Response to Simon Lee

Abstract

Jim Bulpitt once argued that though they dominate the United Kingdom the English never took the Union seriously, either ignoring it or regarding it as a mere extension of England and Englishness. This unthinking-ness about the Union was the historical ballast of the British state but it could also become, when alarmed into reflection by change, the undoing of that state. That undoing point Simon Lee believes we have now reached. For one inference from Bulpitt’s analysis is that traditional British statecraft intentionally misrecognised the English Question because government ‘attempted to relate to (or distance itself from) all parts of the periphery in similar fashion. For the centre then, if not for the English, England was part of the periphery.’² If the popular English understanding of the United Kingdom assumed a correspondence between British Government and English identity, Westminster assumed otherwise. The Government’s overriding concern was with what Madgwick and Rose called the‘fifth nation’ — ‘the United Kingdom is a fifth “nation” in Westminster’.³ This fifth nation embodied an ideal and a principle. The ideal was multinational solidarity and the principle was an association of the willing. The objective of New Labour’s constitutional reform was to strengthen that fifth nation. Reform was not concerned with ‘constitutional symmetry’ but with the practical accommodation of ‘difference and rough edges’.⁴