The flipside of secessionist nationalist movements in the UK (and which I hadn’t considered) is the creation of a Unionist identity which is explicitly a rival nationalist project, which is not quite the same as a counter- or non-nationalist centralising project.

That is, its emphasis isn’t so much that devolution is a failed constitutional experiment but that it’s artificially divided a unitary people, and is this sense almost irredentist— it aims to recover politically lost territories

Britain never actually experienced the nationalist wave that swept the rest of the continent — the closest parallel was the construction of a British identity during the Napoleonic Wars against which France was the foil— but never until now an illegitimate internal rival

An irony here is that it’s less that Brexit was an expression of this nascent affective feeling than that the political reaction to Brexit helped accelerate it; coupled with the simultaneous strains of peripheral nationalism, it’s a politically powerful combination

The expectation here, then, is that symbolic politics will come to the forefront: the affective tools of nationhood and nationalism will be employed to (re?)construct a British demos in response to the state’s internal challengers, in a way none of us living have yet experienced

In this sense, last summer’s importation of American racial politics added another element to an already combustible mix; aiming to deconstruct Britishness and its symbols at *precisely the point* it’s being reimagined in a newly politicised direction— to Unionism’s benefit?

I’d argue the renewed political status of history (and its second order effect, the rise of the “ historian here”) is a product of this context: instead of historians deconstructing a faded national myth, several new & rival national myths are in the process of construction