Not sure if this has already been posted but it seems appropriate after John Harris' Guardian article:
http://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/the-problem-with-the-english-england-doesn-t-want-to-be-just-another-member-of-a-team-1-4851882?utmsource=Twitter&utmmmedium=SocialIcon&utmmcampaign=inarticleesocialiconss
A few extracts:_
_
"Brexit is the result of an English delusion, a crisis of identity resulting from a failure to come to terms with the loss of empire and the end of its own exceptionalism, argues Cambridge University professor Nicholas Boyle"
....
"Europhobia was shown by the referendum to be a specifically English psychosis, the narcissistic outcome of a specifically English crisis of identity. That crisis has had two phases, roughly two centuries apart."
.....
"Similarly, we could say the English have been unable to recognise how much of their society and its norms was constructed during the imperial period and in order to sustain empire, and have therefore been unable to mourn the empire’s passing or to escape from the compulsion to recreate it."
....
"The psychosis, the willed triumph of illusion over reality revealed by the referendum result, is most damagingly still at work in the determination of the English to cling on to their old exceptional status as anonymous masters of the United Kingdom and of the other nations with which they have to share the Atlantic Archipelago."
.....
"The absence of a separate English parliament reduces the nations granted devolved assemblies to the marginal status the English gave them in the days of glory, as those slightly comical regional variations on a Britishness of which England – invisible and characterless in itself – was therefore alone representative."_
This echoes a book that dh studied as part of his Geography degree in the late 70s: "Internal Colonialism: the Celtic Fringe in British National Development" by Michael Hechter, in which he discussed how (and why) the Empire still exists - it's just now Scotland, Wales and NI 
. The book was updated in 1998 with a new intro mentioning devolution in Scotland and Wales. It also at least partially explains why the Scottish and Welsh identities have been retained - because the default "British" one was actually English. _
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0765804751/ref=cmm_swrrcpapiiVcmAzbVRTMSRA
(Sorry for all the underlining: wrote it in notes on my phone and copied and pasted and it's decided to underline 
)