FROM Portrait frame, Henry VIII almost invisible among a great wash of crimson velvet adorned with gold and fur, looks at us. England’s growing foreign trade had turned Tudor-era London, which was characterized by Flemish craftsmen and Florentine magnates. The wealth of aristocratic emigrants gave them immense influence with the king. In one famous case, merchant Francesco de Birdi persuaded the wife of an English rival to stay with him – and then arrested her husband for refusing to pay her board.
Then, on the eve of May Day in 1517, English anger flared up. “The foreigner and the foreigner eat the bread of the orphan children, and all make a living from the artisans, and all associate with the merchants.” need a preacher, Thousands of mobs attacked the homes of wealthy migrant merchants and poor migrant workers.
After five centuries, English nationalism is again the island’s most powerful political force. However, this is a contradiction: three of these nine top contenders Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid and Nadim Jahavi – to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister – are of Asian descent.
The political matter of electing him is almost self-evident. All three have reputations for professional competence, have significant support among the party leadership, and would help increase support among traditionally pro-Labour Asian communities. However, there is a problem: Res. Although no one is rude enough to call it by its name.
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rise of english nationalism
Five decades ago, politician Enoch Powell gave a speech It has become the core of English nationalism. “Like a Roman,” he said at a meeting of Conservative Party members in Birmingham in 1968, “I think the Tiber River is covered in blood.” He claimed that immigrants were dominating the country. Blacks were forcing white residents out of their homes. “In 15 or 20 years’ time in this country,” Powell quoted a constituent as saying, “the black man will have the whip on the white man.”
Labor and Conservative governments had both welcomed immigration From 1948, understanding that workers were essential to post-war reconstruction – but by the time of Powell’s speech, society seemed unable to adjust to the tension.
Edward Heath, later prime minister from 1970–1974, dismissed Powell from the shadow cabinet. The public response was illuminating: East End dock workers and Smithfield meat porters rallied in support of Powell, and only a few of the more than 100,000 letters received to the politician 800 were serious,
Powell’s speech may have been a racist satire – but it spoke of deeply rooted concerns about culture and identity. Politician’s Historical Imagination, Scholar Peter Brooke has noted, was shaped by the partition of India. “In 1946,” Brooke writes, “Powell’s dream was to create the conditions necessary to export self-government from Britain to the Empire, that is, the spirit of national unity.”
After the Partition, Powell became convinced that politics that did not integrate would turn into sectarian warfare – and this was a real threat to him. In his constituency of Powell, controversy erupted over Sikh bus drivers’ demands that they be allowed to wear beards and turbans. There was a dispute over a school where a child was reported to be the only white in his class.
From the seventh century onwards, historians RM Lumianski suggests, a hazy sense of the existence of a separate English nation shaped the political course of England – centuries later, a search for expression in writers as ideologically diverse as George Orwell and EP Thompson. That cultural sensibility will now become a weapon.
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Brexit tide
growing up anti-immigrant sentiment—the result of the right to free movement within the European Union—the new right-wing parties laid siege to the Conservative Party, demanding the return of an English sovereignty they claimed had been destroyed. The Irish journalist said, “England is stumbling towards a national independence which is rarely discussed, let alone prepared for it.” Finton O’Toole celebrated, “It is on the verge of one of the strangest nationalist revolutions in history.”
From the 1970s to the 1990s, the Conservative and Labor parties pioneered economic globalization, with the City of London at its core. The project brought great prosperity, as did the Tudors – but also inequality, and the dissolution of the cultural bonds of many communities. The regional nature of this crisis was unmistakable. Even in 1975, when Britain voted to remain in the European Economic Community, support in England was more muted than elsewhere. In the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum, Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to remain in Europe. England chose to break history in a big way.
Even before the referendum, Michael Kenny spotted That “a new sense of ethnic-majority nationalism may be one of the forces behind a deep sense of disenchantment with politics, politicians and the political system, as well as the latter as a consequence.”
For the Conservative Party, Europe represented a serious challenge. Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rejected European political integration—but adopted economic union. Thatcher understood that leaving Europe would harm British finance capital and industry. More importantly, it would negate Britain’s voice in shaping the course of continental politics.
However, the party was now forced to choose between its economic base—British capitalism—and the populism represented by the Brexit movement.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson proved adept at using English nationalism to seize control of the party, breaking with the legacy of the patrician Heath and the globalist Thatcher. johnson, Many insiders argueHoped to lose the referendum, knowing it would lead to an economic crisis.
Johnson won a landslide election in 2019 – simply because he faced expulsion from office projected economic disaster After this trade relations with Europe ended.
question of caste
From Tim Bell’s workIt is clear, among others, that a significant problem lies ahead for conservatives: having built their political fortunes on immigration and race, can leaders now reverse course? Educated, financially successful, and ideologically aligned with his party on immigration, figures such as Sunak and Javid are involved in Englishism. His race, however, also makes him representative of the social tensions that caused Conservative voters to rebel against the party in Europe.
To protect Britain’s economic competitiveness, the government Extended stay allowed Filling jobs previously held by Europeans, from outside the EU. You don’t need great imagination to see that a voter who didn’t want Polish or Hungarian workers wouldn’t welcome large groups of Indians or Pakistanis. For many, an Asian prime minister would be a step too far.
Of course, English nationalism should not be confused with crude racism. conservative long term racism To recruit working-class white voters. Even Thatcher, as Australian politician Bob Carr famously claimed, “a shameless racist,
The influence of politicians like Sunak and Javid shows the great distance conservatives have come across in recent decades. The party itself has proved surprisingly willing, as Powell might have said, to hand the whip over to the Black Man. Like Henry VIII, the modern Conservative leadership’s world-view is based on London’s ethnically diverse cosmopolitan culture – not on English villages and small towns.
Pandit Krishna Kumar has seen, in a thoughtful essay, that English intellectuals sometimes regard nationalism as “a foreign phenomenon, invented elsewhere and thankfully kept away from English shores.” The idea, he argues strongly, actually exists, indicated among other things by the veneration of the monarchy, a particular rural beauty, a sense of royal nostalgia and whiteness.
The challenge before British conservatism is to reconcile the culture of its party leadership with the fact of electoral dependence on English nationalism. To do so would be difficult—even impossible.
The author is ThePrint’s National Security Editor. He tweeted @praveenswami. Thoughts are personal.