Uneasy being English: The significance of class for English national sentiments

Abstract

The contemporary forms of English identity and nationalism have received sustained attention since the late 1990s. Much of this attention has been framed in terms of English responses to recent constitutional changes in the UK, particularly Scottish and Welsh devolution in 1997. In this paper, I try to understand contemporary sentiments towards Englishness less in terms of political change, and more in terms of its relationship to class. Drawing on qualitative interviews with the ethnic majority respondents, I demonstrate the associations people make between class, inequality and exclusion and being English. In particular, I identify both a decline in social deference and an increase in contempt towards a so-called underclass in people’s talk about being English. In reflecting on this, I suggest that part of the explanation for why people are uneasy about identifying with ‘being English’ relates to an absence of an equal sense of English national membership.