John Redwood
England is a summer’s day by a river in a wooded valley, an afternoon on the cricket field, strawberries at Wimbledon, and well kept gardens in leafy suburbs. It is seeing Shakespeare enacted at the Globe, hearing William Byrd and Handel. It is a way of life and a way of thinking.
At their best Englishmen and women believe in fair play, freedom and tolerance. We want to live and let live. We are Tolkein’s hobbits of the Shire. Our land is fertile, our climate temperate, our island disposition makes us interested in the wider world but beholden to no foreign empire. We are confident of our island, its protecting seas and its traditions. We hold our heads high because we have not been conquered for a thousand years, we are proud of our democratic traditions, we take delight in our past and present enterprise and economic success, we are pleased our ancestors fought to free others on the continent of Europe.
I remember once showing a Russian visitor the House of Commons. I talked to him about the portrait paintings on the walls: the winners and the losers, the establishment figures and the rebels, cavaliers and roundheads, free traders and interventionists, Labour, Liberals and Conservatives, monarchists and republicans. He replied after a while “How wonderful it must be to live in a country which is at peace with its past”. We see nothing wrong with celebrating Cromwell and Charles under the same roof, for their conflict produced the 1660 settlement and in turn the Glorious Revolution.
England has been settled since 1660. Our near neighbours have had revolutions, military dictatorships and radical constitutional upheavals in later centuries. I might have been a Parliamentarian in 1640, but would probably have been more in sympathy with the royalists by 1645 and would have objected to the killing of the King. I like to think I would have been a slave trade abolitionist, a free trader against expensive corn, an enthusiastic advocate of the wider franchise when reform Bills came to the Commons. I want our current Parliaments to further the long march of everyman and woman to be an owner of business and shares, as well as a voter and a property owner. The English story is far from complete. Everyman and woman has come a long way in three hundred years, but there is much further I would like him and her to travel.
The English story is now interwoven with the British story. Some of us are happy with the Union, others now chafe at it. We all agree that the future of our Union will evolve and will be settled by arguments and votes, not by guns and bullets. That is the English way, and is often also the UK way.
John Redwood is the Conservative MP for Wokingham in Berkshire.
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John Redwood is right, English history is interwoven with British history but that does not stop polititians and the media making the confusion between England and Britian, Mr Brown our current Prime Minister talks of the ‘Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights’ as being British, whereas they are disitinctly English, the media often have the headline British then on further reading it is all about England, it is timely that we have ‘What England means to me’ for those of us who know the difference to tell our own story
Barry (The Elder)
7 Sep 07 at 12:30 am
I don’t think John Redwood is right when he says that England has been ’settled since 1660′. What about the events of 1687-89, the ‘Glorious Revoluton, invasion by the Dutch, events which are arguably even more important in English history and to English liberties than the events of 1642-49??? John seems to have forgotten the Bill of Rights and All That - which have not been repealed, just ingnored, by our British government.
Ian Campbell
7 Sep 07 at 3:37 am
I believe John could be a good friend to the “English Cause”. I do not go along with his inherent belief in the Union but I salute his English heart.
Greg
7 Sep 07 at 7:35 am
I’m not so sure that John Redwood is right in that the problems facing the Union will be solved by argument and votes. there is a limit on the time that the people of England will wait for equality with the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Len Welsh
7 Sep 07 at 12:39 pm
I disagree with Len Welsh. Whatever form of settlement the Union progress’ into will not be solved by anything other other than argument or votes. If the English feel too put upon for too long they may unilaterally declare independance but there is no need to do more than that.
Falco
13 Sep 07 at 10:54 am
I do not accept accept Falco’s viewpoint, history tells a different tale. English politicians do not have the bottle to declare independence, they have not moved in the years since devolution to look after the interests of the people of England, and Leopards do not change their spots. In any case there needs to be an English Parliament to negotiate with the Scottish one to extract ourselves from the Union, a parliament the the Brits seem to have set their minds against.
Len Welsh
14 Sep 07 at 8:45 am
What a lovely, romantic picture Mr Redwood paints! It is true that sometimes one can fool oneself, by spending a summer’s day by the river…etc that England is still the England our forebears fought for, but all too easily reality kicks in… It seems we are beholden to other ‘empires’, or why else would we have to follow ill-judged rules set by Brussels? Be it rules about how many immigrants we have to let in, or how we have to allow the Human Rights Act as defence to those who do not even fit the description of the first word!…The list is endless and England is being taken for a fool, by those who want to get what they can at whatever cost to decent people. If we don’t stand up for ourselves, our infrastructure will crumble to dust and England will be another Zimbabwe…
Trish Bellamy
25 Nov 08 at 1:05 pm