England, Englishness and Brexit
AILSA HENDERSON, CHARLIE JEFFERY, ROBERT LI ~NEIRA, ROGER
SCULLY, DANIEL WINCOTT AND RICHARD WYN JONES
Abstract
In the 1975 referendum England provided the strongest support for European integration,
with a much smaller margin for membership in Scotland and Northern Ireland. By 2015 the
rank order of ‘national’ attitudes to European integration had reversed. Now, England is the
UK’s most eurosceptic nation and may vote ‘Leave’, while Scotland seems set to generate a
clear margin for ‘Remain’. The UK as a whole is a Brexit marginal. To understand the campaign,
we need to make sense of the dynamics of public attitudes in each nation. We take an
‘archaeological’ approach to a limited evidence-base, to trace the development of attitudes to
Europe in England since 1975. We find evidence of a link between English nationalism and
euroscepticism. Whatever the result in 2016, contrasting outcomes in England and Scotland
will exacerbate tensions in the UK’s territorial constitution and could lead to the break-up of
Britain.
Keywords: England, Englishness, nationalism, euroscepticism, Brexit, referendum
Introduction
Ahead of the forthcoming Remain/Leave EU
referendum, the headline above the front
page editorial of the 3 February 2016 edition
of the Daily Mail asked: ‘Who will speak for
England?’ It was an obviously rhetorical
question. Britain’s most influential newspaper
has no doubt that it provides the authentic
voice of ‘middle England’. As such, the
editorial itself went on to assail the ‘onesided,
stage-managed charade of scaremongering,
spin. . . and censorship’ that was the
‘Remain’ campaign and demanded that cabinet
eurosceptics have the ‘courage to speak
out’ on the choice facing the electorate. The
choice was couched as follows:
Are we to be a self-governing nation, free in
this age of mass migration to control our
borders, strike trade agreements with whomever
we choose and dismiss our rulers and
lawmakers if they displease us?
Or will our liberty, security and prosperity be
better assured by submitting to a statist, unelected
bureaucracy in Brussels, accepting the
will of unaccountable judges and linking our
destiny with that of a sclerotic Europe that
tries to achieve the impossible by uniting
countries as diverse as Germany and Greece?
Again, questions asked with obviously
rhetorical intent.
While the Daily Mail editorial provides
important insights into some key eurosceptic
arguments, this article will focus instead on
the framing provided in the headline, and in
particular the role of ‘England’ and English
opinion in the referendum. This may appear
to be a somewhat quixotic preoccupation.
After all, the headline itself is an obvious
allusion to the famous parliamentary debate
that was to lead the United Kingdom into
the Second World War (another characteristic
eurosceptic trope). The editorial itself goes
on to reassure its readers that ‘of course, by
“England”. . . we mean the whole of the United
Kingdom’. Yet, strikingly, the headline
was not repeated in the paper’s Scottish edition
published on the same day. Consciously
or not, the Daily Mail’s editorial team
grasped that there is a distinctively English
dimension to the debate over the UK’s membership
of the European Union (EU).
The central contention of this article is that
in this, at least, they are correct: England qua
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England matters. Not simply because, with
almost 85 per cent of the UK electorate, England
is politically predominant among the
state’s constituent national territories. There
are also national differences in attitudes to
the European Union. Differences exist not
only between England and at least some of
those other territories but also—and emphatically—within
England itself, structured
around patterns of English national identity.
To demonstrate and explore this argument
we organise our discussion in two parts.
First, we compare attitudes towards the EU
between the UK’s nations in order to highlight
the extent to which attitudes in England
are now distinctive. Here we also seek
to determine when currently observable differences
began to emerge. Second, we ask
why England is different.
Before commencing with the discussion,
however, three points should be made. The
first concerns the potential implications for
the future of the UK as a state, beyond its
membership of the EU. Our second and
third points are related and methodological.
Should the UK elect to leave the EU but
Scotland vote to remain, Nicola Sturgeon
has made it clear that a second Scottish
independence referendum might be triggered
(see Minto et al., this issue). There is
also a possibility that, on a close vote, the
UK might be kept in the EU against a small
majority to leave in England (of one or two
points above 50 per cent).1
If English
euroscepticism is linked to English nationalism,
that result could have dramatic conse-
quences.
Second, it is worth pondering why the
notion of a distinctive ‘English politics’
remains startlingly unfamiliar. England has
very rarely been treated as a distinct unit for
(contemporary) political analysis. In part, at
least, this reflects the tendency of political
science to succumb to a ‘methodological
nationalism’2
—by which we mean the
assumption that nations and states share the
same boundaries. The assumptions that
political identity is essentially formed around
nations and that each nation is ‘housed’ in a
state (which it occupies fully) have made it
difficult to pay sustained research attention
to substate units of analysis, both in the
UK and beyond.3
Politics scholars have
produced several substantial studies of
contemporary English nationhood in recent
years.4
Valuable as these studies may be,
attempts to take England seriously remain
hampered, not least by a comparative paucity
of social attitudes data.
Which brings us to our third point.
Because the ‘nation-state’ has been viewed
as the ‘natural’ unit for analysis, public attitudes
surveys have routinely been designed
to generate data at that level of analysis. In
the present context, this means that we simply
do not have access to solid, consistent
evidence dating back to the start of the UK’s
membership of the European Economic
Community (EEC) which allows us easily to
disentangle attitudes to ‘Europe’ in Wales,
Scotland, Northern Ireland and England.
From the mid-1990s, informed by the developments,
debates and processes that led up
to devolution, a strong evidence-base on
public attitudes on some constitutional questions
in the non-English parts of the UK has
built up, though rarely with a consistent
focus on the EU. England has, however, typically
been subsumed within British or UKwide
samples rather than being a unit in its
own right, with only sporadic exceptions
under the banner of the British Social Attitudes
(BSA) Survey. In what follows we
have attempted to explore some of the available
historical data, but as will become clear,
there are distinct limitations as to what is
possible given the limitations of past survey
evidence.
Since the establishment of the Future of
England Surveys (FoES) in 2011, sustained
attention has been paid to public attitudes in
England on constitutional matters. English
attitudes to European integration—and their
distinctiveness compared with other UK
nations—have been a central theme in these
surveys.5
Other analysis has followed suit:
all of which allows for a more detailed
exploration of the current differences
between England and the other UK nations,
as well as—territorially and in terms of
national identity—within England itself.
England, the rest of the UK and
Brexit
Despite some claims to the contrary,6
electors
in England and Scotland now have very
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different views on the UK’s membership of
the EU. Table 1 presents data from commercial
opinion polls fielded between the UK
general election on 7 May 2015 and the end
of May 2016 that probed attitudes to EU
membership. They include results from eleven
polls that produced all-England findings,
twenty Scottish polls, five from Wales and
three from Northern Ireland.
While all the polls reported had sample
sizes of 1,000+, they otherwise differ in terms
of survey mode and even question wording.
(Until the start of September 2015 variants of
a Remain/Leave question were asked. It was
only subsequently that the polls tended to
converge on the Electoral Commission’s recommended
referendum question: ‘Should
the United Kingdom remain a member of
Table 1: EU referendum voting intention by UK Nation, May 2015–March 2016
England Scotland Wales Northern Ireland
Remain
%
Leave
%
Remain
%
Leave
%
Remain
%
Leave
%
Remain
%
Leave
%
2015
15 May 53 47 61 39
21 May 68 32
30 May 72 28
1 June 78 22
26 June 54 46
3 July 65 35
7 July 66 34
10 Sept 64 36
16 Sept 48 52
24 Sept 53 47
27 Sept 65 35
30 Sept 72 38
13 Oct 62 38
16 Oct 81 19
21 Oct 67 33
1 Nov 54 46
8 Nov 55 45
11 Nov 46 54
15 Nov 52 48
16 Nov 75 25
17 Nov 49 51
4 Dec 49 51
9 Dec 61 39
2016
13 Dec 49 51
12 Jan 66 34
14 Jan 64 36
4 Feb 66 34
7 Feb 70 30
11 Feb 45 55
16 Feb 66 34
29 Feb 49 51 64 36
6 Mar 48 52
7 Mar 59 41
9 Mar 61 39
13 Mar 51 49
17 Mar 65 35
18 Mar 53 47
Average 50.4 49.6 65.6 34.4 50.8 49.2 75.3 24.7
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the European Union or leave the European
Union?’). All of which means that great caution
must be exercised in comparing their
results. Polling in Wales and, in particular,
Northern Ireland, is also less frequent than
in Scotland and England, suggesting that
even greater caution is in order when pronouncing
on public attitudes in these places.
Notwithstanding these important caveats,
there is much of interest to note. Most obviously
the four UK nations divide into two
pairs. England and Wales appear (only) just
in favour of remaining, though over half of
individual polls in England show ‘Leave’
majorities (2/5 in Wales). By contrast, Scotland
and Northern Ireland are firmly in the
‘Remain’ camp, with Remain averaging over
65 per cent in the Scottish polls and Northern
Ireland (on the basis of particularly
patchy data) appearing to be even more
committed to the cause.
This territorial pattern looks especially
striking when compared with the 1975 referendum
on EEC membership (Table 2): the
rank order of Yes/Remain has reversed.
England in 1975 was more enthusiastic about
EEC membership than Scotland is now
about the EU. All four parts of the UK show
marked changes (final column Table 2—
again noting the limitations of the 2015–16
data). England, Wales and Northern Ireland
have experienced Damascene conversions;
Scotland has shifted substantially. England’s
is by far the most politically significant of
these swings: weighted by its 83.9 per cent
population share, the English swing of 18.3
per cent from Yes/Remain to No/Leave
equates to a UK-wide swing of 15.4 per cent.
The UK-wide Yes vote in 1975 was 67.2 per
cent. England now makes the UK as a whole
an EU referendum marginal.
Two questions arise. First, at what point
did attitudes in England shift in a eurosceptic
direction? Second, and relatedly, what is
(or has been) the extent of regional attitudinal
difference across England? We shall
attempt to address both these questions on
the basis of the somewhat limited available
data.
The result of the 1975 referendum
(Figure 1) can act as a baseline. There was
relatively little variation around the England-wide
outcome of a 68.7 per cent Yes
vote across the country’s nine standard
regions. And, strikingly, all the English
regions recorded outcomes that were more
positive about EEC membership than Wales
(just) and Scotland and Northern Ireland
(clearly). Broadly, moving northwards and
westward from the south-east of England
shifted the balance of attitudes more against
the EEC (with London in 1975 something of
a less enthusiastic exception).
Given data limitations, working out when
attitudes began to change after 1975 is a
much more challenging proposition.
Eurobarometer—the EU’s own survey—
provides the longest time series available on
attitudes towards the EU. Particularly valuable
here is the key repeated question which
asked if the EU is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing ‘for
your country’. Note, however, that sample
size limits Eurobarometer’s usefulness as a
vehicle for cross-national comparison within
the UK. The relative sizes of the samples
make the data more robust for England than
for Northern Ireland (although this sample is
boosted above its population share). The
Scottish data should be treated with even
greater caution: as indicative, not definitive.
The sample sizes for Wales are simply too
small to be usable. With those caveats in
Table 2: 1975 and now
1975 Referendum 2015–16 Poll Average Change
1975 – 2015–16
Yes
%
No
%
Remain
%
Leave
%
No minus Leave
%
England 68.7 31.3 50.4 49.6 À18.3
Wales 64.8 35.2 50.8 49.2 À14.0
Scotland 58.4 41.6 65.6 34.4 +7.2
Northern Ireland 52.1 47.9 75.3 24.7 +23.2
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mind, Figure 2 displays results for this question
in England, Northern Ireland and
Scotland.
These data suggest that, up until the mid-
1980s, the balance of opinion across the UK
appears to have seen the EEC as a ‘bad
Figure 1: Nations and regions in the 1975 referendum
Figure 2: Good thing or bad thing? England, Northern Ireland and Scotland
Source: Eurobarometers
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thing’. There is one notable exception—a
spike of ‘approval’ evident in the mid-1970s,
probably associated with the 1975 referendum.
From a clearly negative balance of
views in the early 1980s, until the early
1990s a steadily increasing proportion of the
population saw ‘Europe’ in positive terms.
This should perhaps not surprise us given
that the 1980s were a decade of dynamism
and perceived success for European integration.
However, this trend was not maintained
after the early 1990s. From this point
a declining proportion of the UK population
regarded Europe as a ‘good thing’; a development
that might be reasonably linked to
the ejection of sterling from the Exchange
Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary
System and discontent about the Treaty of
Maastricht.
Turning our attention to the distinct
national dynamics, during the mid-1970s
more respondents in England expressed a
positive view of the EEC than was the case
in Scotland or particularly Northern Ireland.
The pro-European ‘spike’ apparently associated
with the EEC referendum begins earlier
and is a little more sustained in England
than Scotland, while there is no evidence of
such a ‘spike’ in Northern Ireland. There
was a rapid return to an even balance or
negative predominance by the late 1970s.
Strikingly, however, from having been
most negative at the time of the referendum,
attitudes in Northern Ireland quickly emerge
as more positive than in England or Scotland.
Although attitudes in Northern Ireland
show the UK’s characteristic pattern of
decline between the late 1970s and early
1980s, nevertheless during this period the
proportion of people viewing the EU as a
‘good thing’ in Northern Ireland was generally
above that in England. By the mid-
1980s, it is clear that a ‘reversal’ had taken
place. Although tending to become more
positive in all parts of the UK, at this stage
the balance towards a larger number of positive
respondents clearly became higher in
Northern Ireland than in England. This is
likely to have resulted from the consolidation
of very high levels of Nationalist
support for European integration, with
opposition concentrated in the Unionist communities.
Thereafter, by the late 1990s and
early 2000s, a relatively clear, stable and
persistent majority of positive over negative
respondents is evident.
The relative patterns in Scotland and England
are more difficult to disentangle, not
least because of the limitations of the Scottish
data. Even given these limitations, the
initial evidence from the 1970s well into the
1980s is that a larger proportion of respondents
in Scotland than England held a negative
view of the EU. Equally, it appears that
a ‘reversal’ also took place in the relative
pattern of attitudes in these countries. By the
late 1980s large sections of the British left
and of the nationalist parties in Scotland and
Wales switched from opposing to supporting
‘Europe’. Mrs. Thatcher was using increasingly
robust language to describe her views
of the EEC. At this stage the weight of opinion
in Scotland seems to have become more
positive than that in England. As in England,
the Scottish balance between those seeing
the EU as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ did not sustain
the high point of positivity reached in the
late 1980s and early 90s. But despite the
volatility and limitations in the data, a fair
reading of the evidence is that from the late
1980s the balance of opinion became relatively
more positive in Scotland than in England.
Highlighting the limits of these Scottish
data, the most recent time point shows Scotland
as less positive about the EU than England,
a finding that stands in contrast to
evidence from FoES as well as commercial
polling on attitudes in Scotland to EU mem-
bership.
The BSA Survey provides another important
although, again, somewhat limited
source of evidence. These data allow us to
explore eurosceptic attitudes on both an allEngland
and English regional basis after
1993. Note than in this case we have defined
eurosceptics as those supporting leaving the
EU or reducing the powers of the Union
(from a question with five options: leave the
EU; stay in and try to reduce the EU’s
power; leave things as they are; stay in and
try to increase the EU’s power; or a single
European state. Also note that to ensure
large enough sample sizes the data is organised
by four rather than nine regions).
Focusing first on the all-England picture
(Table 3), these data suggest a tipping point
in the mid-1990s after which eurosceptic
views become (almost always) the majority
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position. Around the start of the second decade
of the new millennium there was a further
significant shift in a eurosceptic
direction. Turning to regional variation, London
generally displays the least eurosceptic
attitudes. More generally, if there are regional
variations in England, the pattern has
reversed from that shown in 1975: levels of
euroscepticism in the Midlands and the
South are generally above the England-wide
average, and London and the North below.
Second, however, these variations (with a
few exceptions) are generally not great.
Finally, where step changes in attitudes are
apparent in the mid-1990s and early 2010s,
the four English regions move in unison. All
of which tends to support previous FoES
findings (see below) that point to England—
with the partial exception of London—as
being relatively homogenous in terms of attitudes
to the EU.
Cross-national comparisons are less
straightforward on the basis of BSA data.
While disaggregating Scottish and English
respondents from the BSA Survey leaves us
with a sample size amenable to reliable statistical
analysis in (and within) England, the
number surveyed in Scotland is small and
subject to significantly wider margins of
error. Data from the BSA’s sister, the Scottish
Social Attitudes Survey (SSAS), is more reliable,
but only episodically available. The
BSA’s Welsh sample is (again) too small to
be usable and the survey does not extend to
Northern Ireland.
Figure 3 presents the available (suitably
caveated) evidence on the differences
between English and Scottish attitudes
towards the EU. On the one hand, the general
structure of opinion appears similar in
England and Scotland. Both show a spike of
euroscepticism in the mid-1990s and a further
significant hardening of sceptical opinion
around the beginning of the current
decade. Equally, a broadly ‘eurosceptic’ position
consistently attracts more support in
England than Scotland. The more reliably
sized SSA samples show a narrower, but still
clear, English–Scottish difference for the
same question.
More robust evidence of cross-national differences
in attitudes towards the EU within
Britain (and inter-regional difference within
England) is provided by the 2014 FoES. This
survey explored the issue directly on the
basis of not only a large sample (3,705
respondent) survey in England, but also parallel
contemporaneous surveys conducted in
Scotland and Wales (a 1,000+ sample size in
both cases).
Table 4 shows that judgements of EU
membership as a ‘good thing’ or ‘bad thing’
were finely balanced in England, with a narrow
preference for ‘Leave’ over ‘Remain’.
Opinion varied very little by English region
(reported here in terms of a five-way division),
excepting London, which was more
positive (and closer to Scottish levels) on EU
membership. Table 4 also confirms that
opinion in Wales on EU membership was
Table 3: Attitudes to EU membership in England, Wales and Scotland, 2014
Scotland Wales England
% % All England
%
North
%
Midlands
%
East
%
London
%
South
%
Membership1
Good 43 35 34 32 30 34 41 35
Bad 27 32 34 34 37 36 28 33
Neither 17 20 19 21 23 17 17 18
DK 13 13 13 14 10 13 14 14
Vote2
Remain 48 39 37 36 34 37 46 37
Leave 32 35 40 40 43 43 33 40
Not vote 2 6 5 6 7 4 3 5
DK 18 20 17 18 16 17 18 18
Number of
respondents
1,014 1,027 3,705 1,061 714 446 468 1,016
1
Generally speaking do you think that the UK’s membership of EU is a good thing or a bad thing or neither?
2
If there was a referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Source: Future of England Survey 2014
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quite similar to England, though shading in
a positive direction among those giving a
view. Scotland was markedly different. The
balance of opinion here was clearly positive,
with a ratio of about 3:2 judging EU membership
as ‘good’ and intending to vote to
remain.
Table 5 reports ‘Agree’ responses for a
wider battery of EU-related questions. These
propositions frame the EU/Europe in both
positive and negative terms and require
Agree/Disagree responses. Again, opinion is
broadly similar in Wales and England. On
all counts respondents from Scotland were
less negative about the EU and European
cooperation (although in their majority Scots
too thought that the EU made migration too
easy and interfered too much through over-
regulation).
The breakdown of the data by English
region here and in Table 4 is significant.
Nothing in these data suggests that England
is politically divided by territory—say, North
versus South. Only London shows a consistently
distinctive pattern. Otherwise the territorial
consistency of opinion across England
is striking, suggesting a ‘nationalised’ pattern
of public attitudes.
Having established that views in Scotland
and England, in particular, are divergent,
with England markedly more eurosceptic,
we now ask ‘why?’
Why is England different?
Englishness and Europe
Analysis of the 2011 FoES exposed a striking
result. In England attitudes towards the EU
were strongly related to feelings of national
identity—but, given the rhetoric and symbolism
deployed by most though not all (cf. the
Daily Mail example) eurosceptics, not, perhaps,
in the way one might expect. While
most eurosceptics focus on the apparent
threat to Britain and Britishness posed by
‘Brussels’, those in England who felt more British
than English were actually most positive
in their attitudes towards the EU. By contrast,
those with a strongly or exclusively English
sense of their own national identity were the
most (overwhelmingly) hostile. This finding
was confirmed by the 2012 survey.7
Because
of its deployment of parallel surveys in Wales
and Scotland, the 2014 survey allows us to
explore whether or not patterns elsewhere in
Britain were similar. That is, do we find that a
stronger or exclusive Welsh or Scottish sense
of national identity is also associated with less
positive attitudes to European integration?
Table 6 shows that the answer is no. The
table cross-tabulates responses from England,
Wales and Scotland on EU questions
(good thing/bad thing and referendum
Leave/Remain) with national identity as
measured by the Moreno scale (which
Figure 3: Euroscepticism in England and Scotland
Source: British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey and Scottish Social Attitudes Survey (SSAS)
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explores nested national identities—’X’ here
referring respectively to English, Welsh or
Scottish identity).
In Wales and Scotland, national identity
(British or Scottish/Welsh) does not appear
to structure attitudes on EU membership
consistently. England is very different. The
more strongly or exclusively English their
sense of national identity, the more likely
respondents were to think EU membership a
bad thing and to want to leave the EU. The
contrast between England and Scotland in
these data is striking. If euroscepticism is
associated with English identifiers in England,
it tends to be British identifiers who
hold this attitude in Scotland. Notably, the
last four columns of Table 6 show a clear,
broadly linear relationship in England where
opposition to EU membership increases (decreases)
with English (British) identification.
The first column is the exception: in England,
British-only identifiers are slightly
more eurosceptic than the previous (more
British than English) category. This may lend
Table 4: Wider attitudes to European integration, 2014
Scotland Wales England
%
Agree
%
Agree
All England
%
Agree
North
%
Agree
Midlands
%
Agree
East
%
Agree
London
%
Agree
South
%
Agree
As an island Britain
has less reason to
belong to the EU than
other countries
30 38 39 39 43 43 29 38
Britain has a great deal
in common with the
cultures and peoples
of other EU countries
34 29 30 28 31 27 33 29
Britain’s special
relationship with the
USA makes EU
membership less
important for it than
for other European
countries
22 27 31 31 33 34 27 31
British people benefit
greatly from being
able to live and work
in other EU countries
52 40 43 41 41 39 49 44
The EU produces too
many regulations inter
fering with the lives of
ordinary people
59 64 66 66 70 70 55 68
The EU helps to
promote freedom and
democracy across
Europe
45 36 39 35 36 39 46 40
The EU has made
migration between
European countries
too easy
59 67 67 69 71 70 57 66
European human rights
law helps guarantee
the basic freedoms of
British citizens
40 34 37 37 35 30 45 36
Source: Future of England Survey 2014
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some support to Ormston’s8
subsequent
finding that stronger feelings of both Britishness
and Englishness each have an impact
on attitudes to EU membership. This may be
a new phenomenon: it was not evident for
England in the 2011 and 2012 FoES data,
and nor was there an equivalent pattern for
Scotland and Wales in the 2014 FoES data.
Overall, there is clear evidence that those in
England who have a strong or exclusively
English identity are significantly more likely
to think EU membership is a bad thing and
to want to leave the EU.
Earlier we noted the absence of strong
variation in attitudes to the EU by English
region (Tables 4 and 5 above). This relative
territorial homogeneity provides one sense of
nationalised attitudes towards the EU in
England. The association between English
(rather—or more—than British) identification
Table 5: National identity and EU membership
British
only
%
More British
than X
%
Equally British
and X
%
More X
than British
%
X only
%
UK’s membership of the
EU a good thing
England 47 52 36 27 15
Wales 35 35 37 31 35
Scotland 45 43 43 45 41
UK’s membership of the
EU a bad thing
England 28 23 31 43 58
Wales 31 37 32 31 38
Scotland 38 36 27 22 33
Vote to remain
in a referendum
England 52 56 39 29 20
Wales 45 40 42 34 38
Scotland 43 51 47 53 47
Vote to leave
in a referendum
England 33 27 37 51 63
Wales 34 44 32 34 38
Scotland 33 38 38 25 35
Source: Future of England Survey 2014
Table 6: Euroscepticism by English region, 1993–2014
% Choosing ‘leave EU’ and ‘reduce EU’s powers’
England North Midlands South London
1993 40 36 36 47 37
1994 39 39 41 41 28
1995 38 37 36 49 32
1996 60 58 61 63 56
1997 48 46 47 53 47
1998 52 46 56 56 47
1999 59 56 60 63 50
2000 58 51 63 62 52
2001 54 52 57 55 50
2002 52 47 57 55 45
2003 49 48 49 52 36
2004 58 54 57 62 58
2005 53 49 54 59 42
2006 53 49 56 56 46
2008 57 56 64 63 36
2012 68 67 68 76 52
2013 66 62 67 70 60
2014 65 61 66 70 59
Source: British Social Attitudes Survey
196 A I L S A H E N D E R S O N E T A L .
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and euroscepticism provides a second, and
arguably deeper, sense of national attitudes
in England towards the EU.
When did English national identity
become associated with discontent about
European integration? Again, data limitations
make this an impossible question to
answer with confidence. We do have at least
one reliable source of data here: the 2006 British
Household Panel Survey (BHPS)—with
very large sample sizes in England, Wales
and Scotland—allows us to examine the situation
a decade ago. It deployed the Moreno
scale in all three nations, enabling us to explore
the relationship between national identity and
attitudes towards the EU in the relatively
recent past—at a time when euroscepticism in
England had risen above its level in the early
1990s, but before what appears as a sustained
rise in these values over the past decade (see
Figure 3 and Table 3 above).
In 2006, respondents in England were
more likely to think EU membership a bad
thing than those in Wales and Scotland
(though with very high ‘don’t know’
responses), and were also more likely to opt
for the Leave/reduce EU powers options
(Table 7). The combined Leave/reduce powers
responses are consistent with the BSA
time series data for both England and Scotland
reported in Figure 2. Interestingly,
Wales at this point revealed EU attitudes
closer to those of Scotland than, as is now
the case, England.
Table 7 also shows that national identity
makes a difference. Feeling only English produced
the most negative responses in England
on the good thing/bad thing question
and the biggest proportion of those preferring
to leave the EU, and the lowest agreement
by some way in Scotland to the EU as
a good thing was among those with a Scottish-only
identity, with the second lowest
among those with a British-only identity.
Similarly, Scottish-only and British-only
identifiers in Scotland were those most likely
Table 7: Attitudes to EU membership in the British Household Panel Survey 2006
Total
%
British
only
%
More
British
than X
%
Equally
British
and X
%
More X
than
British
%
X only
%
EU
membership
a good thing,
or a
bad thing?
Good thing England 30 38 40 31 27 19
Wales 36 32 36 37 38 33
Scotland 37 38 42 43 44 27
Bad thing England 27 25 23 22 34 39
Wales 20 27 25 16 16 20
Scotland 20 25 28 21 15 23
Don’t know England 43 38 38 47 39 42
Wales 45 41 39 46 46 47
Scotland 42 37 30 37 41 50
UK’s long-term
policy should
be to. . .
Leave EU England 18 16 14 13 20 28
Wales 12 19 18 9 9 13
Scotland 14 14 12 12 9 18
Stay in EU,
reduce powers
England 37 37 38 35 46 37
Wales 35 38 30 35 42 30
Scotland 34 35 48 38 36 27
Leave things
as they are
England 33 31 33 40 25 27
Wales 38 33 29 37 36 44
Scotland 36 33 22 33 35 41
Stay in EU,
increase powers
England 10 13 12 10 7 6
Wales 11 6 18 15 11 9
Scotland 13 13 14 15 14 11
Work for a single
European state
England 3 3 3 3 2 2
Wales 3 4 5 4 2 3
Scotland 4 6 5 3 6 4
Source: British Household Panel Survey 2006
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to want to leave the EU, and British-only
identifiers in Wales were also the most likely
to see EU membership as a bad thing and to
want to leave the EU. So although more
recent FoES survey data are not particularly
supportive of the case, there is evidence here
prefiguring recent findings that exclusive
identities, whether British or English/Scottish/
Welsh, may push towards euroscepticism.9
We can be confident that English national
identity is now closely associated with
eurosceptic sentiment—and this relationship
seems also to have been in evidence a decade
ago. Given the available evidential base
we cannot be certain when this association
developed, although we hope that further
excavation of the data archives will allow a
more extensive genealogy (or archaeology)
of the relationship to be reconstructed. Survey
data on its own is, however, unlikely to
explain why it is that ‘Europe’ appears to
have developed as Englishness’s ‘other’ in a
way that does not currently seem to be the
case for Scottishness, Welshness or, in England
at least, Britishness. For that other tools,
and other articles, will be required.
Conclusion
Analysts of public attitudes across Britain or
the whole of the UK have identified some
important factors and patterns that help to
generate predictions about—and eventually
to make sense of—the outcome of the UK’s
referendum on EU membership. The evidence
suggests that British voters do not,
generally speaking, have a strong sense of
cultural affinity with the EU. However, their
cultural concerns—including worries about
migration into the UK—may be outweighed
by a sense of the economic benefits of EU
membership (Curtice, this issue). Vasilopoulou
(this issue) shows that voters in the referendum
will be expressing their views on
the EU, rather than using it as an opportunity
to reward or punish politicians for other
things they have done. There are clear
sociodemographic patterns—around age,
level of education and affluence—that divide
those expressing an intention to vote on the
two sides of the referendum. Nevertheless,
the evidence is that only a few voters have
strong views on the EU, one way or the
other. Many electors have yet to make up
their minds and a significant number of
those who have expressed a view remain
open to change—a situation that places a
particular premium on political leadership.
Our analysis indicates that a full understanding
of the dynamics of the UK’s EU referendum
requires analysis at the level of the
nations that make up the UK. The balance of
‘economic’ and ‘cultural’ motivations may
well vary across the different nations of the
UK. England is and, in particular, the English
are already more eurosceptic than their
near neighbours. Not only that, but in a context
in which many people have not yet
made up their minds, it is at least conceivable
that the referendum campaign could
become part of a process in which political
and broader identities are shaped. ‘Remain’
campaigners in England appear to struggle
to articulate a cultural case for EU membership,
which may in turn allow the ‘Leave’
campaign to dominate the ‘cultural’ dimension
of the debate. If, in doing so, ‘Leave’
can convince more voters in England that
English national identity is inconsistent with
membership of the European Union, the
campaign may yet further the development
of a politicised English national identity,
institutionalising a form of politics that cuts
across conventional party lines. In this context
it is worth recalling that one of the central
insights of the vast academic literature
on nationalism is that nationalists create
nations.10
To ‘speak for England’ is, in an
important sense, to call England into being.
There is far more at stake in the forthcoming
referendum than simply the future of the
UK’s relationship with the European Union;
at stake too is the political identity of the
UK’s largest component territory and, potentially,
the viability of the UK as a state.
Notes
1 R. Ormston, Disunited Kingdom? Attitudes to the
EU across the UK, London, NatCen, 2 December
2015 http://whatukthinks.org/eu/wp-content/
uploads/2015/12/Analysis-paper-3-Disunitedkingdom.pdf
(accessed 11 May 2016).
2 C. Jeffery and D. Wincott, ‘The challenge of
territorial politics: beyond methodological
nationalism’, in C. Hay, ed, New Directions in
Political Science: Responding to the Challenges of
an Interdependent World, Basingstoke, Palgrave,
198 A I L S A H E N D E R S O N E T A L .
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2010; A. Henderson, C. Jeffery and D. Wincott,
eds, Citizenship After the Nation State, Basingstoke,
Palgrave, 2013.
3 C. Jeffery and A. Schakel, ‘Towards a regional
political science: data and methods “beyond
methodological nationalism”’, Regional Studies
vol. 47, no. 3, 2013, 402–4.
4 K. Kumar, The Making of English National Identity,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2003; A. Aughey, The Politics of Englishness,
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007;
B. Wellings, English Nationalism and Euroscepticism:
Losing the Peace, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2012;
M. Kenny, The Politics of English Nationhood,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014.
5 R. Wyn Jones, G. Lodge, A. Henderson and D.
Wincott, The Dog that Finally Barked: England as
an Emerging Political Community, London, ippr,
2012; R. Wyn Jones, C. Jeffery, G. Lodge, R.
Scully, A. Henderson, G. Gottfried and D.
Wincott, England and Its Two Unions: The Anatomy
of a Nation and Its Discontents, London,
ippr, 2013; C. Jeffery, R. Wyn Jones, A. Henderson,
R. Scully and G. Lodge, Taking England
Seriously: The New English Politics, Edinburgh,
ESRC Future of UK and Scotland, 2014.
6 K. Mahendran and I. McIver, Attitudes Towards
the European Union and the Challenges in Communicating
‘Europe’: Building a Bridge Between Europe
and its Citizens – Evidence Review Paper Two,
Edinburgh, Scottish Executive, 2007; J. Curtice,
What does England Want? Edinburgh, ScotCent,
14 October 2013, http://www.scotcen.org.uk/
media/205435/wst-briefing-4-styled-final-7-.pdf
(accessed 11 May 2016).
7 Wyn Jones et al.., England and Its Two Unions.
8 Ormston, Disunited Kingdom, pp. 16–17.
9 Ibid.
10 See the classic exchange between E. Gellner,
‘Reply: “Do nations have navels?”’, Nations and
Nationalism, vol. 2, no. 3, 1996, 366–70, and A.
D. Smith ‘Opening Statement: Nations and their
pasts’, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 2, no. 3,
1996, 358–65.
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