This is a book about the United Kingdom. What unites it, what divides it and how its people got where they are today. The upcoming referendum on Scottish independence and the promised referendum on British membership of the European Union have provided the author with pegs on which to hang her thesis, or rather theses, for as the title implies there is no consistent theme.
Linda Colley is professor of history at the University of Princeton, having formerly taught at Cambridge, Yale and the London School of Economics. Her book is intended as a companion to a series running on BBC Radio 4.
“In recent decades,” Colley writes, “the United Kingdom has become increasingly exposed to some of the changes and trials that are taking place under the heading ‘globalisation’. The resurgent angst over identity politics . . . needs to be understood . . . as reaction . . . to trends such as increasing immigration and erosions of national sovereignty.”
The make-up of Great Britain or the United Kingdom, she argues, far from having been settled for centuries, is constantly evolving and subject to amendment.
The expression “Great Britain”, to describe England, Wales and Scotland, has been valid only since James VI of Scotland became James I of England and united the three kingdoms under his rule in 1603. Even then Scotland retained its own parliament until 1707.
The use of the words “United Kingdom” to describe England, Wales, Scotland and all or part of Ireland is of more recent origin, having been officially designated in 1801 and subject to shrinkage when the Republic of Ireland became independent, in 1922.
In a series of elegant essays the author recounts the influences – the sea, liberty, monarchy – that have made the UK what it is today. The sea, she argues, has served as a bridge rather than a source of isolation. It was the route by which the UK imbibed foreign cultures rather than simply exporting its own.
As for liberty, the suggestion that the Magna Carta, habeas corpus or the Bill of Rights made the UK some sort of uniquely benign political culture, ripe for export to other less enlightened nations, can be exaggerated, but it is one that helps explain the historic self-confidence of the British governing classes. As the author remarks, “Rather like Americans, varieties of Britons have sometimes wanted, or been predisposed to believe that – on account of their own pristine freedoms – invading and interfering with other people’s liberty must be for their benefit.”
As it happens, the belief that British citizens enjoyed greater freedoms than citizens of other comparable countries has long been an illusion. By the early 20th century the UK franchise was one of the narrowest in Europe. Witness the fact that only about half the male population of Glasgow was entitled to vote. Many of those who volunteered to fight in the first World War had never enjoyed the right to vote for or against the politicians who sent them to the front.
As for the monarchy, England at least had the great advantages of not having been successfully invaded for 1,000 years and of having been a single kingdom with a single body of law, one principal language and, for the most part, a single religion since the 10th century, with the result that “the Crown became for many Britons a sort of lucky charm and emblem, both as a force that seemed to be protecting the UK from the calamities that seemed to be overwhelming other European polities, and as a marker of this privileged British immunity and well being”.
Had Britain been defeated by Napoleon, the kaiser or Hitler, the British crown would have gone the way of other European monarchies, but Britain has seen off all-comers and the monarchy has thrived.
And yet, notes the author, there are growing tensions within England. Increasingly wealth and power seem to be concentrated in London and the southeast, and this is reflected in the political divide.
Outside of central London, the south is now almost entirely blue. The north, apart from wealthy enclaves in North Yorkshire, Cheshire and Cumbria, is almost entirely red.
Colley devotes a chapter to each of the nations that make up the United Kingdom. The Scots, she says, for all their complaining, have done well out of the union. As recently as the past two decades Scotsmen had a disproportionate share of the top jobs, including foreign secretary (Robin Cook), chancellor (Alistair Darling) and prime minister (Gordon Brown).
In days gone by they had more than their share of colonial governorships. The empire, says Colley, provided multitudes of Scots with money, land, trade, commodities, opportunities and jobs. What’s more, Scotland, unlike Wales and Ireland, has never been colonised or conquered.
As for Ireland, despite its turbulent relationship with Britain, the two nations remain inextricably entwined. About six million people in Great Britain are of Irish origin. Contrary to the widely held view, their ancestors did not just provide navvies and soldiers for the empire. “There were also middle class and propertied Irish emigrants to Britain, many of whom became firmly entrenched in the professions, law, medicine, journalism, the arts and politics.” Witness the novels of Anthony Trollope that feature Phineas Finn, a Catholic MP, who is shown socialising in London’s political salons and in assorted country houses before finally returning to Ireland equipped with a comfortable sinecure: “Phineas Finn had many real life counterparts.”
Quite where all this leads is hard to say. For every piece of evidence that points in one direction there is evidence pointing the opposite way. Much of the content is anecdotal. Colley does not believe that the fragmentation of the UK is inevitable, though much obviously hangs on the outcome of September’s Scottish referendum.
She does, however, venture three suggestions for the future: an English parliament (“located somewhere in the north of England”) leaving defence, foreign policy and macro-economic strategy to Westminster. This to be combined with much greater devolution for the Scottish parliament and the assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland and, finally, a written UK constitution.
Personally, I don’t buy it. As for a written constitution, I am not convinced that there is a problem that needs fixing. And as for another parliament, most English people think they have far too many politicians, and they are unlikely to vote for any more. A slightly more likely, but also improbable, scenario is that this time around Scotland rejects independence but that two years down the line the British vote to leave the EU, triggering renewed demands for Scottish independence. Now that would set the cat among the pigeons.
Chris Mullin was a British MP from 1987 to 2010 and has written three volumes of diaries.
