Britain will never be a united nation because rifts created during the reformation, in the time of Henry VIII, are still shaping culture and politics, a Cambridge academic has claimed.
Professor Robert Tombs said that the UK was still deeply divided into left and right, which emerged from the ‘anti-establishment' breakaway protestant groups in the North and traditional Anglican and Catholic communities in the South.
“British characteristics that we still see, which marks us quite deeply, is the division which really began with Henry VIII and the beginning of the religious divide in England,” Professor Tombs told the Hay Festival.
