Fintan O'Toole

This evening I went to hear Fintan O’Toole lecture to a packed house at Queen’s. His main point was that the Brexit vote was the displacement of English anger over its diminished place in the world. He started by noting that surveys were done in 2011 and 2012 in which people were asked about identity. In London, Manchester and, to a lesser extent, Liverpool, respondents identified as British. Elsewhere in England, they identified as English. That dichotomy was entirely correlated to the Remain-Brexit split in the voting. The English respondents, furthermore, wanted to be ruled by an English parliament, not a UK parliament.

Fintan said that English identity was once built on two concepts: the British Empire and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. After World War II, the British Empire dissolved. In the 1990s, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland won devolved governments that have grown ever more independent. Meaning that the United Kingdom was less so.

So unlike N.I., Wales, and Scotland, England is not governed by a devolved assembly but by the UK-wide parliament. Which chafes a bit. Brexit was a means to give voice to this feeling of being disenfranchised and diminished. Here’s an excerpt from one of O’Toole’s columns:

"It was not inevitable that the desire to restate English sovereignty would be channeled into chauvinism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and a misplaced conviction that if you share sovereignty in a complex arrangement like the EU, you lose it. But without a more positive articulation of Englishness, the country that is struggling to emerge has ended up with a nationalism that is both incoherent and oddly naive.

"Crudely, passionate nationalism has taken two forms. There is an imperial nationalism and an anti-imperial nationalism; one sets out to dominate the world, the other to throw off such dominance. The incoherence of the new English nationalism is that it wants to be both. On the one hand, Brexit is fueled by fantasies of “Empire 2.0,” a reconstructed global trading empire in which the old colonies will be reconnected to the mother country. On the other, it is an insurgency and therefore needs an oppressor to revolt against. Since England doesn’t actually have an oppressor, it was necessary to invent one. Decades of demonization by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and by the enormously influential Daily Mail made the European Union a natural fit for the job.”
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