Anglophobia

Why Anglophobia was measured against Islamophobia

In 2005 Hussain and Millar, of the Department of Politics at the University of Glasgow, examined the prevalence of Anglophobia in Scotland alongside that of Islamophobia. Setting two such words next to each other is unusual, and the result was more interesting than either measurement alone.

Scottish identity came close to rivalling low levels of education as an influence towards Anglophobia. Having an English friend reduced Anglophobia by about as much as having a Muslim friend reduced Islamophobia. A lack of knowledge about Islam had as much effect on Anglophobia as it did on Islamophobia, which the authors read as indicating a broader rejection of the other rather than anything specific to Muslims.

The headline finding follows from that: national phobias have common roots, independent of the nations they are directed at. The differences were narrower than the words suggest. Anglophobia was slightly less prevalent than Islamophobia, and unlike Islamophobia it correlated with a strong sense of Scottish identity. It had fallen slightly since devolution.

The study also asked the people at the receiving end. Only 16 percent of the English living in Scotland regarded the conflict between Scots and English as even fairly serious.

Why the word is really about nationalism

Benjamin Disraeli said the proud English were sprung from a horde of Baltic pirates who were never heard of in the greater annals of the world. George Orwell put the point structurally: in Notes on Nationalism, written in May 1945 and published in the first issue of the magazine Polemic that October, he wrote that Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalism have points of difference but are alike in their anti-English orientation.

That is what makes the word awkward. It names a component of three distinct national movements, each with its own grievance, rather than a single attitude with a single history.

In Wales the grievance is documented in statute. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542 annexed Wales to the Kingdom of England and replaced the Welsh language and Welsh law with English language and English law, with section 20 of the 1535 Act making English the only language of the courts.

In Northern Ireland it took the form of the IRA targeting England during the Troubles. Outside the United Kingdom the word attaches to different histories again:

• the Hundred Years' War in France
• the Falklands and perceptions of imperialism in Argentina
• suspicion of British interference in Russia
• a stereotype of English immigrants as complainers, in Australia and New Zealand

When Anglophobia becomes an assault charge

The record in Scotland includes incidents as well as attitudes. In 1998 a 19-year-old apprentice mechanic, Mark Ayton, was punched to the ground and kicked to death by three youths, and his father explicitly cited his English accent as a factor. Court proceedings recorded that immediately before the attack the attackers were singing Flower of Scotland, whose lines about sending them homeward to think again refer to the Scottish victory at Bannockburn.

In 1999 an inspector and race relations officer with Lothian and Borders Police said a correlation had been noticed between the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and anti-English incidents. Football produces its own spikes: there was a run of anti-English attacks during the World Cup of 2006, one of which involved a seven-year-old boy in an England shirt being punched in the head in an Edinburgh park. A woman originally from England was assaulted in an alleged anti-English attack in 2009.

The political register produced its own examples in 2020, when groups of Scottish nationalists picketed the border, airports and stations in hazmat suits with dogs to stop English people crossing, and when the Westminster leader of the Scottish National Party wrongly accused an English-born photographer living in Caithness of breaching pandemic travel restrictions, in a case that drew accusations of bullying a private citizen and an eventual apology.

Why the Anglophobia comparison matters

A word that ends in this suffix, Germanophobia and Sinophobia among them, invites the assumption that the hostility is shaped by its object, that fearing the English is a different phenomenon from fearing Muslims because the English and Muslims are different. The Glasgow study is evidence against that assumption.

What predicted both was education, identity and whether the person knew anybody from the group in question. The object was close to interchangeable, which is a finding about the person holding the prejudice rather than about anybody it is aimed at.