- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday November 28 2000 17.06 GMT
As power devolved to Scotland and Wales over the first two years of Tony Blair's government, the proportion of English people saying they owed allegiance to England, not Britain, grew from 7% to 17%.
The researchers discovered no evidence of resentment in England about power passing to the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, but the figures suggested that 6m adults in England no longer subscribed to a British national identity.
More than a third of this group (37%) freely admitted to being racially prejudiced, compared with 17% of those who continued to assert their Britishness.
They were also much more likely to think that immigrants take jobs away from people who were born in Britain (70%), that it was "bad" that people from ethnic minorities were getting ahead (26%), and that attempts to give equal opportunities to blacks and Asians in Britain had "gone too far" (46%).
The Little Englanders were also more likely to say it mattered a great deal to being English that people were white and born in England, with English parents.
Nearly threequarters (73%) wanted to keep the pound as Britain's only currency and 22% thought Britain should quit the EU altogether - a much more strongly Eurosceptic stance than among those acknowledging British nationhood.
The survey by John Curtice, of Strathclyde University, and Anthony Heath, of Oxford University, concluded: "We have found that those who feel English are indeed different from those who feel British, being consistently more inclined to want to shut out the outside world. Indeed 'Little Englanders' appear to be alive and well, if not yet very thick on the ground."
By contrast 6% of those who described their ethnic origin as black and 7% of those who said they were Asian classified themselves as English, not British. More than a third said they were British, not English.
The survey found a quarter of people living in England thought Scotland should become completely independent, but the most common response to Scotland's status was indifference. More than half would be "neither pleased nor sorry" if Scotland were to become completely independent.
A fifth of English people wanted independence for Wales, either inside or outside the EU. And a majority (54%) thought Northern Ireland's long-term interests would be with the rest of Ireland rather than as part of Britain.
But these reformist views did not lead to any great appetite for devolution within England, where 15% favoured regional assemblies and 18% wanted an English parliament.
"This is probably why the somewhat muted attempts by the Conservative party to identify itself as the party of English interests have met with an even more muted response," the study said.
One reason why English nationalism might struggle to assert itself was a lack of potent symbols belonging to exclusively England after centuries of intertwined British culture.
More than half thought fox hunting and Guy Fawkes night were English rather than British institutions. Paradoxically, a third thought the same about the Houses of Parliament, the centre of the British democratic state.
The survey, based on more than 3,000 interviews with a representative random sample of people in England, Scotland and Wales, was the 17th in the British social attitudes series.
