The United Kingdom is slowly devolving. The Scots have their own Parliament and the Welsh have an Assembly (I can’t remember what is going on in Northern Ireland these days).
As England does not have its own Parliament much has been made of the ability of Scots MPs to vote on certain matters that affect England but English MPs not being able to vote on the equivalent matters that affect Scotland.
It is all a bit of a mess.
The presence of different cultures within the UK was never what made the empire. On the contrary, the desire of London was often for homogeneity and monolingualism at home. The empire was the places overseas.
In modern English usage, an empire can be one of two things–the domains governed by an Emperor/Empress, or a realm in which the mother country governs the outlying realms as conquered provinces or colonies. (Thus for example, we read of the “French colonial empire” even when France was a republic.)
The first usage is clearly inapplicable to the UK, as Her Majesty the Queen is no longer empress of anything. The second usage is inapplicable to the UK itself, as the four constituent pieces are all represented in Parliament and in the highest offices in the land, and the three outlying pieces have their own assemblies as well.
There are still a few remaining colonies, such as the Falklands, Bermuda, and Gibraltar. These remain as colonies by mutual consent, not by conquest, and to call them an “empire”, even in lower case, would seem like a delusion of grandeur. Nobody does it any more.
Only by people who don’t or should know better. The Scots and the Welsh get very upset about people using English and British as interchangeable terms. Talking of which, Obama might not have said it, but someone (a press secretary or some such) DID refer to the UK as England on Gordon’s recent visit. I saw it on the news, and my Welsh girlfriend was incensed. Particularly daft as Gordon is Scottish.
Wales is a principality, governed at the time by England - which, being a Monarchy, trumps a principality, so it tends to lose out in the recognition stakes.
Not sure it ever was? It’s a weird anomaly. Politically it is a single country and is represented overseas as such. The government itself describes the UK as a unique ‘country consisting of four countries’. No, I don’t get it either.
San Vito, English and British
This is a good explanation of it, although I’d just point out the fact that while England, Scotland and Wales are countries in their own right, Northern Ireland is not, it’s a province. Together they make up the country called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as you said - I still don’t really understand how that works but that’s what it is.
The constellation of different political and geographical terms is remarkably complicated and I’d say even here in Britain most people don’t understand all the details of it.
Yep. And Unca Cece covered this in his column about why Prince Ranier of Monaco couldn’t style himself as a king:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/794/why-cant-prince-rainier-become-a-king
namely:
I’m not up on my English history, but I suspect that even when Wales was ruled by a Welsh Prince of Wales, he was still a vassal of the King of England (if he wasn’t, he’d have been the King of Wales; if not a vassal of the King of England he was probably a vassal of some other king). And after Edward I (I think) conquered Wales and bestowed the Princedom on his heir apparent, the Prince of Wales definitely became subordinate to the King of England.
I shall now don my asbestos underwear, fully expecting to be very heatedly corrected in my misunderstanding of Welsh history by indignant Welshmen.
Cheers,
bcg
It all depends on what definition of ‘country’ you choose to use - as SanVito mentions, Wales can be considered a principality rather than a nation, as it was not a separate kingdom when the United Kingdom came into being. Even describing N Ireland as a province contradicts the definition of Ulster as one of the four provinces of Ireland, for the latter includes counties in the Republic.
This is not only all terribly wrong but very strange as well. No one here ever uses British to mean ‘English to the exclusion of the Welsh’, I don’t know where you’ve got that from. And I’m not sure whether it’s true that ‘British’ used to mean solely the Welsh and the Cornish, but even if it did, you’ve just said that’s not the case any more so the idea that ‘technically, the English aren’t British either’ is completely false.
‘London’ may govern Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in the sense that that’s where Parliament sits, but Parliament contains elected members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. So while I guess it’s true to say ‘London’ governs those nations, it’s completely wrong to say that England governs them; all four states collectively govern themselves.
Wales was never ruled over by a succession of single monarchs, but there were various people to hold or claim the title ‘King of Wales’. The difficulty is that applying modern definitions of ‘country’ means applying modern concepts of nation states, rather than the clutch of various kingdoms which made up Wales.
FWIW, the last Welsh Prince of Wales was no government subordinate - Owain Glyndŵr - Wikipedia
While it’s true that other countries gained independence from the British Empire, the Empire was governed by the United Kingdom, and independence was approved or ceded by the government of the United Kingdom. There was no separate government of the British Empire, and no representation of the colonies in the UK government. Therefore, as a practical political matter, and also a legal matter, it’s also appropriate to say that the colonies obtained their independence from the United Kingdom.
Quite so.
Herbert Asquith’s gravestone says, “Prime Minister of England”. His own family got his title wrong. It’s especially amusing since he was an early proponent of devolution; he was among the first to seriously propose Home Rule in Ireland, for example.
You’re not too far off. The last real (and arguably, only) Welsh Prince of Wales was Llewelyn ap Grufydd and he essentially became a vassal via the Treaty of Montgomery in 12… hundred and something.
Edward I didn’t like the arrangement Llewelyn struck, so when he became king on Henry’s death he declared Llewelyn a traitor to the Crown and eventually had him beheaded.
In reality, there’s never been a ruling “Prince of Wales”; the various Llewelyns really only controlled Gwynedd, the northwest corner, and the rest was a series of small squabbling baronies.
There was a greater acceptance of ‘England’ being used as a reference to the whole of the UK in the fairly recent past, with offence neither being intended nor taken - George Orwell’s essays are one example I’ve noticed this in, where ‘British’ and ‘English/England’ are used interchangeably.
Edit: I suppose this doesn’t justify Asquith’s family, though, given it was a specific title
We have our own Assembly, with powers slowly dripped down to it depending on how well people behave.
It’s funny you should bring up Orwell- he’s buried in the same churchyard as Asquith, in Oxfordshire.
Anyway, while I do recall England being used as a stand-in for Britain in days of yore, I don’t remember seeing it done by anyone who wasn’t English.
My guess is that the point was as follows: “British” originally referred to the Britons, the indigenous people of Britannia at the time of the Roman conquest. When the Romans left, most of the island got overrun by Jutes, Angles, and Saxons; the Britons were left with Wales and Cornwall. The modern inhabitants of England are mostly descended from those Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, with an admixture of the earlier British. So the statement probably should have read “the English aren’t Britons”.
How come nobody ever gives the Frisians their props?
I would think that the difference is that all four of those countries/principalities/provinces (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) have elected representation in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. “Empire” normally connotes one country having domination over its territories, which have little or no say in the imperial government. Now of course there may be tensions in the U.K. about the balance of power between England and the other, smaller components, plus issues like Scots, Irish and Welsh nationalism, but the fact of full participation in the British government makes it unlikely that the term “empire” fits.
“Empire” was normally used to mean the overseas territories, not the United Kingdom itself: “Britain and her Empire”, etc.
But is the concept of four countries making up a larger country any more difficult to follow than the idea of fifty states making up a larger state?
This is nit-picking taken to the max. It quite obviously denies any immigrant the chance to become a Briton. It also handily ignores all the cross-pollination that has gone on between the various bits of the British Isles over the centuries. I’m a mongrel English/Scottish/Irish thing that grew up in England myself, so please do let me know if I am British or not.
'cos we tend only to think of them as black and white cattle, so we only give them crops.
As for the thing about using “England” as though it also meant “Great Britain”, yes, there used to be a lot of that, just as there used to be English football supporters somehow imagining the the Union Flag meant "England. (But they might have been very stupid football supporters). There is not nearly so much of it now. However, you’ll still find B.B.C. articles or newspaper articles saying something-or-other about new measures in education or health or whatever, without making it clear exactly which bits of the U.K. they mean - usually it turns out to be a measure that relates to England or England and Wales, but it makes things tricky to read to get what the facts are.
“British” has two meanings - a historical one and the current legal/political one. You’re both right, you’re just using two different definitions.
If you went up to 100 British people and asked them about this stuff, about 90 of them would get it wrong. It’s such an annoying country name - sometimes I get jealous of places like Venezuela.