State-wide Parties as Regional Parties? Englishness, Brexit and the UK Party System

The rise of English national identity has implications for the internal constitutional arrangements of the UK state as well as for views on UK membership of the European Union. We know, for example, that those who prioritise their sense of English national identity are simultaneously less sympathetic to the existing devolution settlement and less sympathetic to EU membership. UK political parties have sought, to varying extents and with carrying degrees of success, to politicise English national identity, casting policy goals in a regional light and making specific appeals to those who prioritise a sense of Englishness. The rise of English national identity offers significant challenges to parties seeking to appeal to voters across the UK as a whole. While the Conservative party appears to have used such appeals to prevent disaffected voters from supporting UKIP, the Labour Party has managed rather less well to appeal to those prioritising their English identity. Using data from the most recent round of the Future of England Survey (FoES), as well as trend FoES data from 2011 onwards, the paper explores how UK state-wide parties have, on the terrain of Englishness, English governance and Brexit, behaved more like regional parties, employing a sub-state lens through which to evaluate political developments, as well as to appeal to voters. The paper offers metrics by which we can examine the extent to which state-wide parties behave as regional parties (drawing on Brancati’s distinction between regional and regionalist parties) before analysing the possible consequences of such approaches for the electoral fortunes of the main UK parties, as well as the UK party system as a whole.