BIRMINGHAM, England—Suddenly, it was real. The future of the United Kingdom was in doubt. Ten days from the Scottish independence vote an unexpected poll surge showed the race was neck and neck.
As the British political leadership rushed to Scotland, so did foreign journalists, suddenly faced with unpicking the confusion surrounding the United Kingdom for their audiences. What exactly is Britain? What is England? Aren’t the English just the British? You mean Scotland already has a government?
But the muddle over British and English identity and the constitutional oddities of the U.K. are something the English themselves increasingly having to grapple with. Whatever the outcome of the referendum on Thursday, some analysts said it will forge a new politics of English identity and lead to constitutional change.
“The English are now thinking about what it is to be English, rather than what it is to be British,” said Andrew Mycock, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Huddersfield, who specializes in British identity.
“There is a sharper sense of Scottish nationality identity because it is a smaller nation,” Mycock said in a telephone interview. “Whereas Englishness is far more diffuse, and it’s always been far more connected to this overarching sense of Britishness.”
