As England celebrates its national day tomorrow, Stephen Bush talks to voters about ‘Englishness’ and uncovers a worrying mood for Labour

Where are you really from?’ When I am being polite, I tend to mumble something about South Africa. When I am feeling difficult, I might say ‘Lithuania’, which is strictly speaking true, but not the answer that they are looking for. But when I am being honest, I say ‘England’.

But what exactly is ‘England’, anyway? The England that George Orwell described as ‘a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with … rich relations who have to be kowtowed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon … [and] a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income’ might feel familiar to me, but there is little in The Lion and the Unicorn that would not strike an equally familiar chord to a Welshwoman, or a Scotsman. England has not had a separate political identity since 1284, despite a series of Welsh pretenders, civil wars, acts of union and nationalist landslides.

So what exactly is this realm that I say I belong to? Eric Kaufman, professor of politics at Birkbeck, has called England a ‘long obscured nation’. England is a kingdom lost twice over. Its own hegemony meant that many of its national writers – Orwell’s all-encompassing England is probably the supreme example – saw no difference between ‘England’ and ‘Britain’, but that same assertiveness drove and powered a Celtic revival, which hollowed out Britishness, and left Englishness behind.

England’s national conversation has decades to catch up on Scotland and Wales. ‘It is almost easier now to be Welsh, Scottish or Irish than to be English,’ says Chris Oxlade, a Crawley native now working to become the town’s member of parliament for Labour. Guy Lodge, associate director at IPPR, agrees. ‘What’s going on south of the border,’ he tells me, ‘is a conversation that’s been going on for sometime [elsewhere] … a waking up to English identity.’

The emergence of English identity has not yet led to a development of an English politics. But, Lodge tells me, ‘mostly you get a link between political expression and political identity.’ With almost two-thirds of people identifying as some flavour of English, it can only be a matter of time before that politics emerges, whether for good or for ill. So I go looking for the beginnings of that expression: to Crawley, a London satellite; Reading, a growing town in the south; Redcar, a declining town in the north-east; and Dover, England’s frontier. All very different but all part of the ‘Frontline 40’ seats that Labour needs to win in order to secure a parliamentary majority.

‘Of course I’m English,’ Tim, a store manager at Crawley’s County Mall, says, ‘We’re a nation of shopkeepers. Getting on, making something of yourself, working hard, that’s Englishness to me.’ In Crawley, Englishness is bound up with what people do – with their jobs and their aspirations. Later, Oxlade, who runs two companies, describes entrepreneurship as a key part of his Englishness. I think of Tim, and a sole trader in Reading, Anuj, both of whom saw Englishness as tied up with their jobs. England – specifically the south of England – is dominated by the private sector. ‘That’s why the work that Tony Blair did, reassuring business, was so important,’ Oxlade tells me. This England – without much in the way of public transport, largely employed in the private sector – can seem like another country to Labour partisans. This is the England that inflicted some of the biggest defeats on Labour in 2010. But it is not resolutely enemy territory: ‘I don’t think that Mr Ed Miliband quite understands how it works on the high street,’ Tim chuckles, ‘but I think his heart’s in the right place, and he’s got some time to work on it.’

In Dover, though, I come face to face with an England that is altogether more hostile to Labour. Karen is a mother of two. She is in her early thirties, and she is thinking of switching David Cameron for Nigel Farage. Englishness, she tells me, pausing only to light another cigarette, is ‘picking up the bloody bill for every Scot who can’t get a job, every Ruritanian who comes over here. It’s following the rules when no one else does. I’ll tell you what England is: a cashpoint’. When I ask her what she thinks about Miliband, she swears before telling me that ‘if he gets in, we’re finished as a country.’

Karen is not a true-blue Tory: she voted Labour in 2005, her first ever vote. But she fits what Lodge describes to me as the classic pattern for a United Kingdom Independence party voter. ‘They are incredibly English,’ he says, and Karen, when I ask her, is not British-English, or English-British, but ‘English, all the way through.’

Dave, a bouncer in Redcar, sees himself as more English than British, and certainly does not think that Britain’s political classes have England’s interests at heart. ‘The only place in this country that the Tories care about is London. Labour, they’re different: they care about London and Scotland.’  He voted for Liberal Democrat Ian Swales last time – the only time in the seat’s history that Redcar has been anything other than Labour – but tells me he will not be voting at the next election: ‘Whoever you vote for, Oxbridge always wins,’ he declares.

These are the attitudes, Lodge says, that encourage Labour to keep quiet on Englishness. ‘They [Labour] think: what’s in it for us? The English are more concerned about welfare, they’re more concerned about immigration, there’s a view that says, “if we give recognition to this, we give credibility that we don’t like”.’

‘There’s a danger here,’ he warns, ’of the self-fulfilling prophecy. All stories about nation are contested. Labour has to engage with this debate because, the more it fails to, the more Englishness goes down the road of becoming a more resentful and more dangerous identity.’

In the constituency of Reading West, on a single street in Southcote, I encounter two very different views of Englishness, but both of them point to how that ‘more resentful and more dangerous identity’ might come to dominate Englishness and England. Anuj, a small businessman, tells me that ‘when I think of English, I think of white people. I don’t see it as for us.’ His neighbour, though, disagrees. Barbara, a teacher and Reading FC fan, talks to me about the England team: ‘When Walcott scores, when Defoe scores, no one’s saying that they’re not English. When Heskey used to start, me and him upstairs thought he was a donkey, but he was an English donkey.’ Back in Crawley, Oxlade argues that the England football team has helped reclaim the England flag from the far-right, ‘who should never have been allowed to take it in the first place’. Research for British Future confirms that civic celebrations of Englishness and Britishness have facilitated a more tolerant and open understanding of ethnicity and nation.

But there is something else that chills me about both Barbara and Anuj. She is proud of England, he is proud of Britain, but they both follow it up with the exact same sentence: ‘You’re not allowed to say that, of course.’ In Crawley, Tim says it too: ‘I’m a patriot. Know you’re not supposed to say it, but I am.’

‘Ukip aren’t ashamed of England,’ Karen tells me. ‘They’re speaking up for England; that’s why I’m voting for them.’ This is the end of the road that Barbara, Anuj and Tim all hint at: this is the tip of the more dangerous identity that Lodge warns about. ‘Think about it,’ says Lodge, offering advice to politicians about Englishness. ‘Contest it, but do not let it become something that is “not allowed”.’

In Crawley the council has revived the St George’s Day parade; Oxlade will be part of it. When Tim tells me that he ‘has doubts’ about Labour, that is partly because the party does not – yet – speak to him as a man hungry for promotion, a retailer trying to get the most out of his business, someone who does not use a great deal of the services that he pays for. But it is also because Labour does not speak to Englishness, to that idea he has of himself as part of a long line of a nation of shopkeepers.

‘We used to make things,’ Karen says to me, and there is something that is still made in England: governments. Just 13 of Labour’s target seats are outside England, and all but three of the ‘Frontline 40’ are within it. Increasingly, winning in England will require not just a policy that speaks to the concerns of the English, but also understands the preoccupations of Englishness.

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