The English question

I have been casting about on the net for some more stuff on English identity, and I’ve found an intriguing paper called Mythologies of English Constitutionalism.

Krishan Kumar has recently suggested that English cultural identity was long ago sacrificed to the greater aspirations of ‘Greater England’, and in time ‘Great Britain’; devoured by the demands of successive imperial ventures.[9] Today, however, there is a veritable cottage-industry springing up around the English ‘question’.

The author Ian Ward notes this important point:

The idea that a distinctively English, and republican, constitutional tradition ‘somehow slipped out of our hands and drifted across the Atlantic’ has been recently suggested by Jonathan Friedland.

It could be argued that the founding fathers of Irish republicanism, Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen were also a product of this tradition. maybe England need to ‘bring home the revolution’ from Ireland as well as from America.


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One response to “The English question”

  1. Harry avatar
    Harry

    There sadly can never be a “left-nationalism”. It takes an intelligensia (whether in Ireland, Scotland or indeed Zimbabwe !) who have some form of patriotic feeling. Read George Orwell – he decribes the left intelligensia very well, that they are haters of all things which are “conservative” (i.e. rooted in history) or patriotic (love of country/flag/liberty) – look to the leading lights of the 1920’s and thirties -George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beartrice Webb, Trade Union leaders etc – who loved the Stalinist regieme simply because it wasnt British!
    The same is true today – look at Claire Short, Ken Livingstone, Mark Steel, Linda Smith and Jeremy Hardy – all leading smartarses of the left intelligensia who detest England and the mass of English people , smirking at and rubbishing it and them at every possible opportunity… : (
    Thats why Britain will either become
    (a) An islamic fasist state
    (b) A national Socialist state

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