British Political Parties and National Identity

This study is about party political discourses on national identity in Britain under the New Labour governments (1997–2010). Britishness has become a major theme in the British political debate since the end of the second world war, and even more so since the early 1990s, either directly or through discussions of specific issues like immigration, Europe or devolution to Scotland and Wales. Numerous political leaders have publicly worried about the weakness of the common citizenship in the UK and the threat to the survival of Britishness, which has been the only common thread in competing discourses between and within parties. The book examines the four issues which have embodied the different aspects of the debate about national identity in the UK, namely devolution, multiculturalism, European integration and globalisation. It shows that the polarised discourses (especially between the Conservatives and Labour) of the 1990s have given way to a relative rapprochement on these issues, with the notable exception of the European Union, where a real cleavage, in rethoric if not in policy, remains between and sometimes within British political parties.