(Photo: Owen Humphreys/PA Wire/PA Images)
Is there any chance, at all, that Scotland won’t vote to leave the UK this time? The unionist pitch in 2014 sounds viciously ironic now, a punchline that had to wait another two years for its retroactive buildup: stay in the United Kingdom and you’ll enjoy an improving economy, a stable pound, membership in the EU, the one-sided benefits of global trade and a culture that’s not at risk from the shit-stained slip-n-slide of parochial nationalism.
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What’s on offer now? Stay in Britain, let’s all drown together with dignity. Don’t leave a dying country on its deathbed. Stay, we can live out our Brexit utopia as one bravely moribund family of nations, wait until the water turns yellower than our teeth, until the grotty marshland bubbles up from under the concrete, livid with chemical contaminants and thick below its silt-clouded surface with the corpses of enemies and friends alike; stay in Bog Hell Britain, eat mud, smear yourself in the mud, get dysentery, die.
It won’t happen: the 310-year-old global nightmare that was the United Kingdom is finally over. Northern Ireland might split off, too; Wales is unlikely to stick around much longer. Every country is just a fiction, an imagined community, and countries fail when those fictions can no longer adequately explain what’s actually going on. In the winter of our nation, everything works by opposites now. The promise made to Scotland in 2014 might as well have been a manifesto of everything the central British state would spend the next few years furiously destroying. And the latest wave of nationalist hysteria – British independence from Europe, British identity, British laws, British jobs for British workers, penury and meanness and smallness and spite, but all of it roaring with Britishness – could only have the effect of finally destroying the object of all this fanatical attachment. The reason everyone talks about Britain so much is because Britain has already disappeared.
And what next for England, after it loses all its Celtic fringes? The most likely route is that we will continue to grandly call ourselves the United Kingdom, to the stifled laughter of the world (in the same way that the Serbian rump state called itself Yugoslavia until 2003), dribbling fantasies and senescence into our warm beer. But there’s a better way. If England must go adrift and retreat into its own past, at the very least we could do it right.
Every so often, Guardian types frettingly suggest the idea of a new, civic, left-leaning English nationalism. Some kind of nationalistic sentiment is inevitable, they reason: people will always have an attachment for their country, and if the Scots and the Welsh can have their own patriotic sentiments without collapsing into outright racism, why can’t the English? It’s an impossibility. There already is a surging English nationalism; it just calls itself something different, decked out in all the colours and all the farty pomp of the United Kingdom, even though many Scots and Northern Irish want nothing to do with it. English nationalism only means something when it’s positioned against someone else to be dominated and destroyed; first the other peoples of this island, then the Irish, then the world. It’s nothing more than the precipitate of British imperialism, with everything that implies: racism, stupidity and murder.
“People are English, but they don’t have to be. There’s been something calling itself China for some 4,000 years; there’s only been something calling itself England for a quarter of that time.”
No wonder the civil service is unofficially calling its post-Brexit trade plans Empire 2.0: a starved imagination that only knows the language of a lost genocidal glory to describe our present wretchedness. Unsurprising that Liam Fox tweeted that “the United Kingdom, [sic] is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its 20th century history.” (He’s not wrong; British 20th century history was not buried, but it was burned and sent to the bottom of the ocean by retreating imperialists who didn’t want the world to know their crimes.) In this incredibly stupid age it’s unsurprising that he denied ever saying those words, while sitting in front of a giant picture of the tweet. Who could look at a spectacle like that and then conclude that this country deserves to trundle on a moment longer?
There’s nothing about the blob of land south of Scotland and north of the Channel that makes it intrinsically English; it’s populated by people who often have very little in common and whose hatred of each other is only just balanced out by their centuries-long determination to destroy everything else on the face of the planet. People are English, but they don’t have to be. There’s been something calling itself China for some 4,000 years; there’s only been something calling itself England for a quarter of that time. Before that there was the Heptarchy, a shifting group of small and independent kingdoms: East Anglia, Mercia, Bernicia, Deria, Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Kent.
Think how much better life could be, once we get rid of useless abstractions. I’ve never really felt English – descended from migrants, at home in the chaos of the city but instinctually revolted by all the dreary rolling nothing of the countryside – but I am from London. English identity is rotten, but Bernician national identity has the power to be anything. Instead of all this suffocating Englishness, the country could burst out into a glittering variety of kingdoms, emirates, fiefdoms, socialist republics and farming communes, a medieval intricacy against the drabness of the modern state.
The government’s current post-Brexit plan is to turn the UK into a giant tax haven, but being a tax haven can only support a fairly limited population. If we’re not to starve, we’ll have to split. Wessex can Wexit if it likes, and leave the rest of us unbothered. London, which is always on the verge of threatening to become its own ghastly Singapore-style liberal-totalitarian city-state, will be helpfully split between multiple kingdoms, giving the whole city a brooding, trendy 70s-Berlin vibe. Our Dark Ages re-enactment might not always be pretty, but at the very least it’ll be interesting. And with the whole country slowly sinking into the dullness of Brexit, can we hope for anything more?
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