AN insidious form of English nationalism was reborn in the streets surrounding Westminster last week – shrill, angry, frustrated, self-pitying. A nationalism dangerously anxious to blame democratic institutions, foreigners (including Scottish MPs) and a nebulous “elite” for its woes.

Above all, it featured a latter-day jingoism framed around the insane delusion that England, once free of foreign entanglements, can banish the myriad problems – personal, social, economic – that are really the bastard children of late capitalism.

But before Scots and fellow Europeans rush to condemn Englishness wholesale, we should pause and consider. English national identity is as old as the green hills of the Cheviots, Pennines and Yorkshire Moors.

It is a popular identity rooted deep in plebeian protest and legitimate struggle against landlords, aristocrats, corrupt monarchs and metropolitan elites.

This is the passionate England of the Peasants’ Revolt, Jack Cade’s Rebellion, the Civil War, the Levellers, the Luddites, Peterloo, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, the Suffragettes, Cable Street, Saltley Gate, and thousands of broken heads sustained in Trafalgar Square riots over the decades.

There is, of course, another face to Englishness. It remains one of the most class-ridden, unequal societies on the face of the planet, because the forte of its narrow ruling class – aristocracy, bourgeoisie, London bankers, Oxbridge intelligentsia, and incompetent military elite – has been to concede just enough reforms over the centuries to defuse mass protest. As a result – despite a millennia of popular struggle – the English state remains a bastion of hidden privilege and oligarchy disguised as democracy.

But here is the sad thing about all those heroic acts of popular English defiance: they failed. The revolution never came. Unlike in France, the monarchy was not overthrown and survives today (even in its current soap opera guise) as a justification for political privilege and economic birthright. The English peasantry may have revolted but it never got to own the green hills: a third of all land in England is still held by traditional aristocratic families, and London itself is parcelled out between six private estates.

The 19th-century Chartists were the first organised working-class political movement anywhere to demand the vote. But full adult suffrage in the UK did not arrive till 1968. Yes, I do mean 1968 because Catholic voters were routinely disenfranchised in the north of Ireland until then by the local Unionist Tories.

The failure of the English popular revolution at the start of the 19th century did not remove dissent but it helped justify a strategy of compromise towards the ruling order. Industrialisation smashed up old community structures and provoked widespread resistance – which was met with massive physical repression (witness the Peterloo state massacre). But industrialisation also brought rising living standards that effectively bought off popular resistance, allowing the old aristocracy and the new Victorian middle-class to rule as they pleased.

And the pleasure of the English ruling-class oligarchy was to colonise a third of the globe, as a way of securing markets and exporting working-class dissenters to the new white Dominions. Thus was born the British Empire as a mercantile project but also nationalist, racist device to transform traditional English radical dissent into jingoist support for the regime.

It worked a treat. The only downside was that the rentier English middle classes grew commercially lazy behind their imperial tariff wall, and the UK slipped into permanent economic decline.

Subsequently, two world wars nearly bankrupted the already weakened British economy, while temporarily reinforcing ideological support for the oligarchy. But as economic decline progressed apace after 1945, the working-class worm turned. There was a massive upsurge in trades union militancy, as the proles rediscovered their ancestors’ predilection for direct action.

Enter the Common Market, subsequently rebranded the European Union. One wing of British capitalism (led in Parliament by Edward Heath) saw joining Europe as a way of modernising the economy. But this cut across the English nationalist rhetoric that held the working class in check and bound the petty bourgeois to voting Tory. Labour Party traditionalists – who were of course British nationalists – opposed joining Europe on “patriotic” grounds. Here we see the roots of the current political imbroglio.

One solution to the conundrum of reconciling the working class with modernising the British economy and state arrived in the shape of Mrs Thatcher. Her policy of privatisation and flogging off council houses cheaply, plus deregulating banks so they could provide instant credit, created a temporary “feelgood” factor for the first time in decades. The senseless Falklands gamble rekindled English patriotism.

Of course, all this was pure artifice. But it gave the oligarchy the political space to destroy the unions by literally dismantling British manufacturing industry.

A new spiv economy was born, with City traders in red braces shuffling Monopoly money. In the de-industrialised north of England and in crumbling English seaside towns, Thatcherism replaced patriotic Labourism as an ideological comfort blanket. Brussels became the new enemy, the source of all woes now General Galtieri and Arthur Scargill had been dispatched by the Iron Lady. When Mrs T was defenestrated by Tory wets – actually that wing of British industrial capital that knew the fantasy economy bequeathed by Thatcherism was a chimera – the English grassroots reacted with a sense of betrayal.

It was this “betrayal” that fuelled the Brexit movement – even if the latter was led first by millionaire financier James Goldsmith, and then ex-City trader Nigel Farage. Enter a deformed English nationalism very different from its progressive predecessors, even if it carries the historic DNA of street protest, anti-elitism and plebeian outrage. It is a Tommy Robinson nationalism that is also finding scapegoats in the Muslim community.

How should progressives, north and south of the Border, respond? We must not start by rejecting the right of English people to their own national identity, an identity which is rich and progressive. The England of John Ball, General Winstanley, Percy Shelley, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Lovett, William Morris, Millicent Fawcett and of Sylvia Pankhurst.

Unfortunately, the current manifestation of English nationalism is borderline reactionary and focused on a delusional political project that sees “independence” from Europe as an automatic escape from all perceived threats to English wellbeing – threats associated with alleged foreign rule, with immigrants, with welfare “scroungers”, with Jeremy Corbyn, and with supposed subsidies for Scotland. Alas, this is not a project to bring down real tyrants, hang aristocrats or sack Canary Wharf.

That said, England must be allowed to rediscover its Englishness. Which could mean that – shocking as it seems – if a majority of the English want to quit the EU, we in Scotland need to accept it, provided we get to go our own way.

Personally, I think leaving the EU hands a victory to the reactionary right. But forcing England to stay in the EU against the wishes of the majority would have equally disastrous consequences.

Self-determination means what it says, north and south of the Border – SNP MPs please note.

Yet I remain optimistic for England and the English. At some point, their tradition of progressive, plebeian resistance will prevail.

A secure, modern Englishness will surely emerge – but only when it succeeds in its historic task of overthrowing the landed and City oligarchy and establishing a genuine English democracy.