A (dis)United Kingdom

But how united is the United Kingdom? The past 60 years have brought a blistering pace of change including globalisation, mass immigration, European integration, devolution and a dramatic increase in incomes that has allowed people to live freer, more individual lives but opened new social divisions. It is a nation still grappling with what these changes mean.
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Pride in being British was palpable in the optimistic but poorer days when Elizabeth acceded. Britain had been on the winning side in the second world war, one of the most unifying events in its history, and showed signs of emerging from postwar austerity. Rationing of tea, the nation’s favourite drink, was lifted.
“There was some sense of a new world being created,” says David Kynaston, author of Family Britain: 1951-1957. “The National Health Service was very powerful, new buildings were going up, things like new schools, and there was a great move . . . from inner cities to new towns and estates with new mod cons.”
There was also a common bond, de­spite divisions among classes, regions and nations. This was a deferential, conservative society in which 35 per cent of people thought the Queen had been directly chosen by God, according to an opinion poll in 1956.
People had no inhibitions in talking about British “native genius” and took their idea of history from books such as H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story. India had left the empire, but Elizabeth could travel the world without leaving lands she ruled.
Today, the empire has crumbled – to be replaced by the Commonwealth – and even Scotland is discussing a breakaway. The devolved nationalist government proposes to hold a referendum on independence in 2014. Polls suggest the Scots will not vote Yes, and no other part of the UK is threatening to pull out – but Scotland may back a second option of deeper devolution. The union is loosening.
Meanwhile, the divide between the UK’s wealthiest corner, London and south-east England, and poorer parts such as northern England and Wales has widened faster since the 1970s than in any other big country.
London’s rise has been a global success – a magnet for foreign wealth and ambitious people of all nationalities – but it is now widely felt that Britain grew too dependent on illusory financial growth engineered in the City.
In 1952, it was Scotland that brought the only blemish on the Queen’s dazzling debut. Prime minister Winston Churchill decided her title would be Elizabeth II – causing offence north of the border, where she was the first monarch of that name, the crowns having been united only after England’s first Elizabeth died 350 years earlier. Scots were so angry that, when post boxes bearing the royal cipher “E II R” appeared, some people removed the “II” and a few put explosives through the slot.
In 1953, when the Queen came to Edinburgh to receive the honours of Scotland after her coronation, she wore a coat rather than sovereign robes, which was criticised as an insult to the dignity of the occasion.
Then, though, there were only hints of the later nationalist surge. The Unionists, as Conservatives were known there, reached a peak of more than half the popular vote at the 1955 general election. In 2010, they won 16.7 per cent and one seat out of 59.
Mr Kynaston says Britain has “moved from class-based politics to a more identity-based politics, which has to do with nationalism or nationhood, or gender or ethnicity”. The monocultural society of the 1950s has become “dispersed” as the era of the mass political party has ended. That fits today’s “much more privatised, individualistic society – and technology has played a big part in that”.
We should not exaggerate these centrifugal forces. While many now identify more with their core country, 81 per cent of people still felt “very” or “somewhat” proud to be British in 2007, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey. National identity is adapting to changing circumstances.
In 1952, there was full employment and hyperbole about a “new Elizabethan age”. Leaders were more wary, knowing the economy was war-weakened and its influence waning. The Queen gently punctured expectations, saying: “I do not feel at all like my great Tudor forebear, who was blessed with neither husband nor children, who ruled as a despot and was never able to leave her native shores.”
Today, people earn on average three times as much in real terms but are apprehensive about the future as Britain struggles to emerge from its longest depression in more than a century. According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the nation is “more productive, more prosperous, more unequal, more stressed, more workless”. John Philpott, the CIPD’s chief economist, says: “Even during good times, people do not seem much happier about their working lives and many exhibit the symptoms of work-related stress.”
Britain was emerging from austerity in 1952 and is desperate to do so in 2012. Today’s “austerity”, however, hardly matches earlier privations. And, short of another world war, “dispersed” Britain seems unlikely to return to 1950s togetherness.
Through it all – the strife of the 1970s, the Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s – Queen Elizabeth has been a steady, calming figure. There is nervousness, though, about what follows. In one poll, only 39 per cent thought the crown should pass to her son, Charles, while 48 per cent wanted it to go to her grandson, William.
Within 40 years of the reign of Elizabeth I, England had plunged into a civil war that led to the execution of the king. That would be an extreme outcome to repeat. More likely, the country will muddle through, reshaping Britishness for the 21st century.

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