The deep roots of English centralism ... and localism
One of the key challenges for localists is that England has been a unitary country for a very long time. Accounts vary, but it is widely accepted that King Athelstan was the overlord who first achieved the unification of England at the beginning of the tenth century. Bits of territory later drifted off and then drifted back again but by the beginning of the eleventh century there was a definitive English state; a unified territory for William of Normandy to conquer. Subsequent civil wars have produced division on political rather than territorial grounds. This is a challenge for localists because, while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have some claim to differentiation within the UK, for a millennium England has been a single political unit where Cumbria is notionally the same as Cornwall and Liverpudlians are theoretically indistinguishable from Londoners. The foundation of England, having pre-dated the post-enlightenment penchent for written constitution