Thread by @NewStatesman

National character is a slippery eel; the moment you think you have a grip on it, it’s gone. Its essence is fleeting; its shape shifts ­constantly and yet you know it when you see it, even if each person sees something different.
newstatesman.com/politics/a-dre…

That is true of all nations and yet feels particularly true of Britain.

In the absence of a constitution or a bill of rights we have no foundational documents to refer to, beyond the Magna Carta, which was not even written in English.

For all the ways in which nationalism is central to what both ails and animates us, from hooliganism to Brexit, it is curiously devoid of purpose or intent.

It speaks to the present only in passing and is so obsessed with the past that it completely eschews the future.

The managed decline of empire has been accompanied by a managed orderly denial of what the empire was and did. This process took place with indecent haste.

A 2020 YouGov poll ­reveals that one in three Britons think the empire is something to be proud of, while just one in five think it is something to be ashamed of.

This, in no small part, is why the Second World War lurks so large in the popular imagination.

We are great, goes the logic, because we were once better.

British identity has no lodestar; it is grounded in no principle; put bluntly it has no point beyond its own self-assertion.

National stories rooted in themes such as freedom, equality of opportunity, reinvention and solidarity clearly have staying power.

In the US more than 80 per cent of people believe they have either achieved the American Dream or are on their way to achieving it; in France an appeal to the values of the Republic remain central to any successful electoral campaign.

That Britain does not draw on similar narratives, though, reflects a strength of sorts. These defining national stories are generally necessitated by some kind of rupture, such as a revolution, which demands an articulation of what the nation stands against.

Britain, as a whole, never had those ruptures. It was not made, but emerged as the messy product of Roman, Viking and Norman invasions, regional fiefdoms and monarchist pretensions, and keeps muddling on, in relative stability and episodic dysfunction.

This, ultimately, is what Britain’s political culture lacks: not so much an ideal or a dream, but a set of principles that could apply to a common future; the idea that Britain stands for something more than posterity and itself.

newstatesman.com/politics/a-dre…