Clik here to view.
Madeleine Bunting's thoughtful article (Comment, 16 May) should remind us that, faced with the new order in Holyrood, the rest of us should not lose our minds. The rational pursuit of English identity or nationalism is as fanciful, dangerous and misjudged as the pursuit of the Holy Grail. Neither of these lauded phenomena exist and the act of their invention is more likely to create a populist myth than trumpeted "cultural Englishness". Numerous communities, groups, classes, networks, cultural movements and parties could each express some calculated expression of their ideas of who they were, now are and would hope to be. What this would reveal is that the English are as diverse, divergent, pluralistic, cosmopolitan carriers of difference as any other supposed nation. Our strength and significance as one of the world's most long-standing civil societies is precisely this recognition, and its embodiment in numerous emotional attachments, customary rights, case law and unwritten constitution.
As Eric Hobsbawm has so well described it, nationalism is a rationalist "invention of tradition", of state builders who have lost trust in the untidy practices of just attending to the everyday activities of governing and living. Nationalism works by press-ganging divergent citizens into a single cultural vessel whose only goal and purpose is to generate unity by identifying alien, and to be despised, "others". No thank you, Madeleine, I'd rather muddle along as we are, than fashion such an anarchic and dangerous fiction as English nationalism in response to what is a sensible Scottish reaction to the current diet of factionalist shire county conservatism.
Dr John Gibbins
Sowerby, North Yorkshire
