National 'Britain Day': Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part Eight)

They were at it again on Monday: Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne called, among other things, for a national 'Britain Day' (our equivalent of Australia Day or America's July 4^th) as part of the drive to promote a stronger sense of Britishness – what the ministers called Britain's 'citizenship revolution'.

Anyone who has read any of my previous blog entries sub-titled 'Inventing Britain For the 21^st Century' will know that I am extremely sceptical about such 'Britology': essentially, the politically driven attempt to define core British values which – it is assumed or argued – will provide a framework for the people of the UK to become more culturally integrated and socially united.

For now, let me just pose a few questions (with some possible answers) and raise a few points concerning this agenda:

1. What date shall we have this 'Britain Day' on, then? Possible candidates: VE Day – a true celebration of a triumphant Britain having defended its values of freedom and tolerance (no, too historically and ethnically narrow); Trafalgar Day (are you kidding?); a date commemorating the end of the Battle of Britain (again, too militaristic and backward-looking); 1 May, which apart from being a traditional English feast associated with Morris Dancing, maypoles and the like (too English) is also the date when the 1707 Act of Union joining England and Scotland together to actually form Great Britain took effect (aaarghh!).

2. What actually are the core values that British people supposedly already have in common, and to which their adherence needs to be further fostered? I have argued before that these boil down to quite abstract, universal ideals, such as various flavours of freedom and equality, democracy, tolerance, decency, etc. One might call these values that the British are said to have in common the 'highest common denominator': they're the most top-level, general philosophical concepts that any reasonable person can buy into, whatever their faith, politics or ethnicity. But as such, do they really provide any additional force for unity, in the sense that people already in theory assent to these principles as expressed in their different cultural and religious traditions? And in any case, what is distinctively British, if anything, about these values? One might even say that by asserting these values as the core components of Britishness, Britishness is defined in relation to an abstraction away from specific, narrow ethnic and religious traditions to a sort of 21st-century global liberal humanism – as Britain typifies the coming together of all the nations of the earth in a new universal, secular culture and economy.

3. If Britain's identity is essentially a modernist abstraction away from historical divisions between races, nations and religions, then perhaps this is the underlying cultural basis for the bizarre design of the logo for the 2012 London Olympics, unveiled on the same day as the ministers' call for a Britain Day (see picture above). This logo contains very little that is recognisably British in any iconographic or representational sense: no historical monuments, geographical landmarks, national identifiers. It's a piece of abstract art reminiscent of the type of non-referential / conceptual works that annually compete for the Turner Prize. It does have something of the quality of commercial art of the type familiar from the British advertising industry, a sector in which Britain does indeed lead the world. It also suggests graffiti art: a manifestation of youth or pop culture which, perhaps it is true, is the nearest thing there is to a genuinely global culture embraced by people of all backgrounds.

4. While we're on the subject of the Olympics, these are one of the few major international sporting occasions when Britain actually competes as Britain, rather than in separate teams for each of the component 'nations' of Britain: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. For the sake of encouraging greater identification with Britishness, rather than with separate national entities, would the ministers propose abolishing the separate football teams and associations for the four British nations? Not a chance! Well, if that's a non-starter, what chance the objective of winning hearts and minds to a reaffirmed Britishness?

5. Because that really is the problem: 'ethnic British' people tend to identify more as English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish than as British. Statistics from the UK National Statistics Office confirm this: more 'white British' people define their identity as English rather than British; while many more UK ethnic Asians and Afro-Caribbeans define themselves as British rather than English, Scottish or Welsh. So doesn't that show that we should be encouraging the newer ethnic and national communities coming into the UK to see themselves as English / Scottish / Welsh in the first instance? In fact, it is only in that way that they can really become British because they will be British in the way that indigenous British people are British: through the filter of national and regional traditions, culture and history that have all contributed towards the Britain of today. Moreover, if communities that still refer to themselves as Pakistani or Bangladeshi started to be accepted and accept themselves as English, then this would really mark a turning point of deep integration and the forming of genuine multi-ethnic nationhood.

6. Equally, it has historically been true that British identity has been most positively upheld only when the English identity that was, and still is to some extent, its heart was affirmed proudly and confidently. Any attempt to re-define Britishness in a way that implicitly or explicitly denies the possibility of an official or politically acceptable expression of English values and culture (Britishness as an abstraction away from narrow national traditions) is actually set on a course away from the traditional wellsprings of Britishness and is unlikely to command the assent of the English people (not defined in a narrow ethnic way but as those who identify as English).

7. Ultimately, the Britology project could be seen as striving to create a united nation (or should that be United Nations) of Britain that has never really existed in the past. This is one of the things that is evoked by the phrase 'citizenship revolution' used by the ministers in their opinion piece. The last time we had a 'citizenship revolution' in Britain (well, actually, it was in England) was in the English Civil War in the 17^th century, when our forebears got rid of the monarchy and we all became citizens of a Commonwealth (in today's terms, a republic). It's only really under a republic that one could imagine this project as having any chance of enduring success. A republic would finally sever the link between the Church and the state, as the monarch currently is both head of state and head of the Church of England (but not of Scotland). Thus, if the monarchy were done away with, Christianity could be denied any privileged claims to being the core faith and value system of England / Britain; and England could be removed from its effective status as the centre of the United Kingdom – the monarch being in the first instance King or Queen of England but certainly not of Britain.

8. Indeed, the more the talk is of Britain rather than the United Kingdom, the more there are grounds to suspect the presence of an underlying republicanism. A Republic of Britain would be one where its citizens now owed primary allegiance not to the outdated specifics of narrow nationalism, Christianity and indigenous ethnicity but to universal secular-progressive principles, and the global market economy and cultural market place. But would it be a nation that belonged to the politicians and the marketing guys more than to the people of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland?