Many people who live in
Denmark think of themselves as Danish, in Norway Norwegian, in Sweden Swedish. But
no one living in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
thinks of themselves a United Kingdomish. A few will say they are Northern
Irish but only an ironist would think to identify as Great British. United
Kingdom governments for over a decade (Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a Unionist
Scot, started it) have encouraged people to think of themselves as British with
British passports, British nationality, a British government; they have been
incredibly successful. In the 2021 UK census “more than half of the
usual resident population (54.8%, 32.7 million) chose a "British"
only national identity in 2021, which is a rise of 35.8 percentage points from
19.1% (10.7 million) in 2011. The opposite trend was seen for the
"English" only identity. This fell by 42.8 percentage points, from
57.7% (32.4 million) in 2011 to 14.9% (8.9 million) in 2021” (Quoted from
Census online data). The 45% who did not claim British as a
unique identity are spread out over those who combined it with English,
Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Northern Irish, Cornish, Polish, Romanian….keep going….
or selected one of those categories as their unique identity. (And spare a
thought for the half million or so
illegals who didn’t get a Census form having no names or addresses and so
didn’t get a chance to self-identify as anything).
This recent success of
“British” is in some ways surprising: there is no national language to go with
“British” - we remain English-speakers - and no football team to encourage with
a Come on Britain! A United Kingdom
team, not a British team, appears at the Olympics and le Royaume Uni turns up at Eurovision to score the traditional nul points. The main advantages of
“British” are that it is shorter than “United Kingdomish” and rather than
tracking the recent merging of two kingdoms and the even more recent military
conquest of Ireland (our Donetsk and Luhansk) it harks back to indigenous First
Nations, the ancient Brits of one kind or another,
The remarkable instability
in self-identification shown by the ten-year shift from “English” to “British”
is interesting. I guess that the Brexit
campaign had something to do with it but it may also be the case that some
English people wanting to escape the stigma of flag-of-St George English
nationalism and football hooliganism, attached to the Brexit cause, switched
their verbal allegiance from “English” to the hopefully less-tarnished
“British”.
I didn’t: on the Census
form I identified as “English” and “European” - the latter, if I recall
correctly, was a write-in not tick-box choice. Since I’d be delighted to see a
united EU member Ireland and an independent EU member Scotland it seemed more
consistent to use “English” than “British”. Wales? Well, Wales voted for Brexit
and so ruled itself out from becoming EU member Wales and its future fortunes
will be linked to those of England, in other words, downhill all the way.
The remarkable instability
in national self-identification re-inforces
my sense that some contemporary identities will lose their current allure
within a decade. Some of those students who currently affect “they” will revert
to “he” or “she” when it ceases to attract Facebook Likes and they have a
conventional job and a steady girlfriend/boyfriend. Some wannabe “transgender”
people will admit that they have no enthusiasm for hormones or the surgeon’s knife (who could blame them?) and will
settle for being good old-fashioned transvestites and good luck to them. More likely, of course, some new fashion will
come along and sweep up all the Likes available.
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