen, will have little impact 

on English identity. Nor has the arrival of the EU in British affairs touched 

identity, as opposed to the constitution, nearly as strongly as many observers 

suggested it would ...No,thebigger challenges are globalization, particularly 

as experienced through global brands, and through immigration, and 

also Americanized culture. 66 

Indeed, despite the declinist concerns variously articulated by 

Heffer, Hitchens and Scruton, there might yet remain more life 

in the Union than is sometimes assumed. As Arthur Aughey has 

expressed it, ‘The existence of nationalism has never predetermined 

its victory over multinational Britishness’. 67 Indeed, the lesson of the 

most sharp-edged recent battle of all between separatist nationalism 

and Britishness – that witnessed in Northern Ireland during the past 

40 years – itself rather points in this direction. Scottish, Welsh and 

English separatism have not begun to approach the violence, organization 

or commitment of the anti-UK campaign waged in the past 

generation by Irish Republicans who sought that the six counties 

of Northern Ireland should be removed from the UK. But even this 

most famous, durable, aggressive and formidable anti-UK nationalism 

has now, it appears, settled for something well short of separatism. 

The Belfast Agreement of 1998 and subsequent political 

arrangements have seen Irish Republicans accept for the foreseeable 

future a reformed Northern Ireland within the UK, rather than 

secession from it. 68 Moreover, nowhere in the UK was Britishness 

more dependent than among Ulster Unionists upon monarchy, Protestantism, 

industrialism and empire. Yet the decline of each of these 

elements of British identity has caused not the ending of Ulster 

Unionist Britishness, but rather its reformulation in different but 

equally committed form. There are no inevitable lessons here for the 

rest of the UK, but the Northern Irish case certainly does not point 

to any inevitable disintegration of Britishness, or any imminent death 

of the UK. 

Might there be a broader, suggestive pattern here? Again, 

Aughey’s observations are pertinent: ‘That one sort of Britain is 

66 Andrew Marr to Richard English, 4 July 2007. 

67 Aughey, Nationalism, p.17. 

68 Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA, London, Macmillan, 2003, 

pp. 285–389. 



dead, the Britain of the Raj, cannot be doubted. That does not mean, 

necessarily, the death of Britain itself.’ 69 And James Mitchell’s 

authoritative recent study of UK devolution has concluded that ‘ever 

looser union’, rather than the end of the Union, seems a reasonable 

prediction. 70 So if there is to be a serious redefinition of Conservative 

Party politics in relation to national identity, then the challenge 

might yet be one of redefining a more relevant Britishness, rather 

than opting for political or cultural English separatism. This suggests 

that neither Heffer’s separatist hopes, nor Scruton’s lament, nor 

Hitchens’s gloom might quite be fully justified. 

National challenges to Britishness from within are, of course, very 

old. But again this perhaps suggests British resilience rather than 

fragility. Richard Weight acknowledges the practical ties that hold the 

constituent parts of the UK together, and counter-balance nationalist 

forces. 71 In Scotland there was historically a profound engagement 

with British Empire, and an economically based enthusiasm for the 

Union. 72 But neither the end of empire nor subsequent economic 

dynamics have necessarily turned Scottish opinion decisively against 

membership of the UK. 73 Indeed, while emotional attachment to the 

UK may have declined, opinion over the economic benefits is largely 

more positive. Andrew Gamble has highlighted how for Gordon 

Brown the need to compete successfully in the global economy is a 

central justification for his Unionism. 74 This was epitomized by his 

claim that the government’s moves to recapitalize the banking sector 

(including the two major Scottish banks) were only possible because 

of the strength of the Union. 75 

69 Aughey, Nationalism, p.48. 

70 James Mitchell, Devolution in the UK, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 

2009, pp. 225–6. 

71 Weight, Patriots, p. 730. 

72 Tom M. Devine, ‘The Break-Up of Britain? Scotland and the End of Empire’, 

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 16 (2006), pp. 163–80. 

73 Tom Nairn, After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland, London, Granta 

Books, 2000. 

74 Andrew Gamble, ‘Gordon Brown and the Reinvention of Britishness’, paper 

presented to the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Boston, 29 

August 2008. 

75 Gerri Peev, ‘Brown: Banking Crisis Has Proved Case for Union’, Scotsman, 15 

October 2008, at http://heritage.scotsman.com/labourparty/Brown-Banking-crisishas-proved.4591680.jp 


CONCLUSION 


Julia Stapleton has recently pointed out that, at least since the latter 

part of the nineteenth century, there have been significant advocates 

of England and Englishness as distinct from Britain and Britishness, 

but that this advocacy has existed within a recognized context of the 

interdependence between England and Britain. 76 The question of 

how dependent Englishness is upon Britishness is an issue that has 

elicited disagreement in political circles for at least a century. 

The thinking of the figures considered here is distinctive in 

relation to this long-standing tradition in part because of its acute 

commitment to the idea of national decline. While this is a cause of 

lament for Hitchens, Heffer perceives current woes as an opportunity 

to reinvent and celebrate a deeper English identity, and to invigorate 

it with a political edge. For Scruton the crisis is not merely one of 

Britishness but of the Englishness upon which it was built. As such, 

Hitchens’s notice of the abolition of Britain might seem misdirected 

– his story, Scruton argues, is ‘specifically English’. 77 Scruton wishes 

to mark the passing of ‘Old England’, and his text has a deliberately 

elegiac quality. 78 He hopes his work ‘might have some long-term 

effect on the way people conceptualize England’ but acknowledges 

that ‘it won’t have any immediate political impact’. 79 By contrast, 

Hitchens and Heffer strike an urgent tone and clamour for action, 

although where Heffer sees possibilities, the hope of national 

redemption for Hitchens is forlorn. 

Each of the authors examined here can be considered significant 

in their own right in this recent period, and have gained a hearing 

among a fairly broad public. A key source of this influence in the 

cases of Hitchens and Heffer stems from their position as key 

members of a high-profile band of public commentators who form a 

caste of quasi-celebrity pundits in the London-based press. As such, 

they enjoy a stable and fairly determinate audience, though this is 

importantly supplemented by the activities of both in the right-wing 

76 Julia Stapleton, ‘England and Englishness’, in Matthew Flinders, Andrew 

Gamble, Colin Hay and Michael Kenny (eds), The Oxford Handbook of British Politics, 

Oxford, Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2009. 

77 Scruton, England: An Elegy, p. 248. 

78 Ibid., p. viii. 


363 



blogosphere. Through books, newspaper writings and BBC appearances, 

Roger Scruton also commands frequent public attention. 

All three figures draw tellingly on established traditions of thinking, 

and in two of our cases, a particular intellectual figure, as a 

forgotten lodestar for contemporary conservatives. Thus, Heffer’s 

continuing attachment to the legacy of Enoch Powell, Scruton’s 

deployment of Edwardian ruralist images of (southern) England and 

Hitchens’s revival of nineteenth-century moralism are important 

indications of the degree to which current streams of conservative 

thinking still flow from long-established intellectual rivers. That they 

are all some way out of kilter with the policy thinking of the party’s 

current leadership is revealing of an emergent tension between the 

strategic imperatives being pursued by politicians of the right and 

some of the party’s most powerful and established intellectual roots. 80 

Our argument suggests, above all, that conventional political 

analysis would do well to pay more heed to thinking and commentary 

that circulate on the margins of mainstream politics on touchstone 

issues of national identity, culture and history. This is not to exaggerate 

the impact of these figures. But it is certainly possible that our 

three writers do indeed signify a shifting mood in political argument, 

attachment and orientation. We need to assess the different audiences 

for whom such figures are writing, and give more weight 

to endeavours to shift the climate of opinion on such issues as ‘the 

English question’, as opposed to persuading frontbenchers of the 

merits of a particular policy. As we have suggested, these three commentators 

perhaps reflect and refract wider concerns about the relationship 

between Englishness and Britishness, but without exerting 

particular political influence over policy, or resolving the problem for 

English enthusiasts that Englishness is so interwoven with Britishness; 

moreover, in each case, there is arguably an exaggerated sense of 

crisis to the declinism so ably articulated. As opinionated columnists, 

book-writers and high-profile pundits, Heffer, Hitchens and Scruton 

have played an important role in challenging, shaping and outraging 

the communities of opinion that circulate around the Conservative 

Party. While they have had little impact on the policy debates animating 

the Tory frontbench on these issues, there is every possibility that 

Heffer and Scruton may be contributing to a changing mindset on 

80 For a fuller analysis of this tension see Michael Kenny, ‘Commentary: Taking the 

Temperature of the UK’s Political Elite’, Parliamentary Affairs, 62 (2009), pp. 149–61. 



365 

the centre right about the need to address England’s political and 

cultural position a decade after devolution. Questions about national 

identity, culture and mission continue to provide opportunities, it 

would seem, for intellectuals and commentators who are one step 

removed from the crucible of politics to gain a hearing and exert a 

degree of influence.

Richard English, Richard Hayton and Michael Kenny1 Englishness ...

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