In his book, My Trade, Andrew Marr makes the point that the BBC is the creature of Parliament, and therefore organisations like those seeking to establish an English Parliament are unlikely to receive as much attention as parties represented within Parliament.
I was interested to find today, then, that the BBC does now have a section of its website devoted to England, rather than just the English regions. I have made the point before that the equation of the nations of Wales and Scotland with the English regions is pretty insulting to all sides. I was aware that it had now has an English news site; if you click on what is meant to be English sport, however, you get the general BBC Sport site.
There is still frequently, in metropolitan circles, a confusion of 'England' and 'Britain' and 'Englishness' and 'Britishness.' I argued in a chapter in the book The Blair Agenda, some nine years ago, that the left - the metropolitan English left - found Englishness as an identity less comfortable than did their Welsh or Scottish counterparts find their own identities. They have seemed to prefer various forms of English regionalism to Englishness as such. While there has been an explosion of books on Englishness since the Welsh and Scottish referendums in 1997, few on the left would have called themselves English liberals or English socialists, though Billy Bragg has been ready to wave the English flag. Mark Perryman, the editor of The Blair Agenda collection, has subsequently himself produced a book on English football, The Ingerland Factor. He also argued, in the Guardian in 2000:
Most left-leaning Guardian reader pals of mine don't just ignore our national day, they are hard-pressed to even name the date, and when they do finally remember it (actually it is tomorrow) they come over all awkward and agitational about the very idea of celebrating Englishness.
Mark rightly identified the Euro '96 football tournament as the moment when the English flag came out of the closet.
With few exceptions, such as the BBC’s own Jeremy Paxman, too many of the metropolitan elite have seen Englishness as a Conservative project with a racial dimension up till now.
Although Welsh and Scottish nationalists have now been joined by journalist Simon Heffer and other English nationalists in wanting to break the BBC into different national bodies, there appears as yet to be no meaningful English broadcasting agenda - in part, because as yet, as Marr argues, an English political agenda exists only on the fringes of politics. But there are many areas of broadcasting strategy encountered by the BBC which can be read in part as a proxy for the debate on Englishness. Notable examples would include the continuing debate over the role of Radio Four; the often-expressed view of BBC management and governors’ view that the BBC ‘super-served’ Middle England - or the South-East Middle Class - with regular protests about much-loved programmes such as Gardeners’ Question Time; the treatment of rural programming, from One Man and his Dog to the Archers; and history or heritage programming.
In Wales and Scotland, the BBC has been directly involved in the 'making' of Welshness and Scottishness. But what about England and Englishness?