Rue britannia or rule britannia? British identities in Scotland and Wales

Abstract

British identity is in flux, especially in Scotland and Wales, where devolution invites many Scots and Welsh to consider what it means to be British. This article employs Q-methodology to investigate the complexities of British identity in Scotland and Wales. Six separate types of British identity are uncovered, three each in Scotland and Wales. Analysis of the commonalties among these very different types of British identity outlines the ‘core’ of contemporary British identity. Furthermore, looking at the primary differences between positive and negative British attitudes suggests that the political parties in Scotland and Wales face significant, albeit very different, obstacles in getting voters to embrace their party's preferred vision of devolution, Britain, and British identity.

Notes

1. Even if Scottish independence or Welsh autonomy do not occur, many in the Conservative Party worry about the negative effects of devolution on parliamentary sovereignty, a key component of Britain's uncodified constitution (Bogdanor, 1999; Foley, 1999).

2. To use Benedict Anderson's (1991) oft-cited concept.

3. While the Q-sorts in my study include statements that tap each one of these important aspects of British identity, the primary goal of this article is to discuss the implications of a changing British identity in Scotland and Wales—not to develop a definitive measure of British identity that would be applicable throughout the British Isles. However, many of the statements in the Q-sort are general enough to be used in future Q-sort experiments in England (and Northern Ireland).

4. Tables 2–6 together list 33 of the 43 statements (77%) that the participants sorted. Statements are enumerated in the tables for ease of discussion. Each participant sorted statements that included no enumeration, and the order of the statements was randomized for each participant.

5. This was an important time to assess Scottish and Welsh attitudes since the Scottish and Welsh electorate had approved referendums which paved the way for the creation of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, but elections to these institutions were still a year away.

6. Twenty-six of the Scottish respondents (33%) and 19 of the Welsh respondents (34%) were university students.

7. The equation for the weight (w) is w = f/(1-f2), where f = individual's factor loading.

8. In these tables the descriptive label for each type comes from an interpretation of the rankings that each given type gives to all 43 statements. For ease of presentation, however, the tables highlight those statements that tend to distinguish that type uniquely from the other two types. Furthermore, many of these distinguishing statements are ones that a given type strongly endorses or rejects. Thus contrasting the rankings that each type gives to the statements listed in Tables 2 and 3 provides a concise overview of the key sentiments which characterize each given type of British identity.

9. The categorization of this type as civic follows the convention that distinguishes between civic and ethnic nationalism and national identity. Ethnic nationalism and national identity emphasize ancestry as the primary marker of nationhood. Civic nationalism and national identity, however, allow others who were not born in a given nation to identify with the nation. For a recent and more robust delineation between civic and ethnic nationalisms and national identities, see Zimmer (2003).

10. The implications of such positive sentiments even from those with a generally anti-British identity are discussed in the next two sections.

11. Beyond the six statements representing the core of all British identities in the Scottish and Welsh samples (discussed in the previous section), there are 17 additional statements over which the three types of positive British identity agree. Nine of these 17 statements are given rankings that differ from 0. These statements are listed in Table 5.

12. For an excellent review of how Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, has attempted—with varying degrees of success—to negotiate this complicated political reality, see McAllister (2001, pp. 98–111).

13. This statement does not apply to extremist British nationalists (e.g. the British Nationalist Party), whose right-wing, anti-immigrant positions place them well outside the mainstream of most of the British public.

14. The Labour Party's policies concerning devolution and broader constitutional reform, as well as the party's attempts at reinvigorating a centre-left British patriotism, constitute more than what the British press dubbed, ‘Cool Britannia’ (cf. Clohesy, 2003; Lynch 1999). At the same time, the ‘re-branding’ of Britain can be seen as one plank of this larger political project.

15. Laura McAllister (2004) argues that the Conservative Party in Wales dropped its outright opposition to Welsh devolution to good effect in the 2003 Welsh Assembly elections, where the Conservative Party in Wales gained both seats and votes in the 2003 regional elections. Furthermore, she argues that, in some respects, the Welsh Conservative Party's sceptical stance might actually explain its relatively strong showing in the 2003 elections, since all the other three major parties are fundamentally in favour of Welsh devolution.