Copied from the Daily Telegraph – 25th August 2025
Recent demonstrations under St George’s Cross reveal a country questioning who it is and who it wants to be Robert Tombs
When we see people of all ages and both sexes demonstrating under St George’s Cross and the Union flag, and when local residents hang flags on lampposts, it is a sign of something momentous.
This combination of English and British flags is full of meaning, symbolising respectively the culture of the country and the sovereignty of the state – both now under threat.
Usually, displaying the flag signals loyalty. Today, it has become a sign of discontent. When local authorities remove our national flags because they are deemed “dangerous”, the point is emphatically underlined. “We are the people of England, and we have not spoken yet”, warned the writer GK Chesterton in 1908.
Some of our rulers would prefer that it remain that way.
The English exception
Flags have not usually inspired in England the emotion they hold in some other countries. We use them on shopping bags, underwear and cushion covers. We shrug if angry foreigners burn them. This is partly because we have many other national symbols, most obviously the monarchy.
Moreover, when England was at the heart of an empire and of a successful multinational state, flag-waving seemed unnecessary and even provocative. It was what foreigners did. The English, and the British more generally, confined themselves to a limited number of official days on which the Union flag would be decorously flown. We were confident enough in who and what we were not to need to wrap ourselves in it. Today, however, flying flags that assert English and British national identity challenges the legitimacy of the country’s own elites.
This is not the first time such a thing has happened.
The idea of national sovereignty was, from its beginnings in the 17th century, a weapon against the traditional powers of monarchs, nobles and priests. The English version was the idea of the “Norman yoke”, which had dispossessed the indigenous people and replaced Saxon liberty with oppression. Even today, one study suggests, people with traditional English surnames are less well off than those with French-sounding names.
Yet this never had the explosive force of other countries’ nationalist myths. The English elite – including the descendants of the Normans – generally sought the consent of their subjects, and were sensible enough to widen the political nation to include potential opponents. Even before it became democratic, England was highly participatory, and bad kings, however sacred, were disposed of by the “community of the realm”. Above all, England has been rich for centuries and has avoided devastating defeat and invasion, the most destructive of revolutionary forces.
The forging of England
Many readers of these lines, I suspect, and many of those hanging flags on lampposts or painting red crosses on roundabouts, would consider that this broadly successful history of England has ended.
I sometimes fear so too, recalling Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt in Richard II: “That England that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”
Many feel that the England they knew and loved is going, or is gone.
England has, over the many centuries of its existence, been in continual flux. Despair about its future has been recurrent. It would be easy enough, if we chose, to recount its history as a succession of catastrophes. The Norman conquest was surely the greatest: the total seizure of all land, the systematic destruction of cultural heritage, the imposition of serfdom, even the eclipse of the language. Yet the new masters called themselves English, much as the Dutch in South Africa called themselves Afrikaans; a new hybrid England emerged.
This England, not its Anglo-Saxon prototype, is the one we have inherited. It became a prosperous exporter of raw materials to more sophisticated markets – a sort of medieval Australia. Foreigners thought its people violent and drunken. The Black Death wiped out half of them but eventually left the survivors better off. A new English culture emerged, influenced by France and Italy, pioneered by Chaucer and reaching its peak in Shakespeare.
But the disastrous loss of ancestral territories on the Continent plunged England into the Wars of the Roses. Then came the cataclysm of the Reformation, followed by two centuries of merciless religious conflict. Foreigners saw 17th-century England as a vicious nest of king-killing fanatics, its politics uncontrollably unstable.
To general astonishment, the 18th century then discovered modernity: liberty, science, politeness, commerce, empire, even happiness. England ceased to be Europe’s laughing stock and became a great power, a partner in union with Scotland. The loss of the American colonies again plunged patriots into despair. Then came utter transformation – what a French economist dubbed the “Industrial Revolution”.
Within a lifetime, England became a different place. Contemporaries realised they were living through unprecedented and unpredictable changes: frightening demographic growth threatened famine, new towns mushroomed, old ways of life were swept away, London and the great commercial cities expanded, and technological transformation happened so fast it made the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray feel like “Father Noah and his family out of the Ark”.
A once self-supporting country became dependent on imported food and raw materials, and hence had to export or die.
Friedrich Engels, the Manchester businessman and communist theorist, predicted confidently that “the revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution”.
On the contrary, by an extraordinary collective effort, the Victorians managed to tame incipient revolution and create a peaceful, prosperous and law-abiding society, with crime falling to its lowest ever level. But the England that the Victorians made was devastated by two world wars, economic depression, and a deindustrialisation that still pauperises whole populations. Then came the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which arguably made the Sixties generation more different from its parents than any generation in history.
Revolution today
Forgive this gallop through history. But it is important. Today we are undergoing demographic shocks comparable in scale with the early 19th century, combined with cultural, ethnic and political changes as great as those of the 1960s – but without economic growth to cushion the impact.
As a result, the questions I am asking – indeed, am asking myself – are these: what is England and Englishness? When did what we think of as Englishness emerge? Is what is happening to us today different from earlier periods of moral and social disruption?
England is one of the oldest continuous nations, arguably the prototype of the nation-state, defined by common institutions and broad participation in government – for example, by jury service, local office-holding and legal rights. Given its size and social mobility, its identity was a diverse one: Cornishmen were not the same as Londoners or Yorkshiremen, and yet they all recognised themselves as English.
Englishness meant loyalty to a common monarch and a common Church, with Parliament and the common law as important national symbols. England ceased to be a nation-state in 1707, but it retained a sense of cultural identity and remained predominant within the Union.
These general observations might suggest a long period of fundamental continuity. Nevertheless, in other ways, English society, beliefs and manners changed profoundly and repeatedly. A 15th-century Englishman or woman would have struggled to accept post-Reformation society – some chose exile, ruin or death. Oliver Cromwell and Charles I would have been astounded and horrified by George III’s England, with its drinking, sexual libertinism and intellectual freedom. Samuel Johnson would have found the noisy, teeming, smoke-filled England of Dickens a nightmare. William Gladstone could not have comprehended Tony Blair’s Britain, with its religious indifference, lack of deference, permissive morality and intellectual frivolity.
The different Englands each had known, with their characteristic beliefs, manners, standards of civility and political structures, had all evaporated.
Ours will evaporate too, and we, like our forebears, will lament it. People of my generation were born in an England still living amid the vestiges of Victorianism. The anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer described the English in the 1950s as “gentle, courteous and orderly […] you hardly ever see a fight in a bar […] football crowds are as orderly as church meetings”.
Much that seemed “typically English” – reticent, law-abiding, respectable, patriotic, strict, snobbish, yet free – was little more than a century old.
It melted away in the 1960s. Yet those years too were undeniably “typically English”: the Beatles and Kingsley Amis were as English as Edward Elgar and WS Gilbert. Over the centuries, England had been seen successively as violent, revolutionary, traditional, brutal, gentle, aggressive, peaceful, aristocratic and democratic. Even cruelty to animals was once considered an English characteristic, and attempts to stop bull-baiting sparked riots.
What and who are we now? Given all these changes, I was not surprised that some readers insist that Englishness is essentially a matter of ancestry. After all, if Englishness is always changing, only genes remain constant. But this is Englishness reduced to its barest biological minimum, and it is not a very English idea: Englishness has rarely been seen as dependent on purity of blood. Daniel Defoe dismissed the notion in 1701 in his popular satire, The True-Born Englishman, describing England as Europe’s “jakes”, where she “voids all her offal cast-out progeny”.
Nor, indeed, has Englishness been based on cultural insularity or the worship of origins. Our ancestors embraced the globe – perhaps too eagerly. They were entranced by Greek statuary, Paris fashions, Indian philosophy and Japanese art. Even those who rediscovered English landscape and folk traditions rarely turned their backs on the wider world.
I am certainly not arguing for multiculturalism or open borders. Nor am I suggesting that there is nothing to worry about because change and flux are inevitable and every generation laments the world it has lost. The great historic changes I have referred to above were survivable – England evidently endured, however transformed – but they were nevertheless cataclysmic and, for many living through them, disastrous. Even if, in safe retrospect, we conclude that the benefits eventually outweighed the costs, those costs were nonetheless grievous.
Mass immigration today may not have the transformative effects of the Norman conquest, the Reformation or the Industrial Revolution, but it does place major strains on our society. It undermines our solidarity and coherence, imposes dangerous burdens on our economy, and weakens unity in the face of external threats. The long-term effects are unknown.
Always old and always new, England is – to paraphrase Roger Scruton, the philosopher – founded on a sense of place and a sense of belonging. I have argued before that we have a pressing interest and duty to incorporate those who have permanently settled here or who are born here of foreign parents. Many believe this is impossible. If they are right, we are in serious trouble. But I do not believe they are right, and in any case, counsels of despair are guaranteed to realise the worst predictions. We must act with what we have. But to succeed, we must end uncontrolled immigration and require integration as other countries – for example, Denmark – have begun to do.
We shall not succeed in integrating everyone – yes, there are doubtless Islamist fanatics arriving on rubber boats – but we need to integrate most people and their children. Here there is a barrier: it is not so much the refusal of some immigrants to integrate as the refusal of many in power in Britain to do what is necessary to integrate them, or even to limit the numbers arriving.
Central to today’s crisis is the way we are governed, and the people who govern us. Scholars have analysed the disintegrative forces at work in modern society, from global capitalism to the internet. But in Britain, as in some other Western countries, we are seeing something unprecedented: the rejection of the nation by a significant part of its own elites.
In previous centuries, whether we were governed by kings, nobles or parliaments, all were committed to the good of the nation as they understood it. Their own futures depended on national success, and their achievements were often outstanding.
And now? Future historians may conclude that the heyday of the nation-state lasted only from the late 18th century to the late 20th. Part of the downfall of the ideal of the sovereign, culturally distinct, democratic nation was a revulsion against war, blamed on nationalism. Hence the 1920s to Thirties vogue for internationalism, pacifism and communism – a time when English intellectuals, as George Orwell remarked, took their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. The Second World War and the Cold War regenerated national identity in the face of common danger.
But since the 1990s, a Western mixture of anarchic individualism, globalisation, American anti-racism and fashionable anti-colonialism has proved all too effective in subverting common nationhood. As is now clear, this incoherent ideological cocktail appeals particularly to a new elite, under 50, proudly cosmopolitan in outlook, sometimes advocating a borderless world and despising traditional ties.
This elite runs most of our cultural and political institutions, including large parts of the civil service and the justice system. When they fail, they simply move on. Their Blob-like unaccountability makes us question whether we are still – or perhaps have ever really been – a democracy.
Integration of immigrant groups into the nation goes against their prejudices and career prospects: their pursuit of “diversity and inclusion” often causes breakdown and division. One of their principal strategies has been an attack on national history, and opinion polls confirm what many of us feel intuitively: that the effect on young people is to alienate them from their own nation.
We are now seeing a rebellion against this elite. Most rebellions fail. Great revolutions, as in France and Russia, usually make things worse. The British way has been to force a change of direction through a shift in public feeling, culminating in a parliamentary clear-out. It looks increasingly likely that this will happen.
One sign is that women, worried about their children’s future, are beginning to take a stand – always a sign of trouble for rulers. But how change will come about is in the lap of the gods. A Reform government? Kemi Badenoch’s finally revived Conservative Party? A coalition of the Right? Or the worst outcome: a last-ditch alliance of the parties of the Left clinging to the status quo?
While the present Government staggers from failure to failure, the duty of the Opposition parties is to use the time to plan fundamental reform of the state and its institutions. As first steps, ministers must take back control of their departments, and bodies in receipt of public funds, including museums and academic institutions, should be made truly accountable to Parliament for their public activities.
This movement will be as momentous as the 1832 Reform Act, the 1909 People’s Budget, the women’s suffrage campaign, Labour’s 1945 victory or the Thatcher landslide. Each came about only after the country had gone through a “winter of discontent”. The Starmer Government seems likely to go down in history for creating another blizzard.
Comment by Barry: Will it be localism?