Once again the gap between politics and media, on one hand, and the general public, on the other, continues to be revealed in its scale. Survey after survey bring us the news that things are changing. That the British public is becoming more progressive in attitude towards refugees and asylum seekers, immigration, unions and industrial action, net zero targets and, most recently, British history.
The National Centre for Social Research’s British social attitudes survey shows a country that has become less nationalistic and jingoistic and, most sharply, less “proud” or “very proud” of British history. Along with that, there were also declines in pride in Britain’s democracy, its political influence and its economic achievements. The only two spheres where pride remained constant and high were sport, and art and literature.
Some of these changes are demographic, or the result of “generational replacement”, according to the survey. Younger generations’ idea of Britishness revolves around a “civic identity” rather than an ethnic one. And while 70% of people over 65 feel “it is important for someone to have been born in Britain”, only 41% of those under 35 feel the same.
There is an ethnic angle as well, with younger, more diverse generations being less likely to be tethered to historical notions of Britishness as a deposit of empire or ethnic heritage that needs to be preserved. And some of these changes can be attributed to the increasing connective tissue between people that has replaced shared uniform notions of national identity. Instead, there is an emergence of new shared references and experiences that create civic notions of belonging, relatability and kinship : the sort of art, literature and sport that score so highly on the pride barometer.
Reading surveys is like reading tea leaves – because we have results rather than reasoning – but it is difficult to imagine that, even after factoring in generational replacement, the raising of questions about empire, history, enslavement and the legacies of colonialism by an entire cohort of writers, academics, media organisations, cultural institutions and researchers has not played a part in many divesting from history as a source of national pride. They have had to face down not just backlash and condemnation from triggered members of the public, but from the media and the political sphere. The new Britain that is emerging is one that has come about organically and over time, but it is also one that has been dragged there.
In that process, the contest is framed by critics of reappraisal as one between those who want to see only the bad in British history and those who also want to recognise the good. In reality, the contest is between those who look for sources of identity in notions of supremacy, and those who do in markers of equality. In other words, overreliance on history, defensiveness about it and an insistence on seeing it as something that says something special about British character betray a lack of confidence, a fragility and a resistance to less hierarchical conceptions of identity. If we dispense with a definition of national character that has been expressed only in terms of exceptionalism in the past, then what replaces it?
Once that question is asked and treated as legitimate, all manner of risks are introduced. If we look to our current nation, one whose features are expressed so strongly in the survey, then one has to reckon with all sorts of uncomfortable realities that some want to deny. That postwar immigration and the diversity it has resulted in have changed the nation’s racial and political character irreversibly. That ethnicity alone is no longer a guarantee of status. And that our place in the world is undermined by overlapping economic crises and community fractures. Modern life, in short, is atomising and anxiety inducing. All the more so when subject to the sort of austerity that weakens public spaces and services, and creates an existence that one increasingly has to navigate rather than thrive in.
For the sort of pride that rests in our historical political and economic prowess, one has to search very hard in a present where reality for those other than a privileged few is increasingly about managing the rising cost of housing, transport, energy and food, and the state of the NHS and schooling, all while contending with Brexit-induced political instability, the recklessness and diminution of the political class and widening economic equality.
It’s not a mystery, then, why English rightwing politicians and the media focus so hectically on “woke” assaults on British heritage and history. It is why such panics about universities changing curriculums or the acute threat to memorials and statues are regular features on GB News and in rightwing newspapers. The right has desecrated the present and so must sanctify the symbols of the past, depositing in its performative protection all its fear of a new country where its influence, demographically and ideologically, is waning. And it’s not a mystery why Labour has broadly abdicated the job of channelling the transformation in public attitudes on race, immigration and history, choosing instead to focus on a “patriotism” that it neither defines nor promotes in any meaningful way. It has internalised that confected panic, and is still beholden to the view that Britain is conservative at heart and must be pandered to, not provoked. The result is declining pride in the country’s democracy and political accomplishments.
And the result is an absence of open contest over who we are: where a dangerous, destabilising minority – egged on by a right overrepresented in our public discourse and media – runs amok. The growing progressive majority, meanwhile, is advocated for, at great peril and cost, by those individuals and institutions outside the political sphere. And as referee is a government gone awol that intervenes only to crack down and mop up when violence spills out on to the streets.
What is being precipitated is not the much-feared confrontation with the forces of reaction, but the alienation of new progressives who do not recognise the country they live in as presented in their media and politics.
The holdouts are loud, powerful and well capitalised, and their assault is allowed to continue, despite all the signs that tell us their constituency is getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror – and that the country is leaving them behind.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
