The Politics of Britishness

The project will test the idea that Britishness has been and continues to be a distinctive synthesis of patriotic identity and political artifice, albeit one challenged by separatist, nationalist tendencies. It will examine the tension between synthesis and separation in the United Kingdom, a tension inscribed in the institutions of devolution and will explore how that tension continues to change. The current devolution settlement was justified by the Labour Government as an asymmetric modification of the old British synthesis. It was designed to provide for the democratic acknowledgement of the nations within the constitution (apart from the English), accommodation (by confinement) of nationalist tendencies, greater transparency in relationships between the centre and periphery and new institutional foci for the exercise of active citizenship. Its stability required no English sense of alienation or dispossession, a limit to the nationalisation of popular sentiment and a continued faith in British institutions. It is an open question whether those objectives have been achieved and the project will explore what, if anything, now constitues the ‘unifying identity’ which Prime Minister Gordon Brown attributes to contemporary Britishness.