The modern identity crisis: 1945 to the present

The end of empire, the end of Britishness

Between 1945 and 1970, the British Empire — the largest in human history and the enterprise around which British identity had been constructed for two centuries — effectively ceased to exist. India became independent in 1947. The African colonies followed through the 1950s and 1960s. By 1970, what had been a global empire was a collection of islands, a Commonwealth of largely independent nations, and a seat on the United Nations Security Council sustained more by inertia than by power.

The identity that empire had sustained dissolved with it. To be British had meant, for two centuries, to belong to the ruling nation of the world's greatest enterprise — a shared identity that could absorb Scots, Welsh, Irish and eventually the subjects of colonies themselves into a common project. Without the empire, what was Britain? What was Britishness? The political establishment had no convincing answer. It substituted the NHS, the welfare state, the special relationship with America, a certain nostalgic pride in wartime solidarity — all real things, all genuinely valued, but none of them capable of doing the work that empire had done as an organising identity for the nation.

The communities that arrived in Britain from the Caribbean, South Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s — holding British passports, many having served in the British armed forces, exercising rights guaranteed by the British Nationality Act of 1948 — exposed the hollowness of the British identity they were legally entitled to claim. They were British in law. They were not regarded as British in practice. The response of the political establishment — tightening immigration through successive Commonwealth Immigrants Acts while leaving the underlying questions of identity and belonging unaddressed — was characteristic: managing the symptom, ignoring the disease.

The identity vacuum

As British identity weakened, the national identities of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland strengthened. Scottish nationalism — which had been a minor political force before the war — began its long growth through the 1960s and 1970s. The discovery of North Sea oil in 1970 gave it an economic argument as well as a cultural one. Plaid Cymru established itself as a significant force in Welsh politics. The question of Northern Ireland, suppressed for decades, erupted into three decades of violent conflict from 1969 onwards.

England, alone among the four nations, had no equivalent political expression. And this was not accidental. England had been absorbed into Britain so thoroughly, for so long, that the political vocabulary for a distinct English identity had been lost. Scottish nationalists could argue that Scotland was a nation with its own history, its own legal system, its own church, its own cultural tradition — all of which was true. Welsh nationalists could make similar arguments. What could English nationalists say? That England was the nation that had built Britain? That England and Britain were effectively the same thing? Both claims were more or less accurate — and both were, in the post-imperial context, deeply problematic.

The difficulty was structural. England had never needed to define itself against Britain because England had effectively been Britain. The English had habitually used the two words interchangeably, had governed in Britain's name while meaning England's interests, and had never been forced — as Scotland and Wales had been forced — to articulate what was distinctively English as opposed to what was generically British. When that generic Britishness began to hollow out, the English had nothing distinctive to fall back on. Into that vacuum — that absence of a civic, political English identity — came something far uglier.

How the far right stole the narrative

The National Front was founded in 1967, formed from the merger of the League of Empire Loyalists, the British National Party and the Racial Preservation Society, subsequently joined by the explicitly neo-Nazi Greater Britain Movement. It grew rapidly — from 1,500 members in 1967 to 17,500 by 1972 — by exploiting anxieties about immigration and by claiming to speak for an England that felt unrepresented and unheard. Its ideology was white nationalist: it believed Britain should be exclusively white, and said so openly. Its political language wrapped that racism in the vocabulary of English and British identity.

To be English, in the National Front's usage, was to be white. To be British was to belong to a race, not a country. The St George's Cross — England's flag — became associated with their marches, their literature and their violence. By the late 1970s, it was possible in many parts of England for the flying of the English flag to read as a statement of racial allegiance rather than national pride. In the 1979 general election the party fielded 303 candidates and received 191,719 votes — the largest vote for a fascist party in British history at that point. The National Front had not invented English nationalism. But it had comprehensively contaminated it.

The National Front fragmented in the early 1980s, splitting into factions that reconstituted as the British National Party. The BNP spent the following two decades in marginal politics until the early 2000s, when it began winning council seats in areas of economic deprivation in northern England — places where deindustrialisation, neglect and a sense of abandonment by mainstream politics had made people receptive to anyone who claimed to speak for them. There is a direct line from the National Front of the 1970s to the rhetoric of far-right groups today. That line was not inevitable. It was allowed to form because no mainstream political party, for fifty years, had the courage to stand in its way.

The establishment's silence — and its cost

The political establishment's response to the far right's colonisation of English identity was not to contest it. It was to concede the territory entirely — and then to treat anyone who walked onto that territory, for whatever reason, as suspect.

By the 1980s, describing yourself as English rather than British had acquired uncomfortable associations. Flying the St George's Cross in your window carried a social risk that flying the Union Jack did not. Talking about English culture, English interests, the English people — rather than British equivalents — invited, in certain circles, a raised eyebrow. The conflation the far right had engineered — English equals white equals racist — had been absorbed, partly, into mainstream political culture. And the response of the mainstream was not to challenge that conflation. It was to avoid the subject.

This suited the political establishment for reasons that had nothing to do with anti-racism and everything to do with power. The idea of a distinct English political identity — separate from the British identity managed at Westminster — was constitutionally inconvenient. If the English began to think of themselves as English rather than British, they might start asking why they did not have their own parliament. They might start noticing the West Lothian anomaly. They might start demanding a different constitutional settlement. It was, from the Westminster establishment's perspective, much safer to leave English identity in the hands of the far right — where it could be used to discredit anyone who raised it — than to engage with it as a legitimate democratic question.

Academic research published in the years after devolution found that English identity had become deeply contested. Scholars identified a widespread unease among English people about identifying as English — an association with class disadvantage, with exclusion, with embarrassment. Younger generations were more likely to identify as British, or as something else entirely. The category "English" had been, in the sociological literature, partially toxified: contaminated by its association with the far right to such a degree that even those who felt English were sometimes reluctant to say so. This was the establishment's achievement. Not through malice necessarily, but through cowardice and convenience, it had allowed a legitimate national identity — one with a thousand-year democratic history — to be associated with bigotry, and had then used that association to avoid addressing the constitutional question that lay beneath it.

Devolution and the English exception

The devolution settlement of 1997–1999 was the most significant constitutional change to the United Kingdom since the Acts of Union. Scotland received a Parliament with primary legislative powers. Wales received a National Assembly. Northern Ireland received a restored Assembly under the Good Friday Agreement. England — home to 56 million people, 84% of the UK's population — received nothing.

The Blair government was not unaware of the problem. It briefly considered elected regional assemblies for England, and in 2004 held a referendum in the North East on a regional assembly. The region voted against it by a margin of four to one, rejecting a body that would have had no real power and would have added a new layer of politicians without addressing the structural deficit. The government took the rejection as a mandate to abandon the English question entirely. It was not. It was a rejection of a specific, inadequate proposal — not of the principle that England deserved a democratic voice of its own.

The consequences of the devolution settlement for the other nations are also significant and underexamined. Scottish Labour and Welsh Labour — whatever one thinks of their politics — have been repeatedly and severely damaged by decisions made at Westminster that they had no hand in shaping. A Scottish Labour MP whose constituents voted against austerity, against welfare cuts, against the bedroom tax, was nonetheless held responsible for a Westminster government's decisions because there was no clear separation between what Westminster did and what Labour in Scotland stood for. The same is true in Wales. The case for devolution is also, paradoxically, the case for the protection of devolved parties from the consequences of decisions made three hundred miles away over which they had no control.

The consequences of neglect

The political consequences of fifty years of democratic neglect are now visible and acute. The Brexit referendum of 2016 was not, primarily, a vote about the European Union. It was a vote by people — predominantly in England, predominantly in areas that felt economically and politically abandoned — who had been given an opportunity to register their alienation from the political establishment in a way that could not be ignored. The constitutional mechanism was European membership. The underlying driver was an English democratic deficit that had been building since 1999.

The rise of UKIP, the Brexit Party and now Reform UK follows the same pattern. Each has succeeded, in England specifically, by claiming to speak for people who felt that no mainstream party represented them. Each has benefited from an absence of legitimate constitutional outlets for English political identity — the absence, in other words, of an English Parliament that could have absorbed and expressed that identity in a democratic framework rather than leaving it to find expression through anger, fragmentation and protest votes.

The 2026 local elections — in which Labour suffered catastrophic losses across its traditional English heartlands, with Reform UK sweeping working-class communities in the north and Midlands that Labour had held for generations — are the latest chapter in this story. They are not the story of a country that has become more right-wing. They are the story of a country whose people have concluded that the existing political system does not hear them, does not represent them, and has no serious intention of doing so.

Reclaiming the tradition

The case for an English Parliament is not the property of the far right. It never was. It is the property of everyone who lives in England — whatever their background, wherever their family came from, however they vote. It is a constitutional argument rooted in the same principles of democratic accountability that gave birth to the Witenagemot in the seventh century, Magna Carta in the thirteenth, de Montfort's Parliament in the thirteenth, the Glorious Revolution in the seventeenth, and the devolved parliaments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland at the end of the twentieth.

The St George's Cross is not a symbol of racial exclusion. It is the flag of the nation that invented parliamentary government. The word "English" is not a synonym for white. It is the adjective that describes the people of a country with a more diverse, more cosmopolitan, more complicated history than almost any other nation on earth — a country whose greatest constitutional moments were achieved by people from Normandy, from France, from the Low Countries, from Germany, from India, from the Caribbean, from everywhere. English identity has always been broader than the far right's version of it. It needs to be claimed back.