Each man is an island unto himself. But though a sea of difference may divide us, an entire world of commonality lies beneath.
—James Rozoff
Hadrian’s Wall, Northumberland, a stone wall that was built to defend Roman-conquered Britain from the northern tribes.
Imagine you’re a Roman soldier posted to Hadrian’s Wall, c. 380 CE. You’re from the Etruria/Tuscany region, one of the relatively few soldiers serving in your legion who is actually from the Italian peninsula. It’s February, freezing cold, and you’re on the night shift looking out from the ramparts. You can’t even see the stars as it’s cloudy, drizzling, and dawn is approaching. A brisk wind is blowing up your tunic, and you’re thanking Jupiter for the delivery of braccae (woolen trousers), which arrived last week and were only three months late. It’s difficult to know which is worse, the weather or the sporadic attacks from the barbarians north of the wall. Your colleague on the night watch on your stretch of the wall isn’t of much comfort as he’s from northern Gaul, doesn’t speak much Latin, and only joined up so that after twenty-five years of service he might get Roman citizenship.
You look out at the vague outlines of this barren land, its sparse grasses and rushes bent in the wind, you think of home, the towns of Lucca and Siena, the countryside, the coastline. You sigh heavily and say to yourself, “Pro di immortales, quid hic facio?” “What the hell am I doing here?” Or words to that effect.
Hadrian’s Wall must have been quite a sight for the “primitive” island tribes. Built in 122 CE, it was seventy-three miles long, and parts of it were fifteen feet high and ten feet deep. A thirteen-foot-deep, thirty-foot-wide “fighting ditch” was dug in front of it. Between the two were thickets of spikes. The numerous gates were fortified, and at every Roman mile along the wall was a small fort, and between each of these two turrets. On one side of this wall was “civilization,” on the other “barbarians.” To this day some English and Scots joke that this is still the case, though the wall is no longer there to separate them.
Over fifteen hundred years, Hadrian’s Wall, symbol of the great reach of the Roman Empire—as well as its limitations—almost disappeared. After the Romans left, it fell into disrepair. Farmers took bits of it to build houses and sheep pens, the burgeoning Christian communities took more for churches, and little by little, as the memory of the Romans in Britain faded, their wall crumbled into the landscape they had sought to conquer.
The Romans never succeeded in uniting the lands. Hadrian’s Wall was built to defend the conquered territory against the parts they couldn’t rule. When they’d first arrived in southeast England in 43 CE, they found an array of Iron Age tribes. These tribes knew of the Romans; they would already have had some cultural and economic interactions with the empire and would also have heard stories of Rome’s military capabilities from Julius Caesar’s incursions almost a century earlier. Back then the tribes had put up fierce resistance, but when the legions fell upon them this time they were unprepared, and crucially, they were not united. They were overrun by the Romans, who then set themselves up in Colchester as they prepared to occupy the whole island.
Historians believe that by 47 CE eleven tribes in the southeast had surrendered, and the Romans controlled the area from south of the Humber in what is now Hull across to the river Severn estuary near the Welsh border. From there, the arduous push into Wales and the north began. By 84 CE they were as far up as the Moray Firth, about 150 miles inside what is now Scotland. Evidence suggests that the Romans sailed up as far as the peninsula of Kintyre, and legionnaires probed into the Highlands, but the Moray Firth was the limit of their settled power in Britain. Had they been able to continue, put the whole island under single rule, and remain, the history of the United Kingdom could have been very different.
But the Roman Empire’s borders were being threatened elsewhere, and troops were needed to defend the heartland, not push forward on the fringes. Back the Romans came, stopping more or less where the modern England-Scotland border is. And after they stopped, they built their wall, the most important surviving testament to the strength and reach of Rome’s military prowess. Geographically the region does not have the rivers, say, or mountains that so often form natural boundaries. But it was where the Romans drew the line militarily.
The wall helped shape the place that would eventually be known as the United Kingdom. For two and a half centuries the line held. Below it, life grew increasingly Romanized; above it, a different Celtic culture continued. The future Wales and Scotland were never fully defeated and would always retain a sense of difference from the region that became known as England—the part of Britannia where Pax Romana held sway and where most of the Roman roads and towns were built.
By 211 CE southern England was called Britannia Superior on the grounds that it was closer to Rome. The capital was moved to London. Northern England was Britannia Inferior (another distinction still relevant today), and York was declared its capital. By the year 296 the land had been further divided. Now the south was called Britannia Prima, the north up to Hadrian’s Wall was Maxima Caesariensis, the Midlands were governed as Flavia Caesariensis, and Wales was known as Britannia Secunda. None of it would last in name, but the outlines of those demarcations are still seen today.
Eventually, events on the Continent conspired against the Romans. A couple years after our Roman soldier asked himself his rhetorical question, General Magnus Maximus asked himself the same thing, and in 383 CE his answer was to take his legions home to challenge the emperor of Rome. A few years later, the entire apparatus of the empire’s northernmost outpost packed up and headed for Rome.
After Maximus left, the “barbarians” (Picts and Scots) broke through to the south, prompting the Britons to petition Rome to send a legion to expel them, which it did. Hadrian’s Wall had by then fallen into disrepair, so the Romans advised the British to build a frontier barrier to keep the northerners out. However, the Romans failed to provide the know-how to use stone, and the British put up a turf wall. The “barbarians” cut straight through, resulting in a second plea to Rome—the same as the first: “Save us!” Again the legion returned, beat back the invaders, and this time showed the locals how to construct a stone wall.
It was no good. Without the Romans, even stone could not hold back the hordes from the north. A third appeal was made—this one known as the Groans of the Britons. The response this time has gone down in the annals of British history and is to this day used in political discourse. Rome wrote back, “Look to your own defenses.” The unifying power in Europe had rejected the British, the British had rejected the unifying power, and they were indeed on their own, looking to their “own defenses.” Comparisons to Brexit are fun, but not necessarily germane. The problem then was that there weren’t any defenses. The shadows were lengthening; the twilight of Roman Britain was giving way to the Dark Ages.
In the late 600s enough of Hadrian’s Wall was still standing for the great Anglo-Saxon scholar the Venerable Bede to describe a section of the wall near the river Tyne as “eight feet wide and twelve high, in a straight line from east to west as is clear to beholders to this day.” But it was already becoming a diminished structure. By the 1700s it meant so little to people that what appears to be one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in British history occurred.
In 1745 Field Marshal George Wade was tasked with intercepting the Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie as it headed south. His troops and artillery, marching west from Newcastle, failed due to the lack of a solid road. This prompted Wade to build a new, cross-country road to Carlisle, along the ancient route of Hadrian’s Wall. He had a long history of road building in Scotland, and a reputation as a no-nonsense military man. The nearest building materials to hand were within his field of vision—it must have seemed obvious that the thing to do was to pull down large sections of the wall and use them as the bedrock of about thirty miles of his road.
The destruction of the wall continued until the 1800s, when its value as a great historic monument began to be more widely recognized. Conservationists took up the cause, and stretches of the wall were cleared of debris and foliage and maintained. The best-preserved sections are in a twenty-mile stretch in Northumberland between Hexham and Haltwhistle and are now one of the great tourist attractions of the UK. In the summer months thousands of keen walkers follow the trail across the same gloriously bleak countryside the Romans encountered all those centuries ago. In winter, though, you get a better feel of what was for them the outer edges of civilization. Most of the towers, crenellations, and gates may have gone, but the wall still stands, both physically and in the collective imagination of the British. It reminds them of the time when they were first politically connected to the mainland of the European continent, when the dividing line was drawn between the two largest constituencies of the island—England and Scotland.
Even now, in the twenty-first century, with much of the wall long gone, even though most of it actually lies south of the Scottish border, the Roman fortification still symbolizes one of the main divisions in what, paradoxically, remains a united kingdom.
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Whereas in Europe we see the difficulty of getting nation-states, and the peoples they represent, to unify under one banner, the United Kingdom has been uniting different peoples and identities for hundreds of years.
Right now, the UK is going through a real moment of “us and them,” between the nations it comprises and within its populations, and many people feel more divided than ever. This has been exacerbated in recent years by the 2016 vote to leave the European Union and its aftermath. Cultures and identities are diverging, interacting in new ways with bigger issues of globalization, nationalism, and the EU.
The majority of Brits are bound together legally, linguistically, and to a great extent culturally. Scotland and England were distinct nations for much of their history, with an often fractious relationship. Much of the trouble started in the thirteenth century, when Edward I of England tried to claim Scotland. After many years of fighting against the English invaders, Scotland’s independence was regained by Robert the Bruce in 1314. Over the subsequent centuries the border was often a hot spot, with raids and incursions from both sides, but the two countries were brought closer together in 1603 when James VI of Scotland also became James I of England, and finally they were officially joined together in the Acts of Union 1707.
Scotland may not be a separate nation-state, but the Scots are a nation quite distinct from the English—and, perhaps most important, they feel that way. The differences between them can be exaggerated, but they do exist, and not just because a greater proportion of men wear skirts north of the border.
Until a few centuries ago there was a mild ethnic difference. The Scots were descended from Celtic peoples, as were the Welsh and Cornish. They came to the islands about four thousand years ago and even inhabited what is now England, although there they were gradually replaced by Frisians, Angles, Jutes, and Saxons. Although the genetic differences between English and Scots are now barely noticeable, to this day the English are sometimes called Sassenachs by the Scots, which is Gaelic for “Saxons.”
Gaelic, or Gàidhlig, was the first language for most people in northwest Scotland during the seventeenth century. But within fifty years of the Acts of Union, only about 23 percent of people spoke the language; this number had shrunk to 4.5 percent in 1901, and 1.2 percent at the turn of this century. About sixty thousand people now speak Gaelic, mostly in the Western Isles, and they are bilingual. The Scots are very aware that their current native tongue is not derived from their original language. What they are left with is historical memory—the knowledge that once they were very different. The English have a vague recollection of being the far larger and sometimes dominant force in the relationship; the Scottish have a much keener sense of oppression.
The question of self-determination has not gone away despite increased independence for Scotland within the Union. When England and Scotland were first joined together, Scotland retained control over its educational and legal systems—for example, English law allows for “guilty” or “not guilty,” but Scottish law has a third category, “not proven.” Leave to one side the joke that this sometimes translates as “Not guilty—and don’t do it again”; it satisfies one of the fundamental tenets of self-rule: overseeing your own judicial system. But Scotland and England were largely ruled as one. Not until 1885 was the post of secretary for Scotland created, and even then it was a junior position. It finally became a senior cabinet post, with the title secretary of state for Scotland, in 1926.
In 1997 a referendum was held on proposals for devolution, in which a firm majority voted in favor. In 1998 the Scotland Act was introduced, creating a Scottish executive and Scottish parliament based in Edinburgh that had significant powers, devolved from London, in what were judged to be specifically Scottish affairs. In 2007 the executive rebranded itself the Scottish government, a term that gained legal recognition in 2012. The following year it called for an independence referendum in 2014. The breakup of the UK now looked like a distinct possibility. With just two days to go before voting, the three main British political parties, by now thoroughly rattled and hoping for a “no” vote, said that if independence was rejected, “extensive new powers” would be given to the Scottish parliament. This was probably one of the reasons for the final result: 55 percent voted against independence.
Following the referendum, Westminster went ahead with the 2016 Scotland Act, which gave Scotland’s parliament control over a wider range of matters, including the ability to amend the Scotland Act of 1998, management of the British Transport Police in Scotland, the right to keep half of the VAT raised in Scotland, and decision making over speed limits and road signs. The latter two may seem relatively trivial compared to powers over education and law, but control of minor issues, as well as great affairs of state, satisfies the need for control of what are perceived as one’s own affairs.
Perhaps this is the reason for the apparent decline in support for independence. Following the result, people were soon talking of a second referendum, and in the 2015 general election, a massive surge of support for the Scottish National Party (SNP) increased its number of seats in the House of Commons from six to fifty-six. However, since then, with the new powers coming through, people have seemed less interested, and the SNP’s focus on a second referendum is perhaps the reason why it hemorrhaged support in the 2017 general election, losing twenty-one seats. It now seems that for the foreseeable future the kingdom will remain united. Scottish identity is strong, but not strong enough for the majority of the population to want it reflected in an independent state. The United Kingdom as a concept still supersedes the differences in identity that exist between the various nations it comprises.
Much of what has been said here about the Scottish-English relationship could be said about that between the Welsh and the English. Again, the English are less aware of the oppression for which their ancestors were responsible than are the Welsh, and this gives an occasional sharp edge to the relationship. But powers have now been devolved to a Welsh national parliament, which has gone a long way in answering questions about self-rule. The suppression of the Welsh language ended long ago: several acts of Parliament have guaranteed its equality in law with English, and Welsh-language TV and radio stations have been set up; this has encouraged a resurgence in its use. Roughly 20 percent of Welsh people speak Cymraeg—that’s around half a million. A Celtic language, it’s closely related to Cornish, and both can be traced back to the language spoken in those regions in the sixth century.
The Cornish also see themselves as a separate region from the rest of the country—Cornish nationalists say that England begins “east of the river Tamar,” which divides Cornwall from Devon. The Cornish were officially recognized as a national minority group in 2014; nevertheless, support for Cornish independence has not yet spread beyond the fringes of politics.
While having a strong sense of their own identity, most people in the British Isles get along fine, subscribing to the same values and to the overarching idea of the Union. Of course, anti-English sentiment is expressed in both Wales and Scotland—I was once effectively refused service in a workingmen’s club in Perthshire. However, such incidents are rare, and for every bigot, thousands of other people rarely give the differences a second thought except in usually well-intentioned banter or teasing.
As a young Englishman I was on a train along with several hundred Scotsmen going to Wrexham to see Scotland play Wales. The journey was one long drinking session punctuated with songs, the lyrics including “If you hate the fucking English, clap your hands.” My hands may have hurt from enthusiastic clapping, but I did not mistake the sentiments of some soccer fans for those of the entire Scottish nation. Hate is a word bandied about in the stands; away from the stadium, most people behave in a more grown-up manner. Just as many Brits who voted to leave the EU did not do so from chauvinistic, extreme nationalism, so many Scots who voted to leave the UK were not anti-English.
Most of the ancient British “tribes” live intermingled, working, living, and playing together. As the population of this relatively crowded island approaches 70 million, it is crucial that the cohesion remains—or, if one of the peoples does decide to break the legal ties, that it is done peacefully. In the past century, in only one corner of the kingdom has this not always been the case—Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland is the smallest of the four main UK regions, representing just 5.7 percent of the land area and, with 1.8 million people, 2.9 percent of its population. It was created in 1921 after the British government divided Ireland into two separate jurisdictions. “Southern Ireland” became independent in 1922, while Northern Ireland remained part of the UK. Some people think that the terms United Kingdom and Great Britain are interchangeable, but the latter refers only to England, Scotland, and Wales (and a few small adjacent islands), whereas the UK also comprises Northern Ireland. The full title is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
From the beginning, Northern Ireland’s population was split between Protestants (the majority) and Catholics. The Protestants tended to be descendants of settlers from Scotland, and to a lesser extent England. Most were and are Unionists and want to stay in the UK; most Catholics were and are Nationalists, who want a united Ireland, although they disagree about how to achieve this. The animosity between the two communities has frequently erupted in violence, the worst of which came during the three decades of the Troubles, which began in the late 1960s and cost more than thirty-five hundred people their lives, with another fifty thousand injured.
The 1998 power-sharing Good Friday Agreement ended most of the violence and the resulting “peace dividend” has helped drive economic growth and a reduction in unemployment. Nevertheless, Northern Ireland remains deeply divided—with an entrenched culture of “us and them.” Few elements of life are as bisected as education and housing, something that is obvious in the capital, Belfast, with physical walls built between the two sides. They are known, collectively, as the Peace Walls, but the sad irony is that they symbolize conflict. This is no continuous, imposing barrier such as that along the West Bank or the Saudi Arabia–Iraq border, but rather a series of somewhat ramshackle concrete and metal structures that zigzag through several of the poorer districts of Belfast, mostly in the north of the city. They started to appear at the beginning of the Troubles. Many begin and end seemingly without reason, but the locals know why: they mark the division of Protestant and Catholic territories between which, without the walls, violence might be more frequent.
Henry Robinson understands the width and depth of these divides better than most. A former member of the Official IRA, he was jailed in his youth for kneecapping a man from the rival Provisional IRA. However, having served a sentence in Crumlin Road Gaol, he has devoted his life to conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, as well as around the world in places such as Colombia. He believes the walls are standing in the way of reconciliation: “I call them Conflict Walls or Hate Walls. The conflict is over, but sectarianism has been allowed to continue to be embedded in society, and the evidence for that is the increase in the number of walls since the conflict ended.”
In all, Belfast has about a hundred of these walls. They have even become something of a tourist attraction, and in the summer months you can see tourists arriving on buses from the cruise ships to gaze at them. They are a strange juxtaposition of the economic benefits that the peace dividend has brought alongside a reminder that the peace is fragile. On each side of the walls the neighborhoods are festooned with the symbols and messages of the antagonists. Look up from the pavement curbs, painted in the colors of the Irish or UK flags, and you will see walls sporting slogans such as THE BRITS HAVEN’T GONE—NOR HAVE WE in support of the Real IRA or ULSTER WILL ALWAYS REMAIN BRITISH—NO SURRENDER. The whole sides of some buildings are given over to murals honoring paramilitary groups such as the IRA and the Ulster Freedom Fighters. Henry is unimpressed with this tribal loyalty: “I think both communities have become comfortable with the terror touts and almost take a perverse, ghoulish pride in the continuation of these monuments of hate. That’s a barometer that maybe things could go wrong in the future unless it’s dealt with.”
The division exists across Northern Ireland, with walls in other urban areas such as Londonderry/Derry, albeit to a lesser extent. In the smaller towns it’s harder to spot the fault lines—but they are there. One housing complex will be predominantly Protestant, another Catholic. A town’s river might be the boundary. It is easy to find districts where 90 percent of residents are either Unionists or Nationalists. In everyday life many people do interact, and the more middle-class areas have a greater diversity in housing; many people don’t make a conscious choice not to integrate with their neighbors. But the political and religious structures built into society shape the way people function and ensure that they lead parallel but separate lives.
Finding ways of breaking down these self-perpetuating divisions is hard. Just as neighborhoods are split, especially in public housing, so are schools. A scheme to integrate the system has faltered, and recent research found that in almost half of Northern Ireland’s schools 95 percent of pupils were of the same religion. Another generation of children is set to grow up belonging to one or the other of the two main factions in an educational system described in 2010 by Peter Robinson, then first minister in Northern Ireland, as a “benign form of apartheid which is fundamentally damaging to our society.” Henry Robinson agrees: “The walls are symbolic of the nonphysical walls and the division where the majority of people educate their kids in separate religious schools. There is a culture of separation in Northern Ireland and a policy of integration, which doesn’t marry up. . . . There’s not enough community support or focus on bridge building on both sides.”
While efforts to end the rift seem to have hit an impasse, something could soon have an impact: changing demographics. After the partition of Ireland in 1921, Protestants outnumbered Catholics in Northern Ireland by two to one, a ratio that lasted until the early 1970s. Now, however, Protestants are no longer even a majority of the total population: according to the 2011 census they accounted for 41.6 percent (across various denominations), with Catholics at 40.8 percent. The religious aspect of the conflict, which has faded in recent decades with the decline in religious practice, has been replaced by a clash of cultural identities: whether a person is a Catholic or a Protestant indicates whether the person is a Unionist or a Nationalist. With birth rates and religious identification declining more quickly among Protestants than Catholics, the Catholics will likely become a majority, which will bring with it political implications and questions about Northern Ireland’s position in the UK.
That position is already problematic following the Brexit vote. The Northern Ireland–Ireland frontier is the only land border in the UK; how should it now be handled? The people and businesses in the region are able to move and trade freely across the border. How this might change could have far-reaching consequences and risks upsetting the fragile peace as well as boosting support for the union of Northern Ireland and Ireland. The British government has said it has no plans to install border controls, but that raises a number of problems—potentially allowing an open route for both people and goods between the UK and the EU, one of the very things people who voted to leave wanted to control.
Brexit has exposed deep divisions throughout the UK. It has exacerbated the old ones—the majority in both Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain—but also exposed a variety of differences within the population.
* * *
One of the clearest demarcations in British society has always been class, and this remains the case today. It might be less clear-cut than in the past—a middle-class teacher may well earn less than a working-class plumber, a train engineer may earn more than someone in middle management—and social mobility and diversity are greater. However, most social-mobility studies find that men and women who attended private schools and then one of the Russell Group universities (the UK’s twenty-four leading universities) still dominate the highest positions in the land in numbers way above their proportion of the population as a whole. The case can be made that these people are the most highly educated, and in many instances the best, people for their jobs; but it can also be argued that this system prevents the UK from finding and utilizing the best of its talents.
Only 7 percent of the UK population attended independent schools, but they dominate the highest levels in the judiciary, the armed services, the BBC, the major corporations, the civil service, and both major political parties. For example, 55 percent of the civil service’s permanent secretaries are privately educated, as are 71 percent of the top judges. About half of the UK’s newspaper columnists are privately educated. A 2014 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission report found that on the BBC’s influential Question Time program, 43 percent of guests had attended Oxford or Cambridge Universities. Other factors are also at play that help perpetuate the imbalance across society. Many major companies offer only unpaid internships, effectively barring young people from applying unless their parents can subsidize their living costs. Consequently the better-off, many of them privately educated, gain the experience and contacts that help them succeed in the world of work.
With both politics and the media disproportionately packed with the privately educated, the latter tend to dominate public discourse, which can have a huge impact on influencing public opinion. But it can also mean that they represent a minority viewpoint, which runs the risk of obscuring how popular the opposing view really is, so that a large number of people become increasingly frustrated that their voices aren’t being heard. That is partly what happened with Brexit, which is why in June 2016 the political, business, and media classes got the shock of their lives when the UK voted narrowly in favor of leaving the European Union. The less arrogant woke up and realized how out of touch they were with huge swathes of the electorate.
Since Brexit, much talk has been of the “left-behinds,” which usually refers to those for whom EU membership and globalization have led not to a better life, but to competition for lower-skilled jobs and sometimes unemployment. Those who voted to leave the EU did so for many reasons and came from all walks of life, but certainly many were from the poorer regions of England and Wales, former working-class areas, reflecting the traditional class divide between rich and poor.
The old divisions are hard to overcome, and some commentators have also started to identify new rifts.
The writer David Goodhart characterized a major new difference in his 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, “between the people who see the world from Anywhere and the people who see it from Somewhere.” He argues, “Anywheres dominate our culture and society. They tend to do well at school and then usually move from home to a residential university in their late teens and on to a career in the professions that might take them to London or even abroad for a year or two.” The Anywheres can feel at home wherever they go, whether that’s Berlin, New York, Shanghai, or Mumbai. On the other hand the Somewheres tend to have a much more clearly defined sense of identity. Like the majority of people in Britain, they live within twenty miles of where they grew up and identify with locality, region, and country—they are more “rooted.”
Among the Somewheres are many whose jobs have slowly disappeared as a result of the economic changes linked to globalization and whose working-class culture has recently been marginalized, especially in national discourse. The word cosmopolitan comes from Greek roots meaning “citizen of the world.” We are indeed all one people, but to persuade those who live near where they grew up, have a strong local identity, and do not possess work skills that are transferable across continents that they are “cosmopolitan” is a challenge.
Goodhart suggests that up to 25 percent of the UK population are Anywheres, about 50 percent Somewheres, and the rest Inbetweeners. These are approximations and rough definitions, but they are useful in understanding modern Britain through the prism not just of class but of worldview. Many “progressive” Anywheres might be embarrassed about expressing love of country, Somewheres less so—their worldview was an accepted “fact” in British society until at least the late 1970s, but the rise of the multicultural society, parallel cultures, and the spread of higher education has challenged it.
Britain’s Labour Party, the traditional party of the working class, is increasingly that of middle-class “progressives,” many of whom lean toward the Anywheres’ worldview. In the 1966 general election, Harold Wilson’s Labour Party won power with approximately 11 million working-class votes and 2 million from the middle classes; in 2015 the figures for Labour stood at about 4.2 million working-class votes and 4.4 million middle-class ones. This changing pattern is down to a range of factors, not least the decline in traditional working-class jobs, but it is also because the party that traditionally concentrated on matters of vital importance to the working class—jobs, housing, and crime—has appeared to focus more on other issues, including identity politics.
These different identities—whether global or more rooted—have been in conflict with one another in debates about identity, nationalism, and, yes, immigration, before and after the Brexit vote. For decades this was in many ways a hidden discourse, as political and media circles seemed to refuse to engage with it. But nevertheless, huge numbers of the population were discussing it across the length and breadth of the land.
Successive governments backed mass immigration as needed for the current and future health of the economy of the UK. A strong case can be made for this. A glance at any of the big UK cities shows that transport, health, and many other industries would grind to a halt if all immigrants in the country simultaneously took the day off work. However, what was lacking was the concomitant funding of social housing and health care, and those in power tended to dismiss people’s concerns without stopping to listen to them properly.
An example occurred in the UK general-election campaign of 2010. The then prime minister, Gordon Brown, had a televised street conversation with a lifelong working-class Labour voter, sixty-five-year-old Gillian Duffy, in the northern town of Rochdale. Mrs. Duffy ventured a range of views on the national debt, education, and the health service, then said, “You can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying that you’re . . . but all these Eastern Europeans what [sic] are coming in, where are they flocking from?” Her comments suggested she felt that if she expressed her uncertainty about the pace of change in her hometown, she would be considered a racist. Unwittingly, the prime minister confirmed her view. After joking with her, smiling, patting her on the back, and wishing her all the best, he got into his car. Then, forgetting that his microphone was still on, he said to an aide, “That was a disaster. Well, I just . . . should never have put me in with that woman. Whose idea was that?” Then, in response to an aide’s asking what she’d said, Brown said, “Oh, everything, she was just a sort of bigoted woman.” Millions of people in the UK who were also anxious about how their hometowns were changing realized that their prime minister thought they were bigots.
Many economists argue that the UK does indeed need immigration; the problem is that it has happened quickly, and the government didn’t take into account the consequences when assessing projections for immigration after ten Eastern European countries joined the EU in 2004. The projections turned out to be far from realistic. A 2003 report for the Home Office claimed that as few as thirteen thousand people a year would come from countries such as Poland and Hungary, if Germany and other major EU countries kept their labor markets open as well. That turned out to be an important if. “Come on in,” said the UK government; “Don’t come on in,” said most of the other EU countries—only three countries (the UK, Ireland, and Sweden) allowed Eastern Europeans immediate access to their labor markets in 2004. The rest of the member states introduced a variety of restrictions, with a view to a more gradual change over a number of years. By mid-2015 about nine hundred thousand people had arrived in the UK from Poland alone. In mid-2017, according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, between 2004 and 2016 net migration into the UK averaged 250,000 people a year. Combined, that is roughly the equivalent to the population of six cities each the size of Liverpool.
Given these statistics, it is unsurprising that in a 2011 YouGov poll 62 percent of respondents agreed, “Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition; it sometimes feels like a foreign country and this makes me feel uncomfortable.” Some people jump on such sentiments as proof of xenophobia and an irrational response to the benefits both of membership in the EU and of globalization. This is somewhat unfair to ordinary people who have seen their neighborhoods or the urban areas they visit undergo rapid change. Some areas have been transformed; that this can make some British feel uncomfortable is as obvious as saying that if large numbers of foreigners suddenly moved into a few districts of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, the local people would feel uncomfortable.
It’s ironic that the same person who decries middle-class gentrification of a working-class area, and who understands how the working class might not exactly embrace such change, is often quick to criticize people who are uneasy about the ways in which immigration can alter a neighborhood. Gentrification is sometimes even called social cleansing, while immigration is termed diversification. What is almost always true is that many of those using these terms are less affected by the changes than those living on the spot. To dismiss people who enjoyed their relatively homogeneous cultures and who are now unsure of their place in the world merely drives them into the arms of those who would exploit their anxieties—the real bigots.
Most British now accept the ideas of ethnic equality, gender equality, and gay marriage. Being anti-immigration does not necessarily accord with being anti-immigrant. Just as there is a difference between being uncomfortable about change and being racist, the same is true of patriotism and nationalism. I define the former partially as “love of one’s own country and respect for those of others” and the latter as “love of one’s own country and contempt for those of others.” History has shown that it takes time for us to feel comfortable with “the other,” but also that, properly managed, both We and They can learn to embrace each other.
This is just as true when it comes to the thorny issue of religion. The 2011 census counted dozens of religions in England and Wales, including Jedi Knights, Heavy Metal, and Satanism. However, these faiths, along with Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, are practiced by a minority of the population of 65 million.
About two-thirds of the people have no participatory connection with a religion or place of worship, which shows what an anomaly Northern Ireland is—the strong religious identities there don’t reflect the reality in the rest of the UK. Church attendance overall continues to decline year on year, a trajectory that began in the 1950s and has accelerated. Despite Christianity’s precipitous decline, 59.3 percent of respondents in the 2011 census claimed to be Christians. This is clearly a cultural relic from times when almost the entire country professed to believe in Christianity and shows that even if many people don’t accept the tenets of the faith, they identify culturally with its history and traditions. But this too is fading: in the 2001 census 72 percent had identified as Christian.
In addition to the 59.3 percent figure for Christians, the 2011 census found that 4.8 percent identified as Muslims, 1.5 percent as Hindus, 0.8 percent as Sikhs, and 0.5 percent as Jews. That correlates roughly as 2.7 million Muslims, 800,000 Hindus, 423,000 Sikhs, and 263,000 Jews. Along with “no religion,” these are the top six categories in numbers. The Jedi Knights were seventh with 176,000 adherents—or possibly people with a particular sense of humor. Only 1,800 were self-declared Satanists.
The future increase in Jedi Knights, and indeed believers in Beelzebub, may be difficult to forecast, but this is less true of the main religions. The fastest-growing faith in the UK is Islam, partially because of birth rates, immigration, and devotion. Whereas most Britons who identify as being of Christian heritage are not religious—less than 7 percent of the population class themselves as practicing Christians—a 2014 poll found that 93 percent of Muslims said they practiced their religion. How much of this is devoutness and how much cultural pressure is difficult to judge, as in most Muslim cultures it is not acceptable to declare a “belief” in atheism. Given the strength of its following, and that one in three UK Muslims is under the age of fifteen, the rise of Islam as Britain’s second-biggest declared religion seems likely to continue. And with ongoing immigration and the decline in church attendance in the Christian community, Islam will probably become the most practiced religion in the country.
That is a different thing, though, from the actual size of the Muslim population. In 2011 about one in twenty people in the UK were Muslim, but the public perception of the ratio is very different, as it is throughout Europe. An Ipsos MORI poll suggested that most Britons overestimate the number of Muslims by a factor of three. This is true of both the non-Muslim and the Muslim populations and may in part be due to the concentration of Muslims in urban areas—80 percent of Muslims live in just four regions: Yorkshire, the northwest, the West Midlands, and Greater London.
This concentration has given rise to the emergence of parallel societies, which can lead to division and challenge social cohesion. Parts of some urban areas (Luton, Burnley, Manchester, and Oldham, for example) are overwhelmingly Muslim and have little contact with nearby predominantly non-Muslim neighborhoods. Multiculturalism has not helped—it prevents assimilation and undermines social cohesion; we risk becoming many societies with different cultures, with reinforced “us and them” mentalities and lifestyles.
In the postwar years the UK struggled to become accustomed to being, in some regions, a multicultural society. The British are now engaged in a similar adjustment in an age of accelerated mass migration, but one that includes a significant additional factor, religion, which, as we’ve seen in Northern Ireland, can be one of the most difficult rifts to heal. As most faiths argue that theirs is the true way, and that others are at best misguided, faiths tend to separate people—an unwelcome development that some religious leaders actively encourage. This is particularly the case with Islam because, compared to other religions, Muslim groups are more politically involved, with a concomitant degree of media attention. Numerous religious women and men of different faiths are endeavoring to bridge the gaps, but too many mosques retain preachers who promote “us and them”—and many on the right wing of British politics are guilty of promoting the same thing.
The UK has long had an Islamic presence—a 1641 document refers to a “sect of Mahomatens,” and the first translation of the Koran in England appeared in 1649. However, fifty years ago the estimated Muslim population was fifty thousand; now it is approaching 3 million. This is a rapid increase that occurred together with rapid changes in social attitudes in the UK. Christian church attendance declined, belief was eroded, and yet religious freedoms were increasingly accepted. Abortion became legal, as did the act of homosexuality. Gay marriage and the adoption of children by gay people is now routine, and the majority of the population, regardless of what some Christians say, accept most of the changes.
Tension comes with the growth of a religion many of whose adherents and leaders do not accept the above examples of modern liberal life as they go against the basic tenets of their faith. A poll conducted by ICM Research in 2016 found that 52 percent of British Muslim respondents believed that English law should be changed to make homosexuality illegal again. This attitude is not a problem when its adherents are so few that they have no power to change the status quo. For example, Britain’s tiny ultraorthodox Jewish Hasidic population tends not to engage in the culture wars of the majority population and is content to pursue its own agenda within its own community. However, Islam is now and will increasingly be in a position to make its views known and heeded, which could have a major impact on society depending on what type of Islam it is—one that is pluralistic and in tune with the majority culture, or one that seeks to reverse the liberal changes for everyone, or one that insists on different laws for different people.
Will there be a Europeanization of Islam, or an Islamification of swathes of European urban areas? At the moment there are examples of both. Millions of modern Europeans are Muslim and fully participate in and are part of the fabric of whichever European country they are citizens of. But in some overwhelmingly Muslim urban areas Islamist ideology (often violent) is propagated by people seeking to control the residents. The more the latter is allowed to spread, the more difficult it will be for the former to resist it.
The answer to “What has my religion got to do with you?” is that we are all British and as such enjoy the right to hold and expound views as to what sort of society we want. The moment religion bumps up against the political arena of man-made laws, we all get a say: any Christian owner of a bed-and-breakfast business who tries to ban homosexuals will soon find this out. Those who claim to support the relatively progressive society that has been created must express confidence in the legitimacy of that progress in order to continue to enjoy the fruits of previous generations’ political labors. This confidence appears to have been waning for many years now with the rise of “cultural relevancy,” and a paralyzing fear that any criticism of aspects of a different culture will be branded racist. Naturally some people are clever enough to have spotted this anxiety and used it to close down debate. Racism is an increasingly easy, shallow term to throw around and in many cases deflects from our understanding of what is actually going in our society.
At its root this fear appears to derive from an overwhelming embarrassment, perhaps guilt, about the myriad evils of colonialism. Hence it might be troubling to fly the British flag, but to hoist that of a former British colony at a cultural event in the UK would be a legitimate expression of pride in culture. One type of patriotism, bad—another, good. This attitude is an interesting mix of guilt, paternalism, and authoritarianism. Many ordinary people in the UK are baffled by these cultural cringes because they do not inhabit the intellectual hinterland of those who propagate the dominant narrative. George Orwell was aware of all this. In the early 1940s he wrote in his essay “The Lion and the Unicorn”:
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God Save the King” than of stealing from a poor box.
Orwell was referring specifically to England, and perhaps his observations provide a clue to the rationale of some English pro-Brexit voters—those who do have a strong sense of national identity and pride and are bewildered by a political and media class seemingly detached from ordinary people’s lives. Orwell was part of the commentariat before the expression was invented. He was an unusual example then for the same reasons as he would be now—he bothered to experience English culture as it is lived by large numbers of people. It taught him to try to understand better.
The UK has held together in the past in the face of nationalist sentiments and class and religious rifts. It is again being tested—whether it is able once more to overcome those divides and re-create the relatively cohesive societies of the twentieth century is yet to be seen. Hadrian’s Wall shows us how far back our divisions go, and the Belfast walls how far we still have to go and how badly things can go wrong.
It is possible to look at the rifts in modern British society, and the competing narratives, and realize how important it is to balance the reasonable concerns of the different factions. Whether in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, or Wales, communities need to be bound together in shared experience, cumulatively composing the nation-state—bound together, up to a point, with shared values, hard as they are to define. Our worst nightmare is a future in which we retreat into our various enclaves—the sum of the parts not equaling, but weakening, the whole.
