Nigel Farage and the political power of English grievance

The Conservatives and Labour have allowed resentment to fester in the biggest part of the UK — and the only region not to have its own parliament, say political experts Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones

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ONE apparent constant in contemporary UK politics is Nigel Farage’s ability to mobilise a sense of grievance among those who regard themselves as English.

By doing so, Farage has, on successive occasions, managed to shift the terms of political debate so that the issues he cares about become the key issues of the day.

His ability to drag the other parties on to his terrain is a classic success story of what political scientists call issue salience.

He identifies a problem, proclaims loudly that it will be our collective undoing and proposes a tantalisingly straightforward solution.

The Brexit narrative was, of course, that the loss of British wealth and influence, as well as the crisis of post-austerity public services, could best be explained by the undue influence of and resources willed away to “Europe”.

In England, this frustration correlated not with British but with English national identity. It also correlated with discontent at the internal union of the UK and a sense that Britain’s political class was distributing resources and influence to other foreigners - in this case, Scots.

A decade on from the referendum, English-identifying electors are now being successfully mobilised on the basis of a new bogeyman.

Social and economic problems in the UK are still being attributed to the way influence and resources are being ceded to foreigners, but this time it's not bureaucrats in Brussels who are to blame for these ills, or Scots - it's the people arriving on small boats.

However, even if Farage’s ability to mobilise grievance to political advantage remains unmatched, our 15 years of research into English national identity underlines that the proffered solutions to those grievances - the seemingly simple, quick fixes - simply don’t work. Exiting the EU has not stemmed English grievance.

Rather, erstwhile Leavers are not happy at the outcome even while preferring not to have to talk about it.