Coward’s lyric is a timely reminder that English whingeing is nothing new. But the vexed spirit of the day is awkward because the problem lies not in our circumstances but in our selves. A national identity cannot be picked out like a new suit of clothes. If anything, it is the image we see reflected in the eyes of others, and what we see now does not look too good. Brexit is leading foreign pundits to regard us with disdain. [...]
It would be wrong to conclude from this that England is by nature more pull-up-the-drawbridge than the other British nations. It is by some distance Britain’s most cosmopolitan region. According to a 2017 survey by the Migration Observatory, London alone has almost five times the foreign-born population of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together. There are more foreign-born in Manchester than in Scotland.
It is often asserted that Englishness, like Britishness, must be a matter of ideas and values – liberty, democracy, equality, tolerance and so on. But it is hard to see these as distinctively native: they are standard-issue social ideals shared or claimed by almost everyone from Australia to Zimbabwe. [...]
Whether a national identity can cohere around the theme of variousness is another question. We had better hope so, because one thing is certain: the imperious workshop of the world, the nation that seized those far pavilions, the England of Nelson and Florence Nightingale … that place is no more. Variety may soon be all we have.
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