Britain is dead... long live Britain
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George Chesterton Adam Cheung Zach Baron Oren Hartov Jessie Atkinson Mike Christensen Jack King Nige Tassell Josiah Gogarty Eileen Cartter
The less British identity matters, the more it suits the multiple identities of Britain’s diverse people
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British GQ
Some people love to talk about putting the "Great" back into Great Britain. Well, perhaps they should get their heads round the "Britain" bit first. What is Britain anyway?

What are its values? Who does it represent? Politically, it is listing. Economically, it's divided between those who buy Himalayan salt and those who buy the 100-piece frozen party platter; culturally, between teepees at Latitude and replica football shirts in Lanzarote. Plus ça change, as we say in Essex.

This year has given more cause than most for reflection. Eight months after the Scottish independence referendum, a general election pulled the first Conservative victory out of a hat for 23 years. We've trundled through a round of big anniversaries (Agincourt, 600; Waterloo, 200; The Battle of Britain, 75). The 800th year since Magna Carta saw more earnest debate than celebration - was it the germ of British liberty or an aristocratic beef? For the most part they passed without fanfare.

To a credulous new arrival, Britain in 2015 must seem a proud, even self-obsessed nation. We never stop talking about ourselves, especially on television: The Great British Bake Off, The Great British Sewing Bee, Great British Garden Revival, Britain's Bravest Cops. We fetishise our countryside like pining teenagers in Secret Britain and The Wonder Of Britain. (Helicopter + Peak District + Nick Drake = the Sunday schedule.)

What that newcomer probably wouldn't realise is that the government has produced guidelines to make schools promote "British values".

And nothing says "national identity crisis" like a government ordering schools to promote national identity.

The awkward truth is that national identity is a myth, since it requires an act of faith in the constructed and accidental. But myths - that act like cultural stitching - have meaning and Britain's are looking threadbare. "History doesn't really inform identity - myth does," Paul Lay, the editor of History Today told GQ. "The English are no longer able to articulate a national myth. In Scotland and Wales they still can." In 2015 we could say Britishness no longer exists.

Britain has been "denationalised". Rather than mourn, let me quote the most influential Briton of the past 50 years and declare, "Just rejoice at that news."

It's none of my business whether Scotland should be independent or not, but I can see the argument for staying is not entirely negative. For any uninitiated Little Englanders out there, Scotland has long been a separate country. But what made the Scotland of today is centuries of participation at the vanguard of the union.

The iridescent beauty of independence is seductive, the muddy, practical considerations of governance less so, and the referendum result of 2014 was a very British decision. The success of the SNP may actually save the union, because by exposing its emptiness, the nationalists have also exposed the best reason to keep it.

The less Britain matters to people - the more belonging is defined on smaller and smaller terms - the more suitable Britain becomes as a framework for greater devolvement and even federalism.

Rather than a mechanism by which Westminster controls the nation, would not a more devolved Britain be the mechanism that frees the nation from Westminster? Nostalgia alone will not be enough. After the sustained neglect of Scotland, Wales and the North, its survival rests on its ability to adapt to new demands, a talent for which it is regularly underestimated. "If a federal balance - one that can overcome the preponderance of England - can be found, I think it would serve to reignite a new sense of Britishness," historian Tom Holland told GQ.

As with politics, so with the cat's cradle of identity. Ask most English teenagers about their identity and they will probably be noncommittal. But ask a Scottish or Welsh teenager about theirs and they will say Scot and Welsh. So be it - it's easy to understand the appeal of an aspirational national narrative. This identity is heartfelt but arbitrary. Class, a complex but maligned concept these days, is the real engine of identity and culture, and class crosses Hadrian's Wall, Offa's Dyke, the Pennines and the M25. "The Scots and Welsh don't get the best out of the union so they use the rallying point of identity to galvanise a sense of social injustice," explains columnist and academic Dave Wearing. However justified Scotland's grievances may be, those who turn a class argument into a nationalistic one are being disingenuous because class and culture have substance and nationalism is, ultimately, hollow. It is an unfashionable view, but I can't see much distinction between the cultural identities of England, Scotland and Wales. There are a thousand tiny differences worth preserving - a dialect here, a tradition there - but nothing that divides and defines as much as where you went to school, how much you earn, what you watch and what you eat.

After the Second World War, immigrants traditionally assumed a vocal British identity wherever they found themselves. Though less strident now, that assumption of Britishness by people from South Asia and the Caribbean - often under great strain - provides a useful example for blood-and-soil Anglo-Saxons. "The appeal of Britishness has always been that it is baggy," says Holland. "It enabled people to feel simultaneously a number of different identities. That is something worth holding on to."

In July, David Cameron made a speech to address the gap between extremism in Muslim communities and what he thinks of as traditional British - and therefore good - values. Among these values are democracy, the rule of law and freedom of speech. This all seems tickety-boo to me - it's just a shame it's not really true. Is democracy British? Doesn't France like democracy too? And Sweden? And the US? We have an unelected head of state and second chamber. Britain seized and exploited countless colonies, including our neighbour Ireland, and our history is littered with suppressed radicals and democrats. The idea that Britain has always espoused justice and the rule of law is more or less nonsense in the grand historical narrative.

We certainly do not support democracy and freedom of speech abroad. Britain backed the dictator Saddam Hussein for decades before deciding to unseat him, helping to unleash bloody chaos on the region. Was that British? We support repressive regimes around the world to this day. This year, our government has gone out of its way to avoid taking in refugees. Half the country was disgusted, the other, I suspect, silently approved. Was this British? Well, hypocrisy is probably our most identifiable and enduring national trait, and it is just as prevalent and invidious on the Left as the Right. Shakespeare knew it. Byron knew it.

Orwell knew it. David Cameron's speechwriter probably knows it.

Crucial to national identity is selective amnesia, whereby we remember the glory and forget the blemishes. "We are very happy to celebrate Britain's role in the abolition of the slave trade, but not so keen to remember the 200 years of slavery that preceded it," says Wearing. The Queen magazine's 1960 "British Special" featured an article including the following passage: "There is no more splendid page in any people's history than that which records the part played by Great Britain in the suppression of slavery and the slave trade. It amply compensates and atones for the sad chronicle of our relations with Ireland." This doublethink about our past (mis)informs how we think about the present.

And there is a lot wrong with Britain right now. There is wild economic inequality that feeds into our education and justice systems; there are divergent strains of discrimination that seem resistant to treatment. And yet... We should temper the self-flagellation with this: there is inequality, scapegoating and religious enmity in every country in the world. So just as democracy and freedom of speech are not "British", these are not British either. Identity politics has increasingly led people to expect a personal utopia as their right, and we often forget what an open, stable and affluent country Britain is compared to almost all others. These comparisons are not meaningless - nor do they excuse the prejudice and injustice that undoubtedly exist here. We need dissent and opposition more than ever, but we also need perspective and context, something the puritanical politics of hysteria always lacks. "It's seems odd that politicians are so unable to articulate anything positive - the aspirational or optimistic," says Lay.

Half a century before Agincourt, Chaucer exposed the English as status-obsessed, filthy minded, fun-loving, stoical, sentimental, gullible hypocrites. What has changed in 650 years? I think that list could be applied to the Scots and Welsh too. After all, they are human qualities rather than British ones.

Britain is entering a new era, with or without Scotland, in or out of the EU. In a few years there will be nobody left who experienced the Second World War. It will evolve with a new version of old memories by which to define itself as the half-life of the 20th century dissipates.

Like many others, I was moved by the portrayal of our collective social history during the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Here, I believed, was the true spirit of Britain: dazzlingly creative, caring and brave in solidarity. And yet three years later a radical Conservative government came to power, promising policies that opposed almost everything Danny Boyle's show celebrated. However much our egos may wish it, one person, one group, one region, does not make a nation. Diversity is not just race or sexuality - it is people who don't think what you think, care about the things you care about or vote the way you want them to vote.

The case for Britain's survival is best argued on a platform of endless, life-giving pluralism. So the most fitting way to view such a nation - its politics, its identity, its values - is that of an umbrella: slightly flimsy at times but rather good at keeping the rain off. Give people a sense of freedom and self-determination under that umbrella, and they will be safer and stronger and freer - free to belong or not to belong. Free to change their government for a better one. Free, even, to leave. It feels like too many take that for granted.

The comments under a recent Guardian article about the union flag piled up like the rambling internal monologue of a nation with infinite multiple-personality disorder. To some, it was "a symbol of bloody colonialism", while for others it was "a design classic loved around the world". Every conflicting statement of vehement pointlessness reminded me that even the flag is now a floating sign, and, like the country it represents, means whatever you say it means.

Being British is something you can be happy to be without being happy about. British by default. It's just an accident, after all.

Perhaps this umbrella identity is not merely the most suited: it is the most suitable. The sheer diversity of Britain - not simply countries and regions, but rural and urban, radical and conservative, irreverent and deferential, hundreds of religions and ethnicities, thousands of different kebabs - means that rather than a cohesive sense of nationhood, what fits best is what we have now, ie, nothing much. It is more important that people feel free than that they feel bound to a prescribed identity. And therefore, Britain, meaningless, limitless, is the perfect imperfect political and cultural union. How the new Britain is ruled and who rules it is up to the British and its various parts. That is another question for another day. Most of the time I'm too busy to care, and what could be more British than that?

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