Adapted by the author from his speech given at the Heritage Lottery Fund's Who do we think we are? forum held at the British museum, London 13 July 2004

Earlier this year, while driving near Halstead in north Essex, I came across a road sign announcing that I was about to enter ‘New England’ and should therefore ‘Reduce my speed.’ I did as instructed, eager to get the measure of this optimistically named place. Ornamented with dragons and satellite dishes, the first building I passed was a combined restaurant and ‘ballroom’ named ‘Taste of China.’ Opposite was a road haulage firm called Westrope, which, at one corner of its sprawling site, had managed to mutate into a clapboard junk shop overflowing with concrete garden statues – a collection that moved effortlessly from robust classical Goddesses to wrinkled gnomes and Old Mother Hubbard’s boot. I noticed a few houses, an unseasonably closed roadside restaurant named ‘Pippins,’ and also a thriving new garden centre: the kind of place where even tightly-buttoned English folk reveal themselves to be at ease with the most flagrant products of cross-breeding.

But that was about it. I had passed through ‘New England’ before I was really aware of having reached it. Later, I looked for the place on a map but could find no trace at all. I searched on the internet but, even when I added encouraging words such as ‘Essex,’ I couldn’t get closer than the east coast of the USA. Despite the temporary yellow signs indicating that one of John Prescott’s new housing developments is being built in the neighbourhood, Britain’s ‘New England’ is apparently still too small to register. The old version, meanwhile, continues to lurk all around us.

‘Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget.

For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.’

Those lines come from G.K. Chesterton’s poem, ‘The Secret People.’ ¹ I quote them from the head of a chapter entitled ‘The English Enigma’ in the Scottish writer Tom Nairn’s book, The Break Up of Britain (1977) ². Nairn used the passage to introduce his argument that a loosening of the British state would only be possible if accompanied by some ‘restoration of the English political identity.’ Ireland, Wales and Scotland could, as Nairn said, be grasped as ‘relatively ordinary examples of modern political nationality’ but ‘the English were too vague and mixed up to fit a nationalist stereotype.’ Diluted by the British Empire, they retained no national dress and possessed only what Nairn called a ‘faltering and disconnected iconography (John Bull etc.).’ There was, he said, ‘no coherent, sufficiently democratic myth of Englishness.’ As a result, the English were left lurching about between worship for the ‘semi-divine Constitution and the Mother of Parliaments’ and crude racism of the sort shown by the London dockers who marched in support of Enoch Powell in 1968.

In terms of constitutional reform, things have been moved on significantly since Nairn wrote those words. We have a Scottish Parliament, a Welsh national assembly and, despite ongoing difficulties, a far less murderous situation in Northern Ireland. We have also seen various attempts to define the values around which a devolved and various Britain might cohere. In 2000 Lord Parekh and the members of his Commission were savaged, and not just by the tabloids, for advocating a ‘rethinking’ of national identity in their report on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain ³. Professor Sir Bernard Crick fared much better when proposing the Home Office’s more disciplinary new ‘citizenship’ test for immigrants in 2003. Tony Blair may have been nervously concentrating on Iraq, but the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, has been busily making the case for a new sense of British identity. In the approach to the 2004 Labour Party Conference, he has used platforms provided by various agencies - from the British Council to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations – to emphasise the importance of being enterprising while still attending to the ‘golden thread’ running through British history: not backward-looking nostalgia, as he insists, but a renewable tradition in which prominence is given to civic values and the sense of duty and fair play.

That vision of a ‘New Britain,’ in which economic prosperity is harmonised with social justice, may indeed be something to work for. But the thought of a resurgent English nationalism does not inspire Mr Brown, nor any of his Cabinet colleagues, to comparable flights. Indeed, ‘the English Question’ is met with palpable silence in government circles. It provokes an embarrassment of the kind that, during Mr. Blair’s first government, made the rebranded politicians of ‘New Labour’highly reluctant to be photographed near old buildings. It is fine to emphasise the virtues of regionalism within Europe, but English nationalism is denied as an incorrigibly primitive beast best kept carefully locked up in its cave.

If there is good reason for this sense of caution, it may be connected to the continued circulation of G.K. Chesterton’s lines about the secret ‘people of England, that never have spoken yet.’ In 1997, they were brandished by Martin Bell as he opposed Neil Hamilton in the Tatton byelection. In June 1999, James Gray, the Scottish Tory M.P. for North Wiltshire, quoted them as he argued against the injustice of a post-devolutionary situation in which MPs for Scotland, now established under its own national assembly, nevertheless retained power to make decisions over England.

Chesterton’s lines are also popular with the champions of the countryside. In February 2002, they were used by Iain Duncan Smith on behalf of farmers beset by Foot and Mouth. Favoured by fox-hunting militants, they also appear on the marching banners of the Countryside Alliance: brandished as the slogan of a rural population oppressed by urban majority values and a Labour government that has no respect for rural custom and practice. They are quoted by the ‘Campaign for an English Parliament’; and they feature in the rhetoric of the UK Independence Party – for whom the ‘secret people’ are oppressed by the remote decision of the European Community.

If these lines from G.K. Chesterton remain one of the most persistently quoted expressions of English identity, this may be because their definition of Englishness differs from other well-known examples. Various figures, including the Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in the 1920s and George Orwell in 1940, have reached their definitions of the national identity by drawing up lists of characteristic qualities or traits. Chesterton had his preferences too, but the Englishness of his “secret people’ is not just an inventory. It is, instead, a defensive stance adopted against the power of the state and the transformations that follow in the wake of a modernising history. As such, Chesterton’s version of Englishness has proved more easily adjustable to changing times than Orwell’s inventory of smokey towns, red pillar-boxes, Autumnal mists and bicycling old maids (a collection of ‘characteristic fragments’ that seemed threadbare and sadly exhausted when John Major tried to reorientate them towards ‘middle England’ in the early nineties ⁴). It has also shown greater application than the horse-drawn ploughs that Baldwin declared to be both primordial and timeless at the very moment when they were actually being replaced by tractors all over the country ⁵. Far more emphatically than Orwell’s or Baldwin’s, Chesterton’s ‘Englishry’ finds its essence in that sense of being opposed to the prevailing trends of the present. It’s a perspective that allows even the most well-placed man of the world to imagine himself a member of an endangered aboriginal minority: a freedom fighter striking out against ‘alien’ values and the infernal works of a usurping state.

So what are the sources of this defensive and surprisingly persistent way of thinking about English identity? G.K. Chesterton’s ‘The Secret People’ was first published in 1907 in a magazine named The Neolith. Its ‘secret’ Englishmen can be imagined as a group of Anglo-Saxon men seated in an unrenovated pub: slow but steadfast, unschooled but instinctively wise. These representatives of native common sense have sat there drinking their undoubtedly real ale while the centuries have unfolded outside and sometimes come crashing in through the door. They have seen the comings and goings of sundry invaders, and gained nothing through a long succession of rulers – from Norman barons to the triumphant puritans of the Civil war. Some may have put down their glasses and wandered off to fight with Nelson at Trafalgar (‘dying like lions to keep ourselves in chains’). In general, however, these unreconstructed natives have not responded enthusiastically to those who have tried to rally them to the defence of their own interests: ‘A few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.’ Or again: ‘It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest / God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.’

Chesterton, who died in 1936, cannot have seen ‘binge-drinking’ of the kind that nowadays tends to alarm even half-drunk observers of the English Saturday night. However, he did find a peculiarly philosophical way of coming down on the side of the alehouse. He treated beer as both the desire and customary right of the put-upon native Englishman. He developed this idea in his argument with the Fabian socialists who imagined building up a strong and expert state as an instrument of enlightened social reform. Working class alcoholism was a matter of concern to the Fabians (as it was to many European socialist parties seeking a wider, and non-drunken, franchise at the opening of the twentieth century). Together with his long-standing friend Hilaire Belloc, who also praised the traditional pub as ‘a fortress of virtue’ in a degenerating present in which ‘nothing . . . is capable of endurance,’ ⁶ Chesterton argued strongly against these meddlesome Fabian reformers. Writing in A.R. Orage’s journal The New Age in 1908, he declared ‘Drink and property have been swelled in our world into abominations . . . The proposed abolition of personal property has its only practical parallel in teetotalism’ ⁷. So this curious Edwardian symbolism grew up, in which beer came to be associated with traditional English freedom, while the joyless and over-intellectual Fabian meddlers such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw put themselves to bed with warm cocoa.

Far from being an outcrop of Tory thinking, Chesterton’s idea of England’s ‘secret people’ originated as part of this argument within the frame of Edwardian socialism. Chesterton and Belloc came to be known as ‘Distributists,’ arguing, against both monopoly capitalism and state socialism, that property and ownership of the ‘means of production’ should be as widely spread as possible. Their vision was variously shaped by Catholicism, anarchism, Chartism, and also the decentralised tradition of guild socialism, a movement that followed William Morris and John Ruskin in finding inspiration in the craft guilds of the medieval age. Their beleaguered ‘England’ was on the side of the people against Industrialism, monopoly capitalism and the rules and bureaucrats of what Belloc called ‘the servile state.’ ⁸ It also had a strongly anti-imperial tinge.

Chesterton elaborated this aspect of his Englishness in an essay entitled ‘On Rudyard Kipling and making the world small,’ included in his book Heretics (1905) ⁹. Here he took issue with Rudyard Kipling, and in particular with the epigram in which Kipling asked ‘what can they know of England who only England know?’ It was, contended Chesterton, ‘a far deeper and sharper question to ask, “What can they know of England who know only the world?”’ With his imperial cosmopolitanism, Kipling may certainly ‘know the world; he is a man of the world, with all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet. He knows England as an intelligent English gentleman knows Venice.’ Insisting that Kipling’s devotion to England was the outcome not of love but of critical thought, Chesterton values it far less than the ‘real’ (by which he means instinctive and unreflected) patriotism of the Irish or the Boers, whom Kipling had recently ‘hounded down in South Africa.’ Kipling, he said, did not belong to England or, indeed ‘to any place; and the proof of it is this, that he thinks of England as a place. The moment we are rooted in a place, the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the whole strength of the universe.’ It was in the same spirit of epic belittlement that Hilaire Belloc had insisted, after passing through Ely on one of his excursions into the fens, that ‘the corner of a corner of England is infinite, and can never be exhausted.’ ¹⁰

This fiercely localised idea of England may have owed something to late nineteenth century Liberal dissenters such as John Morley and William Harcourt, who had been derided as ‘Little Englanders’ for their opposition to British imperialism and pursuit of the Boer War. But Chesterton found his own way of insisting that ‘the “large ideas” prosper when it is not a question of thinking in continents, but of understanding a few two-legged men’. He argued that travel of the kind in which Kipling had indulged was a mere distraction which shrank the world into a series of destinations:

‘The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. . . The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men – diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men – hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky.’

Or again, this time in opposition to the new mobility of ‘motor-car civilisation’: ‘The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance; the motor-car stupidly destroys it’.

We may initially feel attracted to this attempt to dissociate ‘England’ from the organisational efficiency of the imperial British state. Yet Chesterton’s remains a thoroughly defensive definition of Englishness – one that was formulated in bitter awareness that the world was actually charging headlong in the opposite direction. Its anti-Imperialism was less a critical engagement with the British Empire, than an inward-looking act of retreat and denial. Though presented as a cosmic locale, Chesterton’s England was from the start also a last ditch to be defended against all sorts of encroaching modern forces.

Chesterton himself demonstrated this in 1914, when he published his comic novel The Flying Inn ¹¹. This work shows beleaguered English virtues lined up against a host of parodied modern absurdities. It opens with Humphrey Pump, whose pub, the Old Ship, lies by an apple orchard in a little village named Pebbleswick. All would have remained well in this organic English nook, except that the British government, thanks to an over-intellectual Cabinet Minister named Lord Ivywood, has succumbed to alien influences. In what may have been intended as a comment on the cranky and disconnected faddishness of Fabian intellectuals, Ivywood has fallen under the spell of a zealous Islamic prophet, and imposed a ban on alcohol. The Old Ship may long have been a refuge for those who wished that, in Belloc’s phrase, ‘the fear of mutation should be set at rest.’ ¹² But it must close, so Dalroy and Pump uproot their pub sign, take a barrel and a large cheese and set off around the country: coming out of hiding to erect their pub sign at a series of fugitive locations, and then melting away again as the authorities catch up.

While it contains the famous poem praising ‘the rolling English road’ (made, as readers may recall, by the ‘rolling English drunkard’), The Flying Inn also imagines the ‘nightmare’ that follows ‘when the English oligarchy is run by an Englishman who hasn’t got an English mind’. That, of course, is Lord Ivywood, against whom Chesterton celebrates the unschooled publican Humphrey Pump as a kind of English aborigine who has learned by experience rather than through books or ‘academically like an American Professor.’ Common sense and an ‘incorruptible kindliness’ lie at the root of Pump’s ‘Englishry’. He also has an instinctive grasp of his native land, knowing the ‘English boundaries almost by intuition’. ‘The deepest thoughts are all commonplaces,’ as Chesterton writes, once again lining up unreflected English instinct against the detached and artificial cleverness of the ruling elite: ‘if they have to choose between a meadow and a motor, they forbid the meadow’. Predictably enough, the governing classes also have a taste for the most pretentious of Modern Art. One scene is set in an exhibition of ‘Post-Futurist Art’ at a fairly unmistakable Tate Gallery. Admirers expound on the virtues of the exhibited works, even though they can’t tell a landscape from a portrait. The show is also approved by the Islamic ‘prophet,’ who pronounces that there is no need for these ‘Post-Futurist’ works to be proscribed as idols, since they can’t really be called pictures at all.

The Flying Inn is still admired as a prescient comedy: an early assault on ‘political correctness’ and the bureaucratic mentality of the centralised state. Chesterton was indeed insightful on some themes. His distrust of Fabianism and the scientifically organised state alerted him early to the dangers of eugenics ¹³. His mistrust of the Fabians was vindicated in the thirties, when many of these highly educated thinkers embraced Stalin’s Soviet Union as the progressive land where centralised state planning had really come into its own. Similarly, there was nothing fictitious about many of the industrial and urban degradations he and Belloc opposed. Yet the dangers of Chesterton’s way of thinking about England as an organic realm threatened by modern forces were also there from the start.

In the poem, ‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ (1911), the malevolent encroacher is presented as a weed creeping inward to obscure the ancient horse carved in the chalk of a Wessex hillside:

‘The turf crawled and the fungus crept,
and the little sorrel, while all men slept,
Unwrought the work of man.’

Yet in ‘The Secret People,’ the agent of destruction had already been given human form. Here are the nullifying bureaucrats of the modern state:

‘Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes.

The racial alien is also dragged in: ‘the cringing Jew,’ accompanied as so often in anti-Semitic iconography, by his loyal sidekick ‘the staggering lawyer.’

These lines, which are not excerpted in the dictionaries of quotations, indicate that qualities distinct from Humphrey Pump’s ‘incorruptible kindliness’ may be found at the heart of Chesterton’s England. Indeed, they suggest that it may be impossible to adopt the values of secret ‘England’, without also signing up to a current of fear and loathing that brings a whole series of ‘alien’ destroyers streaming by.

This was certainly the case with the organic movement that set out to revive the (genuinely) depressed English countryside in the nineteen twenties and thirties. One of the organisations bent on ‘reviving the English type’ at this time was a Chestertonian-sounding association named the English Array, which had cells or ‘musters’ around the country. Its members were on the side of compost, brown bread, and the old village hierarchy. They disliked white bread, tinned and imported food (“English food in English bodies” as they put it), and also the alien bamboo that was threatening to replace native hazel as a frame for English runner beans ¹⁴. Thanks to its far right ideologues, who including the notoriously anti-Semitic A.M. Ludovici, and also A.K. Chesterton (a fascist cousin of G.K. Chesterton), this eccentric defence of the English countryside was identified with a anti-Semitic assault on the financial system and a tendency to view the urban population as gibbering, faithless, horribly over-fertile products of degenerate interbreeding. Having emerged with one foot in this camp, the Soil Association would later have to reorganise itself around the understanding that, while the organic idea may be benign when it comes to potatoes, carrots and apples, vile things start to happen when it is applied to human societies.

Despite Chesterton’s incipient anti-Semitism and his softness for fascism (admitted in the 1930s, when he opposed Stalinist Communism as the alternative), his lines about ‘the people of England, that never have spoken yet’ found their most respectable application during the Second World War. And perhaps never more strongly than in the House of Commons debate of September 1940, which brought down Neville Chamberlain, together with his policies of appeasing Hitler, and opened the way for Churchill to become prime minister in his place. When the leader of the Labour Party, Arthur Greenwood rose to speak, Leopold Amery shouted ‘Speak for England, Arthur!’ from the Conservative benches.

But the secret phobias would return with the launch of This England, an explicitly Chestertonian publication that would become one of Britain’s most widely circulated ‘heritage’ magazines ¹⁵. Launched as a ‘quarterly reflection on English Life’ in 1968, it advocated ‘looking back with pride,’ and said of the contemporary world, ‘it may be clever and modern and progressive. But it’s certainly not English.’ This may have been faintly amusing when applied to decimalisation. But by 1976, the targeted encroachment was different: ‘the knowalls have opened the flood gates until our cities throb with trouble. England, is our home. Heathrow is our front door.’ In 1992, the owner of This England, Roy Faiers, was involved in the successful campaign to defeat John Taylor, now Lord Taylor of Warwick, when he stood as black candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Cheltenham.

The polarisations that are so characteristic of Chesterton’s vision of England continue to reverberate in other ways too. A considerable number of recent books about England continue to adopt an elegiac mode, even if their funereal lament for England and its representative forms is by no means always accompanied by accusations directed at an ‘alien’ encroacher ¹⁶. An ostensibly comic strand of fiction persists as well. In 1995, the journalist and historian Andrew Roberts, published The Aachen Memorandum, a slight but highly symptomatic novel in which an ‘English Resistance Movement,’ consisting mostly of Roberts and his thinly disguised friends, rise up against a German dominated European Superstate, which bans Christmas Trees, Hollywood films, and elaborates interfering rules concerning the right, or otherwise, of native English women to shave their armpits ¹⁷. Pursuing the same theme of bunkered Englishness, Richard Littlejohn came up with To Hell in a Handcart (2001), a sniggering fulmination directed at predictable targets – from the political correctness of the state functionary to racism awareness training ¹⁸. It serves quite adequately to bring us up to a present in which Chesterton’s poem ‘The Secret People’ appears (complete with ‘staggering lawyer’ and ‘cringing Jew’) as ‘poem of the month’ on the British National Party’s website.

I don’t wish to overstate the connectedness of the examples I have cited, yet there is little doubt that, while Chesterton’s version of ‘secret’ England dates from nearly a hundred years ago, it expresses a way of thinking about identity and change that remains active to this day. It is by no means a dominant outlook, yet its persistence in an age that is actually defined by global mobility, transnational identities, and a weakening of the nation-state, justifies the sense of caution that many feel about English nationalism. In polarising the past from the present, it produces a kippered England in which the very thought of difference or change is instantly identified with degeneration, corruption and death. Chesterton and Belloc may have associated their ‘remaining’ England with Catholic values, but it has since become a Philistine England, in which ‘native commonsense’ becomes indistinguishable from ‘unspoken’ (but all the more effective) prejudice and in which the elegiac spirit becomes militant and vicious. In too many versions it is a secret England, not because its people are genuinely too oppressed to speak, but because they prefer to sit muttering over their beer: sharing ‘unspeakable’ ideas that are neither remotely adequate to the issues they pretend to address nor capable of commanding public debate.

This way of thinking about England as a land of beleaguered residues does nothing to clarify the problems it addresses. Instead, it wraps them in a grossly simplified narrative of (old) authenticity and (new) corruption, and then sends its followers out in search for scapegoats. It justifies sceptics, such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who shun the idea of Englishness altogether, preferring to identify with a ‘New Britain’ organised around a democratic conception of citizenship rather than a reactive fantasy of organic roots ¹⁹. It also lends urgency to the project of those who would reclaim English traditions (including the vin-da-loo ‘Ingerland’ of the football terraces) and create an expanded ‘New England’ in which, as Billy Bragg has suggested, the hyphenated phrase ‘Anglo-Saxon’ testifies to the fact that the English have been mongrels since time immemorial. ²⁰

Certainly, we should reject the suggestion that English ‘identity’ consists of a single closed lineage to be conserved against present challenges. We should avoid putting anyone’s static and disconnected idea of tradition where political interaction and civic vitality should be. We should also refuse the idea of the English as a secret people. Back in 1914, Chesterton’s roving commonsensical publican Humphrey Pump made do with a pub sign, a cheese and a barrel of beer. But, if this year’s Labour Party Conference is anything to go by, his instinctive, fox-hunting descendants prefer to dump dead animals in the streets of Brighton, and to snarl anti-Semitic insults at Gerald Kaufman. ²¹

What, finally, are the implications of this outlook for those concerned with history and cultural heritage? This is surely a time for more rather than less historical awareness. Yet our sense of history should be informed by critical perspective: it needs to be capable of understanding the ‘otherness’ of the past and aware of the dangers of cleaving to imagined ‘organic’ continuities. Far from being left to the British National Party or the monocultural elegists of This England, ‘heritage’ should be embraced as a various theme: one that expands horizons rather than narrowing them, and also confirms (as many of our museums and galleries are already doing) that it is entirely possible to maintain a sense of cultural belonging in the 21st century without retreating into a dank tribal recess – Humphrey Pump’s ‘The Old Ship’ - and peering out aggressively at the increasing number of people who know that the future lies elsewhere.

Notes

1. ‘The Secret People,’ Stephen Medcalf (ed.), Poems for All Purposes; the Selected Poems of G.K. Chesterton, London: Pimlico, 1994, p.p. 56-8.

2. Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, (1977), Second Edition, London: Verso, 1981. pp. 291-305.

3. Bhiku Parekh (and the Runnymede Trust), The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain; Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, London: Profile, 2000.

4. George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’ (1940), quoted from Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 2; My Country Right or Left 1940-1943, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, pp. 75-6.

5. See ‘England,’ a speech given at the Annual Dinner of the Royal Society of St. George, May 6, 1924, in Stanley Baldwin, On England; and other Addresses, London: Allan & Co., 1926, p. 7.

6. Quoted from ‘At the Sign of the Lion’ in Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea (1906), London: Methuen, 1912, pp. 251 & 252.

7. G.K. Chesterton, “The Last of the Rationalists,” The New Age, 29 February, 1908, p. 349.

8. Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, London: Foulis, 1912.

9. G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, London: John Lane, 1905, pp. 46-53

10. Hilaire Belloc, ‘The Sea-Wall of the Wash.’ In Hills and the Sea, p. 104

11. G.K. Chesterton, The Flying Inn, London: Nelson, 1914.

12. Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea, p. 254.

13. G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils, London: Cassell, 1922.

14. For the English Array and other rural activists of this period, see my The Village that Died For England, (Revised Edition) London: Faber, 2003, pp. 180-240.

15. For a discussion of This England, see my The Village that Died for England, pp. 41-3

16. Recent examples of elegiac writing about England include Peter Vansittart, In Memory of England (London: John Murray, 1998) Roger Scruton, England: an Elegy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000) and Byron Rogers, The Last Englishman; the Life of J.L. Carr (London: Aurum Press, 2003).

17. Andrew Roberts, The Aachen Memorandum, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995.

18. Richard Littlejohn, To Hell in a Handcart, London: HarperCollins, 2001.

19. See the exchange on this issue between Tom Nairn and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in Tom Nairn, Pariah; Misfortunes of the British Kingdom, London: Verso, 2002, pp. 163-70.

20. See the articles by Billy Bragg, John Williams, Pete Davies and others in Mark Perryman (ed.), The Ingerland Factor, Edinburgh & London: Mainstream Publishing, 1999. Billy Bragg’s treatment of the hyphen in ‘Anglo-Saxon can be found on his CD English, Half English (2002). For an interesting account of six ‘Anglo-British’ figures who have broken with thoroughbred fantasy, see Kevin Davey, English Imaginaries: Six Studies in Anglo-British Modernity, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1999.

21. See Gerald Kaufman, ‘Larcenous, racist scum,’ The Guardian, September 30, 2004.

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Patrick Wright is a broadcaster and writer. His first publication On Living in an Old Country (1985) tracked the rise of 'national heritage' as a theme in post-war British life. Since then he has published A Journey through Ruins (1991), The Village that Died for England (1995) and Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (2000). Patrick's most recent book on Englishness is the enlarged edition of The Village that Died for England (Faber 2003). Patrick Wright has also written regularly for magazines and newspapers, including the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Independent and the Observer. His work for television includes The River, a four-part series about the Thames, and A Day to Remember about the history of Remembrance Day. In 2000 he co-selected Tate Britain's Stanley Spencer exhibition while Tate Britain's Paul Mellon Centre Fellow. Since May 2000 he has been Professor at the institute of Cultural Analysis, Nottingham Trent University.