English politics is, almost without exception, an exercise in directing the public's overwhelming spite at whatever target is required. When it backfires, you see policy changes in response, because that venom is all our system understands.

There's no joy in Englishness now - if ever there was - we just have things we hate less than other things. That's on the national scale, mind: individually we're no worse than anyone else in general. But collectively we are an amorphous, bile-spitting horror.

Englishness, as a concept, is defined by what it denies to outsiders and by what, through circumstances seemingly beyond our control, the English once had (or believe we once had) that is now denied us. It's an ideology of impoverishment and jealousy.

It looks backwards and inwards, to a proscriptivist definition of nationality at odds with its own real history. It seeks both exclusivity of membership and greatness of influence: empire and colonialism over union and federalism.

The English desire to be ruled at home, and to rule others abroad. The least Englishman must stand higher than the greatest Frenchman, and will be content in his grovelling subservience to his English betters as long as he's assured of that.

S'fucked up.

Oh btw, we just thought of a great example of this conflict that you can see unfolding in real time, and that's how ardent monarchists treat Meghan Markle. People who instinctively genuflect to royalty but hate foreigners and PoC having their brains frazzled by the contradiction.

Basically anyone of insufficient Englishness (which means whiteness too) achieving a position of respect or authority - Marcus Rashford, Lewis Hamilton, Nicola Sturgeon - sends these people into a sort of frenzy.

Because they can't reconcile their desire for heirarchy, their need for servility, with their loathing for outsiders. They have to excuse it somehow - look at how "Monaco" trends whenever Hamilton is publicly lauded.

You can see this Englishness in the press, mostly, and we've all watched it play out with Brexit, in which Boris Johnson - a failure as a statesman, a husband and a father who backstabbed his way into power - is cast as the hero against EU bureaucrats.

Johnson's status as PM, and as an elite, borderline aristocrat makes him automatically worthy of respect under Englishness. While the EU's lot, with generally much better credentials, are inherently illegitimate because they exert authority over the English.

A non-English person who has power over an English person - even a certified boot-licker - is automatically a dictator. Englishness simply has no other role for foreign leaders.

That's why Brexiteers talk about the EU as if it's some elaborate German or French power-grab: anything that makes England less than a master feels like slavery to them.

Even if you explain that there's no material difference to being governed by laws made in Brussels to laws made in London - especially when they're mostly in accord with one another anyway - you get told that isn't the point.

You have more in common with a French, German, Belgian, etc. person of similar social status than you do with the inbred ghouls that run the UK, but that doesn't matter.

They might be slavering horrors who see you as slurry that has somehow developed the ability to mimic human speech, but damn it, they're *our* slavering horrors who see you as slurry that has somehow developed the ability to mimic human speech.

Anyway, we're getting what we deserve and Scotland and Wales should wall us off as soon as they get the chance while Ireland reunifies. Let England rot in its own misery.