Arlene Foster spoke this week about the DUP's "blood red line" of avoiding any post-Brexit differences between Northern Ireland and Britain. The image was not in good taste, but it was revealing. When politicians resort to such overheated rhetoric, it is usually because they know deep down that they are protesting too much.
To really understand the hysteria about "the territorial integrity of the union", we have to understand that it is not about what it seems to be about. Beneath the surface of anxiety about the EU's Brexit proposals is a deep pool of panic about the union itself. For even the DUP must know that the blood red line of Britishness is now a thin red line. It has been worn away, not by the EU, but by the English. The union is being undermined, not by Michel Barnier, but by John Bull.
In his 2002 survey of modern British identity, Patriots, the historian Richard Weight noted of the English: "They have woken up en masse to the fact that their blithe unionism is no longer reciprocated and that their seamless Anglo-British identity is effectively redundant." Since then, three very strange things happened.
The first of them is nothing. Almost the entire British political class pretended that nothing was happening in England and therefore did nothing about it.
The second was what usually happens when something very big is building up and everyone is trying to keep the lid on it: an explosion. The Brexit referendum vote on June 23rd, 2016, was about many things, but one of the main ones was the non-metropolitan English blowing the lid off.
Most astonishing
And the third thing that happened is the most astonishing of all: after the explosion, the political class, as we saw again at the Tory conference this week, went back to pretending that it didn’t happen. The thing to be defended at all costs in the Brexit negotiations is the very thing the English were so deeply unhappy about – the union.
In the past few weeks, it has become clear that if there is to be the disaster of a no-deal Brexit it will be because, as Theresa May re-emphasised in her conference speech, the Tory Party, egged on by the DUP, has made "the integrity of the union" into the reddest of red lines.
Customs checks on goods moving between Britain and Northern Ireland, even very low-key ones in warehouses or on board ships, would be an outrageous affront to the union. Hence, there can be no compromise on the Irish border question; hence there may well be no deal.
This is all very well – unionism is a perfectly legitimate political principle on both sides of the Irish Sea. Except that to fetishise it at this moment is to miss the point spectacularly.
The point is not just that the Brexit referendum showed how disunited the union is: Scotland and Northern Ireland voted one way, England and Wales another. It is that the great force that lay behind it is the emergence of English nationalism. The English blew the union up into the air.
Panicky governments
It is Brexit itself that raises fundamental questions about the “integrity of the union”. The great show of rallying round the union flag and dying in the last ditch of unionism is nothing more than the usual last resort of panicky governments: denial and distraction.
Before Brexit there was a reasonable excuse for paying no attention to what is in fact the most remarkable political phenomenon on these islands in the 21st century: the astonishingly rapid emergence of a specifically English political identity. The excuse is habit.
In the (relatively short) history of the union since 1707, it was generally a fair assumption that trouble would come, if it came, from the smaller “partners”: the Irish of every stripe, of course; the Scots; possibly the Welsh.
The idea that Englishness would be the problem was absurd – England was so unaware of itself as a separate political community that its politicians and journalists could use “England” when they meant “Britain” and vice versa. The English had folded their national identity into two larger constructs – the empire and the union – and it would surely never be unfolded again.
But the empire evaporated, and the union’s long-term future began to look more and more uncertain. Two big things happen in the 1990s. The Belfast Agreement of 1998 made Northern Ireland’s place in the union an explicitly open question: Britain accepted that it could leave whenever a majority of its population wished this to happen. And the following year, the Scottish parliament was established. Over the next decade its existence would gradually establish the idea that Scotland’s place in the union is also contingent: the British government agreed in 2014 that the result of the referendum on Scottish independence would be binding – the Scots were shown the door even if they decided not to go through it.
‘Blithe unionism’
Yet it seemed to occur to very few people in the political mainstream that the English might react to any of this. Their “blithe unionism” would be unaffected. In fact, it was very profoundly affected. This was obvious in the 2011 census: fully 60 per cent of the people of England identified themselves as solely English. Remarkably, given that people could choose “English” and“British” if they wanted to, only 29 per cent of the English identified themselves as feeling any sense of British national identity at all.
Even more starkly, the important Future of England surveys in 2012 and 2013 showed that this re-emerging English identity was highly political. The English were saying very clearly that they did not see Westminster and Whitehall, the institutional pillars of the union, as being capable of representing their collective national interests.
The pace of this withdrawal of support from the institutional status quo is dizzying: in 1999, when the Scottish parliament was just established, 62 per cent of English respondents agreed that “England should be governed as it is now with laws made by the UK parliament”. By 2008, this had fallen to a bare majority, 51 per cent. But by 2012 it was down to 21 per cent.
This mass disaffection fed Brexit: there was a direct correlation between those who expressed a strong English identity and those who voted for Brexit. What happened in 2016 was essentially that the English outside the big multicultural cities staged a peaceful national revolution.
Clings to a fantasy
And yet for the very people who claim to be on their side, it seems they need not have bothered. It is one of the weirdest facets of the current crisis that the DUP, which clings to a fantasy of an eternal union, has a much louder voice in Theresa May’s Brexit strategy than the English people, who have shown that they do not.
England’s roar has been muted; the stirring music of loyalty to an unchanging union turned up to 11. But what if the defence of the union ends up doing terrible harm to the English? What, in the end, will there be for Northern Ireland to be united with?
