How Britain Ends

English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations

By: Gavin Esler

Narrated by: Robin Laing

Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

A thoughtful, articulate and important book about the rise of English nationalism and the impending breakup of the United Kingdom from one of the finest BBC journalists of the last 20 years.

How Britain Ends is a book about history, but also about the strange, complicated identity of Britishness. In the past, it was possible to live with delightful confusion: one could be English, or British, Scottish or Irish and a citizen/subject of the United Kingdom (or Great Britain). For years that state has been what Gavin Esler calls a 'secret federation', but without the explicit federal arrangements that allow Germany or the USA to survive.

Now the archaic state, which doesn't have a written constitution, is coming under terrible strain. The English revolt against Europe is also a revolt against the awkward squads of the Scottish and Irish, and most English conservatives would be happy to get rid of Northern Ireland and Scotland as the price of getting Brexit done. If no productive trade deal with the EU can be agreed, the pressures to declare Scottish independence and to push for a border poll that would unite Ireland will be irresistible.

Can England and Wales find a way of dealing with the state's new place in the world? What constitutional, federal arrangements might prevent the disintegration of the British state, which has survived in its present form for 400 years?

©2021 Gavin Esler (P)2021 Head of Zeus

Reasonable account of a state passing out of history

This is a decent essay by a reasonable man, offering a reasonable account of the sources behind the UK’s current crisis of identity.

Esler’s Scottish conscience can’t help but force him to be more honest about those sources, their contradictory natures and their workings out on the peoples of these islands than one usually finds in other similar works.

So he avoids the worst of the rose-tinted nostalgia he interrogates very well, yet he can’t help glancing back himself through a certain sepia-tinged gauze, and fails to make explicit certain connections and resonances that might pick out the glints of the harder edges to ‘Britishness’ that has underpinned that conquest state over the past three centuries. The suggestion that Bridget Cleary’s murder was somehow representative of the Irish Catholic community in general of the time and thus justify Protestant opposition to home rule is ludicrous. We hear about his ancestors in 1912 and their supposedly reasonable decision to stick with the UK; not so much about the proto-fascism and ethnic cleansing in the province 1920-22.

Indeed, for all the references to the ‘four nations’, Gavin doesn’t really provide any reason to credit Northern Ireland with a status equivalent to that of the three historic nations on the island of Britain. And one cannot escape the feeling that, like most non-English unionists charmed and mystified by what ‘Britishness’ means, Gavin simply missed that at root it’s a pseudo-nativist cosplay of a kind of Britannic “romanitas” by English elites, indulged in with the same amateurish spirit of ambiguity they bring to so many of the games they play between themselves.

With those legendary gifts for omission and understatement that mark the English aristocratic tradition, it was easy to overlook it as a Jock or a Paddy or a Taffy on the make in London. But it remained true nevertheless. Britain, Albion, the UK, the British Isles: it really doesn’t matter, for it was all only ever England, for England; this was a truth not requiring explicit uttering, but one tacitly approved of and maintained by all the right sort of people, from the better families and with the proper qualifications.

Anyway, still a decent if flawed light essay on current affairs improved greatly by some great narration.