Fintan O'Toole on Britain and England

Where England meets the Channel: Dungeness (photo © hidden europe)

England used to be such a large country. A land that stretched from the shingle ridges of Dungeness to the sunlit fells of the Lake District, from the marshy Fens to Cornwall’s cliffed coast. But it’s shrinking. In a recent article published in the German weekly Die Zeit, the Irish critic and columnist Fintan O’Toole warns that a country is often diminished in any quest to recover lost national status. O’Toole suggests:

“The quest for size has led to making Britain smaller. Is this the beginning of a development that will end with an English nation-state?”

I haven’t lived in England for almost 30 years. When I have visited England in recent years, it seemed like a very foreign land. When I head off from Berlin to countries like Sweden, Slovakia and Slovenia, they seem in some ways familiar – not so very different from Germany. But England feels like a very different place, as alien as Belarus.

Have I changed? Well, most certainly. Has England changed? Immeasurably. And it’s in that context that Fintan O’Toole’s essay in Die Zeit is so very interesting. The legacy of empire and a prevailing sense of English exceptionalism has so shaped public discourse that England has been diminished. And it’s set England at odds with its national partners in the United Kingdom. O’Toole suggests:

“It is important to remember that the English nationalism that has driven Brexit is not just anti-European. It is anti-Scottish.”

Over the past fortnight, we have seen Gibraltar finally joining the Schengen group of nations, while Northern Ireland has reshaped its trading arrangements, moving away from Britain and much closer to the Republic of Ireland. For both these territories, there is the prospect of sunnier times ahead. But it is in Scotland that the consequences of English nationalism will be played out with the most dramatic consequences.

O’Toole argues that England’s treatment of Scotland will give added weight to calls for another referendum on Scottish independence. And whereas in the past, the European Union could always be used as a scapegoat when things went wrong in England, that’s going be a whole lot harder in the future.

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