A couple of vignettes: John Major said that Britain would always be a land of warm beer and cricket on the village green, and Chris Evans more recently provoked a substantial postbag on the hot topic of what constituted an English breakfast.
I remember John Major's comment, intended to reassure voters that Britain would always be Britain despite Maastricht (or whichever EU treaty it was), and thinking that it didn't resemble the Britain of my experience. And the noticeable feature of the "what makes an English breakfast?" postbag was the extent of the variation between regions about what should, or should not, go into it.
What has always struck me, as an English/British person, is how markedly regional England (and its culture) is. Everything from the building materials - despite the prevalence of brick, it's still a good guide to where you are - to food, to dialect and accent, screams of a profoundly regional place. Even when British English are abroad as sports fans, this seeps through - how many St George flags or Union Jacks have the names of a place or club emblazoned across the middle?
Maybe this is why the "proud to be British" or "proud to be English" statements seem to fall a bit flat for me - what, ultimately, does it mean? I'm already demonstrating my confusion - I don't know in this context whether to refer to British or English. Both seem a bit alien to me, but largely because I'm seeing them through the lenses of other people's experiences, and since they are not mine, they feel a bit wrong.
The reason they feel wrong, it seems to me, is that when people talk about characteristics of being British or English, they tend to pick on things that really can't be national (tolerance, fair play), or are in fact regional (see above). In other words, we tend to go to either extreme. In a recent blog for the BBC, Mark Easton pointed out that it was unfair on the rest of the world to pick issues like tolerance and decency, even democracy, as national characteristics. And regional issues can be incredibly nuanced - as a child, I would notice that even if I was using the same words as kids only twenty miles away, it would be pronounced differently: 'larking' and 'laking' meant the same thing, but I could tell you which one was said in the West Riding and which in the Vale of York. We even ordered our fish and chips in a way that wouldn't be understood 30-40 miles further south (anyone else ask for 'one of each', meaning fish and chips?).
The odd thing about Britain/England is that this deep regional association is in complete contrast to the wider political and constitutional arrangements. The UK has an incredibly centralized tax-collection system, for example, which is what provokes so much debate around the Barnett formula etc - in effect how much money anyone has is decided centrally, even if all the money (and sometimes more and sometimes less) ends up flowing back again to the same place. The constitution is similar - despite the fact that regional government has always existed (even without regional assemblies, there were always 'government offices' for the regions, they just weren't democratic) - it's all dominated by Westminster and Whitehall, apart from the more recent devolutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Part of the 'British' identity is, I think, wrapped up in this centralized state. This is the Britain of the armed forces, of the Empire and Commonwealth, of the monarchy. But beneath this, sometimes even overlapping with it, is a regional culture of peculiar strength: our armed forces are recruited still to regional regiments (although increasingly less so), a number of our ships are named after cities. And probably only the monarchy remains as a unifying influence (despite the republican element within Britain).
What is striking, then, is how far much apart from a shared monarchy is 'up for grabs', a sort of vast pick and mix from which people can take their identity. Mark Easton examined this through institutions - no other country has anything like the BBC, or the NHS, for example. But these are peculiar institutions to pick, not least because they are very recent, but also because they are a bit nebulous. When we talk about the BBC, are we really saying we like high quality TV with no adverts? Is that strong enough to be an identity? Or are we talking about Reithian values, in which case how far does even the BBC represent this? It's a similar issue with the NHS - do we mean the original intention of a service free at the point of use, and (presumably) not managed via an immense queuing system? In which case we don't mean quite what we have now, with charges for dental and optical treatment and prescriptions - even for car parking - and sometimes long waits to see consultants and for operations? I think the BBC and NHS both represent an idea that we like, but may not in practice experience very much. In that sense we might include the Church of England as well - as Yes Prime Minister put it, no-one goes to it, but we all feel better knowing it's there.
Scottish nationalism in this sense is an extension of these themes. It's noticeable that the SNP isn't proposing to break with the monarchy (and why should it? It belongs to Scotland too). In other words, the one uncontestable unifying factor isn't going to change. But how politics and government is organized in the countries that share that monarchy is most definitely up for grabs. Perhaps it's relevant in this context that when Scottish devolution took place in the late 1990s, even the role of the BBC was an issue, including the idea of a separate Scottish edition of the 6 o'clock news. Recently the SNP has argued that the Union itself imperils the NHS, and whatever the merits of that argument, it would seem to be true that the version of the NHS that most closely resembles the original idea is in the devolved areas of the UK.
One could regard constitutional arrangements simply as a matter of what the majority want, i.e. 50% + 1 vote. But in practice in other countries, most constitutional changes require bigger mandates - 2/3rds at least. This suggests that constitutional issues are much more about consensus than majority views. In other words, it's not enough for 50% + 1 to vote in favour - it's much more a question of starting at what everyone agrees with and then achieving as much co-ordination and consistency as possible while retaining as much support as possible. And maybe the issue here is that once we move beyond the monarchy, there isn't much that everyone agrees is a good idea. Beyond this is a mass of regional identities, some of which might be shared by 'super-regions' (broadly what the north/south debate seems to me to be about). What's striking about the debate on Scottish independence is that the Scots are ahead of the rest of us in terms of defining themselves (as well they might be), and thus what they want the constitutional settlement to be, within the monarchy.
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