The politics of Englishness provides a digest of the debates about England and Englishness and a unique perspective on those debates. Not only does the book provide readers with ready access to and interpretation of the significant literature on the English Question, it also enables them to make sense of the political, historical and cultural factors which constitute that question.

The book addresses the condition of England in three interrelated parts. The first looks at traditional narratives of the English polity and reads them as variations of a legend of political Englishness, of England as the exemplary exception, exceptional in its constitutional tradition and exemplary in its political stability. The second considers how the decay of that legend has encouraged anxieties about English political identity and about how English identity can be recognised within the new complexity of British governance. The third revisits these narratives and anxieties, examining them in terms of actual and metaphorical 'locations' of Englishness: the regional, the European and the British.