SIMON HEFFER: TORY ENGLISHNESS

Prominent among those influentially engaging with the re-emergent English question is the leading right-wing commentator Simon Heffer, who has expressed his disaffection regarding post-1997 devolution in typically crisp terms:

Part of Heffer's argument here relies on an English pride and confidence, based in turn on a recognition that Englishness is the dominant strain within Britain: ‘Englishness is probably, should be, 85 percent of Britishness’.Footnote ⁹ But an important aspect of Heffer's own argument lies in the very personalized form of cultural awakening in which he has been involved since the later 1990s:

Such a position inevitably influences Heffer's attitude towards the broader cultural shape of Britain: ‘We are not a multicultural society. We are a monocultural one tolerant of other cultures.’Footnote ¹¹ It is also self-evidently based on a profoundly historical conception of English culture and identity. In particular, Heffer has drawn heavily in his writings on cultural portraits, for example in his study of the ‘deliberately’ English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams – a study that presents its subject explicitly as a cultural nationalist, and which emphasizes the importance of the cultural dimensions of Englishness, whether Anglican Protestantism, folk song, rural landscape, history or heritage.Footnote ¹² Heffer has also made significant contributions to the scholarly understanding of modern conservative thinking and British elite culture.Footnote ¹³ Such interventions have helped him provide an historical inflection to the anti-liberal hostility of the right-wing newspapers for which he writes. And, for Heffer, national decline can be directly linked to the spread of liberal orthodoxies: ‘The seeds of Britain's decline were propagated in England, not least by English liberals of the twentieth century…whose guilt complexes and underdeveloped thought processes brought a welfare state and numerous other forms of crippling self-indulgence’.Footnote ¹⁴

As a well-known right-wing political journalist and polemicist,Footnote ¹⁵ Heffer has repeatedly expressed profound disaffection with the direction pursued by the Conservative Party leadership since Margaret Thatcher's resignation as prime minister, and it is in this context that his arguments about Englishness and Britishness are especially revealing. For Heffer's assertions have at times been stark in relation to the UK, as with his comments in 2007 concerning the end of the Union: ‘The Union is over, morally at least. When Scotland voted for devolution in 1997 the Union fell into a coma…England and Scotland will only ever be happy together if they are politically apart.’Footnote ¹⁶

Heffer first made his call to break the Union in 1999, eloquently stated in Nor Shall My Sword– an attempt to rouse the English from their slumbers, and to accentuate a newly rising tide of Englishness. Heffer is adamant that the revival of the latter is integrally connected to, and perhaps propelled by, the likelihood of further radical constitutional change. He therefore provides a forceful justificationfor a programme of cultural Anglicization, in preparation for such an eventuality. In one sense, he expresses contemporary conservative hostility to the devolutionist constitutional arrangements established by post-1997 Labour administrations. But he also embodies a striking departure from traditional conservative positions in his argument that the break-up of the Union is both inevitable and, in various respects, necessary for England's revival.

Nor Shall My Sword argues that England represents a perfectly viable independent territorial and political entity. Throughout the book Heffer bewails various blocks to the recognition of this fact, and outlines the mental reconfiguration that is required for those who inhabit England to embrace and deepen their cultural (and indeed ethnic) sense of Englishness. Frustratingly for him, ‘many in England instinctively persist in the notion that the English nation would in some sense be inadequate alone’, and he seeks to disabuse them of this deep-seated notion.Footnote ¹⁷ Consequently the Union of England with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – a Union that has for so long been seen by its critics as a bulwark for English hegemony, and for England's values and interests – is strikingly re-presented here as the source of the latter's problems. Rather than fearing the demise of Britain, the English should wake up to this prospect and embrace the possibilities it presents. However, for England to work as a political society and sovereign territorial state, there needs to be a conscious attempt to promote and deepen a sense of pride and self-consciousness among its people.

PETER HITCHENS: THE BRITISH DEMISE

A very different brand of right-wing argument concerning Englishness, Britishness and the UK has been propounded in forthright terms by the writer and broadcaster Peter Hitchens.Footnote ¹⁸ In his newspaper columns and books in recent years, Hitchens has been preoccupied with what he considers the profound decline of morality in modern Britain. He reads this as a phenomenon of huge importance during the past half-century, but one with much older origins:

According to Hitchens, moral decay lies at the heart of the processes shaping Britain's more general demise. In a widely publicized polemic against the modernization of cultural and social life, he pinpoints ‘a deep shift in the way the British people view themselves, their past and their future. Fewer each day now consider themselves to be British.’Footnote ²⁰ There are echoes here of some scholarly arguments of recent years, about broad trends in popular opinion and national self-understanding.Footnote ²¹ But Hitchens's argument has a particularly disaffected and polemical tone. He contrasts the fading of the imperial age (symbolized by the funeral of Winston Churchill) with an event that he takes to be emblematic of all the mistaken modernity of contemporary cultural life (the ersatz public mourning for Diana, Princess of Wales).

Unlike Simon Heffer, Hitchens laments the fact that the future of Britishness appears gloomy: ‘It grows increasingly difficult to see how Britishness could be saved. Nonetheless, I think that it's important that we should regret its passing.’ Why? Because the identities of the constituent nations of the UK prosper best together:

This clearly has significance for conservative politics itself. ‘I think conservatism is Unionist or it is nothing…Once the Conservatives ceased to be a powerful Unionist force in Scotland, they became irrelevant, likewise in Wales…But also I just think that Scotland, Wales and Ireland bring important things to the country.’Footnote ²³ So, again in contrast to Heffer, Hitchens is uneasy about the renewed emphasis upon the distinct nations and national identities that co-exist within Britain: he regards the turn towards the ‘narrower loyalties of the UK's smaller nations’ as entirely regrettable.Footnote ²⁴ Simultaneously, however, he slips unselfconsciously between references to Britain and English values when propounding his nostalgic account of the nation's lost heritage. In his mind, emphasis upon England is merely one more unfortunate instance of the profound transformation in the national self-understandings and moral character of the peoples who inhabit Britain.Footnote ²⁵

There is no doubting Hitchens's reluctance to enthuse over a resurgent sense of English pride as such. Of Englishness itself, he comments:

Is it his view that Englishness possesses a more chauvinistic dimension? ‘Well, it has that capacity because it's visceral, whereas Britishness is more thoughtful, it seems to me. Britishness contains everything that Englishness contains.’Footnote ²⁷

There is an unshakeable air of gloom about Hitchens's analysis, as he laments growing criminality and moral permissiveness alike.Footnote ²⁸ He seems determined to be a Cassandra-like figure: a prophet of disaster whom readers enjoy hearing without necessarily heeding. His declinist stance shows no particular hope of redemptive recovery, given his totalizing critique of the state of the current Conservative Party and his deeply pessimistic analysis of contemporary political morality. However, Hitchens does fit a familiar pattern of declinist writers on the politics of nationhood,Footnote ²⁹ his fears for contemporary Britain reflecting an exceptionalist view of English/British development drenched with longing for a return to a lost golden age, and infused with the fear that the trajectory of social change is moving inexorably away from a traditionally defined morality.

Hitchens is in some ways an atypical figure: an idiosyncratic blend of former Trotskyite, British patriot, rural romantic and 1950s moralist (his support for the conservative moral orthodoxies of yesteryear, including capital and corporal punishment, make him a favourite of TV and radio producers). Yet he can also be placed within the cantankerous family of anti-liberal declinist commentators, an assembly of figures who throughout the twentieth century have proclaimed the demise of the nation. Not untypically among such commentators, he despairs of nearly all the conventional remedies offered for the social problems he dissects in garish detail.Footnote ³⁰

ROGER SCRUTON: AN ELEGY FOR ENGLISHNESS

Roger Scruton is one of England's most prominent public intellectuals.Footnote ³¹ A central theme within his scholarly and public writings has been the cultural basis and political character of Englishness. He is sceptical about the cultural state of Britishness (‘things had moved on so much that the whole concept of Britain had been thrown into disarray. It had become quite apparent that there is no such cultural entity any more'Footnote ³² ); but his thoughtful writings on Englishness reflect a dual sense that this is both a phenomenon worthy of celebration, and also one which has now been substantially destroyed: hence his elegiac portrait.Footnote ³³

An attachment to the idea of England has always been at the heart of English/British conservatism. As Scruton commented, ‘I don't think you can be a conservative in the end without being some kind of nationalist. You are always going to have in the back of your mind a conception of the community whose structure you are trying to retain.’Footnote ³⁴ Scruton's conservative philosophy draws upon Burke, Hegel, Oakeshott and Hayek, rejecting universalism and preferring instead a politics based on human instinct. In a Burkean compact between the living, the dead and the unborn, trust is placed in our collective inheritance, particularly in the form of societal organizations, practices and traditions, the law and the constitution. A sense of place and territorial loyalty is therefore central to identity. For Scruton, that place and identity is England, which is ‘shared not as a reality so much as an ideal which constantly impacts on reality’.Footnote ³⁵

Central to this ideal is the countryside, which has defined the English sense of home and belonging. Scruton eulogizes this lost idyll and bemoans the commensurate erosion of identity, but also detects pockets of resistance: ‘rumours of the death of the countryside are exaggerated, but it is certainly changing in character and there are lots and lots of pressures on it’.Footnote ³⁶ Echoing Heffer and Hitchens, he argues that some of England's worst enemies can be found within – namely the liberal left and the Labour Party. New Labour, he comments, ‘inherits from Old Labour an anti-English stance’, epitomized by the ban on fox-hunting. As he commented on the ban:

Immigration has similarly been used ‘as a foil against the English by their enemies’, particularly by ‘the Ken Livingstone types who live in a culture of repudiation towards the English idea’. Immigration, Scruton argues, ‘provides them with a very interesting way ofdelegitimizing England: the idea that it should be multicultural not monocultural, and it's not because of the intrinsic racism of the English’. The cultural shift wrought by immigration has played an important part in undermining the viability of his cherished vision of England. Yet it also has had a role in heightening awareness of the idea: ‘as people have been waking up to the problems of a large Islamic minority it has become even more in people's minds that this is not something that is easily reconcilable with our inherited way of doing things’. The political process of devolution is also central to the growing public sense of Englishness, even though it too constitutes a harmful assault. Behind the politics of devolution, Scruton argues, ‘there was also a whole culture of devolution’ based on Celtic resentment. ‘That process I think awoke people to the idea of England, for how do we explain this political process without this idea?’Footnote ³⁸

The effect of devolution is to lay bare the interdependent relationship between Englishness and Britishness. Differing markedly from a tendency in academic analysis to emphasize the accommodating and underdeveloped character of Englishness in relation to the British imperial ideal,Footnote ³⁹ Scruton argues that Britishness and the empire were ultimately projections of a prior sense of Englishness:

Britishness cannot therefore contain the multiple nationalisms of the English and revanchist Celts, making the prospect of an accommodation of Englishness within Britain almost impossible. Sovereignty has also been ceded to the European Union, to the extent that ‘the English are no longer a sovereign people, and their law is no longer their own’.Footnote ⁴¹ Globalization and urbanization have subverted the established order in which locality defined allegiance. The cardinal place of the Church of England –‘the operative word there is not Church, but England’Footnote ⁴² – has withered; with it, the unity of nationality, religion and the English language has been lost. Sovereignty, unity, Anglicanism, countryside, locality, cultural gentleness, legal responsibility and freedom, parliamentary representation, serious culture: all have been eroded. So Scruton's argument demonstrates the way in which discussion of Englishness can become a vehicle for the expression of attachment to a broader set of conservative political values. In this respect, there are clear continuities between the styles of conservative argument of such figures as John Betjeman and Arthur Bryant in the inter-war years, and a figure such as Scruton.Footnote ⁴³

Scruton's projection of England does not sit easily with his defence of the nation-state more generally. He has the problem – perhaps generic to the new Anglo-conservatism – that positing an independent culture of Englishness and calling for a new political settlement in the United Kingdom invariably means a radical adjustment of the constitutional order associated with the unitary British state, which has remained a fixity within conservative thinking for well over a century. Scruton needs to locate and defend a plausible distinction between what is English and what is British, both culturally and in terms of state architecture. His frequent invocations of the Irish-born Burke and Wilde, in order to exemplify some deeply English characteristic, hints tellingly at this problem. Similarly, while the Westminster Parliament is in England, it was – and indeed remains – a UK rather than an English institution. Again and again, the phenomena celebrated by Scruton as key components of Englishness turn out to possess a clear British dimension. Scruton's dream of detaching a pristine English culture from British traditions and its other national cultures ultimately founders upon the historical complexity shaping the relationship between England and Britain.

CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATISM AND THE UNION

Four main points emerge from consideration of Heffer's, Hitchens's and Scruton's arguments about Englishness and Britishness. First, their sustained, highly visible and resonant engagement with this complex problem highlights and reinforces its growing significance in UK politics: the disaffection of many with England's place in a reconfigured Union, and the particular difficulty this causes for those on the traditionally Unionist right. Opinion poll evidence attests to the existence of popular disaffection,Footnote ⁴⁴ but the arguments of the three commentators under scrutiny in this article illuminate its complex texture and the diverse nature of responses on the right. Asymmetrical devolution has brought with it renewed controversy about the West Lothian question, and also about the differential sums of public money spent in the constituent parts of the UK.Footnote ⁴⁵ For conservatives, in particular, the fraying of a traditionally harmonious English/British relationship has been disconcerting, threatening to unravel the understanding of the state upon which their political thinking has traditionally been based.

As the self-proclaimed national party, the Conservative Party has traditionally defended the Union and opposed devolution, as ‘for much of the last three centuries, belief in nation was synonymous with a belief in the Union’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The patriotic Britishness with which Conservatives identified ‘drew heavily upon English traditions, notably the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and a Whig history of progress and exceptionalism, plus the values and interests of an Anglicized elite’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Now, as the model of a sovereign unitary state and a monocultural society wanes, the Conservatives face a conundrum. Confronted with cultural and constitutional challenges, should they seek to extricate English identity from a Britishness with which they have traditionally associated, thereby damaging the Union that they for so long sought to defend? Or should they aim to preserve an asymmetrical Union and risk being positioned as the opponent of a rising current of English populism? Here, the answers offered by Heffer, Hitchens and Scruton vary, demonstrating the diversity of right-wing reactions to this problem. Seen positively, this highlights the existence on the right of vibrant reflection upon a central problem; seen more negatively, it attests to the difficulty of finding shared ground in response to a genuine difficulty.

Indeed, the second point to emerge from our analysis is that these very prominent commentators on the English–British relationship are more effective at articulating the nature of the problem, than at producing effective and practically influential remedies for it. Their arguments have only a limited purchase upon and influence over political power and policy. All three – and the arguments they espouse – currently occupy maverick positions even in relation to right-wing centres of power and policy-making authority. Neither Heffer's populist English anti-Unionism, nor Hitchens's enthusiastic Unionism and suspicion of English populism, nor Scruton's Edwardian Englishness, are anywhere near to the core of current Conservative Party politics. And, while some on the left have expressed anxiety that the Conservatives could play the English card to good effect, and that the party might channel English disaffection and grievance, there are reasons for doubting that this will occur. For one thing, few mainstream figures have been keen to associate themselves with the politics of English resentment.Footnote ⁴⁸ Some senior figures and a number of backbenchers may privately have aired more pronounced sentiments about the current position of England within the Union, but they have had negligible impact on frontbench thinking as a whole.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Conservative Party has been reluctant to engage seriously with proponents of an English Parliament, and the party leader, David Cameron, has been keen to emphasize his own Unionist credentials.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Cameron, the risks to his project to modernize the Conservative Party are clear: embracing a populist English nationalist position would run counter to his strategy of softening the party's image and occupying the political centre-ground.Footnote ⁵¹ The shrill tone of Heffer's high-cultural Englishness, or the baleful lament of Scruton's hardly fit the impression of a party at ease with contemporary British society that Cameron has sought to cultivate. Indeed, a good deal of the potential appeal of these arguments has drained away in the context first of the economic prosperity overseen by successive Labour administrations since 1997 and, latterly, following the political resurgence of the Tories.

Moreover, after a decade of devolution and five decades of a declining vote share in Scotland, what Scruton labelled the ‘emotional pull’ of Unionism remains strong.Footnote ⁵² For the former Conservative secretary of state for Scotland, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, ‘the Conservative Party remains overwhelmingly a Unionist party, totally committed to the Union’.Footnote ⁵³ According to this view, devolution does not represent an absolute transformation of relations between England and Scotland, as it is a misreading of history to assume that there was ever a pre-devolution situation in which the two nations were fully unified as one. As Rifkind highlights, the nature of the UK has always been diverse, with different legal and legislative requirements, different churches, and different education systems:

Rifkind acknowledges that since devolution to Scotland, Englishness has re-emerged. He also recognizes that ‘the Labour Party has a much greater party political interest in Scotland, and the Tory Party has a much greater party political interest in England. That's simply where our strengths are.’Footnote ⁵⁵ However, the debate within the party over how to respond the West Lothian question, including Rifkind's own proposals for an English Grand Committee, has largely been conducted within a discourse aimed at preserving the Union, with the objective being to stem rather than to exploit English resentment about the asymmetries of devolution.

Again, the Conservative policy objective expressed by the chair of David Cameron's recent Democracy Taskforce, Kenneth Clarke, to devise ‘some sensible constitutional minor change, in my opinion, to finish the business of devolution’ and tackle the ‘niggle that sometimes English matters are settled against the majority votes of the English MPs’,Footnote ⁵⁶ seems to be more attuned to the mainstream of public sentiment than the polemics of our three commentators. The sometimes-feverish talk of Heffer, Hitchens and Scruton fails to resonate to a sufficient degree with even Conservatives among the English electorate, and so a radical policy shift seems unlikely. According to the analysis of various polling data conducted by the psephologist John Curtice, there has been no dramatic or continuous shift in popular feeling towards a sense of Englishness at the expense of Britishness in the last decade. A small shift did occur in the wake of the changes associated with devolution, but no further significant change in grassroots sentiment can, he argues, be detected from available data.Footnote ⁵⁷

Indeed, a third point emerging from our case studies is one that helps to explain the difficulty there would be for English separatists to gain political momentum or practical change: the fact that Englishness and Britishness are so incredibly difficult to disentangle culturally and historically in any credible fashion. This near-impossibility of decoupling Englishness from Britishness represents an acute problem for Heffer and Scruton. Even such articulate advocates as these of a historically rooted English cultural case have acknowledged that much of what they draw upon is British, rather than merely English. Both ScrutonFootnote ⁵⁸ and Heffer have conceded this problem of the cultural complexity of identity:

This problem has long historical roots. As Robert Colls demonstrates, Englishness until the mid-nineteenth century provided the dominant register through which a sense of British nationhood was expressed – even in non-English regions.Footnote ⁶⁰ The very fact of England's long-standing hegemony in terms of the British state and its wider culture hampers current conservative attempts to locate and disseminate a pure Englishness. ‘England’ requires an active (and ideological) process of ‘invention’, not a straightforward act of historical recovery.

Fourth, the sense of crisis implicit within these figures' declinist arguments is out of kilter with the majority of popular sentiment. It is far from clear that the moral breakdown identified by Peter Hitchens has impacted in any significant way on contemporary politics, and his concerns are, in this sense, sectional and sometimes idiosyncratic (for instance his support for capital and corporal punishment). His gloomy assessment links the passing of the imperial age with a declining sense of Britishness and – his greatest concern – the moral degeneration of the nation.Footnote ⁶¹ But the apocalyptic manner in which he frames his anxieties, for example his worry that English identity has been tarred by the ‘mobs of fat, beery men’ who wave St George's flags at England football matches,Footnote ⁶² closes him off from political influence even when a discourse of social breakdown and concern about violence and moral decline have become central to political debate. On the broader ‘crisis’ of British identity, again there are reasons for doubting that the problem is sufficiently grave to necessitate the kind of dramatic reordering of politics sought by someone like Simon Heffer. Even within the community of opinion around the Daily Telegraph, he is far from uniformly reflective of opinion. For a pro-UK, pro-Britain line runs alongside his own and is reflected in the paper's editorial position: ‘We should make the contemporary case for Britain as a cultural, economic and military force for good’.Footnote ⁶³

It might be true that the notion of a comfortably consensual Britishness faces serious problems. But it might also be argued that anxiety about a supposed crisis of Britishness involves an exaggeration of actual threats, and that such anxiety might be read as a further symptom of the declinist mentality which the British political elite has tended to adopt since the late 1960s, rather than a reflection of pervasive and urgent popular opinion.Footnote ⁶⁴ Put another way, given that English concerns and interests clearly dominate the agenda of the UK Parliament, will most English people simply fail to be sufficiently bothered about the kind of issues so important to Simon Heffer and Roger Scruton? Will inertia and a disinclination to deal with the complexities and challenges that disentangling the Union would involve inhibit English nationalism? In answer to the question, ‘Where does England fit into the reconfiguration of Britain?’Footnote ⁶⁵ it is possible to argue that the realities of English size and economic centrality take the heat out of the supposed English problem in relation to Britishness. As Andrew Marr has pointed out:

Indeed, despite the declinist concerns variously articulated by Heffer, Hitchens and Scruton, there might yet remain more life in the Union than is sometimes assumed. As Arthur Aughey has expressed it, ‘The existence of nationalism has never predetermined its victory over multinational Britishness’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, the lesson of the most sharp-edged recent battle of all between separatist nationalism and Britishness – that witnessed in Northern Ireland during the past 40 years – itself rather points in this direction. Scottish, Welsh and English separatism have not begun to approach the violence, organization or commitment of the anti-UK campaign waged in the past generation by Irish Republicans who sought that the six counties of Northern Ireland should be removed from the UK. But even this most famous, durable, aggressive and formidable anti-UK nationalism has now, it appears, settled for something well short of separatism. The Belfast Agreement of 1998 and subsequent political arrangements have seen Irish Republicans accept for the foreseeable future a reformed Northern Ireland within the UK, rather than secession from it.Footnote ⁶⁸ Moreover, nowhere in the UK was Britishness more dependent than among Ulster Unionists upon monarchy, Protestantism, industrialism and empire. Yet the decline of each of these elements of British identity has caused not the ending of Ulster Unionist Britishness, but rather its reformulation in different but equally committed form. There are no inevitable lessons here for the rest of the UK, but the Northern Irish case certainly does not point to any inevitable disintegration of Britishness, or any imminent death of the UK.

Might there be a broader, suggestive pattern here? Again, Aughey's observations are pertinent: ‘That one sort of Britain is dead, the Britain of the Raj, cannot be doubted. That does not mean, necessarily, the death of Britain itself.’Footnote ⁶⁹ And James Mitchell's authoritative recent study of UK devolution has concluded that ‘ever looser union’, rather than the end of the Union, seems a reasonable prediction.Footnote ⁷⁰ So if there is to be a serious redefinition of Conservative Party politics in relation to national identity, then the challenge might yet be one of redefining a more relevant Britishness, rather than opting for political or cultural English separatism. This suggests that neither Heffer's separatist hopes, nor Scruton's lament, nor Hitchens's gloom might quite be fully justified.

National challenges to Britishness from within are, of course, very old. But again this perhaps suggests British resilience rather than fragility. Richard Weight acknowledges the practical ties that hold the constituent parts of the UK together, and counter-balance nationalist forces.Footnote ⁷¹ In Scotland there was historically a profound engagement with British Empire, and an economically based enthusiasm for the Union.Footnote ⁷² But neither the end of empire nor subsequent economic dynamics have necessarily turned Scottish opinion decisively against membership of the UK.Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, while emotional attachment to the UK may have declined, opinion over the economic benefits is largely more positive. Andrew Gamble has highlighted how for Gordon Brown the need to compete successfully in the global economy is a central justification for his Unionism.Footnote ⁷⁴ This was epitomized by his claim that the government's moves to recapitalize the banking sector (including the two major Scottish banks) were only possible because of the strength of the Union.Footnote ⁷⁵

CONCLUSION

Julia Stapleton has recently pointed out that, at least since the latter part of the nineteenth century, there have been significant advocates of England and Englishness as distinct from Britain and Britishness, but that this advocacy has existed within a recognized context of the interdependence between England and Britain.Footnote ⁷⁶ The question of how dependent Englishness is upon Britishness is an issue that has elicited disagreement in political circles for at least a century.

The thinking of the figures considered here is distinctive in relation to this long-standing tradition in part because of its acute commitment to the idea of national decline. While this is a cause of lament for Hitchens, Heffer perceives current woes as an opportunity to reinvent and celebrate a deeper English identity, and to invigorate it with a political edge. For Scruton the crisis is not merely one of Britishness but of the Englishness upon which it was built. As such, Hitchens's notice of the abolition of Britain might seem misdirected – his story, Scruton argues, is ‘specifically English’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Scruton wishes to mark the passing of ‘Old England’, and his text has a deliberately elegiac quality.Footnote ⁷⁸ He hopes his work ‘might have some long-term effect on the way people conceptualize England’ but acknowledges that ‘it won't have any immediate political impact’.Footnote ⁷⁹ By contrast, Hitchens and Heffer strike an urgent tone and clamour for action, although where Heffer sees possibilities, the hope of national redemption for Hitchens is forlorn.

Each of the authors examined here can be considered significant in their own right in this recent period, and have gained a hearing among a fairly broad public. A key source of this influence in the cases of Hitchens and Heffer stems from their position as key members of a high-profile band of public commentators who form a caste of quasi-celebrity pundits in the London-based press. As such, they enjoy a stable and fairly determinate audience, though this is importantly supplemented by the activities of both in the right-wing blogosphere. Through books, newspaper writings and BBC appearances, Roger Scruton also commands frequent public attention.

All three figures draw tellingly on established traditions of thinking, and in two of our cases, a particular intellectual figure, as a forgotten lodestar for contemporary conservatives. Thus, Heffer's continuing attachment to the legacy of Enoch Powell, Scruton's deployment of Edwardian ruralist images of (southern) England and Hitchens's revival of nineteenth-century moralism are important indications of the degree to which current streams of conservative thinking still flow from long-established intellectual rivers. That they are all some way out of kilter with the policy thinking of the party's current leadership is revealing of an emergent tension between the strategic imperatives being pursued by politicians of the right and some of the party's most powerful and established intellectual roots.Footnote ⁸⁰

Our argument suggests, above all, that conventional political analysis would do well to pay more heed to thinking and commentary that circulate on the margins of mainstream politics on touchstone issues of national identity, culture and history. This is not to exaggerate the impact of these figures. But it is certainly possible that our three writers do indeed signify a shifting mood in political argument, attachment and orientation. We need to assess the different audiences for whom such figures are writing, and give more weight to endeavours to shift the climate of opinion on such issues as ‘the English question’, as opposed to persuading frontbenchers of the merits of a particular policy. As we have suggested, these three commentators perhaps reflect and refract wider concerns about the relationship between Englishness and Britishness, but without exerting particular political influence over policy, or resolving the problem for English enthusiasts that Englishness is so interwoven with Britishness; moreover, in each case, there is arguably an exaggerated sense of crisis to the declinism so ably articulated. As opinionated columnists, book-writers and high-profile pundits, Heffer, Hitchens and Scruton have played an important role in challenging, shaping and outraging the communities of opinion that circulate around the Conservative Party. While they have had little impact on the policy debates animating the Tory frontbench on these issues, there is every possibility that Heffer and Scruton may be contributing to a changing mindset on the centre right about the need to address England's political and cultural position a decade after devolution. Questions about national identity, culture and mission continue to provide opportunities, it would seem, for intellectuals and commentators who are one step removed from the crucible of politics to gain a hearing and exert a degree of influence.