ever underestimate the surreal wisdom of the great British public. That is the message to be gleaned from a recent YouGov survey, which showed that over a third of adults living in England would vote yes to the question, “Should England be an independent country?” if a referendum were held tomorrow (the figure rises to nearly 50% among the over-65s). These findings point to a key problem with the seemingly endless recent debate about English patriotism. Some participants no doubt held nuanced views about the uncertain future of the UK. But framing the question as one of “English independence” shows how hopelessly confused the discourse of nationalism has become over the last few years. Which imperial yoke would these hypothetical yes voters be throwing off in an English independence referendum? The United Kingdom — a nation state centred on, led by, and overwhelmingly dominated by England over the last three centuries? Or some other, imagined oppressor? The dream of English independence is, on the whole, a rather murky business. From the 2016 Brexit vote and its aftermath to the ugly scenes involving far-right demonstrators in Trafalgar Square last month, “In-ger-land” has become a rallying cry for people whose sense of disgruntlement about a perceived lack of national empowerment borders on visceral rage. Even if this impulse is hard to understand in a country as powerful and privileged as ours, the underlying emotion is real enough. It is easy to ridicule this tendency, as Stewart Lee did in 2013, in a famous standup routine with a recurring punchline (“These days you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you’re English”) which has become a shorthand on social media for bogus forms of white victimhood. On the other hand, England is such a confused, confusing entity (a country but not quite a nation, a territory but not quite a sovereign state), that its current status as a receptacle for feelings of political disenfranchisement is hardly surprising. One of the major problems with contemporary debates about “Englishness” is that England does not really exist as either a coherent idea or a concrete political reality. Because it has so few political institutions that are truly its own — no parliament, no legal system, few cultural references to distinguish it from Britain as a whole — England can mean pretty much whatever people want it to mean in any given circumstance. The historian Benedict Anderson famously argued that all countries are “imagined communities” that develop their own fictional narratives over the years to create a sense of shared belonging. But in England’s case, because it has not been an actual nation state since at least as far back as the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707, its national community is more imaginary than usual. When we consider how ridiculously long ago it was since England was an autonomous nation, and how completely its sense of identity was replaced by Britishness in the several centuries since the foundation of the United Kingdom, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that England barely exists at all. At the very least, feeling any kind of nationalism or patriotism for a nation state that effectively disappeared a century before the invention of the steam engine seems deeply weird. Because England is so lacking in constitutional substance, debates about its political and cultural identity tend to deteriorate very quickly into vagueness and cliche. While the populist right invokes distant memories of Churchill and empire to suggest that England must be rescued from modern interlopers such as Black Lives Matter or the EU (despite the fact that both Churchill and empire are really tokens of Britishness rather than Englishness), liberal commentators have been falling over themselves over the last decade or so to argue that the concept of England must be reclaimed for progressive ends. This well-meaning trend, which began in earnest in the mid-00s with publications such as Billy Bragg’s book The Progressive Patriot, argues that we need to counter the nostalgia and racial divisiveness of the right by developing a vision of England that celebrates notions of diversity, multiculturalism and internationalism. The problem with this liberal rearguard action is that — in common with its rightwing nationalist counterpart — it has so little to go on where England is concerned. It’s fairly easy to gesture at the importance of a tolerant, progressive culture in modern Britain. It is much harder to demonstrate what this might have to do with English nationalism per se, or how we should go about giving concrete expression to progressive patriotism in a context where English statehood remains a far-flung historical memory. What, we might ask, does our modern, ethnically diverse population of 56 million really have in common with the 5 million or so white people who lived in England prior to its mutation into the United Kingdom in 1707? I would suggest very little – and even less which does not also apply to Scotland and Wales, not to mention many other countries throughout the world. Nationalism has a dubious history when it comes to progressive causes. But in a half-nation like England, it cannot even begin to form part of a discussion about the reform of our cultural identity before it is backed up by the hard political reality of a fully sovereign English state, or at least the imminent prospect of English devolution. Maybe this reality will materialise at some point in the near future, if Scottish independence provides the shock necessary for a truly new and politically viable England to come into being. At that point, a more meaningful debate can begin. But until that happens, there is not much that can be said about England and Englishness that will not quickly fall victim either to conservative myths of national greatness, or hazy liberal platitudes about multicultural tolerance. For well over a decade now, commentators from across the political spectrum have endlessly repeated the idea that “we need to talk about England”. Having published a book on the subject last year, I count myself among the guilty. But increasingly, it seems that until England is forced to reinvent itself in radical constitutional ways, we need to stop talking about the chimera that is English identity, and focus on more urgent, more tangible political projects. • Alex Niven is a lecturer in English literature at Newcastle University and the author of New Model Island