British as a national identity is an odd one. I used to ask students of mine to self-identify while avoiding the sociological ‘CAGE’ (Class, Age, Gender, Ethnicity). When they went for geographical identities, it was usually by city, or by the birth nation of their parents, or as ‘European’. But that was a very young cohort. Census data shows that most people in Britain self-identify geographically by their component nation – England, Wales, or Scotland.
As the map below shows, it’s not generally something most citizens of the UK self-identify with. Instead, the English usually consider themselves English, the Welsh likewise Welsh and the Scottish Scots.
Where we do find Britishness in significant numbers is in London and Northern Ireland. This is, I’d argue, because those two locations contain large numbers of people who aren’t English, Scottish or Welsh, but nonetheless wish to self-identify with the UK as a whole.
The data is fifteen years old and may have changed a little since then, especially with the emerging self-identification of ‘Northern Irish’ in Northern Ireland.
But certainly at that time, and likely now too, ‘British’ as a self-identification remains something used by people who aren’t actually Britons, and is generally not used by many British people themselves. What’s especially interesting about this is that so very many British people have roots in more than one of the UK’s constituent nations. One might assume that they’re exactly the people that Britishness was made for. Yet that’s not often the case.
One theory I formulated, after noticing that German students also didn’t affiliate as German, but rather as being from their city, region or else European, was that perhaps there are negative associations with the term British (Empire etc) which discourages people from adopting it easily.
One thing that I do find awfully tedious, and I speak as a descendant on both sides from people who didn’t stray outside of north-eastern Ireland for at least five millennia according to a DNA test conducted by Bryan Sykes at Oxford, is this kind of national identity purity test, famously linked by Norman Tebbit to cricket support.
And yet Britishness appears to be most popular among cohorts of citizens who might well fail Norman’s famous test – the (Northern) Irish and the diasporic communities of England’s conurbations, especially those of sub-continental extraction.
Perhaps Britishness as an identity is a cloak worn lightly if at all, in lieu of a more attenuated geographic affiliation. It covers all permutations and possibilities, and can be discarded if and when the opportunity arises to offer a more detailed explanation of geographic identity.