Identity of England, by Robert Colls <br></br>Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000, by Richard Weight

Over the moon, or sick as Monty Python's dead parrot? Stephen Howe looks at two views of the stoic English and their future

Richard Weight should curse his luck, or his timing. He has produced a major work on national identities in modern Britain: the fruit of long research, wide reading and hard thinking, engagingly written, bubbling with fresh ideas. The subject is becoming more prominent and contentious: the "English Question", especially, is going to demand increasing attention in the next few years. There has already been a small flood of polemical or journalistic accounts, ranging from Simon Heffer's, Peter Hitchens' and Roger Scruton's sorrow and rage at the decline of Englishness, to Jeremy Paxman's more relaxed and liberal-minded stroll round the oddities of English character.

Weight has come up with the first contemporary attempt to give the subject historical depth and scholarly weight. He had good reason to expect that Patriots would command the high ground as our battles over national identity reach their climax. This would be the book that media pundits and politicians would keep by their bedsides, quote and at least pretend to have read.

Just after Patriots, though, there now appears Robert Colls' Identity of England, covering much of the same ground. Arising from even more years of work, based on an even broader range of sources, it's also more synoptic, more provocatively argued and pungently expressed. Frustrating for Weight, then, to publish a good book about a crucial, and fashionable issue, just when someone else comes up with a great one on the same subject.

The two are not quite identical in their focus. Colls sweeps across a broader span of time, glancing back to ancient Celts and Anglo-Saxons and dealing more substantially with the Victorians and the interwar years, while Weight focuses more closely on the post-1945 era. Weight's title refers to Britain, Colls' to England; but this distinction is far less clear-cut than it appears, for reasons which go to the heart of their subject. Almost all the puzzles, anxieties and angers over national identity on this island have revolved around the way Britishness and Englishness have overlapped and intertwined.

The central problems are thus the same. Will Britishness – and the British state – survive far into the 21st century? If it does, how will it have refashioned or (in the abused word which Richard Weight deploys rather too uncritically) modernised itself? How will the English – whose identity was in many ways submerged by expansionist Britishness – define themselves? Who, today, are the English anyway?

On some levels, Colls and Weight offer complementary accounts. Weight says more about Scottish and Welsh nationalism (though he doesn't seem to like the Scots much); Colls is far stronger on the impact of Empire and its aftermaths. Both authors are weakest when discussing Ireland, Weight's too-brief allusions to Ulster Protestant ideas of Britishness being especially feeble.

Weight's is – inexplicitly – a very urban story, while Colls gives far more attention to the countryside. He argues, rightly, that although (or because) England has been for centuries one of the most urbanised societies, the "true England" of our collective imaginings has always been rural. Reflecting this, Colls has a great deal to say about ideas of space and place, while a strong environmentalist consciousness suffuses his work: these are all dimensions missing or underplayed in Weight's version. Weight says more about high politics, Colls about grassroots initiatives.

Both give close attention to popular culture, with Weight focused on broadcasting, Colls on music (his first book was a wonderful study of Durham miners' songs and folklore). Both, though, choose rather predictable examples of how Englishness has been reflected in song: there's no Roy Harper, Robert Wyatt or even Vivian Stanshall, while rather astonishingly, both authors somehow manage to misquote the Sex Pistols (mangling different songs).

Although both naturally give attention to the effects of mass post-war immigration, this remains far too much on the level of how "we" respond to "them"; not enough on how "they" have contributed to rethinking "our" identity. Someone called Stuart Hall features in Weight's account, true; but this is the presenter of It's a Knockout, not the Jamaican-born cultural critic who should be recognised as a crucial voice in these debates. When Weight, in his conclusion, alludes to "Muslim fanatics" threatening "the British way of life" this is – to put it mildly – not an especially thoughtful contribution to the argument.

In other ways, the two accounts are sharply opposed. Identity of England is a more idiosyncratic, uneven, almost disorderly work than Weight's, but perhaps because of that, more thought-provoking. It is certainly more sophisticated, drawing on a far wider range of intellectual resources and offering more hard-edged analysis. Weight has a tendency to resort to large chunks of straight-ahead political narrative, sometimes only loosely connected to his themes, while his more theoretical passages are frankly gauche, as with a quite bizarre "summary" of Isaiah Berlin's thought.

Weight tends occasionally towards a slightly apocalyptic tone. Colls' understatement – as when he refers to the "little ripple of concern that England wasn't up to the job of being England" – seems more apt to its subject. Weight also intermittently drifts into cliché – the British Empire is "as dead as Monty Python's parrot" – while Colls, by contrast, has really acute things to say about Cleese and co's influence on national identity.

Weight is far more optimistic than Colls about the future of Britishness. He identifies with the forces of "modernisation", and finds them in slightly surprising places, from the iconography of Princess Diana to the Millennium Dome, whose only surviving admirer he seems to be. He seems convinced that we are becoming not only a more open and egalitarian, but a more democratic society. Although he cites Richard Hoggart extensively, he could usefully have recalled Hoggart's warning that populism is not at all the same thing as genuine democratisation. His conviction that patriotism is positive leads to some of his least likeable passages: a repetitive, dull sub-Orwellian grouching about the left's anti-nationalist bias.

Colls is much more sceptical. He wonders whether nationhood – any nationhood – can be truly pluralist and still command anyone's loyalties. Weight's hopes are based on what is new, Colls' on what has endured: "It is necessary for peoples to trust each other, and the English still do."

Stephen Howe's latest book is 'Ireland and Empire' (OUP)