The futile fight for England’s identity The nation thrives on self-abasement

By a process of extrapolation, this image of “Old Dry Keith” seems as good an answer as any to all the current hand-wringing about who the English “really” are, though it is understandable that few tourist boards would wish to put it on a poster. For it affectionately describes someone most of us know: a hobbyist distracting himself from the mediocrity of life by finding solace in a few modest pleasures, inexpertly but enthusiastically pursued. Think of the love affair with the garden shed; Basil Fawlty trying and failing to listen to Brahms; teabags placed in a plastic bag in the holiday suitcase. As Bill Bryson observed, albeit of the British generally: “[They] are so easy to please. It is the most extraordinary thing. They actually like their pleasures small.”

Admittedly, this version of us reads a bit like one of the narratives of self-deprecating mundanity gathered at Very British Problems, and for that reason will appear disappointingly anticlimactic to many. A recent, much-mocked, attempt to summarise “Britishcore” in The Guardian left commentators thirsting for a less self-abasing, more red-blooded story of who “we” are. (I say “we” for the sake of argument: I was born and raised in Scotland to English parents, making my grasp on the contours of my own national identity as slippery as it gets.)

The consensus seems to be that there is now a great need for a settled narrative of admirable traits and daring achievements that the English people can claim as their own. According to Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick, Scottish and Welsh people already have this, but “woke culture” has taught the English to be ashamed of the past and “we can’t possibly forge a united country around an identity we aren’t proud of”.

But while serving a bit less shame with our history would be no bad thing, I’m not so sure the Scots and the Welsh really do have such a firm grasp on the magnificent deeds of their forebears. What they have instead is a pronounced animus toward their larger neighbour — and there is nothing like the spectre of a much-disliked outgroup to bond an ingroup. By dint of being the more powerful partner in the Union, England lacks this sort of resentful focus. Nor is there even a satisfying hatred of France or Germany to get people going any more, international football fixtures notwithstanding. 

And it is not just the lack of an obvious local contrast class that hampers our quest for national differentiation. It is also the fact that, across the world, millions speak the same language as us, and some of them share our head of state. No wonder it feels so hard to articulate where we end and the rest of the world begins. Viewed from this angle, hackneyed English traits like repression, understatement and self-deprecation even start to seem like useful features, not bugs. Creating an in-your-face sense of English selfhood, when we can already shapeshift so easily and advantageously into wider settings, might even be positively against the national interest.

Still, Jenrick seems to crave a more definite story — even if only to get interviewers to stop asking him about the details. What, then, are the options? In discussions of national identity, it’s standard to distinguish two possible routes: ethnic and civic. But practically speaking, the ethnic route is hopeless in an already multicultural country set in a globalised world — at least, assuming social cohesion is the sincere aim.

Of course, there are those who positively relish an ethnic framing for English identity, seeing it as compensatory for years of neglect and liberal guilt-flinging, and they tend to be unconcerned about the conflicts in existing communities that this exacerbates. We should note that “identity” is used here in Francis Fukuyama’s sense of a site of grievance about lack of adequate political recognition, rather than as a source of beaming pride in past achievements. It’s hard to tell a convincingly chest-thumping story about yourself when you are simultaneously pressing a tale of victimhood and alienation.

In any case, no one in parliament is currently making the case for ethnic identity as a national narrative (and long may that last; we are not Hungary, after all). The official focus is on the destructive effects of mass immigration generally, and not on particular minorities who have been here for decades or centuries. Shorn of probably the easiest yet least ethically acceptable route to creating the sense of a unified People, academics and politicians have turned instead towards “civics”. This envisages social cohesion as achieved not by appeals to ethnicity, but by commitment to a shared set of norms and values, and appreciation of common history. 

Such a conception is implicit in the “Life in the UK” test, required as part of an application for British citizenship, and is presumably the kind of English identity that Jenrick thinks is on the wane. But trying to implement a single normative story, endorsed at scale, also seems likely to undermine existing solidarity. This is because a civic approach requires not just that you indoctrinate already-incentivised newcomers into a single story, but that you get longstanding and more recalcitrant citizens to sign up too. 

Never mind the inevitable religious and cultural conflict that this would entail, in a context where, for years, we have been encouraged to make values up as we go along — we’d also have to improve the cultural and historical literacy of the average Anglo-Saxon type first. Arguably, given the state of national education, the “Life in the UK” test has already created a two-tier society; one in which the only people who know what the Statute of Rhuddlan was, or who designed the Clifton suspension bridge, are those trying to get into the country. Add to this the fact that another part of the English personality is to be disputatious, mocking and contrarian and the hope of us collectively submitting to just one set of norms is bleak. 

As these remarks suggest, our best hope of telling a convincing, genuinely cohesive story about English identity is not to stipulate what facts about history and literature we are supposed to recite approvingly, nor the values we are all supposed to hold — but more neutrally to stick to predictable facets of the national character: a love of small pleasures, emotional repression, argumentativeness, and all the rest of it. This is in fact what chroniclers of Britishcore are already trying to do, though with an off-putting helping of smugness or self-loathing on the side. 

And crucially, to avoid the twin traps of self-aggrandisement and self-flagellation in working out who we are, we still need the help of outside observers looking in, for we are probably our own least reliable narrators. It takes Chinese consumers of English video content, say, to remind us that we are not all sophisticated bon viveurs in the midst of a culinary renaissance, as we might otherwise like to imagine. We are still a country where schoolchildren are unable to identify courgettes, and where companies launch cheese toastie-flavoured crisps. In other words, we are the home of Old Dry Keith — a fact in which we might be interested, but should feel neither particularly proud nor ashamed.

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Kathleen Stock is an UnHerd columnist and a co-director of The Lesbian Project.

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