The matter of Britain
by Sebastian Millbank, The Critic:
Nationhood is a harder question for the British than for most countries, because we are not one nation, but several — England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Add to this the crown dependencies of Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, overseas territories like Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, not to mention 15 commonwealth realms which are ruled over by the same King, including Jamaica, Australia and Canada; or for that matter the parliamentary republics of the Commonwealth, many of which share the Common Law, the Westminster system and the English language.
For opponents of British nationhood, this complexity is a basis for denying us any identity of our own — this is the “St George was a Palestinian, Fish and Chips are Jewish” crowd, who claim that because British identity is drawn from many sources, that we have no identity of our own. This is equally the idea of “fundamental British values” reduced to tolerance and diversity promoted by our conservative government. This is a nation without a story, a people without a shared object of reverence.
I would argue, to the contrary, that the global scope and complexity of Britishness is precisely a reflection of the strength and exceptionalism of our culture and history. Whilst other countries are the product of modern revolutions and nation-building, Britain uniquely retains a mediaeval constitution; an organic mode of sovereignty and belonging that far precedes the liberal, absolutist ideas of statehood proposed by Hobbes and Weber.
Our mediaeval constitution and ancient, sacred idea of nationhood, is under attack by extremists of both Left and Right. Whilst fantastical progressives seek to deny us our history, there are also plenty of nationalist foes of Britishness, from those who deny our European identity and would subordinate us to America; to those who seek to reduce it to an English ethno-nationalism.
For Britishness is as much Celtic as Anglo-Saxon, and despite the claims of Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English nationalists, the hybridity of Germanic and Celtic culture applies to all four nations, who formed a religious, literary and intellectual unity long before they were joined politically. Englishness itself has always been an imperial, and not just national culture. Where American conservatives look to their Declaration of Independence as informing their national origins, Britons today should recall our own moment of rupture and refounding in 1534, when parliament declared that “this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king…unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms, and by names of spiritualty and temporalty, be bounden and ought to bear, next to God, a natural and humble obedience.”
It would be just as convenient to many nationalists of the right as it is to progressives of the left to ignore or historicise the Christian nature and origins of British nationhood, but it is inescapably central. The uneasy truth is that though it may be easier to sell a Britishness shorn of theological particularism, Britain is a Christian nation, or it is nothing at all.
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