To be English is to be guilty of the Original Sin

For too long Englishness has been condemned not celebrated. Now is the time to reclaim our identity

If England wins the World Cup, it could be rather embarrassing. We’ll have to confront the fact that the English exist, which will be hardest of all for the English, who have suppressed their national identity like hiccups in a church. We have no public holiday, no political party, no independence movement (even though we were practically run by the Scots for 13 years) and no national costume – although, for all our attempts to blend in, you can always spot an Englishman abroad. As when I met a Scottish friend for lunch in a Dublin hotel and he covered his eyes in horror and whispered: “Could ye look any more bloody English?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I replied, as I hooked my blazer onto the back of the chair.

Englishness is shaped, like everything in this country, by region and class. George Bernard Shaw said: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” The north hates the south; the south-west hates all of us; everyone hates London (sorry, it is what it is).

The middle-class thinks Englishness died in Switzerland in 1983 with David Niven. When England beat Panama in the World Cup, video surfaced of some working-class fans in Benidorm singing the national anthem – and one Twitter account described their burnt bellies as “a vision of Hell”. There are Englishmen who have built their whole identity around rejecting Englishness, and they’re often the most painfully English people of all. What other country could produce The Guardian, which dedicates columns to arguing that its English readers either don’t exist or are inherently racist?

Why is the English flag impermissible and yet the Saltire flies so freely in Scotland? Because, say the Nats, Englishness equals colonialism. Well, it was technically a British empire that once ruled the waves, and Scotland was a keen participant. Highland culture was promoted in the 1800s to foster an identity that could sit easily within imperialism without challenging it (Scottish planters in the West Indies dressed their slaves in tartan) and it’s no coincidence that the new, class-conscious brand of Scottish nationalism emerged in the Sixties just as the empire wound down.

It wasn’t long after that there was a (relatively brief) eruption of English football violence, which is the most common explanation for our present bourgeois anxiety about the St George’s cross. But why we would cede our national symbols to a few numbskulls who couldn’t even point to England on a map is a mystery.

Maybe English self-loathing is a microcosm for the West’s hatred of itself. As Douglas Murray never tires of pointing out, you don’t hear the Turks apologising for the Ottoman Empire, and yet Westerners feel they must perpetually say sorry for things that occurred many moons before we were born. The best explanation for this is an extension of the thinking of Hilaire Belloc, the Anglo-french historian (like all the best Englishmen, an immigrant), who argued that “the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith”. Christianity, whether we believe in it or not, is seared into the West’s consciousness, along with the idea of Original Sin: the teaching that we have to atone for past crimes.

Colonialism has joined the long list of ancient offences. The English are a particularly sinful nation because we’ve been top dog for so much of our history (you have to go back a long way to find us being oppressed by someone else), so Englishness – like theft, homophobia and fly-tipping – has become something that our post-christian society must be seen to condemn.

The West’s sense of historical shame is rooted in fact and being conscious of the horrors of imperialism keeps us humble: those who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them etc, etc. But I’m so tired of being told what to think, particularly about who I am. And I fear that guilt feeds repression.

The more you try to convince the English they don’t exist, the more a vague identity is likely to clarify and narrow, and discriminate; the more you deny Englishness a healthy outlet for expression, the more likely it is to erupt. Tommy Robinson could name his anti-islamist hate group the English Defence League with little complaint because the word English was neglected: the longer moderates refuse to engage with Englishness, the more likely it is to be copyrighted by thugs and loons.

A clever centrist politician would go all in on England. Don’t get me wrong: I love Britain. But it is part of a historical legacy that is being deconstructed. Brexit has illustrated divisions between parts of the UK that, yes, could be healed but could also lead to the emergence of a new, self-consciously English voter.

A socialist might emphasise the history of exploitation and dissent among our “dark Satanic mills”; the Tory could make more of liberty. There are a thousand different Englands beneath the setting sun, but Englishness certainly does exist and the conspiracy to deny it voice must end. You have to let a lion roar once in a while. FOLLOW Tim Stanley on Twitter @timothy_stanley; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion