ABSTRACT
The political process of UK constitutional change was accompanied by a set of moral panics concerning potential, possible or impending crises of national identity. Concerns were expressed that devolution would lead to a decline in ‘British identity’ which would in turn further undermine the legitimacy of the UK state. Similarly, concerns were expressed that the establishment of a Scottish parliament would precipitate a rise in ‘Scottish identity’, which would in turn lead to increased calls for Scottish political independence. However, the most colourful rhetorical formulations involved the spectre of a rise in English national consciousness threatening not only the constitutional status quo, but sometimes the very foundations of civilised society, as illustrated by John Barnes’s comments to the House of Commons Select Committee on Scottish Affairs in 1998:1
Although these kinds of argument were typically presented as statements of mere common sense, existing academic analyses did not necessarily confirm the presuppositions on which they rested. For example, the idea that the legitimacy of the British state depended crucially on the construct of ‘British identity’ overlooked
the enormous variety of ways in which Britishness is, and has been, understood (R. Cohen, 1994, Davies, 1999, Samuel, 1998) and the capacity for political institutions to be legitimated without direct recourse to the construct of ‘identity’ (cf. Kenny, 2004). The association in Scotland between Nationalism as a political force and national identity as a psychological condition appeared to owe more to the categories of formal political rhetoric than to those of common-sense (A. Cohen, 1996). Images of English people lacking reflexive awareness of the atavistic potential of their dormant national passion paradoxically represented a popular stereotype used at the time by English people themselves (Condor, 1996).
