Nation, class and resentment: The politics of national identity in England, Scotland and Wales

PALGRAVE POLITICS OF IDENTITY & CITIZENSHIP SERIES

Nation, Class

and Resentment

The Politics of National Identity

in England, Scotland and Wales

Robin Mann and

Steve Fenton

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship

Series

Series Editors

Varun Uberoi

Brunel University London

London, UK

Nasar Meer

University of Strathclyde

Glasgow, UK

Tariq Modood

University of Bristol

Bristol, UK

The politics of identity and citizenship has assumed increasing impor￾tance as our polities have become significantly more culturally, ethnically

and religiously diverse. Different types of scholars, including philoso￾phers, sociologists, political scientists and historians make contributions

to this field and this series showcases a variety of innovative contributions

to it. Focusing on a range of different countries, and utilizing the insights

of different disciplines, the series helps to illuminate an increasingly con￾troversial area of research and titles in it will be of interest to a number of

audiences including scholars, students and other interested individuals.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14670

Robin Mann • Steve Fenton

Nation, Class and

Resentment

The Politics of National Identity in England,

Scotland and Wales

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

ISBN 978-1-137-46673-0 ISBN 978-1-137-46674-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46674-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016953850

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Robin Mann

Bangor University

Bangor, UK

Steve Fenton

University of Bristol

Bristol, UK

v

Acknowledgements

The origins of this book lie with the research we undertook as part of

the Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Citizenship, held by

the University of Bristol and University College London, which ran

between 2004 and 2009. This book draws extensively on the data col￾lected for that project, and we express our gratitude to the Leverhulme

Trust for funding it. Particular thanks go to Professor Tariq Modood

and Professor John Salt,directors of the Leverhulme Programme. We

also thank the many,manypeople who gave up their time to take part in

the research.

We draw upon a number of other data sets in this book and fully appre￾ciate the opportunities we were given to access them. A large amount of

the survey material presented is based on an analysis of the 2015 British

Election Study Internal Panel Survey. In addition, the data and analysis

provided by YouGov, The Institute for Public Policy Research and the

Future of England Surveys, British Social Attitudes Surveys, the What

Scotland Thinks website, and Roger Scully’s exceptional Elections in Wales

blog all provedto be invaluable resources. Further qualitative interview

material pertaining to Wales was based on research supported by the

Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods

(WISERD), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council

(ESRC) (Grant RES-576-25-0021) and the Higher Education Funding

vi Acknowledgements

Council for Wales (HEFCW). We would like to thank colleagues across

WISERD who are involved in the research for these projects.

In writing this book, we also have several individuals to thank. Special

thanks must go to Graham Day for his careful reading of four draft chap￾ters, as well as his insightful comments on the book as a whole; many

thanks are extended to Ben Wellings, who exchanged some very useful

emails and made some of his work available to us. We have benefited

considerably from the key contributions of a large number of scholars

working in the fields of national identity and the politics of nation. We

owe an intellectual debt to Susan Condor, Robert Ford, Jon Fox, Steve

Garner Matthew Goodwin, Eric Kaufmann, Krishan Kumar, Michael

Kenny, Tariq Modood and Richard Wyn Jones.

Thanks are also due to the following publishers for granting permis￾sion to use earlier versions of some of the material that appears in this

book: Sage Publications for Mann, R. (2012) ‘Uneasy being English? The

significance of class for English national sentiments’, Ethnicities 12(4):

484-499; and Palgrave Macmillan for Mann, R. and Fenton, S. (2015)

‘English nationalism and Britishness: Class and the sub-state identities’,

in R. Garbaye and P. Schnapper (eds.) The Politics of Ethnic Diversity in

the British Isles. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Pages 151–173.

Robin:

The completion of this book has coincided with my involvement in a

major funding award made to WISERD from the ESRC to establish a Civil

Society Research Centre (Award ES/L009099/1). I would like to express

particular gratitude to Ian Rees Jones, director of WISERD, and Howard

Davis, WISERD’s co-director, for their support. Additionalthanks go to

my colleagues in the Bangor School of Social Sciences, who have made

it such an agreeable place in which to research, teach, and write. They

include Howard Davis, Martina Feilzer, Bethan Loftus, Cynog Prys,

David Dallimore, and Marta Eichsteller.

From Robin: On a personal level, I wish to thank, first and foremost,

my wife Bethan and my two sons, Edwin and Ioan, who have provided

a constant, and welcome, distraction from the writing process. I also

thank my parents, Valerie and William Mann and Ann and Peter Loftus,

for their encouragement and support. Finally, these acknowledgements

Acknowledgements vii

would be incomplete if I did not also thank my co-author, Steve. After

all, it was he who offered me my first academic post at the University

of Bristol all those years ago to carry out this research. Over the past 10

years I have benefited immeasurably from his mentorship. This book is

the culmination of our collaboration.

Steve is, as ever, so grateful to Jenny, Alex and Lynda for their love and

support, and to Iona, Astrid and Isobel for so much fun and happiness.

Robin Mann and Steve Fenton

Bangor and Bristol

November 2016

ix

1 Introduction: Nation and Class in Twenty-First-Century

Britain 1

2 Resentment, Classes and National Sentiments 31

3 Class and Majority English Identities 71

4 The Politics of English Identity and Nationalism 99

5 The Nationalist Alternative: Nation and Class in Scotland 139

6 Wales, Nationalism and the Politics of Resentment 169

7 Conclusion 203

Bibliography 211

Index 241

Contents

xi

Table 5.1 Differences by social class on the question ‘should

Scotland be an independent country?’ (2013) 164

Table 5.2 Class support for SNP in 2010 and 2015

general elections 165

Table 5.3 Recall of 2010 vote of SNP voters in 2015

general election 166

Table 6.1 Moreno national identity in Wales, Scotland and

England in 2012 193

Table 6.2 Intended vote in 2015 general election by chosen

national identity in Wales (%) 197

Table 6.3 Party vote in general election 2015 by social class in

Wales (%) 198

Table 6.4 Party vote in 2015 general election by country of

birth in Scotland and Wales and by Welsh language

ability in Wales (%) 198

Table 6.5 Preferences for Welsh Assembly powers by country

of birth 199

Table 6.6 EU referendum and immigration by party, country

of birth and Welsh language ability 200

List of Tables

© The Author(s) 2017 1

R. Mann, S. Fenton, Nation, Class and Resentment,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46674-7_1

1

Introduction: Nation and Class in

Twenty-First-Century Britain

For more than a decade we have been researching and writing on ques￾tions of national identity, and English identities in particular (Fenton

2007, 2012; Fenton and Mann 2011; Mann 2006, 2011, 2012; Mann

and Fenton 2009, 2014). Drawing on fieldwork carried out in England

we have stressed the importance of considering popular sentiments of

the nation—of attending to what so-called ordinary people have to say

about nation and country, rather than elites, intellectuals, politicians or

nationalist leaders. By paying close attention to what people say about

the nation, we have argued that national identities should not be exam￾ined separately from wider material contexts. People do have anxieties

about the state of the nation, and these anxieties are deeply connected

to changes in class structure and material conditions. During the same

period, scholarly interest in national identities within Britain has flour￾ished across historical, political and social sciences. This includes a grow￾ing concern with the varied meanings of national belonging for ordinary

citizens. Given the breadth of scholarship in this area, including our own,

it is time to take stock.

The Changing Political Landscape of National

Identity

The political context of national identity in Britain has transformed sig￾nificantly since we embarked on our research. At the turn of the new mil￾lennium a key question was whether an English backlash would emerge

in reaction to political devolution to Scotland and Wales and the for￾mation in 1999 of the Scottish and Welsh governments. Academic and

popular interest in Englishness was beginning to mushroom giving rise

to a vast multidisciplinary literature across literature, history, cultural

and media studies, political science and sociology. Survey and qualitative

research on ordinary people’s views of national identity had also started

to take root (Condor 2000; Curtice and Heath 2000). But the evidence

did not point to any great popular concern over matters of devolution to

England or English self-government (Mandler 2006). The muted nature

of England’s initial response to devolution seemed to reinforce some

longstanding assumptions concerning an absence of an English national￾ism (Nairn 1977).

The current form of Scottish and Welsh nationalism can be traced

back to the 1960s, when the phenomenon of substate nationalism expe￾rienced its first truly political arrival. This was the time when attachment

to Britishness, to Union and Empire, began to be seriously questioned.

At their peak in the early 1970s it was Scottish and Welsh nationalisms

which threatened the British state, whilst any corresponding English

nationalist movement was conspicuous only by its absence. The English

were seen to be unconcerned about ‘national identity’, nor did they ques￾tion the place of England within Britain. This has changed quite mark￾edly. In the very short period between 2013 and 2015 we witnessed the

politicisation of English identity and nationalism in relation to the rise in

support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)—a party

which, it has been argued, resembles the closest UK politics has had

to an English nationalist party (Ford and Goodwin 2014a; Jeffery et al.

2014; Mann and Fenton 2014). The transformation is not confined to

England; we also witnessed the Scottish Independence Referendum in

September 2014 with its decisive, albeit close, vote in favour of remaining

2 Nation, Class and Resentment

part of Britain. This was followed by the extraordinary results in the 2015

general election, with Labour losing all but one seat in Scotland and the

Scottish National Party (SNP) achieving phenomenal success. The grow￾ing popularity of the SNP in Scotland is not matched by increasing sup￾port for Plaid Cymru (Plaid), the Party of Wales, whose status as the main

opposition party in Wales is challenged by both the Conservative Party

and UKIP. In this context, the Conservatives were able to retain power at

the UK level in 2015, at least in part, through mobilising English anxiet￾ies over Scottish political influence. These events would appear to support

the conclusions of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) reports

on the Future of England Surveys of a politicisation of English identity,

referred to by the authors as ‘the dog that finally barked’ (Wyn Jones et al.

2012, 2013; Jeffery et al. 2014). Thus we have before us a particular ques￾tion over nationhood across Britain which is both recent and problematic.

National Identities and Their Material Settings

There is no doubt that devolution of powers to Scotland and Wales has

begun to make people think about England as a political entity, one that

is distinct from Britain. But to focus solely on constitutional matters

misses some important questions. We argue that people connect to the

nation, in large part, as a consequence of their material and practical

experiences—of employment and the way expectations relating to health

care, housing and neighbourhood are met. Moreover, many of these

experiences are class experiences. These social and economic contexts also

need to be considered if we are to fully grasp how people orientate them￾selves to nation. Our understanding of national identity across Britain

has benefited enormously from access to an excellent body of survey

research. Through large samples and fixed questions, this work provides a

wealth of evidence for broad patterns of change over time in the strength

of national identity, for example with regard to shifts from British to

English identifications. But survey research also has the tendency to omit

the material context in which people talk about their country or sense of

national attachment. We find that strong national identities and resent￾ments are commonly situated within the broader accounts people give of

1 Introduction: Nation and Class in Twenty-First-Century Britain 3

their material lives. It is through people’s views on being English, British

or otherwise, that we locate deeper sources of resentment—of a world

in which they are ‘left behind’ or of a country that has changed for the

worse (Ford and Goodwin 2014b). This has two immediate implications

for an analysis of discontented national identities. The first concerns how

discontentment is to be traced empirically: in our view, this is not solely

through perceptions of changing constitutional settlements or even the

explicit sense of national identity but through broader popular sentiments

which can include references to everyday life and neighbourhoods and to

social and economic changes to nation and country. Hence our focus

is not only on asking direct questions about national identity but, in a

more far-reaching respect, with national identity as a lens into the state

of the nation. The second aspect is that changes to social classes, along

with material shifts in the political economy, have contributed to the

circumstances in which questions of nationhood and national identity

are problematised and, thus, are important considerations for explaining

the growing assertion of substate identities. Nationhood is not simply a

question of psychological security derived from a taken-for-granted sense

of attachment; it is also rooted in the material and moral reality in which

individuals seek to live their lives. Class experience is, therefore, an inte￾gral part of the story of national identity in twenty-first-century Britain.

Popular Sentiments and the Nation

We believe that popular sentiments and everyday life should receive far

more prominence than they do in both scholarly and political narratives

of nations and national identities across Britain. This is a focus we share

with a growing body of research into everyday nationhood. Since the

1990s, influenced by trends in postmodernism, anthropology and the

turn towards culture and discourse, there has emerged a new subfield

within nationalism scholarship concerned with the discursive production

and reproduction of identities and with researching nations in relation to

everyday life and popular discourse (Brubaker et al. 2007; Edensor 2002;

Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008; Wodak 2009). Britain itself has provided a

fruitful context in which to explore issues of everyday national belonging

4 Nation, Class and Resentment

(Billig 1995; Condor 2000, 2010; Thompson and Day 1999; Edensor

2002; Kiely et al. 2000; Leddy-Owen 2014; Skey 2011). The collective

evidence of qualitative studies has identified the complex, and often con￾tradictory, ways in which people experience, and talk about, the nation

(Condor et al. 2006). Within qualitative accounts, national identities can

vary considerably in their meaning and salience for ordinary actors. These

studies also reveal how commonplace beliefs may be drawn upon to

make sense of national identity, including taken-for-granted associations

between nation and particular classes (Mann 2012) within an unstated

whiteness (Garner 2012; Tyler 2012). To these ends, survey research can

be questioned for assuming that national identities have fixed or singu￾lar meanings which can be deduced from responses to direct interview

questions.

At the same time, we wish to retain a definition of nationalism as both

a collective and political phenomenon. The relationship between elite and

popular forms of nationalism has always been a key concern for broader

nationalism scholarship, although there are disagreements over the nature

of this relationship. Kedourie (1993) in particular considers nationalism

as an elite creation by nationalist intellectuals who are set apart from the

masses. Nairn (1977) on the other hand envisages an interactive relation￾ship whereby nationalist projects, though initially conceived by elites,

are then spread through attempts to engage with the masses. Similarly,

for Breuilly (1993) the ‘success’ of nationalism as a political project—

for example, in pursuit of independence or self-government—relates to

the connection between elite portrayals of the nation and the way this

appeals to and resonates with popular beliefs and grievances held by large

sections of the population. Drawing on examples from recent East and

West European history, Whitmeyer (2002) has argued that elites are not

solely responsible for the development of nationalism and, moreover, that

not all elite nationalisms have been successful in their appeal to ordinary

citizens. The history of Europe is full of cases where elite-driven versions

of nationalism have been rejected by the people, or at least by some peo￾ple, as well as cases where an alternative version of nationalism to that

propagated by elites arose from the people themselves.

This distinction provides a useful way of framing some important ques￾tions about nationhood across Britain. In particular, it makes attending

1 Introduction: Nation and Class in Twenty-First-Century Britain 5