IN one of his songs Billy Bragg asked "How can you lie back and think of England when you don't even know who's in the team?" Now as England kicks off the European Championships today, the question is even more pointed. Not only is it hard to remember who's in the team, it is even harder to know what, apart from bluster about beef and empty fantasies about the past, the team is supposed to represent.
What now is the essence of Englishness?
Shakespeare? Probably according to recent research, a Catholic. The monarchy? On its last legs, the Church of England? A minority faith, even among the minority of the population that practices Christianity. The green and pleasant countryside? A battlefield for a war of attrition between motorway engineers and hippies in trees. The stout-hearted miner? On the dole. The pin-striped city gent? Barings gone, Lloyd's in disgrace. The roast beef of old England? A question not to be asked.
Until the rise of official Europhobia (recent polls show over 40 per cent of English people in favour of threatening to withdraw from the EU), the thuggish element among England's soccer supporters was the most obvious evidence of the re-emergence of a particularly virulent strain of English nationalism. As demonstrated most dramatically by the neo-Nazi inspired riots in Dublin last year, which now haunt the nightmares of the organisers of the European Championships, England has an identity problem.
Those of its sacred symbols that have not collapsed under the weight of belated modernity have been turned into a commodity for consumption by tourists. In 1993, the marketing director of the English Tourist Board told the Observer that "people come here for our `heritage', our arts, our fashion, and our countryside. Royalty is a branding device that pulls those attractions together."
Even without its penchant for bad marriages the royal family could hardly have survived the conversion from holy symbol of national unity to branding device intact. But what will take its place?
Not only is England no longer a great power, but it is in relative decline, even within the United Kingdom. Figures released last week show that average per capita income in Scotland, at £8,210, is know higher than that in England (£8,160). That decline has placed English nationalism on a very slippery slope.
Last weekend, just as the England soccer team was facing down allegations of misconduct on board a flight from Hong Kong, one English newspaper revealed that their compatriots are currently regarded in the same city as the "new Coolies". The English, once the imperial masters, are distinguished by their eagerness for menial jobs that the Hong Kong Chinese won't take, not least because the wages, though poor enough, are still better than those available at home for unskilled work.
The two stories are connected by more than a coincidence of location. The swaggering arrogance of the footballers is not as far as it might seem from the much more humble reality of present-day England. There is a large element of, self-pity in the jingoism that has been on display in recent weeks everywhere from the petulant obstruction of EU business in the beef war to the loutish behaviour of members of the national team. The aggression owes less to arrogance than to insecurity. Since England feels the whole world is against it, England has to get its, retaliation in first.
The Crystal Palace manager Dave Bassett, defending the English footballers to the Daily Mail after the airline incident, summed up the peculiar mixture of belligerence and self-loathing Anglo-Saxons are a race apart. We've always been a warlike nation, more aggressive. And hard drinking is part of that culture. You could say it's yobbish, or loutish, and it can be. But we can't deny it's the way we are, and football only epitomises it. They don't like us abroad anyway, so what does it matter? They hate us, really."
The circularity of this self-justification - they hate us, so we're awful to them, so they hate us - is not confined to the sidelines of football stadia. A barely more sophisticated version has been played out in Brussels all this week, where British obstruction of EU business has merely served to alienate the European governments it is supposed to persuade.
Much of the jingoism of the English media in recent weeks points up the paradox of fighting talk from the battlements of a crumbling castle. The very newspapers which have been whipping cup xenophobia directed against "those dastardly foreigners" (Daily Express) and against the EU (described last week by the Sun as "the greatest threat this country has faced in 300 years") are themselves part of an industry "that is mostly owned by foreigners.
The Australian-born American citizen Rupert Murdoch, the Canadian Conrad Black, and the tax exile Lord Rothermere own the newspapers that have been railing against foreigners. Some of the politicians who have been most comfortable with their rhetoric - Michael Portillo and Michael Howard - are themselves the offspring of European immigrants. For the most part, the English can't even call their jingoism their own any more.
The image of an island nation confronting a hostile continent across the Straits of Dover is, nevertheless, deeply rooted in English culture. The highlights of the national epic are all repulsions of foreign invasion - the defeat of the Spanish Armada in the 16th century, the Battle of Trafalgar in the 19th, the Battle of Britain in the 20th.
Modern English nationalism, with its characteristic strain of aggressive popular conservatism, was created in war - the 22-year war against Napoleon - and sustained by war.
It was restrained, though, by its place in two related associations of nations - Britain and the Empire. "The fiction of a British nation," as Neal Ascherson writes in the current issue of Prospect magazine, "has kept English nationalism in check". The compensation for the submergence of English identity within the idea of Britain was the opportunity to claim superiority over countless other nationalities in the Empire. With the end of Empire - the final obsequies will take place in a year's time with the return of Hong Kong to China - and the increasingly tenuous hold of British identity, the restraints on an unreconstructed and potentially aggressive English nationalism have been lifted.
THE first person to see its potential was Enoch Powell, who is still the inspiration both for the Europhobic strain within the Conservative Party and for the wilder populist nationalism of the streets and football terraces. Originally an ardent lover of Empire, Powell realised in the early 1960s that the cliches of imperial rhetoric were clapped out, and that the price for British victory in the second World War had been the end of Britain's status as a great power.
He looked for an adequate replacement, and the only one he could find was a combination of internal racism and external opposition to the European project. English nationalism - almost alone in Europe - had no 19th century popular movement to appeal to. The civic and populist elements of nationalism elsewhere had been, in the English case, subsumed into imperialism and Britishness. Powell had nowhere to go but backwards to a crude hatred of "foreigners" that is not an expression of, but a substitute for a secure sense of national identity.
The impact of Powell's obnoxious concoction should not be judged solely by his own lack of direct political success as late as 1972 an NOP poll showed that 40 per cent of respondents believed that the Tory party should have him as its leader. His intellectual influence both on the right-wingers who joined the party under Margaret Thatcher and on the current editors and leader-writers of the Tory press is enormous.
Margaret Thatcher, with her Falklands adventure and her brilliant balance of nationalist rhetoric and clear-eyed pragmatism, dealt with the English chauvinism that Powell had conjured by absorbing it. Shortly before she came to power she said of the neo-fascist National Front that "at least it is talking about some of the problems" and she paid enough respect to both the racist and the anti-European dimensions of Powell's renovated nationalism to keep them within the bounds of mainstream conservatism.
But, in spite of their current rhetoric, her successors have actually been extraordinarily inept in their attempts to harness the traditions of English populist conservatism. Just two years ago, for instance, John Major's government utterly misjudged the appropriate note for the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings, and in trying to make political capital out of the event managed to alienate even the British Legion and Dame Vera Lynn.
When the Conservative Party could no longer successfully stage-manage a national military commemoration, it ought to have been obvious that it was dealing, in English nationalism, with a force that it no longer fully understood.
What John Major had tried to do was replace Mrs Thatcher's heady nationalism with something else that had habitually been a part of the English self-image - J.B. Priestley's "characteristically English sense of community, decent fellow-feeling, fairness". His problem was that the strain of English national identity that defines itself through fair play, toleration and a rough-and-ready egalitarianism - has been marginalised within Conservatism by the rise of the New Right after 1979.
If it can be rescued at all, its salvation is very unlikely to come from within a Tory party that is increasingly a prisoner of the nationalism that it thought it could exploit.
