English Democrats: Are the BBC taking the monkeys; or do they just not give a monkeys?

Watched the TV interview with the English Democrat chairman Robin Tilbrook on the Daily Politics yesterday. Effectively, he was given about half of the five minutes allotted to the item, with the remaining half being given over to a couple of panellists. I thought he held his own quite well against some fairly tough questioning. [...]

The governance of England must not be left out of the process of constitutional reform

Over the past week or so, I’ve been attempting to write a rather long post on the implications of the ongoing MPs’ expenses scandal. I started to write it last week, when I was concerned that the initial reaction was tending to ignore the fact that public outrage about MPs’ behaviour was symptomatic of a [...]

Must Our Modern Liberty Be English Liberty?

I’ve been thinking and reading quite a bit recently on the subject of liberty and the national question. This was the topic of a debate at the Convention On Modern Liberty event in London at the weekend. I wasn’t there but I’ve read the interestingly divergent accounts by Gareth Young (who was speaking on behalf [...]

Speaking the Nation: The search for a new national vocabulary

It’s hard sometimes to say ‘England’ even when you mean it, and mean to. The old political-linguistic correctness kicks in, and I find myself saying ‘British’ or ‘Brits’ to refer to my country or compatriots. This reflex reaction isn’t just a relic of upbringing and of a historic identification between England and Britain that is [...]

No more Great Britain: A blueprint for a federal UK

The trouble with the UK is ‘Great Britain’. The future of the UK, if it has one, will be settled by coming to a more stable, mature and equitable relationship between the different nations that currently make up that state. Great Britain, and its even more ill-defined cognate ‘Britain’, is the great interloper that stands [...]

Letter to Brian Simpson, MEP – Anglophobe

Hat tip to Waking Hereward for this little gem. Here’s what the Labour MEP for the North West Region said, writing in the Labour magazine Egremont Today:
“I don’t know about you, but I am getting a bit fed up with those who keep telling me we need to have an extra public holiday centred around [...]

Nation of England: Self-rule will come with self-pride

‘Nation of England’! Now there’s a phrase to stir the blood or – for some – to make it boil. ‘Nation of England’: sounds rather un-English, doesn’t it? We English are not given to aggressive displays of ‘national pride’ and self-assertion. It sounds like the demand of some rebellious ethnic minority to be respected and [...]

No way back for Britain: federation or independence are the only options

Another way to address the question of the constitutional options that should be put to all the nations of the UK at the same time as a Scottish referendum on independence for Scotland (see previous post) is to say that we should all have a vote, not just on independence for our respective countries, but [...]

Are you British?

Native UK citizens (those born and brought up in the UK) have multiple national identities: British together with combinations of English, Scottish, Welsh and (Northern) Irish. However, which is their ‘primary’ identity? I would contend that most people identify in the first instance with one of the ‘constituent nations’ of the UK rather than with [...]