Changing claims in context: national identity revisited

Abstract

This article re-examines how willing the English and Scots are to accept or reject claims to respective national identities by people born elsewhere. A previous paper showed, counter-intuitively, that people in the two countries were similar in their willingness to accept claims to national identity. Since then, different political parties are in power in England and Scotland, with differing policies and attitudes to identity. Have the original findings changed in the context of this significant political change? We conclude that the English and Scots continue to be similar on accepting or rejecting claims. However, they have diverged with regard to claims by white people, with national identity a less important explanatory variable than education in Scotland, whereas in England it remains the determining factor. For claims by non-whites, the two societies have become more similar. Education remains in Scotland, and to a considerable extent in England, the more important explanatory variable.

Keywords:

• national identity claims
• identity markers
• English
• Scottish
• British
• race

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to The Leverhulme Trust for supporting research on national identity since 1999, and in particular for their most recent grant enabling them to commission the National and the Scottish Centre for Social Research to ask the questions in the 2006, 2008 and 2009 surveys. We are also grateful to Lindsay Paterson for his invaluable statistical advice. The article is the product of a collegiate form of working in which the data, the analysis and the drafts have been discussed by both authors throughout, and they are equally responsible for it. We wish to thank the two referees for the journal who made constructive and perceptive comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. We refer to this as the ‘default’ question.

2. See, for example, speeches by the former prime minister, Gordon Brown (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/dec/13/labour.uk, and http://www.fabians.org.uk/events/speeches/the-future-of-britishness), including his introduction to the edited book with the journalist Matthew d'Ancona (2009). Not to be outdone, the present prime minister, David Cameron, has made his own claims to Britishness (http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2009/07/david-cameron-proud-to-be-british.html [Accessed 4 April 2012]).

3. Most commentators thought that no party would ever get an overall majority under the Additional Member System (AMS) unless and until they received 45 per cent of the vote, an outcome very unlikely in a multi-party system such as Scotland's. The Scottish National Party (SNP) got 45 per cent of the constituency vote and 44 per cent of the regional list vote in May 2011.

4. In the May 2011 Scottish parliament election, support for the SNP went up by 12.5 percentage points in the constituency vote, and 13 percentage points in the regional list vote compared with 2007.

5. For an analysis of devolution and national identity in Wales, see Andrews and Bradbury (2009).

6. As in our previous paper, we are confining our analysis to ‘natives’, that is, people born and living in either England or Scotland. Around 10 per cent of the resident populations of each country were born elsewhere. Our justification for so doing is that we are focusing on how people receive the claims of those not born in the country of residence.

7. That only 96 per cent would accept the equivalent white person is intriguing. We do not know what the remaining 4 per cent require for acceptance; English parents or lengthy residence in England are possibilities.

8. Between 2006 and 2008 the data show a 2 per cent fall in those claiming to be English not British and a balancing rise in those claiming to be British more than English or British not English.

9. The percentage choosing ‘Scottish not British’ falls by 6 per cent to 32 per cent, and the balancing change is in the ‘Equally Scottish and British’ group. Named after the sociologist Luis Moreno, who developed it from Juan Linz, as used in surveys, it reads as follows: Which, if any, of the following best describes how you see yourself? [English/Scottish/Welsh] not British; More [English/Scottish/Welsh] than British; Equally [English/Scottish/Welsh] and British; More British than [English/Scottish/Welsh]; British not [English/Scottish/ Welsh]; Other description (WRITE IN); (None of these).

10. Combining ‘more Scottish than British’ and ‘British not Scottish’ gives us the following percentages: (for white claims) 55 per cent, 41 per cent, 12 per cent, 4 per cent; and for nonwhite claims, 56 per cent, 47 per cent, 22 per cent, 23 per cent. If we combine ‘equally Scottish and British’, ‘more Scottish than British’ and ‘British not Scottish’, we get the following percentages: (for white claims) 54 per cent, 36 per cent, 18 per cent,B1 per cent; and for non-white claims, 58 per cent, 42 per cent, 24 per cent, 12 per cent.

11. It would be technically possible but very time-consuming to merge the 2006 and 2008/9 data sets thus increasing the sample size and also making it possible to do formal tests of difference and change. We judged that it would not be worthwhile because the data did allow us to do sufficient analysis and the similarities between the data sets are clear. If we had more than two time points at greater intervals, merging the data sets might have been worthwhile.

12. The full models are too voluminous to reproduce here but are available on request from the authors.

13. The Wald test allows us to assess whether an explanatory variable has any effect on the dependent variable. It is used when the explanatory variable has more than two categories, and it assesses whether these categories taken together have any effect.

14. We did not discuss the impact of gender in our previous paper, nor shall we do so in this one. As can be seen from the Appendix tables, the effects are not systematic in accounting for accepting or rejecting claims and we do not judge them relevant to the arguments of the paper.

15. Where we make such a statement, we mean more likely and statistically significantly so.

16. The class effect is sizeable and statistically significant overall, and the beta coefficients in the full model show a fairly clear gradient through the class structure. However, only one in four of those individual beta coefficients is statistically significant. Interpretation of these results is difficult because the class effect drops out completely in 2008/9 but there have been no societal changes that would explain this sociologically.

17. Perhaps the easiest example of this to grasp is in voting behaviour. If between two election dates in a two-party system, the proportion voting for party ‘A’ goes up by 10 per cent and the proportion voting for party ‘B’ down by 10 per cent, it is intuitively likely that some individual voters, say 5 per cent, will have changed their votes from ‘A’ to ‘B’, but the overall result is produced by 15 per cent changing from ‘B’ to ‘A’. One can, however, say that at least 10 per cent of voters must have changed their voting preference.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frank Bechhofer

FRANK BECHHOFER is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Governance at the University of Edinburgh.

David McCrone

DAVID McCRONE is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Governance at the University of Edinburgh.