Five and a half years after the referendum, arguments about Brexit are still capable of ruining your Christmas lunch. But at least the questions it has reignited – about national identity and the future of the UK – have been testing some of our finest authors. Julian Hoppit’s The Dreadful Monster and its Poor Relations (Allen Lane, £25) traces the essential historical background, from 1707 to the present, not only to the debate on Scottish nationalism and independence but also to arguments about levelling up within English regions. The “dreadful monster” is the taxing state, whose uneven impact has caused endless conflict between the four parts of the UK, and within England itself.
But in modern times the historian gives way to the social scientist. So many surveys have there been that one cannot but sympathise with the angry interviewee who hoped that “Scotland would bloody well hurry up and become independent so that everyone would shut up and people would stop doing all this stupid research about bloody national identity”.
Still, we do need to discover what the English want, and Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones seek to find out in Englishness (OUP, £30). They show how much can be done with the social scientist’s toolkit – but perhaps the United Kingdom is more likely to survive if we do not think about it too much. An excess of self-consciousness, after all, is as bad for a nation as for an individual.
Questions of national identity seem of little concern to those left behind, the heroes of Broken Heartlands by Sebastian Payne (Macmillan, £20), a book reminiscent of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. But Payne, educated in Gateshead and Newcastle, is no Old Etonian slumming amongst the poor. He paints a stark picture of victims of social and economic change, ignored and patronised by Labour, and left with a visceral dislike – and even fear – of Jeremy Corbyn, who, like all except one of the past five Labour leaders, hails from Islington.
It is not only the heartlands that are broken. So, fortunately, is the old Establishment. Andrew Mitchell, the former International Development Secretary, whose career was ruined when he was accused, falsely he insists, of calling Downing Street policemen “plebs”, has written the political memoir of the year, Beyond a Fringe: Tales from a Reformed Establishment Lackey (Biteback, £20). With its cast of sadistic and paedophilic prep-school headmasters, Cambridge Union undergraduates debating whether “a woman’s place is in the harem”, and Conservative whips – all male, of course – with thumbscrews for rebels and honours for toadies, it reads like something out of Evelyn Waugh.
